I've been getting into poetry a little bit lately, and I'm looking for good recommendations. My favorite poet (Raymond Carver) is way too depressing for me right now, so I'd really like suggestions for not-sad poetry. If you can provide links to someone's work, even better.
W.H. Auden has been my favorite for years, though he's not exactly a perky kind of poet. That says, he does a brilliant sort of wry observation of life at times that hits me in just the right place when I'm feeling deeply cynical. It's his depressing poems that get linked to the most, but if you can find a collection of his longer work at the library or the like, I'd strongly recommend reading "For the Time Being", his Christmas oratorio. It does have some grim parts--it's about the nativity, after all--but it's like this long, slow, complex rise of hope out of the darkness. Lovely stuff. (Though you may want to skip the song of the soldiers right before the slaughter of the innocents. Dark humor at its most unnerving.) On a much sillier side, I love Shel Silverstein's poetry for goofy fun. It's aimed at kids, but that doesn't mean it's low quality, by any means, and any decent library with a children's section should have a collection or two of his stuff.
Hmm... Auden's pretty great (I recently picked up his collected works). Non-depressing poetry is a difficult condition, but I think you might dig a book by Anne Carson called An Autobiography of Red. It's a novel in verse so there's no ready links to the text.
I'm no good with poets but here are two individual poems I've recently come across and enjoyed~! Love After Love ~Derek Walcott The Truly Great ~Stephen Spender
I've been enjoying Marcus Wicker's work as of late. His stuff isn't usually depressing, even though his book is called Maybe the Saddest Thing. Otherwise, I always enjoy the selections on [PANK]. I'm in love with this poem by Oliver Bendorf: I Promised Her My Hands Wouldn't Get Any Larger. And it's by a trans poet.
Anne Carson is one of the most interesting poets writing today --- not standard middlebrow magazine poetry by any means. My favorite of her books is called Short Talks; it's hard to find by itself, but most of the content is included in her 90s collection Plainwater. She also wrote a very strange and interesting book called Eros the Bittersweet that isn't poetry but has been hugely influential among contemporary poets. It's a personal reading of/meditation on ancient Greek poets that focuses on love having more to do with absence than presence. My favorite 20th-century poet was an English guy named Basil Bunting, who was far out of the mainstream of his time --- he was Northern, a Quaker, and kind of an adventurer as well as a poet. His masterpiece is a long poem entitled Briggflatts.
Gotta rep my man Rick Barot. Disclaimer: Rick was one of my college English professors and I'll never live it down. Here's some Elizabeth Bishop. I like her work quite a bit (because that first poet crammed her down our necks).
...man, I must have read different E.E. Cummings than you did. It tends towards bittersweet rather than sheer tragedy, but he can get as dark as Emily Dickinson a lot of the time.
Well, he can be dark when aiming at government and institutions, but his personal stuff is generally pretty chipper, occasionally lapsing to poignant and bittersweet. To the best of my recollection, and now I'm going to pull my complete Cummings off the shelf tonight and peruse. Maybe I skipped over the downers.
I don't think I've read a complete collection of his, just selections from. So it's entirely possible that the editor of that collection had picked out most of the depressing stuff. (I only remember two specifically non-depressing ones: one on a falling leaf, and an erotic poem.)
I've been reading Bunting's Complete Poems for a little while, but I'm having a hard time getting into his Sonatas. Sonically, they are incredible, but, couched as they are in Modernist allusions, they don't leave too much of an impression on me. "The Spoils" reads the same to me as Pounds' Cantos. I will admit that I haven't made it through Briggflatts, but I was curious if you had any suggestions on how to crack this difficult, aurally pleasing nut. Also, I didn't suggest enough poets to the OP. Try Yusef Komunyakaa, James Wright, Terrance Hayes, Alice Friman (my mentor), Richard Siken's Crush, Alex Lemon's Mosquito (his later stuff isn't as good), and John Berryman's Dream Songs when you want to read some depressing stuff.
The Sonatas are, in fact, mostly about the music, and I agree that they can resist analysis the same way the Cantos can. My advice about Briggflatts is to skip the third movement until you've got a grip on the other four. It's supposed to be about Alexander the Great's army advancing into India and being turned back homeward after the vision of an angel (or something), but I don't think I'd have figured any of that out on my own no matter how much I'd read it. I guess the point is that one's life reaches its climax and then inevitably falls, even if one is Alexander the Great. Movements 1, 2, 4, and 5 are far more personal to Bunting and in my opinion musically better, too. There are at least two good recordings of Bunting reading Briggflatts --- one studio, one at a venue, if memory serves --- and I strongly recommend reading along while he recites. He wrote his poetry for his own Northern accent, and such is Bunting's attention to music that sometimes the accent really matters.
Jack Ridl. Only just started reading his newest book, Practicing to Walk Like a Heron (kindle version), and what I've read thus far is great, great stuff. And if you like sports, especially basketball, go buy a copy of Losing Season, NOW. A couple examples of his stuff that I managed to google up: Hardship in a Nice Place Hands ...and, hell, I'll type one of the ones I just read from his new book wholesale (in code tags to preserve spacing): Code (text): MY WIFE HAS SENT ME AN EMAIL My wife has sent me an email. She asks if we have enough coffee for the weekend. She adds, "I love you." I hit reply and type, "Yes, we have plenty, two bags of French Roast in fact. We'll be fine." I add, "I love you, too" and hit send. I am sitting in our living room, laptop on my lap. She is sitting in her office upstairs. We are emailing in our own home. We have lived here for thirty-five years. Outside my window, in the garden, outside hers, in a window box, June's early rise of zinnias and salvia lifts to bloom amid the dusty miller. It is raining, the rain dousing the cosmos and cleome as it falls from the roof. She emails, "you should see this rain from up here." I email, "You should see the rain from down here." Yesterday after a nice lunch together I got up and went to the garage and sorted through the shelves not knowing what I was looking for. After lunch today, I'm going to find the trowel my father used. I'll get a rag and some rust remover and bring it back.
I am a horrible person. I completely forgot I created this thread. My local library sucks, so I'm going to have to wait to get some of this stuff until I have cash again. Meanwhile I will read the ones online over the next couple of days... Thanks, everybody.
Try inter-library loan! My library (the one I work at) is fantastic, but the poetry selection is terrible. I only raise money, but after I've been here long enough, I might try to spur a fundraising drive (i.e. a grant) to get a better poetry collection.
Get this -- my county library system got rid of inter-library loans. ALL OF THEM. If it's not in the county library system -- and it's a small backwards county, not an urban one -- you can't get it. I hate living here.
