Even 1977 is a rather generous cutoff, using it to accommodate Aubade by Philip Larkin
I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what’s really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify…
Agreed… All the best ones are Scottish.
My seventy-seven-year-old father
put his reading glasses on
to help my mother do the buttons
on the back of her dress.
“What a pair the two of us are!”
my mother said, “Me with my sore wrist,
you with your bad eyes, your soft thumbs!”
And off they went, my two parents
to march against the war in Iraq,
him with his plastic hips. Her with her arthritis,
waved at each other like old friends, flapping,
where they’d met for so many marches over their years,
for peace on earth, for pity’s sake, for peace, for peace.
Jackie Kay was born in Edinburgh in 1961 to a Scottish mother and Nigerian father whereupon she was given up for adoption. John and Helen had adopted Kay’s brother, Maxwell, two years earlier. Many years later, she located her biological father and made plans to meet him while harbouring some anxiety as to how this might be received by her adoptive parents who had given her and her brother so much. She has referred to this as a “kind of adultery”.
Can rewrite this “stanza” as sentences without losing meaning or impact, sad!
My seventy-seven-year-old father put his reading glasses on to help my mother do the buttons on the back of her dress. “What a pair the two of us are!” my mother said, “Me with my sore wrist, you with your bad eyes, your soft thumbs!”
Generic wistfulness, old people being old like a commercial for cotton or something. Oh, you support world peace? Good for you, so do millions of other people, now why is this a poem again?
Lol, I didn’t need the Dwan spoiler.
You knock it into the rock.
a lady and a man standing, and a sun and a boat.
Now: a sun and a boat, a lady and me, and I knock it in here on the rock
I could paste a dozen Roger Waters or Thom Yorke lyrics in here and feel pretty good about it, but how about a video of Christopher Eccleston absolutely crushing a delivery of John Cooper Clarke’s “Evidently Chickentown”
Written words can be powerful, but when they’re spoken with this sort of passion it’s a completely different ball game:
not denying that 99% of the poetry I enjoy was written pre-1970 and it’s a bummer but I sorta agree with the spirit of your blistering hot take. But here are a few recent poems that might speak to you:
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W.S. Merwin, writing about the split from 2p2
SEPARATION
Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color
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Ron Padgett, editing the autobiography of smrk
POEM
I don’t know
I may not be much
Be a mess
Personality no good
All surface no inner strength
Poetry not any good
This poem not any good
I might die an old man
Scribbler of trash
Forgotten paper-scratcher
But I’ll tell you this
I really love to lay around on my ass
Totally watching television
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Richard Wilbur died in 2017? Not sure when he wrote his best stuff but here he is describing me three Novembers ago staring through my phone camera through a window
BOY AT THE WINDOW
Seeing the snowman standing all alone
In the dusk and cold is more than he can bear.
The small boy weeps to hear the wind prepare
A night of gnashings and enormous moan.
His tearful sight can hardly reach to where
The pale-faced figure with bitumen eyes
Returns him such a god-forsaken stare
As outcast Adam gave to Paradise.
The man of snow is, nonetheless, content,
Having no wish to go inside and die.
Still, he is moved to see the youngster cry.
Though frozen water is his element,
He melts enough to drop from one soft eye
A trickle of the purest rain, a tear
For the child at the bright pane surrounded by
Such warmth, such light, such love, and so much fear.
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Robert Creeley died in 2005 and I’m guessing this was written pre-1970 but it’s about why we all read this forum so here
I KNOW A MAN
As I sd to my
friend, because I am
always talking,–John, I
sd, which was not his
name, the darkness sur-
rounds us, what
can we do against
it, or else, shall we &
why not, buy a goddamn big car,
drive, he sd, for
christ’s sake, look
out where yr going
by WILFRED OWEN
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.
Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
You’ve heard me, scornful, harsh, and discontented,
Mocking and loathing War: you’ve asked me why
Of my old, silly sweetness I’ve repented—
My ecstasies changed to an ugly cry.
You are aware that once I sought the Grail,
Riding in armour bright, serene and strong;
And it was told that through my infant wail
There rose immortal semblances of song.
But now I’ve said good-bye to Galahad,
And am no more the knight of dreams and show:
For lust and senseless hatred make me glad,
And my killed friends are with me where I go.
Wound for red wound I burn to smite their wrongs;
And there is absolution in my songs.
The village life, and every care that reigns
O’er youthful peasants and declining swains;
What labour yields, and what, that labour past,
Age, in its hour of languor, finds at last;
What forms the real picture of the poor,
Demands a song—the Muse can give no more.
Fled are those times, if e’er such times were seen,
When rustic poets praised their native green;
No shepherds now, in smooth alternate verse,
Their country’s beauty or their nymphs’ rehearse;
Yet still for these we frame the tender strain,
Still in our lays fond Corydons complain,
And shepherds’ boys their amorous pains reveal,
The only pains, alas! they never feel.
On Mincio’s banks, in Caesar’s bounteous reign,
If Tityrus found the Golden Age again,
Must sleepy bards the flattering dream prolong,
Mechanic echoes of the Mantuan song?
From truth and nature shall we widely stray,
Where Virgil, not where Fancy, leads the way?
Yes, thus the Muses sing of happy swains,
Because the Muses never knew their pains.
They boast their peasants’ pipes, but peasants now
Resign their pipes and plod behind the plough;
And few amid the rural tribe have time
To number syllables and play with rhyme;
Save honest Duck, what son of verse could share
The poet’s rapture and the peasant’s care?
In my mind it goes more like this:
III
My genial spirits fail; And what can these availTo lift the smothering weight from off my breast?
It were a vain endeavour, Though I should gaze for everOn that green light that lingers in the west:
I may not hope from outward forms to win
The passion and the life, whose fountains are within.
But truth is truth
In Trade for a Son
A toe is no bargain
So I offer a foot
But feet do little
Without both legs
And arms are not needed
Without him to hold
Yet still, no deal, not even a counter
So I bid my remains
And am left
Wholly empty
The Old Main Drag – Shane MacGowan
When I first came to London I was only sixteen
With a fiver in my pocket and my ole dancing bag
I went down to the dilly to check out the scene
And I soon ended up on the old main drag
There the he-males and the she-males paraded in style
And the old man with the money would flash you a smile
In the dark of an alley you’ll work for a five
For a swift one off the wrist down on the old main drag
In the cold winter nights the old town it was chill
But there were boys in the cafes who’d give you cheap pills
If you didn’t have the money you’d cajole or you’d beg
There was always lots of tuinol on the old main drag
One evening as I was lying down by Leicester Square
I was picked up by the coppers and kicked in the balls
Between the metal doors at Vine Street I was beaten and mauled
And the ruined my good looks for the old main drag
In the tube station the old ones who were on their way out
Would dribble and vomit and grovel and shout
And the coppers would come along and push them about
And I wished I could escape from the old main drag
And now I’m lying here I’ve had too much booze
I’ve been shat on and spat on and raped and abused
I know that I am dying and I wish I could beg
For some money to take me from the old main drag
Tho
This is excellent.
Edit: oh no wonder, it’s from 1952!
yup I mean Richard Wilbur is long way away from being a cosmic event like Shakespeare & Yeats but Wilbur was a great poet with an outrageous ear who feels like a direct descendant of Frost. He was writing good (but cautious) stuff until he died in 2017.