Contemporary Poets

I must admit, most of the poetry I read is by poets long dead. Are there any contemporary poets you admire and recommend?

Lucille Clifton - African-American. I like her ability to universalize her own experiences.

Carolyn Kizer - She can be pretty academic, but the more I read, the more I liked her humor.

Karl Kirchway - nice eye for the sacredness of natural spaces.

Which dead poets do you read? What are you looking for in poetry.

A poet relatively recently dead that I love is the Serbian poet Vasco Popa, esp for his "Little Box" series of poems.

Contemporary poets I love include Penelope Shuttle, Billy Collins (the one-time American poet laureate), the great, recently departed Seamus Heaney, Mimi Khalvati, Greta Stoddart, U A Fanthorpe (also recently departed, sadly), Sharon Olds, Yehuda Amichai (adore, though he died in 2000), Robin Robertson...

Sorry not to be saying more about them, but it was an interesting exercise for me, as I thought that I was primarily interested in contemporary poets - until I began going through my books! I've realised that long-dead poets, depending on how you interpret "long", actually make up the bulk of my favourites.

Sharon Olds, Mark Strand, Ted Kooser, W.S. Merwin, Robert Bly, Charles Simic

Bruce Weigl, James Fenton would be two.

And as far as I know Nicanor Parra is still kicking around though he's 100 years old. He's the best of my best IMO.

Oh wow, Parra is still alive. He is pretty amazing, yes.

I love Nicanor Parra.

>2 aulsmith: I like poets from the Romantic era (Blake to Keats) and early 20th Century. I used to go to poetry readings in the 90s, but since I've moved overseas I haven't had the opportunity. And like most people, I went to the poetry readings to read my own poems, barely listening to the others while I waited my turn. Although there were a few good poets and a few memorable poems.

What I'd like to know is what are the trends in poetry these days? In the 90s it was all 'stream of consciousness'. Please tell me that has passed. SOC is ok if it is done by someone with real talent, but it was misunderstood to mean any unstructured thought is a poem.

8: Then I would recommend trying Kirchway. He really gets that Romantic sense of nature informing life. (Though structurally he's mostly free form)

I haven't been able to discern any kind of trends since the middle of the seventies. Seems like people form schools, clustering around certain mentors, but that anything goes. Makes it very hard to find new poetry since you never know what you're going to find if you pick up a chapbook by someone you don't know.

I discovered Leeds poet Tony Harrison a few years ago. His Tony Harrison Selected Poems contains some brilliant and quite unique poetry. "V." is a good place to start. A 1987 Channel 4 film, which features the author reading V., is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOTV4a6b1lM .

I've recently "discovered" Derek Walcott, I also like Carolyn Forche, Natasha Tretheway, Louise Gluck.

Poets I discovered after they died, dammit: James Still and James Dickey

>10 chrisharpe:
Thanks for the link to "V"! That was one of the things I missed out on by not having a TV in the early years of Channel Four. Strange to think that Tony Harrison must be in his seventies now. and that all the "rude words" in V are nowadays somehow less alarming than the pullovers worn by late-1980s poetry audiences...

Lots of worthwhile names already mentioned above. Simon Armitage is another excellent Yorkshire poet. And Walcott isn't the only Caribbean poet worth reading, by a long chalk: Grace Nichols, Fred d'Aguiar, Kamau Braithwaite, Linton Kwesi Johnson, John Agard, Amryl Johnson, ...

I was a member of the Poetry Book Society for quite some years: I found that to be a very good way of staying in touch with what's going on in (UK) poetry, and making sure that you buy at least four newly-published poetry collections each year. But I stopped when I found I was building up quite a backlog of TBR's.

Speaking of Caribbean poets, Caroline Carver is very interesting. Although she's English, she spent her formative childhood years in Jamaica and channels her childhood voice when she's writing poetry. She won the National Poetry Prize in 1999 (I think) for a poem called "Horse Underwater", which is published in her collection Jigharzi an Me. The whole collection is amazing.

Richard Wilbur, Paul Mariani, Fred Chappell, Dave Smith.

> 12 thorold, I resisted liking Simon Armitage, after I read his All Points North (not poetry) some five years ago. However, I have come to really enjoy his verse translations (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was very good indeed, The Death of King Arthur). His radio programmes have also been excellent, delivered in the sort of unaccented English we should hear more of on the BBC. Now I look forward to reading anything he publishes or broadcasts.

As for the pullovers, I'm probably wearing one now - aren't they in fashion any more? I suspect Simon Armitage has a few too...

> 11 southernbooklady / thorold, I've been wanting to read Omeros for years, but can't get hold of a copy. Is it as good as it sounds?

> 5 lriley, having trouble getting hold of Nicanor Parra too. I read some a long while back.

Great thread!

Let's see,

I like Tracy K. Smith, Terrence Hayes, D. A. Powell, Sharon Olds and Tony Hoagland.

Lately, I've been into Jericho Brown.

Sharon Olds, C.K. Williams, Mary Oliver, Julia Alvarez, and Luci Tapahonso

Also, the recently deceased Czeslaw Milosz and Denise Levertov

In Italy, there are poets like Milo De Angelis, Marco Guzzi, Valerio Magrelli, Biancamaria Frabotta and Livia Candiani.
I like them.

Permit me to introduce myself by suggesting Les Murray - a very fine (though idiosyncratic) Australian poet? By the way, I'm a 70 year old Australian but not, alas, a poet.

Charles Simic is great. So is J. Andrew Schrecker.