American Poetry

[Mirabell]

speaking of Vendler. I'm befuddled by her steadfast admiration of Jorie Graham's work. I've been meaning to write a review of Sea Change for a while now.

There is much that I find interesting in Graham, but apart from the downright awful (Swarm) she tends to be primarily boring, no?

[promtbr]

Amercian poets/books that have influenced me (in approx. order):

The Lice-- W.S. Merwin (Big, Big influence and was my bible in some tough times--don't like much of his stuff after tho)

The Lady in Kicking Horse Reservoir and White Center-- Richard Hugo (went on a besotted tour of tiny Montana towns that appeared in his work when I learned of his death and told all who would listen that their poet had died-I then learned many hard-scrabble farmers and ranchers don't read modern poetry )

Seven Years From Somewhere and Ashes-- Philip Levine

All of John Ashberry I have read, particularly Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror and As We Know (never read any after 90)

Ditto Donald Justice

I like Raymond Carver's poetry I have read

Earlier stuff, I like much of Gary Snyder and Ginsberg. Stevens and Pound are givens.

I loved the early John Berryman I read. Sounds like I need to look into him.

All the above reflects that I have not read poetry for a long time...
---

[Bev Stayart]

I read Edna St. Vincent Millay and Sara Teasdale. I also like Robert Frost.

[nnyhav]

speaking of Vendler.

Today's NYTBR has Vendler on the new selected Wallace Stevens.

...we have long needed, and now possess, through the unerring taste of John N. Serio — editor of The Wallace Stevens Journal and “The Cambridge Companion to Wallace Stevens” — a genuine “Selected Poems.”

The unmentioned elephant in the room is Holly Stevens' edition, The Palm at the End of the Mind. (What, the fake?) It isn't clear to me why John Serio's Stevens would be preferred, notwithstanding past service. No TOC on amazon so I don't know how much they overlap.

(However, it did prompt me to return to The Palm at the End of the Mind, so all is not lost ...)

[Mirabell]

I'm getting the LoA edition next week anyway so I don't care very much.

[Mirabell]

A slightly ranty review of a book on Berryman

ScholarshipFAIL: Samuel Fisher Dodson’s Berryman’s Henry: Living at the Intersection of Need and Art shigekuni.

[JTolle]

Ashbery Ashbery Ashbery Ashbery! YES as many times! Though I was unimpressed by A Worldy Country recently, Three Poems, Self-Portrait and Chinese Whispers are all books I love and are dazzling.

Laura "Riding" Jackson: lived to be 90 worked with Graves and was one of the most important American poets until (I think) the 60s when she stopped writing poetry because she considered it a "deceiving" way to perceive truth. But her stuff is really great, and difficult.

Henri Cole: (I'm biased because I've met, worked with, and been taught by him) is such a superb living poet. Middle Earth is beautiful and his selection of poetry Pierce the Skin is such a frustratingly small book but everything inside is top-notch.

Stevens: nuff said

Love Langston Hughes. Ginsberg's Kaddish makes me cry, Howl amazes me. Have the really nice New Directions hardback of Cantos but I can't even work myself through them, Pound is crazy. Need to read Williams' Paterson though I can't stand "The Red Wheelbarrow".

I'm really sort of ambivalent about the Mark Strand I've read, except for The Continuous Life and The Story of Our Lives which I can't get enough of.

Russell Edson -- Prose poet. The Tunnel: Selected Poems (1994).

My high school english teacher used to read Edson and Kinnell to us before class started, great guy.

Who knows something about Charles Olson?

[Refus de Sejour]

Who knows something about Charles Olson?

Impressive eyebrows and choice of eye-wear. Proponent of open form poems, patterned not on traditional metre but on the poet's own breath rhythms. His own work was frequently sprawling (for instance, the epic Maximus, a study of the area around his home). I recall him stating that he didn't want to be T.S. Eliot, he wanted to leave behind a mountain of poetry from which a future Eliot could mine.

Video of him reading from Maximus.

I don't have any strong feelings on his verse one way or another, but he's certainly one of the big, influential figures in US poetry - the Beats' picked up on his breath-derived 'open field' poetics (and he was initially enthusiastic about the Beats, but later found he couldn't get along with them on a personal level).

Bit of gossip: he was notoriously sexist. Women were usually barred from his lectures at colleges or open schools; on rare occasions, they were allowed to stand outside in the hallway and listen in

[Hamlet]

THREE AMERICAN POETS
Melville, Tuckerman and Robinson
Penguin books.

Picked up a copy of this, probably, not very well known little volume last year.

http://www.amazon.com/Three-American...4350404&sr=1-2


Liam/Eric:-
arguably, a beautiful and fitting piece of cover art --

Autumn on the Hudson River (1860) by Jasper Francis Cropsey

[books]

Personally, I find the works of Emily Dickinson to be captivating in a sense of the sheer vastness they inherently provide to the reader in such a physically succinct manner. Although open to widespread interpretation, they are fundamentally, and evidently for the most part, associated with Dickinson's introverted lifestyle filled with despair and devastation. The organization of such chaos into terse, untitled poems is an art form that should be regarded as central to the American verse that was generated in that nebulous epoch of a very novel, organic style of expression as well as a progenitor of modern poetic quasiminimalism. Does anyone agree?