Yes, this is a bizarre exercise, but it fits with a couple of messages I’ve been getting from Writing Division folks over this past year — and what better time to explore the bizarre and non-urgent than after the semester is complete.
So the purpose of this discussion — to be held in the Soarats Forums that you can reach by following the link at the bottom of this blogpost — is to brainstorm a scaffolded list of books of poetry/poets/poems that prose writers might read to feel a bit more native in the wilderness of non-prose.
By a “scaffold” I refer to its pedagogical rather than execution sense: a prose writer/reader might want to start reading some of the poets in Column A (Anne Carson, Luis Glück, TS Eliot, Pound, Larkin, etc.) as a means of getting the background to tackling Column B (Michael Palmer, Jacques Roubaud….), eventually reaching Column Z (John Ashbery or someone). There are a number of highways and bi-ways — New York School, language-poets (do they still have those), etc. — so this discussion will generate different kinds of lists with specific purposes. (What order of John Ashbery books to read, what order of Pound’s Cantos to read, a chronological list of poems to prove that the language poets deserve a negative or positive reaction, etc.)
This is also of course an evangelical opportunity for the poets — you’ve been hording the good stuff and us prose-emphasizing readers/writers are eager to climb up the mountain for your sage advice. It is safely assumed that a good poet can tackle reading — and writing — sophisticated prose, but many of us prose folks are flummoxed when we try to read poems in the same darned literary magazines our stories, essays, etc appear in (or at least aim that they appear).
This entire discussion emerges from this comment (and I’ll leave it anonymous for now):
“I read poetry in college — TS Eliot, Pound, Keats, Wordsworth, Coleridge, etc. — but now I pick up a good literary magazine and take a look at a poet who has been getting a lot of attention, and I feel like I haven’t learned how to read this stuff.” (Anonymous)
And just to get this out of the way, go ahead and point at me and laugh and say “that guy doesn’t understand poetry/what an un/sophisticate” so we don’t waste any more energy talking trash.
So click below and go crazy.
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