Saturday, February 23, 2008

a little advice

I'm so stoked we're back in action, my friends. I'm currently taking a Contemporary American Poetry course, and I love the fact that I can sit and drink tea for hours while reading Adrienne Rich and Robert Lowell, and say I'm doing something academically productive.

However, I'm in a bit of a pickle. I have to pick one poet to do a major research project on (15 page paper) and I was looking for suggestions. My current leaning is either Adrienne Rich or Elizabeth Bishop. However, as part of the project, we have to read every single thing our poet has ever written, multiple times. I welcome your thoughts.

3 comments:

Andrew said...

All right! We are hitting this hard.

I would have expected Margaret Atwood to be in the mix, actually. What ever happened to her? Jorie Graham, you've probably heard me say enough about that one.

Anyway, I like Bishop quite a lot. Rich I appreciate, on an academic/intellectual level, but I just don't have the same gut reaction to her. If you do Bishop, Thomas Gardner's book "Regions of Unlikeness: Explaining Contemporary Poetry" is an excellent read. I just skimmed the Bishop section, because I was mostly looking for her influence on Jorie Graham, but he has an excellent ear as well as a twist of metaphysics.

Seriously, though, I just re-read "At the Fishhouses" and almost wept. So, so good. In other news, should I do my Contemporary British (Isles) paper on Philip Larkin or Dylan Thomas?

joy said...

Atwood doesn't really have enough stuff to warrant this project, unfortunately. As for you, I would go with Larkin. I feel like Dylan Thomas is too commercialized a lot of time, and frankly a few of his "love" poems gross me out.

alyssa said...

I can't say I know my American poets. Sorry, Joy. If you ever need to choose a British poet from the Romantic or Victorian era or a Spanish poet from the 20th century, holla.

And I do agree that Dylan Thomas can be overdone.