Poetry Hit Rate

luka

Well-known member
just for the record, i am better than mina loy.
also pounds translations of chinese poets turn out to be far better than i originally thought.
 

empty mirror

remember the jackalope
the Maximus Poems are very good
bear in mind i do like zukovsky but i don't think those two can be compared
zukovsky is stuck on language more than olson
olson is stuck on time

Maximus has more in common with Pound's Cantos or even Moby Dick or Dos Passos' prose

Maximus is a retelling of the history of America in poetry
exploring its beginnings in the whaling towns in the Northeast
he combines historical documents, local lore, the vernacular, the bard's voice, poetry for the page-----mix in some personal narrative/nostalgia

i am maybe 3/4 of the way into it. been reading it for more than a year

again, i am not sure it would be of much interest to non-US readers
but it surely resonates for a an Eastern-Seaboard dweller such as myself



id also be interested to know if anyone here has made any headway with olson. i'm considering buying maximus when im in the uk but im not sure its worth my while. i don't like any of the people associated with him, not even bunting or zukovsky, both of whom get a lot of love from people whose opinions i respect.
i enjoy david jones very much. i have all his books, which i consider an acheivement in itself. they're not easy to come by.
i've got the whole first section of the anathemata typed out if anyones interested in having a look.
 

craner

Beast of Burden
also pounds translations of chinese poets turn out to be far better than i originally thought.

Eh? What made you suddenly change your mind about that? I can't keep up with you.

Kenneth Rexroth's are quite good.
 

luka

Well-known member
empty mirror, do you just plough through it? how do you approach the thing? it seems very heavy going, and he doesn't even seem to have the outbursts of music and lyricism which enliven the cantos, or at least, not to the same degree, or with the same facility.
 

craner

Beast of Burden
I'm amazed you persist with these boys, they seem to give you high blood pressure.

You can dance around Maximus, I'm sure. I don't think it's meant to accrete like sediment, but who knows? Some of it gets silly, like when he starts to reproduce discarded shopping lists.
 

empty mirror

remember the jackalope
RE: maximus

i guess the parts the interest me get a closer reading
and the more esoteric (or as craner noted, quotidian) bits i sort of gloss over

your brain will separate the wheat from the chaff
 

sufi

lala
: “Λέγουσιν They say / ἃ θέλουσιν What they like /
λεγέτωσαν Let them say it /
οὐ μέλι μοι I don’t care /
σὺ φίλι με Go on, love me /
συνφέρι σοι It does you good.”
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2...odern-poetry-began-much-earlier-than-believed zzzz sorry the guardian is so fucking boring
 
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sufi

lala

Confession




So anyway, I killed Boris Johnson.
You know who he is, yeh?
Not much of a crime, really.
It was, I dunno, 2005, maybe 2006
he was on his bike
going down the Charing Cross Road
and me, I was on foot, of course.
Anyway, there was a bus behind him
and I took my chance. I pushed him under
the bus went over and then he was dead.
Noone saw me. Noone stopped me.
Everything that’s happened since has been
a dream. A deep and horrible dream.
Wake up. For the sake of us all, wake up.
 

sus

Well-known member
a discussion at work eventually came round to this: is it possible to actually like poetry or do people only like individual poems? i've tried hard and i must have a hundred collections but even the 'big boys' - Hughes, Heaney, Larkin, Dylan Thomas, Baudelaire,Rimbaud, Shakespeare - seem to have an awful lot of filler in amongst all the hits. despite the fact that i've always considered myself as someone who likes poetry i can't really claim to like more than 50 poems...am i the only one or is quality control something that poetry thinks it transcends?
I'm sorry that nobody engaged with your topic Loki, and just used it as a general poetry pastebin. This is exactly my experience with poetry as well. O'Hara has maybe three good poems. Elliot has a handful. Auden has a few. Etc etc. But the corpus?? Are you kidding?? So much filler. I never understand it. Why isn't their production function uniformly brilliant! Poets are a big waste of space. Except for every once in a while, they put out a poem and it justifies their sorry existence. But 99% of the time they are net negatives, life-suckers rather than life-givers. I believe everything I have said here in full and without reserve or qualification.
 

luka

Well-known member
i inspired him a lot to be a writer but of course hes never helped me out in return. im not bitter though, g9ood luck to him
 

sus

Well-known member
It's because you didn't participate properly in his threads. He's already DM'd me the names of several successful literary agents
 
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