Who are some actual contemporary poets of merit? I'm looking

i donno bro read some literary mags, there's always a half dozen forgettable poems about non-edgy stuff every eissue

>>8913676
Yeah, just read a variety of lit mags. There'll be a lot of agenda-driven stuff in nearly all of them, but they don't consist entirely of it. Also read anthologies that aren't curated by ideologues.

What are you looking for in a contemporary poet?

>>8913729
Free verse done right. You have to know the rules in order to break them.

>>8913729
I am curious on the direction poetry is taking. I want to know how it has changed from the modernists to now, even past what I guess you would call postmodernism of the 60s onwards (Ashbery for instance).

I have been reading Anne Carson, who I guess you would call contemporary. She is great, but I sometimes feel like she is an anomaly, kind of plays by her own rules and isn't really influenced by anything contemporary (her background in classicism). Correct me if I'm wrong.

Here's a near sonnet by Henri Cole. Is this along the lines of what you're looking for?

Oil & Steel

My father lived in a dirty-dish mausoleum,

watching a portable black-and-white television,

reading the Encyclopaedia Britannica,

which he preferred to Modern Fiction.

One by one, his schnauzers died of liver disease,

except the one that guarded his corpse

found holding a tumbler of Bushmills.

"Dead is dead," he would say, an antipreacher.

I took a plaid shirt from the bedroom closet

and some motor oil—my inheritance.

Once I saw him weep in a courtroom—

neglected, needing nursing—this man who never showed

me much affection but gave me a knack

for solitude, which has been mostly useful.

>>8913766
You'd probably be better off reading some historical survey. I don't think you'll understand any change just by reading poetry without any secondary sources that allude to general cultural changes as well.

>>8913801
ooooooooo thats good

>I'm looking for stuff other than SJW political/ideological agenda-driven stuff

Dan Schneider

http://www.cosmoetica.com/Poetrylinks.htm

Joe Bolton. I mention his name in every contemporary poetry thread because he is supremely underrated.