Rolling Contemporary Poetry

Is dear world worth getting?

a clicky slideshow of young poets with minimal text

True in so many ways

the introduction to dear world is a tour de force

not necessarily a good one, but a tour de force nonetheless

i don't really know! i borrowed rather than bought it and so i can approach it w/o sunk costs to consider -- it is satisfying to me that it should contain so much stuff i dislike, because that reminds me that there is so much new poetry going on and i really don't have to care about or like all of it, but obviously that does not render it v.f.m.

I spose what annoys me about the current UK Poetry Kidz isn't actually the poetry itself. It seems like not a good look to get angry because someone wrote a poem, even if I don't like it. It's not like they're having the good life handed to them either, the royalties aren't like having a secure job in finance and even someone of Todd Swift's stature can still have a bottle of urine thrown on him by members of The Wanted as he walks through London on the way from his gym to his flat.

It's more the efforts on the part of established people in poetry writing and publishing to canonise this (very particular slice of) new poetry as 'The' new poetry. I mean, picking up and reading all those Faber pamphlets really isn't equivalent to 'seeing what young poets are writing today', as per the line so many reviewers have gone with.

A great claim is being made for them - not even a claim of potential but of achievement. The claim might not be being made by the writing itself, but man is it ever annoying reading Sean O'Brien and the rest of the creepy coupe when they pretend that Riviere, Berry, etc, are 'the' young generation of poets writing today.

Not least because it's bollocks that an established poet in the UK should need Faber pamphlets to show what was 'going on'. Anyway, I'll be over here with my lamp looking for one good man.

the clever ones tend to emigrate

i'm fairly new to the world of contemporary poetry but having read almost nothing but it for the past two months i would just like to say that lyn hejinian's 'my life' is totally stunning

i wrote a chunk of my ma thesis on a hejinian i never finished /:

she's really good, though, i think. i think ilx user 'j.' has been reading my life for plural years. hejinian's theoryish book is a good book to look at if you're getting involved in that like whole thing. i think most Contemporary Poet types would think of her as being quite old hat but i mean, those people.

yes i have.

i have yet to finish it.

but each time i do better. sustained attention to it pays dividends.

i would like to think that if ilx user 'the pinefox' were to read it he would have reservations about its intelligibility but grudgingly admit that it really is something.

i tried to teach it once. boy did i have to try to back out of that.

while browsing the poetry section at B***** & N****, I picked up a book by Brian Russell (whose name is uncannily similar to that of a friend of mine), The Year of What-Next--it is about terminal illness, but in a good way

sorry, that's The Year of What Now

I'm not finished reading it yet. also, I've been drunk

anyone read glyn maxwell's recent book on poetry?

c sharp major do you have any kind of personal history or animus w/r/t young british poets or is this a purely unmotivated distaste? this is not meant to be a loaded question, i am just curious

i have read hamilton's intro to the new poetry anthology and like, of course this guy's pop-culture touchstones are TNG and eddie izzard

also i got really annoyed because i bought it without reading the details and when it arrived i realised i'd bought something in bloodaxe. oh dear oh dear oh dear oh dear no.

i have no personal history or animus! and i like a great number of young british poets-- i don't think I feel a distaste for them in general? It would be unreasonable for me to expect of myself that I would like all of these young people; it's maybe a little disappointing to me when the ones I like fall so clearly into a type.

on flicking through thus far the only one i've been tempted to stop and actually read is the 'therefore' guy

have spent as much time rolling my eyes at the biographies as i have reading the poetry. probably a bad sign

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/19/books/john-hollander-poet-known-for-his-range-dies-at-83.html?hp

so i posted abt this on fb but would like to submit the question here also

just picked up michael robbins' widely-praised book alien vs. predator, and i think i *get it*--it's cleverly versified pop culture riffs with some pathos baked in by way of careful use of references--but, like, this shit seems to have blown people's minds? and i'm not sure why? i know it's like uncool to hope for a view into a narrator's inner life or whatever, but as clever as this is, it leaves me pretty cold.

have any of you guys read it? thoughts?

Michael Robbins - Alien Vs. Predator (nb this book of poems is not about aliens, predators or their conflicts)

it got its own-damn-thread, fwiw

i think it's weird reading more than three poems of his at a time, or maybe ever, because of the sorta exposure of formula, technique, types-of-reference-points, &c, but I also think there's something insufficient about only seeing him in this broader context; that stuff is punchy, & wasn't being fed to people like that (afaik &c&x), & it seems to have some sorta formal timeliness that delivered what he wrote quite freshly, which can evaporate under scrutiny/saturation

oh lookat that

currently trying to wrap my brain around bernadette mayer's 'scarlet tanager'

btw i really love brenda hillman's essay on teaching contemporary poetry, which also functions as a guide on how its readers can slip into it more easily/thoughtfully:

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/essay/239762

It makes a straightforward patriotic statement based on an image of a bird; it rhymes.

lol

what's good

should i just keep reading twitter

I liked Charles Bernstein's book from this year...

markers who do you follow on twitter

http://shoutkey.com/provision

click that

and no it isn't a trick

New Franz Wright, bleak and amazing as ever.

ck williams, my favorite living poet. one of his poems was part of my wedding vows.

and now this

http://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-et-jc-a-movie-based-on-a-book-of-poems-tar-stars-james-franco-of-course-20131111,0,2046763.story#axzz2kY6zFryD

a good friend has a new book coming out soon: http://www.h-ngm-n.com/dear-corp

A friend of mine sent me the link to this Kate Kilalea poem and I think it's incredible: http://newpoetries.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/don-share-on-kate-kilaleas-henneckers.html

(the subsequent interpretation stuff i find a little wearying: all this i-i-i- itemising of a person's reaction raises my hackles the way faux-naivety does)

I've been doing a poetry-reading round-robin email with a few friends - i.e. where we record mp3s of ourselves reading poems and send them to each other - and it's having a huge effect on how i think about poetry, way out of proportion to what i would have expected. I don't feel like I get a better sense of the poems from reading them aloud, but rather a bunch of different conflicting and sometimes unhelpful versions -- as dramatic monologue, as collection of sounds, as rhythm game. It makes everything so much harder; it's turning me against things i've liked for a while.

That poem's really exciting. To begin with - e.g. "Wow. The rain. Rose beetles" and "Ickira trecketre stedenthal, said the train" - I was prepared to be irritated, but as it expanded it got more and more wild and interesting.

The interpretation had some useful things to say, but you're spot on with the faux-naivety thing. The whole "I googled this and got nothing, but googling something else gave me a clue" style is very weird unless the point of his site is to be some step-by-step guide to approaching a poem.

my friend's new book is really, really good: http://www.h-ngm-n.com/dear-corp/

Kilalea is good and so is Tara Bergin I think

just read clover's "red epic" and enjoyed it a lot and now i see it is available free: http://communeeditions.com/red-epic-joshua-clover/

I can't find a more suitable thread to post this to, but I just wanted to say it makes me a little sad to see the dismissal of the poet H.D. in some earlier posts. Have people read Trilogy and Hermetic Definition? The earlier poetry generally hasn't done much for me (though many others swear by it), but I think the late poetry, especially those two collections, are where it's at. I remember "Winter Love" in particular as having some strikingly musical passages, though it's been a while since I read it. (I ditched my copy of Hermetic Definition a long time ago because I was annoyed with my youthful underlining and marginalia.) Helen in Egypt is a hard nut to crack and is perplexingly static. I can't say I've ever loved it either.

Her memoir, Tribute to Freud is also quite good (and I've seen it recommended in bibliographies of works on Freud for non-specialists), and the highly edited memoirs New Directions put out at one time, entitled The Gift, has some fascinating material (though I never made it through the unexpurgated version of the memoir material put out much later by some university press or other). End to Torment (on Pound) is also at least a breeze to read. I can't say I've ever enjoyed her fiction.

(I might be partial to the material in the Gift because of the references to Pennsylvania German culture, which makes up a good part of my own background.)

it makes me a little sad to see the dismissal of the poet H.D. in some earlier posts.

I searched around in this thread for these dismissals and couldn't find them. That doesn't mean they aren't there, but can you give me a hint?

Haha, there were maybe 1.5 dimissals, but not on this thread just in the deep archives of ILB.