Poets You Ought To Know About
We've expanded & reorganized our library of Net links to help you find out about the poets whose work you ought to know. To mark our approach to the new century, they are now indexed in two separate files: 20th Century Poets & Contemporary Poets (= living, reading, writing, practicing poets now = 21st century). We think you'll want to bookmark the index page for easy reference.
We begin with Bob's Top Ten list (well, actually, there are 15. . . ): must-read, must-hear wordworkers newly ensconced in the About Poetry library. They are featured below.
Next week, we'll add the poets our Museletter correspondents say you ought to know. We've asked our correspondents for news of the poets deserving to be known in their far-flung parts of the world, accolades for poets who are Web-izing their work, names of the unsung heroes who should be sung -- soon the voices of a thousand poets will echo in these virtual rooms!
--Bob Holman & Margery Snyder
from BOB HOLMAN (New York):
Gwendolyn Brooks
Our dearest National Treasure, winner of the Academy of American Poets Prize this year, Gwendolyn Brooks still refuses to fly, our Ms. Brooks, she’s around at the end of the open mic, Ms. Brooks, Gwen. . . Voices from the Gaps has a poem bio and good links, her page at AAP includes an audio file of her reading “We Real Cool.”
Wanda Coleman
She is High Priestess of Poetry, her work a hypnotic blend of form and magic (. . . and we never use the word “magic”). Her “South Central Los Angeles Death Trip 1982” is posted at S.A. Griffin's The Open Ended It.
Michael Lally
Michael Lally has lived more lives as a poet than most actors do roles, so it’s no surprise he turns out doing stints for Hollywood (where he ran the Hollyword series for years) and voiceovers. Reading his poems is reading history as liquor smooth and wicked, fun and troublesome.
Michael McClure
McClure's Beat writing and SF Renaissance crossing-over to theater (The Beard) and essays (Scratching on a Beat Surface), his multitalent, his performances with Manzarek, all are evidenced on his bountiful Web page.
Czeslaw Milosz
Nobel Prize winner Czelaw Milosz' bilingual site includes
a streaming text poem. He is the conscience of the world.
Eileen Myles
Eileen Myles: the Last of the New York School. Clear humor, universal lesbian, Presidential candidate, a Kennedy, a gungho performer, a slashing academic, unbowed. Hear her read “Sleepless” & “On the Death of Robert Lowell” at Mp3.Lit.com.
Alice Notley
Currently living in Paris, she carves the poem out of beauty without disturbance. Uses dynamite as dental floss. Her papers are collected at collected at UCSD & you can read selections from The Descent of Alette (best book, 1996) online at Douglas Clark's Lynx: Poetry from Bath site.
Lou Reed
The Poet Laureate of rock’n’roll gives a taste of what a poet’s Web page can do (hats off to Timothy Greenfield-Sanders).
Jerome Rothenberg
Jerry Rothenberg: Inventor of “total translation,” accounting in the English version for every element in the original language, including the so-called “meaningless” vocables, word distortions and redundancies. His close study and involvement with American Indian poetry and ritual promoted the development of Shaking the Pumpkin: Traditional Poetry of the Indian North Americas (1972). Great performer/poet/translator/anthologist: “He saved us twenty years” -- Allen Ginsberg.
Patricia Smith
Patricia Smith defines Slam poetry as an aesthetic, not a vaudeville. Her early years battling Lisa Buscani for the trophy at National Slams in Chicago, Boston & San Francisco are the most extraordinary slams of all times. Her crossover to a successful journalism career belies the myth of slammers as shallow bad writers: her battle (poetry vs. piping) at the Boston Globe the stuff of myth. She writes for Ms now. Dr. Slam, Julie Schmid, has written a lot on Patricia. Kurt Heintz, leading man of e-poets and director of the amazing vidpo “Chinese Cucumbers,” gives her the top slot on his new Book of Voices site: beautiful intro and new poetry.
Sekou Sundiata
“America’s de facto Poet Laureate” and perhaps the best performer of the so-called spoken word anywhere. Health has punched him down but the work keeps rising. Some beautiful poems and a bio are online at the site for Moyers' Language of Life, in which he starred, & there's a great review of his amazing new CD, longstoryshort, in The Austin Chronicle.
John Trudell
With the recent release of the CD Blue Indians), Trudell reminds that the revolutionary’s work is everongoing. His live gigs are now bristling rants; he sometimes yearns for the years when his pickup truck was his address; no one synthesizes the at-odds plurality of worlds we live in into a calm, directed, smart passionate trail as he does: His eulogy to enviroactivist Judi Barr, his person-to-person epistle to Prez Clinton.
Anne Waldman
Fast-speaking woman, daughter cum mother of the Beats, founder of the “Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics” at Naropa, historian of Jove (Iovis), definer of Marriage, Mother of Actual. She has inspired generations of poets, especially women, to speak it out and write write write: an Inspiration. There's a great poem & action foto at Bohemian Ink & a page full of good stuff at Annie Finch’s great Womynlinks site.
Koon Woon
The poet of solitude, Koon Woon has lived on the other side of madness, has returned with gentleness, humble humor, Whitman condensed talking to a goldfish. Ah. Please read The Truth in Rented Rooms, the Best Book of Poetry 1998.
C.D. Wright
Her poems stop at the fence so you can catch up, then soldier forward, words alone, you come to. She is Collaborator, Poet Laureate of Rhode Island, of Arkansas, publisher of Lost Roads. Her poem “Oneness” is at the DIA Center for the Arts Readings in Contemporary Poetry site.
