Twentieth-century American poetry

[fearandpanic]

A place to discuss or post bits by (or about) your favourites, least favourites, the most overvalued, most undervalued, or the not valued at all.

(I know there's a poetry thread in the depths of "the hated world" somewhere, but it's a little too broad a topic.)

[user_548]

Wallace Muthafuckin' Stevens.

I walked into the Supermarket today and heard 'Having a bad day? Roundy's Ice Cream makes it better. Having a good day? Roundy's Ice Cream makes it better!' I immediately thought of The Emperor of Ice Cream.

[faster]

Oppen, man.

John Berryman doesn't seem to get much love these days.

But my favorite underrecognized poet is Robinson Jeffers. Really a titan.

[AlbionMoonlight]

Kenneth Patchen

[user_710]

Oppen is my favorite.
Also love William Bronk.

Bill Williams, of course.



Favorite American poets presently writing: Michael Palmer and Peter Gizzi.

[user_1950]

Frank Bidart, particularly his longer poems like "Ellen West" and "The War of Vaslav Nijinsky."

Elizabeth Bishop. Robert Lowell. Lorine Niedecker. C.K. Williams.

[user_4541]

woah, weird. Peter Gizzi is teaching at my school's graduate program. I applied but didn't get in. argh. So is James Tate who is pretty good.

[faster]

I really can't read James Tate.

[maRi]

why i am not a painter by frank o'hara is lovely.

i really appreciate his drawing attention to an important distinction, often overlooked. between 'the nostalgia of the infinite' and 'the nostalgia for the infinite' in personism: a manifesto, which is quite charming.

Personism has nothing to do with philosophy, it?s all art. It does not have to do with personality or intimacy, far from it! But to give you a vague idea, one of its minimal aspects is to address itself to one person (other than the poet himself), thus evoking overtones of love without destroying love?s life-giving vulgarity, and sustaining the poet?s feelings towards the poem while preventing love from distracting him into feeling about the person. That?s part of personism. It was founded by me after lunch with LeRoi Jones on August 27, 1959, a day in which I was in love with someone (not Roi, by the way, a blond). I went back to work and wrote a poem for this person. While I was writing it I was realizing that if I wanted to I could use the telephone instead of writing the poem, and so Personism was born. It?s a very exciting movement which will undoubtedly have lots of adherents. It puts the poem squarely between the poet and the person, Lucky Pierre style, and the poem is correspondingly gratified. The poem is at last between two persons instead of two pages.

also

and stones
'...it was raining bourbon and (hic) champagne and bop (sic)...'


curious if you agree with the following and if they are related thoughts to you:

A poet's occupation is to compose poetry. The writing of it is everywhere.

It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so.

[Dohol]

But my favorite underrecognized poet is Robinson Jeffers. Really a titan.

Truth.

[nirav]

http://www.writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/" onclick= "window.open(this.href);return false;

[fearandpanic]

"George Oppen's standard, his obsession, was "honesty" in the poem. Ezra Pound's ideogram of a man standing by his word. He insisted on writing only about what he himself had seen, and the act of seeing. The angels he had mentioned in a poem were the ones in the windows of Chartres. Uniquely among American poets, there are almost no mythological references and no myth-making, no exotica, no personae, only one or two passing historical references, and almost no similes in his work: in Oppen's world, things are not "like," they are there, right in front of you, and there with an exclamation mark.

Curiously, Oppen's struggle for "clarity"--another favorite word--did not result in the kind of small perfection of unadorned speech achieved by Reznikoff and Niedecker, poems that reached what Zukofsky called "total rest." Oppen's poems represent the struggle itself, and he continually rewrote them, cutting out and pasting words on top of other words, as though he were a mason building a brick wall. They are often abstract, as mystical as koans, a sea-surge of contradictory forces: assertions and their negations, declarations couched in double negatives, questions without answers, straightforward observations placed next to gnomic utterances..." -- Eliot Weinberger, from "Oppen Then" (preface to the New Collected Poems.)

[bryan]

"George Oppen's standard, his obsession, was "honesty" in the poem. Ezra Pound's ideogram of a man standing by his word. He insisted on writing only about what he himself had seen, and the act of seeing. The angels he had mentioned in a poem were the ones in the windows of Chartres. Uniquely among American poets, there are almost no mythological references and no myth-making, no exotica, no personae, only one or two passing historical references, and almost no similes in his work: in Oppen's world, things are not "like," they are there, right in front of you, and there with an exclamation mark.

Curiously, Oppen's struggle for "clarity"--another favorite word--did not result in the kind of small perfection of unadorned speech achieved by Reznikoff and Niedecker, poems that reached what Zukofsky called "total rest." Oppen's poems represent the struggle itself, and he continually rewrote them, cutting out and pasting words on top of other words, as though he were a mason building a brick wall. They are often abstract, as mystical as koans, a sea-surge of contradictory forces: assertions and their negations, declarations couched in double negatives, questions without answers, straightforward observations placed next to gnomic utterances..." -- Eliot Weinberger, from "Oppen Then" (preface to the New Collected Poems.)

I really like that description. Any Oppen online?

[faster]

Not much, google tells me, but here's one:


Psalm

In the small beauty of the forest
The wild deer bedding down --
That they are there!

Their eyes
Effortless, the soft lips
Nuzzle and the alien small teeth
Tear at the grass

The roots of it
Dangle from their mouths
Scattering earth in the strange woods.
They who are there.

Their paths
Nibbled thru the fields, the leaves that shade them
Hang in the distances
Of sun

The small nouns
Crying faith
In this in which the wild deer
Startle, and stare out.

EDIT: this has pretty elaborate spacing. It was visible in the post window, but was reformated when posted. Oh well.

[faster]

And a better one:

Who Shall Doubt


consciousness



in itself



of itself carrying



'the principle

of the actual' being



actual



itself ((but maybe this is a love

poem



Mary) ) nevertheless



neither



the power

of the self nor the racing

car nor the lilly



is sweet but this

again, imagine interesting spacing, sparse.

[fearandpanic]

Here's a few more:

From Discrete Series: "Town, a town ...", From Of Being Numerous, "And Their Winter and Night in Disguise", Image of the Engine, Myth of the Blaze, Populist, Return, Time of the Missile, Vulcan

[Gaendaal]

Why just American?

[Dohol]

Good point.

[P. Wretch]

Some of the recorded utterances of Donald Rumsfeld (not just the famous 'unknown knowns' one) are uncannily close to Oppen:

Glass Box
You know, it's the old glass box at the?
At the gas station,
Where you're using those little things
Trying to pick up the prize,
And you can't find it.
It's?

And it's all these arms are going down in there,
And so you keep dropping it
And picking it up again and moving it,
But?

Some of you are probably too young to remember those?
Those glass boxes,
But?

But they used to have them
At all the gas stations
When I was a kid.

?Dec. 6, 2001, Department of Defense news briefing


The Situation
Things will not be necessarily continuous.
The fact that they are something other than perfectly continuous
Ought not to be characterized as a pause.
There will be some things that people will see.
There will be some things that people won't see.
And life goes on.

?Oct. 12, 2001, Department of Defense news briefing


Much as I despise the man, there is something inadvertently brilliant about that 'Glass Box' one, although it may have something to do with the Slate journalist's introduction of cunning line-breaks.

[potatocircle]

I'm american but i'm not too fond of americans' poetry.

i'm a big fan of kurt schwitters, ernst jandl, paul celan, charles olson, j.h. prynne, ishmael reed (as poet, not fiction writer).

not 20th C., but been really enjoying refreshing the mallarme inside as i've been rereading the c.f.mcintyre translations closely with the french - and both are hilarious/ dismal.

hans magnus enzenberger's got some stuff i like too.

recently, the translation of Laura Sol?rzano's lobo de labio (LIP WOLF) has been providing much flagrance around the abode