Joshua’s answer to “Do you ever feel that much of the poetry published in Poetry magazine is so obscure that it becomes…” > Likes and Comments
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I remember the first time I read The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. I read them all in one sitting. Maybe I understood one third or so. But I felt I was in the presence of a master. I read Musing the Obscure to understand the poems better. Then I read the Collected Poems again. One of the truly greatest reading experiences of my life. I don't get that same feeling when I read many issues of Poetry magazine. So much just seems meaningless and elitist in a bad sense.
I guess one question is, what do you mean or what do you look for in a "master"? Isn't there something intrinsically dead about that concept? By all means read only unequivocally great poetry--Vallejo, Dickinson, Yeats--or don't read poetry at all ( Frank O'Hara: "If people don't need poetry bully for them. I like the movies, too"). What a magazine like Poetry offers is contemporary writers shaping the art and not always getting it right. But it's living. It's contact with the present.
Like Mr. O'Hara, I like the movies as well. I just watched the movie Frantz by the French director Francois Ozon. I loved the movie. It occurred to me that nothing in contemporary war poetry can compare with this. The journal Consequence Magazine seems to be written by MFA students. It's hard to find much to compare with WWI war poems. I would rather look forward to the Vietnam documentary coming this fall on PBS. I guess what I am saying is that modern poets are missing out on some opportunities. I like a good WTF poem also, but I prefer something that gets human.
The poetry that means the most to me nowadays is written by poets with a profound understanding of historical experience (or what is almost the same thing, a profound historical experience that they can speak from with knowledge), coupled by a truly alive and idiosyncratic sense of the language. Which means lately that I do tend to reread more than I read contemporary poetry; I am also drawn, in a way I wasn't in my thirties, to discursive poets like John Koethe and C.K. Williams. Every now and then, though, I come across a poem in Poetry or elsewhere by a contemporary poet that doesn't read like a pure experiment or the product of someone's assignment, but which rises to that level of "news from poems" of which WCW spoke. Danez Smith and Tyehimba Jess can do that for me; Anne Boyer and Lisa Robertson always do; Robyn Schiff is amazing; I could go on. But I agree that mere cleverness is insufficient. And I don't have the faith I once did that combining words by any method, provided that method is sufficiently rigorous, is sufficient for a good poem. I want language that thinks anew, written by someone with a beating heart.
I put a lot of extra effort into your book since this discussion. I read and reread. I came to appreciate it much more. I'm still not sure the effort seems worth it, however. Like so much poetry today, it seems like part of some Oscar Wildean useless art. After a life of reading literature, poetry, and philosophy, I find myself searching more through science and politics for answers to the troubles I observe in the world. I do hope to read more of the poets you mentioned above. I will continue to respond to your comments as long as you make them. That alone on your part is a sign of a willingness to reach out.
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Jimmy
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Jul 03, 2017 02:48PM
I remember the first time I read The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. I read them all in one sitting. Maybe I understood one third or so. But I felt I was in the presence of a master. I read Musing the Obscure to understand the poems better. Then I read the Collected Poems again. One of the truly greatest reading experiences of my life. I don't get that same feeling when I read many issues of Poetry magazine. So much just seems meaningless and elitist in a bad sense.
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I guess one question is, what do you mean or what do you look for in a "master"? Isn't there something intrinsically dead about that concept? By all means read only unequivocally great poetry--Vallejo, Dickinson, Yeats--or don't read poetry at all ( Frank O'Hara: "If people don't need poetry bully for them. I like the movies, too"). What a magazine like Poetry offers is contemporary writers shaping the art and not always getting it right. But it's living. It's contact with the present.
Like Mr. O'Hara, I like the movies as well. I just watched the movie Frantz by the French director Francois Ozon. I loved the movie. It occurred to me that nothing in contemporary war poetry can compare with this. The journal Consequence Magazine seems to be written by MFA students. It's hard to find much to compare with WWI war poems. I would rather look forward to the Vietnam documentary coming this fall on PBS. I guess what I am saying is that modern poets are missing out on some opportunities. I like a good WTF poem also, but I prefer something that gets human.
The poetry that means the most to me nowadays is written by poets with a profound understanding of historical experience (or what is almost the same thing, a profound historical experience that they can speak from with knowledge), coupled by a truly alive and idiosyncratic sense of the language. Which means lately that I do tend to reread more than I read contemporary poetry; I am also drawn, in a way I wasn't in my thirties, to discursive poets like John Koethe and C.K. Williams. Every now and then, though, I come across a poem in Poetry or elsewhere by a contemporary poet that doesn't read like a pure experiment or the product of someone's assignment, but which rises to that level of "news from poems" of which WCW spoke. Danez Smith and Tyehimba Jess can do that for me; Anne Boyer and Lisa Robertson always do; Robyn Schiff is amazing; I could go on. But I agree that mere cleverness is insufficient. And I don't have the faith I once did that combining words by any method, provided that method is sufficiently rigorous, is sufficient for a good poem. I want language that thinks anew, written by someone with a beating heart.
I put a lot of extra effort into your book since this discussion. I read and reread. I came to appreciate it much more. I'm still not sure the effort seems worth it, however. Like so much poetry today, it seems like part of some Oscar Wildean useless art. After a life of reading literature, poetry, and philosophy, I find myself searching more through science and politics for answers to the troubles I observe in the world. I do hope to read more of the poets you mentioned above. I will continue to respond to your comments as long as you make them. That alone on your part is a sign of a willingness to reach out.
