Poets Today

Although I read and teach a lot of Old School poetry, I also try to continue to read contemporary poets, although it's hard to keep up with the all the poetry that's out there. That's not cause for despair; it's actually cause for celebration. Professor and writer Judith Johnson, I believe, applied the term "a false economy of scarcity" to the impulse some people have to create narrow canons of literature--an impulse that may be guided in part by a fear of abundance. An abundance of literature may make some people feel as if literature is "out of control." It may be out of their control, but it's not out of control. Some people may feel as if, with new literature pouring out all the time, "the standards" may disappear. Canons shift all the time; just look at any poetry anthology from the 19th or early 20th centuries. Standards vary according to criteria, in spite of a yearning to establish the indisputable list of great works.

Among the contemporary poets I've enjoyed reading are, in no particular order, Natasha Trethewey, Marilyn Chin, Mark Halliday, Jim Daniels, Virgil Suarez, Rita Dove, and Kevin Clark--to name only a handful. I like some of Sherman Alexie's poetry, and I've enjoyed poems by Gary Soto, too. I'm partial to my late friend Wendy Bishop's posthumous collection, My Last Door, but I think even if I hadn't known Wendy, I'd be impressed with it.

I also just like reading poetry in the magazines in which I publish, or in magazines I just pick up. Often I don't remember the name of the poet whose work I like. But there's good poetry appearing all the time. In recent years, I've placed a few poems in British magazines, and it's nice to see what sorts or things are going on poetically over there. I've read a smattering of contemporary Swedish poetry in Swedish, and I even translated one. It's by Marie Silkeberg, from her collection, Black Mercury. It appears in a book I wrote with Wendy Bishop and Kate Haake, Metro: Journeys in Writing Creatively. Here's the untitled poem (in English):

Mother! my son called in the night.
Mother! I can't see you.

You can, my precious.
You can see my voice.

Listen to the sky now, so wildly blue,
And to black birds when they fly.


Thanks again to Marie Silkeberg.

Copryight Marie Silkeberg; translation copyright Hans Ostrom 2007.

Ultra-Talk

Mark Halliday read his poetry on campus here the other evening, and it was a great reading. Halliday is known as the "ultra-talk" poet because many of his poems are discursive and conversational--rhetorically rich monologues. The label can be misleading, however, because his poems are exceptionally well crafted and, without being preciously self-conscious, are often self-reflective, and they are extremely subtle in the ways they move and the ways they end. The poems are often relentless in their pursuit of the implications flowing from the premise with which they begin or from which they (apparently) sprang. Many of the poems are sardonic, satiric, and downright funny: qualities one thirsts for in poetry from any era. His poetry is not altogether dissimilar to that of Kenneth Koch. (I wish I had asked him directly about that comparison; maybe he doesn't like Koch's poetry.)

Halliday's books include Little Star, Selfwolf, and Jab, and he has also published a book on the work of Wallace Stevens. Halliday teaches at the University of Ohio.


During his reading, as he was introducing a poem that was, to some extent, a miniature novel, he said there were 11 reasons why he couldn't be a novelist and, by implication, why had to be a poet. He didn't specify what the 11 reasons were, but I hope to hear them some day. I am sympathetic to his difficulty with fiction. I've written and published stories, published one novel, and written other novels--but I find fiction-writing almost immeasurably harder than writing poetry. Writing novels is "labor" in a way that writing poetry does not seem to be, even as writing and revising poetry are no vacation. I tend to get distracted from plot, characterization, and scenes by . . . . well, by almost anything. One word can throw me off the track. In the forest of writing-fiction, poets often behave like bad hunting-dogs; when they're supposed to be moving forward on the track of that plot, they wander off to look at a bird, sniff something arcane, bark at the moon, lie down, scratch themselves, or hunt an animal in which the hunter has no interest. Unfortunately, and fortunately, poets are interested in everything. To them the demotic is rare.

Please find and read Mark Halliday's poetry.