Two poems found today...

"Women Don't Riot" by Ana Castillo
"Oh, atlas" by Joshua Beckman

I also posted the following to the forums at Poets.org:

A Tendency to Disappoint?

I’m curious who else in this crowd finds himself (or herself) disappointed by their favorite contemporary poets. I for one am saddened when poets that I have long loved begin to be (or seem to be) at that point in their careers when they seem to merely churn out work.

Perhaps it’s ego. Perhaps I’ve just grown as a writer and the specific poets I was once consistently wowed by were never quite as ambitious as I had once perceived. Or, perhaps more likely: do poets begin to trust their audience too much? If a poet’s work is well-received, does the poet as soon become a caricature of himself, believing he has found his voice (or at least the voice that serves him in a certain capacity).

Perhaps this is unfair. I mean, poets can’t afford to experiment continually. Or can they?

Everyone in this forum has probably read or written, heard or said the truism: poets “don’t make money.” But it isn’t true. Most don’t make money. Few make very much money. But there is a market (however small) for good poetry, and many award-winners can make quite a comfortable living.

That, I believe, is why our favorite poets, at some point in their careers, seem to be writing on autopilot. I can't help but wish the poets I've spent my education looking up to, emulating, reading for encouragement, would do something more ambitious than release yet another book of poems like the last. Where are the ambitious collections they wrote in their youth? Where are the more-ambitious projects one would expect to see as culminations of certain scholarly careers?

Perhaps I'm alone in this thought, but many (though thankfully not all), seem all too comfortable being the poets they established themselves to be, and little more.