More than 20 years ago I had the privilege of attending a Q&A with Jorge Luis Borges. Clearly, I blew it, since my 50-year-old’s memory of a spontaneous translation of Spanish I could barely hear is just about blank—but I do remember he was asked at least twice who among his contemporaries had influenced him. The first time he replied “No one.” The last time he said, “None of them. I never read them. Why should I? They have the same problems I do.”
Something like that may start to explain the choices so far in Poetry Daily's emailed poet’s picks for National Poetry month:
- Kim Addonizio: from Walt Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”
- Rex Wilder: John Keats, “After Dark Vapours Have Oppressed Our Plains”
- James Richardson: Samuel Daniel, Sonnet 33 of “Delia”
- Beth Ann Fennely: Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Thou Art Indeed Just, Lord”
- Terrance Hayes: John Keats, “To Autumn”
- Dick Allen: Alfred Lord Tennyson, “The War”
- Karl Kirchwey: Arthur Rimbaud, “The Sleeper in the Valley (Le Dormeur du Val)”
- Bob Hicok: Wilfred Owen, “Anthem for Doomed Youth”
- Gabriel Gudding: Rubén Darío, “To Roosevelt (A Roosevelt)”
- A. E. Stallings: Edward Thomas, “Out in the Dark”
- Allison Funk: Emily Dickinson, #341 (“After great pain, a formal feeling comes—”)
- Kelly Cherry: William Blake, “The Sick Rose”
But it’s more than that— not one poem listed above is more recent than World War I, and only two are not in traditional forms! Even the Rimbaud is a sonnet, though the translation doesn’t attempt rhyme or meter. It’s almost as if Pound and Eliot and Williams and Olson and Zukoski and Ginsberg had never written, as if the dominant poetry of the 20th Century had been excised from poet’s memories. It’s not because these poets are traditionalists—only Addonizio and Stallings are associated with New Formalism, and Addonizio chose Whitman. And I’ll lay you odds Gudding chose the other non-metrical piece (from Darío) because of its anti-US rhetoric rather than its poetic merit. Darío was a wonderful poet, but that is not a wonderful poem: Here is the poem, and here is a translation, though not the Gudding translation from the email.
What do you think?
Update: 4/21
Aimee Nezhukumatathil has picked a passage from H. D.'s 1924 "Let Zeus." So we're finally past WWI, and H. D., with Pound, Lowell, and Ford, is one of the original Imagist poets--but look at the passage:
Stars wheel in purple, yours is not so rare
as Hesperus, nor yet so great a star
as bright Aldeboran or Sirius,
nor yet the stained and brilliant one of War;
stars turn in purple, glorious to the sight;
yours is not gracious as the Pleiades are
nor as Orion's sapphires, luminous;
yet disenchanted, cold, imperious face,
when all the others blighted, reel and fall,
your star, steel-set, keeps lone and frigid tryst
to freighted ships, baffled in wind and blast.
Irregularly rhymed iambic pentameter, with only two (conventional) substitutions: an initial trochee in line 6 and a trochee following the caesura in line 11.
6:52:39 PM 
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