It is one of the most clickbaity premises around. “Poetry Died 100 Years Ago,” intones one opinion writer in a 2022 piece for The New York Times, pointing to the publication date of Eliot’s The Waste Land and “modernity” more broadly. Several articles in the past ten years for The Washington Post offer similar gloomy takes, sweeping across economics and government data as well as hot takes on Twitter. What these kind of alarmist, reactionary takes have in common is a serious disengagement with the literature of the present. By disengagement I mean that these writers’ funeral sermons seldom discuss, in detail, a single poem. This is a problem of reception, not of poesis, or making. I offer, here, under a perhaps too-pithy conceit, the antidote: a hyper-close, even seemingly rudimentary, close reading of ten poems from the past ten years that I believe offer glimpses of the most vital work in today’s poetry.

“Walking like a Robin” by Bernadette Mayer

take 3 or 4 steps then stop

look smell taste touch & hear

is there anything to eat?

oh look, there’s some caviar

it must be my birthday, thanks

i must be very old, like seventy…

In a mere twelve lines—said by T.S. Eliot to be the average length of a poem in English—Mayer goes beyond the usual environs of a human looking at the world through human eyes by showing in what ways being a robin and being a human are alike: “is there anything to eat? / oh look, there’s some caviar / it must be my birthday, thanks / i must be very old, like seventy / i guess i’m falling apart, i’ll just / sew myself back together but will it last?” Nowhere does this poem ever truly break free from the conceit of the title, which gives a unified, satisfying simplicity and a deft lightness.

The turn happens artfully as well, with an open look, almost friendly without being desperate, at the reader: “please take a piece of me back home.” Part of Mayer’s power is that such innocuous language slips right away into a friendly didactic tongue-in-cheek and yet totally serious reminder not to “pay your rent, in fact / remember.” The utopian call for a new world is as lightly handled as every other aspect of the poem, and this lightness is what gives its dark weight (“property is robbery”) its charming resonance. That this poem is calling for a new world is its way of harping on the distresses of the current one without giving into despair.

For some readers, to praise a poem for being charming might not be serious enough, heavy enough, especially given the frankly disturbing status of the world, ecologically with global warming, politically with an alarming turn toward authoritarian regimes, and technologically with the influx of surveillance capitalism. And yet the lightness of a charm is what rewards someone reading. It gives pleasure. Mayer’s body of work has a singularity in its accomplished book-length conceptualism that almost precludes isolating single poems, but these twelve lines indicate, in my opinion, the underlying dynamics of great poetry: speed, quickness, color, exactitude, matter of factness and almost zilch-for-one sentimentality.

“Voyage of the Sable Venus” by Robin Coste Lewis

Prologue:

 

What follows is a narrative poem comprised solely and entirely of the titles, catalogue

entries, or exhibit entries, or exhibit descriptions of Western art objects in which a black female figure is

present, dating from 38,000 BCE to the present.

 

The formal rules I set for myself were simple:…

That I begin introducing this poem with its prologue, rather than the verse elements of it, might already be surprising to some readers. But such is the state of poetry that this conceptual framing is almost a non-event as such. It is not unusual in and of itself. But the poem itself was a landmark event when it came out in 2015, winning major prizes for Coste Lewis.

Lewis’s “Voyage of the Sable Venus” is one of the most remarkable conceptual works in recent memory, let alone in the past ten years. “Voyage of the Sable Venus” manages to be so because of the steady gaze it holds against such a broad sweep of time and its materials. As put in the prologue, this is a “narrative poem comprised solely and entirely of the titles, catalogue entries, or exhibit descriptions of Western art objects in which a black female figure is present, dating from 38,000 BCE to the present”; the matter-of-fact presentation continues with the “simple rules” Coste set herself in writing the piece. Like other poems on this list, there is indeed a fundamental simplicity to the piece that creates its efficacy, as well as a fundamental readability. This piece is on this list because it is weighty, simple, artful, important, and memorable. It is also interesting, irrefutably, in the sense that Mikhael Epstein defines it in his theory of interesting, whereby the more provable yet improbable a claim is, the more interesting it is. This poem compacts thousands of years of power dynamics in history into a single poem that operates almost with one hand tied behind its back to show a mirror to the culture that produces these “Western art objects in which a black female figure is present,” as Lewis almost neutrally notes.

The poem begins as a list: the opening stanza stages of a countdown, from a “Four-Brested Vessel” to “Three Women in Front / of a Steamy Pit,” to “Two-Faced / Head Fish Trying on Earrings” to the problem of the singular which the poem reminds us is “Unidentified”. Soon enough, it is clear that Lewis has made a music of the found language, rendering an incantation centered on the “Head of a Girl // In the Bedroom, / In the Kitchen. / Contemplation Dark / Girl, Girl.” I point out these details of the text to show that the poem rewards close reading and that if we only read the prologue to get the gist of the concept, we are seriously missing out. By the poem’s end, we have encountered the mix-up of the headspace wherein an architectural relief becomes a haunting “Relief / Relief // Relief / Relief.”

“Merry Christmas from Hegel” by Anne Carson

It was the year my brother died, I lived up north and had few

friends or they all went away. Christmas Day I was sitting in

my armchair, reading something about Hegel. You will forgive

me if you are someone who knows a lot of Hegel or under-

stands it, I do not and will paraphrase badly, but I understood…

“Merry Christmas from Hegel” is perhaps one of the saddest poems I have ever read as well as one of the most consoling. The poem seems so understated that the effect of the whole is more surprising. It does not announce its ambition the way Lewis’ poem does, but still accomplishes something that goes deep into the heart. The poem manages to springboard an observation of time and place (“It was the year my brother died, I lived up north and had few friends or they all went away”) and occasion (“Christmas Day I was sitting in my armchair, reading something about Hegel”) into a somewhat vexed close reading of a text (“…I understood him to be saying that he was fed up with conventional grammar, with its clumsy dichotomy of subject and verb, with what he called ‘speculation’”), which transforms into a report of what a dedicated reading practice can do:

I was overjoyed by this notion of a philosophic space where words drift in gentle mutual

redefinition of one another, but at the same time, wretchedly lonely with all my family

dead and here it was Christmas Day, so I put on big boots and coat and went out to do

some snow standing. Not since childhood! I had forgot how astounding it is.

The report makes a space for astonishing observation: “Fir trees, the teachers of this, all around. Minus twenty degrees in the wind but inside the trees is no wind. The world subtracts itself in layers.” This then triggers an appreciation for what poetry can do. It is  worth quoting in full so you get a sense of the masterful understatedness culminating in a memorable afterglow:

I suspect, if I hadn’t been trying on the mood of Hegel’s particular grammatical

indignation that Christmas Day, I would never have gone out to stand in the snow, or

stayed to speculate with it, or had the patience to sit down and make a record of

speculation for myself as if it were a worthy way to spend an afternoon, a plausible way

to change the icy horror of holiday into a sort of homecoming.

Carson’s tone is hard to describe but it is deep-going and rangy, from bemused to pain-struck to mildly bored. Her attention to detail is contagious.

“Wannabe Hoochie Mama Gallery of Realities’ Red Dress Code” by Thylias Moss

I have learned to be still

I have learned that I don’t have to go anywhere

to find the center of the universe

Anything can be that center

From any point, any speck, any dust mite

I can widen

what that speck includes

what that speck is willing

to embrace

The occasion of the poem seems simple: a woman is putting on a form-revealing red dress, or no, a woman is imagining putting on a red dress, or no, rather, a woman is acknowledging the ways she has already been wearing a red dress this whole time–cosmically, potentially. The poem begins in a series of artful seemingly double-spaced monostichs, that have the air of flotation devices, for all the philosophical ideas that can be hung on them: “I have learned to be still / I have learned that I don’t have to go anywhere / to find the center of the universe / Anything can be that center / From any point, any speck, any dust mite / I can widen / what that speck includes / what that speck is willing / to embrace.” This language – so spare and all-encompassing and parallel as to seem almost predictably Buddhist – becomes supercharged when the speaker muses to herself that  “& because of how easy it is to connect dots / one day red might arrive / some planes and geometries might meet / an event of red dress might happen/ for dress is not always red / red happens to dress / red dress is an event/ red might slip by dress.”

The poem becomes a time-space paradox. Multiple realities are switching on in one painful plane of perception. The speaker, strangely calm for all this twisting of planes of reality, notes: “some of what I believe and practice / could be questioned / if I put on a red dress / but if I am still / an event of red dress might happen.” Moss enlivens what the poet Rilke called, in translator Stephen Mitchell’s turn of phrase, “the superhuman deliciousness of staying still” via this oddly calm tone, present tense, and grammatical slippage (that “event of red dress”). The self-awareness of the poem as a space in the world allows the rules of the world to bend, the grammar to slip, in a way that is believable, habitable. The details, simple line by simple line, pile up until the poem becomes single-spaced, speedier than ever, whereby “hoochie mama gets in / at least one of all possible equations” and “the red dress / was put on under my skin / and it fits me / Oh it’s so amazing / that everything that passes through / fits.” The poem’s last line is the only one that has one word, all the more impactful for the whirlwind we have just been through. It is probably the most direct revisioning of the Whitmanesque heritage of epic catalogue and sweeping invocation.

“Rail” by Jorie Graham

I set out over the

unknowable earth

once more. Everything

still underfoot. A mat

of fallen and unfallen

matter. Things flinch

but it is my seeing

makes them

flinch….

Jorie Graham has perfected the art of the stormy, sublime poem for decades, resulting in what I think of as one of her most, almost allegorically good, poems about the encounter between a person and the world, beginning with almost melodramatically heroic fanfare: “I set out over the / unknowable earth / once more. Everything / still underfoot.” The set-up of the poem is hardly novel for Graham’s oeuvre in this respect, but its simplicity, speed, and efficiency make it a stand-out, especially given some of the sprawl of some of this poet’s later work.

The poem captures the drama of what it could even mean or feel like, in our historical moment, to pray. And this is explicit in the text, whereby the speaker asks “How / will the real / let me drop just / in time” and “How will it pay me / out, / pass me along to / the next / I?” The poem uses a sly judgment of how economies of value have soaked into the language we use to talk about ourselves with that play on paying something or someone out, only to return, as ever she does, to the visible world: “I / walk down the hill / where I feel my / letting go go / into the down / of the hill.” The poem summons the materials of our moment in an image where the speaker puts her hand simply on a railing, letting us see “the hand slides / down the spiral / rail like a / millennium / dappled with / dna and spoor / just right / enough to / end.”

Graham’s poem is an example of tremendous choicefulness where the drama of the lone figure in the light of the anthropocene is visible, all the more so because of what Graham has chosen to subtract.

“Alice in October” by Ann Lauterbach

It is impossible to say anything else, Alice said to herself. I think everything has

been said so the only thing to do is repeat what has been said but to repeat it

somewhere unexpected. I suppose this is what poets do, or some of them. It’s a

little like a baseball that starts in the pitcher’s glove…

If this list were not bound to its years, I would be including the long poem “Alice in the Wasteland” by Lauterbach in her brilliant 2009 Or to Begin Again, which was my first introduction to this poet’s work. That poem uses a long narrative framework to let us witness Lewis Carrol’s heroine in T.S. Eliot’s landscape. The adventure that follows is primarily linguistic: Alice wanders around, disoriented, has conversations about language and meaning with the thunder, with passing creatures, and with all manner of odd inhabitants from Carrol’s topsy-turvy Victorian landscape. Luckily for me, though, Lauterbach wrote a sequel poem, a brief one-page prose poem in her 2015 book Under the Sign.

Lauterbach tends to slide into commentary about the nature of text and vision. Here, the third-person point of view in prose allows a steady scenic description: the “day” is “windy,” where “the leaves were already partly down from their niches, bittersweet vines were crawling and twisting around the trunks.” This attention to environment leads to heightened meditation: “Perhaps, she thought, if you do one thing every day at the same time you feel better about the way everything shifts around you, and you are not sure of your relation to these shifts, if you are part of them, or apart from them.” A quirky question emerges: “What if you decide to be tossed from pillar to post, and not attempt to hold on?” Lauterbach slides into an unusually plain, and therefore moving, commentary on mortality:

I suppose that memory is a way of holding on to time, but it seems to me quite

inaccurate and clumsy, compared to a tree with its rings or a skeleton, which hold time

much more firmly in place. I guess while we are alive there isn’t any chance of holding

onto anything. And then when we die, something or someone holds onto us, for a while,

and then that goes away as well.

Prose poetry remains one of the richest areas that poets today are working in. Lauterbach, better known for her stormy fragmentary poetics and her occasional pared-down lyrics, is actually one of the most notable contributors to the genre of the prose poem.

“View from a Folding Chair” by Mónica de la Torre

Never decorative, it embodies a chair’s provisional character.

Utilitarian, never just there, called upon to serve.

Communal, egalitarian, levelling its occupants, gathered for
an occasion.

Rarely will it hold the sitters captive. Its precariousness invites
walkouts, even when secured by an admittance fee….

What readers who originally read it in The New Yorker might not have appreciated about this slim, seemingly stand-alone lyric, is that it comes from a larger ekphrastic sprawling book that responds to an installation piece by the German artist Martin Kippenberger, itself a response to the work of Franz Kafka’s unfinished novel, Amerika. That this poem more than holds its own without the context of the book speaks to something important about conceptual work—that no matter the degree or artfulness of its context, much of it, when it is good, can have the same dazzling effect as a poem that would seem traditionally lyric and only based on personal impressions of the author’s life, the typical Wordsworthian emotions recollected in tranquility.

A list structure appears here, but rather than linking the individual lines with easy-to-picture imagery, de la Torre asks us to hang our hats, as it were, on the situation at hand. Here is the view from one of those annoying flimsy folding chairs that only come out at certain times in the landscape of events. Here are several phenomena that might be observed from the most pedestrian of set-ups. The language would seem to violate that typical truism that a poem should not use abstract, multi-syllabic words, and that only common nouns, words of one syllable, are ideal. And that de la Torre works in the fragment, with a deadpan humor, ups the ante of her achievement, which is to trust that the reader, too, can think and follow along.

The poem also has a list within its list structure, taking on the seemingly unpoeticizable images of Google and data and clouds:

a projection of the high-desert landscape and transit

     surrounding an old ice plant in Marfa

requiring no other technology but a lens and a dark room;

ironically inverted in this picture of a tiny fraction of the

     planet—

with no Google logo and copyright date camouflaged to

     appear like a wisp of a stratus cloud—

is the electrical plant across the street

De la Torre’s commingling of what would seem to resist poetic treatment here, the mundane “old ice plant in Marfa / requiring no other technology but a lens and a dark room,” turns the poem’s collection of disparate views from the relatable position of a chair into something darker and foreboding. While many of the poems on this list believe in the image as a powerful tactic in a poem, de la Torre is never not aware of the way an image is already mediating something and already mediated: “these are moving images to experience, but not keep.” What then happens to what we cannot save? These chairs, described as “plastic palace people,” become “both transience and ritual.”

The last line is one my favorite in all of contemporary poetry, subverting the rest of the poem into sharp relief: “Welcome into the fold. Who cares what the future brings.” The sudden swerve, the finding out that I am a part of the world I have been reading of, gets me every time, as does the flirtation with pessimism. This poem encapsulates an attitude toward consuming media and what it means to be human in response.

“To Tell of Bodies Changed” by Jana Prikryl

Having desired little

more than the

arrival of the little more

that arrives,

outside our window a cypress

of model proportions.

Consider this poem from Prikryl’s first book, The After Party, in which a famous line from Ovid gets excerpted in a forever present tense of the infinitive, indicating Prikryl’s philosophical interest. Juxtapose that with a kind of moody night scene involving “a cypress / of model proportions” and a tip-off that we are in “Rome” and a chance meeting with “a tortoise,” and we are already in for an intense re-imagining of that most common of poetic situations, where a poet encounters an animal. That this poem can both give us a satisfying little invocational philosophical missive (“Having desired little / more than the // arrival of the little more / that arrives,” is how the poem opens, prolonging the tension of where we are, what we are about to encounter, and what is about to happen) as well as peculiar, spelled-out almost proto-typical realistic exactitude is what makes this poem so unusual: the tortoise “scrapes too near. / Our friends hurry over when they hear, / exclaiming over its mute / resolute / distinctness and helpless slow efforts to flee.” Marianne Moore would have gushed over this poem, as she would have over its later metaphysical opinion that “Metaphors swarm the surfaces of things.”

For many poets, this encounter between animal and poet self with a splash of philosophizing would be enough to end the poem, but part of what distinguishes Prikryl’s writing is her unusual sense of scale. We end up with a speaker who unloads on us that she “ought to have expected / from Fra Angelica’s small panel / among others, / the souped-up full-spectrum wings.” The poem’s evolution into ekphrasis becomes a way to demarcate that a poem is that kind of aesthetic object that, per the title, is a kind of body that can change. I find Prikryl’s work inspiring because of the way it both uses by-now familiar conceits (those who have read a lot of Ashbery will find her work follows in step with his jangling, disjunctive turns) and also bears no shame about its intellectual hang-ups:

A painter once squared himself against a difficult question

and said no one could just create

a landscape,

but isn’t it true

that expectation builds a neighborhood

and there is nowhere else that you can live.

I will not pretend to understand every line of the poem, but I am enthralled by its confidence, its variable lineation, its pacing that is so inwardly dictated that I am not sure where such an odd source of perception could come from. An encounter with a tortoise, a Fra Angelica painting, and a series of mind-bending descriptions of landscape. Here is another wonder of descriptive language that begs us to reread, rather than scroll through, as it were, to see the “extravagance of umbrella pines / propping their fingers under the bonus horizons / of the hills, redundancies / boosting the city’s resemblance to itself.”

“The End” by Dorothea Lasky

Promising myself I would not do this again

Is what kept me going

A friend told me

And I listened

Taking a thing to the end of its life

Is what I was made to do

This poem, from Lasky’s 2014 book, Rome, stood out to me for several reasons and offers several lessons about what makes great poetry.

This spare, seemingly simple poem illustrates the idea that a poem is a mirror by which we get to see our own experience. For its essential egolessness, I believe it is a consummate poem to remember. There is the spare line and exactitude of its economy, the musical quality of its language: why is the rhyme between “what I was made to do” and “Well that’s not true” so exciting? Is it just the plainness of the language, the way it feels like this poem is a raw nerve exposed to the painfully nearby cosmos? Our imagination as readers gets pulled out from under us, as it once was: “I went out to the stream / And brought in the water,” says the speaker, in a nude archetypal landscape. The lives at stake are here “my folks, my kin, my brethren,” and this triple repetition launches a ghostly presence whereby the speaker acknowledges: “I brought in the greenish milk / To feed the ones who were already dying // Oh did they go / Oh I do not know.”

As I reread this now, the legacy of the COVID-19 pandemic and all those who died in it come to mind, as does my own personal experience attending to the bedside of a close friend who almost died in childbirth. That there is so much space and roomminess for me as a reader to make inferences and connections is what gives it staying power, and heart.

“Herewith the Prologue” by Aditi Machado

I came along a silk route. I came low like low things. Slow, farcical

leaves rimmed the trees. Some chic birds. I came along a long way,

bolstered by merchants and prophylactics and an obscure shade

that became my practice.

“Herewith the Prologue,” published in the Brooklyn Rail,  opens Machado’s second book, Emporium, and it displays several characteristics that I think are important to point out for not only what makes a great poem but also for what is characteristic of some of the most vital verse of our time–musical richness and textual friction.

In the opening lines here, leaves—a common enough image—get described in a way I never would have expected: “slow, farcical,” which immediately lets us readers in on a world that is about to be both its surface and its paradoxical inner essence, as Machado sees it in the “long way” that the speaker “came.” Geography, psychogeography, historical, physical: all erotic.

Machado offers a sort of hero with a different sort of egolessness: “Sometimes I’d stop / to confer with magnolias and find the writing on the margin / creeping in.” Like the other poems on this list, it asks us to pause, linger, attend. And not all poems do—many poems seem designed to be almost frictionless reading experiences. I cannot help but feel the rub it requires:

Or I’d look up at the archive wandering hysterically

like a womb. I’d stop at markets where rank matadors offered me

coins.

    Magnalia! Magnalia! I heard these bards, I loved

those shops, little bourgeois vessels of amnesia and maybe

lockets. And sometimes

           I’d stop at theatres

and watch the facsimile faces twatting by, the customary graffito

on a restaurant tile.

It takes a rare poet to make an exclamation point–two!—seem as tonally complex as these do. And if we think a summoning up of a landscape along a silk road with picturesque “shops, little bourgeois vessels of amnesia and maybe / lockets” is removed from us, Machado’s poem also has that satisfying element of satire and critique. This speaker, coming along this transhistorical “silk route,” comes upon “the very neat devices of a memoirist or politico.” The speaker is beckoned forth by something better, “the clematis reminding me / I was to pursue a sound.”

This poem reminds me, the way that other poems do on this list, that poetry is, after all, a living art of sound, that tiny unit that disappears when spoken out loud and whose only and somewhat fledgling meager evidence is the textual, the word.