Poetry discussion by contemporary poets

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

Comments anybody?
As can be readily seen, the field of writing classed as Poetry is massively broad and deep!
With as much controversy as is life in general and the world at large!
I found the admission about the better contemporary poets being female quite enlightening and one I must delve further into to verify if made as a sound judgment. I do not negate that as a possibility but have not enough knowledge of contemporary poetry as I do of the classic poetry of the giants known and praised the world over..
Be it readily admitted that I do not attempt to mimic other poets be they famous or even talented unknowns.
I stubbornly follow my own path and measure in my writings be it for good or ill. . Tyr

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3A. On May 24, 2009 at 12:21 am Terreson wrote:
Man, this thread is so rich it makes me want to go out to a local Mexican restaurant, a favorite watering hole among local professionals, and order two top shelf margueritas. Initial blog entry is juicy. The ensuing conversation with its ideological lines drawn fascinating. And, rather to be expected, there is Thomas Brady championing the poetry of Millay like some good feminist. Elsewhere on this forum he has expressed perfect dismissiveness of such women poets as H.D., Mina Loy, Marianne Moore, and Laura Riding. But that is all silly stuff, perfectly inconsequential.
Martin Earl, here is what I get from your blog entry. Mind you, I am having to dig a little here. Your entry relies a bit much on short-hand for its thinking. You are not saying, categorically, women are better poets than are men. But you are saying there is a certain capacity for poetry, and for poetry comprehension, women poets have a main line to that men poets do not constitutionally have. And I agree. (It would have been beneficial, by the way, had you made the effort and given the examples you said you wouldn’t. That you don’t amounts to a laziness.)
From your comments I am figuring you are over fifty. So am I. I read your post and I think: is he just now coming to the tidal turn in poetry women have always, always made? Your discovery, while it may be new to you, is really not all that new. Speaking for myself, I say flat out the big discoveries I’ve made in poetry, and in writing in general, have always come at the hands of women writers. H.D., Colette, Riding, Dickinson, Sexton, Heloise, Madame de Sevigne, Lady Murasaki, Italian folk poets of the strege tradition. These are the poets and writers who’ve taught me the essential things. They happen to be women. The exceptions to the rule have tended to prove the rule: both Rilke and Goethe.
There is a story Robert Graves tells. He is speaking of Sappho whom he considered about the greatest poet who has ever lived. He felt she gave perfect voice to The Lady of the Wild Things.
“Sappho undertook this responsibility: one should not believe the malevolent lies of the Attic comedians who caricature her as an insatiable Lesbian. The quality of her poems proves her to have been a true Cerridwen. I once asked my so-called Moral Tutor at Oxford, a Classical scholar and Apollonian: ‘Tell me, sir, do you think that Sappho was a good poet?’ He looked up and down the street, as if to see whether anyone was listening and then confided to me: ‘Yes, Graves, that’s the trouble, she was very, very good!’ I gathered that he considered it fortunate that so little of her work had survived.”
I am glad for you you’ve come to what you’ve come to. Maybe it is important to put it out yet again. On the other hand I got to say this. One Sappho, one Dickinson, one Millay, one Sexton, one Pattie Smith no more makes a poet than one Eliot, one Crane, one Lorca, or one Neruda.
Anyway, your picture amounts to an idealization of women I am not sure Jane Austen, George Eliot, Colette, or Simone de Beauvoir would cotton to. While I note the biggest lessons I’ve learned have come at the hands of women poets I also note the majority of women poets are no less or more mediocre than their male counterparts.
Terreson

On May 24, 2009 at 9:39 am Gary B. Fitzgerald wrote:
The only champion a good poet needs is Father Time.
Ask Emily and John.

On May 24, 2009 at 11:20 am thomas brady wrote:
Terreson,
So I’ve been hoisted by my own petard?
“there is Thomas Brady championing the poetry of Millay like some good feminist. Elsewhere on this forum he has expressed perfect dismissiveness of such women poets as H.D., Mina Loy, Marianne Moore, and Laura Riding.”
Your strategy is insidious, Tere, this damning with faint praise all women poets, dooming every last one.
If one ignores the light-years of talent separating
Edna St. Vincent Millay, author of half of the 10 best sonnets ever written in English
and
H.D., Pound’s GF,
Marianne Moore, Dial Clique editor and supporter,
Laura Riding, Fugitive club member and Robert Graves’ GF,
then one is merely damning with faint praise ALL WOMEN POETS. This is a TRICK by the male status quo: include a few women (a GF, why not?) whose poetry is laced with FAILURE, and by doing so blur all distinctions so that it is assumed critical rigor is not even necessary when it comes to women.
As I said before, if Millay is thrown under the bus, no woman is safe.
There is plenty of documentary proof for what I am saying. Millay actually felt a kinship with Poe, who was abused by the same envious, low readership, fragile, ambitious, Modernist clique, and there’s a plethora of evidence to back up these facts.
Tere, you like to believe, with Mr. Fitzgerald, that poets are superheroes who don’t need critics and that criticism is mostly an annoyance and a sign of impotent envy, but I’m afraid this is a childish belief; a few well-placed notices can destroy a poet’s reputation, especially if she is a woman.
Thomas

On May 24, 2009 at 1:16 pm Gary B. Fitzgerald wrote:
Hey…don’t drag me into this sordid affair.
I’m just a simple, didactic, philosophical Nature poet, remember, Thomas?

On May 24, 2009 at 2:16 pm thomas brady wrote:
You can’t wriggle out of this one… Mr. Wordsworth!

On May 24, 2009 at 4:50 pm Gary B. Fitzgerald wrote:
Actually, Thomas, I’m a lot closer to your hero, Eddie Al, than I am to all these others.
Especially in the drinking department. :-)
I’d be happy to declare my own heroes here but the only ones I can come up with are William Blake, Dylan Thomas, Lao tzu and E.E. Cummings. Oh, and Bob Dylan. Oh, yeah, and Charles Darwin, Galileo, Newton, Einstein and Copernicus and oh, that’s right, Shakespeare and Keats and Whitman. And did I mention Dickinson, Lindsay, Snyder, Frost, Plath, Wright, Roethke, Merwin, Yeats, Millay, Stevens, Eliot, Williams, Pound, Bishop, Lowell, Crane, Patchen, Rexroth, Moore, Ashbery, Creeley, Bly, Sexton, and everybody else who ever taught me how to think?

On May 24, 2009 at 7:08 pm Terreson wrote:
Thomas Brady says:
“Edna St. Vincent Millay, author of half of the 10 best sonnets ever written in English.”
On whose authority, please. The sonnet in English has been pursued for a good 500 years. 5 out of 10 best sonnets in English might be a bit of a claim even for the most ardent of Millay’s enthusiasts.
Thomas Brady says:
“There is plenty of documentary proof for what I am saying. Millay actually felt a kinship with Poe, who was abused by the same envious, low readership, fragile, ambitious, Modernist clique, and there’s a plethora of evidence to back up these facts.”
I look forward to reviewing the documentation.
Thomas Brady says:
“Tere, you like to believe, with Mr. Fitzgerald, that poets are superheroes who don’t need critics and that criticism is mostly an annoyance and a sign of impotent envy,…”
Actually, I view the case of critics in a much less flattering light. They put me in mind of cowbirds (species: molthrus), whose parasititic habits have become a seriously impacting disruption in the natural history of other bird species, what with their learned behavior of laying their eggs in the nests of other birds. Now there is an objective correlative for you.
Terreson

On May 24, 2009 at 10:56 pm Gary B. Fitzgerald wrote:
I forgot Shelley, Tennyson, Byron, Pope and Poe. And that’s the thing, Thomas. It’s like a smorgasbord, a cornucopia of flavor and styles, ideas and thought. No one selection is any better or more delicious than the other, just…different. Different people have different tastes.
You don’t like the fish, try the beef. Don’t like the crab, try the steamed peas and lamb.
It’s an unending buffet for the mind, the whole world in a sauteed kipper. It’s poetry!

On May 24, 2009 at 11:16 pm thomas brady wrote:
Nice list.
Yea…Einstein’s great.
Your point?

On May 25, 2009 at 1:06 am Terreson wrote:
Because the interest is vital to me, I keep trying to make sense of this blog entry and subsequent exchange. It would help this reader tremendously if ya’ll blog starters would learn the Montaigne lesson, learn the art of the essay, and compose your thoughts before composing your words. But so it goes.
I am thinking this is what the thread is about, how Martin Earl caps his comments:
“By looking at poetry qua poetry we are more apt to read more sensitively, praise more accurately and winnow more decisively. But just in case you’ve missed my point, I think we’d all be the better for paying serious attention to the poems now being made by poets who happen to be women, and trying to figure out why they’re so good.”
This is the substance of the post, right? Or that serious attention should be given to women poets writing today because they are so good. If this is the proposition I can go with it. I regularly meet in online venues (women) poets who rock me, knock my socks off clean into the washer, who show me something new in rhythm, syntax, and sense. And so I must wonder just how familiar the blog’s author is with the scene, which has pretty much shifted from print to screen.
And I must wonder about something else too. At least in America, women poets have been shifting the scene for a long, long time, or for a good hundred years. The proof is in the popular anthologies of poetry. (You got to love the dialogue we guys and girls got going.) So again I am wondering. Am I allowed to reach back to Lola Ridge, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Angelina Grimke, Sara Teasdale, Elinor Wylie, Hazell Hall, Georgia Johnson, or do I have to put my sights on young women poets working today?