Favorite contemporary poets?

[Janine]

Hey Janine, you studied with Stephen Berg? I've only browsed his poems but now I have a reason to look more closely.

Hi again uranderson, Yes, truly I did for a year or maybe one semester. He was a really cool guy, very nice and down to earth. I think he was pretty young, since I added up his birthday and mine and he would just be about 16 yrs older than I am, so he would have been about 36 when he taught at PCA, which has since turned into University of the Arts. I learned a lot in his class and appreciated poetry more from the classroom stimulation. It was one of my favorite classes besides art studio classes.

That's really cool. He was one of the editors too? It really is one of the finest poetry anthologies in existence in my opinion. Were you in an MFA program or something? I was lucky enough to get a couple courses with Carolyn Forche at George Mason several years ago. Have you read her? She reminds me a lot of Levertov. The Country Between Us is her classic. I can provide links to some of my favorites if you haven't.

Yes, you know I thought he was one of the editors - thanks for refreshing my memory. I know that book is still popular and used for teaching purposes. It is a great book and even though mine is in tatters I will keep it forever. NO, I was not in an MFA program....never pursued it that far. I received my BFA in Illustration - long story concerning a career in the field. I posted some of my artwork online if you would be interested in seeing it. I do pencil, colored pencil, mixed media with pencil and colored flat grounds and detailed ink (dot pattern style). The English and poetry classes I had were strickly required since my college gave a degree...some art schools do not. I enjoyed Berg's class. I am glad I have not lost my memory that badly and recalled his name. He was a nice guy like I said. Most students liked him a lot. His poetry was good and I wonder what ever happened to him.
Funny, after I found him online I searched for my illustration teachers and came up with two of them. One, my favorite, is dean of the college now or maybe he is assistent dean and dean of another art school. Yikes, these guys must be pretty old by now! Is Stephen Berg still alive? - I certainly hope so. Shamefully, I have not read much of his work, but never too late. I am not at all familiar with Carolyn Forche. I will have to look up some of her work, if she is similar to Levertov. Sure, thanks, send me the links to her work. I love discovering someone new. In college and after I read a lot of Levertov, but I think I only touched minimally on her massive body of work. What I read struck me always as simple, but not simple - as you said layered. I guess I mean 'simple' in that the words were not difficult or of need of constant checking a dictionary for meaning. I liked her simplistic style and her directness and I always read the last line and said to myself - wow. It just struck a cord with me, and her writing seemed to me to seem very natural and never forced.

I did like that Levertov poem, it's typical of her, multiple layers of meaning (implied in part by line breaks, like the line "I love" which seems almost like a meaningful declarative statement in its own right), and skilled use of metaphor.

Yes, I agree completely - this is what seemed to attract me to her writing. Glad you liked the poem. Thrilled I found it at long last. She does command the use of metaphor exquisitely. I like the way in this poem I posted the last stanza directs the reader to a new idea on the though of 'invading'. Some people do 'invade' our very souls and they change us forever. I think when I read this first time, it was the right time for me - someone significant had invaded my being and my soul and left me feeling exactly as the poem states in the last few lines. I have though of this poem for years. Amazing how the essense of it stayed with me. I think, too, it will mean different things or conjure up different images to different people. That is what I liked about it, as well.

Possibly what I like most about her is her turning away from abstractions, analyses, and other forms of codified or rigid thought/behavior and moving toward a more organic, animalistic (in the best sense of the word) way of approaching life, love and art. This major theme in her work is represented well by this poem, I think the second half is in part a statement of that shifting worldview (sorry, it's not the best explanation of what I mean, but it's late and I'm groggy )

No, even though you are groggy - I know the feeling well - you really make a world of sense to me here. You stated this so well and I commend you. I quite agree with what you say and it gives me some new ideas on her work.

Of course it's not that simple, her best poems are strong enough to resist that kind of simplistic, "A" means "B", explanation, instead suggesting alternate possibilities of meaning with successive readings. Similar to the way life is, I guess.

Definitely and exactly as life is. Can we ever figure it all out? I liked the bit of obscurity and enigma in her writing. I liked to interpret the imagery and the idea to suit my own person feelings, at the time I absorb the words. Her poetry seems to allow for this.

[quasimodo1]

Excerpt from "As You Leave Me".....
You hum along with Mathis--how you love Mathis!
with his burnished hair and quicksilver voice that dances
among the stars and whirls through canyons
like windblown snow, sometimes I think that Mathis
could take you from me if you could be complete
without me. I glance at my watch. It is now time.

You rise,
silently, and to the bedroom and the paint;
on the lips red, on the eyes black,
and I lean in the doorway and smoke, and see you
grow old before my eyes, and smoke, why do you
chatter while you dress? and smile when you grab
your large leather purse? don't you know that when you leave me
I walk to the window and watch you? and light
a reefer as I watch you? and I die as I watch you
disappear in the dark streets
to whistle and smile at the johns
{African-American Poet, from the deep south, military experience in the Korean conflict left him with a drug habit, he went to prison where he started writing poetry and corresponding with other poets. 1931-1991}

[quasimodo1]

"I made hay while the sun shone.
My work sold.
Now if the harvest is over
And the world cold
Give me the bonus of laughter
As I lose hold.” sample of contemporary poet John Betjeman

[Virgil]

How about Robert Bly. Hewe's one.

What Jesus Said
by Robert Bly

The wind blows where it likes: that is what
Everyone is like who is born from the wind.
Oh now it’s getting serious. We are the ones
Born from the wind that blows along the plains
And over the sea where no one has a home.
And that Upsetting Rabbi, didn’t he say:
“Take nothing with you, no blanket, no bread.
When evening comes, sleep wherever you are.
And if the owners say no, shake out the dust
From your sandals; leave the dust on their doorstep.”
Don’t hope for what will never come. Give up hope,
Dear friends, the joists of life are laid on the winds

[Virgil]

Or how about Billy Collins:

from The History Teacher
by Billy Collins

Trying to protect his students' innocence
he told them the Ice Age was really just
the Chilly Age, a period of a million years
when everyone had to wear sweaters.

And the Stone Age became the Gravel Age,
named after the long driveways of the time.

The Spanish Inquisition was nothing more
than an outbreak of questions such as
"How far is it from here to Madrid?"
"What do you call the matador's hat?"

The War of the Roses took place in a garden,
and the Enola Gay dropped one tiny atom on Japan.

....

[Virgil]

I like this better by Billy Collins, except for the last line:

from On Turning Ten
by Billy Collins

The whole idea of it makes me feel
like I'm coming down with something,
something worse than any stomach ache
or the headaches I get from reading in bad light--
a kind of measles of the spirit,
a mumps of the psyche,
a disfiguring chicken pox of the soul.

You tell me it is too early to be looking back,
but that is because you have forgotten
the perfect simplicity of being one
and the beautiful complexity introduced by two.
But I can lie on my bed and remember every digit.
At four I was an Arabian wizard.
I could make myself invisible
by drinking a glass of milk a certain way.
At seven I was a soldier, at nine a prince.

....

[quasimodo1]

To Virgil: Love Robert Bly and will give him more attention... "Give up hope,
Dear friends, the joists of life are laid on the winds" excellent visual image. BTW, Do you know if Janine has worked the gliches out of her new hardware? quasi

[Virgil]

Another good contemporary poet is Robert haas.

from Meditations At Lagunitas
by Robert Haas

All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-
faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk
of that black birch is, by his presence,
some tragic falling off from a first world
of undivided light. Or the other notion that,
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies.
We talked about it late last night and in the voice
of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone
almost querulous. After a while I understood that,
talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,
pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman
I made love to and I remembered how, holding
her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,
I felt a violent wonder at her presence
like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river
with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,
muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish
called pumpkinseed.

....

[Virgil]

To Virgil: Love Robert Bly and will give him more attention... "Give up hope,
Dear friends, the joists of life are laid on the winds" excellent visual image. BTW, Do you know if Janine has worked the gliches out of her new hardware? quasi

I haven't heard from her today. that is a great line by Bly.

[quasimodo1]

Fishing on the Susquehanna in July
by Billy Collins


I have never been fishing on the Susquehanna
or on any river for that matter
to be perfectly honest.

Not in July or any month
have I had the pleasure--if it is a pleasure--
of fishing on the Susquehanna.

I am more likely to be found
in a quiet room like this one--
a painting of a woman on the wall,

a bowl of tangerines on the table--
trying to manufacture the sensation
of fishing on the Susquehanna.

There is little doubt
that others have been fishing
on the Susquehanna,

rowing upstream in a wooden boat,
sliding the oars under the water
then raising them to drip in the light.

(excerpt from the aformentioned poem)

[Virgil]

Even though she passed away now ten years i think, Amy Clampitt is another favorite:

from The Sun Underfoot Among The Sundews
by Amy Clampitt

An ingenuity too astonishing
to be quite fortuitous is
this bog full of sundews, sphagnum-
lines and shaped like a teacup.
A step
down and you're into it; a
wilderness swallows you up:
ankle-, then knee-, then midriff-
to-shoulder-deep in wetfooted
understory, an overhead
spruce-tamarack horizon hinting
you'll never get out of here.
But the sun
among the sundews, down there,
is so bright, an underfoot
webwork of carnivorous rubies,
a star-swarm thick as the gnats
they're set to catch, delectable
double-faced cockleburs, each
hair-tip a sticky mirror
afire with sunlight, a million
of them and again a million,
each mirror a trap set to
unhand believing,
that either
a First Cause said once, "Let there
be sundews,"

....

[quasimodo1]

To Virgil: Give me a bit to digest a new source. Have you noticed how the "Axis" thread has taken on a life of it's own? quasi

[stlukesguild]

I've just recently discovered Yves Bonnefoy. The cover blurb proclaimed him as France's "greatest living poet" which was enough to peak both my interest and my skepticism. Critical commentary found outside seemed to concur as to his status... but then again... "contemporary French literature"... that description alone is enough to raise an eyebrow... more overwrought/over-intellectualized mind games? I am glad to say that I took the chance with Bonnefoy. His poems are quite marvelous... sensuous... with slight elements of surrealism... yet crystalline. Bonnefoy has written numerous poems entitled simply, "A Stone". These certainly allude to tombstones or gravestones and the voice is sometimes that of the deceased... (ala Edgar Lee Masters?) and sometimes that of the stones:

A Stone

We granted each other the gift of innocence;
For years just our two bodies fed its flames.
Our steps wandered bare through trackless grass.
We were the illusion known as memory.

Since fire's born of fire, why should we desire
To gather up its scattered ash.
On the appointed day we surrendered what we were
To a vaster blaze, the evening sun.


A Stone

Those mornings of ours,
I would sweep up the ashes; I would fill
The jug and set it on the flagstones,
So the whole room was awash
With the fathomless smell of mint.

O memory,
Your trees blossom against the sky;
We could almost believe that it's snowing.
But thunder retreats down the path.
The evening wind sheds its excess seeds.


A Stone

The grass granted color to our shadows,
Before us on the path; and once
They rebounded on some stones.

Bird-shadows, too, brushed by them
With a cry, or lingered where our foreheads
Leaned together so we almost touched
Because of words we wanted to share.


from Let This World Endure

I.

I right a broken branch.
The leaves are heavy
With water and shadow
Like this sky now, before

The dawn of day. O earth,
Clashing signs, scattered paths,
But beauty, beauty absolute,
The beauty of a river:

Let this world endure,
In spite of death.
The gray olive
Clings to the branch.

II.

Let this world endure,
Let the perfect leaf
Halo forever
The ripening fruit.

Let the hoopoes, when the sky
Opens at dawn,
Fly forever from under the roof
Of the empty barn,

Then alight over there
In legend;
And all is motionless
An hour more.

III.

Let this world endure,
Let absence and word
Fuse forever
In simple things.

....

Yves Bonnefoy
from The Curved Planks
tr. Hoyt Rogers
Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2006

[quasimodo1]

PASSER-BY, THESE ARE THE WORDS
Passer-by, these are words. But instead of reading
I want you to listen: to this frail
Voice like that of letters eaten by grass.

Lend an ear, hear first of all the happy bee
Foraging in our almost rubbed-out names.
It flits between two sprays of leaves,
Carrying the sound of branches that are real
To those that filigree the still unseen.

Then know an even fainter sound, and let it be
The endless murmuring of all our shades.
Their whisper rises from beneath the stones
To fuse into a single heat with that blind
Light you are as yet, who can still gaze.
(first part of this poem) by Yves Bonnefoy{1923-present}

[stlukesguild]

Oh, yes! That is a lovely one as well... also included in the same book: The Curved Planks. You can find a link to the entire poem here:

http://www.loc.gov/poetry/180/011.html