Poetry for the Adult Man

Five years ago I made a decision with lasting impact on my life: I started reading poetry again.

In the early days of the pandemic, I needed time by myself. The kids woke up early, and needed attention, and keeping them away from my wife was a constant, only intermittently successful, battle. Being in HR with no departmental leader meant there was a lot of stress as other people were constantly pushed to the breaking point, and I needed something that would keep me going throughout the day. So I'd wake up at 5:30 or so, make a pot of coffee, and read 40 pages of poetry. (Derek Walcott at first)

This was a pivot that had been coming, anyway: I'd been in London the previous fall and done a "bookstore crawl" through independent shops, where poetry was a thing; the London Review Bookshop did one of their celeb parody threads where Pierce Brosnan came in asking about upcoming poetry titles; from that list I'd found Laura Scott's So Many Rooms and the ending piece in Helen Tookey's City of Departures made it clear that the time was right.

For the next two years, poetry was always a part of whatever I was reading: blind spots by major poets, historical poetry, and trying to keep up with the current publishing world. Though as it turns out, poetry is not hierarchically organized, there is no real top of the heap anymore, so you can follow someone influential who has published quite widely and find there's no real consensus about their value or worth because even most poetry readers haven't heard of them.

And we continue on with it because it is old-fashioned, out of step, superfluous, hostile to the idea of efficiency as a written production, hostile to efficiency as a reader (a 70 page collection that really hits three times is a marvel), and something we do simply out of the love for something beautiful and considered.

Nevertheless, a list:

Sujata Bhatt

Mimi Khalvati (Afterwardness especially)

Louise Glück (I cannot even describe what it's like to have read someone's work in whole and then have them win the Nobel, top shelf feeling as a reader; The Wild Iris is indeed her best)

Tomas Tranströmer (there's a line in one of his poems about how the grey winter sky makes all of the other colors seem more vivid which evoked a specific feeling about having grown up in Michigan that I didn't even recognize it as part of my reality until I read him saying it, top tier poetry experience)