POETS. Do they still exist?

eminem - 'stan'
rakim
krs one
melle mel
etc

When exactly was poetry a populist art form?

ofcourse people are still writing poetry. vacuous ways to pass the time for these vacuous times have overshadowed endeavors which truly reward and enrich us... but the form survives, maybe less visible than other times.

when i was a kid I loved old Chinese poems my grandfather would read to me, there is a feeling in them which informs my aesthetic decisions today - everything from painting to design to dj.

and during the teenage years I really liked Ginsberg and the rest of the beats...

recently I've been reading off and on a Polish poet from the 50s and a contemporary Afgan poet who recently moved to California. I don't always remember to pick up these books but when I do I'm always touched by how effective and powerful and just enjoyable it is to read.

i'm a big fan of the neo-victorian absurdist Sir Percy Vere, i'll try and find a link, bear with me....

he's an object of ridicule in the arts establishment, i think i'm his only fan. i first saw him reading his poems in a pub in whitstable (neptune) and someone chucked their pint over him. i think thats what endeared me to him. the writing is completely over the top, hysterical, purple and prolix, but i like the jokes.

http://sir-percy.blogspot.com/

really nice...

George Elliott Clarke

Local celebrity of some repute. I saw him read at university in St. John's, NF. Most of his stuff deals with his experiences being black in rural Canada. He seems to have made a decent living at it anyway.

I've been reading Iranian poet Majid Naficy, in exile or just expat in California. very good...

There is a huge, huge number of poets writing in the US today, and there are probably more poetry journals, small publishers, and new poems appearing than ever before. It is an entire universe, one that can be cracked by reading blogs, spending time in bookstores and libraries with good poetry sections, and perhaps quickest of all, by hanging around with young writers. Some will complain that the entire enterprise is academically situated (and it is, no doubt about it), and rather hermetic, but still . . . there is an enormous amount of new poetry being published today, from the ultra avant-garde side to the quaint rural to everything in between.

Roger Mexico said:

When exactly was poetry a populist art form?

Click to expand...

good question - the answer of course being that it never has been. it probably is fair to say that poetry enjoys an especially low profile at the moment, with the exception of those risible and utterly objectionable themed "anthologies" - Poems To Fall in Love To/Break Up To etc. the lowest of the low, a prostitution of frequently great poems, dragging art down to the lowest common denominator, offering people cheapened emotional responses on a plate, removing all subtlety and power from the form...and so of course they sell fantastically well.

most of the Big Names (Heaney, Duffy, Muldoon and, worse, Paulin) are fairly weak - shit. my old tutor craig raine is a great critic but aside from the odd gem (e.g. 'Arsehole') his poetry isn't much cop.

not contemporary, but fairly recent, and brilliant, is Elizabeth Bishop.

everyone should read Christopher Logue's translations of Homer - a real high point of late 20th C art.

another good poetry translation, actually, is heaney's modern english version of the medieval scots poet Robert Henryson's /Testament of Criseyde/ - unfortunately the only editions of this available cost about 300 pounds....

there's a dating website aimed at writers of romantic poetry. sorry can't remember the name.

"Crush" by a US poet called Richard Siken is awesome, he's championed by Louise Gluck, who you should also check out if you haven't heard of her, she's like the US poet(te?) laureate. Fabulously depressing and funny.