Poetry Discoveries

[Zooey]

On a whim, last week I pulled out my modern American Lit anthology I kept from a class last semester, and started reading some of the poets I'd never heard of and would have never made the syllabus in a general survey course.

So what are some of your unexpected poetry discoveries, whether they be in the back of anthologies, found on the internet or picked off the shelf at a bookstore on a whim?

My favorite discoveries so far have been Rane Arroyo and Lawson Fusao Inada. The former deals with a lot of subject matter I can directly relate to, and the latter's style fascinates me--it's like the poetic equivalent of jazz.

How about you?

[mono]

Indeed, over years, I have found a few gems, often hidden or neglected. A few gained a little popularity, such as William Stafford, Raymond Carver, and Theodore Roethke, yet I also must mention Ricardo Sternberg (a wonderful poet I discovered from a poetry reading), Kingsley Amis (truly incredible!), the rare poetry of O. Henry, James Clarence Mangan, and Mary Elizabeth Coleridge (a descendent of Samuel Taylor Coleridge).

[subterranean]

One of my discoveries is Peter Porter and Dom Moraes. I happened to find this small poetry book, which consists the selected works of Peter Porter, Dom Moraes, and Kingsley Amis. I have heard and read about Amis, but Porter and Moraes were new to me. I personally love Porter's style...witty.

[Aurora Ariel]

All pleasantly discovered within the last 18 months:

Beat poet Gregory Curso, Elizabeth Bishop, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Torquato Tasso, Francois Villion, and Judith Beveridge.

I also recently had a look at Michelangelo's brilliantly crafted sonnets- a multi-talented artist!

[subterranean]

Hello, Ariel...Welcome back!

[stlukesguild]

Poetry "discoveries"? I think that most of my books are something of a "discovery" with the exceptions of those imposed upon my during school. Even then... I almost always find myself rediscovering them years later when I read the work afresh ignoring all I knew or thought I knew. Emily Dickinson, for example, was a true shock. Such brilliantly dense poems... not at all what I had thought of her at all. Anyway... if I were to seek out only those works that I discovered by chance, I might include:

Theocritus' Idylls (tr. Richard Stuart Calvary)... such lovely, 'idyllic' poems of love and nature.
Jehuda Halevi and Ibn Solomon Gabriol:beautiful medieval Spanish Sephardic Jewish poetry.
Poems of Arab Andalusia (tr. Cola Franzen) of which the Spanish translation from the original Arabic was amajor inspiration for Lorca. Beautiful poems of love and longing from a "golden age" of religious tolerance in Moorisg Spain.
San Juan de La Cruz was a fabulous discovery... a religious/erotic poem of visionary splendour.
Thomas Traherne- A real "discovery" for many as his original manuscripts were lost or misattributed for centuries. This 17th C. writer is something of a spiritual forebearer to William Blake.
Gerard Nerval-Chimeras- I first discovered one or two of these fascinating poems in an anthology of French poetry.
Theophile Gautier- Enamels and Cameos- As the title suggests these poems are exquisitely wrought and precious (in the best sense... like Herrick) and as one might expect from a one-time painter, visually delicious.
Mallarme- A Tomb for Anatole (tr. Paul Auster) The master of art pour l'art confronts the death of his son and words fail him... fragments is all he might offer.
Paul Claudel- A Hundred Movements for a Fan, Claudel, the brother of sculptor Camille Claudel (lover of Rodin) and Ambassador to China composed these lovely poems building upon Chinese poetic traditions of understatement and calligraphy.
Geoffrey Hill- A fierce and hard poetry of classical beauty, moral outrage, and religious doubt.
Anthony Hecht- Another poet capable of great moral outrage as well as lush beauty and even self-deprecation... all contained within an exquisite classical structure. With time his work moves me more than all those sloppy, free verse, confessional poets of the era.
Richard Howard- I first turned to Richard Howard's poetry after being enamored of his translation of Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal. Often taking the form of imagined letters between poets, artists, famous lovers, aristocrats, composers, etc... his poems are learned, witty, sensuous, lush...
J.L. Borges- I owned Borges Labyrinths for years. Upon finally reading it I was struck with almost a revelation. It was almost as if he were just what I was seeking out... a key to much of my understanding of Modernist/Post-Modernist art and literature. As a result, I became (admittedly) a true "Borgesian", seeking out everything the great Argentine wrote. He is as brilliant a poet as he is a writer of fictions... indeed... as usual, he blurs every distinction between poetry and prose.
Fernando Pessoa- I discovered Pessoa after Borges... but he is (along with Kafka) one of Borges true predecessors. Where we can never be certain which character in his dramas (if any) is really the voice of Shakespeare, we cann never be certain where Pessoa's voice is. Rejecting the Romantic notion of the artist's single "voice" Pessoa writes under numerous pseudonyms (or "heteronyms" as he terms them). These various heteronymns each compose a highly different body of work. Some engage in writing to or even about the others in letters, criticism, etc... Simply put, Pessoa ammounts to 3 or 4 of the greatest Portuguese poets ever... 3 or 4 of the most fascinating poets of Modernism.

[Jean-Baptiste]

I've often wondered why Rita Dove was not on the syllabus of my first year lit course, even though she was Poet Laureate of the US for a time. I love her.
Robert Penn Warren, Richard Eberhart, and H. D. are all deserving poets that were sadly ignored as well. I can't really fault my professor, as he was diligent enough in introducing some other, lesser known or new poets to me--such as Robert Wrigley who wrote a book called "Reign of Snakes," and Richard Wright who wrote "Country Music" and "Southern Cross." All of which are incredible.
There's another poet that I keep meaning to look up, named Gabriel Preil. I've only read one poem by him, in translation, entitled "The Power of a Question," but I was very impressed.