[lbo-talk] The Best American Poetry 2004

[andie nachgeborenen]

Well, you know, poetry is often, umm, opaque. Obtuse
is not the word that leaps to mind in characterizing
Donne, Herbert, Marvell, Milton -- or to leap ahead
and across the channel, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Baudelaire,
or across the Rhine, Hoelderin, Novalis, Rilke
(Goethe's deceptively easy looking, but don't be
fooled -- Shakespeare and Dante are like this as well)
-- or further east, Akhmatova or Mandelstam. You want
stuff that goes down easy, stick to Heine, A.E.
Houseman or Robert Frost -- poets of no small
magnitude, and whom I respect tremendously, but they
won't make you work the way Donne, Rilke or Akhmatova
do. 

--- Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:


> 
> On Dec 10, 2006, at 8:57 PM, mike larkin wrote:
> 
> > On a whim, I picked up this volume (edited by Lyn
> Hejinian, series  
> > editor David Lehman).  For the life of me, I can't
> make heads or  
> > tails of a single poem. When did American poetry
> become so obtuse?
> 
> Well, Ashbery won the Yale Younger Poets Prize in
> 1956, so it's been  
> at least 50 years!
> 
> Doug
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