Rolling Contemporary Poetry

bernstein is pretty good at both criticism and poetry but girly man is maybe his worst thing ever, get a copy of 'all the whisky in heaven: selected poems' (been remaindered i think?), have a flick through 'attack of the difficult poems' and 'content's dream' if you have access to a library with that sort of thing, particularly 'recantorium' in the former

one of the poems in the new book is a list of the words in girly man, in descending order of frequency

I got the selected, haven't done more than flip thru it yet tho

more patricia lockwood, sort of

http://www.thingx.tv/articles/mad-men-poetry-recap-season-6-premiere-2335/

Sorry guys

I suck at self promo

i flipped through the new bernstein the other day in st marks bookshop and it didn't really "click", unfortunately, but i want to return to it at some point. i really like the poetry of ben lerner, and have read two of his collections: the lichtenberg figures and angel of yaw. they touch on theoretical questions, and in this way show the influence of the Language poets (i suppose), but for the most part work really well just as lyrics. There is a lot of humor in his work, and an everpresent mood of sublimated melancholy... the prematurely resigned sadness of the precocious artist. Here is a link to some poems from the Lichtenburg Figures (2004): http://www.theparisreview.org/poetry/248/ifrom-i-the-lichtenberg-figures-ben-lerner Lerner's 2011 novel "Leaving the Atocha Station" is very enjoyable too.

Hey, a good friend of mine has an essay in today's NY Times about the influence of Jack Handey's Deep Thoughts on a new generation of American poets.

that is a good essay and i should probably read some of those poets

that lerner poem upthread is really good! that is all

or 'those lerner poems', i'm not really sure

they are separate poems. the lichtenburg figures is a sonnet sequence actually. but thanks, yeah, he is one of my favorite contemporary poets. if you liked those you should check out his novel too, which had me laughing out loud at several points.

Damn!

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KBK1sjr-MT8

I said, damn!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBK1sjr-MT8

not watching that

was it a requirement of the form that they address their damn poems to famous women, what's that about

i saw louise mathias read last weekend and think she is pretty wonderful - there's a small sampling of her stuff here:

http://home.earthlink.net/~pero/louise-mathias.html

thanks for linking that jack handey article, eazy

Emily Berry's "Dear Boy" is absolutely fantastic, btw

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/media/landays.html#feature

What's a good anthology of recent/contemporary American poetry?

the examples in that jack handey article sound a lot more like npr moth radio hour bits than deep thoughts

probably not the right thread for it but, what do people think of jorie graham

Have never liked a Jorie Graham poem, but in each case you could def come up with a list of interesting things the poem could be said to be doing.

haha yeah i see that

I'm co-signing with cardamon's comment.

that's kind of how i feel about all poetry tho

I saw Jorie Graham give a talk and a Q&A once and she was lucid and compelling, and I was like, Oh! I like her when she speaks directly!

yup, with cardamon here. I think of her as epitome of in-the-academy US poetry.

got bought John Burnside's The Hunt in the Forest for birthday. Clearly a good poet, finding the repeatedly used tools (woods, darkness, illness, slaughter) a bit tiresome. It's enjoyable, but there aren't many 'Yes!' bits really. I like best his less freighted depictions of nature - esp winter, drizzle, that sort of thing, and he's at his best in this where extremes of darkness, death, insubstantiality, dying etc are replaced by things attenuated by... well, atmospheric dreariness I guess. I like his general approach, and the pastoral of cancer, illness and sensations of light and gloom, but it somehow doesn't quite hit the mark a lot of the time. Still good, still very pleased to get it.

yup, with cardamon here. I think of her as epitome of in-the-academy US poetry.

― woof, Friday, 21 June 2013 09:35 (1 week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

which american poet is the epitome of not-in-the-academy u.s. poetry?? not that i disagree with you, the biggest fan of hers i know is a hahvahd guy

i don't know i spelt it like that, he's not one of those harvard guys

I Watched a Snake

hard at work in the dry grass
behind the house
catching flies. It kept on
disappearing.
And though I know this has
something to do

with lust, today it seemed
to have to do
with work. It took it almost half
an hour to thread
roughly ten feet of lawn,
so slow

between the blades you couldn't see
it move. I'd watch
its path of body in the grass go
suddenly invisible
only to reappear a little
further on

black knothead up, eyes on
a butterfly.
This must be perfect progress where
movement appears
to be a vanishing, a mending
of the visible

by the invisible--just as we
stitch the earth,
it seems to me, each time
we die, going
back under, coming back up . . .
It is the simplest

stitch, this going where we must,
leaving a not
unpretty pattern by default. But going
out of hunger
for small things--flies, words--going
because one's body

goes. And in this disconcerting creature
a tiny hunger,
one that won't even press
the dandelions down,
retrieves the necessary blue-
black dragonfly

that has just landed on a pod . . .
All this to say
I 'm not afraid of them
today, or anymore
I think. We are not, were not, ever
wrong. Desire

is the honest work of the body,
its engine, its wind.
It too must have its sails--wings
in this tiny mouth, valves
in the human heart, meanings like sailboats
setting out

over the mind. Passion is work
that retrieves us,
lost stitches. It makes a pattern of us,
it fastens us
to sturdier stuff
no doubt.

presented without comment except that obviously the indenting is not meant to be like that.

which american poet is the epitome of not-in-the-academy u.s. poetry??

wcw!! at least then.

still riding that horse eh

shd I read emily berry / sam riviere / nick laird?

not sure I didn't get burned by sidereal

gonna ride that horse as long as eliot stans exist!!

eliot was so not in the academy he was working for lloyds of london or whatever

✌_✌ OTM, as per, re: Emily Berry's Dear Boy, above. Delighted to see the hitherto ineffable charms of post-swim vending machine Wheat Crunchies and the ball sack of Michaelangelo's David finally effed in verse.

i suppose the epitome of not-in-the-academy u.s. poetry is whatever posthumous bukowski collection came out this year

-

stevie i'm not sure those words in that order made sense

tumblr poets

i should have ever finished/sent you that collection of fantasy poems

haha yes. i think there is kind of a crossover between 'poets who have tumblrs' and 'mfa poets' tho tho i dont know if that is what you mean by 'tumblr poets'

i guess another answer is 'weird twitter' |:

In-the-academy poets tend to have a great deal in common, therefore it is a simpler matter to select an epitome from among that herd. Exoacademic poets are few and must travel strange paths to anything like prominence, so they share much less in common. Each one who attains any readership reigns in his own little kingdom apart. Bukowski is a good example.

I want to read the Berry myself - from a glance it seems really good.
I liked the Sam Riviere collection.
Every now and again I read something and think Laird might be alright, but actually really most of what I see by him reinforces my first instinct, from many years ago when I read a longish poem of his in a student anthology, which was that's he's not very good (tho' he makes all the right gestures) - solid box-ticker, too faber, idk quite what I'm trying to say.

which american poet is the epitome of not-in-the-academy u.s. poetry??

haha good q; and aimless otm I guess about various paths of poets outside the academy.

I think you can have a teaching post and not be an 'academic poet' in quite the sense we're talking about - but I am curious, which name US poets of the last thirty years say have not held a poetry/creative writing position somewhere in higher ed? (presumably but not necessarily on principle)

shd I read emily berry / sam riviere / nick laird?

Berry is I think better than Riviere, and also the most approachable, definitely the one you read if you read just one. So much of Riviere's charm for me is in the brattishness of his poetic persona, this feeling of the person who is still a precocious child in their late 20s. So he is clever and funny and mean but there is always (intentionally, in a way that i reckon a lot of time has been put into) this edge of petulance and slapdashness. Berry is more willing to use the conventional strengths - lyricism, tenderness, visible craft, the delicately chiming juxtaposition of images - and so the personality of them is less startling, especially as she's often writing stories rather than personal reflection.

but like both of them have got me back into poetry in a rly strong way so they are first in my heart

I have never read Laird.

i don't think he sits well with them. Feels like the previous generation.

the next generation is Lamp's fantasy poems i hope

I'd never heard of Patricia Lockwood before today, but damn.