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What Are the Best Poems of the Past 25 Years?
Austin Allen on July 24, 2012, 12:30 AM
In 2006 the New York Times asked a select group of literary sages: “What’s
the best work of American fiction of the last 25 years?” The results of
the poll stirred chatter, passions, and healthy controversy. Toni Morrison’
s Beloved emerged as the voters' favorite, followed by Don DeLillo’s
Underworld, Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, and John Updike’s Rabbit
tetralogy.
To the best of my knowledge, no one has yet compiled a similar list for
poetry. I find this slightly surprising: whereas it might take a reader
years to plough through the fiction list, anyone can consume an equivalent
number of poems in a single afternoon, and so feel encouraged to join in the
parlor game. Besides, while the contemporary fiction canon is fairly well
established (most people interested in the Times list would already have
been familiar with Beloved), contemporary poetry is a vast hodgepodge
through which critics have only just begun to wade. Kvetch if you like about
the reductiveness of literary “canons”: in this case, a little winnowing
couldn’t hurt.
Though I can’t match the Times’s ability to survey famous authors, I
thought I’d at least try to start the discussion by suggesting a few
choices of my own, then soliciting other picks from readers. Below is a list
of five poems I predict will stand the test of time, accompanied by brief
commentaries (justifications?) for each. The poems are ranked in no
particular order—I have about equal confidence in all of them—and I can’t
call them a “Top Five” because my knowledge of recent poetry is nowhere
near exhaustive. They’re simply five poems that I think belong on any best-
of list. I’ve also mentioned a handful of “runners-up” that I greatly
admire.
My criteria for judgment were few and straightforward. I stuck to works in
English, the only language whose poetry I’m competent to judge, and
disqualified poems by writers I’ve known or worked with. I did not, however
, confine myself to American poets. I looked for poems that have lodged in
my memory—that I’ve returned to with pleasure over and over. Most of all I
looked for poems that seemed to me “word perfect.” That is, I privileged
shapeliness over sprawl, self-contained achievement over vaulting ambition.
(One arguable exception is choice #5, an excerpt from an uneven but
wonderfully daring book-length poem.)
Again, I hope this list is the start of a conversation. I invite readers to
comment on it, add to it, or offer thought-provoking reasons for subtracting
from it. If nothing else I’m excited to share these pieces, the full texts
of which I’ve linked to wherever possible.
1. “Sentimental Education,” Mary Ruefle
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15909
I stumbled across this poem two or three years ago and still find it
remarkable with each rereading. It’s unlike anything else Mary Ruefle has
written, but then many of her poems are oddball experiments unto themselves.
Randall Jarrell famously defined a poet as someone who “manages, in a
lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or
six times”; Ruefle prefers to chase her storms into a variety of exotic
provinces, and in “Sentimental Education” the result is a triumph of well-
made luck.
The poem is set amidst a tangled web of schoolhouse crushes, during an era
that is rendered deliberately vague. The Flaubertian title seems to point to
the nineteenth century, and many of the names mentioned sound Victorian (“
Cortland Filby,” “Ogden Smythe,” the teacher “Ursula Twombly”); but
other names (“Olina Korsk,” “Yukiko Pearl”) would be out of place in a
Victorian classroom, and we hear of a florist who “punches the wrong code”
at the register, a modern enough detail. This may be late twentieth-century
Britain, or it may be an imagined country. Either way, Twombly’s class is
a petri dish of longing, of hopeless affection for even the least endearing
people and traits (“Nadine Clair loves Ogden Smythe / who loves blowing his
nose on postage stamps”).
All this thwarted passion fulfills itself in two rhetorical climaxes, one in
the middle of the poem and one at the end. In the middle we get a startling
but strangely moving tribute: “Please pray for William Shakespeare / who
does not know how much we love him, miss him and think of him.” Ruefle’s
insight here cuts deep: the great, dead authors we fall for in classrooms
are as painfully unavailable to us as the cute boy or girl the next desk
over. (And vice versa.) After several more images of futility we encounter a
girl who has been forced to wear a dunce cap, its “paper cone” mirroring
the one with which the florist wraps bouquets of roses. This humiliated
student, who has been “singled out” among her equally lonely peers, is “
trembling” and “sincere in her fervent wish to die.” As the poem closes,
even that dark passion finds an unlikely object:
Take it away and give it to the Tartars
who roll gloriously into battle.
2. “Outsider Art,” Kay Ryan
http://thisrecording.tumblr.com/post/60050113/outsider-art-by-k
This poem fascinates me in part because its topic fascinates me. Treat
yourself sometime to a perusal of Wikipedia’s “Outsider art” page,
including the list of “Notable outsider artists.” There you’ll learn
about the half-blind English orphan who created thousands of ink drawings at
the behest of an inner “medium,” the American janitor who built a shining
religious monument in a rented garage, and the French postman who
constructed an entire palace out of stones he found on his route.
As these examples suggest, outsider art is not just folk art or art created
by anti-establishment types (though it can take on those meanings also). In
its specialized sense, it refers to the art of “amateurs” whose severe
eccentricities or diagnosed disorders—schizophrenia or autism, for example
—place them genuinely outside the mainstream. Such art varies widely but is
often marked by one or more classic features: ardent religiosity, obsessive
symmetry, narrow thematic preoccupations, horror vacui (literally,
abhorrence of a vacuum; in art, the compulsive filling of blank spaces). It
tends to awe and disturb in equal measure, to shake up our ordinary
understanding of "beauty" and "inspiration."
All of this background is implicit, not spelled out, in Ryan’s “Outsider
Art.” In a few swift brushstrokes she captures the homeliness (“too dreary
/ or too cherry red”), the religious oddity (“covered with things / the
savior said / or should have said”), the sublimated violence (“they gouge
and hatch”) often associated with outsider artworks. Also the horror vacui:
“There never / seems to be a surface equal / to the needs of these people.
” This sly observation could apply just as well to artists in general, all
of whom are outsiders in their own minds, none of whom will ever have time
or material enough to exhaust their creative urges. And of course the “
outsider artist” mantle could be stretched to fit Ryan herself. Though she
has by now received mainstream recognition, including a U. S. Poet
Laureateship, she worked for most of her career very quietly on the margins,
confining herself zealously to her signature formal mode. Her brief, self-
effacing lyrics with their jaunty internal rhymes seem at first digestible,
even friendly. Only on closer inspection do we feel like the audience in her
poem: “not / pleased the way we thought / we would be pleased.”
3. “Homage to Pessoa,” Frederick Seidel
http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/homage-to-pessoa/
Seidel is a great provocateur and, sporadically, a great poet. The scion of
a mining millionaire, he has fashioned a legend for himself as a man of
wealth, mystery, and taste, as well as scorn for the boundaries of taste.
His stance—or rather, that of the poetic persona he has created for himself
—can best be described as “too rich to give a damn.” Too rich to give a
damn whether you know he’s rich (in fact, he makes sure you do: poem after
poem name-checks Savile Row, Ducati motorcycles, the Carlyle Hotel); too
rich to give a damn whether he offends you (in fact, he baits you as often
as he can: “A woman my age naked is just a total nightmare”); too rich to
give a damn about you at all (he pointedly avoids poetry readings, book
signings, audience relations in general).
Unfortunately his insouciance often extends to form, making it hard to pick
individual Seidel performances—as opposed to the Seidel character, the
overall repertoire—that will live on. He loves throwaway gestures of all
kinds: deliberately ridiculous rhymes, one-off puns, endings that seem
already to have boarded a private flight to the next poem. As a result, his
most finished and satisfying poems are often his least characteristic. Such
is the case with “Homage to Pessoa,” a short lyric in which (after the
example of Fernando Pessoa, who juggled a cluster of poetic personae) he
offers a variation on his typical autobiographical character.
The speaker of “Homage” seems to be an aristocrat from another era,
perhaps another century. He wears white gloves and carries a gold-knobbed
cane, which he “set[s] aside” as he prepares to kill himself. The reason
for his despair? “I once loved. / I thought I would be loved. / But I wasn
’t loved.” Seidel is blunt as a rule, but the tone here is nakeder, less
arrogant, than he usually allows himself to be. The cane is an obvious
phallic symbol, an emblem of ineffectual desire. So is the pen with which
the speaker tries to write. So is the shotgun he slides in his mouth,
knowing that his death won’t win over the beloved any more than his wealth
or art will. And so is the chilling final image of the hunting dog, which
may be “pointing” toward the speaker himself, or toward the object of the
failed erotic chase, or (like the horses in a famous Dickinson poem) “
toward eternity.”
4. “The Scale of Intensity,” Don Paterson
http://www.donpaterson.com/poem_gods_gift_to_women.htm
The last 25 to 50 years have been a golden age for prose poetry. James Tate,
Mark Strand, Russell Edson, and Matthea Harvey, among others, have all done
notable work in this once obscure form. Though it’s a whisker-close call,
Don Paterson’s “The Scale of Intensity” may be the most bizarre and
challenging prose poem I’ve come across yet.
It’s certainly the least cheerful. Its form is based on those charts that
explain certain scientific scales, like the Fujita for tornadoes or the
Richter for earthquakes, in terms of the effects of the disasters they
measure. Here, however, the catastrophe is neither fully natural nor fully
human; it’s a nameless horror spreading over nature and civilization alike.
At intensity level 9 of 12, the following effects are observed:
Small trees uprooted. Bathwater drains in reverse vortex. Wholesale
slaughter of religious and ethnic minorities. Conspicuous cracks in ground.
Damage to reservoirs and underground pipelines.
That line about wholesale slaughter isn’t even the darkest in the poem.
Does Paterson “earn it," as the saying goes? Nothing in the context leavens
its brutality, but that’s because this is a poem about our worst fears
realized, a pure distillation of fear itself. It reminds us that real mass
tragedies occur for no detectable cause: genocide isn’t linked to
malevolent forces in the earth or air, just as natural disasters aren’t
linked to human sinning. By imagining a world in which evil is unitary and
measurable, if not controllable, Paterson paradoxically highlights the cruel
randomness of our own universe. If the “intensity” is more than we can
easily stomach, it’s also far more than most poems are willing to risk.
5. “Sublimaze,” Gjertrud Schnackenberg
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2010/07/0083030
I would have loved to represent Schnackenberg by her comic gem “Two Tales
of Clumsy,” but it just missed the 25-year cut, having first been published
in 1985. Fortunately, her output has remained as marvelous as her name. Her
most recent book, Heavenly Questions, consists of a linked suite of elegies
for her late husband, the philosopher Robert Nozick. It follows the
meanderings of the speaker’s mind as she sits by his hospital bedside,
watching him fade and pass, confronting for herself all the old
philosophical problems: time, identity, infinity, love, death.
It’s a work that aims to touch the heights, intellectual as well as
emotional, and sometimes overreaches in the process. But where it succeeds,
it succeeds grandly. The second section, “Sublimaze,” is the centerpiece
and high-water mark of the volume. The title is the brand name of a powerful
painkiller; it also puns elaborately on “maze,” “amaze,” “sublime,”
and “sublimate,” in both the scientific sense of vaporizing a solid and
the Freudian sense of converting socially unacceptable impulses into
creative ones. As the husband dozes under the influence of the drug, the
speaker, nodding off also, wanders a dreamlike maze: a conflation of the
Minotaur’s labyrinth, the Hagia Sophia, and a network of hospital corridors.
The section begins: “The door I crazed with knocking reappears”—another
pun, this time on “crazed” (cracked, maddened). “A transitory door, lit
on the wall…” All the doors the speaker encounters are transitory; none is
the door, the one that will bring escape or death. The frustration of the
dream at times threatens to craze the reader also. Yet the intricate stanzas
, the narcotic rhythms of Schnackenberg’s iambic pentameter convey
uncannily the sense of waiting for death—one’s own or someone else’s—in
the sterile purgatories our society has built for the purpose. With
deceptive calm the poet plays at the threshold between reality and
hallucination, existence and oblivion, madness and revelation. Her lullaby
is the kind that may inspire nightmares.
Runners-Up: “Angels,” Russell Edson; "Distressed Haiku," Donald Hall; “
Chekhov: A Sestina,” Mark Strand; “Baked Alaska, A Theory Of,” Matthea
Harvey; “In Paris With You,” James Fenton
Special Mention: Omeros, Derek Walcott—the definition of a sprawling,
uneven, hyperambitious work, but also the only major epic poem of the past
25 years, and a formidable achievement by any standard. |
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