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The Modern Element: Essays on Contemporary Poetry
A collection of bold, insightful, and controversial essays by “a poetry critic of the very first order” ( New York Times ). Over the last ten years, through essays in The New Republic , The New Yorker , and other magazines, Adam Kirsch―“one of the most promising young poet-critics in America” ( Los Angeles Times )―has established himself among the most controversial and fearless critics writing today. Sure to cause heated debate, this collection of essays surveys the world of contemporary poetry with boldness and insight, whether Kirsch is scrutinizing the reputation of popular poets such as Billy Collins and Sharon Olds or admiring the achievement of writers as different as Derek Walcott, Czeslaw Milosz, and Frederick Seidel. For readers who want an introduction to the complex world of contemporary American poetry, from major figures like Jorie Graham to the most promising poets of the younger generation, Kirsch offers close readings and bold judgments. For readers who already know that world, The Modern Element will offer a surprising and thought-provoking new perspective.
354 pages, Hardcover
First published January 7, 2008
9 people are currently reading
69 people want to read
About the author
Adam Kirsch
36 books80 followersAdam Kirsch is the author of two collections of poems and several books of poetry criticism. A senior editor at the New Republic and a columnist for Tablet, he also writes for The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. He lives in New York City with his wife and son.
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
April 18, 2022
Adam Kirsch’s book on contemporary poetry surveys over 20 poets who made their name from the twentieth century onwards. His view of good poetry feels decidedly conservative, one which favours the traditional form over confessional or free verse, but Kirsch's writing appears well-mannered even with writers he does not find agreeable. In an essay criticising Jorie Graham, Kirsch applies a systemic eye to show that there is no causal logic to the extracts of Graham’s poetry that he selects. For a critic whose job is to help orient a reader to a writer, Kirsch’s analysis comes across as frustrated. If an expertis unable to gain insight into Graham’s writing, the book suggests that even the most intuitive readers are unlikely to gain anything beyond an appreciation for Graham's poetic swerve.
What I appreciate about The Modern Element is the flair that Kirsch brings to his essays. He’s astute at contextualising poets in their historical context, and even with poets he would appear to dislike he does highlight where he believes they succeed. On John Ashberry, he finds reading in shorter doses to be valuable (“to read it at great length, as one is generally made to do in any volume of Ashberry’s, is mildly masochistic”). On Geoffrey Hill, a writer whose formal verse you would believe Kirsch sympathetic towards, he criticises over-seriousness (“Hill… has never embraced the kind of humility necessary [for poetic evolution]”). What resonates is that Kirsch demands more from contemporary poets than vulnerability and authenticity; likewise he expects from formal poets more than a straight fidelity to form.
To build on the previous point, Kirsch comments at various points in his book on obscurity and authenticity. He sees them as bad habits, a lasting imperative from Pound’s proclamation that poetry must “make it new”. In the former, poets deliberately obscure or avoid legibility in their writing in pursuit of conceptual innovation. In the latter, authenticity becomes a totalizing force or arbiter of a collection’s success, a form of social currency or even a marketing heuristic. Absent harmony between form, content or recognized technique, poetry becomes hard to appraise. I find myself sympathetic towards Kirsch’s opinions, but his anger at both obscurity and authenticity is occasionally misplaced. Writers like Sharon Olds do indeed over time become shrill as they continue writing about the same subject, and there are points where she rightfully should be called out. (Kirsch is a Jewish man, and he is rightfully incensed when Olds compares herself in a poem to a Jew in the Holocaust). But variations in technique and experimentation in tenor are overall beneficial to poetry. Maybe Kirsch is suggesting that such experiments should not be published – but I would argue that public failures of experimentation are also part of the wider artistic process. Others will follow in imitation. Some will be good enough to make it new.
More interesting are Kirsch’s survey and attempts to knit together the rupture between the poetic traditions of the past and the current landscape we find ourselves in. Kirsch has written elsewhere about how the rupture between old and new makes it hard for new readers to get to poetry (how does one teach it, after all), and he was also an early bird in using his platform to assess the connection between rap to spoken word. But he has a comfort zone and in The Modern Element, his essays are slanted toward white men. Of the four women he speaks of – Jorie Graham, C.D. Wright, Louise Gluck and A.E. Stalling – he warms only towards Stallings. More unfortunately is that only one poet of colour is mentioned in the whole book: Derek Walcott. It is a shame that The Modern Element did not cover writers like Carl Phillips, Li-Young Lee, June Jordan, Langston Hughes or even Audre Lorde, all contemporaries who wrote or were writing in the 20th century. These absences for me blunt the strengths of the work.
What I appreciate about The Modern Element is the flair that Kirsch brings to his essays. He’s astute at contextualising poets in their historical context, and even with poets he would appear to dislike he does highlight where he believes they succeed. On John Ashberry, he finds reading in shorter doses to be valuable (“to read it at great length, as one is generally made to do in any volume of Ashberry’s, is mildly masochistic”). On Geoffrey Hill, a writer whose formal verse you would believe Kirsch sympathetic towards, he criticises over-seriousness (“Hill… has never embraced the kind of humility necessary [for poetic evolution]”). What resonates is that Kirsch demands more from contemporary poets than vulnerability and authenticity; likewise he expects from formal poets more than a straight fidelity to form.
To build on the previous point, Kirsch comments at various points in his book on obscurity and authenticity. He sees them as bad habits, a lasting imperative from Pound’s proclamation that poetry must “make it new”. In the former, poets deliberately obscure or avoid legibility in their writing in pursuit of conceptual innovation. In the latter, authenticity becomes a totalizing force or arbiter of a collection’s success, a form of social currency or even a marketing heuristic. Absent harmony between form, content or recognized technique, poetry becomes hard to appraise. I find myself sympathetic towards Kirsch’s opinions, but his anger at both obscurity and authenticity is occasionally misplaced. Writers like Sharon Olds do indeed over time become shrill as they continue writing about the same subject, and there are points where she rightfully should be called out. (Kirsch is a Jewish man, and he is rightfully incensed when Olds compares herself in a poem to a Jew in the Holocaust). But variations in technique and experimentation in tenor are overall beneficial to poetry. Maybe Kirsch is suggesting that such experiments should not be published – but I would argue that public failures of experimentation are also part of the wider artistic process. Others will follow in imitation. Some will be good enough to make it new.
More interesting are Kirsch’s survey and attempts to knit together the rupture between the poetic traditions of the past and the current landscape we find ourselves in. Kirsch has written elsewhere about how the rupture between old and new makes it hard for new readers to get to poetry (how does one teach it, after all), and he was also an early bird in using his platform to assess the connection between rap to spoken word. But he has a comfort zone and in The Modern Element, his essays are slanted toward white men. Of the four women he speaks of – Jorie Graham, C.D. Wright, Louise Gluck and A.E. Stalling – he warms only towards Stallings. More unfortunately is that only one poet of colour is mentioned in the whole book: Derek Walcott. It is a shame that The Modern Element did not cover writers like Carl Phillips, Li-Young Lee, June Jordan, Langston Hughes or even Audre Lorde, all contemporaries who wrote or were writing in the 20th century. These absences for me blunt the strengths of the work.
October 11, 2009
I thought his essays on poets were very articulate in explaining not just how he feels about their poetry but why. I'm not very articulate in that way myself--I can say that I like or don't like something but often find it very hard to explain why. I feel this way especially with poetry. His essays helped me understand what I like and don't like about certain poets and their work. He manages to distinguish between obscure poetry and complex poetry without coming across as one of those modern poetry-bashers that thinks poets should return to the "good old days" when "anyone" could understand and love poetry. He understands that poetry will not always be easy but also that it should not make a game of its own obscurity either. 6/09
August 26, 2019
Excellent essays that mostly appeared in The New Yorker on modern and post modern poets. All of the essays take a thematic approach to what a particular poet is known for, and expand and illuminate on that. What has the poet achieved and the why and how of it. The essays on Richard Wilbur, Theodore Roethke, James Wright, and Frederick Seidel were my favorites. This book is a good entry way to a particular poet and may lead to a greater appreciation of the poet.
July 30, 2008
I've read Kirsch in magazines for several years. I've read some of his The Wounded Surgeon. I usually find myself liking his take on things.
He has a chapter on Glück. Here are some snippets:
The boast of deeper knowledge gained through deeper suffering is one of Glück's favorite rhetorical devices. She is forever flaunting this superiority before the reader.
Glück's self-dramatizing impulse means that what her experience lacks in rarity she must supply in the form of rhetorical intensity.
For Glück,it has always been the self that comes first.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
My impression is that Kirsch finds Glück to be someone who's self-involvement prevents her from doing truly great work.
I read Kirsch's chapter on Jorie Graham. I found it to be an excellent description of what I don't like about a lot of MFA-driven poetry. He breaks the experience of reading a poem into two categories: the phenomenal and the theoretical. The phenomenal includes the musicality of the words, their surface meaning and their relatively easily accessible allusions, symbols, and metaphors. The theoretical is the intellectualization that can only be guessed at by the engine of MFA-driven speculation through deep reading. He finds much modern poetry, including Graham's, too much theoretical and too little phenomenal. He says Graham's style is algebraic, where she witholds important information from the reader, leaving the reader to solve for x. After I finished reading the chapter I thought to myself that Graham could put out a Selected Poems which would essentially be a statement "I want you to know that I think complex thoughts, but I don't want you to know exactly what they are, but by making them obscure, I want you to think they are deeper and more thought-out than I've been able to manage."
As for Ashbery, Kirsch essentially says the reader must plow through many lines of worthless mannerism to get to the very few lines of epiphany. He seems to see some value in Ashbery, but basically a few scattered gems in the overall mud.
Kirsch seems to feel that Geoffrey Hill is a poet who has potential but almost never quite reaches it fully. He describes him as simulating feeling as opposed to rendering experience. He says he uses solemnity, which is to seriousness as sentimentalism is to emotion. And that made me think of so many poets who read their poems in a solemn monotone as if that delivery itself confers a vatic significance to their bland drone. He says Hill does not move the reader because what he writes would be shocking hundreds of years ago, but is what's expected now. Kirsch like Hill best when he writes prose poems. He also seems to find some good things in a very recent book of poems. For the rest, he indicates that Hill allows himself to enjoy using language, even if that language is insufficient in dealing with its subject matter. At one point Kirsch says that what makes good literature is work that is not literary. He quotes Philip Larkin as saying "as a guiding principle I believe that every poem must be its own sole freshly created universe , and therefore have no belief in 'tradition' or a common myth-kitty or casual allusions in poems to other poems or poets, which I find unpleasantly like the talk of literary understrappers letting you see they know the right people."
- -- - - - - - - - - - - - - -- - - - - - - - - - - - -
I learned about the Irish poet, Dennis O'Driscoll, whose work I'm looking forward to becoming more familiar with.
I won't go into detail on all the poets Kirsch discusses. Let it be said that he has something good and bad to point out in almost all of them, so that I got a sense of balanced criticism as opposed to partisan polemic.
He has a chapter on Glück. Here are some snippets:
The boast of deeper knowledge gained through deeper suffering is one of Glück's favorite rhetorical devices. She is forever flaunting this superiority before the reader.
Glück's self-dramatizing impulse means that what her experience lacks in rarity she must supply in the form of rhetorical intensity.
For Glück,it has always been the self that comes first.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
My impression is that Kirsch finds Glück to be someone who's self-involvement prevents her from doing truly great work.
I read Kirsch's chapter on Jorie Graham. I found it to be an excellent description of what I don't like about a lot of MFA-driven poetry. He breaks the experience of reading a poem into two categories: the phenomenal and the theoretical. The phenomenal includes the musicality of the words, their surface meaning and their relatively easily accessible allusions, symbols, and metaphors. The theoretical is the intellectualization that can only be guessed at by the engine of MFA-driven speculation through deep reading. He finds much modern poetry, including Graham's, too much theoretical and too little phenomenal. He says Graham's style is algebraic, where she witholds important information from the reader, leaving the reader to solve for x. After I finished reading the chapter I thought to myself that Graham could put out a Selected Poems which would essentially be a statement "I want you to know that I think complex thoughts, but I don't want you to know exactly what they are, but by making them obscure, I want you to think they are deeper and more thought-out than I've been able to manage."
As for Ashbery, Kirsch essentially says the reader must plow through many lines of worthless mannerism to get to the very few lines of epiphany. He seems to see some value in Ashbery, but basically a few scattered gems in the overall mud.
Kirsch seems to feel that Geoffrey Hill is a poet who has potential but almost never quite reaches it fully. He describes him as simulating feeling as opposed to rendering experience. He says he uses solemnity, which is to seriousness as sentimentalism is to emotion. And that made me think of so many poets who read their poems in a solemn monotone as if that delivery itself confers a vatic significance to their bland drone. He says Hill does not move the reader because what he writes would be shocking hundreds of years ago, but is what's expected now. Kirsch like Hill best when he writes prose poems. He also seems to find some good things in a very recent book of poems. For the rest, he indicates that Hill allows himself to enjoy using language, even if that language is insufficient in dealing with its subject matter. At one point Kirsch says that what makes good literature is work that is not literary. He quotes Philip Larkin as saying "as a guiding principle I believe that every poem must be its own sole freshly created universe , and therefore have no belief in 'tradition' or a common myth-kitty or casual allusions in poems to other poems or poets, which I find unpleasantly like the talk of literary understrappers letting you see they know the right people."
- -- - - - - - - - - - - - - -- - - - - - - - - - - - -
I learned about the Irish poet, Dennis O'Driscoll, whose work I'm looking forward to becoming more familiar with.
I won't go into detail on all the poets Kirsch discusses. Let it be said that he has something good and bad to point out in almost all of them, so that I got a sense of balanced criticism as opposed to partisan polemic.
December 19, 2007
All I've read so far are the first two paragraphs of the jorie graham essay, but they weren't much fun. Even fancy writing about poetry should be a little bit of fun.
Reading further, I'm actually pretty freaked out by this book. I fear Kirsch is too conservative to be a trustworthy reader of the contemporary poets--like Jorie Graham, John Ashbery, and CD Wright--that he's penned essays about.
Reading even further, I actually think this book is a problem. Kirsch is flatly wrong about some of the more compelling and indefinite poets he writes about--like Jorie Graham, CD Wright, and Ashbery--and with the poets he does get, and with whose work his conservative tastes are comfortable--like Simic, Hecht and James Merrill--we don't need a critic's help at this point.
That said, this is the kind of book that's fun to read because it provides opportunities to disagree. Though I would say it could do more damage to the cause of contemporary poetry than good.
Reading further, I'm actually pretty freaked out by this book. I fear Kirsch is too conservative to be a trustworthy reader of the contemporary poets--like Jorie Graham, John Ashbery, and CD Wright--that he's penned essays about.
Reading even further, I actually think this book is a problem. Kirsch is flatly wrong about some of the more compelling and indefinite poets he writes about--like Jorie Graham, CD Wright, and Ashbery--and with the poets he does get, and with whose work his conservative tastes are comfortable--like Simic, Hecht and James Merrill--we don't need a critic's help at this point.
That said, this is the kind of book that's fun to read because it provides opportunities to disagree. Though I would say it could do more damage to the cause of contemporary poetry than good.
February 5, 2008
More like 3 1/2 stars. He writes clearly and seriously, which I admire, and he makes some excellent points, but he also sounds like a stodgy old man a lot of the time.
July 30, 2018
For the most part a collection of real genius. Where he fails is in his near-hysterical and warped reading of some women poets. His wildly sexist response to the work of Louise Gluck, for example, is especially mad (and unworthy). It is disappointing to see such a serious flaw in the thinking of a writer so erudite, one whom I have deeply admired. I feel almost personally wounded by it. Still, there are essays here that I will read again and again.
December 28, 2024
One reader’s opinion on one critic’s opinions, but I found the sections of this that I read to be indispensable. The essays on each poet were insightful, informed, and provided immense value to my understanding of each poet and their context in the broader world of poetry.
Also, his Billy Collins read is delightful.
Also, his Billy Collins read is delightful.
February 21, 2011
To be honest, I only read the essays on Seidel, Simic, Milosz, and Gluck. I especially appreciated his discussions of Seidel and Gluck. I became interested in Kirsch after he skillfully dismantled the Bukowski myth and located the sort of "arrested development" at work in Bukowski's mostly male admirers in a New Yorker article(though I think Gerald Locklin's recent prose assessment of Bukowski--a good poet of his time but not great--was a bit more even handed).I've been a big fan of Gluck for awhile and believe, despite her tenure as laureate, her work, overall, is underappreciated. Kirsch talks about Gluck's concentration on tone and voice in poetry in her "urgent, reverent, hypnotic monologues." He writes about the elusive "self" in Seidel's poetry and the social critique in the poet's work, crystallized as sharp and sometimes absurd wit. Very helpful collection. Will probably dip into it as I encounter other the work of the other poets discussed by Kirsch.
April 11, 2016
. Excellent essays on contemporary poets. I particularly liked the ones on Derek Walcott, Geoffrey Hill (a really thorough examination of his career), Louise Gluck, C.D.Wright, Richard Wilbur (how I admire him), Theodore Roethke, James Wright and Joseph Brodsky. All the above and more examine the poet’s output and growth over time and offer stimulating and often surprisingly accurate estimations. Kirsch also takes brilliant swipes at Billy Collins and Sharon Olds, the former for superficiality and condescension, and the latter for a single-minded narcissism. Both accusations are well-documented and thoughtful rather than mean-spirited. Kirsch is a superior critic—I was driven to highlight many of his observations
Read
May 12, 2015Adam Kirsch writes interesting and compelling arguments about the elements and qualities requisite to poetry, and why real poetry is an important and irreplaceable art form. He also discusses how some writing called poetry fails to qualify as such. Whether one agrees with Kirsch's opinions or not, anyone who wants to study and/or write poetry can benefit from considering what he writes in these essays.
Want to read
January 14, 2008Let's see if Adam Kirsch can do better than Camille Paglia.
June 28, 2008
Intelligent analysis of some of my favorite poets.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews