That was a great list of poets upthread, Jen. I'm particularly fond of Lowell, and "Skunk Hour," with its chicken-and-egg relationship to Bishop's "The Armadillo."

A few other more-or-less contemporary poets who I think are important (and capable of powerful verse):

• John Berryman, with his lush Dream Songs (http://plagiarist.com/poetry/1058/) about his alter-ego/whipping boy Henry.

• James Wright, the master of turning ordinary events into the stunningly transcendent (http://plagiarist.com/poetry/1339/).

• Richard Hugo, Wright's foil, who turns the transcendent into the ordinary (http://plagiarist.com/poetry/1468/).

• Robert Creeley, who's funny as hell (http://plagiarist.com/poetry/1640/).

• A.R. Ammons, with his scientific approach to language (http://plagiarist.com/poetry/8075/).

Well, there's a lot more, but those are some of my favorites.

I'm also with P-C in the Absolam! Absolam!-loving camp. It's convoluted as hell with its stories within stories within stories, some of which are half-remembered untruths and some of which are outright obfuscation, but it manages to indict the idea of history as an objective truth, indict racism and the Great Man concept, and rain damnation across time, all with some of the most gorgeous language set to paper in English. And, yeah, at the topmost level, the whole action is "guy tells a story to his roommate about his family." It's flat-out engrossing.

I'm particularly fond of Lowell, and "Skunk Hour," with its chicken-and-egg relationship to Bishop's "The Armadillo."

* James Wright, the master of turning ordinary events into the stunningly transcendent (http://plagiarist.com/poetry/1339/).

I'm required to note by my alma mater that both Lowell and Wright went to Kenyon College, thankyewvurrymuch.

JZ made me read Stephen Dobyns poetry all morning - great stuff. It made me think of Victor (Dobyns was a reporter in Detroit for a while) and TAL (he tells a lot of stories in his poetry).

Kenyon is kinda Ground Zero for contemporary poetry.

And I think footnoting fiction is pretentious as fuck.

Not a Terry Pratchett fan, then?

I was just coming back to post that, having gotten back into Soul Music.

To me, current "litfic" is the trade paperbacks on the front table at Barnes & Noble.

Also, although I haven't read much Dickens, I lurved Bleak House, and have a strategy for people who are freaked out by the length: read it as it was written. As a serial. Granted, I didn't actually spread it out one chapter a week or whatever, but I did take a couple of breaks. I think I read it over a couple of months. (Usually I finish the kind of book I generally read for fun in a day or two, even work days.)

Oh, and also, this whole discussion reminds me to give another shot to books I only read in high school, because I was generally unimpressed with them at the time, but I was generally unimpressed with anything.

Ooh. Jesse really was too cool for school.

Here we go a-meara-ing:

I always think of "a fishhook/an open eye."

It kills me every time I read it. The book that's from (_Power Politics_) is incredible from start to finish.

For reference:

you fit into me
like a hook into an eye

a fish hook
an open eye

I can't read poetry with my higher brain on -- I just let my eyes skim the pretty words until some of them catch on my heart.

I do this sometimes, too, particularly with e. e. cummings. I'm not sure what it is about his work that lends me to heart-reading but it does. This is one of my favorites, and I get something different out of it when I read every word (it's a sonnet, with the correct scansion and rhyme, so reading every word emphasizes that) and when I just try to absorb the language through a weird kind of osmosis:

your homecoming will be my homecoming-

my selves go with you,only i remain;
a shadow phantom effigy or seeming

(an almost someone always who’s noone)

a noone who,till their and your returning,
spends the forever of his loneliness
dreaming their eyes have opened to your morning

feeling their stars have risen through your skies:

so,in how merciful love’s own name,linger
no more than selfless i can quite endure
the absence of that moment when a stranger
takes in his arms my very life who’s your

-when all fears hopes beliefs doubts disappear.
Everywhere and joy’s perfect wholeness we’re

Silvia Benso (her views on ethics would be interesting to a number of Buffistas - Jen, I'm looking at you.

Duly noted! I'll check her out.

That was a great list of poets upthread, Jen.

Thanks hayden! I love Richard Wright, too.

I feel like I left out so many poets from that list... Donne, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Baudelaire, Dickinson, Sexton, Forché, Glück (our current poet laureate), Neruda, García Lorca, Kees, Kenyon, Thomas, Roethke... The list is never-ending.

Never read him, P-C. One day.(I'm just frustrated by my lack of understanding.)