Seth Abramson tends to divide opinion.

He’s sort of the anti-Anis Shivani.

If Shivani’s role in the intellectual ecology of poetry is to be a blowhard a–hole and bomb throwing provocateur, then Abramson is the ultimate defender of the status quo – the status quo, in this case, being the importance of MFA programs in the aforementioned intellectual ecology of poetry.

However, at least both write with some regularity about contemporary poetry in more or less prominent venues. God knows poetry needs people with the means and desire to do so.

God knows a blogger-cum-poet-cum-activist with a blog whose reach extends not far beyond his own family doesn’t meet that criteria.

But to get back on topic.

Abramson recently posted on the Huffington Post Ten Recent Books of Poetry You Should Read Right Now.

After all of that earlier discussion of provocateurs versus defenders of the established order and intellectual ecologies, this is all just a misbegotten excuse to post my own top ten.

I know. Ugh. But here it is (in no particular order):

Charles Wright, Sestets: Poems
I was not a Wright fan until I heard him read at the Folger Shakespeare Library and heard his recent work. To me, he was sort of a Merwin-lite, which is like Corona Light. Really – what’s the point? Is Corona such a heavy brew that we need a watered down equivalent? But what Wright is doing these days just impresses the heck out of me. Sestets: Poems keeps some of the rawer edge of his contemporary work while working within a single form (the sestet, naturally) for an entire collection.

Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse
I think this was the second or third book by Carson that I read. I know that I bought it while I was living in Iowa. It’s verse novel retelling of the tale of Herakles and the monster Geryon (slain during the accomplishing of Herakles’ seven labors). Geryon, an ugly, monstrous child, teased at school, finds purpose as a gay bohemian artist – a photographer to be exact – whose earlier love affair with Herakles makes his death at his former friend and lover’s hand so much more heart rending. Good stuff. As always, the way the contemporary and the classical intersect in Carson’s work is amazing.

Charles Simic, The World Doesn’t End
This book was from 1990, so it’s beyond the fifteen year limit Abramson set himself, but I think that Simic gets short shrift these days. Yes, he’s tending to repeat himself, but his best work is very, very good. And this is one of his best. It’s also the first book by him I ever read. I was in Montgomery, Alabama and these surrealistic prose poems opened up contemporary poetry for me. The intersection of lightheartedness with undertones of barely held memories of war torn Eastern Europe is still worth appreciating.

Adrienne Rich, An Atlas of the Difficult World: Poems 1988-1991
Adrienne Rich’s style was a huge influence of my writing when I was younger (maybe it still is – certainly the echoes remain). An Atlas of the Difficult World: Poems 1988-1991 and Dark Fields of the Republic: Poems 1991-1995 deeply affected me. I was not necessarily “up” on things like feminist poetics and queer/LGBT poetics, but I could tell something was going on there that was important and that I needed to understand better. I picked Atlas over Dark Fields because the time period it covers was also important for me and my creative and intellectual development. Dark Fields has a cooler title though (it’s from The Great Gatsby – “And as I sat there, brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out Daisy’s light at the end of his dock. He had come such a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close he could hardly fail to grasp it. But what he did not know was that it was already behind him, somewhere in the vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.”)

Kim Addonizio, Lucifer at the Starlite
Let’s get something out of the way first. Kim Addonizio is hot. She’s mid-fifties, but looks like mid-thirties. And she looks and talks like she’s living the bohemian dream of a twenty year old lit major dreaming of life as an artist-cum-shaman. And her poetry has that aura of college rebellion and youthful sexual transgression. There’s also a certain shamanistic quality to her writing (it is no surprise that she has also published two books on the creative process). But there is also a Bukowski-esque despairing darkness of the stories in her poems (a lot of narrative poetry in her oeuvre). Of two pack a day failure. She appears to be living the dream, but her poetry often tells of that dream’s failure. Oh, and she is originally from Washington, DC.

Bob McCann, Warehouse
You won’t find this chapbook, I expect. It was self-published by Bob in the early nineties. Frankly, he over edited the titular poem, Warehouse. But listening to him read its various iterations at the weekly poetry group we attended was incredible. It was filled with lines and images that blew away this young would be poet (or poet who was young then; funny to think that I am almost now the same age he was then). I haven’t seen hide nor hair of him in years. I don’t even know if he still lives in St Petersburg, Florida. You’ll find a brief reference to him and to the poem here.

Fanny Howe, Selected Poems
I am not very comfortable including “selected” or “collected” poems in here. It feels like cheating. But when I came across this book, I thought she was something special – someone I should have been reading for years. Howe hit a certain zeitgeist in my life and I’ve got to include it.

Anonymous, Beowulf (tr. by Seamus Heaney)
Heaney, of course, is a Nobel Prize winning Irish poet. Despite myself, I am a fan of his poetry. If I were to name a favorite, it would be his 1979 collection, Field Work. He has a certain hard empirical concreteness (in my mind) to his lilting (what a cliche – to call an Irishman’s literary voice ‘lilting’) lyrical voice. Makes the pastoral touches enjoyable. But his masterwork may not be any of his original works, but his translation of the Anglo-Saxon epic, Beowulf. I bought this book at Chapter 11 Books near the Kroger’s grocery store in midtown Atlanta.

Ted Joans, WOW
Ted Joans meant a lot to me, though I hardly knew him. For a young man in Paris for the first time, what massive figure to meet (I was both young and short [still am short], so it was pretty easy for folks to seem to tower over me). I have to include this, his last (to my knowledge) book. Chapbook really. Read more here.

Abdellatif Laabi, The World’s Embrace: Selected Poems
I was visiting my friend Mike in San Francisco (I was living in Los Angeles at the time) and insisted (of course) on visiting City Lights Bookstore. Upstairs, they have a lovely room devoted to poetry. By chance, I came across this book. Loved it. Had a couple of quibbles with the translation (the translator seemed to translate a particular line without realizing that it was a reference to Baudelaire, so the English didn’t reflect it), but the beauty of the poems comes through. Great way to integrate political sentiment into beautiful, lyrical pieces.