Status Updates From The New Poetry

“Stop, stop, oh for God’s sake, stop!’ you shriek
As your tears run down, but he goes on and on
Mercilessly till you think your ribs must crack...

While this carcass’s eyes grimace, stitched
In the cramp of an ordeal, and a squeeze of blood
Crawls like scorpions into its hair.”

Those Lowell poems -- incendiary, I think, is the appropriate word. Wowza. The way he flexes on Melville and Johnathan Edwards though, like -- could you BE any more obvious in your attempts to canonize yourself within the American tradition? "William Bradford, eating pie within the remnants of the shattered "American Dream," turns to the reader to say: the Southern states are a lot folksier than the Northern states."

Beautiful collection. Lowell's Quacker Graveyard in Nantucket gives me chills.

Berryman... I'm a poetry pleb, I never really get him while I'm awake -- but weirdly enough? I read these same poems while totally delirious in sleep deprivation once and they TOTALLY hit me. HARD. guess that's why he called 'em "dream songs"?

Nabbed a first edition of this anthology from The Monkey's Paw yesterday - there was a second edition too, with a cover I didn't like as much, but only just learned that edition added previously unpublished Plath poems to the collection (!!! - that certainly ups the resale value, don't it?), although I've never been a personally huge Plath fan. Sexton also missing this edition, so the affair's a sausage party