drawing by me


I am going to respond only to the poets I felt strongly about.

BEAT/SF RENAISSANCE

Gregory Corso:

I read The Mad Yak and got really excited for more of Gregory Corso's poetry. I really thought it would be in the Mad Yak style. Simple, with a neat/unique point of view kinda I dunno earthy but still sorta mystical. I don't know how our anthology portrays Gregory Corso's work because after The Mad Yak I sort of got disappointed. His work just didn't captivate me after Yak. It almost seemed like it was a different poet...and that saddens me because I thought I might actually like Gregory Corso. But like I said we are reading from an Anthology so it might be manipulating my thoughts about him as a poet.

NEW YORK SCHOOL

Frank O'Hara:

He really started to get into my head. I really don't know if he has left yet. I like how he is able to have a poem that sounds like he is telling an everday story but how the story can be somewhat distorted and the reader dosn't care. Maybe it's just me but I love the clever references to Movie Stars (like they are his own little nods/odes to the past). But it's not just the Movie Star references...it's also (like I said) how he can tell a story and I feel like I am listening to a story and I feel satifyed after reading it. My favorite poem of his in our Anthology is Why I Am Not a Painter it has this awesome franticness and playfulness to it.

My favorite section of the poem is when he talks about orange:

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven't mentioned
orange yet. It's tweleve poems, I call
it ORANGES.

Kenneth Koch:

Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams it's funny. It's absoulty funny. It's a great parody but you can totally see the respect for William Carlos Williams. 'I don't think I could do that very well... I just mock.

The snippets that Kenneth Koch comes up with are hilarious. Notes you would never see ever written yet you kinda wish they had been written just because it would be so absurd to have them be written.

I think my favorite has to be #4 it's silly yet kinda creepy if you really think about it...



alright so next post will be the MISC.