I
recently read a 600-page introduction to modern poetry (for fun), so I've had that on my mind lately. The book had a lot of dry parts
(as you might imagine) but I enjoyed learning about poets I've never heard of
before or getting some of my misconceptions of certain poets/movements sorted
out.
I am by
no means an expert -- there are many poets I haven't read, and many others who
I've only read a bit of. But I've been reading poetry for several years now, and the modern period is what I am most comfortable with and arguably like best. I am not up-to-date enough on contemporary
poetry to make a list of anything more recent than 1970 (and there is a lot to
keep track of -- damn internet/damn globalization), but one day I will be. For now, I'll share my knowledge and interest in poets most active from about 1890-1970, which includes the period preceding modernism and the bulk of post-modernism as well. I realize this is well past the scope of what most scholars consider to be modern, so if you are a scholar you can ignore the term and just think "he's listing poets he likes from (approximately) an 80-year period."
It is also
my firm belief that people should read more poetry. Attention spans and TV are
big competition, but for people generally interested in literature, art and
self-expression, poetry is really worth it, and it’s much less of a commitment than novels. I get that no one has the time to read War and Peace, but most poems
in the past 100 years are one page or shorter, and good poems can stimulate
your thoughts or emotions in only a moment.
So for poetry
enthusiasts old and new, here are ten "modern" poets I'd recommend:
E. E.
Cummings
And if i sing you are my voice,
"hate blows a bubble of despair into"Cummings was the first poet I read intensely, and many of his poems are locked in as all-time favourites of mine. His ideas and emotions are often ordinary, but he expresses them in ways that are really novel, often because of his syntactical inversions and somewhat personal use of symbols. You can understand the deeper meaning by thinking past what he’s saying to what's implied.
My
favourite line, from one of his sonnets, is the one quoted above, "And if i sing you are my voice,". Here, singing can mean an artistic eruption or any sort of
self-expression, or it can mean a general feeling of jubilee. The lover in the
poem is the vehicle that allows the speaker to have this eruption. Many of us
lovers can relate to the feeling that the one we love lets us express our
creativity or individuality in ecstatic ways.
Although
I like his political or heavily experimental poems less, I was able to get into
him (and poetry in general) because of the payoff I felt I received when I
spent some time reading and re-reading his poems.
Gwendolyn
Brooks
Since Number Five is out of the bathroom now,We think of lukewarm water, hope to get in it.
"kitchenette building"
Many of
Brooks' poems have an inner-city feel that most other poets of this time period don't have and cannot fake. If some aristocrat from New England wrote a poem like "kitchenette
building", for example, I doubt that he could do it convincingly.
Brooks has a few poems that are still talked about and recited, such as "We Real Cool",
but she wrote lots more that isn't talked about much. Reading thru a collection
of hers, it's easy to see the quality in her writing and pick your own
favourites. Maybe it's from growing up downtown, but her poems have always
seemed a lot more real to me than most other modern poets.
Charles
Bukowski
" ...I didn't fly all theway to Galveston to play
chess."
"the 6 foot goddess"
Dying within the last twenty years, Bukowski gets the least amount of love from critics
out of all the poets on this list, though he’s still popular with readers.
Someone once told me that he was the most stolen author from the Ottawa
Chapters. He has so many excellent poems I'm not even going to link any here,
but I would recommend reading him for an hour straight, sober, drunk, high,
whatever.
His
stories (in poems) have a way of taking you over, mostly thru his voice but
also thru his unabashed confidence in subject matter. He will tell you all the
details, which frankly is refreshing. He might be unpolished, but when you read
Bukowski, you really feel like you know Bukowski. The first book of his I
picked up, Sometimes you get so alone it just makes sense, isn't nearly as good as slightly earlier Love is a dog from hell. Like him or not, I highly
recommend spending some time with him to feel his persona fully take control.
He does that better than perhaps any poet I have ever read.
T. S.
Eliot
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
"The Hollow Men"
He gets called
the father of modern poetry, even though he emerged after it commenced. I don't
respect T.S. Eliot as much as many others do, but I still find a handful of his
poems completely engrossing. The Waste Land and "The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock" are two of the
finest poems written in English as far as I'm concerned, and he has a handful
of other poems that are also quite excellent.
The main problem
I have with Eliot is that he was a major elitist and assumed that certain types
of poems should be more heralded than others. I've read many of his nonfiction
pieces, like "Tradition and the Individual
Talent", and he makes some good points, but I can't help but think he
must have been kind of an asshole.
Nevertheless,
he completely revolutionized poetry, for better or for worse, and his allusions create a world that you can get enveloped in. Even if many of his
lines are allusions to other works of art, they can still stand on their own
(most of the time), and some of those lines I find myself remembering and
re-reading.
Pablo
Neruda
I no longer love her, that's certain, but maybe I love her.Love is so short, forgetting is so long.
Some
argue the best poet of all-time, Neruda is one of the first poets I ever
actively read. Around the time when I started reading poetry, I took one of
those bizarre online quizzes that tell you "What kind of dog you are," or in
this case it was "what sad depressing poem are YOU?!". I answered
about four scientifically rigorous questions and got "Tonight
I Can Write the Saddest Lines", one of approximately four poem options
you could land on.
Unfortunately,
with translated poems you never get the full feel for the work like you would
in the original, and I find that, at times, Neruda borders on the cliche,
though I can't be sure how much of that is Neruda and how much is bad
translation. Still, the reposeful feel of his poems can sweep you away as if
sitting by a fire in some cottage where you never have to work or feel tired
again.
Frank
O'Hara
there in the hall, flat on a sheet of blood that
ran down the stairs.
Some of
his poems that I read I find so-so, but others offer images/scenarios that make
you re-read them and try to dissect the situation that he paints. He has a New
York feel about him which makes me a bit weak in the knees, since I associate
that with some idealized version of alcohol, drugs, easy women and the 1950s
that might be less cool in reality. This poem is excellent and haunting.
Wilfrid
Owen
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
I used to
hate the so-called war poets until I read Owen. He died young in World War One,
but he wrote some very good poems before he did. He didn't write free-verse,
but there are some innovative elements to his work, namely his oft-gruesome
subject matter and the variation of stanza lengths. "Dulce et Decorum
Est" is his best and
most recognized poem; the second stanza and proceeding couplet make such
excellent use of imagery that they stand up 100 years later.
Fernando
Pessoa
#87 in The Book of Disquiet
Fernando Pessoa’s work survives translation surprisingly well. I was first introduced to Pessoa through Erin Moure's excellent book Sheep's Vigil by a Fervent Person, which I would recommend to anyone who likes poetry. I haven't read all his stuff, but from what I have read he seems to have an uncanny ability to get into the minds of his speakers, who seem to have various personalities (this is actually a huge point about Pessoa -- read up on his heteronyms). He can express complicated ideas in a way the reader can relate and take you swimming thru his mind with seeming ease. He can sweep you away, not in the cliche romantic way, but in the sitting-on-the-edge-of-your-seat way.
Gertrude
Stein
"A SUBSTANCE IN A CUSHION."
Another
poet who really gets in your head is Gertrude Stein. Tender Buttons is full of what I consider to be
largely nonsense, but I can see how some of the prose in it is tied to the
objects and food that serve as sub-titles throughout the book. The way her
prose poems flow gets stuck in my head is like an annoying song that you can't
help but repeatedly sing, and some of the phrases she unleashes are still
surprising 100 years later.
From a
creative standpoint, I think Stein is an excellent writer, but it’s her rhythm
that really makes me interested. Try reading her aloud for several minutes.
Like Bukowski, she can really overwhelm you, and that kind of artistic power I
find invigorating and mystifying.
William
C. Williams
dance naked, grotesquelybefore my mirror
waving my shirt round my head
and singing softly to myself
"Danse Russe"
Often considered
an ideological opponent to T.S. Eliot, William C. Williams was a doctor as well
as a poet, which puts him in a pretty select group. Williams preferred to use
the local and common in his poems instead of grandiose allusions like Eliot
or syntactical play like Stein. I'm not a fan of his most famous poem, "The Red Wheelbarrow", but he has countless others that I love dearly
because of their simple, specific images. The images are easy to picture and
relate to, but the ideas they suggest can be complex or profound.
I prefer
poetry that is accessible to most educated people but that, for the detailed
observer and analyzer, offers more. I think that is true of Williams.
And a few
honourable mentions:
Stanley
Kunitz
Kunitz is
a poet who is full of quality work, though none of the individual poems strike
me so much as to read and re-read them. Perhaps if I spent more time with him,
he would become a favourite. His clarity of expression makes him easy to like.
Mina Loy
An
interesting poet/artist who had many admirers more famous than her, Mina Loy
published avant-garde poems that are still interesting today. Her writing is
quite different from many others of her time period, though you can see various
influences within her work. Didn't publish much in terms of collections of her
own work -- most of the work she published was in literary journals and anthologies.
Marianne
Moore
I never
really got into her, but her style is fierce and original. Syllabic metre is
always interesting, but she strikes me most with her unique vocabulary and
unexpected comparisons. Ironically, this particular strength makes her writing tougher
to relate to.
Jean
Toomer
Toomer is
someone who I just need to read more. Some of his poems have had a
lasting impression on me or at least make me smile and nod. I recommend "Her Lips
Are Copper Wire".
Elinor
Wylie
I picked
up a book of hers and wasn't very impressed, but her poem "Wild Peaches" remains a favourite of mine for its vivid imagery and imagination,
framed in a style that was old-school even at the time. “Wild Peaches” cultivates
a sort of local colour that sweeps you into the environment.
a.m.k. is a poet, blogger, technical writer, and editor of academic journals. He lives with his poetry books in Centretown.
[Images are all from the authors' Wikipedia pages.]
Thanks for posting this.
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