OF COURSE, diverse types of poetry and poets will always exist and satisfy readers who want to have their outlook on life backed up or justified. Perhaps only a limited number of ideal readers exist who want to be changed or convinced of literary directions new to them. John Barr, in his essay in ‘POETRY’ September 2006, while criticizing creative writing programmes with a mediocre experience base, but acceptable craftsmanship, in fact only touched on some reasons for poetry’s inability to connect with the average citizen (and the remedy is not to spout reams of ‘political’ verse).
Another recent drawback is the current buildup of ‘gender studies’ and ‘body politics’ that increased since the 1980s, where editorial boards and literary spokespersons began to promote ‘gay’ literature as a new or even ‘the new’ literary trend, often secreted in a coded, subliminal use of aesthetics, especially in poetry. What may have started as a broad-minded and necessary desire to end bias against writers with a ‘gay’ outlook perhaps ends up becoming the reverse, with a new naturalized bias towards gregarious heterosexual or ‘straight’ pleasures expressed in poetry, or literature in general.
Yet some of the greatest poets, like Walt Whitman, who was explicitly open to living broadly by the most open-minded romantic sexuality, or later outstanding poets like W.H Auden, Allen Ginsburg, James Merrill, and Frank O’Hara among others were far from being so self-centered aesthetically as to like or promote only ‘gay’ poets like themselves. Their topics were far broader than that. So, what often occurs today is the faulted dismissing of broad-minded poetry due to the promotion of selected poets with a cultural association with a trendy ‘gay’, or asexual  orientation, rather than much contemporary or experiential merit to their work.

Penguin’s Modern Poets
It is refreshing indeed over forty years later to refer to the Penguin Modern Poets series of the 1960s for excellent examples of poetry rooted in the most common and basic experiences shared by humans everywhere. Three poets — David Holbrook, Christopher Middleton, and David Weevil — are featured in Volume 4.
Holbrook, a teacher of English from Hertfordshire, with many books to his credit on language, education, and literary criticism, even a novel, is the type of poet who, despite his involvement with the craft of writing, has much to say in superb poems about being a husband, a father, a person exposed to all the ups-and-downs of day-to-day life; nothing sensational or extraordinary, but in fact quite subtly sexual and romantically suave.
Volume 4 opens with Holbrook’s poem, ‘FINGERS IN THE DOOR’, written for his daughter, which begins:
‘Careless for an instant I closed my child’s fingers in the / Jamb. She held her breath, contorted the whole of her being / Foetus-wise against the / Burning fact of the pain. And for a moment / I wished myself dispersed in a hundred thousand pieces / Among the dead bright stars. The child’s cry broke, / She clung to me, and it crowded in on me how she and / I were / Light years from any mutual help or comfort…’
Such stunning poetry is rooted in the most common human experience. In his final poem, ‘CONVALESENCE’, Holbrook again finds common ground with any reader:
‘In bed a week, shrinks to the counterpane / The world, one’s dealings, and the morning post / Lies next the medicine, torn envelopes – one’s pen / Taken up now and then, idly, and then lost, / While you sleep, like a child, the books and other / Gear / Tumbling from the bed, an idle buzz-fly troubling / The ear. / But then the racking ends, and the throat clears / A fine day, and you dress, still tender, raw…’
Some poets become more successful than others, but the ‘others’, like Holbrook, succeed permanently; indelibly in the common truth of their poems.
Christopher Middleton is a more cosmopolitan English poet, living and teaching not just in London, but Zurich and Texas, translating modern German poetry, writing under the structural influence of Jazz; his poems stop you in your tracks to ponder a multitude of enigmatic and touching experiences in diverse places. One of his most beautiful and jazzy movement poems is ‘NAVAJO CHILDREN, CANYON DE CHELLY, ARIZONA’, which is about travelling by truck across Arizona, in famous Navajo Indian country, with its ancient petroglyphs on canyon walls, and giving away lollipops to the native children who flock the passing truck. It begins:
‘You sprouted from sand / running, stopping, running ;/ beyond you tall red / tons of rock rested / on the feather Tamerisk. / Torn jeans, T-shirts / lope and skip, toes drum / and you’re coming / full tilt / for the lollipops.’
David Weevil, one of Canada’s most unique modern poets, actually born in Japan, but grew up in Ottawa, studied at Cambridge, lived and taught in Malaysia and Texas, writes poems whose parts stick in your memory with their corporeal intimacy and mental detail, their integration of the body with wild nature, city life, and familial environments.
In ‘IN LOVE’, he writes:
‘She touches me. Her fingers nibble gently / The whole street leans closer, its doors / Grin open and cluster shut…/ Look, bodies that puzzled me no longer love; / Effulgence of grasses cover her body – / Her texts are pillows, strong wrists and liquid / ankles / I could paint her as I fell on her / and did, with my tongue, lungs, and my whole heart / – Each breath exploding Its hot ether lash.’
In ‘AT RIDEAU FALLS’, all his feeling for a Canadian landscape he is about to leave comes to a head in this brilliant little twelve line poem:
‘The tideless Ottawa is small / Beside the rivers of old Capitals; / Is logged by nylon-shirted men, / Match-makers. At Rideau Falls / I watch, drunk, the thrust of a barge / Bruising my ribs with each lurch, coils / Of surf stampeding up the night…’
For Holbrook, Middleton, and Weevil, verse is crafted only after experiencing the world leaves something worthwhile to write.