Anthologized

   

As a student, you tend to read poetry in anthologies, and certain poems are often anthologized and so become "the canon" that is taught.  I had to buy the Norton Anthology of Poetry in a college class along with many other undergraduates.

I saw an article on the Most Anthologized Poems of the Last 25 Years. It has the usual suspects on the list. If you look at the top dozen -

1. William Carlos Williams, “The Red Wheelbarrow”
2. T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
3. T. S. Eliot, “The Waste Land”
4. Robert Frost, “Birches”
5. Robert Lowell, “For the Union Dead”
6. Robert Lowell, “Skunk Hour”
7. Ezra Pound, “The River-Merchant’s Wife : a Letter”
8. W. H. Auden, “Musee des Beaux Arts”
9. Elizabeth Bishop, “One Art”
10. Gwendolyn Brooks, “We Real Cool”
11. Emily Dickinson, “Because I could not stop for Death –”
12. Robert Frost, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”

- you'll see poems you read in a classroom, but what you don't see are many contemporary poets and poems. That is partially about publishing, copyright and paying for the reprint rights. Older poems are cheaper or perhaps even free. You will always find public domain poems and classics included in anthologies.

Not that I wouldn't suggest reading all of the top 25 poems. And poetry anthologies are a good way to discover poets that you can then read in their own collections. 

Was there a poet you discovered by reading their work in an anthology?  Add your anthology comments below.

The Love and Hatred of Poetry

If you are a reader of this blog, the chances are that you are NOT a poetry hater. But I discovered a book, THE HATRED OF POETRY, by Ben Lerner that is about those who do hate it.

Lerner is not a hater. He is the author of three books of poems and two novels. But he does feel there are haters.

In a review of the book by Craig Morgan Teicher, he starts by saying:

Although Ben Lerner’s latest book is titled “The Hatred of Poetry,” I am almost certain that poetry is less hated now than it has ever been. I don't think the readers who would be drawn to this book — poetry fans with their dukes up — actually need it at all. And an actual hater of poetry wouldn't get past the first page.

Lerner's book uses Marianne Moore’s poem “Poetry,” for its opening - "I, too, dislike it" but Moore continues:

Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one
discovers in
it after all, a place for the genuine.

As a poet, I meet lots of people who don't like poetry, though "hate" may be too strong verb to use. Blame school or blame poets and poems that plot not to be understood, I think poetery is more popular now than it was in the 20th century. I agree with the reviewer who says that "Poetry is read by a larger number of people than ever before, if only because it is written by more people than ever before, due in large part to the proliferation of MFA programs..."

Yes, it is an incestuous popularity. Poets love poetry. Poets buy poetry books and go to readings. Ask if you give a reading how many people in the audience are poets. A lot. And there are more readers who enjoy poems that allow them in without pain, and enjoy hearing poets read their work and talk about it.

That is always true at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival which celebrates 30 years of gathering those kinds of people this October.

Finally, back to Moore's poem, which concludes:

In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand,
the raw material of poetry in
all its rawness and
that which is on the other hand
genuine, you are interested in poetry.

2015 Best of Poetry Lists

More end-of-year best book lists are being announced. There are the known and "official" best of lists, like the National Book Awards and there are plenty of lesser known ones.

Still time to grab an end-of-year poetry gift for a friend or for yourself.

The GoodReads website has its list of readers' choice book awards, including 20 books of poetry. There are a few titles or poets that I know, but the majority are ones I don't know. There is Felicity by Mary Oliver, but also the winning title, The Dogs I Have Kissed, by Trista Mateer who is "Known for her eponymous blog and her confessional style of writing, this is Trista Mateer's second collection of poetry."



Assuming that the list is simply based on votes by readers of the site, you can either see it as a real list of books readers enjoyed or a chance for lesser-known poets to have their friends vote them up. I'd like to believe it is the former, a kind of crowdsourced what-I-read-and-liked list. Either way, it brought to my attention some books I would not have seen otherwise.

Another list of 8 comes via the Flavorwire website.  

I occasionally look at Amazon's list of best-selling poetry books because it does mean something to know what people are buying. That list always has titles that seem like they were purchased by students for a class (lots of anthologies) and also a bunch of current titles. I'm not a big buyer of anthologies, but I can see someone buying 100 Best-Loved Poems in the way that I once bought the Miles Davis "Greatest Hits" album (knowing he never had any "hits") in the hope of getting the best in one place.

A Poet's Glossary

Looking through A Poet's Glossary, by poet Edward Hirsch, certainly offers many possibilities for writing prompts. Hirsch has put together a very international collection of terms from A (as in abededarian) to Z (zeugma).

You might try writing a Bedouin women’s ghinnawa (highly stylized verses) or a style of gentle banter that originated as a sung verbal duel in the West Indies called picong.

There are also the more familiar terms that we were introduced to in school.

The book has been called a followup to Edward Hirsch’s best-selling book How to Read a Poem: And Fall in Love with Poetry from 1999 which contained a useful but limited  glossary.

For example, Hirsch defines "couplet" as two successive lines of poetry, usually rhymed (aa), which has been an elemental stanzaic unit—a couple, a pairing—as long as there has been written rhyming poetry in English. 

We call a couplet closed when the sense and syntax come to a conclusion or strong pause at the end of the second line, thus giving a feeling of self-containment and enclosure, as in the first lines of “To His Coy Mistress”:

Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, Lady, were no crime.

We call a couplet open when the sense carries forward past the second line into the next line or lines, as in the beginning of Keats’s Endymion (1818):

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness, but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep

     Full of sweet dreams . . .

Ben Jonson told William Drummond that he deemed couplets “the brav­est Sort of Verses, especially when they are broken.” All two-line stanzas in English carry the vestigial memory of closed or open couplets.

In an interview, Hirsch explained his intent for the glossary:

I see this as a book for the initiated as well as for the uninitiated reader. People who don’t know much about poetry can find what they need to know about certain basics, like the nature of the line or the stanza, or the characteristics of a form, like the ghazal or the sestina. But there are also a lot of things in this book that even widely read readers of poetry may not know much about because they are outside our tradition. So, for example, you might not know to look up a form of African praise poem called the oríkì. If you care to think about praise poetry—what it is, how it functions—then the oríkì has a lot to tell you. To help the reader along different pathways, I’ve added “See also” at the bottom of every entry.

Curious about the abecedarian and zeugma?

Poetry - What Sells?

I clicked a link today to the Poetry Bestsellers on Amazon.com and was surprised by the results (which change every hour).

Surprise #1: A lot of Kindle versions of classics including books like the King James Bible and The Iliad.

The Julie Andrews' Collection of Poems, Songs, and Lullabies was there, along with the Fagles translation of The Odyssey and the movie tie-in Bright Star: Love Letters and Poems of John Keats to Fanny Brawne.

Surprise #2: I had to go to #33 to find a book of real contemporary poetry - Evidence by Mary Oliver.

Salting the Ocean

"How should we use poetry?" people sometimes ask poet Naomi Shihab Nye.

She responds, "Read it! Share it with one another! Find poems that make you resonate. Different poems will do this for every person. We 'use poetry' to restore us to feeling, revitalize our own speech, awaken empathy."

Over the past 25 years Nye has "used poetry" in classroom workshops in schools all over the country. In this lush, amusing, and touching anthology, Salting the Ocean: 100 Poems by Young Poets, she gathers 100 poems and divides them into four groupings: "My Shadow Is an Ant's Night" (poems about the self and the inner world), "Think How Many Stories Are in Your Shirt" (about where we live), "My Grandma Squashes Roaches with Her Hand" (about family), and "Silence Is Like a Tractor Moving the Whole World" (about the imagination). Students in grades 1 through 12 are represented in this anthology, brilliantly illustrated by the talented Coretta Scott King Honor recipient Ashley Bryan.

These young poets have mostly grown up, now, to become dentists and actors and construction workers, but the purity of their work lives on.

from an Amazon.com Review by Emilie Coulter

Sample poem:

"One" by Butch McElroy

We had a
'Most commonly misspelled word'
Spelling test
Yesterday in English,
Fourth Period.
I commonly misspelled them all.
Except one.
Loneliness
Was the only one I got right.

Two Summer Poetry Picks

Alan Cheuse's Summer Book Picks from NPR includes these 2 books of poetry (Hurrah for critics who include poetry on their summer reading lists!)



Sonata Mulattica by Rita Dove

...And brava, too, for former Poet Laureate Rita Dove's Sonata Mulattica, a book-length group of poems about the life of George Polgreen Bridgetower, an African-European who played violin with Beethoven and then had a falling out with the great man over a woman. Dove tries to get under the skin of this unique and compelling character in a series of smart — sometimes even smart-aleck — musical verses.

Read an excerpt from Sonata Mulattica




Shannon: A Poem of the Lewis and Clark Expedition by Campbell McGrath

Excerpt from 'Shannon: A Poem of the Lewis and Clark Expedition'

Campbell McGrath's book-length poem Shannon recounts the story of young George Shannon, the Pennsylvania-born teenager who was the youngest member of the Lewis and Clark expedition. McGrath's dramatizes George's 16 days of wandering across the Great American Desert alone after getting separated from the main group of explorers. The boy studies the land, he studies his past, he studies his heart and, as poet McGrath would have it, fills entire days (and pages) with sightings of "buffalo … buffalo … buffalo …."

Endpoint and Other Poems by John Updike

Endpoint and Other Poems
 by John Updike

"A stunning collection of poems that John Updike wrote during the last seven years of his life and put together only weeks before he died for this, his final book.

The opening sequence, “Endpoint,” is made up of a series of connected poems written on the occasions of his recent birthdays and culminates in his confrontation with his final illness. He looks back on the boy that he was, on the family, the small town, the people, and the circumstances that fed his love of writing, and he finds endless delight and solace in “turning the oddities of life into words.”

“Other Poems” range from the fanciful (what would it be like to be a stolen Rembrandt painting? he muses) to the celebratory, capturing the flux of life. A section of sonnets follows, some inspired by travels to distant lands, others celebrating the idiosyncrasies of nature in his own backyard.

For John Updike, the writing of poetry was always a special joy, and this final collection is an eloquent and moving testament to the life of this extraordinary writer."

via Amazon

More Poets Wish List

When a non-poet friend asked what she should buy a poet friend as a holiday gift, I was initially stumped. Just buy them something they like - What's the difference if the person is a poet? But she wanted to buy something "poetic."

So, I crowdsourced it and posted a list as this blog's current poll. It's my own Top 10, but... What would make your wish list?

The bolded items below are the current top 5, but we need votes - otherwise, you may get a tie, wallet or a nutcracker this season! Hey, I'll take a writing getaway - but I don't think Amazon stocks those - try this link for some getaways

1. poetry books (of poems, about poetry, about writing or poets)
   
2. poetry read on audio
3. blank books for writing
4. music that is inspirational
5. gourmet food (yes, that can be inspirational!)
6. coffee / tea
7. wine or other beverages
8. a writing getaway (pricey but very cool)
9. a Kindle book reader
   
10. writing tools (pens, notebooks, magnetic poetry..)

Suggestions?

A Poet Wish List

A friend of mine (not a poet) recently asked me, "Ken, you're a poet. What would a poet like to get as a gift?"

Well, my first thought was that they want the same things as everyone else. (Poets are not really that strange.) But, I know what she meant. What kinds of things with a connection to poetry or writing would someone who writes poetry enjoy getting?

I gave it some thought and emailed a list and a few suggestions. I added that list to this blog on the home page as the current poll.

• poetry books (of poems, about poetry, about writing or poets)
• poetry read on audio
• blank books for writing
• music that is inspirational
• gourmet food (yes, that can be inspirational!)
• coffee / tea
• wine or other beverages
• a writing getaway (pricey but very cool)
• a Kindle book reader
  
• writing tools (pens, notebooks, magnetic poetry..)

Now, I ask you - vote in the poll and, even better, post a comment with some specifics. What would make your wish list: music that gets you writing, a place you'd like to go and write, a blank book, special pen, beverage... What book of poems would you like to get this holiday season? Is there a movie that works especially well for poets?

New Poems? (Ballistics by Billy Collins)

I see that Billy Collins has a new collection of poems coming out in September. Sure to be a good seller at the Dodge Poetry Festival that month.

I'm a Collins fan. I bought The Apple That Astonished Paris in 1990 (it came out in 1988) which is probably before many readers knew of his work. He started getting a lot more attention in the later years of the last century (Picnic, Lightning in 1998) and really came to the front when he was appointed (surprisingly) Poet Laureate in 2001.

I was lucky enough to spend a week with Collins when he taught a poetry workshop on Long Island. The classes were great. The discussions were lively. He revealed the secret of the paradelle to us and we vowed to help keep it a secret. (We failed.) But the best part was our nightly sessions in a Southampton bar.

So, I look forward to his new book. But, I also wonder about this whole idea of a "new book" of poems from Collins or any leading poet.

You don't get books of poetry published unless you have already published most of them in periodicals.

I don't know what the table of contents for the new book looks like, but I suspect a lot of the new poems are ones I have already read and/or heard him read: maybe "Brightly Colored Boats Upturned on the Banks of the Charles," "August," "January in Paris," ( I recall the origin being in the Paul Valery quote "Poems are never completed, they are only abandoned") "The Lodger," "On Not Finding You at Home," "The Lanyard," "The Order of the Day," "Flock," "Constellations," "Carry," "Genius" and others. If you wanted to bother searching online, you could find a lot of them - for example, "The Breather" is on the Poetry magazine site. I have heard him read "Revenant" which is in the voice of a dog who was put to sleep, and it always gets a good reaction and laughs, so that's probably in there.

The title poem was one I heard him read back in 2005 on Garrison Keillor's Prairie Home Companion radio show. (Give a listen yourself.) "Ballistics" is based on the famous Harold Edgerton photograph of a bullet passing through a book and is echoed on the new book's cover.

I'm not saying there's nothing new in books of new poetry, but if you follow a poet's work, go to readings and read magazines, journals and online, you probably have encountered the poems before.

Still, buyers of poetry books are a small but solid consumer base. We like to have the book in our hands. We like to buy them at readings. We like to get them signed by the poet. Ballistics will sell well. Book sales may be down, but I think poetry will hold steady.


Suggested Link: Take a look at the series of Collins' poems that were animated at BCactionpoet.org