Ah, darling David Ahh! I thought of you dearly yesterday as we drove through San Francisco, wishing I had time to call you, to talk.

I don't ask that anyone like him. But I wish I had just one hour with ANYONE to try to show you what he meant/means to me. I have such stories!

I don't ask that you like him. But in a list like this, to leave Lawrence out would be a travesty. He is a MEGALITH of the 20th century, whether any of us like it or not.

Let me quote you a moment from Kenneth Rexroth's introduction to Lawrence's Selected:

"Hardy was a major poet. Lawrence was a minor prophet. Like Blake and Yeats, his is the greater tradition."

I have a feeling I have not written the last of Lawrence. There is a REASON, and an UNreason, AHhh, why someone you like, like Hoagland, feels as he does about D. H. Lawrence.

No-one has to like him. But no-one should spit on him. His place in our literature, and the venom and condescension he inspires continue to astound me. I cannot imagine what my life would have been if I had not found him.

As I said to Gypsy Boy, let's talk, you and me, if you like.

Cal

My admiration for Lawrence grows and grows. When you read the complete poems, you find a lot of works that are really a sort of philosophy chopped up in lines, but the best poems, which is how we customarily judge our poets, are just magnificent—beautiful and true and utterly without cant.

Writers who admired Lawrence include W. H. Auden and Philip Larkin—no slouches there, either.

Rexroth's introduction to his selection of poems by Lawrence is also Rexroth at his best, and is well worth reading.

I have encountered a lot of snobbish rejection of Lawrence from people who have not read him at length—usually people steeped in New Critical ideals, and the same people who dismiss Jeffers.

But certain great poets—Blake, Lawrence, Jeffers—need to be read differently than certain prim perfectionists. They demand a different kind of reading. It seems to me they require a deeper sort of reading.

Dave

I would like to nominate one book and question some others.

Am I right in thinking that Auden's "The Shield of Achilles" has not yet been nominated?

Also, is the year 2000 considered 20th Century? That's the year of Kim Addonizio's "Tell Me." Pardon my ignorance of calendars...

Am I right in thinking we should not nominate "Collected Poems" volumes as has been done with WC Williams?

Just wonderin'.

Cally,

Don't worry, I feel no obligation to like him. I am grateful that my poetry education, from the start, has been utterly haphazard and idiosyncratic, leaving me with a fairly strong immunity to feeling obliged to like anything.

Another near miss! (Or near hit, depending on how you look at it.)

Pound and Eliot are "megaliths" too, but I don't care much for either.

I like Rexroth as a critic and commentator, more so than as a poet or translator, but I love Hardy. I also love Blake, but I can take or leave Yeats. So I am not sure what to make of this quote.

No spitting or venom here. What I have read so far simply hasn't moved me. But, I'll give him another day in court.

David R.

Not sure about the Auden book, but I think we settled on 2000 as the last year of the century, ans the issue of nominating collecteds has been discussed throughout the thread at some length.

David R.

No slight against Lawrence or Stevens, but L.E. Sissman did an amazing job of standing up to death in his last collected poems, Hello Darkness. Donald Hall and his wife Jane Kenyon famously wrote on the subject and accomplished very moving work. Across the pond, George Barker wrote many elegies. I'm surprised Hall, Kenyon and Barker haven't come up yet. And Sissman was no slouch, writing in his consistently polished rhymed couplets or blank verse.

76. A Book of Luminous Things: An International Anthology of Poetry
 

I am using my fifth and final choice to continue in the direction of expansion of thought and craft. Though an individual poet can influence a fellow poet to develop the craft it is more imperative (IMO) to have access to many writers especially those outside one's language limits.

I have already submitted an anthology in my agenda of broadening the scope 51. These are not Sweet Girls: Poetry by Latin American Women

Tony has listed 15. Modern European Poetry, edited by Willis Barnstone and though I am sorely tempted to add "A Book of Women Poets from Antiquity to Now" (editors Aliki and Willis Barnstone), because of the special focus on women poets over the borders of time and national borders which might be encouraging to all whose voice is drowning in a flooding of male perspectives (yes, there is often a discernible difference) I have decided to go for broke and suggest as 76. A Book of Luminous Things: An International Anthology of Poetry edited by Czeslaw Milosz.

As the editor says in his introduction: I have always felt that a poet participates in the management of the estate of poetry, of that in his own language and also that of world poetry. Thinking about that estate, such as it is at the present moment, I decided I could contribute to its possessions provided, however, that instead of theory, I brought to it something of practice. (...)

My proposition consists in presenting poems, whether contemporary or a thousand years old, that are, with few exceptions, short, clear, readable, and to use a compromised term, realist, that is loyal toward reality and attempting to describe it as concisely as possible. Thus they undermine the widely held opinion that poetry is a misty domain eluding understanding.

If I had to chose only one book of poetry to take with me to solitary confinement on a desert island or elsewhere, knowing I would never be allowed to leave that place or have any communication with anyone outside it, I would chose an anthology, perhaps not this one for I'd want a little mystery as well as realism, but it would certainly be an anthology rather than a single poet. (But the collected works of William Shakespeare would be my choice if the rules included drama.)

Now I have spent the last of my voting capital, every sou, but am the richer for this thread.

Thx again, Tony, for initiating the thread.

77. Lunch Poems by Frank O'Hara
 

Few poets have written poems that celebrate the exuberance of being alive more than Frank O'Hara. Whitman of course comes to mind and without getting into a comparison of O'Hara and Whitman it can be said both of them wrote poems that sweat on the page. In regards to form O'Hara is an example of what FV can do at its best. But the most important thing about O'Hara is that he's fun to read. I'm sure everyone is familiar with his work to some extent but here is one of the most famous poems from Lunch Poems.


A STEP AWAY FROM THEM

It's my lunch hour, so I go
for a walk among the hum-colored
cabs. First, down the sidewalk
where laborers feed their dirty
glistening torsos sandwiches
and Coca-Cola, with yellow helmets
on. They protect them from falling
bricks, I guess. Then onto the
avenue where skirts are flipping
above heels and blow up over
grates. The sun is hot, but the
cabs stir up the air. I look
at bargains in wristwatches. There
are cats playing in sawdust.

On
to Times Square, where the sign
blows smoke over my head, and higher
the waterfall pours lightly. A
Negro stands in a doorway with a
toothpick, languorously agitating.
A blonde chorus girl clicks: he
smiles and rubs his chin. Everything
suddenly honks: it is 12:40 of
a Thursday.

Neon in daylight is a
great pleasure, as Edwin Denby would
write, as are light bulbs in daylight.
I stop for a cheeseburger at JULIET'S
CORNER. Giulietta Masina, wife of
Federico Fellini, è bell' attrice.
And chocolate malted. A lady in
foxes on such a day puts her poodle
in a cab.

There are several Puerto
Ricans on the avenue today, which
makes it beautiful and warm. First
Bunny died, then John Latouche,
then Jackson Pollock. But is the
earth as full as life was full, of them?
And one has eaten and one walks,
past the magazines with nudes
and the posters for BULLFIGHT and
the Manhattan Storage Warehouse,
which they'll soon tear down. I
used to think they had the Armory
Show there.

A glass of papaya juice
and back to work. My heart is in my
pocket, it is Poems by Pierre Reverdy.


http://www.amazon.com/dp/0872860353?tag=poetsorg-20&camp=14573&creative=327641&linkCode=as1&creativ eASIN=0872860353&adid=0099A08WGS1M4KSQAYXC&&ref-refURL=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.poets.org%2Fviewmedia.php% 2FprmMID%2F5970

Good call, John. And speaking of Pierre Reverdy... !

Nemo

I have a selection of Reverdy published by Wake Forest University Press but no single volume and I don't read French. Hopefully someone who does is a Reverdy fan.