How do I into contemporary poetry?
I love everything from Shakespeare up to Yeats, but once I get into the 20th century, things get iffy for me. Are there some critical works that explains the transition from traditional forms to the experimental, free verse, weirdness?
If anyone can explain the ethos of modern poetry, I'd be interested.
>>8269204
Everything post 1970 sucks balls
All modernism really did for poetry is allow more variety in form, and most modern poets have works that you can appreciate even if you don't like the more unusual and esoteric stuff. E.g. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by Eliot, or The Idea of Order at Key West by Stevens. If you want critical explications, there are plenty: just search for some on Google or Amazon. They'll probably help you appreciate some of it.
>>8269559
I haven't really read much of it, but I'm sure some of it is good. I'd imagine it's just the more popular or famous stuff you don't like.
Just read that shit mayne
>>8269559
Christ, thank you. I haven't read anything halfway decent post 1950's, actually. Do I need to read more or is everything post-modern just really bad? Or both?
>>8269204
you need to get out of your bias of what you think good poetry is supposed to be.
>ethos
modernism initially is a reaction to the "productive nature, passive mind" mindset of romanticism, where modernists promoted a "productive mind passive nature". principally, modernism used "realization" to replace description, so instead of copying the external world like so many romantics did the modernists insisted on its own form of reality, which they attemp to show through an assimilation of imaginitive visbility and the constructed object. modernist poets developed "collage" techniques to realize a sense of immediacy, for example the changing of perceptual to conceptual through the use of syntactic gaps to create spaces between images in order to imagine that the particular run-in with history can have an intensity in the present.
modernism is a postromanticism, and postmodernism is a depature from modernism; postmodernists carried out experimental strategies that modernism ended up shying away from. Lukacs says the art "replaces the concrete universal by an abstract particularity", and postmodernism exposes the poverty of this.
>>8269204
just read ts eliot and ezra pound senpai
try some transtromer.
>>8269204
Read Robert Frost. And don't stop. And maybe some Heaney. And Simon Armitage.
>>8270365
Heaney and Armitage? Armitage is still alive!
>>8270365
he said 20th century
>>8270365
He is contrasting "contemporary...20th century" to Yeats, with the dividing being modern weirdness.
Looking at the mentioned poets would be best since they are some of the origins for this weirdness
>>8269204
It depends on the poet, and you need to read a lot of them in order to get a feel for what they are all about. Read essays on them too, if you can find any.
Eliot, for one thing, is pretty existentialist who used free verse to reflect the lack of structure in society. Yeats is an Irish nationalist who was interested in form. Frost was interested in a once-civilised New England becoming a wild wilderness of death and isolation. WCW was all about an Imagiste bringing poetry down to the barest, most particular, and small, because in the small you find the universal.
The more you read the easier it gets.
>>8269204
Have you tried Larkin? He admired the poetry of Thomas Hardy and detested "modernism"
>>8269204
http://www.ubu.com/contemp/goldsmith/73/71-79/poems71-79.html
>>8270156
in what book did lukacs say that
OP here, just got back from work.
Thanks to everyone you posted, googling some of the suggestions really piqued my interest, and I'll be sure to add a few new titles to my Amazon wish list because of you guys.
A minor question that I was thinking about today: are there any prominent forms or meters favored by poets today? I'm familiar with iambic pentameter and dactylic hexameter, odes and sonnets, but I've never been able to detect any patterns in contemporary works in the past.
If modernism was trying to create new forms, which, if ahy, caught on? Or am I grossly oversimplifying the modernist's aim?
Also, pic unrelated
Eliot, Rita Dove, Charles Simic and Elizabeth Bishop are 20th century standouts for me (even though 3/4 are modern, not contemporary); as obvious as it sounds, in my experience, your frame of mind entering the reading is key, just like listening to atonal music, sometimes your enjoyment takes second place to appreciation for variety and the pure strangeness of it all.
That sounds like a cop out and I'm sure you're already familiar, but there's substance out there, in all of the free verse. Circumstance behind poetry is nice in the modern age, too, though that's in reading, not just composition.
>>8271855
meter (and rhyme) are "out of fashion" today
>>8272728
Rhyme is, but meter?
>>8273017
regular meter is definitely frowned upon
>>8273035
Not really frowned upon, just not overly common
>>8270156
>Lukacs says the art "replaces the concrete universal by an abstract particularity"
nice pet name for James Joyce, haven't heard that one before
>>8273035
I wouldn't say frowned upon, surely? Simon Armitage often uses meter.
>>8269204
Why don't you get a big collection of Modernism and also collections of contemporary verse?
>>8273017
>contemporary poetry
>using rhyme and meter non-ironically
stop being stupid
