Almost every poem that I've read that's been written and published within the past 100 years just rings with this conceited tone. So many poems just say to me "oh, look how clever I am, did you see what I did there?" or they try so hard to push the envelope that they're not even a form of self-expression, but rather a way of showing off.
There are some famous poets that I'm completely fine with, like Frost, Whitman, and Vachel Lindsay, but other poets like T.S. Eliot, Ginsberg, and Sexton just sound so proud when I read them. The same goes for most poets that I've read in current popular poetry magazines and in the contemporary american poetry anthology I've been reading.
I feel like it's all about who can make the prettiest or most intriguing poem, rather than who can put out a poem that is honest and genuine.
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I have no problem with T.S. Eliot, but I have studied his poetry at length and taught it in literature workshops. However, I do not consider someone like Eliot to be 'contemporary,' but rather 'modern.' That's an important distinction in my opinion. Most, but not all, contemporary poetry is crap. The elements of poetry are so utterly lacking in most of it that I think it is a mistake even to label it poetry. There are wonderful exceptions, however, as in all things. Read something like Donald Revell's "Zion," Forrest Gander's "Voiced Stops 1," "Strangler Fig" by Les Murray, "Jacob" by Edgar Bowers, or the sonnet sequence "Loss and Gain" by Geoffrey Hill and your faith in contemporary poetry might be restored. The problem, as I see it, is that contemporary poetry is no longer accessible in the way that Romantic and Victorian poetry were. It is also often less musical and less artfully made, almost as if the rejection of those things were something to be valued. Don't feel bad, I don't understand the mindset either.
Argh, they suck. i haven't, yet I easily have common many human beings commonly the greater youthful siblings of buddies who've been taken in by employing this. you shouldn't supply them any money. it quite is consumer-friendly in many actual competitions to have a reading cost. I advise figuring out on up Poets and Writers magazine or The Poets' industry e book for a listing of valid classes and contest.
You can look at any period in English literature (or any other literature) and find lots of people making precisely the objections to 'formless' 'difficult' modern writing that you do here.
Sir Philip Sydney's Apologie for Poetrie throws the same mud at Shakespeare as you are heaving at T S Eliot.
Don't worry about it. Poetry doesn't need you.
Read more. What living poets are you reading? Stallings? Wilbur? Reeser? Li-Young Lee? Gywnn? Any number of poets being translated? What poets do you read from other countries?
Sure.I like to write about what others feel and not just my personal feelings.
Gary.
Have you read Yeats?
I don't really 'read' poetry, as much as I do write it. But, you definitely have a point, there!