/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.1534497]

ITT: We discuss poetry - I'm bored of talking about novels.

I think that Seamus Heaney is the natural successor to Yeats and Behan, but is a better poet than either, AND he doesn't get tanked up all the time and start fights in pubs (as far as I'm aware).

[Anonymous No.1534508]

He looks on the brink of kicking right off in that picture, truth be told. Typical fucking paddy. Probably pissed.

[No.1534507]

I like him and all, and Death of a Naturalist is one of my favorite poems of all time, but I don't think he's a better poet than Yeats.

How about other contemporary poets? I like Philip Larkin and Billy Collins but don't really know too many others.

[Anonymous No.1534520]

It depends what you mean by contemporary - Larkin's a contemporary of Heaney (in his early career), but he's not very contemporary to us - he's been dead 20+ years.

If we're talking about living poets, I've always been fond of Carol Ann Duffy but I haven't read much of her stuff since she became poet laureate - it tends to screw up your work.

[Anonymous No.1534523]

From Strugnell's Sonnets
for D.M. Thomas

The expense of spirits is a crying shame,
So is the cost of wine. What bard today
Can live like old Khayyam? It's not the same--
A loaf and Thou and Tesco's Beaujolais.
I had this bird called Sharon. Fond of gin--
Could knock back six or seven. At the price
I paid a high wage for each hour of sin
And that was why I only had her twice.
Then there was Tracy, who drank rum and Coke.
So beautiful I didn't mind at first
But love grows colder. Now some other bloke
Is subsidizing Tracy and her thirst.
I need a woman, honest and sincere,
Who'll come across on half a pint of beer.

Wendy Cope - she's a lazy cow though, hardly ever writes a damn thing, then moans when people share her poems for free on the internet.

Yeah, fight the power.

[Anonymous No.1534526]

>>1534497
>doesn't get tanked up all the time and start fights in pubs
this is a good thing?

[Anonymous No.1534533]

>>1534526

It's neither a good nor a bad thing, it's just a thing.

[Anonymous No.1534535]

>>1534523


Waste Land Limericks

I.
In April one seldom feels cheerful;
Dry stones, sun and dust make me fearful;
Clairvoyants distress me,
Commuters depress me--
Met Stetson and gave him an earful.

II.
She sat on a mighty fine chair,
Sparks flew as she tidied her hair;
She asks many questions,
I make few suggestions--
Bad as Albert and Lil--what a pair!

III.
The Thames runs, bones rattle, rats creep;
Tiresias fancies a peep--
A typist is laid,
A record is played--
Wei la la. After this it gets deep.

IV.
A Phoenician called Phlebas forgot
About birds and his business--the lot.
Which is no surprise,
Since he met his demise
And was left in the ocean to rot.

V.
No water. Dry rocks and dry throats.
Then thunder, a shower of quotes!
From The Sanskrit to Dante.
Da. Damyata. Shantih.
I hope you'll make sense of the notes.


Yeah, fuck off and write some more poems, Wendy you lazy moo.

[Anonymous No.1534538]

>>1534520

Yeah poet laureate tends to do that to people haha.

Larkin's poetry still rings true to contemporary society though, isn't that the whole idea.

'Sympathy in white major' for me ranks as one of his best, anyone else?

[Anonymous No.1534547]

I've only read Heaney's early poems and, while I can admire some of the technique, and some of the utterly fantastic appropriation of Irish vernacular, I'm sometimes left in doubt as to how much depth is actually there. And the points do sometimes seem to be a little labored – that bloody diggin potatoes/ writing with a pen analogy! Not poems I return to over the years, anyway.

As to be the natural successor to Yeats, as I said I don't know Heaney's work well enough. Yeats is oftenabout masks, and how the masks we wear when we set down to write poetry can reveal more about us than if the goal is some form of catharsis through pure expression. Ultimately, perhaps it had to be this way for Yeats as his daily life seemed to cause him so much anguish, I certainly see it as the overriding concern of his poetry as it develops over the years – one of the truly great narratives in poetry.

They were, it seems to me, writing at very different times in Irish history (obviously!). But when Yeats was writing, the Irish identity was still in flux somewhat; the impression I get from Heaney's Ireland is of a place, for better or worse, fairly established in the poet's & reader's imagination.

As for contemporary poets, I'm dipping into The Drowned Book by Sean O’Brien at the moment and he is, well, pretty fucking accomplished! If, I suspect, a little bit of a phony when it comes to his politics.

[No.1534555]

>>1534547

This is an erudite and insightful response. Thank you, anon.

[Anonymous No.1534575]

>>1534547
Well put, one thing grated though. Heaney's Ireland not in a state of flux? I would argue that the Ireland in Heaney's 'North' for example is in a state of disarray and echoes the concerns of Yeats' work on national identity and belonging.

[Anonymous No.1534581]

What do you all think of Tony Harrison? Perhaps the spiritual successor to Phillip Larkin and Thomas Hardy? He continues the generational angst, yet adds a schism between the working and upper-middle class, with him set fair between.

[Anonymous No.1534593]

>>1534575
There's probably a lot of truth in that, though as I say, I don't know Heaney's work well enough to agree or disagree with any certainty.

What I would say is that at different times in Yeats' work we see a poet reimagining an Ireland according to his, well I don't want to say whims as it sounds flippant, but according to his poetic conceits anyway. So we get the Romantic 'plashing', dew-dusted morn of the early poems. We get the violent terrible beauty of Ireland throwing away the yoke of tyranny in other poems. We get the mythical, (slightly toadying) aristocratic Ireland of other poems, and others too. In a sense, he was making it up Ireland as he went along - in the most sublime way - because Ireland at that time was sufficiently protean to allow him to do that. I don't know if the same goes for Heaney, or even if it's a fair comparison, though I should probably try and read more of him to find out!

[Anonymous No.1534608]

What does lit think about Ashbery? I've heard good and bad things about him, want to know before I dive.

[Anonymous No.1534611]

>>1534593
Well, as Yeats was a contemporary to Joyce, It'd be fair to say that they both had differing opinions about their Ireland. With Joyce's Dublin being the "center of paralysis". I've never enjoyed yeats, he was a bit of a wanker.

[Anonymous No.1534614]

>>1534608
The man is extremely intelligent and extremely obscure.

[Anonymous No.1534627]

>>1534611
I didn't realise we were discussing Joyce, sorry.

As to Yeats being a wanker, most poets (unless I've been very unluky in the ones I've met) are indeed wankers. The good ones are wankers and egoists.

[Anonymous No.1534629]

>>1534547

OP here. Nice response.

Although I'm not entirely sure how serious my original statement was (I love Yeats), I don't think that what you're saying relates to Heaney's early works as much it does to his later stuff - the poet of Death of a Naturalist and North is deeply concerned with the fluidity of Irish identity - he himself had been criticised for not engaging with "the troubles", and as the child of protestant and catholic parents, a lot of his work seems to me to be asking the question of what it is to be Irish.

The later work - Field Work and Electric Light for example are far more sedate. With the nobel proze in his pocket and knowing he's the mack-daddy of British poetry (I think he accounts for about 75% of sales of all poetry in Britain), he's seems more manifesto building: he's now more certain of what it means to be Irish, and it's whatever he says it is.

[Anonymous No.1534644]

>>1534520
>I've always been fond of Carol Ann Duffy but I haven't read much of her stuff since she became poet laureate - it tends to screw up your work.

I can confirm this: everything Duffy has written since the late 1990s has been pretty dire. But it's even worse since she became laureate: just loads of "topical" poems commissioned by newspapers that want to appear cultural.

[Anonymous No.1534646]

>>1534627

Triolet

I used to think all poets were Byronic--
Mad, bad and dangerous to know.
And then I met a few. Yes it's ironic--
I used to think all poets were Byronic.
They're mostly wicked as a ginless tonic
And wild as pension plans. Not long ago
I used to think all poets were Byronic--
Mad, bad and dangerous to know.

O NOES I GIEF AWAY MOAR WENDY COPE POEMS WITHOUT COPYRIGHT PERMISSION U MAD WENDY?

[Anonymous No.1534652]

Since we are mostly discussing Irish poets, what does everyone think of Paul Muldoon?

[Anonymous No.1534655]

He'll be dead soon and everyone will be like 'oh he was so great!'

[Anonymous No.1534668]

>>1534655
>He'll be dead soon and everyone will be like 'oh he was so great!'
Heaney? Everyone is already on his dick, to be fair. He just won the Forward Poetry Prize for his new collection, which he probably wrote before breakfast on the day of the deadline.

[No.1534667]

A quality thread! Well-done, /lit/.

[Anonymous No.1534675]

>>1534629
Absolutely fair enough - and I don't know his work well enough to argue with you! And yeah, I have noticed that reluctance to talk about the troubles.

Thanks for the recommends, added Electric Light to my wish list for next month.

Nice thread OP, and makes a nice change round here.

[Anonymous No.1534720]

>>1534675
>I have noticed that reluctance to talk about the troubles.

This was one of the "hot topics" for the whole Belfast scene from which Heaney emerged: to what extent should poetry talk about social politics directly, and to what extent should it have a definate position on "the issues". It seems a slightly twatty argument to have, but I guess it resulted from a pressure that they felt was being placed upon them; like they were being pressured into "saying something" about the issues people were experiencing. This poem by Michael Longley is one that I always remember:

THE ICE-CREAM MAN

Rum and raisin, vanilla, butterscotch, walnut, peach:
You would rhyme off the flavours. That was before
They murdered the ice-cream man on the Lisburn Road
And you bought carnations to lay outside his shop.
I named for you all the wild flowers of the Burren
I had seen in one day: thyme, valerian, loosestrife,
Meadowsweet, tway blade, crowfoot, ling, angelica,
Herb robert, marjoram, cow parsley, sundew, vetch,
Mountain avens, wood sage, ragged robin, stitchwort,
Yarrow, lady's bedstraw, bindweed, bog pimpernel.


Here, Longley is almost writing an elegy for a casualty of the political turmoil. Yet, the poem plays around with the idea of avoiding those issues. Is the listing (90% of the poem) just a distraction from one important line, or is that a simplistic way of viewing the role of literature?

[Anonymous No.1534725]

>Is the listing (90% of the poem) just a distraction from one important line, or is that a simplistic way of viewing the role of literature?

I didn't mean that as an actual question, by the way. I'm just saying: the poem raises this question, knowing that obviously there's no right or wrong answer.

[Anonymous No.1534739]

How about Scottish poetry?
Has anyone read any Hugh MacDiarmid?
I would particularly recommend "A Drunk Man Looks At The Thistle", which is a book-length poem published in the 1920s. I view it as an extended mediation on Scottishness, and on the relationship between the individual, the local, the national and the global. It's also hilarious in parts, and is written from the point of view of a drunk bloke, who is passed out on a hillside throughout the whole poem. It's written in fairly dense "Scots", rather than "standard English".

[Anonymous No.1534743]

I think Heaney is still trying to work through these issues - the first poem of Electric Light (OK, 10 years old, but still after the troubles were allegedly "over") has the lines

Where the checkpoint used to be
Where the rebel boy was hanged in '98
Where negative ions in the open air
Are poetry to me. As once before
The slime and silver of the fattened eel.

Heaney seems to be concerned that the political engagement he was almost forced to make has moved him away from the elegaic poet of nature he wanted to be or envisaged himself as. It's almost as if he saw himself as the heir to Hughes, rather than Yeats, and has been a victim of his own irishness and the times he grew up in. The Death of a Naturalist is a hymn to the poet he may have been, and the work he does now still addresses these issues

[Anonymous No.1534779]

>>1534720
mmm, because outside of his work he's been a little freeer in his comments hasn't he?
I'm probably misquoting him utterly here, but i remember when he turned down the knighthood he said something along the lines of "no man has ever raised a glass to the Queen in this house.." Though again, maybe he isn't saying much more than his disapproval of the class system.

You read any Louis Macneice OP?

Someone mentioned Paul Muldoon earlier and I remember getting a collected works from the library once and being impressed with a writer whose grasp never outstripped his reach, or whichever way round your meant to say that old chestnut. Good stuff though I sometimes only realised it a while afterwards.

[Anonymous No.1534780]

>>1534739

Bible Bashing

Knock, knock

"Who's there?", we asked

A reasonable question at such an unreasonably early hour
on a Sunday morning

"Jehovah's Witnesses" replied the taller of the two
short-back-and-sides-sober-suited-shiny-shoed gentleman
shuffling on our doorstep

"Jehovah's Witnesses who?" we said as we peered round
our father's legs as he stood akimbo on the Welcome mat

"Jehovah's Witnesses who are waiting for The Second Coming,
The Divine Purification and Imminent Armageddon"
said the tall one waving a copy of The Watchtower in the air

"We've just come for a brief chat" he added

"Very brief" said my father as he slammed the door in their face

copyright elvis mcgonagall, 2004

I always felt a little guilty for not reading more MacDiarmid, especially A Drunk Man Stares at a Thistle. It's one of those poems like Canto General that I just can't seem to get past the first pages. I don't know why, but it just doesn't speak to me, Being written in Lallans doesn't help either.

[Anonymous No.1534789]

>>1534779

Coincidentally enough, I was reading London Rain earlier - I'd forgotten how much I like MacNeice:

The rain of London pimples
The ebony street with whte
And the neon-lamps of London
Stain the canals of night
And the park becomes a jungle
In the alchemy of night

I love the image of the rain "pimpling" the streets. I think he manages to mix formalism and naturalism and an urban romanticism that is pretty unique. I haven't read as much of his work as I'd like to have though...

[Anonymous No.1534809]

>>1534789
He sometimes seems to be the neglected figure of that generation of Auden, Spender, Isherwood (although Louis didn't run away to America at the first whiff of war). I've only go the...er autumn journal. But I'm looking for a poem i read years ago called A Ruined House I think. I don't know, but i seem to remember that had an interesting take on Ireland, imagining it as a..well, ruined house.

[Anonymous No.1534816]

>>1534809

Maybe this?

You know the worst: your wills are fickle,
Your values blurred, your hearts impure
And your past life a ruined church—
But let your poison be your cure.

It's from "Thalassa"

[Anonymous No.1534825]

>>1534816
no but it's nice!

[Anonymous No.1534832]

When I see a couple of kids
And guess he's fucking her and she's
Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,
I know this is paradise

Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives--
Bonds and gestures pushed to one side
Like an outdated combine harvester,
And everyone young going down the long slide

To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if
Anyone looked at me, forty years back,
And thought, That'll be the life;
No God any more, or sweating in the dark

About hell and that, or having to hide
What you think of the priest. He
And his lot will all go down the long slide
Like free bloody birds. And immediately

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

I wish Philip Larkin had been my dad. I think I would be happier now if my parents had such an attitude. But then:

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.

[Anonymous No.1534841]

>>1534832
How you became a poet's a mystery!
Wherever did you get your talent from?

I say: I had two uncles, Joe and Harry-
one was a stammerer, the other dumb.

[Anonymous No.1534846]

I thought it made me look more 'working class'
(as if a bit of chequered cloth could bridge that gap!)
I did a turn in it before the glass.
My mother said: It suits you, your dad's cap.
(She preferred me to wear suits and part my hair:
You're every bit as good as that lot are!)

All the pension queue came out to stare.
Dad was sprawled beside the postbox (still VR) ,
his cap turned inside up beside his head,
smudged H A H in purple Indian ink
and Brylcreem slicks displayed so folks migh think
he wanted charity for dropping dead.

He never begged. For nowt! Death's reticence
crowns his life, and me, I'm opening my trap
to busk the class that broke him for the pence
that splash like brackish tears into our cap.

[Anonymous No.1534851]

>>1534832


Larkin was such a fanny rat that if your mum was anything like attractive, and living anywhere around the midlands, or north of England, between say 1960-1970 then there's a pretty strong chance he actually IS your dad.

Then again, They fuck you up, your mum and dad/they do not mean to but they do

[Anonymous No.1534857]

Thanks /lit/ that was a nice thread - I'm off out now to drink beer and start fights like a proper poet.

Loads of love,

OP

>mfw a thread on 4chan actually went how I'd hoped

[Anonymous No.1534867]

>>1534851
That was an odd for thing for me to say now I think about it. I didn't know what he was like as a person at all. But reading High Windows, I do kind of like his attitude.

[No.1534893]

This has been incredible. It should be archived.

[Anonymous No.1534896]

>>1534832
When I was younger I used to think I was like a reincarnation of Philip Larkin because I related to him so much.

I think I was misguided though, because I also at other times thought I was the reincarnation of Sid James or Jean Genet.