Your recommended non-metrical poets
 

I wanted to start with a quick thanks for all of the assistance I've gotten on previous threads.

With this one I'm interested in getting some names you'd recommend along the lines of non-metrical poetry. Preferably poets who've been active in the past few decades, but older stuff is fine as well.

I don't think anything I include will be a big revelation for anyone, but the main names I've looked at to date:

- Leonard Cohen
- Federico Lorca
- George Seferis
- Wisława Szymborska
- Czesław Miłosz
- Rilke
- Georg Trakl
- Irving Layton

Among the above I know Cohen the best, the rest I've only touched on a little.

Thanks in advance for any help.

I wouldn't call Rilke non-metrical, and Lorca also frequently writes metrical.

Off the top of my head, Alan Dugan is one of my favorites. His poem Funeral Oration for a Mouse is one of the best poems I know, and it's not metrical. Stanley Kunitz writes both metrical and non-metrical, and his poem The Portrait is another top favorite of mine. Philip Levine (who started as a metrical poet) also has some very fine non-metrical poems, though it takes some digging to find them among his overproduction. James Tate also has some very fine poems lurking among a body of lesser poems.

Shane Mc'crae, Ishion Hutchinson, Geofrey Hill, Alice Oswald, Jay Wright, Toby Martinez, Clarice Lispector, Anne Carson, Osip Mandelstam.
I've intentionally not drawn a difference between those who use metre and those who don't: it seem to me rather boring to worry about the distinguishing of rhythm: recently I can't even be bothered to distinguish between poems and novels: there is something much more strange beneath all this conservative artificiality: language which is really about living. Although, if you do want categories: Rilke is almost completely metrical in his German.

Thanks for the comments on Rilke, I was listing out poets I'd read and forgot to consider if all were actually non-met.

I haven't read too much of him, just the Duino Elegies and New Poems. My memory failed me as my impression of the latter was it being non-met. It may have been the translation.

Similar thing with Lorca as well, I've only read him briefly and it's been a few years.

Leonard Cohen strikes me as very much a metrical poet.

Non- (or primarily non-) metrical poets I admire include Kim Addonizio, Dorianne Laux, Martin Espada, Marge Piercy, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. E.E. Cummings is masterful in both rhyme/meter and free verse.

What makes you say that re: Cohen? (I'm always interested in chatting about him)

His earlier stuff is definitely more traditional though I haven't analyzed the meter. Mid-career seems more a mix of avante-garde, minimalism, sometimes prose-like. Meter came back in his later work but it's a bit of both.

He was always well versed in it but the poetry that reached a bookstore was often non-met.

It’s odd to come here and ask for suggestions of non-met poets as though they’re shy birds. I’m sure you’ve heard of T. S. Eliot? William Carlos Williams? Ezra Pound? There are poets who wrote in both with meter and without meter: Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, John Berryman. If this sounds like a syllabus for a survey course in 20th century American Lit that’s the point. Maybe slip Loraine Niedecker in or Hilda Doolittle (HD.) The closer you come to the present day the list explodes. Just start reading. You don’t need a list. Maybe buy a couple of Norton Anthologies to get started.

I'm mostly interested in current stuff (the past few decades) that members consider standouts. There are a lot of people writing these days, but getting some specific recommendations is helpful.

My hope is to find some writers who'll challenge the way I think about my own writing. But maybe I can still get that by looking a little further back as well.

You can find everything you need to work out of from the poets I listed. Another advantage is they didn’t write directly from their lives all the time. I move around in my reading and a good deal of it is translated. Reverdy, always, Jean Follain, Szilard Borbely is a Hungarian poet I like. Alejandra Pizarnik. I can scramble around enough to sound out some of the French and Spanish but Hungarian is impossible. I have also been reading a Japanese poet Sakutaro Hagiwara who was from many decades ago but his style in translation is current.

In English I’ve been reading Brigit Pegeln Kelly and like it very much. Lyn Hejinian who just passed away is someone I’ve been reading awhile. Her book “My Life” is one to read more than once. Mary Jo Bang. Henri Cole’s non-met sonnets are good.

So very much of current poetry regardless of form is like being trapped in a plane seat with someone who thinks you want to know all about his/her life. Say what you will about Modernism but at least they could see past their nose.

As is Mandelstam in his Russian—only one foray into free verse that I know of—but I get what you’re saying about not wanting to draw a distinction.