Poetry 101

I got an e-mail recently from someone who visited here and wrote to thank me for talking about poetry. I haven't, really, in any substantive way, although if you'll notice the links, there is one to Poets.org.

I'm a poetry junky. My history with poetry is the history of a snob who became a devotee: I started reading poetry because I thought it was intellectual. I began to love it. It's roughly analogous to contemporary avant-garde music -- I'm fascinated by the exploration and the chance to learn. It's a world that's not quite this one, even though it's often more relevant than the news. (That's probably why I read so much speculative fiction.)

I've reviewed a fair amount of poetry at Epinions.com, and one or two collections at Rambles and Green Man Review. Maybe I should mention some of those as part of my Books to Watch Out For column.

A while back I reviewed Louise Erdrich's collection Original Fire at Rambles. She's a little scary -- her poetry goes down into bedrock emotions, and has a lot to say to outsiders. Maybe insiders should read it too -- they may not be so inside as they think.

Jorie Graham took me a while, but when I finally started to get it, my hair was standing up. I reviewed her collection The Dream of the Unified Field at Epinions. It's sort of a "collected/selected" book -- twenty years of Jorie Graham, and it's superb.

Mark Doty is another who keeps finding new things for me to see. His strongest collections, I think, are Atlantis and My Alexandria. They're the most real. I haven't reviewed those two collections yet, but I have done Sweet Machine, also an excellent volume.

The last entry in my "Poetry 101" essay I think has to be Jimmy Santiago Baca. He's a remarkably compelling poet (and I say that knowing full well I'm talking about an area of literature in which "compelling" is the make-or-break criterion). See my review of Black Mesa Poems for my take on his work.

So there. Now I've talked about poetry. A bit. I'm sure there will be more, because there are many poets whose work I love. In the meantime, investigate these people. Learn something. That's what it's about.