Jarrell, Randall. The Lost World: New Poems. New York: Collier Books, 1966.

This collection of poems is strikingly different from Jarrell’s body of work about wartime aviation. These are mostly dream-like meditations on childhood, told from the perspective of a child, and sometimes as persona poems in the voice of a woman. They employ deliberately prosaic language and a stocky, often single-stanza form.

Merwin, W.S. The Lice. New York: Antheneum, 1967.

A forceful, strong-voiced body of poems. Possibly a predecessor of Glück’s ventriloquistic style? Also somehow reminiscent of Kinnell’s The Book of Nightmares. Haunting, powerful, and impossible to summarize.

Merwin, W.S. The Moving Target. New York: Atheneum, 1979.

The soldered-together sentence fragments, lack of punctuation, and disruptive repetition of certain phrases in this collection of poems is highly reminiscent of Paul Celan. This collection seems clearly more influenced by French than The Lice, which, by compare, moved into a more distinctly American voice, while retaining the high-voltage associations and also adding metaphoric elements reminiscent of Pablo Neruda. Merwin was striking out in new directions in The Moving Target, no doubt heavily influenced by his translation work.

Moore, Marianne. Selections from The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1962.

Poems of observation, many of which follow a pattern of syllabic counts from stanza to stanza. Many of these poems employ a wit akin to that of the Algonquin Round Table (Dorothy Parker et al.), and certainly possess a kind of period charm. But beyond this, the work is interesting for its celeritous musicality, and in particular the ways that Moore works with enjambment and slant internal rhymes to create pleasurable disorientation.

Silkin, Jon. Poems New And Selected. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan UP, 1966

These are compelling meditations on life and death, at once seemingly plainspoken and yet intellectually intricate and refined. His poems about the death of his son, as well as similarly resonant poems about the death of animals, betray a deep sensitivity and a beautiful use of forms that invent themselves as they go along.

Snodgrass, W[illiam] D[eWitt]. Heart’s Needle. New York: Knopf, 1959.

This is a collection of meditations upon failure, written in a variety of somewhat formal structures. The title sequence focuses on failures in parenthood. This collection does not strike me as “confessional” in the sense we have adopted since the 1980s of direct revelation and admission of shortcomings, as much as it attempts to find language suitable to relate a sense of futility in the speaker’s voice, and the speaker’s relationship to the world.

Stevens, Wallace. “Ideas of Order.” and “The Man With the Blue Guitar.” The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. New York: Knopf, 1977. 117-188.

A collection of musically-driven poems, which seem to find their way by musicality into strange ideas and sensibilities. “The Man With the Blue Guitar” is an ars poetica composed in couplets, simultaneously explaining and demonstrating Stevens’ poetics through the metaphor of the blue guitar.

Williams, William Carlos. “Spring And All” Imaginations. New York: New Directions, 1970. 88-151.

An experimental work interspersing poems with fragmentary prose commentary on the importance of imagination in art and life. An incredible sense of freedom is achieved by the deliberate meanderings, starts, stops, and intentionally mis-headed sections. The poems, set apart from the surrounding experimental-style commentary, demonstrate Williams’ characteristic style.

You see, posts I made about Shakespeare or Wallace Stevens are placing high in Google searches. And these days, a remarkable number of students use Google as a means to gather materials for English essays. In fact, a lot of them simply plagiarize what they find. Cut. Paste. Grade.

There are a number of websites and tools designed to help teachers detect plagiarism. In the end, though, the root problem still lies with a younger generation feeling so creatively uninspired by literature and its presentation in schools that they flock to their computers to Google up a grade rather than think about what they have read (if they did).

I have no idea if that is what this person was doing. But I know she (if it really was a she) was frustrated enough to dump her thoughts into the website of a total stranger.

How have we failed? Still burning in my mind is the experience of introducing a young South American college student to Neruda for the first time. The air was electric. I know it’s possible to love literature because I do–and I have seen firsthand how it can make others come alive.

That so many students are now, by contrast, so deeply disenfranchised that they Google their way through an English grade breaks my heart. If you look closely, even The Bard has a tear in his eye.

What is so great about this poem is the way it feels in your mouth when read aloud (try it!) and the way it delights the senses–all the while evading much in the way of prosaic meaning. Yet despite its lack of solid, linear, non-symbolic meaning, the poem is profoundly assertive. Rather than examine the lush (concupiscent, perhaps?) language elements of this poem, I would like to take a moment to talk about the line breaks, and how the few artificially broken lines in the poem serve to strengthen the simultaneous sense of certainty and delight.

The first is:

The muscular one, and bid him whip /
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.

These lines, and the one above it, are part of a command, which is necessarily declamatory. While most of the breaks in this poem fall on caesuras–like commas and periods–this more deliberate break has a deliberate effect: suspense. What will the muscular roller of big cigars whip? Apparently nothing more brutal or kinky than the makings of ice cream. But momentarily, our mind gets pushed out on that ledge.

Rather than create ambiguity, line breaks can also serve to reinforce a (false) sense of certainty about objects the poet refers to:

Let the wenches dawdle in such dress /
As they are used to wear …

Take from the dresser of deal, /
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet /
On which …

here “such dress” and “that sheet” combined with, again, the structure of a command, gives us an artificial sense that we know what the speaker is talking about. You know–that sheet. And yet, we do not. “Such” could mean “so much” as well as “that type of”–both meanings that somehow imply we know what the speaker is talking about already. This device–of declaiming in such a way as to imply the reader is inside the experience–can be a very powerful way to create certainty and ambiguity at the same time. The result is pleasure, and a more interesting poem. The line breaks serve to reinforce this, by giving great weight to the objects themselves.

Other lines build certainty through the classic device of rhyme:

If her horny feet protrude, they come /
To show how cold she is, and dumb.

Ultimately, the poem works to bring a tremendous amount of energy of declamation, certainty, perhaps even pomp and circumstance–to a collection of images and ideas that are not logically sound. The simultaneous self-assurance of the speakers voice, reinforced by line breaks and other devices, combined with the tremendous amount of strangeness in this poem, makes it a highly energetic and impactful work.

What is so great about this poet is his ability to bring tremendous strangeness and tremendous certainty together in many of his works. Ultimately, Stevens seems to have studied, understood, and reproduced a great deal of art that does not necessarily have great prosaic meaning. Yet it does mean something to the poetic mind, where it works and dwells and delights–time and again, read after read.