Top Ten Fictional Poets

February 22, 2011 2:19 PM

John Mullan in The Guardian compiles a list of the top ten fictional poets from literature. The article's comments thread has already reminded him of a couple he neglected: "Ka" (Kerim Alakusoglu) from Orhan Pamuk's Snow, and William Ashbless from Tim Powers' The Anubis Gates. Others might include Kid from Samuel Delany's Dhalgren; Cesárea Tinajero, Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima of Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives (really, the character lists for many of Bolaño's novels would provide multiple fictional minor poets of course); Adam Dalgleish from P.D. James' mysteries; Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago; Saul Bellow's Von Humboldt Fleisher. Other links to discussions of fictional poets.
posted by aught (48 comments total)

Duh, of course Zhivago was in the original linked article's list. That's what I get for pondering too hard!
posted by aught at 2:22 PM on February 22, 2011

I wonder how long it'll be before some bloody clever dick says Shakespeare. I mean, oops.
posted by LD Feral at 2:22 PM on February 22, 2011

It annoys me when people snark a top-10 list for "neglecting" a subject. Maybe your favorite fictional poet was 11th! Top ten ≠ all.
And now I'm going to wallow in 10+n fictional poets.
posted by L'Estrange Fruit at 2:23 PM on February 22, 2011

Strugnell's Haiku

(i)

The cherry blossom
In my neighbour's garden - Oh!
It looks really nice.

(ii)

The leaves have fallen
And the snow has fallen and
Soon my hair also...

(iii)

November evening:
The moon is up, rooks settle,
The pubs are open.

-- Wendy Cope
posted by maryr at 2:30 PM on February 22, 2011 [2 favorites]

Seymour Glass.
posted by mr_roboto at 2:35 PM on February 22, 2011 [1 favorite]

Joseph Knecht's stuff was pretty nice.
posted by elmaddog at 2:39 PM on February 22, 2011

Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz!
posted by jozxyqk at 2:44 PM on February 22, 2011 [9 favorites]

Homer, Valmiki, Vyasa.
posted by goethean at 2:47 PM on February 22, 2011

Jem Casey.
posted by cog_nate at 2:49 PM on February 22, 2011

Martin Silenus!
posted by fight or flight at 2:50 PM on February 22, 2011 [3 favorites]

/prepares indignation grenade

"John Shade"

/carefully reinserts pin
posted by Celsius1414 at 2:52 PM on February 22, 2011 [10 favorites]

Looks like somebody didn't get the point of Possession, choosing Ash rather than LaMotte. And no Ern Malley or Ossian? Fake is different from fictional?
posted by RogerB at 2:56 PM on February 22, 2011

The poet in Tanith Lee' Paradys series! The one with the really strange "origin story" in Book of the Dead who is namedropped in later stories.
posted by subdee at 3:04 PM on February 22, 2011

A bit of a tangent--what I really hunger for is to hear the music of fictional musicians, especially Adrian Leverkuhn from Dr Faustus (Mann).
posted by jfuller at 3:09 PM on February 22, 2011

How about the worst fictional poets? I nominate Enoch Soames, Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings of Greenbridge, Essex, and the redoubtable Ned Softly:

"For ah! it wounds me like his dart.

"Pray, how do you like that 'Ah!' Does it not make a pretty figure in that place? 'Ah!' It looks as if I felt the dart, and cried out at being pricked with it:

"For ah! it wounds me like his dart.

"My friend Dick Easy," continued he, "assured me he would rather have written that 'Ah!' than to have been the author of the Aeneid."

posted by Iridic at 3:23 PM on February 22, 2011 [1 favorite]

I need a new copy of Dhalgren. I read that sucker. I read it and read it. I rode that book. I broke that book's spine and kissed it on the cover, which then fell off.

I didn't apologize.

I'm like that with certain books. They know why.

And they like it.
posted by Splunge at 3:42 PM on February 22, 2011 [2 favorites]

Please subtract one ' from the above, dropped in a fit of passion.
posted by Splunge at 3:43 PM on February 22, 2011

England's greatest one-armed poet, John Lillison.
posted by steef at 3:48 PM on February 22, 2011

And they like it.

Hear hear!
posted by dhalgren at 4:19 PM on February 22, 2011 [1 favorite]

Henry from the Dream Songs.
posted by nasreddin at 4:40 PM on February 22, 2011 [1 favorite]

Also, jeez, Possession was such a letdown. I mean, I get the whole archive-porn angle, but there's nothing to the book besides dreary and predictable academic romance. Oh, what a surprise, the two protagonists fall for each other in a way that echoes the poets they study! I didn't see that coming from the first fucking page! Even the poems weren't very good. (If someone here has finished the second half of the book, I'd be happy to be disabused of my opinion.)
posted by nasreddin at 4:49 PM on February 22, 2011

Well, if you don't like the pastiche poetry and you don't like the way the 20C academic love story echoes the 19C poets', then there's definitely no point reading the rest of Possession. That's about all there is to like there. The predictability of the love story is surely part of the point, as it's meant to be a slightly arch commentary on the meanings of "romance," genre and otherwise, as much as an entry in (whichever) genre; but it's still definitely not everyone's cup of tea. And there's also the general problem of parody there, in that you have to really like, say, your Wordsworths and your Rossettis and your Shelleys to want to read a pastiche of them at all, but if you like them too much, it can rub you the wrong way.
posted by RogerB at 4:59 PM on February 22, 2011

Oh man, Possession is one of my favorite books. And, as a rule, I liked Ash's poetry more than LaMotte's. And book about books is right up my alley. I loved Pale Fire, too. I guess I just respond to archive-porn.

Do I have....bad taste?
posted by chatongriffes at 5:00 PM on February 22, 2011

I feel like Ebenezer Cooke from John Barth's The Sot-Weed Factor should be up here, even if he's just a fictionalized version of a real individual, nevermind the fact that he barely writes any poetry. He's Poet Laureate of Maryland! Appointed by Lord Baltimore, himself! Sort of!
posted by jsnlxndrlv at 5:01 PM on February 22, 2011

Also from Dhalgren: Ernest Newboy, who reads (the) Kid(d)'s poems and gives that three-page speech about prisms, mirrors, and lenses. Unfortunately we don't get to read any of the poetry written by either character.

I love that book as much as Splunge, but maybe not so ... physically.
posted by twirlip at 5:01 PM on February 22, 2011

Well, if you don't like the pastiche poetry and you don't like the way the 20C academic love story echoes the 19C poets', then there's definitely no point reading the rest of Possession. That's about all there is to like there. The predictability of the love story is surely part of the point, as it's meant to be a slightly arch commentary on the meanings of "romance," genre and otherwise, as much as an entry in (whichever) genre; but it's still definitely not everyone's cup of tea.

Thanks, I suspected as much. But what does that last sentence actually mean? Is she writing a poorly plotted book in order to make it clear that "romance" is a simplistic genre or something?
posted by nasreddin at 5:13 PM on February 22, 2011

Don't tell me you kids forgot about Fernando Goddamn Pessoa and his 79 shadows.
posted by Your Disapproving Father at 5:28 PM on February 22, 2011

What I meant that she's playing on both the modern "romance novel" and older "romance" (~= novel) meanings. One man's "poorly plotted" book is another man's intentionally conventional story for the sake of both enjoying and parodying the romance-narrative conventions, that is.
posted by RogerB at 5:28 PM on February 22, 2011

What a ridiculous list. If you're going to do English lit, do English lit, but tossing in one Russian entry doesn't somehow represent the rest of the world, it's a pathetic copout. If you're going to include Russian literature, Vladimir Lensky from Eugene Onegin is far more important than Zhivago. And if you're going to include Russian literature, what's your excuse for ignoring the rest of the world? This guy obviously knows nothing but English lit, so why not stick to it?
posted by languagehat at 5:57 PM on February 22, 2011 [2 favorites]

No love for Pierre Menard? C'mon, his fans include Douglas Adams and John Hodgman.
posted by mek at 6:37 PM on February 22, 2011

Oh, come now. Trurl's Electronic Bard is, by definition, the best fictional poet. (From Stanislaw Lem's The Cyberiad).

“Have it compose a poem — a poem about a haircut! But lofty, noble, tragic, timeless, full of love, treachery, retribution, quiet heroism and in the face of certain doom! Six lines, cleverly rhymed, and every word beginning with the letter s!!”

Seduced, shaggy Samson snored.
She scissored short. Sorely shorn,
Soon shackled slave, Samson sighed.
Silently scheming,
Sightlessly seeking
Some savage, spectacular suicide.

(Now imagine being the translator who had the task of translating that from the original Polish!)
posted by straight at 8:10 PM on February 22, 2011 [2 favorites]

How about the worst fictional poets?

Vogons, duh.
posted by maryr at 8:26 PM on February 22, 2011 [1 favorite]

Oops, my bad, they're third worst.

"Vogon poetry is the third worst in the Universe. The second worst is that of the Azgoths of Kria. During a recitation by their Poet Master Grunthos the Flatulent, of his poem, Ode to a Small Lump of Green Putty I Found in My Armpit One Midsummer Morning, four of his audience members died of internal hemorrhaging, and the president of the Mid-Galactic Arts Nobbling Council, survived by gnawing one of his own legs off... The very worst poetry in the universe died along with its creator, Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings of Sussex... in the destruction of the planet Earth."

posted by maryr at 8:30 PM on February 22, 2011 [1 favorite]

The Walrus was Paul.
posted by Kinbote at 9:10 PM on February 22, 2011

Oops, sorry... cranberry sauce. My bad.
posted by Kinbote at 9:12 PM on February 22, 2011

Heh, just ordered another copy of Dhalgren from Amazon. Honestly I read my first copy until I had to keep the book in a ziplock bag because the glue on the spine crumbled away. Very hard to read when you take a page from one pile, read it and then put it in the second pile.

But I have done that. It comes from having to go forward and back reading the stuff in the margins.

And I love it still. Not to mention that I want to have Sam Delaney's children.

Sam, call me!
posted by Splunge at 9:12 PM on February 22, 2011

Dhalgren has been recommended to me one times too many now. Time to buy. Thanks mefi.
posted by mek at 9:51 PM on February 22, 2011

I hate to be that person who says "I can't believe they ignored MY favorite" but seriously, no Bokonon?
posted by Daily Alice at 3:13 AM on February 23, 2011

I need a new copy of Dhalgren. I read that sucker. I read it and read it. I rode that book. I broke that book's spine and kissed it on the cover, which then fell off.

Heh. I still have the copy I bought in highschool (c. 1978), the fat Bantam paperback with the swollen sun on the cover. It's almost fatally creased and cracked, spine repaired and front cover reattached with shipping tape several times. As a grown-up, I bought the subsequent Wesleyan and Vintage trade pb editions, but reading them doesn't feel the same. Also, the first couple of Wesleyan printings introduced a lot of embarrassing new typos to the text, which was particularly annoying considering Delany's painstaking attempts over the years to get the ones in the original Bantam edition corrected. (For completeness, Delany purists can find the errata sheet for the current Vintage trade pb edition here.)
posted by aught at 6:56 AM on February 23, 2011

Sam, call me!

Splunge, you might get an answer if you call him "Chip." ;-)
posted by aught at 6:58 AM on February 23, 2011

"John Shade"

Who was in the linked article's list, right? (Unless I am misunderstanding your comment.)
posted by aught at 7:02 AM on February 23, 2011

My heart expands;
’Tis grown a bulge in’t—
Inspired by
Your beauty effulgent.

—William the Bloody
posted by nicepersonality at 7:03 AM on February 23, 2011

Is the estimate of "top ten" based on the quality of the poetry supposedly by these fictional poets, or based on the actual author's characterization of the poets?

Either way, I'd probably nominate Ruth Zardo from Louise Penny's Inspector Gamache series. Wonderful, crusty character (utterly foulmouthed but dearly loved in her community)--and most of her poetry is actually taken from an early book by Margaret Atwood. (I'm fascinated by this--curious how well Atwood and Penny know each other and if Atwood is utterly amused by Ruth. From everything I've heard about her, I suspect she is.)
posted by dlugoczaj at 7:17 AM on February 23, 2011

Unfortunately we don't get to read any of the poetry written by either character.

One of the reasons I posted this FPP was my long-term fascination with hints about fictional texts we don't quite get to see (Borges stories would provide a prose counterpart to this list of fictional poets; and yes, "Pierre Menard...").

With Dhalgren many years ago, and more recently (and maybe even more intensely) with Orhan Pamuk's Snow, I had to fight the urge to try myself somehow to compose poems that fit the descriptions of the missing works in the text, knowing well it was a fool's impulse. I think the fact both books contain scattered draft lines, and hints about phrasing in what was originally scribbled in the heat of inspiration here and there - which anyone who's seriously written poetry knows may or may not have anything to do with the final work - makes it even more maddening by definition to never be able to have the referenced poems themselves.
posted by aught at 7:21 AM on February 23, 2011

@aught - yes he was last in the list, which is why I was preparing my indignation weaponry until I saw his name and could stand down. :)
posted by Celsius1414 at 7:43 AM on February 23, 2011

aught, do it! You won't get the imaginary poem of the character, but you will get something. Take the few hints of what it is as inspiration. It may be good, it may not be more than jokey pastiche; at the very least it'll be a fun bit of whimsey to practice with.

(My favorite Imaginary Fiction, btw, is the television schedule in Matt Howarth's graphic novel WRAB: Pirate Television. Someone else actually picked up one of the names and synopses from that schedule and ran with it for a while.)
posted by egypturnash at 11:31 AM on February 23, 2011

aught: "Sam, call me!

Splunge, you might get an answer if you call him "Chip." ;-"

Yeah I know, but I didn't want to get too personal.
posted by Splunge at 12:47 PM on February 23, 2011

I had to fight the urge to try myself somehow to compose poems that fit the descriptions of the missing works in the text, knowing well it was a fool's impulse.

If it was done well, a book of missing poems by fictional poets could be very awesome.
posted by twirlip at 10:53 AM on February 24, 2011