Greatest Poets of the 21st century..so far...

[tonywalt]

That is poets who became well known/published(widely or not) after..say 1990.

- Jericho Brown
- Jennifer Chang
- Valentino Cano
- Cate Marvin

I like some of Richard Blanco's stuff.

[TheFifthElement]

Simon Armitage
Carole Ann Duffy
Jean Sprackland

[sandy14]

John Burnside
Katie Tempest
Kathleen Jamie
Helen Mort
Adam Horovitz

(maybe someone could suggest some American poets)

[MorpheusSandman]

I don't know if we should use "greatest" in such a contemporary context; how about "most promising" or even "contemporary poets who've caught your eye, ears, and mind"? Here's a few that come to mind:

Tracy K. Smith
Steve Gehrke
Simon Armitage
Lucie Brock-Broido
Stephen Burt
Anne Carson
AE Stallings

We should also all post some poems. I'll just post one, since it's long, but this is one of my favorite contemporary poems I've read in recent years: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/244204

[desiresjab]

Ha! Certainly no consistency so far. I am only going to suggest one name for the moment--Troy Jollimore, who is also a philosophy professor in California. He seems to have what it takes.

http://walrusmagazine.com/articles/2008.12-poetry-regret-troy-jollimore/

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/180541

[stlukesguild]

I'll second Anne Carson... other than that...?

[Lykren]

Anne Carson - :thumbs_up

Richard Blanco - :sleep: at least Obama likes Bob Dylan though.

[MorpheusSandman]

I'll second Anne Carson... other than that...?Carson is wonderful, though I may enjoy Stallings even more for her formalism. Try:

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/31340
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/245872
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/31066

[AuntShecky]

"Washing an Elephant" by Barbara Ras was the best poem I've read (so far) this decade.

[tonywalt]

http://lavenderwolvesliteraryjournal.weebly.com/issue-1-february-2014.html

"Giving In" by Valentina Cano is very good. She is skilled with metaphors and imagery and this poem on depression captures the thing she speaks. It is short.

[Majesty]

I don't know but i don't like carol ann duffy's poems,anyone else feel the same?

[tonywalt]

I don't know but i don't like carol ann duffy's poems,anyone else feel the same?

I like her stuff. I also forgot to add:

- Margaret Atwood (always interested in Novelists who are also poets - invariably starting as a poet)
- Derek Walcott (not all of it, but his more contemporary stuff is good)

[MorpheusSandman]

Obviously I would've listed Walcott if I thought he counted; but he's over 80 and released his first volumes in the 50s. Not exactly "21st century."

[tonywalt]

Obviously I would've listed Walcott if I thought he counted; but he's over 80 and released his first volumes in the 50s. Not exactly "21st century."

Yea, I know he's a stretch. He did win the Pulitzer in 1992.

[desiresjab]

I don't know but i don't like carol ann duffy's poems,anyone else feel the same?

I didn't see anything that impresses me in her or Anne Carson. They suffer from the same malaise that almost all contemporary poets do--no rhythm.

It is not like they are startling imagists to make up for their rhythmic deficiencies. Their images are weak and never surprise.

I read, read, read modern poetry until it is coming out of my ears. The problem has been so obvious to me for a long time. All these famous contemporary poets are acadamecians. They get published easily because of their universities. They make a name out of worthless drivel that should be called prose, but they are the ones setting the critical standards and teaching the impressionable minds. In short, people, the game is fixed in their favor the way banking regulations favor the bankers.

If either of these two are considered major poets, it just proves how dead modern poetry is. The high powered literary journals are full of offal that all sounds the same.

[Lykren]

I could not disagree more about your assessment of Anne Carson's imagery. What are we to make of something as startling as:

"Enormous pools of a moment kept opening around his hands each time he tried to move them."

or

"The instant of nature forming between them drained every drop from the walls of his life leaving behind just ghosts rustling like an old map."

Regarding rhythm, it doesn't make sense to say that a poem can have NO rhythm; all sound has rhythm. It's just that you don't like those particular rhythms. As for Carol Ann Duffy, I think she is pretty sentimental and not very interesting.

[desiresjab]

I don't know but i don't like carol ann duffy's poems,anyone else feel the same?

I didn't see anything that impresses me in her or Anne Carson. They suffer from the same malaise that almost all contemporary poets do--no rhythm.

It is not like they are startling imagists to make up for their rhythmic deficiencies. Their images are weak and never surprise.

I read, read, read modern poetry until it is coming out of my ears. The problem has been so obvious to me for a long time. All these famous contemporary poets are acadamecians. They get published easily because of their universities. They make a name out of worthless drivel that should be called prose, but they are the ones setting the critical standards and teaching the impressionable minds. In short, people, the game is fixed in their favor the way banking regulations favor the bankers.

If either of these two are considered major poets, it just proves how dead modern poetry is. The high powered literary journals are full of offal that all sounds the same.

[desiresjab]

What do I make of them? I think they are terrible. The startling thing about them is how bad they are. If that is the best that can be found to quote her she is even more of a hack than I thought.

Regarding everything having rhythm: sure. Dumping a load of gravel has rhythm. So what? There is nothing poetic about it. I don't like that particular rhythm, either.

If people find some pleasure in these poets, I sincerely think that is great for them, though not for poetry. If they are moved deeply, then who am I to object? I am a little jealous that they get to be moved deeply, perhaps, and these same poets leave me indifferent.

But my opinion still stands that they are prose writers calling themselves poets. They go out and sit by a pond, writing their "reflections" down in a journal, lift them out and revise a little, and call it a poem. That is how their work feels to me. Hey, they get to set the standards of what poetry is. They have a piece of paper from someone else that says they can write. Modern people follow and believe in their experts--right to the slaughter.

[tonywalt]

I also like this one by Billy Collins about Goya http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/candle-hat/

[tonywalt]

And the video application for Bukowski's Nirvana works very well here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3bVjadfXD4

[tonywalt]

And Bukowski's 'live free' really works in this advert. Like it alot. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2QM5uo196Q

[Lykren]

Here's another of Anne Carson's, a translation of Sappho's fragment 94.


I simply want to be dead.
Weeping she left me

with many tears and said this:
Oh how badly things have turned out for us.
Sappho, I swear, against my will I leave you.

And I answered her:
Rejoice, go and
remember me. For you know how we cherished you.

But if not, I want
to remind you
]and beautiful times we had.

For many crowns of violets
and roses
]at my side you put on

and many woven garlands
made of flowers
around your soft throat.

And with sweet oil
costly
you anointed yourself

and on a soft bed
delicate
you would let loose your longing

and neither any[ ]nor any
holy place nor
was there from which we were absent

no grove[ ]no dance
]no sound
[


A better blending of the traditional and the modern I cannot imagine. Her patient utilization of emptiness strongly evokes the poignant mono no aware that is the subject of the poem. The rhythms are persistent but gentle, carrying along the poem and pausing only when the narrator's emotions temporarily overwhelm her capacity for narrative. The imagery too is quiet and reflective of the general sentiment. But occasionally intensity breaks through the narrator's tendency for passivity and so gives us a short glimpse of the conflicting emotions we are sure must be present: the sudden drama of "I simply want to be dead," the sharp intimacy of "your soft throat," and the "costly" and "holy place" which seem to refer to an outside world significant in that it affects the lovers' (?) physical proximity, but that cannot alter their faith in their relationship. A poem which begins as an account of a dialogue by the end is spoken from an ambiguous point of view, being neither monologue nor objective narration.

Note: unfortunately this post is being formatted incorrectly, deleting the spaces between the brackets. Don't know how to change that.

[desiresjab]

Sappho wrote this poem, not Anne Carson. Her intelligence is noted, but I am not able to tell what Carson contributed. Maybe some other translations of the same fragment, if they exist, would shine the matter up.

[desiresjab]

So it scans right, I guess I should have said: Sappho wrote this fragment, not Annie Carson.

[MorpheusSandman]

I didn't see anything that impresses me in her or Anne Carson. They suffer from the same malaise that almost all contemporary poets do--no rhythm.In general I agree with you in your assessment about modern poetry lacking rhythm; I'm with Pound who said that poetry atrophies when it gets too far from music. That said, I would by no means unequivocally say "all" modern poetry suffers from this. Several of the poets I mentioned and poems I linked to are quite rhythmic. Here's another: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/246954 While Carson can be occasionally prose-like when it comes to her rhythms, this is not always the case. Rhythm abounds in this poem: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/178364 in its subtle slant rhymes, assonance, and shifting accents, how it uses vowel contrasts to emphasize words.


I read, read, read modern poetry until it is coming out of my ears. The problem has been so obvious to me for a long time. All these famous contemporary poets are acadamecians. They get published easily because of their universities.This is a nice little conspiracy theory, but, I'm sorry to inform you, it's not the case at all. Let's forget for a moment that there are numerous poets getting published outside of academia and numerous poets in academia who aren't publishing or aren't getting published easy or getting recognition; most aspiring poets enter academia because it's the only way to make money will still being deeply involved in what they do. As I mentioned in the other thread, publishing poetry doesn't pay well, it almost never has. So the only option to get a job that's related is in academia. It's also strange that you would apply this conclusion only to contemporary poetry when poets like Eliot and Auden were heavily involved in academia, especially Eliot who may have been as influential a critic/teacher as he was a poet. Meanwhile, Jame Merrill and WS Merwin never taught at all.


If either of these two are considered major poets, it just proves how dead modern poetry is. The high powered literary journals are full of offal that all sounds the same.In every generation going back as far as we have written records you can find people writing who have said the exact same thing. There are always malcontents who feel that their contemporaries are vastly inferior to the canonical authors of the past. Yet every generation never fails to produce at least one or two poets that become canonical, and usually several more that are remembered though not quite as well. It's VERY difficult to assess artists before they die, much less when they're just starting out, as you have no idea if they'll end up producing end-of-life masterpieces like Mozart and Beethoven or peter out. You're free to dislike Carson, as everyone is free to dislike anything, but I think it's wrongheaded to just denounce contemporary poetry in totum and take yourself out of the interesting process of canon-making.

FWIW, all the literary journals I subscribe to (and they are many: Poetry, American Poetry Review, Tar River Poetry, Poetry East, Rattle Poetry, and more recently The Kenyon Review, Field, The Journal, Crazyhorse via Lit Ragger) are far more heterogeneous than homogenous, sometimes even within the same magazine. Poetry, eg, can publish poems as oblique and surreal as Natalie Diaz's My Brother My Wound (http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/247312) to those as classical and straight-forward as AE Stallings's Drinking Song (http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse/184/1#!/20606526); what, pray tell, "sounds the same" about these two poems?

[tonywalt]

I also like this free verse piece by Sherman Alexie

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/237270

[myrrhina]

I agree entirely with the statement 'They suffer same malaise that almost all contemporary poets do- no rhythm'
It does seem wrong to say that 'all' contemporary poetry suffers from this, but it is, in my opinion, true. I have read loads of modern poetry and found nothing to compare with real poetry. I'm sorry but I don't find the poems that you have given links to 'rhythmic'. If they have rhythm, it is a mathematical, one might almost say an 'academic' rhythm. It is not the lyrical rhythm of poetry.
most aspiring poets enter academia because it's the only way to make money will still being deeply involved in what they do. As I mentioned in the other thread, publishing poetry doesn't pay well, it almost never has. So the only option to get a job that's related is in academia.
This is true, but I think that poetry and a job in academia are not exactly related. They are rather the exact opposites. A true artist is not interested in getting a livelihood at the expense of his art. Van Gogh lived on bread and coffee for most of his life and he is now among the Immortals. I know this is rather an extravagant theory, but if one must have a job, would it not be better to do something that has not the faintest connection with one's art? Because academicism invariably deteriorates the quality of art; it has been so in all ages, and one cannot be an academic without academicism influencing one's art.

It's VERY difficult to assess artists before they die, much less when they're just starting out, as you have no idea if they'll end up producing end-of-life masterpieces like Mozart and Beethoven or peter out.
Of course, there is room for improvement, but I believe we can judge the quality of a poet by the poetry he has produced so far. And after all, what we are discussing right now is 'contemporary poetry' and not poems that 'might' be written in the future.

[MorpheusSandman]

I have read loads of modern poetry and found nothing to compare with real poetry.As long as you are going to define "real poetry" as "poetry from the past that I love," I don't see how there's really much room for discussion. I don't find Carson's The Glass Essay or Gerhke's The New Self lacking in the slightest compared to old "real poetry."


I'm sorry but I don't find the poems that you have given links to 'rhythmic'. If they have rhythm, it is a mathematical, one might almost say an 'academic' rhythm. It is not the lyrical rhythm of poetry.LOL What in the world does this even MEAN? You're being so vague as to make discussion impossible. There are so many different KINDS of rhythm possible in poetry: accentual, accentual-syllabic, syntactic, alliterative, assonance, rhyme, slant-rhyme, etc. that to merely speak of "rhythm" in toto is rather pointless, and adding adjectives like "mathematical" or "academic" don't help matters. The most mathematical rhythm that's ever been is the accentual-syllabic that dominated English poetry from the time of Chaucer until roughly the time of Yeats; it was so mathematical that such "verse" was frequently called "numbers;" so are you dismissing all that poetry? As for "academic rhythm" I have NO clue what you mean (or could possibly mean) by this.


I think that poetry and a job in academia are not exactly related. They are rather the exact opposites. A true artist is not interested in getting a livelihood at the expense of his art... if one must have a job, would it not be better to do something that has not the faintest connection with one's art? Because academicism invariably deteriorates the quality of artThis is all just patent nonsense and could only come from someone who knows not the slightest thing about what goes on in academies and has a tenuous grasp on history or the creative act of poetry.

1. I have no idea how you could possibly conclude that poetry and a "job in academia" are "exact opposites." How is teaching poetry and/or creative writing to others "the complete opposite" of writing poetry? Do not poets think about the art of poetry while writing, editing, and after and before doing either? How is that thinking any different than writing about it, or teaching others? TS Eliot said that his criticism and teaching came out of his own personal poetry workshops, of thinking through what aspects of poetry he admired and which he didn't.

2. The bit about "true artists" is laughably naive. Yes, many artists have suffered for their art; equally yes, just as many have not. Nobody ever seems to want to talk about the great artists that didn't struggle or the terrible artists that did. How much one struggles has nothing to do with how good or bad their art is. Everyone, however, has to make a living, and when one wants to spend a life absorbed in their art but can't make a living doing it, the next closest thing is teaching it or writing about it. I can't see that this absorption is, on the whole, negative or positive for poets. If you list all the greats from the 20th century I'm guessing it would be about 50/50 between those that made their living off something related to poetry VS made their living off something unrelated.

3. Finally, I have no idea why you would think "academicism invariably deteriorates the quality of art;" Invariably? Really? Eliot's academicism deteriorated his art? Auden's? Frost's? Hill's? I have no idea why anyone would think it would, unless they're holding on to old romantic ideas that poets are these divinely inspired creatures. They're not. Most poets start off imitating and sounding like it. If they gain any originality at all it's usually through the alchemical process that Eliot described in Tradition and the Individual Talent, ie, by mixing influences in such a way that made the work seem new. There are very few exceptions to this (Stevens was one). So it seems to me that the academy would be the one place where a poet would be guaranteed to pick up and start to assimilate such influences while learning about their art.

[tonywalt]

Can we post examples of contempory poems that we like instead of this very old argument about the evolution of poetry? It would be so annoying if this thread is closed.


http://badfuturist.com/valentina-cano-cold-war/

Here is an example of some of Valentina Cano's work.

I'm most interested in emerging poets in the smaller presses - some good stuff there.

Thanks, Tony

[MorpheusSandman]

I see no reason this thread would/should get closed, and discussing the state of contemporary poetry seems appropriate in a thread about the best contemporary poets!

Anyway, I haven't heard of Cano, but that piece doesn't strike me as anything special. Later I may post some pieces I recently read in Kenyon review that I very much liked, though I'll have to copy by hand since I can't copy/paste from Kindle.

[tonywalt]

[QUOTE=MorpheusSandman;1257661]I see no reason this thread would/should get closed, and discussing the state of contemporary poetry seems appropriate in a thread about the best contemporary poets!

Noted.

This is prose, but could be called flash fiction. It's short, but do enjoy!


http://carabosseslibrary.blogspot.ca/2013/12/dawn-by-valentina-cano.html?spref=bl

[TheFifthElement]

http://badfuturist.com/valentina-cano-cold-war/

Here is an example of some of Valentina Cano's work.


I like her work.

I also like Imtiaz Dharker: http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoem.do?poemId=14257
Moniza Alvi: http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/i-would-like-to-be-a-dot-in-a-painting-by-miro/
Kapka Kassabova: http://www.clivejames.com/poetry/kassabova/life
Jay Bernard: http://www.poetryinternationalweb.net/pi/site/poem/item/19571/auto/LINGERIE
Heidi Williamson: http://www.poetrypf.co.uk/heidiwilliamsonpoems.shtml
Jean Sprackland: http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoem.do?poemId=458

[tonywalt]

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/nightclub/

I like this one by Billy Collins. I know he's hugely popular on this thread, but thought I would include him anyway.

[Lykren]

I have Mary Barnard's well-known translation of some of Sappho's poems, and though I don't think Barnard translated that same poem, her volume, though good, as a whole seems rather flat to me compared to Carson's. Here is Barnard's version of Sappho's famous Fragment 31:


He is more than a hero

He is a god in my eyes -
the man who is allowed
to sit beside you - he

who listens intimately
to the sweet murmur of
your voice, the enticing

laughter that makes my own
heart beat fast. If I meet
you suddenly, I can't

speak - my tongue is broken;
a thin flame runs under
my skin; seeing nothing,

hearing only my own ears
drumming, I drip with sweat;
trembling shakes my body

and I turn paler than
dry grass. At such times
death isn't far from me

Carson's:


He seems to me equal to the gods that man
whoever he is who opposite you
sits and listens close
to your sweet speaking

and lovely laughing - oh it
puts the heart in my chest on wings
for when I look at you, even a moment, no speaking
is left in me

no: tongue breaks and thin
fire is racing under skin
and in eyes no sight and drumming
fills ears

and cold sweat holds me and shaking
grips me all, greener than grass
I am and dead - or almost
I seem to me.

But all is to be dared, because even a person of poverty

and another version, by Sherod Santos, for comparison:


He must feel blooded with the spirit of a god
to sit opposite you and listen, and reply,
to your talk, your laughter, your touching,
breath-held silences. But what I feel, sitting here
and watching you, so stops my heart and binds
my tongue that I can't think what I might say
to breach the aureole around you there.
It's as if someone with flint and stone had sparked
a fire that kindled the flesh along my arms
and smothered me in its smoke-blind rush.
Paler than the summer grass, it seems
I am already dead, or little short of dying.

[desiresjab]

Thanks. I always learn from you folks. Let me replace the word all in my statement with in general, and maybe that will help.

The thing is, not all rhythms or rhythmic "runs" are aurally attractive, either. A great deal of work might be put into rhythms which the ear may not consciously notice. Only a later intellectual unraveling of the techniques involved to see where the power came from, will bring appreciation. This kind is good too. Poems can't all have the hypnotic quality of Swineburne's best. We would like plenty of both kinds, to tell the truth, since they are not mutually exclusive.

I never hear rhyme mentioned as a rhythmic device, though I believe it is. This is not an advertisement for rhyme. However, rhyme is a rhythmic device, in my view. It can pull the reader up short, like jerking the reins of a horse at a cliff. In an age where "organic" rhythm has to a large degree supplanted scanned meter as the orthodox mode, it seems to me that many current poets would be wise to take more advantage of rhyme's rhythmic qualities. When a body of work is cloyed with predominantly one form (free verse, organically rhythmed), that is usually a negative to me.

[desiresjab]

Well, I almost hate to say it, but I prefer both other versions to Carson's. Hers is the one that seems forced to me. Whover he is who opposite you sits, is really clumsy and far less intimate than the simple the man who is allowed to sit beside you.

[stlukesguild]

I agree entirely with the statement 'They suffer same malaise that almost all contemporary poets do- no rhythm'
It does seem wrong to say that 'all' contemporary poetry suffers from this, but it is, in my opinion, true. I have read loads of modern poetry and found nothing to compare with real poetry. I'm sorry but I don't find the poems that you have given links to 'rhythmic'. If they have rhythm, it is a mathematical, one might almost say an 'academic' rhythm. It is not the lyrical rhythm of poetry.

As Morpheus suggested, every generation has those who fail to appreciate or even recognize the strongest achievements of their own time... because they have a misguided notion of an "ideal" or true or "real" art from the past and the further anything falls from this antiquated ideal, the further it falls from being "good" let alone great. Artistic comparisons are a two-way street. You cannot compare the achievements of an artist from one era or tradition as opposed to those of another using the values or standards of but a single of these. In other words... if I were to compare a painting by Rembrandt...

http://employees.oneonta.edu/farberas/arth/Images/110images/sl16_images/selfportraits/1669-1.jpg

with one of Matisse...

http://www.adlogomosaic.com/art/2007/05_matisse_the_girl_with_green_eyes/matisse_the_girl_with_green_eyes.jpg

this comparison would be wholly useless if I were to base it upon the notion that the art of Rembrandt represented some ideal that all art should aspire to. Matisse fails to achieve Rembrandt's naturalism, his ability to suggest the individuality or personality of the sitter, his mastery of anatomy, his ability to suggest light and 3-dimensional form, etc... But I might just as validly look at Rembrandt's failings based upon the values and standards of Matisse. Rembrandt's use of color is comically poor in comparison to Matisse. Matisse is far more innovative with regard to expressive distortions and his paintings are far more fluid... able to capture the essence of his subject with a minimum of detail as opposed to Rembrandt, who in comparison might be seen as having overworked his paintings.

I think that poetry and a job in academia are not exactly related. They are rather the exact opposites. A true artist is not interested in getting a livelihood at the expense of his art. Van Gogh lived on bread and coffee for most of his life and he is now among the Immortals.

That is the most fantastic and Romantic of fantasies... and suggest a complete lack of any knowledge of the lives of artists. Art and Money are intrinsically intertwined. The greatest eras in art... the greatest artistic centers... Rome, Paris, Florence, London, New York, etc... achieved their cultural status as a result of money. Wealth is needed to support the arts. Arts institutions and the proper training of artists demand great wealth. Wealth is needed in order for individuals to be able to afford the luxury of free-time in order to create and enjoy artistic creation.

Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian, Rubens, Degas, Monet, Manet, Matisse, Picasso, etc... were all quite successful in monetary terms. Van Gogh likely would have enjoyed similar success had he lived another decade. His work was being feted by other artists and collectors within but a few years of his death. Within a decade of the artist's death, his works were seen in major exhibitions in Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, Berlin, Cologne, etc... But a few years further and paintings by the artist had enetered into the permanent collections of museums in Vienna, Rotterdam, and any number of private collections of important dealers/collectors.

I know this is rather an extravagant theory, but if one must have a job, would it not be better to do something that has not the faintest connection with one's art? Because academicism invariably deteriorates the quality of art; it has been so in all ages, and one cannot be an academic without academicism influencing one's art.

Matisse...

http://777alex777.users.photofile.ru/photo/777alex777/2121520/large/35099276.jpg

Max Beckmann...

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/51/Max_Beckmann's_'Self-portrait_with_Horn',_1938-1940.jpg

Paul Klee...

http://pics.livejournal.com/oleg_mishin/pic/001q9hgd/s640x480

Wassily Kandinsky...

http://www.invisiblebooks.com/KandinskyComposition%20VIISketch913.jpg

Arshile Gorky...

http://culturacolectiva.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/23012199.JPG.jpeg

Hans Hoffmann...

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/9b/Hans_Hofmann's_painting_'The_Gate',_1959%E2%80%936 0.jpg

Willem DeKooning...

http://www.moma.org/images/dynamic_content/exhibition_page/53598.jpg?1374095343

Robert Rauschenberg...

http://blog.lib.umn.edu/jrock2/rockblog/images/rauschenbg_1963.jpg

Richard Diebenkorn...

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/b0/Cityscape_I_360.jpg

... are all among the most innovative artists of the last century. Their work shows no trace of "academicism"... and yet every last one of them taught. The ability to survive upon the sale of "fine art" or poetry or musical composition alone is rare. Artists, like any other human being, need to support themselves and their dependents. The "starving artist" fantasy wears thin quite fast... and one soon discovers that without a consistent source of income, one cannot afford a working studio space, art supplies, etc...

Of course, there is room for improvement, but I believe we can judge the quality of a poet by the poetry he has produced so far. And after all, what we are discussing right now is 'contemporary poetry' and not poems that 'might' be written in the future.

The difficulty with assessing contemporary art is due to a number of things. We are simply overwhelmed by the amount of contemporary art/poetry/music available whereas the art of the past has been weighed and the finest work cherry-picked by generations of artists, art lovers, etc... We also need to consider that when looking at contemporary art we are often dealing with innovative forms and formal languages which have yet to have been absorbed (or rejected) by the culture. It doesn't take much research to discover just how many of the painters of Modernism, for example (Degas, Monet, Van Gogh, Matisse, Picasso, etc...) were initially thought of as extremely difficult... if not ridiculous jokes. We might also find painters, such as one Hans Makart, who was once the leading painter of Austria and Eastern Europe... feted and collected by wealthy aristocrats and industrialists... and now almost wholly forgotten... except as the teacher of Gustav Klimt.

I have no faith in the prescience of today's "critics" as being superior to those of the past.

[TheFifthElement]

And in true Lit-net fashion, in a thread devoted to the best poets of the 21st Century the most quoted poet is Sappho :rolleyes:

[Majesty]

Quoting a famous poem by carol ann duffy:

Somewhere on the other side of this wide night
and the distance between us, I am thinking of you.
The room is turning slowly away from the moon.

This is pleasurable. Or shall I cross that out and say
it is sad? In one of the tenses I singing
an impossible song of desire that you cannot hear.

La lala la. See? I close my eyes and imagine the dark hills I would have to cross
to reach you. For I am in love with you

and this is what it is like or what it is like in words.


can anyone tell me what's good about this poem? how does a room turn away from a moon?

[MorpheusSandman]

And in true Lit-net fashion, in a thread devoted to the best poets of the 21st Century the most quoted poet is Sappho :rolleyes:Technically, the most quoted poets are translations of Sappho, but such translations can be useful in getting an idea of how different contemporary poets handle the same material.

[MorpheusSandman]

In an age where "organic" rhythm has to a large degree supplanted scanned meter as the orthodox mode, it seems to me that many current poets would be wise to take more advantage of rhyme's rhythmic qualities. When a body of work is cloyed with predominantly one form (free verse, organically rhythmed), that is usually a negative to me.All of the early free-verse poets were extremely concerned about how to create an aural, rhythmic aesthetic in poetry without meter or rhyme. Whitman found it largely through rhetorical devices like anaphora; Eliot found it through syntactic repetition paired with line breaks. If there is a general problem with most modern poetry it's in the general ignorance (literally as in "to ignore") any and all rhythmic devices. To me, rhythm in poetry is purely about sound patterning, and rhyme is just one element of such patterning. I don't buy into the notions of "organic" VS "metrical" rhythm; all poetry is artificial, and the emphasis on "natural" speech in poetry seems to be almost anti-poetry, since "natural" speech has always been called "prose." Even a poet with as pared-down a style as Gluck is not afraid to use line-breaks and consonance quite extensively, as in her October: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/16723 (listen for the plethora of "n(d)," "ed" and "in" sounds: again, planted, end, garden, dense, sound, ground, harvested, and how they're emphasized by the line endings). To me, that sound patterning is no more natural or artificial than meter, but it's definitely rhythmic. She also, like Whitman, uses heavy anaphora ("Is it," "Didn't," "I x" "When did")

[tonywalt]

Here is one I like by Thomas Lux

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse/153/4#!/20601896

[tonywalt]

another one by Thomas Lux

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse/137/3#!/20594064

[tonywalt]

This one by Beth Ann Fennelly

http://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2012/02/poem-not-to-be-read-at-your-wedding-by-beth-ann-fennelly.html

[tonywalt]

And this is probably everyones favourite, Denise Duhamel "How will it end"

How It Will end
We’re walking on the boardwalk
but stop when we see a lifeguard and his girlfriend
fighting. We can’t hear what they’re saying,
but it is as good as a movie. We sit on a bench to find out
how it will end. I can tell by her body language
he’s done something really bad. She stands at the bottom
of the ramp that leads to his hut. He tries to walk halfway down
to meet her, but she keeps signaling don’t come closer.
My husband says, “Boy, he’s sure in for it,”
and I say, “He deserves whatever’s coming to him.”
My husband thinks the lifeguard’s cheated, but I think
she’s sick of him only working part time
or maybe he forgot to put the rent in the mail.
The lifeguard tries to reach out
and she holds her hand like Diana Ross
when she performed “Stop in the Name of Love.”
The red flag that slaps against his station means strong currents.
“She has to just get it out of her system,”
my husband laughs, but I’m not laughing.
I start to coach the girl to leave her no-good lifeguard,
but my husband predicts she’ll never leave.
I’m angry at him for seeing glee in their situation
and say, “That’s your problem—you think every fight
is funny. You never take her seriously,” and he says,
“You never even give the guy a chance and you’re always nagging,
so how can he tell the real issues from the nitpicking?”
and I say, “She doesn’t nitpick!” and he says, “Oh really?
Maybe he should start recording her tirades,” and I say,
“Maybe he should help out more,” and he says,
“Maybe she should be more supportive,” and I say,
“Do you mean supportive or do you mean support him?”
and my husband says that he’s doing the best he can,

that’s he’s a lifeguard for Christ’s sake, and I say
that her job is much harder, that she’s a waitress
who works nights carrying heavy trays and is hit on all the time
by creepy tourists and he just sits there most days napping
and listening to “Power 96” and then ooh
he gets to be the big hero blowing his whistle
and running into the water to save beach bunnies who flatter him,
and my husband says it’s not as though she’s Miss Innocence
and what about the way she flirts, giving free refills
when her boss isn’t looking or cutting extra large pieces of pie
to get bigger tips, oh no she wouldn’t do that because she’s a saint
and he’s the devil, and I say, “I don’t know why you can’t just admit
he’s a jerk,” and my husband says, “I don’t know why you can’t admit
she’s a killjoy,” and then out of the blue the couple is making up.
The red flag flutters, then hangs limp.
She has her arms around his neck and is crying into his shoulder.
He whisks her up into his hut. We look around, but no one is watching us.

[desiresjab]

How It Will end

We’re walking on the boardwalk but stop when we see a lifeguard and his girlfriend fighting. We can’t hear what they’re saying, but it is as good as a movie. We sit on a bench to find out how it will end. I can tell by her body language he’s done something really bad. She stands at the bottom of the ramp that leads to his hut. He tries to walk halfway down to meet her, but she keeps signaling don’t come closer. My husband says,

“Boy, he’s sure in for it,” and I say,

“He deserves whatever’s coming to him.”

My husband thinks the lifeguard’s cheated, but I think she’s sick of him only working part time or maybe he forgot to put the rent in the mail. The lifeguard tries to reach out and she holds her hand like Diana Ross when she performed “Stop in the Name of Love.” The red flag that slaps against his station means strong currents.

“She has to just get it out of her system,” my husband laughs, but I’m not laughing. I start to coach the girl to leave her no-good lifeguard, but my husband predicts she’ll never leave. I’m angry at him for seeing glee in their situation and say,

“That’s your problem—you think every fight is funny. You never take her seriously,” and he says,

“You never even give the guy a chance and you’re always nagging, so how can he tell the real issues from the nitpicking?” and I say,

“She doesn’t nitpick!” and he says,

“Oh really? Maybe he should start recording her tirades,” and I say,

“Maybe he should help out more,” and he says,

“Maybe she should be more supportive,” and I say,

“Do you mean supportive or do you mean support him?” and my husband says that he’s doing the best he can, that’s he’s a lifeguard for Christ’s sake, and I say that her job is much harder, that she’s a waitress who works nights carrying heavy trays and is hit on all the time by creepy tourists and he just sits there most days napping and listening to “Power 96” and then ooh he gets to be the big hero blowing his whistle and running into the water to save beach bunnies who flatter him, and my husband says it’s not as though she’s Miss Innocence and what about the way she flirts, giving free refills when her boss isn’t looking or cutting extra large pieces of pie to get bigger tips, oh no she wouldn’t do that because she’s a saint and he’s the devil, and I say,

“I don’t know why you can’t just admit he’s a jerk,” and my husband says,

“I don’t know why you can’t admit she’s a killjoy,” and then out of the blue the couple is making up. The red flag flutters, then hangs limp. She has her arms around his neck and is crying into his shoulder. He whisks her up into his hut. We look around, but no one is watching us.

To me this is a very fine piece of flash fiction, and it does not appear to lose anything by being treated this way. Every word had my full interest and still does. To break the lines into a poem seems like an arbitrary decision, if you can pretend you have just written this piece as flash fiction. Its 515 word length may be just a coincidence.

It turns out that this fine piece of writing is perfect to illustrate some of my concerns. First, I would like to ask anyone, is it really poetry and why? Can you imagine doing the above to Yeats or Hardy and getting away with it? But does that mean anything?

In my opinion How It Will End does not lose anything rendered as prose, other than perhaps a certain quickness--maybe.

Read aloud to an audience, the piece would do great, generating the laughter and nods that so many popular poets depend on at their readings these days.

My question is compound: Is it poetry, and why?

[Lykren]

My question is compound: Is it poetry, and why?

I think that's an unanswerable question, and probably also meaningless.

[sandy14]

Quoting a famous poem by carol ann duffy:

Somewhere on the other side of this wide night
and the distance between us, I am thinking of you.
The room is turning slowly away from the moon.

This is pleasurable. Or shall I cross that out and say
it is sad? In one of the tenses I singing
an impossible song of desire that you cannot hear.

La lala la. See? I close my eyes and imagine the dark hills I would have to cross
to reach you. For I am in love with you

and this is what it is like or what it is like in words.


can anyone tell me what's good about this poem? how does a room turn away from a moon?

The moon and earth are rotating - hence the image - as night passes the moon moves across the sky. So from the narrator's perspective, the room is turning away from the moon. Alternatively the narrator is on a train/boat/plane - and so the room is not static - that is another possibility.

[tonywalt]

Here is another one by the LITNET favourite, Denise Duhamel:


Buddhist Barbie

In the 5th century B.C.
an Indian philosopher
Gautama teaches 'All is emptiness'
and 'There is no self.'
In the 20th century A.D.
Barbie agrees, but wonders how a man
with such a belly could pose,
smiling, and without a shirt.


Denise Duhamel

[tonywalt]

“What Do Women Want?”

I want a red dress.
I want it flimsy and cheap,
I want it too tight, I want to wear it
until someone tears it off me.
I want it sleeveless and backless,
this dress, so no one has to guess
what’s underneath. I want to walk down
the street past Thrifty’s and the hardware store
with all those keys glittering in the window,
past Mr. and Mrs. Wong selling day-old
donuts in their café, past the Guerra brothers
slinging pigs from the truck and onto the dolly,
hoisting the slick snouts over their shoulders.
I want to walk like I’m the only
woman on earth and I can have my pick.
I want that red dress bad.
I want it to confirm
your worst fears about me,
to show you how little I care about you
or anything except what
I want. When I find it, I’ll pull that garment
from its hanger like I’m choosing a body
to carry me into this world, through
the birth-cries and the love-cries too,
and I’ll wear it like bones, like skin,
it’ll be the goddamned
dress they bury me in.


Kim Addonizio, “What Do Women Want?” from Tell Me. Copyright © 2000 by Kim Addonizio. Reprinted with the permission of BOA Editions, Ltd, www.boaeditions.org.

[tonywalt]

This one by Billy Collins is sharp and funny.


The Revenant - Billy Collins

I am the dog you put to sleep,
as you like to call the needle of oblivion,
come back to tell you this simple thing:
I never liked you--not one bit.

When I licked your face,
I thought of biting off your nose.
When I watched you toweling yourself dry,
I wanted to leap and unman you with a snap.

I resented the way you moved,
your lack of animal grace,
the way you would sit in a chair to eat,
a napkin on your lap, knife in your hand.

I would have run away,
but I was too weak, a trick you taught me
while I was learning to sit and heel,
and--greatest of insults--shake hands without a hand.

I admit the sight of the leash
would excite me
but only because it meant I was about
to smell things you had never touched.

You do not want to believe this,
but I have no reason to lie.
I hated the car, the rubber toys,
disliked your friends and, worse, your relatives.

The jingling of my tags drove me mad.
You always scratched me in the wrong place.
All I ever wanted from you
was food and fresh water in my metal bowls.

While you slept, I watched you breathe
as the moon rose in the sky.
It took all of my strength
not to raise my head and howl.

Now I am free of the collar,
the yellow raincoat, monogrammed sweater,
the absurdity of your lawn,
and that is all you need to know about this place

except what you already supposed
and are glad it did not happen sooner--

that everyone here can read and write,
the dogs in poetry, the cats and the others in prose.

[tonywalt]

Fly by Valentina Cano

She caught scent of him,
a bonfire in the rotating room.
Smoke filled her lungs
like cobwebs, like silk.
Every breath became a trap
and she thought of flies
in abandoned drinks.
A rush of sweetness
and drenching of wings.

[myrrhina]

First I should define what I mean by real poetry, or rather let me say good poetry.There is no definite or uniform criterion to determine the greats of any age.
GOOD poetry is made up of two things : style and
sincerity. Both are requisite in equal degrees….
The poet, therefore, is one who puts into a beautiful
form the expression of an overpowering emotion….
The reason of this is that ethical beauty is at the back of
all beauty. Beautiful forms, beautiful sounds, beautiful
colours, beautiful faces are simply the channels by which
spiritual perfection is suggested to our spirit, and the
resulting yearning, the desperate struggle upwards of the
soul towards the Supreme Beauty, however dimly and darkly
felt, is what produces all great art whether in poetry or in
music, or in sculpture, or in painting. (Alfred Bruce Douglas)
This is what Shelley meant when he said that, “Intellectual Beauty would free this world from its dark slavery.”
The formalism of the Neo-Classicists is sickening but the anti-formalism of modern poetry also carried out to excess is inartistic. Experimentation with the poetic form is not only desirable, but necessary. Shakespeare experimented with the Petrarchan sonnet (because English is a harder language to rhyme than Italian) to create the Shakespearean sonnet. It is a poetic form in its own right because it has beauty of form.
Compare these two translations of the same lines by two poets.



Fragment from Euripides’ Hecuba
A song of lamentation Oscar Wilde

O blowing wind! You bring my sorrow near,
For surely borne with the splashing of the oar,
And hidden in some galley-prison drear
I shall be led unto that distant shore
Where the tall palm-tree first took root, and made,
With clustering laurel leaves, a pleasant shade
For Leto when with travail great she bore
A god and goddess in Love’s bitter fight,
Her body’s anguish, and her soul’s delight.

I shall pass with my soul over-laden,
To a land far way and unseen,
For Asia is slave and handmaiden,
Europa is mistress and Queen.
Without love or love’s holiest treasure,
I shall pass into Hades abhorred,
To the grave as my chamber of pleasure,
To death as my Lover and Lord.



Translation by Janet Lembke and Kenneth J. Reckford.

Oars, sea-sweeeping oars,
Will you bring my sad life
Home to an island?

The isle where the first palm and laurel
Sprouted, honoring Leto
With gifts: holy shade and trunks to grip
As she labored to bear Zeus twin children?


…. And I am called slave
in a land of exile,
made to leave Asia,

made to become Europe’s servant
and bride to my death.









Prescience of today's critics.
This is true. The man of the day is but the man of a day.
But I don’t particularly admire‘old’ or ‘recognized’ artists
To consider some writers from the 20th century whose work I consider good;
Willa Cather- Paul’s Case “The carnations in his coat were drooping with the cold, he noticed, their red glory all over. It occurred to him that all the flowers he had seen in the glass cases that first night must have gone the same way, long before this. It was only one splendid breath they had, in spite of their brave mockery at the winter outside the glass, and it was a losing game in the end, it seemed, this revolt against the homilies by which the world is run.”
“As he fell, the folly of his haste occurred to him with merciless clearness, the vastness of what he had left undone. There flashed through his brain, clearer than ever before, the blue of Adriatic water, the yellow of Algerian sands.”
Violette Leduc- La Batarde
" I came into the world, I vowed to entertain a passion for the impossible."
"The rose bush bows under the ecstasy of its roses. What do you want it to say?"
"This August day, reader, is a rose window glowing with heat. I make you a gift of it, it's yours."
And Truman Capote.





Academicism
I should change the word 'invariably'. Superlatives are always untenable. There were at least three exceptions I forgot. There might be more. Walter Pater was a university don but he was also a great artist.
Edith Hamilton (The Greek way to Western civilization, Mythology etc)
James H. Cousins whose book “The Work Promethean” is an example of literary criticism raised to the level of artistic creation. So maybe it has no influence, maybe it is fifty-fifty. And definitely a job in academia would give the leisure and opportunity for research and improvement. Thanks, I learned from you.
But it is wrong that an artist has to turn to teaching to get a living. ---don’t have to do that. Yet the artist is more important than any of these because it is he who has direct influence on the evolution of the soul of man. “The arts are the most effective means that man has evolved for piercing through or casting aside the non essentials of ordinary existence and touching the vast movement of cosmic life.” (Hegel)But in ‘existing society the artist is but a broken vessel’. He is utterly useless. And when the artist turns to teaching to earn a living it is a kind of confirmation of this impression. Not that society would care if the artist starved in protest!
Art and money are linked, but not intrinsically. In the existing social system (and has existed for centuries)there is nothing that is not linked with money, so art is also inevitably linked with it. ‘The true solution of humanity’s economical and other problems will only be found when the services of life are not only free to all, but directed towards ‘divine’ ends; not towards the disruptive gratifications of the flesh, but towards the unifying influences of the spirit’. The idea is Shelley’s but its ancestry can be traced as far back as Plato and Socrates. It is rather an Utopian concept, but man’s object in life is to ‘set sail from Utopia’, to be never satisfied with the second best, to seek always for a better, nobler and more beautiful form of life.
I liked most of the drawings posted by stlukesguild, and they don't show any signs of academicism, as far as I can judge. Thanks

[myrrhina]

The dotted space before '--- don't have to do that' read 'doctors, lawyers, bankers and corporate executives don't have to do that.'

[myrrhina]

The dotted space before '--- don't have to do that' should read 'doctors, lawyers, bankers and corporate executives don't have to do that.'

[tonywalt]

Here is another poet I like

I Don't Miss It BY TRACY K. SMITH



But sometimes I forget where I am,
Imagine myself inside that life again.

Recalcitrant mornings. Sun perhaps,
Or more likely colorless light

Filtering its way through shapeless cloud.

And when I begin to believe I haven’t left,
The rest comes back. Our couch. My smoke

Climbing the walls while the hours fall.
Straining against the noise of traffic, music,

Anything alive, to catch your key in the door.
And that scamper of feeling in my chest,

As if the day, the night, wherever it is
I am by then, has been only a whir

Of something other than waiting.

We hear so much about what love feels like.
Right now, today, with the rain outside,

And leaves that want as much as I do to believe
In May, in seasons that come when called,

It’s impossible not to want
To walk into the next room and let you

Run your hands down the sides of my legs,
Knowing perfectly well what they know.

[tonywalt]

Interstate 101 South, California, 1981 by Tracy Smith

Remember the radio, the Coca-Cola sign
Phosphorescent to the left, bridge
After bridge, as though our lives were
Engineered simply to go? And so we went

Into those few quiet hours
Alone together in the dark, my arm
On the rest beside yours, our lights
Pricking at fog, tugging us patiently

Forward like a needle through gauze.
Night held us like a house.
Sometimes an old song
Would fill the car like a ghost.

[tonywalt]

“For a Singer” by Stuart Dischell

All those years waiting for good
News that would change

Your life. It never came.
Others heard it.

Others were changed.
But you kept on anyway.

That's what makes you remarkable
Among the unremarkable

In your boots and skirt
On the bus outside the show.

Took some years for the blues to become your own.

[desiresjab]

Folks may get a kick out of this guy I just found. He is entertaining--kind of the shock jock of literary criticism. His website is one of the most extensive I have ever viewed. No one can accuse him of a lack of dedication, he has posted hundreds if not thousands of his articles on film, poetry and fiction, plus a range of other topics. His website Cosmoetica has received 300,000,000 visitors.

Sometimes he (Dan Schneider) seems brilliant, at other moments a churl. He will tell you right up front that his poetry is better than Whitman's. He is a decent poet, not a great one. He has the gall and irreverence to re/compose certain poems of the great masters to make them better, as he stridently claims. In a few instance he may even have been right. Snodgrass decomposed great poems to show the power of the origional compared to what a decent or hack poet might have written, Schneider goes the other way and rewrites the poems of the masters.

He has no lack of opinions, and many of them are extremely harsh on what he calls poetasters, a long list including some of the best known contemporary (and otherwise) poets in the English speaking world.

Good for him! He is right about the state of modern poetry. It is controlled by professor poets and their allies in publishing. As I have maintained since my first day here, there is a paucity of technical know-how among the great majority of published poets today. Instead of Floyd Mayweather expertise, what we are subjected to in poetry journals is the equivalent of a ToughMan contest where skill is concerned. (Sorry about that analogy Morph. You know I'll never quit sports analogies).

Schneider is no Ezra Pound, but he is a viable critic on many things and understands poetry both technically and emotionally. Like me, you will probably find yourself agreeing joyfully with some of his judgements and wildly disagreeing with others. And, oh, his wife is a poet and critic too. Do not be flabbergasted that she is better than Emily Dickensen, just enjoy the show. It is a pretty good one.

[MorpheusSandman]

Dan Schneider is an idiot that tries to puff himself up because nobody would listen/care otherwise. He's a semi-decent film critic sometimes (hardly a Jonathan Rosenbaum or David Bordwell) but a sub-mediocre poet and poetry critic, and it's almost sad to see him attack critics that are infinitely better like Helen Vendler. (http://www.online-literature.com/forums/showthread.php?69175-Know-Thy-Queen-Her-Majesty-Helen-Vendler) Schneider's style of criticism is what I termed long ago "opinion vomiting." It's not really analysis or theory or the real fruits of serious study; it's just "this sucks 'cause I don't like it and this rocks 'cause I like it," and even though he obviously uses more words, that's basically what it boils down to. What little analysis he does offer is so superficial as to be either tritely obvious or incomplete in ways that leads him into hilarious contradictions and ignorance, as the above thread points out.

BTW, I don't mind opinionated critics, but strong opinions need to be earned, not just shouted as loudly and verbosely as possible hoping that someone will agree. When Vendler declares certain poems/passages in Stevens "failures" and others "successes," one may agree or disagree, but there's no way to read her in-depth analysis and say that she hasn't earned the right to her opinions, as arguably nobody knows his poetry so deeply. It's also worth pointing out that, whatever Vendler's opinions, she's never so pompous about it. Her opinions are something uttered in passing amidst a mountain of insightful analysis. With Schneider it's the reverse; his analysis seems little more than a way to rationalize his opinions. I never get the feeling that Schneider has earned anything, certainly not enough to be as obnoxious as he is about what he says. He very much seems to be a classic victim of the Dunning-Kruger effect.

[desiresjab]

There is a certain entertainment value in his antics. You sound like his style when you talk about him. I have to disagree on his film criticism, it absolutely stinks IMO. Fistful of Dollars got his GREAT rating, whreas No Country For Old Men was an artistic mess, a cartoon. Same with Fargo, it was a mess too, but Godzilla Returns, or some such scat, was GREAT. The clown doesn't have a clue about films. His claim to fame is one nice compliment by Ebert, which he repaid by saying Ebert had the killer instinct of a collie in a wolf pack.

I can't help it if he is right about some things, especially the state of contemporary poetry and many of the hacks held up by the current establishment as heros of the language. I can't help it if he has many of the reason right.

I am able to separate the wheat from the chaff. It is not as if I would buy into his statement that Elliot is the most overrated poet in the history of the English language.

A website with 300,000,000 hits, shouldn't that be making someone some big conch? Or does he do it for all for the love of the kill.

He hasn't made our list right here in this thread. Do you want to nominate him?

[MorpheusSandman]

This is a discussion forum; it's the proper place for opinion vomiting, not in 5,000 word essays masquerading as criticism. I hold the latter to a much higher standard. Anyway, I thought I made it clear that I don't think critics should really be judged on whether one agrees with their opinions or not. That Schneider lieks/dislikes this or that film is rather irrelevant to me; it matters more what he has to say about them. To me, when he speaks about film he sounds like he has more worthwhile to say than when he talks about poetry; but it's probably been too long since I read him to offer any examples. I did check out his No Country review, as it's one of my 2-or-3 favorite Coen films, and it is quite typical of Schneider's garrulous, superficial opinion-vomiting when it comes to poetry. I mean, I won't claim my review (http://www.cinelogue.com/reviews/no-country-for-old-men) is super-concise or without its opinions, but at least I did far more than Schneider in far less words (about 50% less if Word is accurate) to analyze what I think is really going on in the film (FWIW, I think NCFOM and A Serious Man are really companion films; the same theme attacked from two very different perspectives. I wrote about ASM here. (http://www.cinelogue.com/reviews/a-serious-man2)).

The only thing Schneider should be nominated for is the "people who need to shut the hell up" list.

[Pierre Menard]

...


Hey, Morpheus. Slightly off-topic, but thought I'd ask why I have the chance. I noticed you mentioned David Bordwell as a quality film critic on the previous page, and I'm quite a fan as well, especially as he's a formalist and tackles the form and craft of film quite in depth. Reminds me of Helen Vendler a bit actually. I was just wondering if you knew of any other really good film critics who are formalists and tackle the actual craft of film?

[desiresjab]

It does not take long to tire of Schneider's pukefest. Acrimony drips from his lips and I am sure he hates the world and everyone in it except his sychophants. I imagine that having a well travelled website gives him a certain amount of power and leverage with those who think he can dispense favors.

His review of Dubliners was pitiful and could gag a healthy maggot. He announced that Ivy Day In The Committee room was the weakest story in the book. He rushed over two reasons--the characters were undeveloped and you had to know the politics of the day to relate to it, according to him. But not according to me. Maybe he is lazier than I thought--all rant and no read. According to me IDITCR is one one the best stories of its length in English, and is no less than the third best story in the book. Pok! Remember the corks popping out of their ales when they sat the bottles down on the stove? And Psss! when a drop overflowed onto the hot stove. Those bottles sitting on the stoves with their corks about to blow are suddenly the Dubliners. Inside that room is a microcosm of everything going on outside. Some of the stories are microcosmal, maybe all of them are intended to be.

Joyce constantly assualts all five senses in the effort to put you "into" his tales. In Counterparts, which Schneider has the sense to admit is a solid story (is that all?), the meaty color of Farrington's face when angry, the blue plumes of the lady visiting his supervisor, the smell of her perfume, the shouts and clanking of the tavern, the arm wrestling contest with the acrobat in the tavern--so much input conspiring upon the senses, makes this story come alive like no other in the book for me. Farrington under the cruel yoke of a master. Who could that be? In the last scene he shows how it is all handed down to this day when he whips his son for no good reason but his own frustration disappointment with life. Ireland is being whipped.

Schneider judges Dubliners as Joyce's best work, which may not be as preposterous as it sounds. There is some basis for that in my eyes, though I am very impressed with Portrait, as well. Parts of Ulysses were incredibly brilliant, such as the funeral carriage ride, the yes sequence, Bloom cooking kidneys, and many others, but that brilliance seems to come and go rather than being consistent. I am certainly no expert on the book.

Of course Schneider's bee bee brain is incapable of relating Joyce's innovations to the fracturing of perspective in visual art going on concurrently via Braque and Picasso and others, or even thinking of it. To him (and this no lie) Joyce's technique was not conscious innovation at all but resulted from the ravages of syphillis. Well, I don't know for sure, but I tend to think special gifts were more responsible than spyrochetes.

Finnegan's Wake?--forget about it. I kept it on the back of my toilet for two years. At the end of two years I did not know a thing about it. Might as well open it anywhere and start reading. Sometimes there were brief passages of brilliance and lucidity, only to be quickly followed by more inscrutable riddles.

If anyone ever tells me they read all of Finnegan's Wake and enjoyed the hell out of it, I am going to have to doubt their integrity. People will get a great handle on Einstein before they ever have a clue about FW.

That's all. I thought you boys and girls might enjoy a report from Schneiderlund, a madhouse of screeches and foamy lips. Such a troll had to have his own site, for he would surely be barred from most others after a short tenure. A man's website is his castle.

[desiresjab]

Very nice review, Johnny. I am glad you mentioned Bell's solipquy on man and steer. That was the part of the movie I enjoyed most.

[desiresjab]

I haven't seen A Serious Man. I either love the Coens or hate them. I would rather be locked in a telephone booth with Dan Schnieder for two hours than have to watch the Big Lebowski again. They bros always use the same composer for their scores, as I am sure you already know. He is no John Williams in terms of production, but he gets the job done perfectly for Coen bros films and sounds like no one else in the game doing it. The music is always subltle, never crashing tympanis.

[MorpheusSandman]

I was just wondering if you knew of any other really good film critics who are formalists and tackle the actual craft of film?Much like Vendler in poetry, while I know other film critics that use formalism I don't know any that so with such a high level of detail and analysis. I mean, I frequently come across mentions of form in, say, Rosenbaum, Ebert, Sarris, et al, but it's merely one aspect of what they occasionally write about, as opposed to making it THE focus of in-depth analysis. You might try VF Perkins and some of Robin Wood's early stuff (though Wood eventually got more into sociological criticism as his career progressed; you can really mark this shift in his "Hitchcock Films Revisited"). You may try some of the early formalist classics, like Arnheim's Film as Art, Eisenstein's Film Form, and Deleuze's Cinema 1 and 2. While formalism was really important in film criticism/studies early on, the "theory" movement that took over literary criticism in the post-war era also took over film criticism, so psychoanalysis, feminism, poststructuralism, etc. became far more common in academia, and most film critics did little more than deliver the typical "this was a good film go see it; this was a bad film, don't go see it" recommendations. Critics/Academics like Bordwell and Vendler are extremely rare.

[MorpheusSandman]

I'm tired of talking about Schneider. I feel even to talk about him forces me to drag myself down to his puny level somewhat, and I don't like that place; it's dark and full of bad vibes.

A lot of people incapable of appreciating Joyce have attributed his later works to the ramblings of a syphilitic madman. Of course, anyone that cares enough to delve into his language experiments knows that there's meaning behind everything, just not in the classic sense of how we determine meaning. Finnegans Wake is little more than a giant language playground, with every sentence filled with neologisms and portmanteaus and mixtures of dialect and accents used to create multiple levels of meaning. I rather agree that it's pointless to try and read Finnegans Wake straight through as an ordinary novel. I've been reading it on-and-off for 8 years and usually just enjoy reading out-loud random passages; but I think one really has to appreciate the art of language to care for it at all.

Einstein is far less complicated than Finnegans Wake. If anything, his formulas were incredibly simple. The genius involved was his ability to think about light, space, and movement the way he did to begin with; but once he was able to, the math behind it all wasn't really complex. Really, the math that models how reality behaves tends to be less complicated than it is counter-intuitive. Yudkowsky discusses an aspect of this as it relates to language here (http://lesswrong.com/lw/jp/occams_razor/). A good extract:
An enormous bolt of electricity comes out of the sky and hits something, and the Norse tribesfolk say, "Maybe a really powerful agent was angry and threw a lightning bolt." The human brain is the most complex artifact in the known universe. If anger seems simple, it's because we don't see all the neural circuitry that's implementing the emotion. (Imagine trying to explain why Saturday Night Live is funny, to an alien species with no sense of humor. But don't feel superior; you yourself have no sense of fnord.) The complexity of anger, and indeed the complexity of intelligence, was glossed over by the humans who hypothesized Thor the thunder-agent.

To a human, Maxwell's Equations take much longer to explain than Thor. Humans don't have a built-in vocabulary for calculus the way we have a built-in vocabulary for anger. You've got to explain your language, and the language behind the language, and the very concept of mathematics, before you can start on electricity.

And yet it seems that there should be some sense in which Maxwell's Equations are simpler than a human brain, or Thor the thunder-agent.

There is: It's enormously easier (as it turns out) to write a computer program that simulates Maxwell's Equations, compared to a computer program that simulates an intelligent emotional mind like Thor.

The formalism of Solomonoff Induction measures the "complexity of a description" by the length of the shortest computer program which produces that description as an output. All that said, there are numerous book-length studies out there that unravel Joyce's multi-level wordplay in Finnegans Wake. In fact, there's an online version that hyperlinks each difficult word and explains where it comes from: http://finwake.com/ Perhaps the best hint I ever heard about reading Finnegans Wake was to pay attention to how big a role repetition plays in it. Starting with the title "Finnegans" = "Fin" (end) + "again," and starting right from the opening chapter: "recirculation," "rearrived," "wielderfight," (wieder = German for "again,"), "doublin" (doubling), "sosie" (twin/double), etc.


Very nice review, Johnny. I am glad you mentioned Bell's solipquy on man and steer. That was the part of the movie I enjoyed most.Thank you. :)


I haven't seen A Serious Man. I either love the Coens or hate them. I would rather be locked in a telephone booth with Dan Schnieder for two hours than have to watch the Big Lebowski again. Funny thing about Lebowski is that I avoided it for years, thinking it would be the kind of movie I'd absolutely hate. I finally watched it last year and it ended up being perhaps my favorite from them. If I had to pick my "hated" Coen film it would probably be Raising Arizona, which just plain annoys me. A Serious Man probably isn't a great film, but I do think it provides a key to understanding the Coen's interest in recent years in dramatizing the idea of quantum uncertainty.

[JBI]

Back to Poetry, do we see any major trends emerging from the 21st century yet, or is it all still clouded in the mass of published mediocrity?

[MorpheusSandman]

I don't see any major NEW trends. I think the penchant for an Ashberyan obscurity, what Stephen Burt has labeled "elliptical poetry," has become perhaps the dominant mode. He also dubbed the modern followers of WC Williams as The New Thing (http://www.bostonreview.net/poetry/new-thing) poets. FWIW, Burt seems to me the critic best tuned in to what's going on in contemporary poetry. Here's a good overview from '04 from Burt: http://www.believermag.com/issues/200405/?read=article_burt

[desiresjab]

Finnegan's Wake does not interest me anymore, Johnny. I suppose it could, if I had to do it. I feel it is a book for gods not men, or men as they might be two hundred years from now, wired and implanted to the hilt, so they can remember and process all those allusions, foreign phrases and word jumbles. I would rather read it for two hours than watch the Big Lebowski, however. When the man on the street can work out Reimann's tensor calculus for himself with full understanding, or independently prove Fermat's theorem, then they might understand FW. How's that?

Put ten thousand average people in a big FEMA camp together and tell them they cannot leave until they work out all of Godel or Wiles (neither of whom any of them probably ever heard of) for themselves. In another building is a person with an IQ of 250+ and the same instructions. I believe the guy with the IQ of 250+ (let's not get into an IQ discussion) is likely to leave first, if anyone does, even though he is an English teacher, let's say, and knows very little math.

I want both parties (who are well guarded and cannot cheat) to work out a solution to Fermat's last theorem. That is the one. The same materials are available to them that were available to Wiles.

The ten thousand people have a best chance of ever getting out of there. What is it?

Four of my biggest heros are Gauss, Euler, Cantor and Godel. Without Gauss there to direct Reimann's thesis toward geometry instead of the theory of equations where he wanted to go, "imaginary" geometry might not have been worked out until after Einstein. Of course there would always have been Bolyai's work for them to consult. From there, many people were capable, I suspect. The anal Gauss could have done it all by himself, I am absolutely sure of that, but preferred someone else to do it, in case there was still heat and controversy attached to the results. Reimann allowed room for controversy. Like his master Gauss, when he left a battlefield all problems were slain. Guys like them do not solve problems, they solve fields of inquiry. Gauss's somewhat brutal indifference to young Bolyai is the stuff of anti-heros, however. He should have taken the kid under his wing right there, and Bolyai would have worked out everything Reimann later did.

I could have been in the wrong mindset for Lebowski. It was a fairly new movie at the time, and the only thing on the satellite systems that night I hadn't already seen. I was forced into it, not even knowing it was a Coen film, and must have missed the opening credits. You might force me to take another peek.

P.S. The people in the FEMA camp have infinte lifespans while they work on the problem.

[tonywalt]

Here is another Billy Collins poem. Sorry if it's already posted - I know he's massively popular in this section.

Consolation

How agreeable it is not to be touring Italy this summer,
wandering her cities and ascending her torrid hilltowns.
How much better to cruise these local, familiar streets,
fully grasping the meaning of every roadsign and billboard
and all the sudden hand gestures of my compatriots.

There are no abbeys here, no crumbling frescoes or famous
domes and there is no need to memorize a succession
of kings or tour the dripping corners of a dungeon.
No need to stand around a sarcophagus, see Napoleon's
little bed on Elba, or view the bones of a saint under glass.

How much better to command the simple precinct of home
than be dwarfed by pillar, arch, and basilica.
Why hide my head in phrase books and wrinkled maps?
Why feed scenery into a hungry, one-eyes camera
eager to eat the world one monument at a time?

Instead of slouching in a café ignorant of the word for ice,
I will head down to the coffee shop and the waitress
known as Dot. I will slide into the flow of the morning
paper, all language barriers down,
rivers of idiom running freely, eggs over easy on the way.

And after breakfast, I will not have to find someone
willing to photograph me with my arm around the owner.
I will not puzzle over the bill or record in a journal
what I had to eat and how the sun came in the window.
It is enough to climb back into the car

as if it were the great car of English itself
and sounding my loud vernacular horn, speed off
down a road that will never lead to Rome, not even Bologna.
Billy Collins

[miyako73]

Being a member of the Eratosphere for several months before I got banned twice, I can say most formalist poets write for other formalist poets. So cliquish even in form and content. I thought new "new formalism" would save the poetry of our age; I was wrong. Most "free versers" write a prose and use line breaks so it will look like a poem. I think the only hope for the 21st century poetry is "elliptical confessionalism" (I just coined that), which is basically about the lunacy of the self and the mind. Remember that OCD poem that went viral? That's "elliptical confessionalism". Elliptical because of economy of words and sparsity of content/narrative. Confessional because the writing itself is a performed confession about the mind and the self.

[MorpheusSandman]

Being a member of the Eratosphere for several months before I got banned twice, I can say most formalist poets write for other formalist poets. So cliquish even in form and content. I thought new "new formalism" would save the poetry of our age; I was wrong... I think the only hope for the 21st century poetry is "elliptical confessionalism" (I just coined that), which is basically about the lunacy of the self and the mind. The formalists on Eratosphere probably write for the other formalists on Eratosphere; but let's not pretend like Eratosphere is the be-all, end-all of formalism out there in the poetry world. In fact, the only leading formalist I know of that post there at all is AE Stallings, and she doesn't seem to contribute all that regularly.

Anyway, I don't think poetry of our age needs saving and I don't think anything could possibly save it because nothing, whether it's new formalism or "elliptical confessionalism" (which just sounds like Ashbery to me; so probably rather old) or Burt's "New Thing" (which is basically just a school influenced by WC Williams) etc., would possibly appeal to everyone. Why? Because the poetry world has grown too diverse for that to happen. Instead, I predict that what we saw throughout the 20th century to continue, meaning that there will be many poets that are held up as the pinnacles of several different styles, whether it's Auden/Merrill in formalism or Ashbery in postmodernism or Rich in feminism or Lowell/Plath in confessionalism or Komunyakaa in social poetry etc. The universal geniuses are only possible in a culture that has some sense of cohesion, and I think such cohesion is impossible in America right now, and unlikely in most of the Western world.

[desiresjab]

Back to Poetry, do we see any major trends emerging from the 21st century yet, or is it all still clouded in the mass of published mediocrity?

Human beings will not grow a new set of emotions. Poetry must add to itself. Minor trends are welcome.

The trend is here in the world already, a growing infant sequestered out of sight for now like young superman. It is, in fact, a bundle of trends whose confluence will form a river to the future. Undiscovered tributaries will be mapped for the first time.

Boots are on the ground.

[tonywalt]

I look forward to seeing more posting of their favorite 21st century poets. Anyone? Anything?

[tonywalt]

Billy Childish


ABOUT A GIRL

she had hair the color
of burning copper
ice blue eyes
and round
perfectly formed breasts
that she was quite proud of.

i remember
laying on her bed
as she stood
naked before me
turning this way and that
posing
showing off her
compact, muscular body:
tight flat stomach
strong legs
wide seductive hips
pubic patch the color of NY methadone.

she raised her arms above her head,
look at my boobs, they don't
sag at all.
do you like my boobs?

she was 19.
i was 17.

the afternoon sunlight
poured thru the window
like nylon honey.

i nodded, yes, i like your boobs. now come
here and let me kiss you.

it was perfect peaceful & pleasant
and, of course
it didn't
last.