#60s poetry

[thegroovywitch]

“I was very much into the poetry and music scene that was going on at the time. A vinyl EP of Christopher Logue’s Red Bird was something that I listened to frequently. So when Royston Ellis invited me to accompany him on guitar I knew exactly how to play textual music around his poems.

I knew about the Beats using music behind their writing. Jack Kerouac read from On the Road with a piano backing him on the Steve Allen Show. Royston did some stuff with the Silver Beetles (the Beatles). Royston was going to be reading poems, and I could play guitar behind them, not with just abstract content, but with melodic passages as well.

I did three events with Royston in 1961: a Heretics Society talk at Cambridge University in March, the British Poetry Festival in July and a TV programme in September.

The British Poetry Festival was a massive, week-long event in London with various literary luminaries such as Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. There were even poets I had read at school such as William Empson, alongside actors from the Royal Shakespeare Company such as Dame Flora Robson. It was a huge honour to take part, courtesy of Royston.”

— Jimmy Page

[frenchnewwaves]

Song by Allen Ginsberg

[byronicist]

"There’s a stake in your fat black heart / And the villagers never liked you. / They are dancing and stamping on you. / They always knew it was you. / Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through."

Sylvia Plath, Daddy (1960)

[aquarda]

Now Night arrives with her purple legion. Retire now to your tents & to your dreams. Tomorrow we enter the town of my birth. I want to be ready.

[vtgbooks]

John Williams ENGLISH RENAISSANCE POETRY 1963 Vtg POEMS Vtg RENAISSANCE Poems

[unknownn-girl]

౨ৎ⋆ ˚｡⋆ me core

(not my image btw creds to whoever took the photo lmao)

[drivemix]

Patti Smith

[velvet-underground-groupie]

“Patti Smith captured sleeping with her guitar.”

[poetrysmackdown]

what makes a poem a poem? does it have to be written in a certain way? is this question a poem if i want it to be?

Fun question! This is just my personal sense as an avid reader and less-avid writer of poetry, but for me it’s useful to distinguish (roughly) between poetry as a genre and poetry as an attitude or philosophy through which language and the world can be understood. And of course these two go hand in hand. I see poetry the genre as essentially a type of literature where we as readers are signaled, somehow, to pay closer attention to language, to rhythm, to sound, to syntax, to images, and to meaning. That attentive posture is the “attitude” of broader poetic thinking, and while it’s most commonly applied to appreciate work that’s been written for that purpose, there’s nothing stopping us from applying that attentiveness elsewhere. Everywhere, even! That’s how you eventually end up writing poetry for yourself, after all. There’s a quote from Mary Ruefle floating around on here that a lot of folks have probably already seen, but it immediately comes to mind with this ask:

“And when you think about it, poets always want us to be moved by something, until in the end, you begin to suspect that a poet is someone who is moved by everything, who just stands in front of the world and weeps and laughs and laughs and weeps.”

Similarly, after adopting the attentive posture of poetics, there’s plenty of things that can feel or sound like a poem, even when they perhaps were not written with that purpose in mind. I’ve seen a couple of these “found poems” on here that are quite fun—this one, for example. The meaning and enjoyment you may derive from the language of a found poem isn’t any less real than that derived from a poem written for explicitly poetic purposes, so I don’t see why it shouldn’t be called poetry.

That said, I do think that if you’re going to go out and start looking for poetry everywhere, it’s still important to have a foundation in the actual language work of it all. Now, this doesn’t mean it has to be “written in a certain way” at all! But it does mean that in order to cultivate the attentiveness that’s vital to poetry, one needs to understand what makes language tick, down at its most basic levels. It will make you better at reading poetry, better at writing it, and better at spotting it out in the wild.

Mary Oliver’s A Poetry Handbook is an extraordinary resource to new writers and readers, and a great read for more experienced folks as well. Mary Oliver’s most popular poems are all to my knowledge in free verse, and yet you might be surprised to find her deep appreciation for metrical verse (patterns of stressed/unstressed syllables), as well as for the most minute devices of sound. In discussing the so-called poetry of the past, she writes,

“Acquaintance with the main body of English poetry is absolutely essential—it is the whole cake, while what has been written in the last hundred years or so, without meter, is no more than an icing. And, indeed, I do not really mean an acquaintanceship—I mean an engrossed and able affinity with metrical verse. To be without this felt sensitivity to a poem as a structure of lines and rhythmic energy and repetitive sound is to be forever less equipped, less deft than the poet who dreams of making a new thing can afford to be.”

In another section, after devoting lots of attention to the sounds at work in Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”, she writes,

“Everything transcends from the confines of its initial meaning; it is not only the transcendence in meaning but the sound of the transcendence that enables it to work. With the wrong sounds, it could not have happened.”

I hope all this helps to get across my opinion that what makes a poem a poem is not just about the author's intention, and not just about meaning (intended or attributed), but also about sound and rhythm and language and history, all coalescing into something that rises above the din of a language we would otherwise grow tired of while out in our day-to-day lives.

I'll always have more to say but I'm cutting myself off here! Thanks for the ask

[angelwngd]

[hisiggy]

Happy birthday yoko Ono I love you I love you I love you

[jarofalicesgrunge]

Alice in Chains during the "Sea of Sorrow" photo shoot (1991)

📸Marty Temme

[labellepluie]

rockstar

[simmyfrobby]

— Colourless Musings, Tathève Simonyan

Hockey Poetry Post 60/?

[burtonandtaylor]

Cleopatra, 1963

[drivemix]

Patti Smith's Wall