Modern poetry

I hate it so much. But to start with, something I somewhat like. Last night I read some more poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins, who is clearly an important person because he always goes by all three names. I think I admire at most one in three so far and like maybe half of those. His frequent hyphenated phrases drive me nuts, and priest or not it is a little ridiculous how he can scarcely keep his poems from claiming to find Christ in something. Or as he might say, his happy-hyphen-harbor sparking-pains the gray-grim inward am of holy Christ. That is, it hurts me. I mean this sort of thing, this hallmarkian opening line:

CAUGHT this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding

Yuck. This one is worse yet, if you can stand to look. I also am not bowled over by "sprung rhythm," which is altogether too close to the modern idea that poetry is text arranged in a strange fashion by someone who names himself a poet. Still, his good poems are such pleasure they make me read and re-read them out loud. There is a poem of quintessence, a borderline gnostic poem, and my favorite so far, grief over the self's autumn.

So that is praise, more or less; by comparison, I hate Billy Collins' poetry. Apparently he was our poet laureate for a couple of years, confirming my impression that poet laureate means "wretched affliction on the language." His WSJ article from Saturday has several examples of his work. I think I would like him personally, since he seems unaffected and, if not actually funny, at least humorous. It would no doubt wear on him, however, when I started and closed every conversation with "Please stop writing poems."

I did read more of the Life of Johnson this weekend, as well as the Adventurer 85, an essay on reading that I really want to talk about. But I was out of town at my uncle's memorial so I will have to work out the backlog today and tomorrow.