100 Books Like Antipoems

Czesław Miłosz was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980. But that isn’t the reason to seek out this book. In fact, the book contains none of his poems; it’s an anthology of poems he selected from across the ages and across the globe. The poems are idiosyncratic to Miłosz’s taste—and he has excellent taste, offering us brief personal header notes to guide our reading. Most of the poems are less than half a page long, none more than a page and a half—and some just a handful of lines. These are delicate, thoughtful poems that never become syrupy or stringent. Even after decades of reading poems, I’ve returned again and again to this book when I want to remind myself of why I turned to poetry in the first place.

Frank O’Hara is most talked about as a “city poet” who, on his time off from working at an art museum, walked around Manhattan writing about what he felt and saw. A poet of “I do this, I do that,” O’Hara is lauded for his finding the beautiful in the quotidian. But that’s the lesser half of the story. O’Hara’s greatest feat is writing tender, quirky and deeply satisfying love poems. If you are not enviably moved by his poem “Having a Coke with You,” there’s little reason to continue reading poems at all.

“Pillow talk of the highest order” ends one review this book. Out of context that would seem to indicate this is a book about romance. There is romance, I suppose, but it is for the English language itself. Open the book at any point and you are likely to be knocked over by the sheer sounds and textures of words bumping into each other—literally and metaphorically. The greatest trick Mullen performs—and there are innumerable tricks here, including anagrams, puns, parodies, borrowed forms—is that she makes poems that are fun to read aloud but also serious in their fun.

This book will challenge your notion of what a poem is or can be. Let it. Subtitled “Diagram poems,” these works mix both word and illustration to get at their playful effects. The illustrations come from “found” or ephemeral sources, e.g., a manual on textiles, or a guide to common beetles of North America, or a grammar on computer languages, or the layouts of American playgrounds. The interplay in the poems creates a wonderful uncanniness. The friction, say, caused when you read “You are special” next to a few numbered puzzle pieces in Figure A. and “Everyone is special” next to a completed puzzle in Figure B, and yet when you try to superimpose the one on the other, you realize that some of the pieces have had to adjust themselves to fit the whole. The sudden epiphany is: How special is anyone? And yet answering that question… show more.

Monica Brown’s picture book biography of Pablo Neruda is a wonderfully written account of his life and the creation of his beautiful writing and poems that sing, even under the weight of tremendous struggles. The lyrical text soars on the page while Julie Paschkis’ colorful illustrations capture the heart and soul of the poet of the people. This is a must-read!

Reading Graves’ biography, I get the sense of not just his wry humour but of his enduring pain. When he covers his First World War service, his jokes are cracked out of exasperation at the orders he receives that led to a succession of “bloody balls-ups,” and retold through a wince.

Graves’ biography has been described as “a version of events that told the poetic truth about his experiences…rather than being primarily fact-driven.” I believe all biographies are a form of fiction as our own memories are more often a product of our imagination than photographic recall.

Graves’ poetic retelling allows a more universal resonance beyond the trenches of the Somme than if he just stuck to the facts of that time and place, and resonated more for me because of this. 

Masefield, before his 50-year tenure as Britain’s Poet Laureate, spent the war writing dispatches from the front. This slim book from l917 is his honest, soberly graphic description of what the Somme battlefield looked like after the fighting moved on—an approach that conveys war’s horrors without any moralizing or exaggeration.

The 1973 coup in Chile violently destroyed the freely elected Marxist government of Salvador Allende and installed the brutal 17-year dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet. For years afterward suspicions swirled that the U.S. was behind the event. But evidence was largely anecdotal. What is so impressive about this book is Kornbluh’s persistence deploying the Freedom of Information Act to obtain thousands of classified documents related to the coup. Kornbluh connects the dots and reveals the smoking guns. Through facsimiles of actual cables, telexes, and phone memos (many still highly redacted) this dossier allows you to draw your own conclusions about what really happened in Chile.

Gabriela was a Chilean poet-diplomat, educator, and humanist, who became the first Latin American author to receive a Nobel Prize in Literature. Her poetry often focuses on dark, humane themes that undoubtedly reflect on traumatic episodes that she had personally endured. 

Gabriela has the knack of scratching the surface, which is potent enough to get all your senses actively experiencing the emotions and character she puts forth. The poems resonate on a deep level, offering a compelling clarity of life with its tragedy and complications. The women depicted here are anything but mad; some would say entirely strong-willed and intense, with a collected control and a modernistic sense of independence.

I’m also a playwright, so I really admire a full story told in propulsive first-person monologue. This novella is a confession of Father Urrutia from his deathbed, beginning with the line “I am dying now, but I still have many things to say.” As he speaks, the priest untangles the twisted, uncomfortable agreements between artists and institutions in Chile under Pinochet. I often recommend this book for people who have not yet read Bolaño and might feel intimated by the length of his major works.