My friend Sean Singer has a Substack called The Sharpener you might enjoy. He sends out ~5 poems a day, M-F. I've discovered several new favorite poets this way, and IMO Sean has good taste. Might help with the "how do I make sure I won't hate this book" problem. There's a paid version that includes a craft essay once a week, but the poems are free.
When I read high literature, my experience is something like this: it is like a larger cup to pour from myself into, and that might feel dull at first when the poem is empty, but if I sit with it for an hour it keeps filling and filling, whereas lower entertainment is filled up immediately. And the thing is: when the cup is full, and the cup is large, oh, does it shake me. I invest every word with layers of meaning and memory and emotion and it becomes almost too much to bare.
One of my problems with a lot of contemporary poetry is they all do the thing where they start with the quotidian and end on the cosmic, like it starts out with the poet washing dishes and ends with Death or Time or the Universe or whatever. Once you start noticing this you'll see it everywhere. Obviously this is a very real phenomenon of being human and great poets from Blake to Berryman have used it effectively but god, it's like a formula now. The Medvedev one just lets the bleak joke hang in the air.
Oh yeah they love that! Yeah it's not anything bad about any poem in particular, it's just the poemyness of them, especially when you're faced with them all lined up in a row in slim little volumes. Very difficult for any one of them to stand out
But that’s true of everything, Shakespeare’s plays, novels, songs. The older forms like the sonnet even guide you to that, with the turn or the ending couplet. I’m trying to think of any work where it goes general to specific. Probably some, but not coming up with any right now.
Even the Medvedev poem has something of that: from “the president is dead” (a detail with finality) to “the president is still alive” (a generalized, possibly interminable state).
All lyric poems have some movement in them, but not all of them have the very specific, historically contingent maneuvers common to contemporary academic poetry. It's possible neither of us have described those maneuvers very well, but I do know what BP is talking about, and it's not quite the same as the volta we expect in the sonnet
I would say specific to general is the direction of thought. Rilke doesn’t start with you-must-change-your-life in his sonnet and work backwards. Besides, that realization’s supposed to be a surprise, like a punchline (or a punch in the face).
Perhaps the objection is to finding profundity in the wrong places?
Possibly what you’re responding to in the Medvedev poem is that it’s practically a standup bit. And with two punchlines: he’s killed his greatest fan! and the president is still alive, a reversal of his opening statement, although it’s not exactly clear (to me at least) how he knows that. And all this on his birthday too.
Yes, it's very informal, written (or at least translated) in a more colloquial diction. There's a dark humor running through his early poems, all about the corruption of Russian society. For instance he has a good one about the girls he knew in secondary school, who were absolutely beautiful and brilliant, and all they wanted was to make money or to marry a rich guy, and he's wondering how at such an early age they acquired such darkness, and how they don't even acknowledge him when he sees them on the street, but for his part, he's even more embarrassed by them.
My friend Sean Singer has a Substack called The Sharpener you might enjoy. He sends out ~5 poems a day, M-F. I've discovered several new favorite poets this way, and IMO Sean has good taste. Might help with the "how do I make sure I won't hate this book" problem. There's a paid version that includes a craft essay once a week, but the poems are free.
Oooh, I'll check it out
When I read high literature, my experience is something like this: it is like a larger cup to pour from myself into, and that might feel dull at first when the poem is empty, but if I sit with it for an hour it keeps filling and filling, whereas lower entertainment is filled up immediately. And the thing is: when the cup is full, and the cup is large, oh, does it shake me. I invest every word with layers of meaning and memory and emotion and it becomes almost too much to bare.
One of my problems with a lot of contemporary poetry is they all do the thing where they start with the quotidian and end on the cosmic, like it starts out with the poet washing dishes and ends with Death or Time or the Universe or whatever. Once you start noticing this you'll see it everywhere. Obviously this is a very real phenomenon of being human and great poets from Blake to Berryman have used it effectively but god, it's like a formula now. The Medvedev one just lets the bleak joke hang in the air.
Oh yeah they love that! Yeah it's not anything bad about any poem in particular, it's just the poemyness of them, especially when you're faced with them all lined up in a row in slim little volumes. Very difficult for any one of them to stand out
But that’s true of everything, Shakespeare’s plays, novels, songs. The older forms like the sonnet even guide you to that, with the turn or the ending couplet. I’m trying to think of any work where it goes general to specific. Probably some, but not coming up with any right now.
Even the Medvedev poem has something of that: from “the president is dead” (a detail with finality) to “the president is still alive” (a generalized, possibly interminable state).
All lyric poems have some movement in them, but not all of them have the very specific, historically contingent maneuvers common to contemporary academic poetry. It's possible neither of us have described those maneuvers very well, but I do know what BP is talking about, and it's not quite the same as the volta we expect in the sonnet
I would say specific to general is the direction of thought. Rilke doesn’t start with you-must-change-your-life in his sonnet and work backwards. Besides, that realization’s supposed to be a surprise, like a punchline (or a punch in the face).
Perhaps the objection is to finding profundity in the wrong places?
Maybe this would be an example of a modern poem that does that. Going from kids screaming to the Dawn of Man. But I still like this poem.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/55518/the-universe-as-primal-scream
Possibly what you’re responding to in the Medvedev poem is that it’s practically a standup bit. And with two punchlines: he’s killed his greatest fan! and the president is still alive, a reversal of his opening statement, although it’s not exactly clear (to me at least) how he knows that. And all this on his birthday too.
Yes, it's very informal, written (or at least translated) in a more colloquial diction. There's a dark humor running through his early poems, all about the corruption of Russian society. For instance he has a good one about the girls he knew in secondary school, who were absolutely beautiful and brilliant, and all they wanted was to make money or to marry a rich guy, and he's wondering how at such an early age they acquired such darkness, and how they don't even acknowledge him when he sees them on the street, but for his part, he's even more embarrassed by them.