`Great Unavoidable Work'

Pardon his fractured grammar but an anonymous reader asks: “If called upon to list five contemporary poets to read whom would you choose?”

My answer would have been different 10 years ago, before the deaths of Zbigniew Herbert, Czeslaw Milosz, R.S. Thomas, Edgar Bowers, Anthony Hecht, Donald Justice and Thom Gunn. If the reader means “necessary” poets, those who have produced, in Geoffrey Hill’s words, “great/unavoidable work,” the list is sadly brief. First, of course, is Hill. Ours, I believe, will be remembered as the Age of Hill, just as much of the 20th century was the age of Yeats, Eliot, Stevens and Auden.

Who else is necessary? Christopher Logue, for his eccentric, far-from-literal adaptations of Homer’s Iliad. Eric Ormsby, an American who lived for decades in Canada and now resides in England. Kay Ryan, certainly, our pithiest, funniest poet. Who would you propose as the fifth name on this hardly definitive list? Who am I forgetting? Fred Chappell, perhaps. David Ferry, best known as a translator of Horace and Virgil, comes to mind. Here is his “Of Rhyme,” from Of No Country I Know:

“The task is the discovering of a rhyme
Whose consequence is just though unforeknown
Either in its completion having been
Prepared for though in secret all the time

“Or in the way each step of the way brings in
To play with one another in the game
Considerations hitherto unknown,
New differences discovering the same.

“The discovering is an ordering in time
Such that one seems to chance upon one’s own
Birth name strangely engraved upon a stone
In consequence of the completion of the rhyme.”

To borrow Ferry’s phrase, the poets I’ve named share a gift for “ordering in time” – a useful way to think of poetry and all accomplished art. I’m reminded of what the late jazz saxophonist Nick Brignola, an encyclopedia of jazz humor, used to say: “So many drummers, so little time.”