Why aren't they more famous

There are a number of poets whose reputations run ahead of their achievements, it sometimes might seem. It wouldn't be polite to name them here but it would be fun to give a few clues about who I think they are and then see who anybody else thinks I mean, but that would be a dangerous game to play.
However, there are a number of names who, it has long seemed to me, are inexplicably much less famous than they deserve to be. It is possible, of course, that they don't pursue celebrity and wider acknowledgement but, if that's the case, there's little point in publishing at all.
Some of the following names might be familiar to the afficiandos of contemporary poetry but you would need to have read a lot of poetry magazines over the last twenty years to know them all.
I've never understood why Martin Mooney isn't listed among the host of tremendous poets that came out of Northern Ireland in the last few decades. I first came across his limited edition booklet Bonfire Makers in 1995, and the poem on Rasputin and Painting the Angel. These two poems alone would be enough to make him a favourite but the rest of his work is very fine, too, from the early booklets Brecht & An Exquisite Corpse and Escaping with Cuts and Bruises through Grub, Rasputin and his Children to Blue Lamp Disco. I hope there's another book due soon.
Martin Crucefix was in his third year at Lancaster when I was in my first. I've followed what I've been able to find of his career since, much of it in Poetry London. His book Beneath Tremendous Rain is well worth a look and the poem Sugar in Banana Sandwiches is a stand out. I realize there's been much more work since then.
Sue Hubbard should be a division higher in the poetry world's rankings, her poem on Rembrandt's model being one of the better poems about painting that one is likely to find.
Michael Daugherty was a stalwart of the littlepress magazines when I read them all in the late 70's, a beautifully lyrical and romantic poet of the time who, one might have thought, could have broken into a more mainstream and more lucrative area than being listed here. I looked him up in the Poetry Library last year and the poems have stood the test of time in their post-hippy, user-friendly gloriousness.
And Paul Berry, another star for me of those magazines run on idealistic shoestrings, deserved better. I have his booklets here, Homages and Holiday Snaps and A Bequest of Fire, and wonder if he's still at it and, if so, where. I'm not saying he, or any of the above, are exactly Seamus Heaney but if I ruled the world then not only would every day be the first day of Spring but also they would inhabit more prominent positions in the poetry firmament.
Beyond the creative writing courses and the Universities, away from the slams and the local reputations and the cliques promoting each other, there has been something great going on. It's just that you do need to look quite hard, and discriminatingly, to find it.
Now, there's an opinion for you.

Creative Block

It is usually the 'writer's block' that they complain about, running out of impetus, not being able to perform. But there is a lesser known affliction, I think, where one can get stuck producing the same old thing and nothing else.
I almost wish I'd never come across the 'fuzzy rhyme' idea because one immediately wants to do it but the results suffer from the law of diminishing returns and then one finds one can't do anything else. O, how I'd love to produce some blank verse that meant something, anything.
There is a sestina on the way, one of those things that writes itself once the pieces are put in place, so please do tune in for that later. But, that poem notwithstanding, I am beginning to realize the importance of meaning beyond all this considered formality.

Snake

Secretly it slithers into nooks,
the glitter of its imprinted skin
a leitmotif of exotic inks
tangled up like an old, slack noose.

Is it something creation has forsaken
that lives without the need for please or thanks
and whatever it is that it thinks
is something that you know no-one can ask.

Stand-out Poems

Sometimes one is struck by an excellent poem and buy a whole book by that poet in the hope that it will be full of such poems but it proves not to be.
I wonder if this is because the moment has passed, or because expectations have been raised too high or that in fact there are some poets who did write one brilliant poem and then a lot of others.
For example, Richard Wilbur, Transit http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/Richard-Wilbur/17602
Marianne Moore, The Steeple Jack http://www.hearts-ease.org/library/contemporary/moore/16.html
Paul Durcan, That Propeller I left in Bilbao,
Jane Holland, They are a Tableau at the Kissing Gate http://www.weddingreads.com/They_Are_A_Tableau_At_The_Kissing-gate-Jane_Holland/

Or it might just have been an excuse to post a few links.

Signed Poetry Books- John Masefield

There are five laureates in my little collection so far and I missed out on a Cecil Day-Lewis a couple of weeks ago. This is the earliest, until I see a Tennyson.

Mrs. Masefield helped John with this book The Dream, a few years before his appointment.

Signed Poetry Books - Craig Raine

Craig Raine, in the 1980's very much the vogue thing with his ingenuity and 'new ways of looking', seems a little bit of a 'forgotten man', a spare Modernist in search of a new purpose. But that might be very unfair of me.

A Martian Sends a Postcard Home and Rich, with the wonderful poem Wulf and Eadwacer, were tremendous books.

Signed Poetry Books - Glyn Maxwell

Glyn Maxwell, one of my favourites among contemporary poets, might have been a little bemused to meet me at Oxford in 2006. It was late in the evening and he might have preferred to be left to play the quiz machine in St. Anne's bar but I was determined to meet him.

He assured me we could chat the next day but I didn't have anything particular to say to him. He read from his plays rather than his poems at that event. One of the many poets who have decided to extend their writing into potentially more lucrative areas than poetry.

Sean O'Brien - Afterlife

Sean O'Brien, Afterlife (Picador)

Having won prizes for all his poetry books and then checked off translation, poetry criticism, an anthology, plays, radio work, short stories and an opera libretto, it was foresseable that Sean O'Brien would add the novel to his empire of genres.

That it is set in the world of poetry comes as no surprise, nor that it is scathingly funny in places or that the characters feel considerable animosity towards each other. The thing one can't foresee is that it is not set in the North East but in the Marches.

But Divott isn't Ledbury, a Jerome is not an Eric Gregory Award, Reeves and Reeves is not Faber and Jane Jarmain isn't Sylvia Plath.

The small, intensely self-regarding world of poetry is claustrophobic throughout a long, hot English summer related in flashback. Tensions and jealousies within a small group of emerging poets find no release and Alex, although not the most talented, is the the most arrogant, manipulative and vindictive. A middle section in which some German Marxists (it is 1976, after all) turn up ex machina to raise the volatilty levels reads less successfully. A party organized by visiting American academics becomes cathartic and ugly with acid-spiked drinks and Hell's Angel violence. But the ending provides one more surprise than might have been anticipated (although, by definition, surprises can't be anticipated) and some justice prevails.

The laugh out loud moments dry up somewhat after the threateningly idyllic first part, but not before the American arrivals have been satirized,

In the course of the evening her interest in poetry developed exponentially. She had heard Lowell read, and Anne Sexton and Elizabeth Bishop. I was surprised she hadn't been waiting on the ice with a net when Berryman went off the bridge in Minneapolis.

And bludgeoned by O'Brien's lumphammer humour,

Here was someone it was quite simple to dislike: all she had to do was turn up.

But after the party, there is a more relaxed, elegiac tone. Jane's mental state after the acid has gone beyond poetry into a place of its own, compared to an impression of Syd Barrett,

the million-mile stare from nowhere into nowhere with no hope of coming back and no here to come back to anyway.

And O'Brien's world-weariness is a part of the feeling of downgraded value in which,

one day the students say that Ulysses is too long; Dubliners replaces it; a little while later they wonder if they have to read all these stories. And so on.

Although the ending seems like a qualified win for good over evil, the world has already been revealed as beyond redemption. The contingent, over-rated futlity of poetry, the vainglorious pursuit of kudos is surgically demonstrated in the world of readings, magazines, conferences and prizes, an industry locked into its own insubstantial vanity and, in fact, O'Brien does wheel out one of his favourite quotes, Vanity, vanity, all of it vanity, to prove the point.

The book gripped me but, as a brand-loyal O'Brien devotee, it was ever likely to. I have no idea how this novel would read to someone who has never seen his work before. He has written about what he knows but you get the idea that he might have preferred not to know it.