Trying to get acquainted with contemporary poetry

[Stewed]

I took English in school, but I feel my competence ends somewhere around the first world war. Some modernist stuff is good; I like it, and can get often get something from it, even though I suspect I'm supposed to have read the bible and the Golden Bough, know Greek, know French literature inside and out, etc, etc, etc. But even without all that, I can find stuff here and there, up to, say, the '50s. Then the trail sort of goes cold.

I got introduced to John Ashbery in a class, and thought I was a big fan, but now mostly his poetry is impenetrable, or seems to form associations I have no access to. I know there's something called LANGUAGE POETRY that as best I can tell is a device for philosophical reflection, and has no aesthetic content of its own. Then there's the poetry I sometimes see in the little magazines, and in newer poetry anthologies, almost all of which appears not to be attempting to do what I want poetry to do; it seems like prose, cut into lines: something closer to a micro-essay, or micro-story, than to what I'd look for from poetry.

So what's up with poetry? Has school made me lazy, made me dependant on the historical sorting process? I mean, I know that if it were the 1820s and I just grabbed a magazine, the odds would be against me stumbling on Keats. But I still have a nagging doubt. I keep wondering if I just don't understand what contemporary poetry is trying to do. (It's also occurred to me that maybe Romanticism died to thorough a death in most of the English lit countries, and that I might do better with translations.)

[cafolini]

I think what happens is that when you put something like contemporary poetry on your back, you are like putting a straight jacket on. It is not possible to categorize any longer in the postmodern age. The categorizing on form is the main problem. Free verse has many forms, infinite are possible, Just pick poems one at a time and like it or dislike it. Canons are a thing of the past. They are in a museum, together with their circular ruins. Forget form. Look for meaning in whatever way it appears before you. Obviously you might find a lot of stuff that you might not be able to grasp or that it's just plain, meaningless quack-quack. Romanticism or any philosophical movement died in the late 19th century. And any Neo of any kind you might find out there is now some crazy straight jacket trying to go back to an impossible past for today. Move on.

[Stewed]

I'm not so much looking for a form that produces good poetry as I'm wondering what the new poets are trying to do. I keep thinking that they must be working, most of them, under a deliberate constraint, since what they write often has such a family resemblance. When you say "forget form," do you mean forget about schools of thought?

[cafolini]

Precisely, that's what I mean. Canonical schools of thought are all philosophical at a time when philosophy has been completely overcome as the leader of the status quo. And we are not going back. It's impossible. Too much to deal with and rightly so. The layman is developing like never before in as many ways as there are ocupations and new fields of scientific knowledge. Never again will the stage turn out philosophical or theological or formal like it once was.

[stlukesguild]

What's up with contemporary poetry? It has always been a challenge to grasp what is happening in the arts because the present is in flux and you are confronted with a array of individuals as opposed to some concept of unity of style and form... which are largely imposed by scholars after the fact.

Poetry is different from prose and always has been so. It makes far more use of the symbolic aspects of language, the sound, and the atmosphere. Quite often it is more about suggestion than literal narrative meaning.

You suggest your competence in literature and poetry ends somewhere around WWI. So what poets have you read from that era onward beyond Ashbery... who is certainly challenging? There are plenty of poets worthy of reading over the past century. Off the top of my head I would suggest W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, R. M. Rilke, Eugenio Montale, Boris Pasternak, Paul Celan, Pablo Neruda, Antonio Machado, Jorge Guillen, Federico Garcia-Lorca, Paul Eluard, Richard Wilbur, Richard Howard, Charles Simic, Seamus Heaney, Dylan Thomas, Allen Ginsberg, W.S. Merwin, Anne Carson...

Ignore any ridiculous claims as to the "end of history" and such gibberish which are little more than Neo-Romantic thinking of a juvenile who imagines that we are somehow wholly different than every age that has gone before.
Indeed, I'd advise to to approach any poet you think to read without any preconceived notion, socio-political cant, or literary theory.

Do make an effort to read a selection of works by a variety of poets and then delve deeper into the work of those who resonate with you. Pleasure is the greatest motivation. Continue to explore that which gives you pleasure.

I cannot offer some seeping statement as to what poets are doing today because they have a broad array of intentions and utilize a broad array of forms or literary vocabularies. Seriously, you will have far more success in posting questions and engaging in debate concerning a specific poet and/or poem that interests you than you will asking sweeping questions about the whole art form as it has existed over the last 100+ years.

[OrphanPip]

Well from after the 50s you have the tail end of the modernists, like Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore. You have the beats and the confessionals, like Ginsberg, Plath, and Robert Lowell. You have the New York School poets: Koch, O'Hara, and Ashbery. You have the Objectivist (not to be confused with Ayn Rand objectivist) like George Oppen and Louis Zukofsky.

In the very contemporary, Anne Carson writes verse-novels which are interesting. I'm also fond of Lorna Crozier, but she's not a major international poet really.

Anyway, this is just covering a few English language poets.

[Stewed]

Thanks for the suggestions. I hope I haven't overstated my confusion; I've read some of what's been suggested here, but not most of it. Now that no one's going to assign readings to me, I've got to be on the lookout for good things I haven't read. That's a good point about schools being invented after the fact.

But I'm somewhat fond of this topic. Rightly or wrongly, is there said to be a reigning school, fashion or idea now? And where does one find out about things like the Objectivists and the New York school? Maybe this is a cultural problem I've got, and it's just taking the form of this poetry question: how to keep it alive after school's over -if that makes sense. "Literature" with a capital L (or maybe I should keep it to poetry) doesn't seem to have much of a public existence. I spent years in a place where poetry was a big deal, and now it seems hardly to exist, or to exist in an attenuated state. What's happened? What's to be done?

[OrphanPip]

I have a copy of the Norton's modern and contemporary poetry anthology that is quite good. I also have the Oxford University Press Canadian Literature anthology which has a strong selection of contemporary poetry from authors like Ondaatje, Atwood, and Carson.

You can often get them used off amazon for a quite reasonable price.

Edit: I also occasionally pick up a book or two from the book store, sometimes I'm pleasantly surprised.

[Stewed]

I have overstated my confusion. I had a Norton anthology for many years. I finally gave it away because I thought it was time I moved past it. I've just recently started getting various anthologies out at the library so as to look up whoever stands out in them. So I suppose I've answered my question, in a way. It was sincere though. I think maybe the Norton anthology gave me a feeling of looking down from a great height, which I miss a bit.

[Stewed]

I should have said "how to become friends with contemporary poetry" rather than "how to get acquainted with." Sorry.

[The Ol' Man]

There shall have to come some one visionary poet to shape the course of his generation's expression. Otherwise, I find the state of poetry after Heaney and his like inconceivable; it may be a guttering flame.
I have been musing on this same question for a while now, and it is a difficult one.

Beside Heaney and Muldoon, I find the state of contemporary poetry an insipid affair. It performs in the absence of passion, and is becoming more and more objective and blandly observational, as though making an outlaw of emotion. At least, so much as I have read of it this seems the case, unfortunately. Blake, Shelley, Keats, Yeats, I think they should all be crestfallen were it not for Heaney retaining something of their force. I think a poem such as The Forge is illustrative in that we meet a poet confronting the difference of the past with the modern state of society. Perhaps much in the manner Yeats weighed his present with the majesty of the past.

[Loganm]

Heaney is washed up second rate. Look up James Merrill. He progressed poetry through the 60s, 70s, 80s. Look up Henri Cole, he's progressing poetry now. Adrienne Rich was born in 1929 and is still alive. She writes some good poetry. I read The Forge the other day and thought it was exactly what you're objecting against. It did have that one really good phrase though toward the last few lines, don't remember it. Never heard of Muldoon.

[stlukesguild]

Heaney is washed up second rate.

Oh well. There it is. You can't beat that for critical commentary.

Look up James Merrill. He progressed poetry through the 60s, 70s, 80s.

Merrill was a major figure... although his reputation seems to have waned. I don't hear much of him since even before his death.

Seriously, you cannot compare Keats, Blake, Shelley, or Yeats with contemporary poetry and assume the intentions and the means of achieving these will be the same. Neither should you presume that the only poetry of real merit is that which employs a Romantic notion of the visionary poet spewing forth his or her emotions upon the page. Again, there is a great wealth of contemporary and near-contemporary poetry I find of great merit. Anne Carson is a fascinating writer who blurs genre: the novel, translation, history, criticism, biography and autobiography, and lyrical poetry in a manner that is clearly Post-Modern... or post-J.L. Borges. Charles Simic is rooted in the traditions of Symbolism and Surrealism filtered through an East-European sensibility. Yehuda Amichai is probably the best poet writing in Hebrew. His poems range from the elegiac to celebrations of love and the simple realities of life. Anthony Hecht, recently deceased, wrote with a great sensuality, a formal beauty, and an eye to the horrors and barbarisms of our day. Ales Debeljak, a Slovenian poet, may fit your notion of the visionary poet confronting history and society. Geoffrey Hill has been acknowledged as one of the greatest living poets in English by many sources that I quite respect. His poetry is incredibly dense (think T.S. Eliot meets Hart Crane and/or Gerard Manley Hopkins. Like Hopkins (and Heaney) his language seems rooted in the gnarled sounds of the Anglo-Saxon. Yves Bonnefoy is generally acknowledged as the strongest living poet writing in French. His Curved Planks, translated by Richard Howard, is particularly exquisite. Richard Wilbur and Richard Howard have continued to build an impressive oeuvre of formally beautiful poetry while rejecting the Romantic-influenced confessional/self-expressive guts spewed forth on the page. They can be witty... profound... elegiac. They recognize that there may be more of interest to the poet than their own personal lives... but at the same time they do not ignore the small realities of the world around them. John Ashbery, whom you mentioned, is hit or miss with me... but surely this is true of many poets. When he hits his in one of the strongest voices in English. Czeslaw Milosz, the great Polish poet and Nobel laureate composed much of great beauty in spite of an awareness of the horrors of the century he lived through. Indeed, Poland seems to have produced a wealth of great poets in recent years. You should also look into Adam Zagajewski, Zbigniew Herbert and the other Polish Nobel laureate, Wislawa Szymborska. The Russians Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Bella Akhmadulina (The Garden) are also necessary reading. The Czech Nobel Laureate, Jaroslav Seifert is another personal favorite. And what of Latin-America? Octavio Paz was every bit deserving of his Nobel prize. Read The Sunstone especially. Also check out Homero Aridjis, another marvelous poet.

[Stewed]

Thanks for the suggestions, stlukesguild. (I think "spewing" is too strong a word for romanticism, mind you.) I've been meaning to check out Richard Wilbur! It's bizarre that he's (if I'm not mistaken) the Poet Laureate of the US, and I hadn't heard of him before a few months ago (and that I never heard of him while doing a BA in English). Hill and Simic sound good, from your description.

I've had bad luck with translations lately. I was really impressed with a few poems by Guillame Apollinaire that I read in an anthology of (translated) French lit that was edited by Paul Auster. I rushed out to the library for more; but everything was flat when I got it home; if I hadn't first read the translations in the Auster book, I'd have assumed I didn't like the poet at all. One of poems in the anthology, "Mirabeau Bridge," was translated by Richard Wilbur. I think it was commissioned for the anthology. Auster said it was the first decent version of it in English. Hey, where does one find the good John Ashbery? I loved Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror, but I've struck out with his collections since then.

Ol' Man: I often get that feeling when I look at contemporary poetry. I tell myself that most writing isn't any good, but still, I wonder. I like Seamus Heaney, but I'm not crazy about him. Paul Muldoon rings a bell; I should check him out.

[The Ol' Man]

Of Heaney, I am infatuated with the Glanmore Sonnets, which I propose for your reading.

stlukesguild,

"Seriously, you cannot compare Keats, Blake, Shelley, or Yeats with contemporary poetry and assume the intentions and the means of achieving these will be the same. Neither should you presume that the only poetry of real merit is that which employs a Romantic notion of the visionary poet spewing forth his or her emotions upon the page. "

I do not think I harbour the thought that both schools are striving for the same or analogous end. It is plain from the post I wrote that I have a preference for the Romantics over what seems the insipidity of most contemporary poetry. That said, some contemporary work is not without merit. Heaney did not walk into the nobel prize as into a bride's bouquet, and he might be the Hesperus of our tired evening.

Perhaps your appraisal of the Romantics as a spewing folk leaves room for a more apt assessment, but the chasm of expressed emotion between then and now in poetry is obviously so wide as to justify your saying. It seems redolent of a great paradox that society is becoming more and more liberal and free-minded, and yet it seems the freest and most expressive poetry exists in a world complete.




Edit: I would revise this thought on the incentive of something that arose of late, and I soon will..