I tend to develop unhealthy obsessions with particular poems. I post those poems here. It’s some nostalgic or worried impulse toward collection; and it’s an incomplete record of what I loved, and when.
If you read around, you’ll find that I post a lot of poems from a given poet all at once, then move on to another. This might seem tedious, I know, but it happens because I read poetry books straight through, cover to cover – even volumes of collected poems. (I understand this is unhealthy, but I’ve learned to accept it.)
More, the monotony is exacerbated by the fact that I wait until I finish a book to post the poems I like in this little miscellany. I tried adding poems as I read, but then I started transcribing whole books, which wasn’t so bad, except it dragged my reading down to a insufferable drawling pace. Now, I’m trying to only post the poems drive me to distraction, the ones that leave me haunted.
In short: Here are some poems I like. I hope you like them, too.
Also, since I have an eccentric knack for enjoying critical essays on poetics, I’ll also include quotations on poetics, prosody or other poetry-related trinkets that charm me. These will likely come in a barrage, much like the poems.
Feel free to leave requests, questions, comments or personal attacks in the comments below.
If you would like to contact me personally, please e-mail me at ashleyannamc@gmail.com
Hey, do you like Geoffrey Hill? http://bit.ly/a2rZsC
I do like what I’ve read, but that’s not much unfortunately. Is there a book you recommend starting with?
I recommend starting near the beginning with King Log, which “Funeral Music” is from though I haven’t read a lot of Geoffrey Hill and came across him through William Logan’s reviews. You are probably a William Logan fan?
Actually, I was digging around an old junk shop yesterday morning and came across a copy of Mercian Hymns for $7 Canadian. Haven’t cracked it yet.
I am a fan of Logan – still getting around to his reviews, though – and I’ll try to get a copy of King Log. I’d be interested to get another perspective on Mercian Hymns. I’m not entirely sure what I make of it.
There is the usual boilerplate that it splays Hill’s own biography against Offa’s. But the most telling line is probably from the Acknowledgments section of the book: “The Offa who figures in this sequence might perhaps most usefully be regarded as the presiding genius of the West Midlands, his dominion enduring from the middle of the eighth century until the middle of the twentieth.” There is also a helpful review here from someone who knows something of Mercia than I do
http://bit.ly/dn529A
I won’t copy any of my own observations here but can by email if you want. Logan says readers of Hill’s poetry “might have been happier with a tract on the mating rituals of the earwig” though finds him the best living poet in English. If you are thinking of getting into Logan’s reviews you should read this review of his reviews; it quotes some of the funny samples:
http://nyti.ms/b3vH3T
“The experience of working his way through a particular Carolyn Forché long poem is one of “nearly unbearable agony” (not because it’s harrowing but because it’s so bad), while Tess Gallagher is pilloried as an “insufferable” drama queen whose poems are “so garrulous and windy” that “what’s intended sincerely often seems grotesquely funny.” The Pulitzer Prize-winning Franz Wright is characterized as “a sad-sack punk, a 50-year-old who . . . moans like a depressive teenager.” The recent poetry of Paul Muldoon is so “full of artificial sweeteners, artificial colors” that it is “probably regulated by the F.D.A.,” and even Muldoon’s Nobel-crowned countryman, Seamus Heaney, is sternly warned that he’s beginning to resemble “a faux Irish pub, plastic shamrocks on the bar, Styrofoam shillelaghs on the wall and green ale on tap.”"
Excellent site. Lots of helpful information here. I’m sending it to a few pals ans also sharing in delicious. And certainly, thanks on your sweat!
Thanks so much!