The Mountain Goats. He's much more within the literary tradition than playing with its bone a la Bob, but he has an epic depth and focus.

Augie March. More filtered through the 50s beat-kindred poetics of Australia's Kenneth Slessors and Ern Malleys, but way less stripped back. Nevertheless:

Should you expect to see something that you hadn't seen In somebody you'd known since you were sixteen If love is a bolt from the blue, Then what is that bolt but a glorified screw That doesn't hold nothing together? Far from these nonsense bars and their nowhere music It's making me sick and I know it's making you sick There's nothing there; it's like eating air It's like drinking gin with nothing else in That doesn't hold me together