Four Contemporary Models for Aspiring Poets

[AuntShecky]

A busy area on this website is the “Personal Poetry” forum in which NitLetters post their original offerings for the purpose of what I assume is receiving not only praise and encouragement, but also for what I sincerely hope is helpful criticism. Although I’ll be the first to confess that I’m not the world’s most savvy poetry maven, I can confidently say that the best advice to aspiring poet is to read.

It’s a good bet that reading, savoring, and admiring certain works is the reason a person gets interested in this game to begin with. No doubt there is power in “the honey and piece of old poems,” as Robinson Jeffers gloriously stated. The poets and their poems of the past are the rock, the stone foundation upon which new works can be built. As we all know - or should know, T. S. Eliot clearly stresses this idea in his classic essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent.”

In order to have a sound starting point from which to write, every poet should have at the very least a nodding acquaintance, if not an intimate relationship, with the body of work that has preceded us – a long, long line-up of artists from Dante to Chaucer, Shakespeare to Milton, Wordsworth to Whitman on down, and every golden wordsmith in between.

As we refresh our memories with the great works of the past -- often, as is said, discovering “new” things about them, at the same time we should keep in mind that we aren’t living in Elizabethan times or under the sunshine of the by-gone American optimism that inspired “The Chambered Nautilus” or even the post WW II malaise of the Beats. We are living and writing in the year 2015 , and thus we ought to know something about what is being created now.

I repeat: I’m no expert, and what I don’t know about up-to-the minute contemporary poetry could fill a major league ballpark. Even so, an online subscription to “Poem-a-Day” as well as the excellent selections from Knopf during April’s National Poetry Month provided me an opportunity to take a look at some relatively recent works.

The following are four examples of contemporary poetry that I’ve found especially noteworthy. Though each explores a different subject and uses various techniques, to me the quartet displays admirable qualities: each piece is cerebral but not incomprehensible, accessible yet not superficial, packs an emotional effect sans sentimentality, and above all shows remarkable dexterity in the use of language and form.

If time and interest allow, read these four poems. Give us your thoughts (about any or all of them) in a reply in this thread.

NB: You may have to scroll down until the poem comes up on the web page.

Jill Bialasky “The Dugout”

Sharon Olds "High School Senior"

Danielle Pafunda “Literal, Littoral, Littleral”

Jonathan Galassi “I Waited”



http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/06/24/the-dugout

http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps...olds/poems.htm

http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/l...oral-littleral

http://aaknopf.tumblr.com/post/11785...-month-is-over

[AuntShecky]

Forgive me for bumping this, but after investing much time and thought into this thread, I was really hoping for some replies.
So, wouldja, couldja, pretty please?

[ennison]

I like Galassi's. I like the playfulness of Pafunda but don't get lots of it. Old's poem ends with a nice image but I prefer the first of the two poems. Bialasky's is a joke but way too dry. My thoughts are telegraphic.

[tailor STATELY]

Thank you Aunty !

"Dugout" - Two poems needing a better connection imho. Better use of language suggested.

"High School Senior" - Wonderful language; prosy. From my perspective: I had trouble relating (my failing).

"Literal, Littoral, Littleral" - Prosy, but I enjoyed the subject matter for the most part. "phenomenological" ? Really? I might have ended with "And when I am no longer analogous,/I go."

"I WAITED" - My favorite of the bunch. This is a poem I can learn from. Knowing when to minimize and not within the poem was intriguing.

The above being noted, I enjoyed them all to a degree. Reading, writing, and arrhythmia.

Ta ! (short for tarradiddle),
tailor STATELY

[Ecurb]

"The Dugout" appears to compare the chirping of human athletes and fans to that of crickets. OK. So? I don't quite get it. Warm summer evenings filled with baseball and cricket chirping evoke pleasant memories. I'm not sure what chirping from "acoustical sails" evokes, or why it is compared to men yelling at a baseball game. Are the men cold-blooded, "tak(ing) on the temperature of their surroundings"?

"High School Senior" is another feminine (if not feminist) anthem, about giving birth and watching one's child grow up. OK, your daughter is heading off for college. It's a miracle. Get over it.

"Literal" is an extended metaphor, in which Pafunda compares herself to first a hitch and then a hitched car. It is another feminine poem, suggesting (possibly in a politically incorrect manner) that women can't drive, and that traveling the coast highway is likely to send one "sinking dolefully, doefully, dutifully into the lake." It is playful and humorous, but I didn't really understand the metaphor.

"I Waited" is a poignant poem about waiting, for a person or a dream, and growing old while waiting. It was clearly written in the Northern Hemisphere, since water swirls counterclockwise down a drain. Time, we learn, "crystallizes pain." Crystals seem poetic, and I suppose the metaphor works, but it seems trite to me. Compare that metaphor to Weldon Kees, in "The Patient is Rallying", comparing the "cold and empty tissues of the mind" to "spines of air, frozen in an ice cube." The latter image is both stunning and original.

I liked all of the poems -- they demonstrate a facility with language and a playfulness. I'm not sure they lack sentimentality, though. High School Senior, in particular, seems a bit too sentimental, to me. I mean, the eohippus daughter (did she collect "My Little Ponies" as a young girl?) has breath like summer clouds, pure depth of feeling, creek-brown hair, daedal hands with their tapered fingers, and pupils dark as the mourning cloak's wing." Sentimentality is a fine thing in poetry, but the poet must be careful to make it profound instead of cloying.

"My daughter
is free and she is in me--no, my love
of her is in me, moving in my heart, "

I don't think this quite gets profound without being cloying done. Of course all parents (and especially all mothers) feel this way, but simply recounting one's feelings doesn't make great poetry.

[YesNo]

Here is what of think of these poems. I'm no expert.

Jill Bialasky “The Dugout”

I noticed this was a female writing about males and so I assumed she did not have a clue, but would start whining about them. The "solitude of brothers" I read as an attack on male social activity. The "angry fathers" I read as an attack on fathers. The "male crickets" I read as an attack on men in general reducing them to crickets by the comparison. By the time I finished the last two stanzas a WTF expression was going through my mind since there was no insight provided. I was glad her poem was short.

Sharon Olds "High School Senior"

Of the four, this one I enjoyed. The final five lines with her banging her parents together like pieces of flint was amusing and somewhat sexy and made the first part worth reading.

Danielle Pafunda “Literal, Littoral, Littleral”

This one made no sense. A poet has between four and ten lines to capture the reader's attention.

Jonathan Galassi “I Waited”

The last line was cute and like Olds' poem added an interesting twist, but I was sort of expecting that twist. I was not expecting what Olds had to say.

[MorpheusSandman]

I'll try to read these when I have time, but if I was going to recommend four contemporary "model" poets they'd be:

John Ashbery -> for his imaginative and playful sense of language and surrealistic anarchy. Ashbery is a great inspiration for poets to let their creativity run wild on any subject under the sun. A good example: http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/daffy-duck-in-hollywood/

Louise Gluck -> For her ability to get the maximum power of the sparest of means. Gluck is great for poets looking for how to transform the personal into the poetic. A good example: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poet...ne/poem/246844

Geoffrey Hill -> For his high-minded seriousness and ability to address the full complexity of history and morality. Hill is great for poets looking to attend on Milton's "Il Penseroso" muse. A good example: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/178130

AE Stallings -> For her formal virtuosity. Stallings is one of the very few remaining masters of form we have, the heir of Auden, Merrill, and Bishop, and great for poets looking how to refine their verse. A good example: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poet...ne/poem/245872

[tailor STATELY]

I have been getting RSS feeds from the following on my http://www.ighome.com/ home page tab for quite some time (since Google took away our home pages):

• Poetry Foundation.org... http://www.poetryfoundation.org/

• Poetry News... http://www.topix.com/arts/poetry

• Poetry Magazine... http://www.poetryfoundation.org/

Informative, yes. Sometimes I get surprised, but mostly no.

I signed up for the Poem a Day at PF.org; will see how it goes.

@ MorpheusSandman: I'll check out your links as time allows as well.

Ta ! (short for tarradiddle),
tailor STATELY

[YesNo]

It seems that one should not only look for models to imitate but examples of what to avoid.

The poets I avoid are Pablo Neruda and Sylvia Plath to pick out two famous names. I've only read a few poems by A E Stallings. The one that MorpheusSandman links to represents what I don't like about formalist poets: generally, they don't write about anything important. Stallings' problem with the word "like" might be cute, but it is a non-problem.

The following are examples of what I have enjoyed as a reader/listener and would love to be able to imitate:

I like Sharon Olds poetry although I find it hard to distinguish between what she writes and flash fiction.

Joni Mitchell's album "Blue" is perfect.

Mary Oliver's most recent poetry collections have been enjoyable.

Lang Leav's "Love & Misadventure" is charming.

[MorpheusSandman]

I've only read a few poems by A E Stallings. The one that MorpheusSandman links to represents what I don't like about formalist poets: generally, they don't write about anything important. Stallings' problem with the word "like" might be cute, but it is a non-problem.

Subject matter is overrated. Far too many think that if their subject is important enough they can get away with writing bad poetry. Poetry is about the art of language and form. Taking a word that's so over-used in such a bewildering number of contexts today as "like" and making a sestina out of it in order to repeat that word the maximum number of times through the maximun number of contexts shows an unusually adept ear for contemporary language, which I'd argue is the most important thing that any poet could possess. Besides, it also shows how hypocritical the notion of "plain speech" in poetry is, because, as Stallings says in the poem, plain speech is crowded with "likes," and any poetry modeled on plain speech would be too... except it isn't. She's pointing out (rightfully) how all writing is artificial in some way, and, in a funny way, the extreme artificiality of the sestina is being used to point out the extreme artificiality of all non-formal poetry that isn't drowning in the "likes" of plain speech. You can think this is unimportant; but to those that write poetry, attention to the details of language (how it's used in reality, how it's used in art) is of the greatest importance.

Besides, there are plenty of non-formal poets who don't write about important things and plenty of formal poets who have and do: Geoffrey Hill comes most immediately to mind as perhaps the most extremely serious poet writing today, and he's mostly a formalist.

[mortalterror]

People who use contemporary models often run the risk of becoming dated because they followed a gimmick, a curiosity, a fashion of their period, rather than what is perennial. Why would you follow a second class model, when you have Dante and Homer before you? Write as they wrote. You can't help but be modern because this is the time you live in and you are a product of your time.

[MorpheusSandman]

Why would you follow a second class model, when you have Dante and Homer before you? Write as they wrote.

You mean write in Greek and Italian? Or write in quantitative meters and terza rima? How exactly do you propose we "write like them?"

The problem is that language changes, and so much of how great authors in the past wrote is embedded in the language of their time, which isn't the language of ours. Of course certain methods and styles date, become gimmicky, etc., but this is also true of Homer and Dante. Can you imagine someone only writing Homeric similes today? They'd be laughed at. You can certainly resurrect certain elements of the past greats, but imitating them while ignoring contemporaries is asking for trouble (of course, I'd say the reverse is true as well).

[MorpheusSandman]

Just to contribute two more names to this thread, this month in APR there's a feature on the poet Frank Stanford that included 11 poems (IIRC) and a lengthy introductory essay to his work in promotion of the new Collected Volume. The poetry is extremely impressive. Apparently, Stanford had very few volumes published in his lifetime and most of his poetry circulated in manuscripts amongst various coteries. While I hesitate to judge a poet on a such a small sample, I can say that it convinced me to buy his Collected volume and make him a high priority on my reading list. Sadly, Stanford died in '78 at the age of 28, so his recognition has been a while coming. The webpage on Poetry describes him as a "swamprat Rimbaud" and the consensus seems to be that he mixed the visionary surrealism of the French with the Southern styles of Twain and Faulkner.

The second name is still with us: Steve Gehrke. He wrote what is probably the single finest poem I've read in any contemporary lit magazine in the last several years, The New Self, and also contributed the also-quite-good The Ship of Theseus. What I admire about both poems is their attention to structural detail, how motifs weave themselves in and out of several different contexts. The linking of The Ship of Theseus to the nature of divorce, the implied metaphor between changing parts on the ship and the changing of people, asking whether such changes make for completely new objects and selves. This is one of the best transitions I've ever read in a poem:

The answer of course is that the ship
doesn’t exist, that “ship”
is an abstraction, a conception,
an imaginary tarp thrown
across the garden of the real.
...
The answer
is that the self is the glue between
the boards, the cartilage
that holds a world together,
that self is the wax in
the stenographer’s ears,
that there is nothing the mind
won’t sacrifice, each item
another goat tossed into
the lava of our needs.
The answer is that this is just
another poem about divorce,
about untombing the mattress
from the sofa, your body
laid out on the bones of the
double-jointed frame, about
separation, rebuilding, about
your daughter’s missing
teeth. Each time you visit
now you find her partially
replaced, more sturdily
jointed, the weathered joists
of   her childhood being stripped
away.

[AuntShecky]

A multiple of thanks to all of you for answerng to my plea. There is a method to my madness. One of the reasons I wanted replies was to see if the reactions of others were similar to mine, or if I was completely off-base.

I've been away from my computer ("Pong 2.0) for a while, so when I finally got back on today, I was gratified to see all of these intelligent responses.

Thanks for mentioning some other poets we could both discover for the first time or go back and re-discover.


I've already mentioned why the four poems appealed to me, but after reading your responses I see there is another attractive aspect: with the possible exceptiion of Sharon Olds, none of them seem "personal." Experts, T.S. Eliot among them, often advise poets to "keep yourself out of it." That seems true, especially in this day and age when so many journal excerpts try to pass themselves off as poetry.

Moral Terror cautions against "following fashion" and that is sound advice. As Eliot tells us we must learn from the past; if nothing else, we will then know what's already been said and in most cases, said much better. Still, it's important to speak in one's own voice, with contemporary diction,not in "slang" or the abbreviated text talks, but using language in inventive ways. In 2015 there's no reason to try to emulate Shakespearean "doth" and " 'sblood."

MorpheusSandman is absolutely right when he says (above) that "subject matter is overrated." I can't count the many times I've typed on these forums (for both poetry and short stories) that "It's not the 'what'--it's the 'how.'" I like to think that any subject is appropriate for a poem as long as it provides a canvas for discovering original ways to use language.

ennison noted the "playfulness" of Pafunda's "Literal,Littoral, Litteral" and that is exactly why I chose it. Except for an occasional multisyllabic word --"phenomenological"--the tone is chatty, but somewhat wry in its repetition of the parallelism in the poem's title-- "dolefully, doefully, "dutifully." If you catch the rhythm, it almost seems the poem is mimicking movement, as in "vehicular independence, the illusion thereof." We have old-fashioned imagery but with a twist: "the crowbar rusting in the garden/from strange use". Another thing I admire about this poem is the line breaks. We often break our lines as if after a comma, the natural caesura as for taking a breath. That's expected. Ho-hum. What's exciting about poetry is doing the unexpected. It has been said of Mozart's music that it lilts along so smoothly that the listener anticipates what the next note may be, but the next note is something entirely different-- with the result that it is absolutely the right note. That could be said of the line breaks in this poem and notably in "The Dugout" set up the surprise in the next line.

The poem begins with a pronoun without an antecedent-- "they." At first we think it's the players sitting in the dugout-- "Gatorade" and the "angry fathers" (such as in the stands of a little League game.) But as we read we're in for a surprise: the pronoun does not refer to humans at all. An unexpected take on the expected, in baseball terms a "change up." That's what poetry does: makes the familiar unfamiliar, and vice versa (Like Diane Wakoski"s "Sestina from the Home Gardener.") Full confession, initially I had the same reaction that Tailor Stately had about connecting the two halves of the poem. Perhaps the imbedded pun of "baseball" and "cricket"? Or is that too facile?

"High School Senior" by Sharon Olds is familiar territory, especially in the graduation month just past. I don't see the poem as particularly "feminist" as other repliers to this thread have seen. But I do admit that the poem appeals to me as a woman and a mother. Even so, is it were subject matter then a Hallmark card would do just as well. It's the use of language and the imagery that makes this poem exemplary. References to evolution --"eohippos" and classicism "daedal" give depth, as well as adding unfamiliar elements to the familiar. Both "unfamiliar" words elevate the language from the everyday. The images are
familiar: "scalp smelling of apricots" and the bird images "throat-feed their young//mourning cloaks's wing" but used in a new way (unfamiliar.)

And finally, my favorite of the bunch, "I Waited." This is a prime example of a "non-" personal, non-autobiographical poem. The back-story is that this poem is a part of The Muse, a novel by Jonathan Galassi, and and "I Waited" is supposedly written by the fictional protagonist,a female poet. The subject matter (yes, subject matter is "over-rated") is an experience by an aged person with an enormity of regrets, all punctuated by the passage of time: "time that crystallizes pain/ time that isn't life or air/ foul time that doesn't/ move but disappears/"

Despite the cliche often heard from old folks who proudly shout they've got no regrets in real life, the reality is that more often than not the end of life can be fraught with disappointment. How does the poem take a familiar experience and make it unfamiliar? Another difficulty is evoking emotion without maudlin sentimentality. Jonathan Galassi does this, I believe, when he closes the poem with a killer punch line that stays with the reader for a long time.

[Nikonani]

People who use contemporary models often run the risk of becoming dated because they followed a gimmick, a curiosity, a fashion of their period, rather than what is perennial. Why would you follow a second class model, when you have Dante and Homer before you? Write as they wrote. You can't help but be modern because this is the time you live in and you are a product of your time.

Well I was about to ****post, but this post is entirely correct. Sorry Abram, found a righteous person.