(Almost) Every Poet I Have Ever Loved I.
Essay Comissioned by Pantograph Punch for National Poetry Day. August 2023.
Essay Comissioned by Pantograph Punch for National Poetry Day. August 2023.
To celebrate National Poetry Day, Jessica Lim revists the Pantograph Punch archive. Here she shares five poets who’ve served as her personal roadmap in understanding the art.
I don’t have a degree in English Literature.
I fell in love with poetry, age 14, when the novel I was reading ended in the middle of a sentence…
No resolve.
No imparting message.
It was perfect…
At the time, contemporary poetry had only recently shattered all I knew of conventional language – its rules and grammar – reassembling it into something more familiar.
11 years ago, the Pantograph Punch published the article ‘Eight Contemporary Poets I Love and Two Dead Guys’ (Parts I and II) in anticipation of National Poetry Day. The articles assemble the work of ten poets who shaped author Hera Lindasy Bird’s understanding of poetry. And, in turn, it shaped my own understanding of poetry.
A poet disclosing their favourite poetry after years of reading is extremely generous.
It’s like making a blood sacrifice into the metaverse with no hope of return.
It’s casting a bottle into the 17th-century ocean, containing the final transcription of the missing fragments of the Rosetta Stone, in the hope it will be discovered by a future linguist interested in archaeology with only philanthropic intent.
To make a record of it, if only to offer a glimpse into the darkest recesses of a discipline perhaps better understood as a reflection of human transgression. The inherent desire to indulge in our own emotional excess in hyperbole.
Like a poem torn from The New Yorker, carried in your breast pocket,
‘Eight Contemporary Poets I Love and Two Dead Guys’ became my own private roadmap map to poetry.
An unwitting site of pilgrimage to constant discovery.
Like a poem torn from The New Yorker, carried in your breast pocket til frayed and torn.
And, upon returning to the article, I often wondered if others would return to the same place…
