Question 8 for 9x9

June 28, 2004

[Question 8 from the 9x9 series that CA Conrad does. Most of my answers have been pretty uninspired but I took some time to write this one.]

Most poets seem to have at least one poet they've read and admired who is not well-known, a poet whose work we like to share with those who will appreciate the work. Is there such a poet's work in your life? If so, who is this poet? Tell us something about how you came to discover their work, and how it inspires you. Maybe share some favorite lines, and titles.

Over the years, there have been a few poets who I've been reading who are not entirely well-known, though they have significant reputations elsewhere, such as the Scottish concrete poet Ian Hamilton Finlay and the Australian poets Martin Johnston and Kenneth Slessor. I've written about Finlay and Johnston for Jacket, as well as about Veronica Forrest-Thomson who is better known now than she was in 1995 when I wrote the article (I discovered her in Charles Bernstein's Artifice of Absorption essay).

One day, Miles Champion handed me a chapbook by the British poet John Temple that completely blew my mind; he moved to Belgium in the Seventies and practically stopped writing poetry after that, though his collected works were recently published by Salt Press. I always thought Hilda Morley was a really great and interesting poet who never got her due; I've wanted to write about Temple and Morley for some time. There's another Brit whose recent collected poems is fantastic, John James, very much alive though I've never met him.

These days I've been reading Edwin Arlington Robinson, who won three Pulitzers late in his life but who isn't really read much now. People think he's stuffy probably because he often wrote sonnets and in blank verse, but he reads to me these days as more "modern" than many of the Modernists, possibly because one could see in him the first successful use of language as "speech" in verse -- he really let speech as he heard and spoke it determine his syntax, rhythms and cadences more than many of those poets who have never cared for form at all, and hence never had a stage on which to properly enact "speech." (Whitman used "speech," for example, but it was only his own manner of intoning things rather than talking. Most people don't talk in such a way that would fit comfortably in several-page long orations.) Robinson's use of Browning's was much better than Pound's, probably because he was actually concerned with living people -- real moderns, losers, outcasts, urbanites, the people you find in Faulkner for example except in the North East-- rather than historical figures that he knew through books.

The handful of poems I've read by the nineteenth century poet Sarah Morgan Piatt are really fantastic -- I’m ordering a recently issued Selected pretty soon. I tend to dip into my American Library anthology of 19th century poetry quite frequently for little finds like this -- Jones Very, Christopher Pearse Cranch and William Cullen Bryant are people I've been interested in in the past.

There's something very exotic about poets whose reputations have not survived their lives in any great form, as if they were actively rebellious against the future -- our present -- and we are invited to join them in it. Quite frequently, I find it quite difficult to read poets whose reputations are rather inflated or whose works are too well known. I read them, of course, but often not in a way that tells me something I didn't already know. Sometimes I wonder if the only true "difference" is the difference of the past, not any weird little thing we can conjure now.