One of my discoveries on the site is the Essential American Poets series, where Donald Hall during his tenure as Poet Laureate selected poets he considered truly noteworthy. There's a brief biographical and critical sketch of their work, then recordings of the poets themselves reading selections. I've been exposed to a lot of contemporary writers that I would have probably skipped right over otherwise.
Two I found notable (for opposite reasons) are Li-Young Lee and Amy Clampitt.
Clampitt's work is very dense, finely wrought and both allusive and elusive. I appreciate some of those characteristics but found myself tuning her out, not least because her reading style is one of the most infuriating I've ever heard. She strings words and thoughts together at a breakneck speed and unvarying tone that would make even listening to her read Dr. Seuss an aggravating chore. Combine that with the sometimes impenetrable nature of her poems, and you've got a recipe for disaster.
I want to take more time with her poems, try to mine them the way I used to be forced to do close readings of Eliot. She's got a whole encyclopedia of knowledge she's drawing from, but I don't yet know if she's using that as the foundation for her architecture or just window dressing.
Lee was born in Indonesia to Chinese parents but emigrated with them to the US when he was about 10. A lot of his poems have to do with displacement, foreignness, being stuck between two cultures. Given my background, there's a lot of very similar and fertile territory there that I find irresistible.
His poems are quite good, both rich and emotional, he's a poet very much in control. But if he weren't reading his own work I could listen to him do golf play-by-plays or read C-Span orders of business. He has an incredible voice that's not high diction or announcer-speak, it has a very intimate feel while still being rooted in performance. You don't forget that he's on stage, but you still feel like he's speaking right in your ear. Here's one of his that struck me as quietly original. Click on the poem's title to hear him read.
Li-Young Lee
The one that didn’t last?
The one in which you learned to be afraid
of the boarded-up well in the backyard
and the ladder in the attic?
The one presided over by armed men
in ill-fitting uniforms
strolling the streets and alleys,
while loudspeakers declared a new era,
and the house around you grew bigger,
the rooms farther apart, with more and more
people missing?
The photographs whispered to each other
from their frames in the hallway.
The cooking pots said your name
each time you walked past the kitchen.
And you pretended to be dead with your sister
in games of rescue and abandonment.
You learned to lie still so long
the world seemed a play you viewed from the muffled
safety of a wing. Look! In
run the servants screaming, the soldiers shouting,
turning over the furniture,
smashing your mother’s china.
Don’t fall asleep.
Each act opens with your mother
reading a letter that makes her weep.
Each act closes with your father fallen
into the hands of Pharaoh.
Which childhood? The one that never ends? O you,
still a child, and slow to grow.
Still talking to God and thinking the snow
falling is the sound of God listening,
and winter is the high-ceilinged house
where God measures with one eye
an ocean wave in octaves and minutes,
and counts on many fingers
all the ways a child learns to say Me.
Which childhood?
The one from which you’ll never escape? You,
so slow to know
what you know and don’t know.
Still thinking you hear low song
in the wind in the eaves,
story in your breathing,
grief in the heard dove at evening,
and plentitude in the unseen bird
tolling at morning. Still slow to tell
memory from imagination, heaven
from here and now,
hell from here and now,
death from childhood, and both of them
from dreaming.
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