Favorite contemporary poets?

It's not often that a review is so well done about new collection of poems by a prolific poet. In this NYTimes book review, the critic exhibits both skill and experience with author-subject and contemporary poetry. What follows is excerpt from this review and samples of the poetry which make you want to explore her work further. ........................"A State of Disobedience" (title of the review)




By JOEL BROUWER
Published: October 14, 2007
Over the course of Alice Notley’s long and prolific career — she’s written more than 25 books since 1971 — readers have assigned her any number of identities: native of the American West, Parisian expatriate, feminist, experimentalist, political poet, Language poet, widow of the poets Ted Berrigan and Douglas Oliver, mother of the poets Anselm and Edmund Berrigan and member of the New York School’s second generation, to name a few. Each of these labels sheds a little light on Notley’s work, but it’s the fact of their sheer number that’s most illuminating: this is a poet who persistently exceeds, or eludes, the sum of her associations.



IN THE PINES

By Alice Notley.

131 pp. Penguin Poets. Paper, $18.
“I’ve been trying to train myself for 30 or 40 years not to believe anything anyone tells me,” Notley has written, and anyone coming to her work for the first time would be wise to follow that example, scraping away the barnacles of received wisdom that cling to her poems, and also casting aside any assumptions about where poetry comes from, or what it should sound like, look like and concern itself with. To write vital poems, Notley has said, “it’s necessary to maintain a state of disobedience against ... everything.” To read such poems requires a similar discipline.

In her new book’s long title sequence, Notley finds that space of perpetual defiance and christens it “the pines.” There, she imagines all conventions of causality and rationality have fallen away, creating an opening for the purely accidental quality of each lived instant, a quality the poet identifies as “love.”

"I am losing my because. In the pines.
In chance, in fortune, in luck, there is no because.
Once I had, and now I don’t.
In love there is no because."


.......................................{copyright New York Times, Sunday Book Review, October 15, 2007)

CAPE BRETON


Out on the high "bird islands," Ciboux and Hertford,
the razorbill auks and the silly-looking puffins all stand
with their backs to the mainland
in solemn, uneven lines along the cliff's brown grass-frayed edge,
while the few sheep pastured there go "Baaa, baaa."
(Sometimes, frightened by aeroplanes, they stampede
and fall over into the sea or onto the rocks.)
The silken water is weaving and weaving,
disappearing under the mist equally in all directions,
lifted and penetrated now and then
by one shag's dripping serpent-neck,
and somewhere the mist incorporates the pulse,
rapid but unurgent, of a motor boat.

The same mist hangs in thin layers
among the valleys and gorges of the mainland
like rotting snow-ice sucked away
almost to spirit; the ghosts of glaciers drift
among those folds and folds of fir: spruce and hackmatack--
dull, dead, deep pea-**** colors,
each riser distinguished from the next
by an irregular nervous saw-tooth edge,
alike, but certain as a stereoscopic view.

....

{excerpt from this poem by Elizabeth Bishop, Vassar graduate, friend of Marianne Moore}

SOUTH OF MARS

It's over now. Part of the story
Has disappeared, into the void
Of something that has ended forever:
I know the exact place, behind the house,
A place where waves can be counted,
Seven hard cold waves,
Like the ones in the sea.

Undreamt of blues and marvellous
Greys set up a background,
A flat light and a mask of ocean salt,
For a sea full of inlets, harbours
And ravines, shipwrecks and sudden
Green splendours: green, I want you,
Green, I am half-full of seawater

Though far, far from the sea,
And the smoothest stone
Is a freshwater myth.
A cool oval breeze reaches me
From the sea, birds can fly in it,
And every half-minute comes the smell
Of the sea, newly cleaned, like a loaf of silver.

....

{first part of Medbh McGuckian's poem, great Irish contemporary poet who also writes in Gaelic}

THY PSYCHE.


LIKE a strain of wondrous music rising up in cloister dim,
Through my life's unwritten measures thou dost steal, a glorious hymn!
All the joys of earth and heaven in the singing meet, and flow
Richer, sweeter, for the wailing of an undertone of woe.
How I linger, how I listen for each mellow note that falls,
Clear as chime of angels floating downward o'er the jasper walls!

Every night, when winds are moaning round my chamber by the sea,
Thine's the face that through the darkness latest looks with love at me;
And I dream, ere thou departest, thou dost press thy lips to mine; --
Then I sleep as slept the Immortals after draughts of Hebe's wine!
And I clasp thee, out of slumber when the rosy day is born,
As the soul, with rapture waking, clasps the resurrection morn.

'Twas thy soul-wife, 'twas thy Psyche, one uplifted, radiant day,
Thou didst call me; -- how divinely on thy brow Love's glory lay!
Thou my Cupid, -- not the boy-god whom the Thespians did adore,
But the man, so large, so noble, truer god than Venus bore.
I thy Psyche; -- yet what blackness in this thread of gold is wove!
Thou canst never, never lead me, proud, before the throne of Jove!
All the gods might toil to help thee through the longest summer day; --
Still would watch the fatal Sisters, spinning in the twilight gray;
And their calm and silent faces, changeless looking through the gloom,
From eternity, would answer, "Thou canst ne'er escape thy doom!"
Couldst thou clasp me, couldst thou claim me, 'neath the soft Elysian skies,
Then what music and what odor through their azure depths would rise!
Roses all the Hours would scatter, every god would bring us joy,
So, in perfect loving blended, bliss would never know alloy!

O my heart! the vision changes; fades the soft celestial blue;
Dies away the rapturous music, thrilling all my pulses through!
Lone I sit within my chamber; storms are beating 'gainst the pane,
And my tears are falling faster than the chill December rain; --
Yet, though I am doomed to linger, joyless, on this earthly shore,
Thou art Cupid! -- I am Psyche! -- we are wedded evermore!



--------{from the Anonymous database of poetry: the Atlantic Monthly.........Does anyone hear the similarities to Poe?}

In Germany where the clouds march in single file

Germany is where the clouds
march in single file
where the sun has a permit to shine
where the moon may not stay up as late as she pleases.

Germany looks like Germany in Derrick .
The only difference between Germany and Derrick
is that something happens in every episode of Derrick.
Germany is filmed on location like Derrick,
and is broadcast on televisions
everywhere.
The criminals in Germany dream
of big guns
of America .
The criminals all have
hot water, electricity and medical insurance.
The criminals lead lives of quiet desperation
just like the teachers, butchers and accountants.

Germany is wealthy and fat
but anaemic and unwise.

....



{excerpt from this poem by South African Poet, Danie Marais}

SOJOURNS IN THE PARALLEL WORLD
We live our lives of human passions,
cruelties, dreams, concepts,
crimes and the exercise of virtue
in and beside a world devoid
of our preoccupations, free
from apprehension--though affected,
certainly, by our actions. A world
parallel to our own though overlapping.
We call it "Nature"; only reluctantly
admitting ourselves to be "Nature" too.
Whenever we lose track of our own obsessions,
our self-concerns, because we drift for a minute,
an hour even, of pure (almost pure)
response to that insouciant life:
cloud, bird, fox, the flow of light, the dancing
pilgrimage of water, vast stillness
of spellbound ephemerae on a lit windowpane,
animal voices, mineral hum, wind
conversing with rain, ocean with rock, stuttering
of fire to coal--then something tethered
in us, hobbled like a donkey on its patch
of gnawed grass and thistles, breaks free. .......................
{excerpt from this poem by Denise Levertov)

KINDLY


............And, like yours,

their eyes keep roaming
around the waiting room

as if it's not comforting exactly
but more like reassuring

to know others suffer.
You exchange looks.

Yours, you worry, shows concern.
Her kindly nod seems to say

there's no cure for fate.
His pleased, determined smile

suggests he'd just as soon scoff
at any prognosis.




© by William Aarnes {latter part of this poem}

FOR JOHN HAAG, LOGGER, SAILOR, HOUSEPAINTER, POET, PROFESSOR, AND GROWER OF ORCHIDS



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“I found myself in a dark wood
where the right way was lost”
--Dante, Inferno, Canto 1, 1-2

In our College of Glooms
he sauntered about in leather pants
striding the halls as if they were a deck
from his sailing days in the Merchant Marine
as if he were here on shore leave
and had to make ship in Seattle
tailing trucks through snowy foothills
as flurries veered at his windshield
and brake lights blinked ahead on the turns
as he chanted to himself and the snow
all the poems he ever learned alone
on moon-washed nights when waves were listening:
Dylan Thomas. Wallace Stevens.
"The Astabula Bridge Disaster."
—squinting into the dark and saying poems,
overtaking a truck on the straightaway
driving hard until he hit Puget Sound
where the sea rushed the rocks on the beach
under a fat moon wreathed in fog
and the bellbuoy chimed all night.
{first stanza of this poem by contemporary poet John Balaban}

A GIFT OF MORNING WATER



--------------------------------------------------------------------------


After the long night with a cold wind riffling the scrim of the teepee lit like a lantern in the deserted prairie, a night of chills in the small of the back, aches in crossed legs, after all the hours of chanting from Indians and Anglos, after their drumming on the iron kettle stretched with hide, its water-filled belly bellowing when tipped, after the prayers sung for forgiveness, for guidance from the grandfather peyote on the crescent of sand, after chewing bitter buttons, swallowing dry powder, after the drumming and the singing and the sweet sage thrown on the image-dancing fire, as the embers died and dawn finally rinsed the top of the tent, the Road Chief, an elderly Tiwa who throughout the night had asked "Him" to show us the right road, said: "A woman is coming with morning water. Listen to her. She is your mother." .........{beginning of prose poem by John Balaban}

BASEMENT OCCUPATIONS



--------------------------------------------------------------------------


Charred coffee zipped and sizzled
on the burner as a greasy ungloved hand
removed the pot then sloshed more
fingers of fuming tar into the cup.

A lip smack, indifferent sigh and a single
cloudy bead of sweat dropped straight off
the nose—it could be an interrogation
chamber, raked with hundred-watt bare light.

That array of pungent household poisons—
the chipped and dented cellar cabinets
holding jars of solvents, cans of reeking
pigments, paints, and tubs of cracking glue,

....

{first part of this poem by contemporary poet, Jim Murphy}

APOLOGIA TO MARS AND MOON


Let me be what awaited me yesterday, and let me resist
tomorrow in a fistful of poppies and dust.

—Pablo Neruda




To right, from lone perspective, the moon waxing
one night from full; to left, the red planet
closer than it has been for sixty thousand years,
will be again for a hundred lifetimes. A man
prone on a pallet of wood, hard, but not hardness
of stone, surety, rather of a conversation
of bone and flesh, tree transformed to function.
Let us not discuss nations, ages, intrusions,
nor when this moment will fall and disappoint. ...........

{excerpt from poem by contemporary poet Gaylord Brewer}

THREE VARIATIONS ON THE SUSPENSION OF TIME

1

Roll Call

The evening adjourns: the contrail intersects
the guy-wire; the robins peck the trash to death;
six blocks away, traffic winds the roads like clocks;

on the porch, paint curls into a self-portrait
of Van Gogh who has lost his hat;
the sun terrorizes the brilliant daisies.

So little time remains to ambush the sky
under the lively, silver applause of cottonwoods—
the red clouds and blue wind spiral together alone

against the curve that leaves us all here standing.

....
{first part of this poem by contemporary poet Michael Catherwood}

Alessandra Lynch and Deborah Tall

I'll post some of their work later--

THE MUSE AT THE DOOR /wanted a word with the poet whose house this was.
“But he’s not here,” I said.

“Didn’t he send you a change of address?”
The heat panted, like the dog it was, at her heels.

The wind chime said nothing, there being no wind.
She laid an envelope on the poet’s pillow.


.............
{excerpt from this poem by Debora Greger, featured poet in Yale Review}

FINISHING UP THE NOVEL AFTER SOME DELAY



I followed a stream plunging out of the jungle
and spilling around boulders broken loose
from the great shade of the triple canopy
where screw-pines walked on hairy stilts below teak
and towering coffin trees, their blue-green trunks
festooned with yellow orchids. Leaf monkeys
hid in banyans as I went by.

A sandfly cloud seesawed the mudflat
and I turned to go the other way
through thickets splattered in sunshine
where green rollers shrieked and bobbed in bamboo,
the cool palms threshing above my head.
the earth, spongy; the air, damp.

A blue-tailed babbler screeched high up
above the nattering stream. Downriver,
some women waded pools with dip nets
as their kids chased fish in the weirs.
I passed unseen behind the jungle wall. ..............

{excerpt from this poem by John Balaban}