fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #2507 ]

⌈ Secret Post #2507 ⌋

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Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

>2013
>still believing poems have to rhyme
>not devoting yourself wholeheartedly to the study of based modernist poetry

Alrite, you've made your point.

If I may derail a bit, I don't know what to make of modern poetry. At all. I can understand poetry from the 1500s through the 1950s (albeit only with notes on unusual words for the early stuff), and I can understand a bit of stuff from the '60s that used a '50s style, but only once have I understood a modern poem without someone having to explain the meaning to me. (I'm in a writing club that allows both poetry and prose, so this means I often sit around awkwardly while everyone else is discussing some apparently great poem.)

A lot of today's "poetry" is really just free writing broken into line-like segments and published without even a spellchecking pass. There I adore and understand a lot of poetry from all sorts of eras and cultures, but once we get into the 19th century it all just sort of stops making sense (I blame The Great War and Dadaism for ruining art). There's a good handful of poets and poems from after 1914 that I understand and enjoy, but they're definitely the exceptions. Let me try to count them on one hand: Tolkien, Wilfred Owen, Dylan Thomas, about half of Seamus Heaney's stuff (half is brilliant, the other half just seems like blather). T. S. Elliot doesn't make any sense but still sounds nice sometimes.

Yeah, poetry is about due for a renaissance.

Edited 2013-11-14 01:15 (UTC)

Talking about poets after 1914, I think Reed Whittemore can be added to the "good" list. He can be a little hard to understand, but he has interesting things to say.

http://voiceseducation.org/content/reed-whittemore-reflections-upon-recurrent-suggestion-civil-defense-authorities

(I also remember a poem about Memorial Day as a child, playing among the soldiers' gravestones, not truly understanding that there were bodies buried there. And in a class I took about Asian-American literature, a Hawaiian poem about an abusive mother was pretty good. I don't remember the authors' names, though.)

Poetry doesn't need a renaissance - more people are writing poetry now than ever before.

The poets I love are mostly from the 1960s (George Oppen, Barbara Guest, Frank O'Hara, John Berryman), so saying the Great War ruined poetry is a matter of taste, not fact.

My favorite love poem is probably Frank O'Hara's "Having a Coke With You". Simple, jazzy, and heart-breakingly full of love.

"T. S. Elliot doesn't make any sense but still sounds nice sometimes."

Shut your mouth. Those five poems we read of his made up the best section of any of my high school or college literature classes.

If it needs footnotes provided by the poet to even remotely make sense, it's not poetry. "The Waste Land" is a Text, in the same insufferably self-regarding way that House of Leaves is a Text.

YESSS! And I wrote my MA thesis on T.S.Eliot.

AYRT

I'll freely admit that part of my hatred for "The Waste Land" comes from the fact that it's exactly the kind of text that my detested AP English teacher adored.

I don't agree. For two main reasons.

First, there is so much poetry even after the explosion of WWI that is still basically in the same mode as poetry before it, if somewhat less formalist, that claiming that poetry has completely disappeared is just kind of absurd. The idea that, like, Auden (much as I hate Auden) or Philip Larkin or John Betjeman or Robert Frost or poets of their ilk are writing poetry that is fundamentally different from things that you see before the war does not hold water, for me. Donald Justice, Wendell Berry, Donald Hall, Jane Kenyon - these are all poets off the top of my head who are making poetry which cannot reasonably be accused of making sense. And you could even say that this is true about some less conventional poets, I think - I mean, are the Beats like Ginsberg that far from Whitman?

And second, I think that a lot of modernist poetry does make sense, even if it is sometimes less immediately coherent than classical poetry, and I think a lot of it is beautiful and deeply meaningful. This is true even for some of the more out there stuff - but the idea that, like, Wallace Steven's "Sunday Morning" is somehow impenetrable or not beautiful, because it is modernist, or "Idea Of Order At Key West" - the idea that "J Alfred Prufrock" doesn't make sense - again, those ideas don't hold water for me. I mean, a lot of it is difficult - Eliot, Pound, a lot of their successors, these are poets whose sense does not come immediately to hand - but the sense is there nonetheless (and it's also probably worth saying that "poetic Renaissance" would not be a totally incorrect description of what Eliot and Pound were trying to do).

Donald Justice, Wendell Berry, Donald Hall, Jane Kenyon - these are all poets off the top of my head who are making poetry which cannot reasonably be accused of making sense

Er. They are poets who cannot reasonable be accused of NOT making sense. I, on the other hand, can very reasonably be accused of it, especially when I leave out crucial words from my sentences...

I would probably say that I'm not really a fan of most of. But there are poems that I just get. I don't think it's necessarily era dependent, sometimes someone's work just speaks to you - maybe you recognize something in it that captures a feeling that you've experienced, or maybe it just makes you feel. Here are a few (more or less contemporary) that I like.

Invitation -Shel Silverstein

If you are a dreamer, come in
If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar,
A hope-er. a pray-er, a magic bean buyer...
If you're a pretender, come sit by the fire
For we have some flax-golden tales to spin.
Come in!
Come in!

Listen to the Mustn'ts -Shel Silverstein

Listen to the MUSTN'TS, child,
Listen to the DON'TS
Listen to the SHOULDN'TS
The IMPOSSIBLES, the WONT'S
Listen to the NEVER HAVES
Then listen close to me-
Anything can happen, child,
ANYTHING can be

Still I Rise -Maya Angelou (http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15623)

Forgetfulness -Billy Collins
(http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19754)

Is Collins the one who wrote that poem about how he wants his students to climb through the poem, to dive into the poem, to [all sorts of playful activities] with the poem, and his students just want to tie the poem to a chair and hit it with a hose until it coughs up its meaning? That one was funny.

It's called Introduction to Poetry.

Call that a poem? It didn't even alliterate.
(rhyming is new, poetry is old, secret is cute, though not really poetic)

[ SECRET POST #2507 ]

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derailment time!

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If you were to ask me if I liked poetry...

Re: If you were to ask me if I liked poetry...

Yes, he is.

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