Generation next: the rise – and rise – of the new poets | Books | The Guardian

Somewhere towards the end of last year, I stood up in front of 400 or so 17-year-olds to talk about poetry. The lecture was one I'd already given in various guises; a comparative reading of two poems: one canonical, the other contemporary. In the past, I'd compared WB Yeats with Sharon Olds, Helen Dunmore with Tishani Doshi, and John Donne with Tiphanie Yanique. That day, we were back with Donne again: "The Sun Rising", one of the language's greatest love poems, as fresh and exultant now as it was when it was written four centuries ago. But rather than scouring the work of Forward or Pulitzer prize winners to find something to read with it, this time I turned to YouTube. The poem I chose was Hollie McNish's "Watching Miserable-Looking Couples in the Supermarket".