The last Scarriet Hot 100 list was headed up by Kent Johnson, a talented poet who loved everything to do with poetry and interacted with me on the internet recently—a good man, a good soul, a loving father. He passed away this year. Before I get into the new list, I wanted to mention him.
There are two ways to think generally about poetry today.
One—poetry is thriving: in academia, in MFA writing workshops, in hard copy book publishing, in the slam bars, in the anthologies, in the inaugural ceremonies in Washingtion DC, in magazines, in prizes, in cash awards, in the federal, state, and local, laureates, in political radicalism, in traditional ways, in experimental ways, on millions of internet outlets, and in every proud, marginalized community.
Two—poetry is thriving AND YET it isn’t as good or important as it used to be.
Every 5-10 years—the latest is a NYTimes piece by Matthew Walther called “Poetry Died 100 Years Ago This Month”—successful American Poetry is tested by a smack-in-the-face, AND YET essay, which ruffles feathers and gets people talking.
This essay is always written by someone who is vaguely “conservative,” rude-yet-polite, and is either not a poet, or a poet who belongs somewhat, but not really, to the top-award-and-prize nexus of the American poetry enterprise.
The response (incensed, mostly uniting) to these once-or-twice-in-a-decade reminders that American poetry, despite all the official and unofficial cheer-leading, no longer matters, takes the following forms—from vehement disagreement to gradually conceding something may be wrong:
One) Your essay is lousy. You obviously don’t read contemporary poetry. You may be racist.
Two) No. Poetry is thriving. You need to read X, Y, and Z (see the top 100 list below).
Three) 90% of poetry is garbage (and I purchase and read new poems every day of the week) but that’s always been true—the bad poetry of the past has been forgotten. I don’t agree with anything you say in your essay.
Four) 99% of poetry is garbage today but that’s because there’s “too many poets.” But it’s better to have too many than too few, and the 1% good poetry today is as good as the best poems from the past—just evolved and different. I agree with one or two things in your essay.
Response One comprises about half the total response, which is perhaps why essays which question poetry’s contemporary worth appear rather infrequently.
Some form of Two, Three, and Four equals an additional 25% of the reactions.
Five) Modern poetry does kind of suck but contemporary poetry lives on in pop lyrics: Paul Simon, Bob Dylan, rap. Your essay is only partially correct.
Response Five fits about 15% of the usual reaction to such essays.
The remaining 10% of the feedback looks more or less like Six, Seven, Eight, and Nine.
Six) World War One and better university training did make Modernist poetry an ideal expression of a certain, unified, mournful sentiment which once paid dividends, but poetry today is written by different people for different purposes. I agree with your essay up to a point, but it’s much too pessimistic.
Seven) You make some good points, but you’re too narrow-minded. If you read more widely, you’d find contemporary poetry reflects the past more than you realize and historically, poetry has always had its revisions and revolutions. You’re too alarmist.
Eight) Poetry has sucked since 20th century prose poetry replaced Millay, Dickinson, Barrett, Tennyson and Keats, never mind Shakespeare and Milton. I agree with your essay 100% but I must take issue with your implication that early 20th Century Modernism was a golden age—Williams’ Wheelbarrow and Pound’s Cantos was, in fact, when the rot set in.
Nine) You’re spot on. Contemporary society is shallow and dumbed-down; only back-scratching poets read poetry today and as far as the general public is concerned, poetry is dead. I recall a previous essay of this kind where academic poetry was compared to subsidized farming. What you say has been true for many years. Thank you for your essay.
Below are poets getting the most attention in this early 2023 moment.
Latest book in quotes, when deemed necessary. BAP = Best American Poetry. Many of the names below were simply the most mentioned as “living poets you need to read” by those objecting to Walther’s essay—not a bad way to take a Zeitgeist temperature.
1) Matthew Walther. Catholic columnist. T.S. Eliot killed poetry. 2) Ada Limón “The Hurting Kind.” U.S. Laureate. 3) Diane Seuss “frank: sonnets.” Pulitzer. 4) David Lehman BAP ed. see Scarriet 11/7/22 5) Tawanda Mulalu “Please Make Me Pretty” 6) Matthew Zapruder BAP ’22 Guest editor 7) Wong May Tang Dynasty translations 8) Ocean Vuong 9) Jason Koo Longest poem in BAP ’22 10) Anni Liu “Border Vista” 11) William Logan slapped by Lehman in ’09 BAP 12) Terrance Hayes 13) Kevin Young New Yorker Poetry ed. 14) Sharon Olds “Balladz” 15) Danez Smith 16) John Keene “Punks” National Book Award 17) Louise Glück best poem in BAP ’22? 18) Martin Espada 19) Joy Harjo 20) John Koethe “Beyond Belief” 21) Forrest Gander 22) Natalie Diaz 23) Robert Wood Lynn 22′ Yale Younger Prize 24) Alice Fulton “Coloratura On A Silence Found In Many Expressive Systems” 25) Saeed Jones “Alive at the End of the World” 26) Elisa Gabbert NYT poetry columnist 27) Jorie Graham 28) Jayme Ringleb “So Tall It Ends In Heaven” 29) Chen Chen “Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced An Emergency” 30) Laura Kasischke best poem in BAP ’22? 31) Ross Gay publishes essays as well as poems 32) Rupi Kaur Instagram Bestseller 33) Amanda Gorman presidential inauguration poet 34) Mary Ruefle 35) Simon Armitage British Poet Laureate 36) Marilyn Chin worked with Paul Engle at Iowa 37) Niina Pollari “Path of Totality” 38) Gerald J Davis “Divine Comedy” prose trans. bestseller 39) Aaron Poochigian “American Divine” 40) Patricia Lockwood 41) Yusef Komunyakaa “Everyday Mojo Songs of the Earth: New & Selected” 42) Illya Kaminsky 43) Maggie Smith “Goldenrod” 44) C. Dale Young “Prometeo” 45) Daipayan Nair “tilt of the winnowing fan” Hawakal press 46) Reginald Dwayne Betts founder & director, Freedom Reads 47) Kirk Wood Bromley verse playwright 48) Cathy Park Hong “Delusions of Whiteness in the Avant-Garde” essay 49) Dilruba Ahmed “Bring Now the Angels” 50) Yousif M. Qasmiyeh 51) Sherwin Bitsui “Dissolve” 52) Jake Skeets “Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers” 53) Brian Teare “Doomstead Days” 54) Billy Collins 55) Naomi Shihab Nye 56) Robert Pinsky 57) Tracy K. Smith 58) Warsame Shire 59) Wendy Cope 60) Marie Howe 61) Ron Silliman lowbrow avant critic 62) Marjorie Perloff highbrow avant critic 63) CA Conrad 64) Rae Armantrout current Yale Younger Judge 65) Susmit Panda 66) Alexandra Lyfton Regalado “Relinquenda” 67) Sara Deniz Akant “Hyperphantasia” 68) George Bilgere “Blood Pages” 69) Ben Mazer ed. Collected Poems, Delmore S. 70) Paul Tran “All the Flowers Kneeling” 71) Shelley Wong “As She Appears” debut publication 72) No’u Revilla “Ask the Brindled” 73) Safia Elhillo “Girls That Never Die” 74) Rio Cortez “Golden Ax” first book 75) C.T. Salazar “Headless John the Baptist Hitchhiking” 76) Nina Mingya “Magnolia” 77) Roger Reeves “Best Barbarian” 78) Luther Hughes “A Shiver In the Leaves” 79) Solmaz Sharif “Customs” 80) Franny Choi “The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On” 81) Dana Gioia poet who wrote one of those essays 82) Mary Angela Douglas 83) Cate Marvin “Event Horizon” 84) Aakriti Kuntal 85) Rita Dove 86) Stephen Cole 87) Deepanjan Chhetri 88) Carl Phillips “Then the War: And Selected Poems” 89) Joshua Michael Stewart “Break Every String” 90) Robert Hass 91) Gregory Pardlo Pulitzer 2015 92) Christian Wiman “Survival Is a Style” 93) Padraig O Tuama ed. “Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems To Open Your World” Amazon bestseller 94) Yana Djin 95) Glyn Maxwell 96) Jenny Xie “The Rapture Tense” 97) Shelby Leigh “mental health poet,” Amazon bestseller 98) Kei Miller “There Is an Anger that Moves” 99) Layli Long Soldier 100) Aimee Nezhukumatahil
George Santayana’s student and a famous poet. Pound and Santayana, as war raged in 1940, had an Axis address.
Give a name to something. Add epigrams. Talk goes viral. Books, aspiring PhD students writing little articles, appear. Now it’s a name we all repeat and vaguely define to our own private, half-lazy, satisfaction. But what the fuck is it, really?
It was because somebody died. A new thing must happen because the young watch the old getting old and dying and it scares them, so they substitute mortality, decrepitude and physical death with “we’re different! we’re new! we’re modern!” and this perversity of frightened youth and frightened middle-age (with some old enablers) thinking themselves special goes on for generations—the “moderns” die (surprise!) and the “post-moderns,” young, excited, and fit, rise up in their place.
Not only do frightened mortals name things “modern” or “post-modern” (it can be as simple as pointing to some thing and saying, “modern”—O holy, stamped, new thing!) the “Romantics”—who were called that after they died, the “Romantics,” themselves, were never the “Romantics”—were named. They were just like the “Moderns!” Now do you see how it works? The professors (the worst! Professors!) know exactly how this works.
Don’t tell anyone: Byron’s favorite author was Pope. Keats’ favorite author was Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s favorite author was Plato. Byron was just a guy writing the best things he could—but no! He was a “Romantic” doing something “new,” which is exactly what the “Modernists” were doing! Ha ha ha!
Do you ever wonder why in poetry there are no more guys today, young guys, like Keats and Byron, just writing stuff that’s really good? And instead there’s all these “new verse movements” and “camps” and “schools” and MFA applications, and “hurray!! the Dick Review just accepted my (crummy) poem!” Do you ever, in an honest moment, wonder about that?
(But there’s always been good and bad poetry! Yes. And how does that contradict what I’m saying? There is good…and bad poetry. Agreed. Do you think “good poetry” just drips out of some dropper at a steady rate, completely on its own, without any input from the world? If you believe that and it’s true, then we all need to shut up and if you believe that and it’s not true, then you are stupid and need to shut up for that reason. Therefore, shut up. “There will always be good and bad poetry” is not an argument.)
Anyway, I’m sorry guys, but it’s really, really time for a reckoning. We need to examine our terminology and start talking to each other, calling a time out on our terminology, so we know who we are, and what our terminology (growing with a mind of its own) has become.
I’m sure many have already impatiently anticipated this: why does Scarriet keep going on about Romanticism and Modernism? Doesn’t Scarriet know these are just bankrupt labels? True. I’m only using this quotidian terminology to investigate false literary reputations of actual persons (little matters, but perhaps this does). Meanwhile, those who object to Romanticism v Modernism go on talking about the “Objectivist” school (ha ha)—(my gadfly Kent Johnson solemnly informed me, “Tom, it’s not a school.”) Memo to all would-be geniuses: Objectivism (Pound or Rand), Marxism, Feminism and Capitalism aren’t real things.
I do hope everyone will join me in this discussion. I have most hope for those from India and eastern Europe: independent and happy thinkers, for the most part; others tend to be either too cynical (hello Brits!) or extremely talented—but too imitative. Americans are much too anglophilic–London and New York intellectuals have made John Stewart Mill their God.
I’ll finish this brief piece by copying, anonymously, feedback this week to Scarriet’s latest essays (with my replies) by two brilliant online acquaintances. This will explain more, perhaps:
REACTION 1
“I try not to wander into the poets’ minds. Their rejection of romanticism may have seemed right to them at that point, it may have been correct or incorrect, but that does not imply the poetry is not good.
Similar flaws exist in writing from the Romantic era but more so in those who attempt to write in meter for the sake of it. They like to be haughty and arrogant and cannot differentiate between being grateful for lyrical energy as a tool, elevating and pushing it further to using it as a skill set to just sound high and mighty. I have no concept that poetry that is difficult or inaccessible should not exist. But this set is often like the Bourgeois, approaching meter and rhyme and forms more as hats to wear than foundations to create and offer and sing. One reason is also that each artist must offer something authentic.
Many who write in meter will have their work compared to the extraordinary work created by these old poets. It is difficult to surpass for most apparently. A lot of that will sound cliche’ since its already written, done though I do believe everything can be elevated but do I get to read such poetry? Romantic poetry that truly surpasses, offers me something truly new, a new rhapsody— no. Very rarely. What we see is just as a shadow of what these great poets created and then some are just copying what has been written and the poems just scream dull and cliche’ and simply an algorithmic approach that invokes nothing in the reader. Some of these poems come across as forces as if the poet can’t understand that a form should not have the poem suffocating in it but only singing, belonging, and elevated. A lot of these poems are dull for me and I just cannot read them. I just get bored. A lot of poets I see whose poems are winning awards just because they belong to the “Romanticism” category are no different from the poets whose work is for some reason very popular today but lacks depth and true innovation and just floats on shallow surfaces.
Language is beautiful. It can be celebrated in lyrical wells, and in its complexity of words. Modernist poetry can be very thought-provoking too and overlaps with my senses as someone who likes science or tech or mathematics. New realms.
Both have pros and cons but the essential thing is both have great things to offer as well. Also, give modernism time. Time is needed for art to evolve. Perhaps, combine the two or just something entirely new. We must allow. I like to separate the art from the artists, poets are tricky creatures, but art, in itself, is a shattering rhapsody. Sometimes the music is obvious, harmonious and at other times like the sea, an inner music— more as a landscape, pick the elements and let the alchemy exist more as silence/ cacophony in the self.”
SCARRIET: Thanks. I feel I have not described the situation well. This is not really a matter of meter versus looseness, though that is part of it. Harmony versus Cacophony. The bourgeois reference is a Marxist sword which I’m not prepared to counter. The beautiful transcends the political for me. Harmony transcends the political. The other issue is poetic reputation—fraudulent or true? That’s important, as well. I don’t know what texts are available to you, but if you compare Shelley’s Defense of Poetry and Poe’s Rationale of Verse to Pound’s ABC of Reading or other discourses in the Modernist canon, you should note a tremendous difference. Art on one hand, clownish ambition on the other.
“Poetic reputation can certainly be fraudulent and changes with time. It is essential that as readers we discard that and approach any work of art unbiased. The beautiful does transcend the political for me as well. However, just like I said, sometimes I may differ greatly in the thought approach that artist adopt but if I feel that the art is good, I do not like to deny that. Clownish ambition is something I would certainly not be content with. I related to modern poetry because of a deep sense of disillusionment. I have tried all my life to offer but I have seen life’s apathy and cruelty almost too closely as well. Many aspects of modern poetry help me voice that energy. I also never think of myself just as a poet or writer. I simply see myself existing and find all paths of exploration have their merit. Thought-innovation, mathematics does appeal to a significant part of me, perspectives that I like simply because of the possibilities they open for the human mind. I simply would not like to compare because I don’t see any gain in that. I would like to take or imbibe what is good. I do agree as poets we have responsibility that the artists whose work deserves very much to be read be read and changing the mindset or the mindset is part of that. They are also wildly different in their approaches, the forms, the states of being, the time and era which doesn’t mean that we can’t compare them but it’s certainly a ground that encompasses a lot before any statements can be made. Of course, as a critic you would be engaging more keenly in these. I am yet to understand and accept the entirely of what all being a critic may require of me and I would not make such a commitment until I feel I have developed an entire sense of how to be in this role. For now, I prefer keeping an entirely unbiased view when I read and an open mind. Public opinion or alleged reputations are something I never take into account. History keeps rewriting itself but mostly, I suppose, that is my right as an artist, to reject the opinions of any human being, prize winner or not.”
SCARRIET: I have heard that our sanity depends on having dreams at night. We cannot choose what we dream. If dreams are unpleasant, they are trying to tell us, something perhaps. In waking (and poetry) I feel desperately a desire to choose only what is pleasant. Life to me has never been a dream. Poetry, even less so. My choosing is paramount. Whether I am dreaming without knowing it, I am not certain, except when I choose the pleasant, I believe I am not dreaming. I choose the pleasant dream. You say life has given you the bad and therefore modern poetry allows you to traffic in the bad? I confess I don’t understand this.
REACTION 2
“I think you misunderstand my point. I’m not saying that TSE, EP, MM, WCW, and RF were the same as Keats, Byron, and the other major Romantics, but that they did the same thing, reformed English verse. You don’t have to love all of either group. (As you know, I’m not a big fan of WCW, and I can leave most Shelley and a lot of Byron, as well as all later Wordsworth, pretty much on the shelf.) As for Frost, he was making it new in different ways. He brought the dramatic monologue into new ground, and may be the first poet in English to bring women’s experience to the fore (always excepting Dickinson, who was brilliantly interior). Frost was doing very nearly what Wordsworth had done in the lyrical ballads, writing the lives often left behind. WW would have loved The Code. / A lot of our differences are differences in taste.”
SCARRIET: Taste, as Poe, said is 95% of poetry, and verse is 95% mathematical. Emerson’s effusive hyperbole re: The Poet is silly and garish by comparison. E. leads to Nietzsche and fatalism/fanaticism. The first poem, I believe, which gets a close reading in Understanding Poetry is Frost’s “Out! Out!” (I think that’s the title) about a horrific accident and the death of a child. Boy, is it well done. But I hate it. Likewise, I don’t like everything the Romantics did. Didn’t the Roman poets do dramatic monologue? Catullus, etc. Shakespeare and Browning, the pinnacle of the dramatic monologue. “Reformed English verse” is too broad a term for me. What does that mean? Rhymes in the middle and beginning of lines instead of at the end? Expanding stanzaic forms? Formalism of more rigor? Extending out the iambic line? Or just a general relaxing? Haiku elements? Do Eliot/Pound/Williams sound more like “natural speech,” like men talking to men? Nah, not really. The insertion of “patient etherized upon a table” was nifty, but like Duchamp’s toilet it’s either a one-time laugh, or if it’s persisted in, it destroys civilization.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Thanks and carry on, everyone! And watch out for that Nietzschean Emerson! Seriously!
I thank the learned and talented souls who cared enough to join the recent FB debate on my poem, I WANT TO KNOW IF THERE IS ONE WOMAN—even as they were genuinely puzzled and outraged by it. This poem, apparently needs to grow into its audience. Ideally, an audience already exists for a poem, but isn’t it better if a poem creates its audience? Yes—but I have no illusion that if this is happening, it is mostly through artificial and pedantic means. But I’ll take anything I can get.
Additional outrage has greeted my Pure and Impure essays, which have crystallized, mostly badly, Scarriet’s long-standing issue with the Pound/Williams/New Criticism Modernists/NAP, carried on in various guises since Scarriet’s founding in 2009 by Alan Cordle of Foetry.com fame.
In part three, I focused on the objection to my slighting the tiny Red Barrow poem of Willie Williams—an opinion which always generates a lot of hate mail. This is because Modernism dug its fangs in deep and look a very long drink (going on one hundred years—and Dracula, I guess, is still attached).
The outrage and misunderstanding seems to be taking three basic forms.:
The first is demonstrated by Kent Johnson, who shares some of my ideas, but who thinks there is something sacred and untouchable surrounding avants who got a little cult-classic book all for themselves and on their own, to celebrate their pre-published, amateur, college dorm, local bar, poetry (and ideas) in the middle of the 20th century, explicitly:—The New American Poetry, 1945 to 1960, edited by a suit for Greenwood Press who dug the nerdy Allen Ginsberg, Charles Olson and Robert Duncan (mostly Ginsberg, because of his recent obscenity fame, thinking a “movement” of whatever Ginsberg was could earn some money).
Here’s what I said very recently to my friend:
Kent Johnson Kent, I have never said Olson’s laughably stupid theories were a “stealth” New Criticism polemic, but perhaps that’s what Olson thought he was doing, so good job, you’re being influenced by me and you’re now officially an ally… The 1960 NAP was not particularly academic; it was just bad, screed poetry, but its intention was academic and their notoriety grew within academia. That’s not a stretch to say, at all. So “hilariously numbskull” describes Olson and Duncan, not my ideas. I don’t think New Criticism has any intellectual merit either—it, too, was an ambitious striking move into the Academy—professors in love with literature were to be replaced by Creative Writing foot soldiers, poets for the “new,” i.e. their own work. It was vaulting ambition, (explicitly laid out by Ransom in his essay, Criticism, Inc.,) which is normal for a poet, sure, but I’m just calling it out and seeing it for what it is. You apparently can’t see it—because (can it be true?) your hurt pride needs to defend Olson’s inanity as heroic and meaningful. Good luck with that, noble, socialist, iconoclast!
The next objection is illustrated by a person I don’t know at all (one of the glories of online debate). This idea is that Modernism and Poe are one big happy family—Baudelaire always mentioned as the key piece, Eliot was influenced by late 19th century French avant-garde poets, etc. My reply to her sums up this objection pretty well, while giving it its due, since there is some merit in it.
Lorraine Yang Poe was being translated in Russia even before France. Poe was a genuinely popular writer; Baudelaire, who achieved fame due to an obscenity issue (like Ginsberg, Joyce) damned Poe with faint praise, by saying America didn’t understand Poe. Baudelaire belonged to the Cult of Literature and Poets as a sickness—Eliot, too. Thomas Mann, etc. It is an enormously influential trope, and Poe was tarred with that brush (wild-eyed drug addict “macabre” Poe!) which gave Poe dubious, credulous fans, but ultimately hurt Poe’s reputation in the long run, in terms of what fewer and fewer people know him to be: lynx-eyed, sober, brilliant, multi-faceted. Eliot, the smartest Modernist, secretly absorbed Poe, but ended up viciously attacking Poe (as became common to do) in “From Poe to Valery” after TSE won his Nobel, thinking it was safe to do so, apparently. Poe didn’t need these “sneering” cowards (Emerson began the tradition by spitefully calling Poe the “jingle man” in a private conversation years after Poe was dead) as much as they needed him, but yes you are correct to point out that there is an (ironic!) mutual relationship of sorts, yes.
Thirdly, the objection: Hey what are you doing for women poets now? You don’t care about women poets, etc. (Let me repeat: my poem “I Want To Know…” is not anti-woman. I’m not blaming “women” for New Criticism. The poem is really just a cry of despair) and any objection based on the falsehood that my poem is anti-woman is not an intellectual objection, but a mere misunderstanding—which a poet should always take responsibility for—or never take responsibility for? That’s another debate. Here’s my (I know, I know, “mansplaining”) response to the more mild objection of “what have you done for women poets, lately, Thomas?”
Anna Savage Actually, I do speak for women writers, who, thanks to Poe, had more respect in the 19th century than they do now, because an extremely influential men’s club clique, the Modernist Pound/Eliot/Williams clique allied with the Southern Agrarian New Critics, took over poetry, literature, and the Academy. They attacked Millay, made poetry crappy, and the sensibility of their world is now what we’re all swimming in (this clique viciously attacked writers like Poe, Shelley, Edna Millay, and ignored all the now forgotten female poets from the 19th century like Elizabeth Barrett). There’s so much work to be done on the Modernism error—that’s my focus. I do not ignore contemporary women poets who are good, however, though like anyone, I don’t have time to study the tens of thousands of poets writing today. . We need more Critics and Anthologists who honestly bring attention to what’s really going on….
I’ve edited Scarriet since September 2009, when Alan Cordle, who I met on the poetry-contest-exposing website Foetry, created Blog Scarriet as an alternative to the Poetry Foundation’s Blog Harriet—which banned poets (yours truly included) from Harriet’s Comments for being “off-topic” (whatever that means; digression is a sign of intelligence in my book) and soon thereafter Blog Harriet (Poetry magazine’s online site) erased Comments as a feature altogether. Poets like Eileen Myles and Annie Finch were regulars on the Harriet Comments; it was a lively good time, I thought, but management didn’t see it that way, which is fine; Harriet managed to birth Scarriet (indirectly).
Poetry and its politics boils down to one question: Is this a good poem?
Alan Cordle’s question on Foetry.com was narrower: did you take contest fees to publish the winner’s book and was that winner your friend? I did not personally expose anyone; I was just an online participant on Foetry because I was curious about Alan’s quest, which seemed to me a sincere attempt to correct a wrong. Today I still believe this.
I broadened the investigation (watering it down to something more intellectual and benign) to Is This A Good Poem? This question is the ruling spirit of Scarriet. I understood, during my unofficial Foetry membership, that poets are allowed to be friends and help each other. This will always happen, and why not? But what ultimately matters is that the best poems are praised (no matter who writes them, or what manifesto is attached to them) and the worst poems are noticed as such.
This gives rise to a sweet philosophical complexity: how do we know what a good poem is? Who are you as a critic (and a person) to make this judgment? Are you, the judge, able to write a good poem? Who are the famous poets who write bad poems? Who are neglected poets who write good poems? What inhibits us from being honest about this?
Anyway, that’s me and Scarriet in a nutshell.
The poet Ben Mazer is a friend of mine. I have written a book on Ben Mazer—which praises his poetry. I defend him as a writer of good poetry, and the friendship matters less in the ratio of how well I defend him as a poet—and how good he actually is compared to poets not on my radar.
Ben was hanging out with the poet Charles Bernstein last year and Ben said, “Charles doesn’t like you.” This flattered me, as I hadn’t realized a poet of some note knew of me or Scarriet. There’s never any excuse to be a jerk—I have been, at times, in the past, in an effort to have strong, honest, opinions—and make a name for myself.
I’ll take this moment to apologize to anyone I may have offended.
I judge (dead and living) poets in the Scarriet March Madness “contests.” A few of these poets I know, but how good they are, and how I am able to articulate how good they are, is on display for all to see, though how well I know this or that poet, is not always known. Those who know me, know I have very few poet pals, and I try very hard not to get close to bad poets. 😆 I met Marilyn Chin as a friend (not a close friend) a long time ago at Iowa before her career took off. I know Philip Nikolayev because I know Ben. I’m a shy person; my life is not full of friendships with poets—not even close. I think this helps me as Scarriet editor. (Yes you’ll notice Mazer and Chin showing up often, but some things can’t be helped, and I honestly believe they are both really good). I also met Dan Sociu in Romania in 2016, and I do think he’s a good poet. If an unpublished poet is good, I will say so. Discovering truly good poets takes a great deal of time and work—I wish I could do more in this area, but no one alive can single-handedly offer this kind of justice to the Poetry world.
I apologize for this laborious introduction; I wanted to look back at 2021:
January “Winter Threw Its Shadow Over the River of My Years” (1/30) is perhaps the best poem of this month because of its poetic cohesion; a poem can have a great idea, but unity is all. A Jeopardy poem, a CIA poem, a NFL rigging poem (life as “rigged” courts self-pity, but Scarriet siezes on the theme a lot) a love-revenge poem (another common theme) but again, interesting topics don’t make a poem good—but (I don’t think I’m wrong) an accessible idea (no matter how simple) is necessary. “Bored” (1/4) is one of the best of the month, and “My Iranian Girlfriends” (1/3) is subtle and witty.
February “I Can Confirm” (2/1) sounds like Blake, which no Scarriet poem tends to sound like. “In The Evenings” (2/9) is richly poignant, probably the best Scarriet poem of early 2021. Scarriet Poetry Hot 100! (2/15) is always exciting. Amanda Gorman is no. 1, Cate Marvin no. 2 (“Republican Party Is Evil” poets really talk like this), followed by Louise Gluck (Nobel), Joy Harjo (3rd term laureate), Don Mee Choi (National Book Award), Jericho Brown (Pulitzer), Noor Hindi (“Fuck Yr Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying”), Naomi Shihab Nye (Emma Thompson reads her poem “Kindness” on Instagram to 2.3 million views), Wayne Miller (wrote article on talking about poetry online at Lithub) and William Logan (the critic/poet) rounding out the top 10. Also on the Top 100 list, the wonderful fugitive poets Mary Angela Douglas and Stephen Cole—I discovered them not too long ago online. As an experiment, a letter to my dad is published as a poem (2/21). “Now That The Poem Is Over” (2/22) works well.
March “This Poem Can Only Speak For This Poem” (3/7) , “Happy Marriage” (3/11), and “The Object” (3/26) (on musical fame), are the best poems. March Madness—the topic is Pop Music—(3/20) runs through early April, with interesting essays on your favorite artists and bands as they compete with each other. Nina Simone and Led Zeppelin are among those who go far. The tourney includes Spanky and Our Gang (“Sunday Will Never Be The Same”), as well as Dylan, Elvis, and Frank Sinatra.
April Many good poems this month as spring 2021 inspires love poems—not maudlin but suave and biting. Failed love poems unfortunately plague Scarriet, but in certain months real wit, rather than bitterness, accompanies the love. This month seems to be one of them. A Brief History of U.S. Poetry revised (4/30). Check out this post! Scarriet literary history at its best.
May continues with lots of good poems. “When You See Me You Insult Me” (5/25) is a classic Scarriet love poem (who hurt you so badly, Scarriet poet?) and the first of many great literary essays arrives on 5/31—a look at the critic Harold Rosenberg, who hadn’t really been on Scarriet’s radar previously.
June Poems of high quality continue. Book announcement of Ben Mazer and the NewRomanticism by Thomas Graves (6/26).
July I read “Weather Poem” by Dan Sociu (7/5). Another audio feature—2 of my songs on YouTube (low-fi) (7/8) Self-indulgent, perhaps; I’ve composed many pop songs never given professional treatment for one reason or another. “Man, Those Decades In American Poetry Went By Fast” (7/11) Another historical re-posting. Finally, an essay: “The Four Quartets Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha” (7/19) in which an overrated work is just one of the things looked at.
August Some of the poems which begin to appear are slightly revised poems written long ago. Three reviews appear this month: The poems of Ruth Lepson (8/1), poems of 14 Younger Poets published by Art and Letters press (8/18) and poems of Daniel Riffenburgh (8/22). Many definitely prefer Scarriet’s prose to its poetry.
September A rather odd article in which the timelines of Delmore Schwartz and Giuseppe Verdi are compared and some observations on the partially neglected poet Schwartz are made. (9/12) An article on Tom Brady and NFL stats (9/26) Scarriet has a very opinionated, love-hate, relationship to sports. Old original poems continue to see the light of day.
October A great month for prose (and poems of decent quality continue) as Scarriet seems to be enjoying one of its best years. “One Hundred Years of Pulitzers” is a revealing historical survey (10/18). “The Poem Defined” (10/21) is a fine essay. Another Poetry Hot 100 (10/27) features the unstoppable Kent Johnson as no.1. The month ends with the scintilating “100 Greatest Poems by Women” (10/31).
November has more Scarriet essays. “Trickle Down Verse” (11/8). “The Good” (11/10). “The Textbook Which Changed Everything: Understanding Poetry” (11/19). In the autumn of 2021, Kent Johnson and his avant friends on FB goaded me into defending my core principles and beliefs. Thanks, Kent! Also this month, you can hear me recite Poe’s “For Annie” on video on my phone, one evening alone in my house, holding my copy of Library America Poe gifted to me by Hilton Kramer many years ago. (11/16)
December The year ends with an essay on Ezra Pound’s The Spirit of Romance, as I attempt to come to grips with this figure who was the subject of a Kent Johnson inspired online debate, “Can a bad person write good poetry?” (12/11) Poems on ‘poetry politics’ (inspired by Kent Johnson and friends) and politics—similar in theme to poems from January 2021, close out the month.
Happy New Year.
Thomas Graves (aka Thomas Brady and Scarriet Editors) Salem, MA 1/1/2022
Scarriet’s Hot 100 has been going on for over 10 years. It’s now a fixture on the poetry scene.
Those toiling in the poetry trenches struggling to be read don’t look up.
Those who do make this list (most aren’t read much, either) are afraid to look down. (Ask Don Share or Michael Dickman)
Therefore no one else really bothers to do what Scarriet does here, taking a long vertical look to judge harshly and succinctly poets in the moment.
I don’t know if the Hot 100 is fruitful—or merely feeds resentment and idle curiosity.
I don’t like to summarize poets’ subjective lives (who cares, really?)—their travels, their membership in hipster guilds, their predictable neo-liberal politics, their fragile creds, their backroom alliances—frankly it bores me to tears.
I do this as an obligation. I just feel—damn— someone ought to do it.
I guess a secondary reason might be that I seek poetic or critical genius, or signs of it, at least. We need the haystack to find the needle.
A final point is that Scarriet putting poets on the list makes them hot. My own subjectivity is involved in the process.
Let’s look back at the previous names, reputable or controversial, who made the list as number one. See if you know them all:
Amanda Gorman 2021 Laura Foley 2019 Jennifer Barber 2019 Anders Carlson-Wee 2018 Garrison Keillor 2018 Sushmita Gupta 2017 Bob Dylan 2017 Matthew Zapruder 2016 Ben Mazer 2016 Vanessa Place 2015 Yi-Fen Chou 2015 Kenneth Goldsmith 2015 Claudia Rankine 2014 Valerie Macon 2014 John Ashbery 2014 Mark Edmundson 2013 Natasha Tretheway 2012 Rita Dove 2011 Billy Collins 2010 John Barr 2010 Harold Bloom 2010
And now, the current list!
1. Kent Johnson —this well-known avant hoaxster asked for reviews to be anonymous 10 years ago. The best minds in poetry said, “great idea!” It hasn’t happened.
2. William Logan —in an era of “too many poems” (Marjorie Perloff) there’s always criticism and reviews—Logan’s the great guilty pleasure, still the most mentioned.
3. Ben Mazer —Randall Jarrell’s living example: the Romantic Modern. Auden (who read Byron) was loud. Mazer has a quieter beauty. Also an editor, Mazer is bringing out The Collected Poems (with never published material) of Delmore Schwartz. Ben Mazer and the New Romanticism (2021) is a critical study of Mazer’s work from Spuyten Duyvil press.
4. Barbara Epler —Editor, New Directions. ND launched Delmore Schwartz when Delmore and founder James Laughlin were companions in their twenties.
5. Don Share —the last poetry editor of the now defunct Partisan Review, a position Delmore Schwartz once held. Share was recently forced out of his position at Poetry.
6. Su Cho —took over Poetry magazine editorship duties after Share was forced to quit. In general, the too-much-white-space poetry of Poetry still sucks.
7. Michael Wiegers —Editor in Chief, Copper Canyon Press.
8. Kevin Young —New Yorker poetry editor. Studied with Seamus Heaney at Harvard along with Ben Mazer.
9. Jonathan Galassi —FSG poetry editor who will publish Mazer’s Delmore Schwartz, much of it seen for the first time.
10. Marilyn Chin —Jury Chair for the 2021 Pulitzer. I knew her when she was a shy poet/translator at Iowa when we both worked for Paul and Hualing Engle’s International Writing Program.
11. Donald Futers —Penguin poetry editor.
12. Fiona McCrae —director and publisher, Graywolf
13. Eric Lorberer —Rain Taxi editor
14. Cal Bedient —with David Lau, edits Lana Turner
15. Robert Baird —reviewed William Logan’s Dickinson’s Nerves, Frost’s Woods in the NY Times, claiming Logan was attempting to play nice (to balance out his literary reputation) with a book of over-fastidious literary research.
16. John Beer —his parody poem, “The Waste Land” is a real achievement.
17. Michael Robbins —influenced by James Schuyler. In an interview, he strongly objected to “deforestation.”
18. Bill Freind —edited book of essays on the poetry of Araki Yasusada—a poet thought by many to be Kent Johnson’s creation.
19. Matthew Zapruder —Wave Books editor
20. Jill Bialosky —Norton poetry editor. Accused of plagiarism by William Logan.
21. Natalie Diaz —2021 Pulitzer prize winner.
22. Ange Mlinko —was the Nation poetry editor
23. Jericho Brown —Won the Pulitzer in 2020.
24. Frank Bidart —recently recognized with major awards. You can read his “Ellen West” online.
25. Laura Newbern —Arts and Letters editor.
26. Ira Sadoff —poet and critic, who once said he is “trying to resist the return to formalism.”
27. David Orr —poet and poetry critic for the NY Times, he once defended Alan Cordle of Foetry.
28. Johannes Goransson —his 2020 book of criticism is Poetry Against All.
29. Joe Amato —he has published a novel on poetics.
30. Jos Charles —she is the founding-editor of THEM.
31. Arthur Sze —won the 2021 Shelley Memorial Award and the 2019 National Book Award.
32. Desiree Bailey —short-listed for 2021 National Book Award.
33. Daniel Slager —publisher of Milkweed editions.
34. Barry Schwabsky —poet and art critic of the Nation.
35. Michael Theune —Structure and Suprise is the name of his textbook on poetry.
36. A.E. Stallings —this New Formalist almost won the Pulitzer in 2018.
37. Adam Kirsch —Jury Chair for the Pulitzer in 2020.
38. Al Filreis —MOOCS and PennSound
39. Dorianne Laux—best known for “The Pipe Fitter’s Wife,” recent runner-up for a major prize.
40. Joy Harjo —current U.S. poet laureate—in her third term.
41. Natasha Trethewey —pulitzer prize winner and latest jury member for that prize.
42. Dale Smith —his Poets Beyond the Barricade: Rhetoric, Citizenship, and Dissent After 1960 came out in 2012 from U Alabama Press.
43. Glyn Maxwell —probably the best living British poet.
44. Robert Archambeau —protested the poet laureatship of Billy Collins.
45. Victoria Chang —shook things up when she said “fuck the white avant-garde.”
46. Mei-mei Berssenbrugge —finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer.
47. Blake Campbell —young, gifted formalist poet who currently lives in Salem, MA.
48. Maureen McLane —in 2019 her Selected Poems published by Penguin.
49. Martin Espada —on the short-list for this year’s National Book Award.
50. Annie Finch —featured in the Penguin Book of the Sonnet. I met her on the old Blog Harriet Comments. I was a feisty comment writer, then, having sharpened my teeth as “Monday Love” on Foetry.com with visitors like Robert Creeley. Later, “Thomas Brady” would tangle with Franz Wright on Scarriet.
51. Charles Bernstein —stung by Scarriet. In a 1984 Alabama conference (Annie Finch pointed me to the transcript, with an unforgettable performance by panelist Denise Levertov) Gerald Stern demanded Bernstein name the “policemen-poets” of “Official Verse Culture.” Harold Bloom attacked Poe in a monster hit piece in the October 11 NY Review at the same moment. Defining point in history for poetry. “Alabama” will bring it up in a Scarriet site search.
52. Forrest Gander —Pulitzer prize winner, friends with Kent Johnson.
53. Marjorie Perloff —avant titan. One of the greatest conversations I ever witnessed was her and Philip Nikolayev debating the worth of Concrete Poetry in the Hong Kong restaurant in Harvard Square. Philip won (but it was his turf).
54. Mark Wallace —was a student assistant for Bernstein at Buffalo.
55. Robin Coste Lewis —is it really that long ago she won the National Book Award? (2015).
56. Philip Nikolayev —met Mazer at Harvard. Fulcrum editor has just published book of Pushkin translations.
57. Rupi Kaur —someone needs to publish a big important anthology which includes poets from all walks of life and mediums and points in history, taking an honest and serious look at all the selections, with popularity one criterion, and critical judgment the other. Poetry cannot keep going on like this. A reckoning is needed.
58. Billy Collins —hated by other prose poets. Because he sells. Kill Robert Frost. Poetry as mobsters fighting for turf. So anyway, how many poets can fill an arena these days? Is Collins the last famous poet living? Are famous poets necessary?
59. Helen Vendler —she must remember Alabama, too.
60. Jorie Graham —in a pretense to be non-pretentious, she lost her gift. Got in trouble with Foetry.com. But survived.
61. John Latta —works at the University Michigan library.
62. Ron Silliman —not sure what’s going on with his blog.
63. Fanny Howe —won the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize in 2009.
64. Julie Carr —Omnidawn published her in 2018.
65. Mary Angela Douglas —a poet of beauty and childhood.
66. Don Mee Choi —National Book Award 2020.
67. Rita Dove —her Penguin anthology produced controversy. She was too dignified to exploit it.
68. Daniel Borzutzky —won the National Book Award in 2016.
69. Sharon Olds —she won the Pulitzer with a book about divorcing her husband. She has written some extraordinary poems.
70. Mary Ruefle —destined for major prize greatness.
71. Peter Gizzi —was the lyric hope for a while.
72. Layli Long Soldier —her first volume of poetry was published in 2017 by Graywolf.
73. Dan Sociu —one of the best Romanian poets; had a chance to meet him (and the late David Berman) in Romania when Mazer and I visited.
74. Ocean Vuong —one of the strategies of contemporary poetry is the trope of tactile feeling. Winner of the 2017 T.S. Eliot prize.
75. Lawrence Rosenwald —editor of War No More: Three Centuries of American Antiwar & Peace Writing, 2016
76. Carlos Lara —Subconscious Colossus is his latest book.
77. Rachel Kaufman —Many To Remember is her new book of poems.
78. Billie Chernicoff —high praise from Kent Johnson.
79. Carolyn Forche —more poets! Bring them in, by the thousands, by the millions! Poets! Poets!
80. Michael Dickman —if a poem is cancelled because of something unkind in the poem (and yet not a reflection of the poet’s own views) is our complicity in this the death of poetry itself? Have the narrow dreams of Plato won?
81. Luke Kennard —from the Guardian (Sun 24 Oct 2021) : has won the Forward Prize for best collection for his “anarchic” response to Shakespeare’s sonnets, a work judges are predicting could “transform” students’ relationship with the Bard.
82. Louise Gluck —from the NY Times (Oct 26 2021) : Consisting of just 15 poems, “Winter Recipes from the Collective” extends the Nobel Laureate’s interest in silence and the void…
83. Murat Nemet-Nejat —a poet and editor of an anthology of contemporaryTurkish poetry.
84. Tom Orange —conceptual poet who has written on Clark Coolidge.
85. John Bradley —the editor of Eating the Pure Light: Homage to Thomas McGrath (Backwaters Press) which appeared in 2009.
86. Richard Owens —Damn the Caesars is his literary journal and Those Unknown his punk band.
87. Toi Derricote —The 2021 Wallace Stevens Award winner. She was a judge for the Wallace Stevens Award for many years, beginning in 2012. The stipend is $100,000.
88. Mark Halliday —a critic called his poetry “ultra-talk.”
89. Ben Lerner —poet, novelist, MacArthur genius grant recipient.
90. Seth Abramson —this lawyer, prof and poet went from Poetry MFA advocate to rabid political tweeter. Seems a throw-back, somehow, to the rough-and-tumble literary times of Poe. Fisticuffs and odes.
91. David Lehman —His BAP (Best American Poetry) began in 1988 with John Ashbery as guest editor. In the latest volume (2021) introduction he brags about the number of guest editors who have won Pulitzer prizes. Well, sure.
92. Jim Behrle —annually pokes fun of BAP.
93. Tracy K. Smith —Pulitzer prize winner and 2021 guest editor of BAP. Whitman-type poems of near-endless listing appears to be the latest trend.
94. Dana Gioia —2018 BAP guest editor. His essay decrying American poetry as a dying, sell-out industry is about 30 years old now and reflects feelings which were not new at the time, and will never go away. All we can do is forget everything else and keep our eyes focused on that Nobel.
95. Terrence Hayes —in the 2021 BAP.
96. Jonny Diamond —editor-in-chief of the always interesting Literary Hub.
97. Daisy Fried —nominated for a Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry.
98. Thomas Brady —makes these ridiculous lists.
99. Atticus —so much depends on “An open window in Paris/is all the world I need.” (poem from his “best-selling” book)
100. Stephen Cole— just some poet who puts his poems on Facebook (he’s really good).
1650 Anne Bradstreet’s The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America: By a Gentlewoman of Those Parts published in London.
1773Phillis Wheatley, a slave, publishes Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. During the American Revolution she wrote to George Washington, who thanked her, praised her poetry, and invited her to his headquarters.
1791 The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin is published in Paris, in French. Ben Franklin’sAutobiography appears in London, for the first time in English, two years later. Had it been published in America, the Europeans would have laughed. The American experiment isn’t going to last, anyway.
Franklin, the practical man, the scientist, and America’s true founding father, weighs in on poetry: it’s frivolous.
1794 Samuel Coleridge and Robert Southey make plans to go to Pennsylvania in a communal living experiment, but their personalities clash and the plan is aborted. Southey becomes British Poet Laureate twenty years later.
1803 William Blake, author of “America: A Prophecy” is accused of crying out “Damn the King!” in Sussex, England, narrowly escaping imprisonment for treason.
1815 George Ticknor, before becoming literature Chair at Harvard, travels to Europe for 4 years, spending 17 months in Germany.
1817 “Thanatopsis” by William Cullen Bryant appears in the North American Review.
1824 Byron, who wanted to travel to America (he met George Ticknor in Europe), dies in Greece.
1824 Lafayette, during tour of U.S, calls on Edgar Poe’s grandmother, revolutionary war veteran widow.
1832 Washington Irving edits London edition of William Cullen Bryant’sPoems to avoid politically offending British readers.
1835 Massachusetts senator and abolitionist John Greenleaf Whittier mobbed and stoned in Concord, New Hampshire.
1835 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow appointed Smith Professor of Modern Languages at Harvard.
1836 Ralph Waldo Emerson publishes 500 copies of Divinity School Address anonymously. He will not publish another book for 6 years.
1838 Poe’s translated work begins appearing in Russia. Dostoevsky, influenced by Poe, publishes him.
1843 Transcendentalist, Unitarian minister, Harvard Divinity School student Christopher Pearse Cranch marries the sister of T.S. Eliot’s Unitarian grandfather; dedicates Poems to Emerson, published in The Dial, a magazine edited by Margaret Fuller and Emerson; frequent visitor to Brook Farm. Cranch is more musical and sensuous than Emerson; even Poe can tolerate him; Cranch’s poem “Enosis” pre-figures Baudelaire’s “Correspondences.”
T.S. Eliot’s family is deeply rooted in New England Unitarianism and Transcendentalism through Cranch and Emerson’s connection to his grandfather, Harvard Divinity graduate, William Greenleaf Eliot, founder of Washington U., St. Louis.
1845 Elizabeth Barrett writes Poe with news of “The Raven’s” popularity in England. The poem appeared in a daily American newspaper and produced instant fame, though Poe’s reputation as a critic and leader of the Magazine Era was well-established. During this period Poe coins “Heresy of the Didactic” and “A Long Poem Does Not Exist.” In a review of Barrett’s 1840 volume of poems which led to Barrett’s fame before she met Robert Browning, Poe introduced his piece by saying he would not, as was typically done, review her work superficially because she was a woman. Poe dedicated his 1845 Poems to Elizabeth Barrett. Then Robert Browning entered the picture.
1845 Poe accuses Longfellow of plagiarism.
1847 Ralph Waldo Emerson is in England, earning his living as an orator.
1848 Charles Baudelaire’s first translations of Poe appear in France.
1848 James Russell Lowell publishes “A Fable For Critics” anonymously.
1848 Female Poets of America, an anthology of poems by American women, is published by the powerful and influential anthologist, Rufus Griswold—who believes women naturally write a different kind of poetry. Griswold’s earlier success, The Poets and Poetry of America (1842) contains 3 poems by Poe and 45 by Griswold’s friend, Charles Fenno Hoffman. In a review, Poe remarks that readers of anthologies buy them to see if they are in them.
1848 Poe publishes Eureka and the Rationale of Verse, exceptional works on the universe—and verse.
1849 Edgar Poe is apparently murdered in Baltimore; leading periodicals ignore strange circumstances of Poe’s death and one, Horace Greeley’sTribune, hires Griswold (who signs his piece ‘Ludwig’) to take the occasion to attack the character of the poet. There is no press notice of Poe’s unusual passing. Baltimore Sun writer, Joseph Snodgrass, who happens to live close to where Poe is found in distress, and Poe’s hated cousin Neilson Poe (who happens to appear) are prime suspects according to Scarriet. The BaltimoreSun, like the New YorkTribune, covers up any hint of foul play with bland and brief coverage.
1850 Nathaniel Hawthorne publishes The Scarlett Letter. There is recent speculation the work is loosely based on Edgar Poe, FannyOsgood, and Rufus Griswold.
1855 Griswold reviews Whitman’sLeaves of Grass and calls it a “mass of stupid filth.” Griswold, whose second wife was apparently a man (their divorce is very complicated, involving Griswold lending out his daughter) fills his review with words such as “vileness,” “rotting,” and “shame.” Whitman later includes the Griswold review in one of his editions of Leaves.
1856 English Traits, extolls the English race, claiming it was the English “character” that vanquished India, is published in the U.S. and England, by poet and new age priest Ralph Waldo Emerson, as England waits for the inevitable Civil War to tear her rival, America, apart.
1859. In a conversation with William Dean Howells, Emerson calls Hawthorne’s latest book “mush” and furiously calls Poe “the jingle man.”
1860 William Cullen Bryant introduces Abraham Lincoln at Cooper Union; the poet advises the new president on his cabinet selection.
1867 First collection of African American “Slave Songs” published.
1883 “The New Colossus” is composed by Emma Lazarus; engraved on the Statue of Liberty, 1903
1883 Poems of Passion by Ella Wheeler Wilcox rejected by publisher on grounds of immorality.
1888 “Casey at the Bat” published anonymously. The author, Ernest Thayer, does not become known as the author of the poem until 1909—he is the uncle of Scofield Thayer, who will publish “The Waste Land” in the revived Dial.
1890 Emily Dickinson’s posthumous book published by Mabel Todd and Thomas Higginson. William Dean Howells gives it a good review, and it sells well.
1893 William James, the “nitrous oxide philosopher,” Emerson’s godson, becomes Gertrude Stein’s influential professor at Harvard.
1896 Paul Laurence Dunbar publishes Lyrics of Lowly Life.
1897 Wallace Stevens enters Harvard, falling under the spell of William James, as well as George Santayana.
1904 Yone Noguchi publishes “Proposal to American Poets” as the Haiku rage begins in the United States and Britain, mostly due to Japan’s surprising victory in the Russo-Japanese War. Imagism, eventually celebrated as “new,” is merely a copy of haiku, and belongs to the same trend.
1910 John Crowe Ransom, Fugitive, Southern Agrarian, New Critic, takes a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford University.
1910 John Lomax publishes “Cowboy Songs and Frontier Ballads.”
1912 Harriet Monroe founds Poetry magazine; in 1880s attended literary gatherings in New York with William Dean Howells and Richard Henry Stoddard (Poe biographer) and in 1890s met Whistler, Henry James, Thomas Hardy and Aubrey Beardsley. Ezra Pound is Poetry’s London editor.
1913 American Imagist poet H.D. marries British Imagist poet Richard Aldington.
1913 The Armory Show in New York, which brings modern art to America, occurs under the guidance of Pound and T.S. Eliot’s attorney and modern art collector, John Quinn.
1914 Robert Frost meets Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell in London.
1914 Ezra Pound works as Yeats‘ secretary in Sussex, England.
1915 Edgar Lee Masters’Spoon River Anthology published. Masters was law partner of Clarence Darrow.
1916 Witter Bynner and Arthur Davison Ficke publish Spectra, a poetry hoax spoofing Imagism and everyone is fooled.
1917 Robert Frost begins teaching at Amherst College.
1920 “The Sacred Wood” by T.S. Eliot, banker, London. Decries “Hamlet.” Writes, “immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.”
1921 Margaret Anderson’sLittle Review loses court case and is declared obscene for publishing a portion of James Joyce’sUlysses, which is banned in the United States. Random House immediately tries to get the ban lifted in order to publish the work.
1922 T.S.Eliot’s “The Waste Land” awarded The Dial Prize before Ezra Pound has finished editing it.
1922 D.H Lawrence and Frieda stay with Mabel Dodge in Taos, New Mexico.
1923 Edna St. Vincent Millay wins Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
1923 William Butler Yeats wins Nobel Prize for Literature
1924 Robert Frost wins Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
1924 Ford Maddox Ford founds the Transatlantic Review. Stays with Allen Tate and Robert Lowell in his lengthy sojourn to America, and helps to found the American Writing Program Era.
1924 Marianne Moore wins The Dial Prize; becomes editor of The Dial the next year, as E.E. Cummings elopes with the retiring editor Scofield Thayer’s wife.
1924 James Whitcomb Riley Hospital for Children opens.
1925 E.E. Cummings wins The Dial Prize.
1926 Yaddo Artist Colony opens
1926 Dorothy Parker publishes her first book of poems, With Enough Rope.
1927 Walt Whitman biography wins Pulitzer Prize
1927 Laura Riding, who published poems in TheFugitive, together with Robert Graves, influence William Empson and the New Criticism with their Survey of Modernist Poetry. She’s almost killed jumping out a 4th story window 2 years later.
1929 Harry Crosby, Black Sun Press editor, free verse poet, nephew of JP Morgan, dies at 31 in suicide pact with his lover.
1930 “I’ll Take My Stand” published by Fugitive/Southern Agrarians and future New Critics, John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, Cleanth Brooks, Allen Tate defend ways of the Old South.
1932 Paul Engle wins Yale Younger Poet Prize, judged by member of John Crowe Ransom’s Fugitive circle. Engle, a prolific fundraiser, builds the Iowa Workshop into a Program Writing Empire.
1933 T.S. Eliot delivers his speech on “free-thinking jews” at the University of Virginia.
1934 “Is Verse A Dying Technique?” published by Edmund Wilson.
1936 New Directions founded by Harvard sophomore James Laughlin.
1937 Robert Lowell camps out in Allen Tate’s yard. Lowell has left Harvard to study with John Crowe Ransom at Kenyon College. The trip by Lowell was recommended by the Lowell family psychiatrist, the Fugitive poet, Merrill Moore.
1938 First Edition of textbook Understanding Poetry by New Critics Brooks and Warren, helps to canonize unread poets Williams and Pound, while attacking Poe.
1938 Aldous Huxley moves to Hollywood.
1938 Delmore Schwartz publishes In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, at 25, a smash-hit volume of short stories and poetry.
1939 Allen Tate starts Writing Program at Princeton.
1939 W.H. Auden moves to the United States and earns living as college professor.
1940 Mark Van Doren is awarded Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
1941 F.O. Matthiessen publishes American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman.
1943 Ezra Pound indicted for treason by the United States government.
1946 Wallace Stegner founds Stanford Writing Program. Yvor Winters will teach Pinsky, Haas, Hall and Gunn.
1948 Pete Seeger, nephew of WW I poet Alan Seeger (“I Have A Rendezvous With Death”) forms The Weavers, the first singer-songwriter ‘band’ in the rock era.
1948 T.S. Eliot wins Nobel Prize
1949 T.S. Eliot viciously attacks Poe in From Poe To Valery
1949 Ezra Pound is awarded the Bollingen Prize. The poet Robert Hillyer protests and Congress resolves its Library will no longer fund the award. Hillyer accuses Paul Melon, T.S. Eliot and New Critics of a fascist conspiracy.
1949 Elizabeth Bishop appointed U.S. Poet Laureate.
1950 William Carlos Williams wins first National Book Award for Poetry
1950 Gwendolyn Brooks wins Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
1950 W.S Merwin tutors Robert Graves‘ son in Majorca.
1951 John Crowe Ransom, the Modernist T.S. Eliot of the American South, is awarded the Bollingen Prize.
1953 Dylan Thomas dies in New York City.
1954 Theodore Roethke wins Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
1955 John Ashbery wins Yale Younger Prize for Some Trees. Judge W.H. Auden requested the manuscript.
1957 Allen Tate is awarded the Bollingen.
1957 “Howl” by Beat poet Allen Ginsberg triumphs in obscenity trial as the judge finds book “socially redeeming;” wins publicity in Time & Life.
1957 New Poets of England and America,Donald Hall, Robert Pack, Louis Simspon, eds.
1959 Carl Sandburg wins Grammy for Best Performance – Documentary Or Spoken Word (Other Than Comedy) for his recording of Aaron Copland’sLincoln Portrait with the New York Philharmonic.
1959 M.L Rosenthal coins the term “Confessional Poetry” in The Nation as he pays homage to Robert Lowell.
1959 Donald Justice wins the Lamont Poetry Prize for Summer Anniversaries.
1960 New American Poetry 1945-1960, Donald Allen, editor.
1961 Yvor Winters is awarded the Bollingen.
1961 Denise Levertov becomes poetry editor of The Nation.
1961 Louis Untermeyer appointed Poet Laureate Consultant In Poetry To the Library of Congress (1961-63)
1961 Robert Graves appointed Professor of Poetry at Oxford—holds the post until 1966.
1962 Sylvia Plath takes her own life in London.
1964 John Crowe Ransom wins The National Book Award for Selected Poems. His Kenyon Review is where Plath and other poets were most eager to publish.
1964 Keats biography by W.Jackson Bate wins Pulitzer. The Burden of the Past and the English Poet by the same author predates, and is a more readable version of, Harold Bloom’sAnxiety of Influence.
1965 Horace Gregory is awarded the Bollingen. Gregory had attacked the poetic reputation of Edna St. Vincent Millay.
1967 Anne Sexton wins Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
1968 Shakespeare’sRomeo & Juliet, directed by Zeffirelli, nominated for Best Picture by Hollywood.
1971 The Pound Era by Hugh Kenner published. Kenner, a friend of William F. Buckley, Jr., saved Pound’s reputation with this work; Kenner also savaged the reputation of Millay.
1971 W.S Merwin wins Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
1972 John Berryman jumps to his death off bridge near University of Minnesota.
Berryman’s classes in the 50’s were filled with future prize-winners, not necessarily because he and his students were great, but because his students were on the ground-floor of the Writing Program era.
1972 Frank O’Hara wins National Book Award for Collected Poems
1976 John Ashbery wins Pulitzer, National Book Critics Circle Award, National Book Award for Self-Portrait In A Convex Mirror
1977 Gerald Stern wins the Lamont Poetry Prize, Judges Alan Dugan, Philip Levine, and Charles Wright.
1978 Language magazine, Bernstein & Andrews, begins 4 year run. CharlesBernstein studied J.L Austin’s brand of ‘ordinary language philosophy’ at Harvard.
1980 Helen Vendler wins National Book Critics Circle Award
1981 Seamus Heaney becomes Harvard visiting professor.
1981 Carolyn Forche wins the Lamont Poetry Prize for The Country Between Us.
1981 Derek Walcott founds Boston Playwrights’ Theater at Boston University.
1981 Oscar Wilde biography by RichardEllman wins Pulitzer.
1984 Harold Bloom savagely attacks Poe in review of Poe’s Library of America works (2 vol) in New York Review of Books, repeating similar attacks by Yvor Winters,Aldous Huxley and T.S. Eliot.
1984 Charles Bernstein at a poetry conference in Alabama mentions the “policemen of official verse culture.” Gerald Stern presses Bernstein to name names. He does not—except to mention T.S. Eliot as being disliked by WC Williams.
1984 Marc Smith founds Slam Poetry in Chicago.
1984 Mary Oliver is awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
1985 Gwendolyn Brooks appointed U.S. Poet Laureate for 1985-6.
1986 Golden Gate by Vikram Seth, a novel in verse, is published.
1987 The movie “Barfly” depicts life of Charles Bukowski.
1988 David Lehman’s Best American Poetry Series debuts with John Ashbery as first guest editor. The first words of the first poem (by A.R. Ammons) in the Series are: William James.
1990 Robert Bly publishes Iron John.
1991 “Can Poetry Matter?” by Dana Gioia is published in The Atlantic. According to the author, poetry has become an incestuous viper’s pit of academic hucksters.
1996 Jorie Graham wins Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
1997 Kent Johnson and Tosa Motokiyu are suspected authors of Doubled Flowering: FromtheNotebooks of Araki Yasusada, one of the richest and greatest controversies in world letters.
1999 Peter Sacks wins Georgia Prize, Jorie Graham, judge.
1999 Billy Collins signs 3-book, 6-figure deal with Random House.
2002 Ron Silliman’s Blog founded. Silliman will attack “quietism” while defending the poetry avant-garde.
2002 Louis Menand’sThe Metaphysical Club wins Pulitzer Prize.
2002 Garrison Keillor’sGood Poems published.
2004 Foetry.com founded by Alan Cordle. The site looks at Poetry Prizes, judges, and poets, in a controversial manner. Shortly before his death, Robert Creeley defends his poetry colleagues on Foetry.com.
2004 Franz Wright wins Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
2005 Ted Kooser wins Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
2005 The LA Times call Alan Cordle “the most despised…most feared man” in American poetry.”
2005 William Logan wins National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism.
2006 Fulcrum No. 5, editors Philip Nikolayev, Katia Kapovich, appears, featuring works of Landis Everson and his editor, Ben Mazer, also Eliot Weinberger, Glyn Maxwell, Joe Green, and Marjorie Perloff.
2007 Joan Houlihan dismisses Foetry.com as “losers” in a Poets & Writers letter. Defends the integrity of Georgia and Tupelo press.
2007 Paul Muldoon succeeds Alice Quinn as poetry editor of The New Yorker.
2007 Frank Bidart wins the Bollingen Prize.
2009 Fanny Howe is awarded the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize.
2009 The Program Era by Mark McGurl, published by Harvard University Press, an historic look at college creative writing.
2009 Following the mass banning of Alan Cordle, Thomas Brady, Desmond Swords and Christopher Woodman from The Poetry Foundation’s BlogHarriet (which soon bans all public comments), they decide to create Blog Scarriet (September 1 2009 to present)
2010 Sir Christopher Ricks publishes True Friendship: Geoffrey Hill, Anthony Hecht, and Robert Lowell Under the Sign of Eliot and Pound.
2011 Rita Dove publishes her Penguin Anthologyof Twentieth Century American Poetry. Helen Vendler and Marjorie Perloff object to her choices. Scarriet defends Dove.
2012 Natasha Trethewey is appointed U.S. Poet Laureate
2013 Mark Edmundson, U VA professor, attacks the quality of contemporary poetry in Harper’s magazine.
2013 Sharon Olds wins the Pulitzer for Stag’s Leap.
2013 Don Share becomes editor of Poetry.
2013 Patricia Lockwood’s poem “Rape Joke” goes viral on social media.
2013 Paul Lewis, professor, brings Poe statue to Boston—the Jingle Man returneth.
2014 Billy Collins interviews Paul McCartney.
2014 Maya Angelou dies.
2014 Peter Gizzi publishes Selected Poems.
2015 Derek Michael Hudson is controversially published as Yi-Fen Chou in David Lehman’sBest American Poetry series, Sherman Alexie, guest editor.
2015 Claudia Rankine’sCitizen: An American Lyric wins multiple poetry and criticism awards, and is on New York Times bestseller list in nonfiction.
2016 Bob Dylan wins Nobel Prize in Literature.
2016 Ron Padgett writes 3 poems for the film Paterson.
2016 Helen Vendler reviews Collected Poems of John Crowe Ransom, editor, Ben Mazer, in NYR
2017 John Ashbery dies.
2017 William Logan, poet, and the best-know poetry reviewer in America, accuses Norton editor Jill Bialosky of plagiarism. Her book is called Poetry Will Save Your Life.
2017 Garrison Keillor, who broadcasts contemporary poems in his Writer’s Almanac, accused of sexual harassment.
2017 Jorie Graham wins the Wallace Stevens Award with a stipend of $100,000.
2017 Kevin Young becomes poetry editor of The New Yorker.
2017 Kenneth Goldsmith lives and dies by “found poem.” Autopsy of Michael Brown causes outrage.
2018 Anders Carlson-Wee apologizes for his poem in the Nation.
2019 Marilyn Chin is awarded the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature.
2020 Ben Mazer resurrects the poems of Harry Crosby.
2020 Louise Gluck wins Nobel Prize for Literature.
2020 Don Share resigns as editor of Poetry for publishing poem by Michael Dickman.
2021 Amanda Gorman reads at Joe Biden’s inauguration.
2021 Thomas Graves, a Scarriet editor, publishes Ben Mazer and the New Romanticism.
1 Anders Carlson-Wee: Brilliant, empathic poem, “How-To,” published in The Nation—then a mob ends his career.
2 Stephanie Burt: Harvard professor and Nation poetry editor publishes Carlson-Wee—caves to the mob.
3Carmen Giminez-Smith:Nation co-editor, with Burt, apologizes for “disparaging and ableist language” giving “offense,” “harm,” and “pain” to “several communities.”
4 Grace Schulman: Former Nation poetry editor: “never once did we apologize for publishing a poem.”
5 Patricia Smith: Runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize in 2018, a slam poet champion, leads Twitter outrage which greets Carlson-Wee’s Nation poem.
6 Ben Mazer:Selected Poems out, discovering unpublished Delmore Schwartz material for Library of America.
7 Rupi Kaur:Milk and Honey, her debut self-published book of viral Instagram ‘I’m OK, you’re OK’ verse, has put a young woman from Toronto on top of the poetry popularity heap.
8 Tyler Knott Gregson:NY Times pointed out this Instagram poet’s first collection of poetry was a national bestseller.
9 Christopher Poindexter: This Instagram poet has been compared to Shakespeare by Huffpost. (He’s nothing like Shakespeare.)
10 Nikita Gill: Probably the best of the feminist Instagram poets.
11 Yrsa Daley-Ward: Her Instapoetry memoir, The Terrible, was praised by Katy Waldman in the New Yorker.
12 Marilyn Chin: Her New and Selected (Norton) this October contains her famous poem, “How I Got That Name.”
13 Frank Bidart: Awarded 2018 Pulitzer for his Collected Poems.
14 William Logan: New prose book: Dickinson’s Nerves, Frost’s Woods. New book of poems, Rift of Light, proves again his formal verse is perhaps the best poetry published today.
15 Kevin Young: New New Yorker poetry editor.
16 Evie Shockley: Was on short list for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry.
17 David Lehman: Series editor for Best American Poetry since 1988—30 years.
18 Linda Ashok: Poet (Whorelight), songwriter (“Beautiful Scar”) and champion of Indian poetry in English.
19 Derrick Michael Hudson: Who still remembers this “Chinese” BAP poet?
20. Dana Gioia: Guest editor of Lehman’s Best American Poetry 2018.
21 Akhil Katyal: “Is Mumbai still standing by the sea?”
22Urvashi Bahuguna: “Girl kisses/some other boy. Girl wishes/It was Boy.”
23Jeet Thayil: “you don’t want to hear her say,/Why, why did you not look after me?”
24 Sridala Swami: Jorge Louis Borges of English Indian poetry.
25Adil Jussawalla: Born in Mumbai in 1940, another Anglo-Indian poet ignored in the U.S.
26 Rochelle D’Silva: Indian slam poet who writes in English.
27 Billy Collins: Pajama and Slippers school of poetry. And nothing wrong with that at all.
28W.S. Merwin: One of the few living major poets born in the 20s (goodbye Ashbery, Hall).
29Valerie Macon: Quickly relieved of her NC poet laureate duties because of her lack of creds.
30Mary Angela Douglas: a magical bygone spirit who sweetly found her way onto the Internet.
31Stephen Cole: Who is this wonderful, prolific lyric poet? The daily Facebook fix.
32Sophia Naz: “Deviants and dervishes of the river/lie down the length of her”
33Rochelle Potkar: “But can I run away from the one cell that is the whole Self?”
34Helen Vendler: No one finally cares what non-poets say about poetry.
35Huzaifa Pandit: “Bear the drought of good poems a little longer”
36N Ravi Shankar: “a toy train in a full moon night”
37Sharon Olds: Like Edna Millay, a somewhat famous outsider, better than the men.
38Nabina Das: “the familiar ant crawling up”
39Kaveh Akbar: “the same paradise/where dead lab rats go.”
40Terrance Hayes: “I love poems more than/money and pussy.”
41Dan Sociu: Plain-spoken, rapturous voice of Romania
42Glyn Maxwell: Editor of Derek Walcott’s poems— The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013
43 Arjun Rajendran: Indian poet in English who writes sassy, seductive poems.
44A.E. Stallings: With Logan, and a few others, the Formalist torch.
45Patricia Lockwood: Subsiding from viral into respectability.
46Marjorie Perloff: An old-fashioned, shaming of NYU professor Avital Ronell in the Nimrod Reitman case.
47Daipayan Nair: Great love and sex poet of India
48Shohreh Laici: Proud young voice of restless, poetic Iran
49Smita Sahay: “You flowed down the blue bus/into a brown puddle/below the yellow lamp post/and hung there”
50Mary Oliver: An early fan of Edna St. Vincent Millay, she assisted Edna’s sister, Norma, in assembling the great poet’s work.
51Natasha Trethewey: Former U.S. laureate, her New and Selected favored to win National Book Award this year.
52Anand Thakore: “a single tusk/White as a quarter-moon in mid-July,/Before the coming of a cloud.”
53Carl Dennis: Author of the poem, “The God Who Loves You.”
54Tony Hoagland: Today’s Robert Bly.
55Meera Nair: “I live in a house/Someone else has loved in”
56Fanny Howe: “Eons of lily-building/emerged in the one flower.”
57Rita Dove: Won Pulitzer in 1987. Her The Penguin Anthology of 20th Century American Poetry (2011) was panned by Vendler and Perloff.
58Diana Khoi Nguyen: Poet and multimedia artist studying for a PhD in Creative Writing.
59 Matthew Zapruder: Poetry editor of the New York Times magazine since 2016.
60Jenny Xie: “I pull apart the evening with a fork.”
61Mary Jo Bang: Chair of the National Book Award judges.
62Jim Behrle: Hates David Lehman’s Best American Poetry series and “rhyme schemes.”
63Semeen Ali: “diverting your attention/for a minute/contains my life/my undisclosed life”
64George Bilgere: Ohio’s slightly more sophisticated Billy Collins.
65Aishwarya Iyer: “When rain goes where will you find/The breath lost to the coming of love?”
66Sukrita Kumar: “Flames are messengers/Carrying the known/To the unknown”
67Sushmita Gupta: “So detached, so solid, so just, so pure. A glory unbeholden, never seen or met before.”
68Merryn Juliette: “before your body knows the earth”
69John Cooper Clarke: “The fucking clocks are fucking wrong/The fucking days are fucking long”
70Justin Phillip Reed: His book (2018) is Indecency.
71Cathy Park Hong: Her 2014 essay, “Delusions of Whiteness in the Avant-Garde,” rules our era. The avant-garde is no longer automatically cool.
72 Carolyn Forche: “No one finds/ you no one ever finds you.”
73 Zachary Bos: “The sun like a boat drowns.”
74 Bob Dylan: “You could have done better but I don’t mind”
75 Kanye West: The musical guest when SNL open its 44th season September 29th
76Raquel Salas Rivera: “i shall invoke the shell petrified by shadows”
77Jennifer Reeser: Indigenous, her new collection, will be available soon.
78Forrest Gander: Be With from New Directions is his latest book.
79Arun Sagar: “through glass and rain./Each way out/is worthy, each way leads/to clarity and mist,/and music.”
80 Joanna Valente: “Master said I am too anti-social.”
81Richard Howard: Like Merwin, an American treasure, born in the 1920s.
82J.Michael Martinez: Museum of the Americas on 2018 National Book Award longlist.
83Amber Tamblyn: The actress/poet’s dad does the amazing flips in the movie West Side Story.
84 Paul Rowe: Stunning translation of Cesario Verde’s “O Sentimento dum Ocidental.”
85Jill Bialosky: Norton editor caught plagiarizing by William Logan
86Robert Pinsky: Editor of the 25 year anniversary edition of Best American Poetry in 2013.
87 Philip Nikolayev: Poet, linguist, philosopher: One Great Line theory of poetry is recent.
88Ada Limón: The poet lives in New York, California, and Kentucky.
89Rae Armantrout: Her poems examine, in her words, “a lot of largely unexamined baggage.”
90 Alex Dimitrov: “I want even the bad things to do over.”
91Sam Sax: “Prayer for the Mutilated World” in September Poetry.
92 Danielle Georges: “You should be called beacon. You should be called flame.”
93 Stephen Sturgeon: “These errors are correct.”
94 Hieu Minh Nguyen: “Maybe he meant the city beyond the window.”
95 Richard Blanco: presidents, presidents, presidents.
96 Kent Johnson: His magazine Dispatches from the Poetry Wars continues the fight against poetry as commodity/career choice.
97 Parish Tiwari: “between falling rain/and loneliness…/the song/that once was ours”
98Eliana Vanessa: Rrrrr. Lyric internet poet of the Tooth, Death, Love, Sex and Claw school.
99Rachel Custer: Best known poem is “How I Am Like Donald Trump”
1. KG is talked about.
2. Vanessa Place Conceptualism’s moment in the sun
3. Ron Silliman Has Conceptualism fever
4. Marjorie Perloff Wrestles with: Avant-garde = Art, not poetry
5. Amy King “Real issue” poet leads the war against Conceptualism
6. Cate Marvin VIDA masses breaking down the walls of Conceptualism
7. Carol Ann Duffy writes poem for reburial of Richard III
8. Benedict Cumberbatch, distant cousin, delivers it.
9. Ben Mazer publishes Complete Ransom
10. Jorie Graham Big Environmentalism comeback?
11. Claudia Rankine Seizing the moment?
12. James Franco Film/gallery/poetry renaissance man or Hollywood punk?
13. David Biespiel April Fool’s Conceptualism piece in Rumpus
14. George Bilgere Just “good poems?”
15. Kent Johnson “Prize List:” Brilliant or KG lite?
16. Susan Howe Who, where, what, why?
17. Ann Lauterbach Can’t hear the baroque music
18. Corina Copp Reproduce
19. David Lau A permisson
20. Forrest Gander Take a look
21. Harryette Mullen Thinking it over
22. Keston Sutherland S’marvelous! S’alternative!
23. Evie Shockley Electrical grass
24. Joe Luna Pale orb that rules the night
25. Geoffrey O’Brien Library of America editor
26. Lisa Cattrone “Your mother could pull a fresh squid from a lumberjack”
27. Jennifer Tamayo Colombian-born New Yorker
28. Juliana Sparr Won the Hardison Poetry Prize in 2009
29. Monica de la Torre Born and raised in Mexico City
30. Caroline Knox Educated at Radcliffe, lives in Massachusetts
31. J. Michael Martinez Hispanic American poet, winner of Walt Whitman award
32. Jasper Bernes Theorist who received his PhD in 2012
33. Mairead Byrne Discovered the internet in 1994 on a plane from Ireland
34. Ben Lerner Eyebrows haunt glasses beneath intellectual hair
35. Ron Padget Young member of the New York School
36. Alli Warren Born in L.A., her book is Here Come the Warm Jets
37. Sandra Simonds “And once you give up drinking, drugs and having random sex, what is left?”
38. John Wilkinson Studied English at Jesus College, Cambridge, United Kingdom
39. Hoa Nguyen Born near Saigon in 1967
40. Will Alexander Also made Johnson’s “Prize List”
41. Sophia Le Fraga “it took me fifteen minutes and eight tries which is too many and too slow I think”
42. Joyelle McSweeney She edits Action Books!
43. Cole Swensen “for instance, the golden section mitigates between abandon and an orchestra just behind those trees”
44. Cathy Wagner Her book Nervous Device came out in 2012
45. Christian Hawkey Is a poet, activist, translator, editor, and educator. Also wears shoes.
46. Dana Ward Was a featured writer for Harriet
47. Stacy Szymaszek “then something happened and a FUCK YOU FENCE went up”
48. Rebecca Wolff “The dominant paradigm of the day: the mediocre narrative lyric.”
49. Lugwa Mutah Kidnapped in Nigeria. Made Johnson’s “Prize List”
50. Maureen Thorson “At first heartbreak made me beautiful.”
51. Sean Bonney Brought up in the North of England
52. Tan Lin Poet, novelist, filmmaker, and new media artist
53. Rob Halpern “I herded me and me and me into a room in groups of ten to twenty and stripped me and me and me naked.”
54. Charles Bernstein Playing in Scarriet March Madness Tourney, too busy to talk right now.
55. Rob Fitterman Postconceptual pizza
56. Matthew Dickman “All night it felt like I was in your room, the French doors opened out onto the porch”
57. Anne Carson Born in Toronto in 1950
58. Christian Bok Born in Toronto in 1966
59. Caroline Bergvall Born in Germany in 1962
60. Peter Gizzi “Beauty walks this world. It ages everything.”
61. Linh Dinh His poem “Quiz” is on the Poetry Foundation site
62. Michael Robbins “A Poem for President Drone”
63. Bill Freind “We found this on the map so it is real.”
64. Danielle Parfunda She is the author of Manhater.
65. Daniel Tiffany “Bin Ramke has come to be known for the procedures and allusions that quicken his ongoing poetic experiment”
66. Cathy Park Hong “To encounter the history of avant-garde poetry is to encounter a racist tradition.”
67. Dodie Bellamy Sex poetry grows apace with her Cunt Norton.
68. Lucas de LimaWet Land is for Ana Maria
69. Rosa Alcala “English is dirty. Polyamorous. English wants me.”
70. Yedda Morrison Whites out Heart of Darkness for her book, Darkness
71. Craig Santos Perez From Guam, co-founder of Ala Press
72. Divya Victor A featured writer for Harriet last year
73. Nathaniel Mackey Teaches at Duke
74. Brenda Hillman Married to “Meditation at Lagunitas”
75. Elizabeth Willis “You don’t blame the lamp for what you cannot read”
76. Ocean Vuong Won a Lilly fellowship from the Poetry Foundation in 2014
77. Bhanu Kapil British-Indian who teaches at Naropa and Goddard
78. Joshua Wilkinson A “Poetry Plus” advocate
79. Elizabeth Robinson “red blush on air makes fatality sublime”
80. Brandon BrownCharles Baudelaire the Vampire Slayer
81. Lee Ann Brown “The Question Undoes Itself/ On an organic twittering machine”
82. John Yau Educated at Brooklyn, Bard and BU
83. Lyn Hejinian The Queen of the Language Poets?
84. Erica Hunt “She likes to organize with her bare teeth”
85. Michael Hansen Poetry editor of Chicago Review
86. John Ashbery And he goes, and he goes
87. David Lehman What is the best?
88. Jim Behrle The clown downtown
89. Alan Cordle He ripped the veil
90. Helen Vendler Sees Yeats in the twilight
91. Billy Collins Free verse genius
92. Seth Abramson Have no idea what he’s talking about
93. Philip Nikolayev Gold mine of Russian translation
94. Valerie Macon We won’t forget
95. Joe Green A Fulcrum poet
96. Garrison Keillor Poetry’s Walter Cronkite?
97. Camille Paglia Feminist-hating blah blah blah?
98. Sharon Olds The sweet crash-and-burn of Iowa Confessionalism
99. Amber Tamblyn The actress. Her new book of poems, Dark Sparkler, is about dead actresses
100. Dan Chiasson Au courant, staus quo reviewer
Cathy Park Hong: “Fuck the avant-garde.” But does she really mean it?
For its whole existence, Scarriet has hammered away at Modernism—and its Avant-garde identity—as nothing but a meaningless, one-dimensional joke (the found poem, basically) tossed at the public by reactionary, rich, white guys in order to make it ‘cool’ to stifle truly creative efforts accessible to the public at large.
The controversy surrounding Scarriet’s claim lies in this one simple fact: the Avant-garde (Ron Silliman, et al) identifies itself as politically Left.
In Leftist circles of the Avant-garde, Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot are championed for their poetry, not their politics.
We might call this Pound/Eliot phenomenon the Art-Split: Bad Poet/Good Poetry.
By accepting this “Split,” the reactionary, white, male, Avant-garde is given license to dress in Left-wing clothing.
You have to believe, of course, that Pound’s poetry is important and good, and that Hugh ” The Pound Era” Kenner’s trashing of Edna Millay, for instance, was a good and noble effort to debunk old-fashioned “quietist” poetry, and not chauvinist, jealous bullying.
Leftist Ron Silliman has no taste for Edna Millay, and the “Split” allows this to appear perfectly normal.
The embarrassing and obvious truth: 1. accessibility to the public at large is democratic, 2. befuddling the masses is reactionary, gets a yawn, too—because of the “Split.”
The reason the “Split” works as an excuse is that it appeals to both Left and Right intellectuals: the greatest ‘am I an intellectual?’ test is if one is able to grasp (and embrace) the idea that a person can be bad but still write good poetry.
We do not believe this is true; we believe the opposite: one cannot be a bad person and write good poetry. If the poet is a truly bad person, the “good” poetry was most likely stolen, or written before the soul of the poet became rotten.
And this is why Modernists hate the Romantics—because the Romantics were poetic individuals, while the Modernists (because of skyscrapers and aeroplanes and women getting the vote and other lame excuses) were not.
The “Split,” the source of so much modernist mischief, is a red herring. The almighty “Split” even makes one think Ezra Pound must be a good poet: one must believe this is so to have intellectual, avant-garde creds—simply for the reason that for so long now, the “Split” has ruled over Letters. The wretched, sophistical, school-boy “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/” is somehow good because Pound is bad. And because it is wretched, it is avant-garde, and because it is avant-garde, it is wretched, and therefore better than, “What lips my lips have kissed and where and why.” This is how those who think themselves very good judges of poetry convince themselves that Ezra Pound is a great poet. Yes, it is truly frightening.
Despite the “Split,” rumblings about the reactionary nature of the Avant-garde were bound to start, as Scarriet does influence the culture it observes.
Witness the explosion of Left indignation in the latest Lana Turner Journal as the “Split”-fooled Left vaguely catches on.
We have Kent Johnson, an imaginative and brilliant man, in “No Avant-Garde: Notes Toward A Left Front of the Arts,” reduced to the most pitiful, quixotic Old Leftism it is possible to imagine. In his essay, he imagines splendidly well, and he knows a great deal, but he’s very bitter, obviously, as the ugly truth—the Avant-garde is, and has always been, reactionary—sinks in.
We have Joshua Clover, in “The Genealogical Avant-Garde,” complaining in the same vein.
The current avant-gardes in contemporary Anglophone poetry make their claims largely by reference to previous avant-gardes.
The genealogical avant-garde is defined by a single contradiction. It has no choice but to affirm the very cultural continuity which it must also claim to oppose.
The “Split” is always rationalized.
The “Split” in this case, however, is not Bad Poet/Good Poetry, and in some ways it is far less problematic.
The “Split” now imploding due to common sense is: Bad Mainstream/Good Avant-garde.
The Avant-garde, as the progressive intellectuals finally understand it, is the Mainstream—and thus, bad. Had they been able to see, 100 years ago, the nature of Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, F. O. Matthiessen, and their New Critic allies, they would not have taken so long to understand the clever reactionary agenda.
But now they are finally getting it.
Cathy Park Hong (writing in Lana Turner no. 7) definitely wants a new boyfriend.And it ‘aint Ron Silliman.
To encounter the history of avant-garde poetry is to encounter a racist tradition.
Poets of color have always been expected to sit quietly in the backbenches of both mainstream and avant-garde poetry. We’ve been trotted out in the most mindless forms of tokenism for anthologies and conferences, because to have all white faces would be downright embarrassing. For instance, Donald Allen’s classic 1959 and even updated 1982 anthology New American Poetry, which Marjorie Perloff has proclaimed “the anthology of avant-garde poetry,” includes a grand tally of oneminority poet: Leroi Jones, aka Amiri Baraka. Tokenism at its most elegant.
Mainstream poetry is rather pernicious in awarding quietist minority poets who assuage quasi-white liberal guilt rather than challenge it. They prefer their poets to praise rather than excoriate, to write sanitized, easily understood personal lyrics on family and ancestry rather than make sweeping institutional critiques. But the avant-gardists prefer their poets of color to be quietest as well, paying attention to poems where race—through subject and form—is incidental, preferably invisible, or at the very least, buried. Even if racial identity recurs as a motif throughout the works of poets like John Yau, critics and curators of experimental poetry are quick to downplay it or ignore it altogether. I recall that in graduate school my peers would give me backhanded compliments by saying my poetry was of interest because it “wasn’t just about race.” Such an attitude is found in Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith’s anthology, “Against Expression,” when they included excerpts from M. NourbeSe Philip’s brilliant “Zong!,” which explores the late 18th century British court case where 150 slaves were thrown overboard so the slave ship’s captain could collect the insurance money. The book is a constraint-based tour-de-force that only uses words found in the original one-page legal document. Here is how Dworkin and Goldsmith characterize Zong: “the ethical inadequacies of that legal document . . . do not prevent theirdétournement in the service of experimental writing.” God forbid that maudlin and heavy-handed subjects like slavery and mass slaughter overwhelm the form!
The avant-garde’s “delusion of whiteness” is the luxurious opinion that anyone can be“post-identity” and can casually slip in and out of identities like a video game avatar, when there are those who are consistently harassed, surveilled, profiled, or deported for whom they are.
Even today, avant-garde’s most vocal, self-aggrandizing stars continue to be white and even today these stars like Kenneth Goldsmith spout the expired snake oil that poetry should be “against expression” and “post-identity.”
From legendary haunts like Cabaret Voltaire to San Remo and Cedar Tavern, avant-garde schools have fetishized community to mythologize their own genesis. But when I hear certain poets extolling the values of their community today, my reaction is not so different from how I feel a self-conscious, prickling discomfort that there is a boundary drawn between us. Attend a reading at St. Marks Poetry Project or the launch of an online magazine in a Lower East Side gallery and notice that community is still a packed room of white hipsters.
Avant-garde poetry’s attitudes towards race have been no different than that of mainstream institutions.
The encounter with poetry needs to change constantlyvia the internet, via activism and performance, so that poetry can continue to be a site of agitation, where the audience is not a receptacle of conditioned responses but is unsettled and provoked into participatory response. But will these poets ever be accepted as the new avant-garde? The avant-garde has become petrified, enamored by its own past, and therefore forever insular and forever looking backwards. Fuck the avant-garde. We must hew our own path.
Yes, “fuck the avant-garde.” But we might just add that it is the avant-garde that has always been the problem; in this case, the tail wags the dog.
The New Critics (ex-I’ll Take My Stand Old South reactionary agrarianists) got an “in” when they launched their textbook, Understanding Poetry in the late 30s—it praised Pound and attacked Poe.
Popular poets like Edgar Poe and Edna St. Vincent Millay were the Mainstream “good” ambushed by the clique of Eliot, Pound and the New Critics.
How blithely and unthinkingly Cathy Park Hong takes up the “quietist” definition of the avant-garde (and ostentatiously Left) Silliman.
1. Mark Edmundson Current Lightning Rod of Outrage
2. David Lehman BAP Editor now TV star: PBS’ Jewish Broadway
3. Rita Dove She knows Dunbar is better than Oppen
4. Matthew Hollis Profoundly researched Edward Thomas bio
5. Paul Hoover Status quo post-modern anthologist, at Norton
6. Don Share Wins coveted Poetry magazine Editorship
7. Sharon Olds Gets her Pulitzer
8. Michael Robbins The smartest guy writing on contemporary poetry now–see Hoover review
9. Marjorie Perloff Still everyone’s favorite Take-No-Prisoners Dame Avant-Garde
10. Natasha Trethewey Another Round as Laureate
11. Ron Silliman The Avant-garde King
12. Tony Hoagland The Billy Collins of Controversy
13. Billy Collins The real Billy Collins
14. Kenneth Goldsmith Court Jester of Talked-About
15. Terrance Hayes The black man’s Black Man’s Poet?
16. William Logan Favorite Bitch Critic
17. Avis Shivani Second Favorite Bitch Critic
18. John Ashbery Distinguished and Sorrowful Loon
19. Stephen Burt P.C. Throne at Harvard
20. Robert Hass West Coast Establishment Poet
21. Harold Bloom Reminds us ours is an Age of Criticism, not Poetry
22. Helen Vendler She, in the same stultifying manner, reminds us of this, too.
23. Dana Gioia Sane and Optimistic Beacon?
24. Bill Knott An On-line Bulldog of Poignant Common Sense
25. Franz Wright Honest Common Sense with darker tones
26. Henry Gould Another Reasonable Poet’s Voice on the blogosphere
27. Anne Carson The female academic poet we are supposed to take seriously
28. Seth Abramson Will give you a thousand reasons why MFA Poetry is great
29. Ben Mazer Poet of the Poetry! poetry! More Poetry! School who is actually good
30. Larry Witham Author, Picasso and the Chess Player (2013), exposes Modern Art/Poetry cliques
31. Mary Oliver Sells, but under Critical assault
32. Annie Finch The new, smarter Mary Oliver?
33. Robert Pinsky Consensus seems to be he had the best run as Poet Laureate
34. Mark McGurl His book, The Program Era, has quietly had an impact
35. Seamus Heaney Yeats in a minor key
36. W.S. Merwin Against Oil Spills but Ink Spill his writing method
37. George Bilgere Do we need another Billy Collins?
38. Cate Marvin VIDA will change nothing
39. Philip Nikolayev Best living translator?
40. Garrison Keillor As mainstream poetry lover, he deserves credit
41. Frank Bidart Poetry as LIFE RUBBED RAW
42. Jorie Graham The more striving to be relevant, the more she seems to fade
43. Alan Cordle Strange, how this librarian changed poetry with Foetry.com
44. Janet Holmes Ahsahta editor and MFA prof works the po-biz system like no one else
45. Paul Muldoon How easy it is to become a parody of oneself!
46. Cole Swensen Some theories always seem to be missing something
47. Matthew Dickman Was reviewed by William Logan. And lived
48. James Tate For some reason it depressed us to learn he was not a laugh riot in person.
49. Geoffrey Hill His poetry is more important than you are
50. Derek Walcott A great poet, but great poets don’t exist anymore
51. Charles Bernstein A bad poet, but bad poets don’t exist anymore, either
52. Kay Ryan Emily Dickinson she’s not. Maybe Marianne Moore when she’s slightly boring?
53. Laura Kasischke She’s published 8 novels. One became a movie starring Uma Thurman. Who the hell does she think she is?
54. Louise Gluck X-Acto!
55. Rae Armantrout “Quick, before you die, describe the exact shade of this hotel carpet.”
56. Heather McHugh “A coward and a coda share a word.”
57. D.A. Powell “Of course a child. What else might you have lost.”
58. Peter Gizzi Take your lyric and heave
59. Marilyn Chin Shy Iowa student went on to write an iconic 20th century poem: How I Got That Name
60. Eileen Myles Interprets Perloff’s avant-gardism as mourning
61. Lyn Hejinian As I sd to my friend, because I am always blah blah blah
62. Nikki Finney Civil Rights is always hot
63. K. Silem Mohammad This Flarfist Poet composes purely Anagram versions of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Fie on it.
64. Meg Kearney Lectured in public by Franz Wright. Still standing.
65. Noah Eli Gordon Teaches at Boulder, published by Ahsahta
66. Peter Campion A poet, a critic and a scholar!
67. Simon Ortiz Second wave of the Native American Renaissance
68. Maya Angelou She continues to travel the world
69. Lyn Lifshin “Barbie watches TV alone, naked” For real?
70. Ange Mlinko Born in ’69 in Philly, writes for The Nation
71. Jim Behrle They also serve who only write bad poetry
72. Elizabeth Alexander She read in front of all those people
73. Dorothea Lasky The Witchy Romantic School
74. Virgina Bell The poet. Do not confuse with burlesque dancer
75. Fanny Howe Wreaks havoc out of Boston
76. Erin Belieu Available for VIDA interviews
77. Ariana Reines Another member of the witchy romantic school
78. Jed Rasula Old Left poetry critic
79. John Hennessy “Too bad I felt confined by public space/despite her kinky talk, black net and lace”
80. Timothy Donnelly “Driver, please. Let’s slow things down. I can’t endure/the speed you favor, here where the air’s electric”
81. Clive James His translation, in quatrains, of Dante’s Divine Comedy, published this year
82. Danielle Pafunda “We didn’t go anywhere, we went wrong/in our own backyard. We didn’t have a yard,/but we went wrong in the bedroom”
83. Michael Dickman Matthew is better, right?
84. Kit Robinson “Get it first/but first get it right/in the same way it was”
85. Dan Beachy Quick “My wife found the key I hid beneath the fern./My pens she did not touch. She did not touch/The hundred pages I left blank to fill other days”
86. Ilya Kaminsky Teaches at San Diego State, won Yinchuan International Poetry Prize
87. Robert Archambeau Son of a potter, this blog-present poet and critic protested Billy Collins’ appointment to the Poet Laureateship
88. Kent Johnson Best known as a translator
89. Frederick Seidel An extroverted Philip Larkin?
90. David Orr Poetry columnist for New York Times wrote on Foetry.com
91. Richard Wilbur Oldest Rhymer and Moliere translator
92. Kevin Young Finalist in Criticism for National Book Critics Circle
93. Carolyn Forche Human rights activist born in 1950
94. Carol Muske Dukes Former California Laureate writes about poetry for LA Times
95. William Kulik Writes paragraph poems for the masses
96. Daniel Nester The sad awakening of the MFA student to the bullshit
97. Alexandra Petri Began 2013 by calling poetry “obsolete” in Wash Post
98. John Deming Poet, told Petri, “We teach your kids.”
99. C. Dale Young “Medical students then, we had yet to learn/when we could or could not cure”
100. Clayton Eshleman Sometimes the avant-garde is just boring
We don’t read Harriet anymore. It’s too dreary, too artsy-fartsy-friends-puffing-artsy-fartsy-friends, too boring. But our man Gary Fitzgerald was kind enough to email us today to let us know that John Oliver Simonhas not forgotten us.
Thanx, Gary Fitzgerald, John Oliver Simon, u rock.
Harriet, the Poetry Foundation Blog, who banned ThomasBrady, Alan Cordle, Desmond Swords, and Christopher Woodman at one stroke on September 1, 2009, is going through a little identity crisis at the moment: how shall I moderate? How shall I banish? Are those who post on my site a community? Can posters police themselves? What is my responsibility towards them, if any?
Before we start equating the firing on Fort Sumter (THE UNION IS DISSOLVED!) to the sarcastic squabbling between Kent Johnson, Michael Robbins, and Henry Gould and the current crop of boy scouts and girl scouts on Harriet, let’s remember that once a self-infatuated twit, always a self-infatuated twit.
Boyd Nielson suggested in a comment on a Harrietpost recently that Harriet is a private blog and can therefore ban and delete as she pleases. But instead of embracing this reality, Boyd Nielson continues, Harriet is failing to make her authority transparent, hiding behind proxies such as ‘thumbs up/ thumbs down voting’ and ‘report this comment’ to punish, to delete, to ‘hold for moderation’ and ultimately to ban, in a faceless manner that is irresponsible, cowardly, and weak.
Scarriet (ya got somethin to say, say it) is blissfully free of this.
To Harriet’s “identity crisis,” and to all the winding, administrative hair-splitting discussion it might elicit, we say: pffft.
Self-important Harriet, and other blogs like it,will 1) banish, 2) delete posts reporting the banishment, and 3) delete posts complaining of those deletions and 4) practice this for infinity, a black-hole-ish, whirling cesspool of censorship.
Paul McCartney will play a concert for Harriet, and their devoted acolytes will sing:
Well, the rain exploded with a mighty crash as we fell onto a limb,
And the first one said to the second one there, I hope that you can swim!
Banned on a whim! Banned on a whim!
Private enterprise is wonderful and Harriet’s status as a private club allows her to throw bums to the curb with impunity. But merely being private is not the great thing, by any means.
Private enterprise is not wonderful because it allows Harriet, the private club, to throw to the curb whomever she chooses, for if it stopped there, ‘private’ would be synonymous with ‘tyranical.’
Scarriet’s existence fills out the formula of private enterpise as something truly good. The private by itself is not good, nor is the private masking itself as the public good, either.
It is only competing private entities which allow for something truly wonderful: real freedom, real debate, sweet discovery, hot thrills, trembling chills, and freezing kisses, warm and exciting.
@Kent: The thing that confuses me is the way most poetry blogs contain…little poetry. Here at Harriet, that’s normal – this is not a ‘personal’ poetry blog but a discussion room and (for me) education centre. But on the blogs of so many poets…no pomes. Are the things so hard to come by? Valuable, yes, but a poet is wealthy with the things, notebooks running empty, mystery scrawls everywhere. More poems on poetry blogs today!
PG
Did it ever occur to anyone on Onan:Harriet that there were other poems out there beside the ones that bloggers write themselves? Has anyone noticed the Robert Burns that just got posted by Travis, for example — who is obviously still sensitive to our criticism here at Scarriet that, since we left, nobody at Harriet talks about poetry anymore, just about themselves?
Check out the 3 Comments on that thread for a shock on that, how they ignore the poetry to show off what they know/don’t know about Salinger. Even Holden Caulfield could have done better!
And can you imagine what Thomas Brady would have had to say, Burns being one of his favorite poets? Or Christopher Woodman on how to pronounce the scots, his children having been to a one-room school house in the hills up above Dumfries? Their dialect became so broad he couldn’t understand them in the kitchen after they had walked home from school, he says, two miles in the gloaming. His daughter Sophia even won 1st prize in the annual Robert Burns Poetry Contest — she recited the master’s poetry by heart even better than the shepherd children, who still spoke the dialect.
Eskdalemuir 1969, he says. The end of the world.
But then that’s precisely why Christopher Woodman got banned, for talking that way. Hi-jacking, Travis would have called it had Christopher come in on his Robert Burns thread. Making it relevant, we would say, empowering the poetry to speak for itself, not for the brown-nosed poetaster.
And we say good point in your sage comment, Kent Johnson. You know your Burns even if you’re deaf to his poetry and have no interest whatever in the best move Travis Nichols ever made. Indeed, you’ve condemned yet another Harriet thread to oblivion in your comment — set the mood for more cynical blather.
Who would dare to talk about poetry under such an asthmatic shadow?
~
In another way, all the comments on Poetry & Gender (Part 1): Why Don’t More Women do Blog-Oriented Writing? are under the shadow of Annie Finch’s truly expansive threads on Harriet last summer (Muse Goddess,Why I am a Woman Poet, and Women’s Work, those three in particular) all on the same topic, and which sparked some real participation, some of it so fiery it had to be deleted. And not because of unacceptable language or content either, but because of the fascinating glimpses the comments gave into various conflicts behind the U.K. poetry scene, Harriet was reaching out that far back then!
Frankly, we agree with those deletions — the deleted comments were too raw, the authors not ready yet for hanging out such linen. Indeed, some of the deletions were of comments by quite well-known U.K. female poetry figures who were letting too much hair down, and needed protection — from themselves!
Sensitive editing we’d say that time, Travis, and we feel sure that Annie Finch herself must have been consulted.
Was Annie Finch consulted when you deleted Christopher Woodman over and over again, Travis, and finally banned him altogether for talking about poetry in a manner you and your friends found threatening?
Did you learn anything at all from the Burns either? Do you have any feeling for what it might have been like for Holden Caulfield to be banned from his school, and why he might have brought that particular poem out into the real world with him?
James and Franz Wright, poets, and miserable sons-of-bitches.
“A Blessing” by James Wright is maudlin crap, perhaps the worst poem ever published.
The lust for horsies and the ‘break into blossom’ trope is embarrassing in the extreme.
“Northern Pike” is a close second: “we prayed for the muskrats”
“I am so happy.” Good grief.
His football poem isn’t much better; “gallup terribly” is a trite way to describe the violence of football. One can tell he’s just a nerdy observer.
“Their women cluck like starved pullets,/Dying for love.” Lines like these are destined for the ash heap.
Don’t get me started on the treacly, self-pitying exploitation of George Doty, the executed killer.
What to do with James Wright, who is nothing more than smarmy Whitman-haiku?
[Note: No woman poet seeking entrance to the canon would be permitted to get away with Wright’s metaphorical slop.]
“Depressed by a book of bad poetry…”
“I have wasted my life.”
Yea.
The times (1972) were right for Whitman-haiku poetry, so James Wright’s Pulitzer is no surprise. Plus, Wright was associated with a lot of big names: Roethke, Kunitz, Tate, Berryman, Bly.
Franz faced a difficulty as a poet. His father was a name. Say what you will about Whitman-haiku, his father did it well.
Franz seems to have genuinely admired his father’s poetry and made no attempt, as a poet, to get out from under his father’s shadow.
Junior poet looks up to senior poet and uses the same straight-forward, plain-speaking, self-obsessed, sentimentality of approach: Look, reader, here is my transparent chest; take a look at what I am feeling. You might think I’d be sad—and good Lord, I have reason to be—but something about the inscrutability of the universe and my inner faith makes me happy.
Recently on Harriet, Franz Wright wrote the following, which Franz never should have written and which Harriet never should have published, and which we publish here because…oh, we forget why.
[Warning: Wright’s comment on Harriet does contain abusive language]
Henry–I have no opinion about your “work”, or the “work” of others like little Kent and the others you masturbate with. My suggestion to all of you is: give up everything for the art. Everything. Can you do that? I did it 35 years ago–do you think that might have something to do with what you little whiners call “being on the inside”? I am not on the inside of shit. I gave up everything, everything, to be a poet. I lived in financial terror and homelessness, sometimes, for nearly 40 years. Can you do that? You little whining babies. —Franz Wright, 12/20/2009 Blog:Harriet
Now, that’s poetry.
Granted, it’s hyperbolic to say you gave up everything to be a poet. What does that even mean? No one wants to suffer, and to say in hindsight that you suffered for your art is arrogant, because even if you thought it were true, it can never be proven by anyone, anywhere, that the more outrageously you suffer, the better your art will be. There’s no substance to such a “brag.”
We loved your latest Hawaii/Benazir Bhuto dream essay, but we noticed you haven’t been participating in the conversations of other posts on Harriet.
It’s not enough to just send missives.
You need to be present.
That blog needs your help.
And you can help yourself by sharpening your intellectual teeth there.
I know there’s not much to choose from. Harriet doesn’t have much going on.
Perhaps you feel intimidated.
Allow us to break down for you a recent Harriet post and comments.
A post by Kenneth Goldsmith quotes Christian Bok (it’s the one with the guy who looks like he’s got indigestion, holding a book in front of the mike, blue background).
Christian Bok is a Canadian professor who wrote a best-selling novel consisting of chapters which use only one vowel. He read the dictionary five times before he wrote it. That’s all you need to know about him, really. Not particularly original, he’s one of those contemporary exotics doing wild experiments in the corner of some ancient fingernail.
Let’s look at the key portion of the lengthy Bok quotation in Goldsmith’s Harriet post.
We”ll look at it in two parts.
First part:
“I’m probably technically oriented and it seems to me that among the poets that I know, many are very lazy and very dumb. I always joke with my students that poetry couldn’t possibly be as hard as they think it is, because if it were as hard as they thought it was, poets wouldn’t do it. Really, they’re the laziest, stupidest people I know. They became poets in part because they were demoted to that job, right? You should never tell your students to write what they know because, of course, they know nothing: they’re poets! If they knew something, they’d be in that discipline actually doing it: they’d be in history or physics or math or business or whatever it is where they could excel.”
Don’t be freaked out by this, Amber. It’s pretty simple.
This is lifted right from the Greek philosopher Plato: “If they [the poets] knew something, they’d be in that discipline and actually doing it: they’d be in history or physics or math or business or whatever…”
Plato’s argument is quite sound and the only decent refutation of Plato’s point of view comes in the form of poems—by poets who happened to be very much tinged with Platonism themselves: Dante, Milton, Shakespeare, Shelley, and Keats–which is all that can be expected.
Your typical inferior poet, however, becomes upset when they hear Plato’s argument. They’re not up to Plato’s challenge.
This is the first part of Bok’s quote you need to understand.
Here’s the second part (as quoted by Kenneth Goldsmith in his Harriet post) :
“I find this very distressing that the challenge of being a poet in effect to showcase something wondrous or uncanny, if not sublime, about the use of language itself, that we tend to think that because we’re conditioned to use language every day as part of a social contract, we should all be incipient poets, when in fact people have actually dedicated years or decades of their lives to this kind of practice in order to become adept at it and I think that craft and technique are part of that. If poetry weren’t informed by models of craft then nobody would need take a creative writing course. I joke with my students again that if it was simply a matter of saying, “You know you’ve written a good poem just because; you’ll know it was a good poem when it happens.” To me, that’s tantamount to telling your students that “You should just use the force, Luke” in order to write a poem. I don’t think it’s very helpful. But to be able to say “Here’s a series of rules of thumb that always work under all circumstances and if you adopt them slavishly, blindly, you can always be assured of writing something, producing something of merit.”
Again, this doesn’t require much thought.
Here Bok is making use of the Greek philosopher, Aristotle. Aristotle didn’t ban the poets from his ideal “Republic” as Plato did. Aristotle accepted poetry as something humans do, and focused on whether it is done well, or badly.
Aristotle would not have accepted the notion we are all poets, and Bok, when he mentions “people have dedicated years or decades of their lives to this kind of practice…” is implicitly agreeing with the philosopher.
Bok didn’t mention this, but I want to mention it to you: Aristotle did pay heed to Plato’s objection that poetry makes us “soft” with fake emotionalism; Aristotle got around Plato’s objection by saying that poetry’s indulgence in emotionalism purges these emotions from us. Aristotle managed to turn a drawback into a virtue.
But here is why Platonic poets tend to be the best: They take to heart Plato’s objection, rather than using Aristotle’s glib betrayal of it.
As soon as you start believing in Aristotle’s purging theory (Catharsis) you make a fatal error; you buy into the idea that poetry’s emotion is a separate thing from it, and then you essentially become a pedantic, doctrinaire kind of poet.
Anyway, the important point that Bok is making in the second part of the quote here is the Aristotelian one: there’s a proper way and form and method to making poetry.
As he did with the purging theory, Aristotle resorts to a doctrinaire pedantry in order to ‘get one past’ his master (Plato was Aristotle’s teacher).
This is important to understand, Amber. You’ve got to go Greek, and you’ve got two choices, Plato’s truly challenging road, or Aristotle’s pedantic road. Most people don’t go Greek at all and groan under both Plato and Aristotle. But you can’t escape them, really.
You can see this in the reactions to Bok in the comments to Goldsmith’s post:
Carolyn, the first one to comment seriously, writes this, “I honor people’s attempts to express themselves in whatever manner suits them.”
Here is the typical modern response. As you can see from her statement, and from what I told you above, she rejects Plato and Aristotle. She has no Greek. She is ignorant. You can ignore these people. Better to be a pedant than to be someone who says ‘express yourself in whatever manner suits you.’ This point of view loses in philosophy what it gains in being nice. It is a tempting vice, this point of view. Avoid it at all costs.
Silem’s post #7 basically sums up the Plato and Aristotle positions and then repeats Bok’s mention of “the uncanny,” which is largely the basis of Romanticism: the “Sublime,” produced when Platonism contradicts itself and produces poetry–a sly but positive phenomenon which I alluded to above. As Longinus said in his famous treatise “On the Sublime” 3rd century, AD, the sublime is both “moral” and “fearful.” The sublime is a contradictory idea–which is the secret of its religious power and appeal.
Comment #8 is by Henry Gould. We can sum up all his comments this way: Mumble.
Comment #9 is by Kent Johnson, who is poison. Here’s a sample. It should make you shudder:
“I strongly suspect that from the bourgeoning technical-hip formation represented by Bok and Mohammad (and both of them very brilliant, to be sure) a more elevated measure of professional status for the poetic vocation will come, via ever more sharply defined knowledge-sets and rigorously applied instrumental techniques.”
Ugh.
Gary Fitzgerald made a witty remark, but was buried by negative votes.
Conrad and ZZZZ had a brief dispute on what position the “avant garde” should take in relation to the mainstream. Pedestrian stuff, really. Not worth your while.
The remaining comments fizzle away into inconsequence.
Maybe Terreson will add something interesting.
(But we’d rather not encourage him.)
And there you have it, Amber. Harriet 101. I hope this helps!
Scarriet 