The Forms of Youth: Twentieth-Century Poetry and Adolescence

THINKERS OF THE 1950s, as I described in chapter 3, warned adults about the supposedly vanishing adolescent; social critics of recent years instead describe the vanishing adult. Richard Rodriguez (born in 1944) writes that his own “baby-boom generation made “youth … into a lifestyle, a politics, an aesthetic, a religion.… We do not know how to mark the end of adolescence” (“Invention of Adolescence,” 125–26). Lawrence Grossberg calls American “baby-boomers … a generation that was never taught to be adults or even to value that identity” (“Political Status,” 42).¹ These social changes, too, have prompted poems. We have seen already the formation and dissolution of the hopeful, even revolutionary mode in which poets of the 1960s celebrated the new, the young, and the incomplete; we have seen newer modes devoted to uncertainty, hesitancy, even indeterminacy, and to an adolescence defined by those qualities, in Robert Lowell, John Tranter, and Paul Muldoon. We have seen, too, how Laura Kasischke, Jorie Graham, and other female poets have organized poems and books around a female adolescence experienced as exhilaration and danger, around the risky new visibility of teen girls’ bodies, and around the lost security of a homosocial girlhood.

That feminist project is not the only one going. The male poets of the American Baby Boom (roughly, those born between 1944 and 1962), discussed for part of this chapter, often treat adolescence with a far less ambivalent nostalgia; its end is the end of the 1960s, the end of hope, and the end of the poem. The youngest American poets, by contrast, sometimes write as if adolescence had no end. Many of them treat adolescence as a set of subcultures and signifiers which they have not yet left (and may never leave) behind. For these poets—as for the young Muldoon—maturity, authority, and stability do not offer stances or ways of speaking worth choosing or even worth trying to imagine; adolescence, and the subcultures that it harbors, offer a locus of present selfhood, a source of language, and a trope for the contemporary poem.

Patricia Meyer Spacks in 1980 described “a movement toward increasingly intense identification with the young on the part of novelists who evoke them. More and more now, as social organization provides less satisfaction, everyone wants to be an outsider. The adolescent can appear heroic in not belonging; the novelist can express through adolescent characters a wistful longing to share their condition” (The Adolescent Idea, 294). Such speculations have not been confined to America; Julia Kristeva writes that the adolescent in Freudian and post-Freudian psychoanalysis—with his (or her) open-ended quest for self-definition—corresponds to the normal adult of our time, when “changes in the contemporary family, the blurring of sex roles and parental roles, and the lifting of moral and religious taboos” mean that “subjects are no longer structured according to rigorous prohibitions or laws” (New Maladies, 136). The end or weakening of such inherited “laws” has gone hand in hand, for many poets, with a rejection of inherited forms or of any form that implies that lives conform to stories—what Lyn Hejinian names “the rejection of closure” (Language of Inquiry). In Hejinian’s own My Life (1980, 1987), “the person posits itself elsewhere, adolescent-like, as a figure in the distance escaping, while awaiting the advent of its more glorious self” (44).

Poets writing after the 1960s often find “glorious selves” in adolescence; often they explain that glory or lyricism or freedom may be found only there. The Canadian poet George Bowering’s Kerrisdale Elegies (1984) are, in part, a rewriting of Rillke’s Duino Elegies to fit contemporary urban conditions. One of Bowering’s elegies reconfigures Rilke’s yearnings so that they suggest pop songs and teens. Where Rilke has “Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel / Ordnungen? [Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’/ hierarchies?]” (Selected Poetry, 150–51) Bowering begins, “If I did complain, who among my friends / would hear?” (“Kerrisdale” 32). Bowering goes on:

To “become a lyric poet again” is to become adolescent, not even a nineteenth-century scholar-gypsy but a modern, dance-frequenting, backseat-necking teen; to use the high language of odes now is to say “Oh yeah.” If Bowering pokes fun at the language of rock-star celebrity, in which exaltation implies fame (and vice versa), he offers nothing better with which to replace it; the language that for Rilke fit an adult’s communion with nonhuman nature now (Bowering implies) fits (and, perhaps, fits only) teenagers in love.

Teen years mean sexual energy and secret, powerful language, too, in C. D. Wright’s “Autographs” (1997), a poem that suggests that the vividness it depicts may not outlast high school. Each of Wright’s forty-four lines tropes the self-descriptions, “senior superlatives,” and intimate signatures found in American high school yearbooks. Where yearbooks conventionally celebrate officially sanctioned attributes and aspirations (“most popular,” for example, or “most likely to succeed”), Wright’s sometimes comic, sometimes breathlessly excited fragments celebrate sex:

Sexual undertones turn into dominant notes: “Rambone: I need it I need it now / Back of her throat: slit light / Wish: compassion … Other sites: corridor, phone booth, shower, elevator, locker, filling station, boat dock, drivein, cafeteria line” (14). The poem ends: “PS: have a wonderful summer and a wonderful life” (15). Will these imaginative, sexually hungry personae have wonderful lives? Perhaps, but perhaps not: the high school language here can produce celebratory fireworks because it does not have to tell us what came next.²

These individual poems by Wright and Bowering (born, respectively, in 1949 and 1935) continue the line of alert homages to and self-conscious modernist emulations of adolescence, the line that began with Williams. Larry Levis (1946–1996) offers instead the concentrated nostalgia in which male Baby Boom poets of adolescence have specialized; he made that nostalgia the cornerstone of his art. “The Poet at Seventeen” (its title perhaps a play on Rimbaud’s “Poètes du Sept Ans”) recalls

Levis has said that during his own teen years, poetry “gave voice to a kind of adolescent loneliness or alienation I felt. And it made sense of things” (Kelen, “After the Obsession,” 33). He would come to see his later poetry both as a way to revivify those feelings, and as a way to return to the landscape and life-world that produced them, a life-world that included not only the agricultural landscapes of the Central Valley but also Levis’s high school disappointments and friends (in particular, his friend Zamoi, who died in Vietnam). “I wanted poetry that would establish contact with … the world I knew in high school,” he explained (Bargen, “Levis and Bargen,” 115–16).³ Levis uses the word adolescence as a modern name for Romantic power, for everything inimical to reason, practicality, and compromise: “if death is an adolescent, closing his eyes to the music / On the radio of that passing car, / I think he does not know his own strength” (Selected, 84). A poem entitled “Adolescence” remembers a romance, at fifteen, with a girl who would die of spinal meningitis; he wished then, and may wish now, “to disappear wholly into someone / Else, as into a wish on a birthday, the candles trembling” (Selected, 84). A poem called “Whitman” (whose speaker is Walt Whitman himself) implies that the power of fluid self-creation embodied in Leaves of Grass has passed, in 1980s America, to teens, who do not understand what they inherit: “Now that I’m required reading in your high schools, / Teenagers call me a fool” (Selected, 105).

In the long lines and detailed, almost novelistic settings of Levis’s final book, Elegy (1997), adulthood means failure even more strongly than adolescence means hope. “In 1967” remembers Levis’s grueling summer job:

Levis’s paid employment during the Summer of Love involved killing things that would otherwise grow up to be useless. As Levis accomplished this depressing, practical task, he experienced quasi-Shelleyan, drug-induced sympathies with a songbird, “part of me taking wing,” as if to flee his own too practical future. The poem concludes not in Levis’s father’s vineyard but with a wide-angle shot of the Baby Boom’s fate:

“Arrested” may include the sense “arrested development”: it is as if the poet says stop me before I grow up. The falling leaves are Shelleyan (“Ode to the West Wind”), as is the sense that a dramatic death might be better than ordinary life; what is not Shelleyan is the association of that sense with the particular experience of a generation, of all those who were teens at that time.

This view persists through Levis’s other late poems: in “Elegy with an Angel at Its Gate,” the 1960s are “an age / Of revolutions that will … Free everyone, put all of us to one side / To be part of another, larger thing that ends / By becoming a movie about it” (Elegy, 60). For Levis (as to many of his coevals) the decade called “the sixties” is to America what each adult’s teen years are to that adult: a promise that, of its nature, must partly fail. In “Elegy for Whatever Had a Pattern in It” (note “Had,” not “Has”), “the Summer of Love has become the moss of tunnels” (Elegy, 33). The poem concludes, “As if we’re put on the earth to forget the ending” (38). Another of Levis’s elegies declares, “Poverty is what happens at the end of any story, including this one, / When there are too many stories,” “When one condition is as good as any other” (Elegy, 51). That poem then retells the myth of Daphne, whom Levis envisions as an attempted suicide, “the only widow in her high school, // After she has decided to turn herself // Into a tree” (Elegy 51). (“Turn herself into” means both “metamorphose” and “swerve her vehicle so that she collides with.”) Levis’s long lines imagine the spaces occupied by lives that should have been full, lives hungry for experience, all of which have already and inevitably fallen short.

We can find these patterns of nostalgia—of youth as energy already wasted, potential already misspent—expressed in different geographical and cultural spaces by Yusef Komunyakaa. In Komunyakaa’s poems about playground and high school sports, innocent energies are at once the motive for a poem and the representative of powers (either in American history or in the life course) that now seem lost. In “Slam, Dunk & Hook,” the “hang time” involved in a basketball shot (the time during which a player appears suspended in midair) and the arc of the released basketball represent the empowered interval between childhood and adult life. The boys in Komunyakaa’s remembered pickup game

In his study of poems about sports, Don Johnson finds that “basketball poems celebrate the creation of ephemeral identities dependent upon the ebb and flow of a particular competition”; “poem after poem stresses getting into ‘the zone,’ rising above physical or sociological limitations—transcendence” (The Sporting Muse, 90). Such transcendence is always temporary, and perhaps unrepeatable. “Love of the game,” writes John Edgar Wideman, “rises like the ball from a shooter’s hand, rising”; “as sure as you’re up, you’re also coming down” (Hoop Roots, 18). For Komunyakaa, the arc of the ball is the arc of youth, the time between inchoate innocence and hardened experience, even between the start of a sentence and its sudden (unpredictable, syncopated) end. Spinning temporarily around and above the reality principle, the basketball players act out a power that—older, apart—none of them will have.

A similar pattern governs Komunyakaa’s “White Port & Lemon Juice,” in which illicit drinking, sexual exploration, early rock’n’roll, and high school football are all of a piece and belong to a pleasurable, now lost world. Johnson notes that football poems (unlike other sports poems) usually focus on physical pain and bodily failure. Troped or simulated destruction in sports is far preferable to the real danger that may overtake Komunyakaa or his teammates later on. Yet the erotic and alcoholic idyll of boys, girls, and homemade wine coolers at the “school dance” (after the football game) involves its own experience of defeat:

Poets of Komunyakaa’s generation less attuned than he to autobiographical anecdote can also see their own adolescence as promise, their maturity as comedown and conundrum. The disappointments inherent in any passage from potentiality to actuality, from hope to realization, from adolescence to adulthood—one of Ashbery’s many subjects—become for John Koethe perhaps the chief subject. Indeed, what Koethe adds to Stevens and Ashbery (who together account for almost all his verse techniques) is a greater concentration on the stages of the modern life course. In Koethe’s “Sunday Evening”—an almost parodically Stevensian poem which features “intricate evasions” and “ambiguous undulation”—the time of reconciliation to disillusion is not the time when pigeons flock downward to darkness, but the time when “the adolescent / Boys that used to hang around the parking lot are gone” (North, 141). Koethe’s “Secret Amplitude” begins by proposing that “the hardest feeling is the one / Of unrealized possibility”; “the proof, / If there is one, is by analogy / With the kind of adolescent ‘knowledge’” Koethe “had on those afternoons in college / When I’d go to New York, and the evening / Deepened, and then the lights came on” (North, 211, 214). Such “knowledge” fades to black; nothing replaces it.

Koethe, as Willard Spiegelman has written, “accepts liminality, thresholds, our in-between status, as the major mark of identity”; his “reconsideration of nostalgia” finds both its most heartening examples of in-betweenness and the chief object of its belated nostalgia in his own generation’s adolescence (“Walllace Stevens,” 183, 179). Middle age, belatedness, and the late-Romantic Stevensian point of view out of which Koethe writes all consist for Koethe (as they had not for Stevens) of an understanding that the promise of youth, of his teens, will always remain beyond his grasp. “A Parking Lot with Trees” asks, “Where is that person whom I took myself to be? / Why has my life been mostly puzzlement, and hope, and inexperience?” How did he feel, or think, about his future, when he was far younger than he is now?

Koethe no longer feels he has that kind of time—his project now is not to become the person he wants to be but to understand the person he was back then. This project—less Stevensian than it is Wordsworthian—differs from Wordsworth’s in that what Koethe wants to understand is not a childhood innocence nor a connection to nature but a sense of choice, threshold, and intellectual exploration that he associates with student life and even with dormitory settings and pop songs: “I wish the songs that moved me once might come to me again / And help me understand the person that I’ve gradually become” (North, 190–91).

The nostalgia that for Koethe empowers lyric poetry points not only to youth in general but to adolescence in the mid-1960s, when Koethe’s generation attended college. “When There Was Time” begins by telling us what Koethe studied there:

“You” supposed yourself then to be “preparing for a place … Where adolescence was supposed to end”; “Who’d want to go there now?” Koethe muses, deciding, instead, “I want the darkness back” (Sally’s, 51–52). Koethe’s nostalgia exceeds Ashbery’s, as his flatter, clearer language differs from Ashbery’s not only in the directness of its statements but in the ways by which Koethe links that nostalgia to a particular generation and its cultural markers. His consistent focus on his own life course and his attention to the connections between that life course and publicly available cultural history link him not to Ashbery and Stevens but to Larkin and Lowell. In his latest book, Sally’s Hair, Koethe likens himself to the Larkin of “Sad Steps” / “Groping through the dark at 4 am to piss,” “growing old / Without ever growing up” (Sally’s, 43). The concluding poem in that book asks how “That adolescent image of myself dissolved, to be replaced by—/ By what?” (Sally’s, 83) Larkin’s Katharine and the narrators in Kasischke’s novels asked the same question; Koethe’s answer—that “agency itself” vanishes in adulthood—resembles theirs (Sally’s, 83).

Koethe’s poems thus define his own adulthood—much as Levis’s and Komunyakaa’s do—by its distance from the remembered promises of his own and his generation’s youth. Koethe’s long, almost languid, indefinitely extensible sentences measure the distance from past to present self. “Falling Water,” the long title poem from his 1997 volume, imagines

The Beatles album in question is the original cover for Yesterday and Today (1966), which showed the Fab Four as butchers slicing the heads off dolls. Recalled after protests, the album became valuable to collectors, though the first fans who bought it could not have known that—just as the value of this moment in Mission Bay may not have struck Koethe until much later.⁴ Koethe uses rock and roll (both the Beatles’ and the Velvets’) as a signifier of adolescence and as a sign that its naïve glories are no more.

So do many poets of his generation. Rock’s ties to youth are as old as the music itself; Keir Keightley writes that Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock” (1955) “represents the final step in the mainstream recognition of separate, age-graded taste cultures for teens and adults” (“Reconsidering Rock,” 112–13). While a few rockers sought “poetic” grandeur (a story I will not tell here), Baby Boomers who published books of poems after the 1960s used rock to invoke youth, rawness, energy, spontaneity, sex—all the supposedly adolescent qualities they could not claim for poetry itself. They wrote about rock when they wanted to think about the youth they felt they had lost, about its lost innocence or its failed revolutions.

Jim Elledge’s anthology Sweet Nothings (1994), devoted to “Rock and Roll in American Poetry,” compiles such poems. Elledge’s volume focuses on Baby Boomers, for whom, Elledge writes, “the elements of rock and roll incorporated into their poetry … almost always represent … a time of innocence—or an era of innocence turned sour” (xix). Ronald Wallace’s near-sonnet “Sound System,” for example, remembers “necking / to ‘Little Darlin’” and other 1950s hits “as my father from his wheelchair in his study / calls out to keep it down, and Buddy Holly, / The Big Bopper, and Richie Valens leave the ground” (Elledge, Sweet Nothings, 87). To Wallace, rock means youth, innocence, sex, rebellion, hope, and immediacy. Poetry, by contrast, frames those qualities and compares them to a disappointing present; poetry, unlike rock, makes us notice loss—the father’s lost legs, or the loss of Holly, Valens, and the Bopper in their plane crash.⁵ Similarly nostalgic examples occur throughout Elledge’s volume; Nancy Schoenberger, for example, writes that when “Van Morrison sang brown-eyed girl … those songs were always me in my green time” (Elledge, Sweet Nothings, 207).

Reviewing Sweet Nothings. Thomas Swiss complained that “most [of the poems] embed their rock-related references in stories about adolescence” (“Poetry and Pop,” 8). Poems about rock—until quite recently—have turned on such reflections: the reasons lie not only in the history of rock but also in the history of poetry. Rock music brings with it a far stronger claim to signify adolescence and to convey immediate, authentic feeling than any claims that literary poetry can now make. In asking readers to compare poems about rock songs to the songs that these poems describe, poems about rock admit their own failure to find or to keep the inner autonomy that we often hope poems can give—and that we associate with youth.

Remember, here, Thom Gunn’s “Elvis Presley,” published in 1957 and discussed in chapter four; remember that Gunn’s admiring poem never sounds like the singer it praises—in fact, it never tries. Instead Gunn shows virtues (self-control, logic, reflection) that Elvis’s singles seem to lack. Gunn, though, keeps his rock and roll poem impersonal, without reference to his own remembered youth. American Baby Boomers make such references the core of their rock and roll poems, many of which might fit under the not entirely ironized title Dave Smith gives to one poem in his sequence Fate’s Kite: “The Endless Days of Sixties Sunshine” remembers how Smith and his then-girlfriend would “ride through valleys of years, Little Richard” and “Sam Cooke rocking between her half-opened knees” (37)

Smith’s poem—and Wallace’s, Koethe’s and Schoenberger’s—thus sound—when they bring up rock and roll—“sentimental” (or “reflective,” sentimentalisch), in Friedrich Schiller’s special sense. Modern poets, Schiller wrote in 1795, “will either be nature or they will look for lost nature”; the first are naïve and need only “feel” to create, the second, sentimentalisch and self-conscious (On the Naïve, 35, 68). Poets who put rock music into their poems cast rock as “naïve,” natural, authentic, youthful, and their own poetry as “sentimental,” reflective, artificial, grown-up. Baby Boomers write such poems almost whenever they write about rock at all. James Seay’s poem on Chuck Berry and “Johnny B. Goode” relies on the changes Seay brings to Berry’s familiar lyrics:

Such contrasts also dominate David Wojahn’s Mystery Train (1990), a history of rock in thirty-five poems, most of them off-rhymed and highly colloquial sonnets. In sonnet number 6, “Jerry Lee Lewis’ Secret Marriage to Thirteen-Year Old First Cousin Revealed During British Isles Tour, 1959: His Manager Speaks,” the Killer’s songs convey the sublime, youthful energy his own grotesque career cannot preserve. “Go ahead and play piano with your nose,” Wojahn admonishes Lewis, “And tear your shirt off singing ‘High School Confidential,’ / But the Feds’ll take the Cadillac and clothes” (30). Wojahn’s sonnets assume, as Kevin Stein writes, that “speaker and audience” have a “common cultural knowledge” that includes “the Baby Boom’s generational myth” (Private Poets, 141). That myth describes the promise of 1960s youth, casting that generation as uniquely important, its teens as promising, its adulthood as failure, and its poets’ goal as nostalgic or disillusioned reflection on adolescence, that is, on a hope already lost.⁶

About adolescence in contemporary America and the modes it inspires in contemporary American poetry, we need not let the Baby Boom have the last word. Steven Mintz finds that now, even more than in decades past, “we have institutionalized youth as a separate stage of life”; “the young are told to grow up [i.e. leave presexual, family-dominated childhood] fast, but also that they needn’t grow up [i.e. assume adult responsibilities] at all” (Hucks Raft, 347, 381). Writing in the New York Times Magazine, Daniel Zalewski identified “infantilized adults,” “teenagers trapped inside the bodies of grown-ups,” in film and television: “What united all these stories from 2001,” he wrote, “is the idea that adolescent angst often dominates people’s lives well past adolescence. Or at least it does in contemporary America,” where “so many Americans sail into their 30’s without getting married or having kids” (“Infantilized Adults”). Three years later, also in the Times, Christopher Noxon described “kidults” or “rejuveniles,” “from childless fans of kiddie music to the grown-up readers of ‘Harry Potter’”; he quotes the sociologist Frank Furendi calling this “deeply troubling trend” evidence that “adulthood has got nothing attractive about it anymore” (Noxon, “I Don’t Want to Grow Up!”).

The psychologist Jeffrey Arnett argues that developed nations in general, and the United States in particular, now harbor a new stage of life, “from the time [when young people] leave high school to the time they reach full adulthood” (Emerging, vi). Arnett calls this stage “emerging adulthood,” though its subjective and emotional components sound very much like adolescence as older psychologists and social critics defined it. Emerging adulthood is “a highly self-reflective time of life,” when emerging adults “struggle with uncertainty even as they revel in being freer than they ever were in childhood or ever will be once they take on the full weight of adult responsibilities” (viii, 3). Arnett sounds at times just like Friedenberg and just like Erikson: emerging adulthood “is the age of identity explorations,” of “instability,” “the most self-focused age of life,” “the age of feeling in-between,” and “the age of possibilities” (8).

Arnett’s subjects “associate becoming an adult with stagnation”; “in their late teens and early twenties, marriage, home, and children are seen … as perils to be avoided” (218, 6). “In some respects,” says one interviewee, “I feel like an adult, and in some respects I kind of hope I never become an adult” (219). “Emerging adults like these,” Arnett adds, “idealize childhood”; they even appear to idealize high school (220).⁷ Arnett’s subjects rarely call themselves adolescents (14). And yet from the perspectives we have seen in this book—in which both poets and other sorts of writers define adolescence by its peer culture, shared tastes, instability, in-betweenness, self-exploration, and self-consciousness—this cohort represents (what less systematic social critics described or feared) the broader-than-ever, widely sanctioned, and even celebrated persistence of adolescence through the lives of people much older than high school age—old enough to have published books of verse.

The phase of life after presexual childhood and before adult responsibility no longer carries the promise of the 1960s that an emerging youth culture could transform a nation or repair its flaws. Poets born in the 1960s or 1970s likely associate such a promise not with their own youth but with that of their parents. On the other hand, that phase of life lasts longer than ever; some writers suggest that it never ends. And these changes in adolescence as idea and as lived experience inform the most recent poets’ attempts to depict it. First and second books by recent poets can find exhilarated or puzzled antinarrative forms, neither pastoral nor revolutionary but saturated with argot, devoted to uncertainty, less given to closure than those before. They, too, see adolescence as preferable to a hollow adulthood, but they remain identified with adolescence, which they see first and last as an in-group, a set of subcultural signifiers. They write about adolescence or something like it—its volatility, antipathy to authority, distinctive argot, and visibly dissident tastes—as it were from within; they are less often nostalgic or dejected than they are exhilarated and secretive.

Pamela Lu’s Pamela: A Novel (1998)—a novella-length text that may be categorized as fiction, an essay, or simply “poet’s prose”—makes this attitude unmistakable: the undecidabilities of contemporary poststructuralist theories represent, for the narrator and her friends (known only by initials), the inconclusiveness of postcollegiate life. Lu writes that

Every generation preoccupied itself with the struggle to produce something new—a defining moment, action or style that would mark it as unique and constitute an answer to the question of “Who are you?” or more often “Who were you?” Now we too were faced with the very same question and wondering if we were destined to be remembered for our refusal to answer the question.

My mother had gone to school to believe more and more with each passing year until finally she believed in all that was right and fitting to believe in and became more or less a convinced, educated person. I on the other hand had gone to school with the objective of doubting everything so that in the end I could not bring myself to believe in anything and was unable to graduate. My mother had graduated and become a graduate student, while I remained an undergraduate and undergraduated myself in every mode of thinking even after I had attained my degree.

Lu may be remembering John Ashbery, with whose lines on the subject my book began: “None of us ever graduates from college / And perhaps thinking not to grow up / Is the right kind of maturity for us” (88). The undecidabilities and uncertainties that poets of Lu’s generation found in Ashbery (among others) now fit the undecidabilities of the life course, undecidabilities whose shareable nature makes Lu’s art possible. “For latecomers like R and me, it seemed as though the examination had been postponed indefinitely, and the question of our admission to the living suspended like aircraft over the interminable stretch of ocean between continents” (96). Lu’s poem or novel therefore ends as her trans-Pacific flight crosses the International Date Line; the poet is stuck between times and suspended in midair.

Other poets identify with decidedly nonacademic, and racier, youth. Mark Bibbins populates Sky Lounge (2004) with club kids, runaways, would-be rock stars, and groupies’ slang. “Arrival with Dark Circles and Premonition” depicts the poet’s alter ego (the poet as virile youth, Stevens might say) as a drugged-out runaway, a neo-Rimbaud whom the adult world treats as a spectacle:

Brenda Shaughnessy’s “Arachnolescence” (from Interior with Sudden Joy, 1999) embraces the ambiguities of teen years and teen personae in an indefinitely extensible present tense. Shaughnessy’s title, like her fast-talking persona, is neither wholly one thing nor the other, and it attracts attention for being in between. Shaughnessy’s rapid, percussive lines insist that the bodily changes she describes (menarche, apparently, among them: “I’ve bullied you / into a few cramps myself”) are sources of individuality, attention, usable creative power:

Adult women are “florid and maternal”; Shaughnessy’s theatrical spider girl is risky, sexy, liberating instead: “Give me liberty / or give me everything you’ve ever loved” (50). The Oxford English Dictionary defines “to spifflicate” as “to deal with in such a way as to confound or overcome completely; to treat or handle roughly or severely; to crush, destroy.” Shaughnessy’s apparently indestructible, yet “spifflicated” gang may derive their adjective instead from “spiffy” (stylish), or from smoking spliffs (marijuana), which would make them hungry indeed (“gourmands”).

Over and over the talented or promising new poets of recent years organize their effects and their tones around some sort of adolescent persona, some avowedly immature voice, whose unpredictable language gives the poems their characteristic, contemporary, effects. Jane Yeh in Marabou (2005) portrays herself among “Teen Spies”: “I’m the smallest. Elijah is our control. / Our mission? That’s undercover for now … I am / past seventeen and have never been kissed” (23). Matt Hart in Who’s Who Vivid (2006), though he tells us that he is “thirty years old,” associates his yearnings with anyone’s teens: “I don’t know whether I’m talking / or if I’m nineteen. I do know I need a haircut. / And the world opens its lips and spits … a fountain of youthful exuberance” (55, 39).

Such effects can dominate a volume. Shanna Compton’s first book, Downspooky (2005) opens by announcing that “we”—the audience the poet imagines and also the group of people she represents—have no adult identity worth the name: “We refer intermittently to teenagers, / mercurial freshmen. We who lead / do not need audible traffic signals” (1). Compton wants to establish her identity as that of a generation and her generation as especially unfixed, uninterested in, or else unable to achieve stability of voice and point of view. In “Thank Y’All for Appreciating My Animals,” “Her teens were actually twenties; / they were matter-of-factly male”; “The teens shimmy / out of their shirts if you let them” (15). Life stories, continuous causal narratives in which people grow or learn, are always for Compton unreliable and unsatisfying quotations from books she did not write: “He’d determined over the last few weeks that We should have married before the baby was born had been lifted from a book with a corner turned down on a page beginning with the word disappointment” (13). Compton’s poems are less stories than they are puzzles and teases; one entitled “Clues Down” compares itself to a crossword.

We have seen something like this point of view—in which teen culture represents flux and uncertainty and the poem itself is a kind of puzzle—in Tranter and Muldoon; Compton and her contemporaries share that outlook but embed sub-cultural signals more deeply in their poems, often forsaking older structures of reference and torquing or rejecting prose syntax in order to do so. The code of Compton’s poems is frankly teenage and sub-cultural (as well as Southern): its loci are drive-ins, garages, vague hangouts, malls, sidewalks, even sports fields. Compton even makes a mock-nostalgic poem out of school mascots:

Compton calls the poem “Those Days of Pomp and Vigor”; after the first stanza (quoted above) comes another about high school football games and another about “totem animals” and a yearbook’s senior picture. Her point is not only that poetry is its own subculture, with its own idiom, much like “jock” or “skater” subcultures in schools, but also that these terms call into being an energetic community more worthwhile than any substitutes from a recognizable adulthood—though “more worthwhile” may be faint praise, like “Grand indeed.”

Rock and roll enters this new and antinostalgic poetry of adolescence in (among other books) Ange Mlinko’s Matinées (1999), which imagines the adventures and misgivings of educated young people in Boston and Providence. Where Baby Boom rock and roll poems usually invoke chart hits to describe a lost youth, Mlinko names (and models some poems around) obscure, sometimes local, rock songs and bands, implying that her own poetics and her favorite rock songs occupy common ground. Her poem “‘No one shone there’” recalls trips through New England:

Reviewing Jennifer Moxley’s first book, Imagination Verses (1996), Mlinko found “a pride of identity, parallel to the indie rock world’s, that thrives on belonging to and chafing against one’s comrades” (“Fighting Words”). She has also written about her own use of rock music: “The imbrication of Matinees with Boston, indie rock, etc. is almost too overwhelming for me to summarize.… But most importantly, I was at the same time involved in an alternative poetry scene in Boston and Providence that seemed a direct parallel to indie rock,” in which “DIY” (do-it-yourself) publications such as “photocopied zines” represent “a communal identity outside the ‘mainstream’” (private communication).⁹ Mlinko can think of rock in this fluidly personal way because she can think about youth in that way too, as a realm of conspiratorial, virtuous circles where “the whole group is in lyrical motion,” rather than as a self-enclosed idyll or a utopian promise she must leave behind (Matinées, 41). “Three Representations of Peacetime” describes a social set (by name: Matt, Courtney, Dan, Naoko), to which the poet belongs: “They are striving to be Fellini’s Juliet, seeing visions each time they close their eyes, / build a treasure of images, teenagers putting on English accents for strangers / pretending to have just met. The feeling the universe is conspiring to charm them” (41). That “charm” belongs to a repertory of attitudes which the poems both associate with youth, and try to produce in us.

Thomas Sayers Ellis’s debut collection, The Maverick Room (2005), goes even further than Mlinko and Compton in linking its own aesthetic to a youth subculture and to a musical subgenre, which the poet insists that he has not outgrown. Though Ellis’s book refers to many sorts of music, from George Clinton and Bootsy Collins of P-Funk to the “Baptist Beat” of gospel, a plurality of its musical references (starting with the title) point to go-go, a 1980s and 1990s style combining elements of funk and rap, played almost exclusively in Ellis’s hometown of Washington, D.C. The music’s relative obscurity and its association with one locale make it more like poetry, and more like adolescence as Ellis envisions it, than the better-known African American musical subgenres that many of Ellis’s peers invoke instead.¹⁰

Go-go events and the kids who frequent them have their own, D.C.-specific code, which the poems incorporate just as they try to mimic go-go’s polyrhythms: “Sugar Bear is the Abominable Snowman of Go-Go, / Laying stone-cold sheets of bottom / Over forgotten junk farms and Indian deathbeds” (53) “Bottom” here means both the bass line in a song and the low-lying ground on which much of Washington rests. “Take Me Out to the Go-Go” depicts another youthful crew and their temporary superstar:

If Ellis’s poems do not seem especially haunted by the chance of outgrowing the subculture from which they speak, that may be because they are haunted by far worse losses. During the peak years of go-go, D.C. led the nation in murders per capita. Some of the freewheeling kids in Ellis’s poetry are now incarcerated men, as his “Barracuda” makes clear, comparing the “tank” (pool) of a former high school swimmer to the “tank” (prison) that confines him now (Maverick, 28). Ellis’s own remembered attempts to play music amount only to “Practice” in “A dank, dark basement”:

This band, like their equipment, seems incomplete, unready, and yet it coalesces into a temporary apotheosis: “timbales and rototoms, side-by-side, were / Like a finish of chrome,” “a horn’s valved prose / Asked for, asked for, asked for” (100). As so often in The Maverick Room, Ellis’ in-groups, bands, and audiences—“My peeps. / My poetics. / My feet,” he punningly calls them—can find their groove, get the life and the language they want, but may not be able to keep it (119).

Most comprehensive, and at times most baffling, among the contemporary poets who forge a new style from characteristics of adolescence—from encodedness, secretiveness, emotional volatility, extreme energies, in-group signals, and above all incompletion—is Liz Waldner, whose readers may feel as if they were eavesdropping or intercepting lines from cryptic diaries. Her works can sound at once “experimental,” intellectually resistant to prose sense, and enthusiastically naïve. The range of reference in Waldner’s first volume, Homing Devices (1997), takes in the New Wave music of her youth along with the modern and ancient poets she admires; Waldner calls her punctuation-studded, ellipsis-dotted prose-poems

attempts to speak the language of loss and be/long/ing.… (and as it is in Sappho (whose poems got palimpsested [hello HD, everybody loves you now] got holes being used for wrapping up vases): I “The moon has set and the Pleiades.… See also The Talking Heads’ “Fear of Music” for Elvis and Mimphis (as it is sayed in the South) and other hopes of post-industrial, post-toasties home and roam and you are so far away, and all I have are letters.

Attempts to grasp a renewable energy—one inseparable from the open secret of lesbian desire—originate in the pacts of Waldner’s teens: “What am / I doing here where did I go where should I be? We / were all, perhaps, nineteen” (Homing, 20). Ancient Greek texts (especially Sappho’s) appear in Homing Devices as parallels to the emotion-laden discoveries of adolescence, which return to adults (as Greek texts do to modern readers) in powerful, mysterious, frustrating fragments.

To say that Waldner grounds her poetry in the unstable codes of adolescence is not to say that she found her teen years delightful. Her prose poem “The Franklin’s Tale” proves otherwise, at least if we take its sentences as memoir:

When I was fifteen I could have said with Mr. Berryman: It’s not a good position I’m in. I melted drugs in spoons and shot them into my veins by the railroad tracks when the train came by with a roar. The captain of the football team called me a commie yankee nigger-lover in front of everybody when he and his friends wouldn’t let me swim in the pool.

“The Franklin’s Tale” names, in its title, Chaucer’s story of faithful love, but its emotional (and erotic) burden updates Sappho instead. The poet remembers “voices at night. the sky. full of ‘triangles and the names of girls’. instauration. she digs, shovel like a hat, like a snout pushes her head between legs and comes out. * They read like love. … She remembers how it is to be with me. / She remembers how it is to be. And wants. To be” (Homing, 45). Waldner’s fear that her adolescent promise has abandoned her along with this early lover comes hand in hand with a fear that she has abandoned her distinctive region (in this case, Mississippi) for failed aspirations to metropolitan adulthood: “All these 20 years, I have lived out of that morning after, driving on the road through the gravel pit as if I were the field every disturbance was a blessing in, tuned, retu(r)ned to you” (Homing, 46).

How does Waldner’s poetry, grounded as it is in memories of her own teens, differ from (say) Levis’s lyric nostalgia or Bunting’s look back at lost love? All these poets valorize (and find a basis for lyric in) adolescence as they understand it, but those understandings are as different as the forms the poets find. Waldner’s own poems imitate the codes, the manner as well as the matter, of the covertly or secretly shared speech that she associates with that time, and Waldner refuses to adopt any point of view associated with maturity, distance, stability, age. She can sound nostalgic, in isolated passages, but more often she rails against nostalgia in the name of a vivid presence, a state of mind in which everything seems possible at once: “What’s the point of Long Long Long and yearn and / Name That Tomb?” “Let them stay, these days. or make going go away” (Dark, 49, 11).

Many of the stylistic adaptations to modern adolescence that we have seen throughout this book involve diction—words, phrases, references, and common and proper nouns that suggest in-groups, new subcultures, teen tastes. Waldner uses such words (she even misspells them). Her most remarkable adaptations, though, involve a notionally adolescent syntax, in which incompleteness and shared secrets show up as stuttering, incomplete, or idiosyncratically assembled sentences. What Hejinian named “the rejection of closure” in contemporary style becomes for Waldner a way to reject the certainties, authoritative tones, even sexual behavior (monogamous, heterosexual, penetrative) she identifies with adulthood. This uncontrolledness permits, for Waldner, a combination (for her they are interdependent) of semantic and sexual abandon: “Dance a bee dance // in mind how good I smell”; “I would like to do it with you so the look of you is like the breeze” (Dark, 71, 77) A confident poem called “Ho, the Isle of Lesbos” even incorporates the distractable shorthand of instant messaging among its “secret signs”: “A fish is / a secret sign for a secret meeting: / dear sexy thing, meet me @ the catacombs / with goldfish cracker-snacks” (Dark, 24).¹²

Adult identities presuppose consistent conclusions, a life course as a story that can be told. Waldner’s “Shrimpy Girl Talk” instead offers “the feel of Now (and now and now and now),” condensing into her verse and prose poems the upheavals, excesses, deprivations, and sexual adventures of her (real or reimagined) youth: “I am not allowed to sing has come to out I mean our house to say I mean stay, or am I?” (Dark, 33, Homing, 65) “So she set herself to win Omnity / From Nullity in her sublunary estate-and-sleeping-bag” (Self, 37). Declaring Waldner both perpetually adaptable and adaptably present, her poem “A Genitive Case (Desiderus)” alludes both to a youth subcultures style of dress (hip-hop, perhaps—or a butch look favored by certain young lesbians) and to a now-discredited biological theory by which organisms can pass on their acquired characteristics, as if nothing inherited—nothing associated with adulthood, procreation, the succession of generations—was therefore fixed:

We can see Waldner’s writings as continuing not only the project described in this chapter, writing contemporary adolescence from within it, but also as continuing the feminist projects we saw in chapter 4, and the (queer) projects we saw in chapter 2. Waldner’s poetry offers forms at once fluid and insistent, tropes for generation or creativity that is not procreation, and kinds of power marked as other than adult. Some of her flirtatious disguises emphasize at once extremes of excitement, contemporary trappings of youth, and a notion of gender as changeable performance: “O O O, waling around in my flippy new sundress I’m in drag.… Hello I’m in disguise as a girl, I have on a bra, a thing not donned since junior high and you don’t know it’s weird, you I don’t know think it’s me!” (Dark, 6) Representations of immaturity, of adolescent and hence unfixed yearnings and bodies, speak—for Waldner and for others of her generation—to the contradictions in earlier attempts to develop a feminist poetics from notionally stable, securely gendered, bodies and selves. Writing in How(ever), a self-proclaimed journal of experimental feminist poetics, Kerry Edwards speaks of her “immense difficulties in—and desire to—create and live within a (feminist) politic that would be adequate to … instability,” “a desire to speak from … a place whose borders haven’t been tested,” “to create a politics that will continually move toward the unfamiliar, uncomfortable, not-yet-understood” (“Listening”). That journal’s successor, How2 would later publish Waldner’s own work.

Waldner’s most recent book, Saving the Appearances (2005), returns explicitly to her teenage experience, implying that in some sense it is not over. Everything that happened to Waldner in her teens in Mississippi, good or bad, comic or painful, seems in her poems to be happening to her still. “It may have been hope that drove me to pinch my own neck one weekend so that in the 8th grade Mississippi Monday someone would tease me about making out”; the fake neck marks here in “Homing In” stand for poems and for the “appearances” that provide the volume with its title (Saving, 72). Teen shames and aspirations remain alive indefinitely in Waldner’s faux-naif, insistent “Winter Solstice”:

“Give you a shape or a face” means both “yield an image for your contemplation” and “reflect a self previously unknown or unformed.” Like Lu, Waldner uses an airplane journey to suggest the in-between, adolescent state, though she also uses its aerial view to suggest memory. Like Lu’s prose work, Waldner’s lyric poem ends in midair.

For all these poets, the association of poetry itself with adolescent subcultures (musical and otherwise) becomes both a way of depicting energetic flux and a response to all the cultural changes (chronicled by Spacks, Arnett, and others) that have made youth seem more valuable, maturity less so. That association also becomes a way of responding to poetry’s own apparent loss of social power and status in the larger, “adult” world. Like the Secret Stars and like Sugar Bear—and unlike the Rolling Stones—young poets such as Ellis and Waldner acknowledge a necessarily limited audience.¹³ Their acknowledgments reflect both the postponement of—or resistance to—adulthood that seems to characterize this generation’s life course, and the “rejection of closure” that much of this generation’s poetry adopts as a formal goal.¹⁴

If social and cultural history and bits of the history of popular music can tell us where some young poets get their verbal resources, can these poets’ attitudes and inventions, in turn, tell us anything about the life course? In America now, writes the social theorist Liah Greenfeld, “identity can no longer be a reflection of … social position, which one simply derives from the environment”; instead “it … has to be constructed … by the individual” (“When the Sky,” 331). As a result, she argues, adults now experience and even seek out the flux and dislocation ascribed to adolescence. “In today’s America, and in particular among the more materially comfortable strata, one, for the most part, does not know who one is.… What if one has chosen wrongly? What if being a mother or a college professor is not the real me? What if I am, as a matter of fact, an alpinist and a ‘child-free’ lesbian?” (331) Greenfeld writes that such “characteristic American self-searching is more common among the young … but it occurs often enough among other age groups to consider it a general problem” (332). “The ‘life script’—our expectations of what we will do, and do next, and next after that in life—has been greatly scrambled,” agrees the education researcher Nancy Lesko; “As a result, the sense of what youth or adulthood is comes into question” (quoted in Levine, Harmful to Minors, 87).

It is only a slight exaggeration to say that for a social thinker like Greenfeld, “adulthood” (maturity, authority, stability of identity, in her sense and in Erikson’s) is no longer a possibility; adults are not what we imagine ourselves to be. In contemporary America, the social researcher Judith Levine concludes, “people do not grow up at sixteen, eighteen, or twenty-one, if they ever do” (Harmful to Minors, 88).¹⁵ One does not have to agree with all such claims in order to see how some poets might find them sympathetic, nor to see how those poets might take not only subjects but also perspectives from the ways in which we imagine youth. From adults, we expect impossible certainties. From the young, we expect energy and novelty, but we do not expect “right choices,” authoritative claims, or even stable beliefs. As much as they revel in its symbols, adolescence is no longer, for these newest poets, primarily a symbol of potential, of the chance that we might become something better than we are. Nor is it a pastoral, self-enclosed world; it is, simply, the state that we are in. Yet it might not be quite right to say that these poets never imagine an adulthood. Perhaps, instead, maturity, practicality, psychological fixity in one household and in one point of view, seems to them all too easy to imagine; adulthood is the state in and for which poetry—that now-subcultural, long-impractical, supposedly outmoded, style-conscious preoccupation—seems to have no value any more, so that the “poetry of a grown man” (in James Wright’s famous phrase) would simply be no poetry at all (Above the River, 212).

I have been examining American—and British and Irish and Australian—poetry as it reacts to and takes its form from a social fact that is also a theme: the changing experiences and meanings of adolescence. Angus Fletcher warns that “thematic approaches to poetic effect are always bound to mislead, or else lead us away from the poetics of the poem in question” (New Theory, 154). Mindful of such warnings, I have tried to show how this theme finds its way into form, for the individual poets I have discussed and for the wider patterns those poets make. One such pattern involves changing perspectives; poets move from writing about youth in others, to writing about their own youth as they remember it, to writing about youth subcultures that their styles assert that they have not outgrown. A complementary pattern—much like the one Spacks discovered in modern novels—involves a progressive disidentification with adulthood, an ever “lessening faith in the possibilities of adult life” (Adolescent Idea, 226). A third pattern sets adolescence as pastoral (self-enclosed, notionally innocent, replicated in each generation) against adolescence as revolution (brand-new, able to change the adult world). Poets up through the 1960s pursue one or the other, if not both; poets afterward may modify or reject both in favor of adolescence as uncertainty.

Besides the conflict between pastoral and revolution, we have seen in these poems about adolescence a conflict between completion and incompletion, between closure and resistance to closure, in the forms of poems as in the adolescent life course. Barbara Herrnstein Smith has noted that poets can achieve strong closure by ending on words or topics that “signify termination or stability” (Poetic Closure, 172). One such topic is death, but another might be adulthood. Poets ambivalent about adulthood may be ambivalent about closure as well. Fletcher describes the tension in all poetry between the “play of perpetual metamorphosis” and the “odd inevitability in well-formed art” (New Theory, 177). Adolescence as a subject for modern poetry has allowed us to see that tension at work. Perpetual metamorphosis, aspirational or unending adolescence as a model for the modern, in poets from Williams forward, has accompanied resistance to closure, to anything obviously complete or well formed. In Marianne Moore, strong but unconventional closure, the closure of logical arguments and syllabic stanzas, suggests the unusual and valuable limits of the studious environments she cherished. In early Auden the closures are ironized, as adolescence must end, but nothing useful can replace it; Larkin’s closures were sign-offs, resignations, that distanced him from the meanings he gave to the young. McGinley’s poems of reassurance featured strong, uncomplicated closure; so did Gunn’s poems of strong subcultures and strong men, in command of the attitudes (and the bodies) their subcultures produced.

As the meanings of adolescence have changed, so have the uses of closure among thoughtful poets who depicted it. Oppen’s poems of optimistic uncertainty about the young (so promising, so unlike him) were poems of exceedingly tentative closure. In Brooks’ late-1960s poems, violent hyperclosure and sharp and irregular (often rhymed) lines opened a new world as they shut off the old. Lowell’s hyperclosure—in which every line could be the last—denied the progress his contemporaries associated with the young. Kasischke, Moss, and Graham invent disconcerting styles that move sideways rather than forward, backward rather than onward as they explore girls’ resistance to the teleologies of heterosexual womanhood—a resistance Waldner’s tactics celebrate. Ironic or merely formal closure returned in Muldoon and in Tranter, for whom few young people succeed in becoming anything: nostalgic, strong closure returned in Komunyakaa and in Levis, to whom adolescence usually meant the past. Resistance to closure and to narrative shape animates the recent writers with whom this study concludes; they favor, instead, an allusive language of in-groups, an aesthetic of frequent interruption, and a sense of immediate secrets shared.

Adolescence means selfhood and sociability; energy and volatility; peer culture, subculture, and distance from culture; the development of an inner core of being; and the exploration of becoming. It has meant all these things at once, and with vastly increased visibility, since the turn of the twentieth century. If, as Fletcher argues, contemporary poems imagine especially fluid environments, where “forms are troped into an ontological game of their becoming,” then adolescence—a state of being which also connotes becoming—will remain one way to represent what poems can do (New Theory, 185). Ideas of the life course, of lyric poems as versions of the self, and of adolescence as the phase of life in which the self is formed help explain why so many modern poets have made adolescence a figure for poetry as such. The same ideas suggest that adolescence—whatever else it comes to mean—will remain a compelling figure for the twenty-first century poem.