Post a poet who is alive today (pic is Geoffrey Hill, check out his Christian Architecture poem)...

tao lin

john green

Any non-troll answers?

Ben Lerner's a pseudopoet. Literally just puts some random words on a page and then writes a 100 page essay with neologism to defend it as poetry. Completely forgotten by the time he's dead for sure. Same with his fucking awful MFA novels.

I've only read his pre-1992 stuff. I've seen him posted here rarely. He's good. Best WWII-obsessed poet is Paul Celan by a mile tho

new name to me, thanks

Ashbery stopped being good in the 70s. I'm not a fan of Carson, but it's passable I suppose. Kinda psuedohermetic.

Jay Wright is pretty cool (the poet), Bloom recommended him and I read some and was impressed. It's a bit more on the romantic, hermetic side at times, though his earlier poems have an interesting Jazz-culture fusion. In a good way that is. Not a meme way like Allen Fucksberg or the godawful beats / black mountainers / etc.

Yes he's black and I know we all subconsciously think "black poets are all memes" but I swear he's good

THERES A FUCK LOAD OF FAT DYKE TUMBLR WHALE SLAM POETS

It's a great essay.

I'm sure there's something nice about Hill's poems, in their way. But I wonder what happened to poems that could be understood by laymen?

If one knew only poets like Hill, Ashbery, Jay Wright, and let's add in Pound & Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and some women poets like Plath, Moore, etc.—if one were to do this, they might conceivably wonder, "what was thought good poetry in the age when education was stricter and elitism was worse? Surely it's even more obtuse than ours?" And how surprising it would be to read Pope, or Coleridge, or Milton!

With some exceptions—Auden, Larkin come to mind—poetry seems to have lost much of its readability. When Browning put out the convoluted and dense Sordello, nobody felt ashamed to say it was obscure and awful. Tennyson said "There were only two lines in it that I understood, and they were both lies; they were the opening and closing lines, 'Who will may hear Sordello's story told,' and 'Who would has heard Sordello's story told!'"

Pound liked it, which ought to surprise nobody.

Anyway, it's not like that now. I think a lot of people are unwilling to say that they don't understand a poem, still less to say that this is a fault of the poem. But they really ought to speak up more often. There's a reason that we don't have a Tennyson or a Dryden.

>when you edit the start of a sentence and forget to check whether the rest still agrees with it grammatically

Ross gay, Thomas lux, louise gluck. Ross gay for beauty and earnestness, lux for dark humor/absurdism, gluck for lyric poetrt

I'm back: >louise gluck

she's not entirely first rate, but her poems are pleasing and people should read them.

> Thomas lux

he's alright

> Ross gay

new 2 me

> But I wonder what happened to poems that could be understood by laymen?

His poems aren't hard to understand once you understand that one hard one with the phrase "the loathing neckings and the fat shook spawn," which he actually explained and you can search for an explanation online. After that, it's pretty easy to understand how the rest works. Honestly even then he's easier to understand than Celan, and Celan is by far the more-read poet

> There's a reason that we don't have a Tennyson or a Dryden.

It's because you really can't publish "easy" poems anymore unless it's politically correct bullcrap (ecopoetics) in free verse, or your whole career is focused around making shitty "new formalist" poems like AE Stallings (who, btw, sucks ass)

>His poems aren't hard to understand once you understand etc etc

if you're admitting that you need to understand something external to his poems in order to understand them, you're admitting that they're not easy to understand in the sense that almost every poet until modernism was easy to understand

I'm not looking to talk intelligence over this—I know I'm quite capable of figuring out Hill's poems, like you are. But poetry for poetry specialists is not what poetry was. I think I like poetry better when it's mostly comprehensible by the second reading.

Me.

>alive today

there are living men and women who have written poems in their past, but the poet him/herself is always dead and gone the moment the poetry is written on the page. So unless there is somebody writing a poem this minute, there are no living "poets", only people.

...

>But poetry for poetry specialists is not what poetry was.

This isn't even true. At least not until the Romantics -- Wordsworth especially. The idea of writing in the language of the common man was radical and revolutionary, and could (and did) not exist in a pre-Enlightenment era. You mention Milton, but how many lay people could understand Milton's extremely latinate English, or his constant and dense stream of classical allusions? Through history, poetry has mostly been written for a courtly or intimate setting; the entire sonnet tradition is thereafter. Hence Shakespeare's plays were consumed by a wide public, but his sonnets and long poems were retained for a very small and private audience.

The truth is that poetry has always been the domain of a kind of 'elite', or at least a self-selecting class of people who have an interest in it. Most people do not have this interest. Only look at how Veeky Forums, apparently a literature board, strongly prefers prose: even here poetry is not well represented. Hence, to return to our Romantic ideal of a universal readership, it is slightly humorous but not surprising that the vehicle of this ambition, the Lyrical Ballads, ended up being read not by the masses, but almost exclusively by people who already were poetry readers.

No, attempting to democratise and universalise poetry is a fool's errand. Ultimately, it will be those who are interested in poetry who read it. And these people are willing to invest the effort. We should not lower the bar in order to appeal to people who have no serious or sustained interest in the first place.

good post. Thanks for defending my position on Hill.

There's something exciting about dense, but aesthetic poetry -- Hill's fits this. When you get good at reading poetry, there's a thrill, like you're reading a dense philosophical treatise, except written as a painting. It's so pleasing.

And then you read "everyman" poetry about ecopoetics or faeries and it just doesn't quench you at all. Takes a very good poet like Keats to make poetry accessible and intellectually stimulating. But it still feels dumb in comparison.

Yeats is about the most intellectual an "everyman" poet gets. And he's yeats, a talent of a century

...

but that's not true

you are putting more stock in Wordsworth's opinion of what he was doing than any serious scholar of 18th century poetry would. You can talk all you want about the "revolutionary" idea of writing in the language of the common man, but poetic diction wasn't actually hard to read.

You say Milton's English was latinate—yes, grammatically. It sometimes takes a moment to parse it. But he is not obscure. You can talk about the "density" of Milton but the fact remains that many people, even uneducated people, find him readable.

There is plainly a world of difference between

And, after all, it is to them we return.
Their triumph is to rise and be our hosts:
lords of unquiet or of quiet sojourn,
those muddy-hued and midge-tormented ghosts.

On blustery lilac-bush and terrace-urn
bedaubed with bloom Linnaean pentecosts
put their pronged light; the chilly fountains burn.
Religion of the heart, with trysts and quests

and pangs of consolation, its hawk’s hood
twitched off for sweet carnality, again
rejoices in old hymns of servitude,

haunting the sacred well, the hidden shrine.
It is the ravage of the heron wood;
it is the rood blazing upon the green.

and

Of Mans First Disobedience, and the Fruit
Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal tast
Brought Death into the World, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat,
Sing Heav'nly Muse, that on the secret top
Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire
That Shepherd, who first taught the chosen Seed,
In the Beginning how the Heav'ns and Earth
Rose out of Chaos: Or if Sion Hill
Delight thee more, and Siloa's Brook that flow'd
Fast by the Oracle of God; I thence
Invoke thy aid to my adventrous Song,
That with no middle flight intends to soar
Above th' Aonian Mount, while it pursues
Things unattempted yet in Prose or Rhime.
And chiefly Thou O Spirit, that dost prefer
Before all Temples th' upright heart and pure,
Instruct me, for Thou know'st; Thou from the first
Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread
Dove-like satst brooding on the vast Abyss
And mad'st it pregnant: What in me is dark
Illumin, what is low raise and support;
That to the highth of this great Argument
I may assert Eternal Providence,
And justifie the wayes of God to men.

Say first, for Heav'n hides nothing from thy view
Nor the deep Tract of Hell, say first what cause
Mov'd our Grand Parents in that happy State,
Favour'd of Heav'n so highly, to fall off
From thir Creator, and transgress his Will
For one restraint, Lords of the World besides?

Especially when you consider that Man's First Disobedience was a very well-known story in an era when English society was Christian.

If you are trying to convince me that both are alike in obscurity, you're transparently bullshitting. It is evident to anybody that Milton's is easier.

And that's their MOST obscure. You couldn't even TRY to argue it for Pope.

You are now floundering and ignoring my point. I'm not interested in comparisons between more and less difficult poetry. The gist of the argument was that the idea of a 'common man' readership is a relatively recent invention which has no real place in the history of poetry, except as a kind of egalitarian fantasy. Whether it's difficult or easy for the 'common man' to read Milton is only tangentially related to my argument, which was precisely that there was no 'common man' reading Milton, at least not as a class. It is true that Pope was wildly successful -- but only within quite a select readership, mostly confined to the beau-monde that he satirised. If you were going to mention anyone, you really should have mentioned Byron, the first literary celebrity, and in a way the first celebrity in any sense of the word. But he is the exception to what is actually quite a consistent rule, that of poetry being the domain of an elite.

>you are putting more stock in Wordsworth's opinion of what he was doing than any serious scholar of 18th century poetry would
I really don't know what you mean by this. What I outlined is nothing other than the stated ambition of the Lyrical Ballads, as from its Preface. How "serious scholars" come into that I cannot tell, but it is not particularly controversial to say that the Lyrical Ballads were written deliberately to appeal to a wide readership. That much is apparently merely from flicking through it. Its diction is simple, there are few complex sentences, it is thematically concerned with common and rustic people, it is heavily rhyme-driven, the ballad is a folk-y kind of form anyway. Point being, even deliberate attempts to include the 'common man' in poetry readership fails. Because poetry is, quite simply, for a particular type a reader -- one who's actually quite rare.

(I also don't know very many scholars of "18th century poetry". Typically they tend to divide into Augustan- or Restoration-oriented specialists for the earlier part of the 18th c., including some of the 17th; and Romantic for the later half of the 18th, spilling over into the 19th.)

type of* reader, I meant, of course.

I'd assume it's to do with poems no longer being middlebrow entertainment. The kind of people who would have been thrilled by a Poe recital are now watching House of Cards on Netflix.

Although presumably there's some chicken and egg there. Poets are writing for a smaller, more specialist readership, so they produce obscure stuff, so they reach a smaller, more specialist readership...

That's definitely true in the case of Poe.