Poetry: The Thing Itself
i love to write & read poetry with the desire to evolve as a poet, always. some poets who've helped me in my evolution so far: joan larkin, elizabeth bishop, & georgia o'keeffe. in the prose poem now, i'm reading baudelaire, looking for the edge. My next stop is Nin Andrews. Any suggestions for new edgy poets to read?
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About chella
I'm a poet who migrated to California with two cats & a fiction writer after living over the South & Midwest. Now I live in Santa Barbara, happily.
Recent News: My second chapbook, How to Teach Grammar, was a runner-up in the Main Street Rag Annual...
Connections
Causes chella courington Supports
Amnesty International. Planned Parenthood, NOW, Breast Cancer Research & Support, Move On.org
I love to read
poetry. I allow myself to read poetry when I've done all my have-to-do work. It's absolutely delicious to read poetry the last thing at night. My dreams are good. Happy to see your face in RR.
I never read edgy as I don't know what edgy means. Isn't life itself edgy?--too much so--and I look for something to round it off. And I love form. I continue to go back to Paul Fussell, Jr.'s "Poetic Meter and Poetic Form" to better love the English language.
What edgy poet have you mined?
edgy poets
thanks, belle, for your response. da powell is a contemporary poet i call edgy in content & form, especially in Cocktail. He writes in very long lines rereading the bible & film from a gay point of view. his other two books, tea & lunch, are equally experimental.
my "edgy" might be your "wtf?!" : )
Chella,
Hi! Thanks for featuring poetry in your blog -- the Red Room seems a bit slanted towards prose (inevitably?), so it's nice to have as many other poets around as possible.
Like Belle, I wonder what precisely you mean by edgy -- by way of some examples. I read a good bit of contemporary American poetry, so I'm sure I could make some recommendations on the basis of that old formula: "If you liked X, you'll love Y!" : ) Meanwhile, you being a California poet, I'd encourage you to look up the work of Brenda Hillman, if you haven't already. Her work growns increasingly unconventional in form, from book to book, so unless you're already an avid reader of innovative/"experimental" poetry, you might enjoy starting with some of her earlier work. I love Bright Existence -- I often say (and accurately enough) that this book saved my life. Go from that to Loose Sugar and then to Cascadia, which is a book that responds in all kinds of interesting and unexpected ways to California geography -- particularly the Cascade Mountains...
thanks so much,
evie, for your suggestions. though i'm familiar with a few of brenda's poems, i really haven't read her work.
i think your wtf is often my response to edgy stuff. ciao, chella