Modern Poetry

[Leabhar]

When did we let random words and psychotic babbling become mainstream poetry and when did real poetry become "outdated"?

[quasimodo1]

To Leabhari: Is this a rhetorical question?

[JBI]

What do you mean? Are we talking contemporary or Modernist?

In the first sense, America is just having an artistic recession right now. Look to the North a little and you will be surprised with what gold you have - there isn't a night in Toronto when there isn't at least 2 poets reading their work for public audiences, and our government subsidies for small presses help to keep poetry publishers afloat better than our Neighbor's.

In truth though, I personally think the influence of Wallace Stevens is the most powerful thing holding back American verse today, as his works seem to be echoing behind almost all American poets after he became popular.

In truth, one must look elsewhere - good poetry is always out there.

If however, you meant modern as in Modernist, and everything following it, I would say that you should read more. Wordsworth is far more philosophical than most of the poets who followed him. If it is form that you have a problem with, well, then I can't help you. Free verse, which is generally acknowledged to be a problematic name, because it is anything but free, is liberating to the art, and has allowed it to survive for longer, without another direction being needed to take it to a higher dimension.

[Leabhar]

Most modern free verse is just writing put into lines
Like this, is this poetry?
They just stole the name "poetry"
And made all other poetry nonexistent
The emperor has no clothes.

[stlukesguild]

I'm sorry, but the analogy to the Emperor's New Clothes has been a tired cliché for decades... if not almost a century when speaking of Modern/Contemporary art/music/literature/poetry/etc... I certainly will be the first to admit that there are weaknesses and problems and hucksterisms and worse within the arts today... but I say this with a full knowledge that the majority of all art for the whole of history has been mediocre at best... as well as from the knowledge that there has been and continues to be artists... and poets working within Modernist and Post-Modernist forms that are unquestionably brilliant. Do you assume that for poetry to be of any merit that it must be structured in a manner in which the form is clearly and immediately understood: a sonnet, a ballad? Is there not a poetry to be found in Shakespeare and the Bible and Whitman and novelists such as Proust and Faulkner and Nabokov and even Poe? Is there no music there, or can music only exist where the form or structure is simple, plain, and clear? Or perchance you believe that the "meaning" of poetry must be clear and divulge itself wholly and easily. Again I disagree. How "easy" to understand are the poems of Dickinson? the longer works of Blake? Luis Gongora? Holderlin? Donne? Yes, there most certainly are some Modern/Contemporary poets who revel in obscurity and hermeticism for its own sake... but I would not suggest that what they have done is "meaningless" but rather that you, the reader, can discern no "meaning" from it. Again... one must ask... is such a "meaning" a necessity? What is the "meaning" of Mozart's Clarinet Quintet or Monet's Waterlilies? If there is none... are they then "meaningless"? Is life "meaningless" if we can discern no clear purpose? Again... I agree that there are some writers who seemingly throw anything together in the form of poetry and imagine that such becomes poetry by virtue of the layout on the page. The poet/critic Thomas Disch referred to this as "snapped prose" and humorously mocked the whole genre:

Take any piece of prose you like
and snap it into lines of verse
like this, using the end of the line

as a kind of comma. You can create
a further sense of shapeliness
by grouping the snapped prose in stanzas, so.

Again... there are endless examples of poor art in any time or place... and surely there are times and places and cultures where art forms bloomed more or less than in other times/places/cultures... but to dismiss an entire art form so braodly suggests that one has not made much of an attempt at understanding or appreciating it.

[Leabhar]

But you have to admit there is definitely a weak flow of poetry today. Every poet or anyone who likes poetry has to admit this. There is something about the modern world that stifles creativity, or maybe the people who publish poetry are only looking for the modernist/postmodernist stuff or the random prose put into stanzas. Come on, even anything beyond someone rambling about drugs and flowers would be preferable to the popular garbage nowadays.

[TheFifthElement]

When did we let random words and psychotic babbling become mainstream poetry and when did real poetry become "outdated"?

Define "random words and psychotic babbling", and

define "mainstream poetry", and

define "real poetry"

in fact, define "poetry"

and then it might be possible to debate...

Some examples would be good.

[stlukesguild]

I have no problem admitting that there is a lot of weak poetry today. I have admitted as much. But again I would argue that this is true of all times and places. We forget that because the hard work has already been done for us with regard to older literature. The weaker work has fallen away and we get the picture... an illusion... that during the Romantic era in Britain (for example) only poets of the status of Blake, Byron, Keats, Shelley, Wordworth, Coleridge, Burns, and a few others were active. But the reality is that for each one of them there were hundreds... thousands that have been gratefully and mercifully forgotten. Again, I don't deny that poetry today is facing some problems. We have discussed as much here at LitNet on this post:

http://www.online-literature.com/for...ad.php?t=36954

I don't believe that popular tastes have much to do with the publication of certain types of poetry as the general public has little interest in poetry. Nevertheless... I have no problem stating that there are many poets currently active who are producing work of real artistic merit. Among these I would include Yves Bonnefoy, Geoffrey Hill, Richard Wilbur, Charles Simic, Anthony Hecht, Wislawa Symborska, Adam Zagajewski, Czeslaw Milosz, Seamus Heaney, Homero Aridjis, Anne Carson, W.S. Merwin, John Ashberry, Yehuda Amichai, etc... Undoubtedly this list just skims over the surface... especially when we consider that there must surely be poetry of real merit being produced around the globe... and yet we are limited to that work which has bee translated. If we consider that many of the poets who have been acknowledged as "classics" in Germany or France (for example) have never or rarelybeen well translated into English (Clemens Brentano, Joseph von Eichendorff, Friederich Schiller, Ludwig Uhland, Annette von Droste-Hulshoff, Theodore Storm, Hermann Hesse (as poet), Joachim DuBellay, Pierre Ronsard, Alfonse de Lamartine, Voltaire (as poet), Victor Hugo (as poet... until recently), Alfred de Musset, Jose-Maria de Heredia, Maurice Rollinant, etc... etc... we must then ask how many of the greatest living poets are being currently translated into English?

[JBI]

Honestly, study the bulk of poetry from any time period, and there are mediocre works. Historical works, however, have been sifted by scholars and time, and therefore are all relatively excellent, whereas modern poetry is unsifted, and subject to countless period pieces, like all poetry of its contemporaneous readership.

Also, the comment on it all sounding the same, and stifled creativity, I think has some merit, but not everywhere, perhaps only in the United States, in the sense that we think of it, and in Britain, where creativity seems to be in conflict with contemporary mentality. That being said, those are two countries; the world still has poets, and good poets among them.

The argument over free-verse I think is misplaced - free verse is nothing but free. Try scanning a free-verse poem, and you will notice that metrically it is just as intricate as any closed form poem. There is an invisible clockwork running through every poem, in the way it is constructed, and though it is less apparent than conventional Iambs, it still is there.

To reduce all verse to broken up prose is rather silly. The problem with verse is nothing like that, it is rather that too many people criticize it, without reading it.

[Leabhar]

stlukesguld - The poets you listed are mediocre at best compared with representatives from other ages.

JBI - That is an argument used by the practitioners of modern poetry, but does it hold up? I do read modern poetry, and most it has no rhythm, no theme, no invisible clockwork to speak of. These people are working on decades of poetry like theirs, they have no understanding of traditional poetry even if they evoke its name. They have no connection to tradition at all. Really, some of the poetry on this site even is better than popular poetry.

Maybe if you take modern poetry as modern poetry and read it as such it can be good, but if you read it as poetry, it is bad.

I dislike people calling it poetry. Lets call it something else. Moetry. Something with no clockwork or rhythm or even meaning which makes sense to only the people who write it.

[JBI]

Don Gutteridge

from Cornering

1
When we were young
we cornered as the
wind and windward
went down

snow-packed bicycle paths
drew us under the
ribbed Bridge with
quicksand / questions

thru October cattails
blown and ragged
milkweed morning

past the river-bank
and summer under
water seldom seen
thunder dreamed

beyond the smoking docks
the reeking fisheries

over C.N tracks and out
to fields sweet
with manure.
...

from New Life in Dark Seas: Brick Books 25 (2000)

originally published in God's Geography (1982)
.........................

can you not see the flow pattern? the repetitition of sounds that keeps this together, and the arrangement of arguments and images that gives it its line-breaks and stanza-breaks? The images make the form, not the stress pattern, and the language itself seems to echo the images.

Take for instance the first stanza, the repetitive alliteration is used to mimic the sound of the wind, and blow through the verse.

Or the second stanza, where 'ribbed' is creating a ribbed feel in the prosody, to modify 'bridge'.

But whats more, look how the poem echos the title, and the central themes throughout; the poem literally corners major places, and describes what is seen, and what is felt, but what is more, if you had the complete poem, or perhaps even from the excerpt, you can tell that there is an inherent biblical allusion going on. It is making reference to Abraham, and his journey marking out the promised land. By doing so, Gutteridge is making a statement about the land, and comparing it not only to the promised land, but to the possessive, the land is a part of us, and we all are connected to it, in a sort of nationalistic way.

In this way, the poem manages to transcend its Southern Ontario setting, and become part of a universal experience, being that one can just as easily map out any other city's corners, or perhaps the world's, and thereby become a part of it. But even more than that, Gutteridge also brings up nostalgia, which is in all of us, and seems to not only empathize with our aging, which is more apparent in his generation, now that the bulk of the population is getting old, but also questions who we are, and the moments and places that change our lives. What we have here are deeply personal moments, made public, and made universal, by the fact that we all have such moments, and all have such feelings, and thereby can all connect with Gutteridge's cornering of Southern Ontario with our own cornering of the places we have been, and have shaped us, and the cities or towns we call home, and the landmarks that we identify with.

Gutteridge not only carefully constructed his poem, but is not devoid of meaning, or style, and is not merely broken up philosophical rantings. He imbues style, sensitivity, and meaning into his work.

Judging by the date of this poem, I hope I have convinced you, or at least sewn doubt into you, to help you sway from your closed minded opinion.

[Leabhar]

The poem you posted makes sense and indeed has a certain kind of rhythm (though it is still a far cry from true free verse). But am I wrong that even this type of poetry is very rare in poetry today? The poet you posted seems to be pretty unknown.

[JBI]

To you. Very few poets are well known in their lifetimes. Some didn't even publish in their lifetimes.

This, in my opinion, is free verse, since I cannot discern a metrical pattern, or a accentual pattern within the verses.

This type of poetry isn't even very rare, it is actually a rather old convention relative to modern tastes.

Take this cutting from Marianne Bluger:

from The Treaties

Lady Simcoe to this hour
moves in grace among the savages
sheened in the glow of bonfires
set on the shore to fish salmon at night.
she watches them
from a high bluff.

When autumn comes she roams days long
under maples torched with fire
stepping lightly still
over leaf-lost trails
through a haze which is
the smoke of autumn mountains.

from New Life in Dark Seas: Brick Books 25 (200)
originally published in Gathering Wild (1987)

The style here, of course, isn't the same, but the same pattern of bending the verse to the imagery is present. Of course, I cannot really dissect this poem without giving the whole piece, but for metrical purposes, we can see how the imagery forms the stanzas, a common convention of today's poets.

Free-verse allows for verse to bend more freely, and to be more shaped. It doesn't mean a lack of style, or form, it means a lack of rules governing how the style and form are constructed. Many poets today use conventional metres, or blend in conventional metres, or even write in closed forms, such as the extremely popular Villanelle, which seems to pop up everywhere these days.


Of course, your argument of these not being "popular" poets is valid to some extent, but that is perhaps because American academies are far louder than Canadian academies, or perhaps Canada has regional publications which don't really publish in too large numbers, or travel very far. Either way though, these poems were well known enough to be re-printed over a decade later, which shows someone, at least, is reading them.

Honestly though, if you want more stuff like this, or perhaps more stuff of this quality, just look for it. It is out there, you merely just need to pick up a nice anthology of contemporary verse (preferably nothing that contains "100 best" or something of the equivalent in its title, or is too thick) and flip through, looking for new poets. Common publishers seem to stick with clichés. Regional publishers take more chances. You will only find well known poets, or well known styles amongst well known publications.

[Leabhar]

These poems, while better than the majority, still read like immature diddies compared with past poetry... They use imagery as rhythm, they have no natural rhythm. This is evident when you read them, and then go read a poem by Frost or Yeats for example. Theirs reads easily, though it can be complex, and this poetry is just hard to read and hard to imagine. Poetry has lost something big.

[TheFifthElement]

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http://www.amazon.com/Staying-Alive-...1760140&sr=1-1
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