Thread 24716693

(Apologies in advance for essentially blogposting.) I have never really read any poetry until now (other than Epic poetry all of which I have read in translation.) I was previously only aware of a handful of names : Wordsworth, Keats, Yeats, from popular culture and have encountered the odd poem throughout my life, but know next to nothing about the tradition or history of poetry. I found myself unsure of where to start, and couldn't find many charts and haven't seen any posted here in a while. I was browsing in Waterstones yesterday and not wanting to buy any more literature as I am currently reading several books and my stack grows at an alarming rate. I thus decided to peruse the poetry section, and picked out picrel and bought it. I read the introduction last night which I found incredibly informative on the "Romantics." I feel enlightened somewhat on the history of the tradition, the term and the specifics of the stylings and content of such poets. I have now read a few poems from this collection and am enjoying them; varied as they are in subject. If anyone cares to spoonfeed me some recommendations or charts, or inform me on the other types of poetry I would appreciate it. What poetry does /lit/ like? Who or what do you enjoy reading the most when it comes to poetry?

>>24716693 (OP)
I don't read much of any poetry, but I really like James Tate. The Lost Pilot would be an example of his earlier style, and Long-Term Memory his later (more prosaic). This is the reading of his that I was introduced to him by:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPJTXOMHTk4

There's a page on poetry on the wiki (see the sticky), but I can't vouch for it. Pic rel could be worth checking out, and the collection it mentions is still online.

>>24716785
Thank you for the reply anon. Looking through the wiki now. I will check out James Tate's The Lost Pilot, I will probably opt to read it first. As for picrel lets see what I get.

>>24716693 (OP)
Nice horse. I wonder who painted it...

>>24716693 (OP)
poetryfag here. /lit/ knows nothing about poetry and most of the advice you get will be from anons who are much less interested in poetry as poetry and much more interested in poetry as heckin based trad memeword exemplar of the West, if that makes any sense. The Romantics are as good a place to start as any. Just read your picrel. If you like your picrel, check out Hopkins. After that, check out Whitman, Yeats, and Dickinson. (For Dickinson you want the edition of her selected poems titled Final Harvest ed. Johnson. Her complete work ed. Johnson or ed. Franklin is also fine, you just don't want the mass-market editions of her shit because they rape her grammatical style for no fucking reason.) You can more or less go wherever you want from there, but that'll give you the general overview of the poets who are the most influential to poets working today.
>but muh free verse is heckin cringe
Try not to think like this until you've read a lot of high-quality free verse poetry. This will make /lit/ very upset because /lit/ does not read poetry and thinks something has to rhyme and say "thou" or it's not poetry. Remember that /lit/ knows nothing about poetry. Regardless, you don't have to read contemporary work, or any poetry written in free verse, if you don't want to. (That would be a mistake but it's a free country.)
>>24716785
>James Tate
Great poet. If OP likes Tate, he'll like Bob Hicok and Tony Hoagland as well.
>chart
Chart's fine. A little fusty but all the poems and poets on there are worth reading.

>>24716806
I sense irony in your post but if you didn't know or were genuinely asking it is George Stubbs' 'Horse Frightened by a Lion.'
>>24716808
Thanks for your reply, and guidance. I am something of a chud myself, but my interest in poetry is not borne of those motivations that you attribute to the average /lit/anon. I have taken note of your recommendations.

>>24716808
>Whitman

>>24716808
>Bob Hicok and Tony Hoagland
As the guy who rec'd Tate, thanks for these. Just read and enjoyed Calling Him Back from Layoff by Hicok.

>>24716892
Exhibit A
>inb4 pound quote jpeg again
You've never read Pound either, you just think he's heckin based trad memewords etc. OP don't get me wrong, Pound's worth reading -- I'm sure Penguin or New Directions or someone puts out a selected poems of his. (Will say that ND publishes an edition of Pound's selected translations that's absolutely worth reading. He's not very "accurate" to the source text but also that doesn't matter because his translations are great.)

>>24716897
Happy you liked it. That's a great Hicok poem. If you liked that, you'll like Larry Levis's poem "Winter Stars."
>https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/53388/winter-stars-56d232a1c9b93
That entire book (Winter Stars) is amazing, btw. It's not Levis's best -- that's probably The Darkening Trapeze, which he wasn't able to finish before he died. "Poem Ending With A Hotel On Fire" is one of my all-time contemporary favs.

>>24716901
When earth's last thesis is copied
From the theses that went before,
When idea from fact has departed
And bare-boned factlets shall bore,
When all joy shall have fled from study
And scholarship reign supreme;
When truth shall "baaa" on the hill crests
And no one shall dare to dream;

When all the good poems have been buried
With comment annoted in full
And art shall bow down in homage
To scholarship's zinc-plated bull,
When there shall be nothing to research
But the notes of annoted notes,
And Baalam's ass shall inquire
The price of imported oats;

Then no one shall tell him the answer
For each shall know the one fact
That lies in the special ass-ignment
From which he is making his tract.
So the ass shall sigh uninstructed
While each in his separate book
Shall grind for the love of grinding
And only the devil shall look.

>>24716806
im not being ironic. thanks for telling me. stop reading ellipses like youre reading text message.

>>24716916
When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

>>24716966
The thought of what America would be like
If the Classics had a wide circulation
Troubles my sleep,
The thought of what America,
The thought of what America,
The thought of what America would be like
If the Classics had a wide circulation
Troubles my sleep.
Nunc dimittis, now lettest thou thy servant,
Now lettest thou thy servant
Depart in peace.
The thought of what America,
The thought of what America,
The thought of what America would be like
If the Classics had a wide circulation . . .
Oh well!
It troubles my sleep.

>>24716976
I can't find it but can you post the first bit from the Cantos? The one that's the "translation" of Anglo-Saxon verse, or if not the translation then the one where he's doing Anglo-Saxon verse techniques in modern English. Might be my favorite Pound

>>24716982
it's called Cantico del Sole
as for the Anglo-Saxon translation of Homer

And then went down to the ship,
Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea, and
We set up mast and sail on that swart ship,
Bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also
Heavy with weeping, and winds from sternward
Bore us out onward with bellying canvas,
Circe’s this craft, the trim-coifed goddess.
Then sat we amidships, wind jamming the tiller,
Thus with stretched sail, we went over sea till day’s end.
Sun to his slumber, shadows o’er all the ocean,
Came we then to the bounds of deepest water,
To the Kimmerian lands, and peopled cities
Covered with close-webbed mist, unpierced ever
With glitter of sun-rays
Nor with stars stretched, nor looking back from heaven
Swartest night stretched over wretched men there.
The ocean flowing backward, came we then to the place
Aforesaid by Circe.
Here did they rites, Perimedes and Eurylochus,
And drawing sword from my hip
I dug the ell-square pitkin;
Poured we libations unto each the dead,
First mead and then sweet wine, water mixed with white flour.
Then prayed I many a prayer to the sickly death’s-heads;
As set in Ithaca, sterile bulls of the best
For sacrifice, heaping the pyre with goods,
A sheep to Tiresias only, black and a bell-sheep.
Dark blood flowed in the fosse,
Souls out of Erebus, cadaverous dead, of brides
Of youths and of the old who had borne much;
Souls stained with recent tears, girls tender,
Men many, mauled with bronze lance heads,
Battle spoil, bearing yet dreory arms,
These many crowded about me; with shouting,
Pallor upon me, cried to my men for more beasts;
Slaughtered the herds, sheep slain of bronze;
Poured ointment, cried to the gods,
To Pluto the strong, and praised Proserpine;
Unsheathed the narrow sword,
I sat to keep off the impetuous impotent dead,
Till I should hear Tiresias.

>>24716693 (OP)
I felt the empty cabin wasn’t abandoned.
The axe, for one thing, blood still moist
on the blade. Then, warm coffee on the stove.
God, it blew outside. The owner, I said,
won’t last long in this storm. By midnight
I was singing. I knew the cabin was mine.
Fifty years later, he still hadn’t returned.

Moss covered the roof by then. I called
the deer by name. Alice, I liked best.
Winslow, next. Reporters came to write me up.
They called me ‘animal man’ in the feature
in the photogravure. The story said I led
a wonderful life out here. I said clouds
were giant toads but they quoted me wrong.

The coroner identified the bones as woman.
I denied I’d been married and the local
records backed me. Today, they are hunting all over
the world for the previous owner.
I claim the cabin by occupancy rights.
I pray each dawn. How my words climb cedars
like squirrels uttered by God.

-- 'Living Alone' by Richard Hugo

>>24716910
Thank you again. Both poems, Winter Stars and Hotel On Fire, were terrific, and I'll give both the books a read.

>>24716808
got any thoughts and recs on prose poetry?

Theodore Roethke

>>24717020
Yes that's the one. Either this or The River Merchant's Wife are my favorite Pound poems. (Apologies to In A Station of the Metro)
>>24717033
Great poem. Love Hugo.
>>24717101
Happy you enjoyed it. One more for the road; Hugo's "Degrees of Grey in Philipsburg." After you read that, try to find D'Ambrosio's essay titled the same -- at the time he lived in Philipsburg and writes about his relationship to the poem/how the poem does and does not reflect the town. Really, really good.
>>24717133
Not a lot of thoughts, not a lot of recs. I don't read a ton of prose poetry. I remember really liking T. Fleischmann's "Time Is The Thing," which is more or less prose poetry. He's (they? she? IDK, pronouns are happening) got an earlier book of prose poems called "Syzygy, Beauty: An Essay" which I enjoyed. Didn't think it was as good as Time though. You might be interested in Anne Carson's "The Beauty of the Husband" or "The Glass Essay" or picrel. (I'm a big Carson fan.) If you haven't read Ashbery's translation of Rimbaud's "Illuminations," now's the time

>>24716785
rollan

>>24717170
I strove with none, for none was worth my strife;
Nature I loved, and next to Nature, Art;
I warmed both hands before the fire of Life—
It sinks, and I am ready to depart.
>On His Seventy-fifth Birthday
>by Walter Savage Landor

>>24717154
>Ashbery's translation of Rimbaud's "Illuminations,"
That's the sort of thing I was looking for, thanks.

>>24717154
>Either this or The River Merchant's Wife are my favorite Pound poems. (Apologies to In A Station of the Metro)
Wow plebby much.

>>24717138
A woman thinks she must cook her cat today…

Suddenly tears, like theater glycerin, seep up out of her ducts and down her cheeks. She thinks of a plague that might overtake the birds, causing all the birds of the world to die… They are raked up like leaves… In a few weeks humankind forgets that there ever were birds on earth…

The sweet hot lachrymal tide once more overflows as she thinks of music being torn and scattered by the wind; musicians overtaken by sudden flood; an earthquake finally destroying the house of music…

Clouds, she thinks of clouds, dark like caves; holes where people wander, having lost their minds; there, those who do evil ride bicycles in mockery of those that stumble forward, mindless, like the blind with broken butterfly hands…

She thinks she must cook her cat today… Set it on fire! Squeeze it in the door! … This to keep herself from screaming…

-- 'The Unscreamed Scream' by Russell Edson

>>24716958
It wasn't just the ellipses anon, it was also calling it a "nice horse" which is a funny way to say you like a painting of a horse. Also the "I wonder" which is often used ironically when someone is making a joke. I assumed there existed some meme I am not privy to.
>Nice post. I wonder if you're ESL...

Been reading John Keats' collected works... so far getting filtered hard by all the Classical references; did not find any poems yet I enjoyed, perhaps due to it being chronological and the Odes being later?

>>24716916
>>24716966
>>24716976
>>24717020
>>24717033
>>24717138
>>24717937
Thank you for all the poems posted thus far, have enjoyed most of them.
>>24718102
Are the Classical references just to the Iliad, Odyssey, etc? Or are they more niche? If the former then I should be fine when I fully delve into his works.

>>24718102
Keats's early work isn't as immediately approachable as the Odes. I suggest you start there + the sonnets. You don't have to read Keats chronologically. The letters are great too. Can't recall the quote offhand but Eliot said something about how they're the greatest works of criticism ever written
>>24718395
His longer work presupposes easy familiarity with Greek/Roman myth, many of the narrative poems are essentially scene-for-scene retellings of different classical stories. Not niche in his day, def niche in ours.

>>24718403
Ah I see, aside from The Iliad & Odyssey I have read Edith Hamilton's Mythology and The Greek Myths by Robert Graves, should that aid me in the Greek aspect? I have yet to read much of the Romans.

>>24718432
It'll help orient you for sure. I recommend reading the myth story on its own before reading the poem. Don't worry about "spoilers" or whatever, doesn't really apply to Keats's narrative work.