confused about the ceiling

In roughly the order I'd read them: René Girard,  Theatre of Envy Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous Jericho Brown,  The New Testament Jericho Brown,  The Tradition Forrest Gander, Be With Martin McDonagh, The Beauty Queen of Leenane Ocean Vuong, Night Sky with Exit Wounds Marjorie Perloff, Wittgenstein's Ladder Claudia Rankine, Citizen Peter Balakian, Ozone Journal Justin Wymer, Deed Diane Seuss, Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and Girl Sharif Solmaz, Look Louise Glück, The Wild Iris Also a list of books I haven't finished, roughly in the order I started them: Victoria Chang, Barbie Chang Helen Vendler, Last Looks, Last Books A.E. Stallings, Like Fred Moten, The Little Edges Gregory Pardlo, Digest Elizabeth Willis, Alive Vijay Seshadri, 3 Sections

Richard Hugo is most famous for this devastating little villanelle, called The Freaks at Spurgin Field Road . I just finished his first book, A Run of Jacks . I'd no idea it was his first book. I'll excerpt two stanzas from a poem called "Northwest Retrospective: Mark Tobey." (Mark Tobey was a painter.) Beyond Van Allen rings, the stars don't glitter, arrogant as moons. When did we start? Light-years ago. Why did we come? No matter. We are not returning to that world of ditch and strain, the research terms: cryogenic fuels, free radicals, plasma jets, coordinated fusion. Only the last, in all this void, applies. A universe is fusing in our eyes.

Yeats had the tremendous ability of manipulating space and time in his poems. He can maintain tension even while focusing on a single image over two stanzas: ...Imagining that I could A greater with a lesser pang assuage Or but to find if withered vein ran blood, I tore my body that its wine might cover Whatever could recall the lip of lover. And after that I held my fingers up, Stared at the wine-dark nail, or dark that ran Down every withered finger from the top; But the dark changed to red, and torches shone, And deafening music shook the leaves;...

The NY Times has run an excellent article on greatness in poetry. It's always interesting to read NY Times on poetry -- there was a fascinating one about Jorie Graham's entrance to Harvard (Valhalla?) -- because NY Times believes in poetry, but is egoistic enough to be upset when it's confronted with something it doesn't understand. That's a very useful quality, because it respectfully/hesitantly calls a pear a pear, instead of some helium-filled blather. Maybe because of it, the article anointed only one great post-Eliot poet: Elizabeth Bishop. I'm pleased and agree. (There was some noise about Ashbery, but we'll see what happens 20 years after he's dead, which means in roughly 10 years. I mean, 21.) The criterion that article settled on for greatness is: “demonstrating the qualities that make poetry seem interesting and worthwhile to such a degree that subsequent practitioners of the art form have found her work a more useful resource than the work ...