John Lowney
A truth so often stated that it seems self‐evident is that the beginning of “contemporary” or “postmodern” American poetry can be identified with the war of two opposing anthologies, The New Poets of England and America (1957) and The New American Poetry (1960). The New Poets anthology, edited by Donald Hall, Robert Pack, and Louis Simpson, featured poets born between 1917 and 1935, many of whom were already known for their expertise in formal traditions favored by the New Criticism. The anthology is introduced by a not‐so‐new poet of England and America, Robert Frost. In his introduction, “Maturity No Object,” Frost writes that “a thousand, two thousand, colleges, town and gown together in the little town they make, give us the best audience for poetry in all this world” (Frost 1957: 12). He underscores as well that “the poet and scholar have so much in common and live together so naturally that it is easy to make too much of a mystery where they part company” (10). While Frost could hardly anticipate the proliferation of creative writing programs in US universities by the twenty‐first century – “a thousand, two thousand”? – he affirms the place of poetry in academia. His introduction is conspicuous, though, as the only prose statement about poetry or poetics in this collection of predominantly lyric poems.
The New American Poetry appears to answer Frost’s claims directly, as editor Donald M. Allen asserts that his anthology is defined by “one common characteristic: a total rejection of all of those qualities typical of academic verse” (Allen 1960: xi). Allen’s anthology also does not include a single poet represented in The New Poets of England and America. Introducing the open form poetics of Black Mountain, San Francisco, New York, and Beat poets, Allen identifies the “New American poets” as “our avant‐garde, the true continuers of the modern movement in American poetry. Through their work many are closely allied to modern jazz and abstract expressionist painting, today recognized throughout the world to be America’s greatest achievements in contemporary culture” (Allen 1960: xi). Allen’s articulation of a “New American” avant‐garde is significant for many reasons. He was introducing mostly younger poets to a wider audience than that of the little magazines and small presses that originally published their poetry. He also was identifying them not solely as individuals, but by their literary communities or networks. He was furthermore accentuating the relationship of innovative poetry to music and the visual arts. At the same time, he was constructing a history of modernism that had been obscured by the New Criticism, specifically the modernism of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams. Finally, in the spirit of their modernist legacy, Allen includes excerpts from longer poems and a substantial section of “statements on poetics” by the “New American Poets.”
Given the bold agenda of The New American Poetry, it is not surprising that it has lasted so long as a landmark of literary history. It has been the prototype for subsequent twentieth‐century avant‐garde collections, from the Language writing of In the American Tree: Language, Poetry, Realism (1986) to the more eclectic experimentalism of An Anthology of New (American) Poets (1998). And because Allen positioned Charles Olson as the preeminent poet and theorist of The New American Poetry, contemporary American poetry anthologies routinely begin with his writing, even though he was born almost a decade before the oldest “New Poets” and most of the “New American poets.”1 Subsequent revisions and reprints of The New American Poetry, from The Postmoderns: The New American Poetry Revised (1982) to the reprint of the first edition by the University of California Press in 1999, have furthermore continued to generate debate about its historical significance.2
Beginning with the so‐called anthology wars of mid‐twentieth‐century poetry, this essay examines selected poets whose careers have been crucial for historicizing contemporary American poetry. These poets include some of the key figures featured in The New American Poetry, beginning with Olson, and continuing with New York School poet Frank O’Hara, figures whose dramatic impact on contemporary poetry emerges at least partially from their literary engagement with the visual arts. Other poets whom I discuss, such as Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Gwendolyn Brooks, and Adrienne Rich, exemplify the literary transformations effected by the new social movements of the 1960s and afterwards. Baraka was the only African American poet represented in The New American Poetry (and the most knowledgeable about modern jazz), while Rich was one of the few women included in The New Poets of England and America. Brooks was also known for her formal expertise before her commitment to the Black Arts Movement. Their political conversions exemplify the experiences of comparable poets who sought a new purpose and new audience for their poetry. I also consider influential poets who, because of their movement among formal and free‐verse practices, defy aesthetic categorization, most notably Elizabeth Bishop and John Ashbery. Finally, I conclude by discussing the renewed opposition of avant‐garde and “mainstream” poetries in the 1970s and afterwards, exemplified by Language poetry and specifically Lyn Hejinian. In exploring the development of mid‐ and later twentieth‐century American poetry through the examples of figures whose impact is pronounced both in subsequent poetry and scholarship, I stress several features of Allen’s rationale for The New American Poetry: the importance of poetry communities or networks, the interaction of poetry with other art forms and media, and the effect of contemporary poetries on our understanding of modernism.
Charles Olson was a formative figure for the New American poetry largely because of his inspirational presence as a faculty member and rector at Black Mountain College, from 1948 until 1956. Black Mountain College featured an innovative interdisciplinary liberal arts curriculum and an internationally renowned faculty in the visual arts and performing arts, including, during Olson’s residency, painters Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, and Ben Shawn, composers John Cage and Stefan Wolpe, and the choreographer Merce Cunningham. Among the poets who taught with Olson at Black Mountain were Robert Creeley and Robert Duncan, and students included Edward Dorn, John Wieners, and Jonathan Williams. Olson is considered the primary theorist of the “New American poetry” largely because of his essay “Projective Verse,” which was published initially in 1950 in Poetry New York and was subsequently excerpted in Williams’s Autobiography (1951). Olson’s articulation of “projective” verse is a direct response to the formalist verse that was prevalent in the 1940s. “Projective Verse” adapts Robert Creeley’s claim that “FORM IS NEVER MORE THAN AN EXTENSION OF CONTENT” to argue for a processive, kinetic open form poetics, or “FIELD COMPOSITION” (Olson 1966: 16). The projectivist composition of poetry, Olson furthermore asserts, is based on breath rather than the measures of the “‘closed’ verse […] which print bred” (Olson 1966: 15). Olson’s emphasis on breath as the fundamental basis for open form composition is evident throughout The New American Poetry, in statements such as Allen Ginsberg’s “Notes for Howl and Other Poems” and Jones/Baraka’s “‘How You Sound??’” as well as in the poetry identified with Black Mountain. Olson’s identification of composition by field with Pound’s Cantos and Williams’s Paterson was also important for rethinking the modernist long poem. And while Olson’s most extensive example of composition by field, his epic The Maximus Poems (1953/1984), resembles The Cantos and Paterson with its investigative movement through historical and mythological texts and its rootedness in a specific place (Gloucester, Massachusetts), his specific intellectual as well as poetic concerns have affected poets as different as Dorn, A.R. Ammons, and Susan Howe. Dorn’s polyglot long poem Slinger (1968) extends the discursive, spatial, and historical scope of Olson’s social critique to the American West, while Ammons’s open form poetics register Olson’s ecological consciousness of American space, most extensively in his long poem Garbage (1993). Finally, Howe adapts Olson’s experimental typographical rendering of space and consciousness in her feminist archival inquiry into the voices and texts suppressed by patriarchy, for example, in Singularities (1990).
The “New American poet” whose influence on subsequent American poetry is perhaps most recognizable is a poet whose “manifesto” mocks the pretense of statements such as “Projective Verse.” This poet, Frank O’Hara, is perhaps also the least apparently “American” of the “New American poets,” with his frequent intertextual allusions to European – and especially French – modernist poetry, painting, and music. O’Hara wrote in “Personism: A Manifesto” that “after all, only Whitman and Crane and Williams, of the American poets, are better than the movies” (O’Hara 1995: 498). This manifesto is as resolutely casual in its tone as it is ironically audacious in its claims for “Personism,” which O’Hara “founded […] after lunch with LeRoi Jones on August 27, 1959” (O’Hara 1995: 499).3 “Personism,” O’Hara writes, is “so totally opposed to this kind of abstract removal [of the personal] that it is verging on a true abstraction for the first time, really, in the history of poetry” (O’Hara 1995: 498). New York School poets such as John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler, and O’Hara shared interests in furthering the methods of earlier French post‐Symbolist writing and post‐World War II experimentation in the visual arts, especially abstract expressionism, into variously experimental modes of poetry. Adapting the surrealist and cubist poetics of Parisian poets such as Pierre Reverdy and Guillaume Apollinaire, O’Hara’s poetry is dynamically urban in its openness to surprise, to shifting sights and sounds, to shifting moods, and to chance encounters. While his most memorable poems are the seemingly casual “lunch poems” that record the urban sensations and thoughts of his lunch break, the dramatic intensity of poems such as “A Step Away from Them,” “Personal Poem,” and “The Day Lady Died” is enhanced by the otherwise artificial temporal constraints of the lunch break.
O’Hara’s most characteristic mode of blurring the distinction between abstraction and representation is his frequent use of proper names, including names of friends, artists, musicians, movie stars, and places, as well as titles of books, paintings, movies, operas, and ballets. In leveling the famous with the familiar, O’Hara not only parodies the authoritative use of literary and mythological names in modernist poetry, he also draws his readers into the everyday life of his social world, a world in which names of friends are as important as the names of celebrities. He also parodies his own professional experience, as a curator at the Museum of Modern Art and an editor for Art News, in which the distinction between the obscure and the famous was itself unpredictable. With the multitude of proper names in his poetry, the subjective presence of the poems is more often a site of associations – of the friends, places, and objects named in the poem – rather than a coherent presence that stands apart to comment on the world. His poetry is as much about community as it is about the individual in the city, but the sense of community evoked in his writing is itself improvisational. O’Hara’s predominantly gay community of literary, visual, and performing artists is a community in process, a process of invention that is both urgent and ironic in relation to mainstream American values in the 1950s and early 1960s. Given the adaptability and social implications of this poetry, it is not surprising that O’Hara has inspired subsequent generations of the New York School. Even though he died tragically at the age of 40 in 1966, his precedent is vitally evident in poetry by Ted Berrigan, Bernadette Mayer, Alice Notley, and Ron Padgett, among many others, a generation later.
Prior to the publication of Allen’s anthology, the New American poetry was disseminated primarily through little magazines such as Origin, Black Mountain Review, and Yūgen. As Alan Golding has written (1995: 114–143), these little magazines were crucial for developing alternative literary communities: they not only provided publishing opportunities for poets, they also fostered a collective sense of purpose. Origin, edited by Cid Corman, featured extensive selections of Olson’s poetry and prose in its first series (1951–1957), while also introducing poets whose experimentation with vernacular poetics and composition by field extended Olson’s precedent. In publishing poetry by writers such as Olson, Creeley, Duncan, Paul Blackburn, Larry Eigner, and Denise Levertov, Origin and Black Mountain Review (1954–1957), edited by Creeley, also revised the New Critical canon of high modernism, emphasizing the imagist and objectivist poetics of Pound and Williams. The little magazine most closely identified with the New York School in the early 1960s, Locus Solus, would play a similar role in affiliating the New York poets with the earlier Parisian avant‐garde, invoked by the title of Raymond Roussel’s 1914 novel, Locus Solus. The journal that was most important for defining the new poetries, however, was Yūgen, edited by Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Hettie Cohen. Yūgen and its successor, Floating Bear, which Baraka co‐edited with Diane Di Prima, not only published all of the groups represented in The New American Poetry, they also published what would become known as “the New Black Poetry” (Major 1969).
Baraka, as an editor as well as a poet, was an exceptionally important figure before he became identified with his leadership in the Black Arts Movement in the later 1960s. As editor of Yūgen and Floating Bear, Baraka fostered an interracial poetic avant‐garde, informed by the latest developments in jazz and the visual arts as well as international poetry. These journals published Black Mountain, San Francisco, New York School, and Beat poets alongside poetry by young African American poets such as Tom Postell, A.B. Spellman, Steve Jonas, and Baraka. Their role, as Aldon Nielsen has written (1994: 214–251), was comparable to the renowned East Village jazz club The Five Spot for promoting experimental arts and for developing communities of artists. The poetry in Yūgen and Floating Bear was also noticeably international, with frequent translations of European poetry, and surrealist poetry, invoking Federico García Lorca as much as Pound and Williams. Baraka’s early poetry, collected in Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note (1961) and The Dead Lecturer (1964), likewise resonated with the dramatic blend of projectivism and surrealism represented in Yūgen and Floating Bear. Baraka was a crucial liaison between the avant‐garde jazz and poetry communities of lower Manhattan in the early 1960s. He played a similarly integral role in his presence in both the black Umbra and mostly white Beat and New York School poetry groups. As a poet and editor who invoked the “American idiom” of Williams with the black vernacular traditions of the blues and jazz, he was an especially significant influence on younger African American poets such as Lorenzo Thomas, Clarence Major, and Nathaniel Mackey, who read Baraka’s provocative writings about African American music, especially Blues People (1963), as avidly as they read his poetry.
Baraka’s career is often defined as a series of transformations that refute his prior selves, from the “Beat Period,” to the “Transitional Period,” to the “Black Nationalist Period,” to the “Third World Marxist Period.”4 Baraka’s commitment to the “Black Aesthetic” in the later 1960s – his transformation from LeRoi Jones to Imamu Amiri Baraka, from the bohemian poet of Greenwich Village to the black nationalist poet in Harlem – dramatically transformed his audience and the legacy of his poetry. His newly defined conviction was unmistakably pronounced in his “State/meant” (1965): “The Black Artist’s role in America is to aid in the destruction of America as he knows it” (Baraka 1991: 169). Yet even his most revolutionary black nationalist collection of poems, Black Magic (1969), combines introspective self‐analysis with such uncompromising affirmations of Black Power as “Black Art” (Baraka 1991: 219–220). And even as his poetry became more overtly Marxist in its revolutionary claims in the 1970s and afterwards, Baraka continued to affirm the poetics of Williams and Olson as well as black vernacular traditions. When he introduces his most ambitious long poem of African American history, Why’s/Wise (1990), it is Paterson and The Maximus Poems along with Melvin Tolson’s Libretto for the Republic of Liberia (1953) that he cites as formal precedents (Baraka 1991: 498).
The “Black Aesthetic” is often associated with the masculine assertiveness of writers such as Larry Neal, Etheridge Knight, Haki Madhubuti, and Baraka. It is remarkable, though, how many memorable African American women writers emerged within the political and institutional contexts of the Black Arts Movement. The year before Baraka’s Black Magic was published, for example, Nikki Giovanni, Audre Lorde, Carolyn Rodgers, and Sonia Sanchez all published important volumes of poetry.5 Probably the least likely but most noticed book of Black Arts poetry published in 1968 was Gwendolyn Brooks’s In the Mecca (Brooks 1987: 401–456). Brooks’s career has often been defined somewhat reductively as a progressive journey from the presumably assimilationist modernist poetics of her early books to the revolutionary vernacular poetics of black nationalism in the 1960s. The first African American writer to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize (in 1950), Brooks’s initial literary esteem resulted from her formally subtle, socially conscious portrayals of African American urban life on Chicago’s South Side, where she lived most of her life. Her evocative portrayal of African American girls and women in her early books, A Street in Bronzeville (1945), Annie Allen (1949), and her only novel, Maud Martha (1953), has appealed especially to feminist readers. Although her poetry addressed local and national civil rights issues during the 1950s and early 1960s, Brooks herself emphasized the political transformation she experienced at the 1967 Second Black Writers Conference at Fisk University, where she met younger radical writers such as Baraka. Brooks wrote in her autobiographical Report From Part One (1972) that her subsequent literary “conversion” to a black aesthetic involved a conscious rethinking of the public for her poetry, as she resolved to “successfully ‘call’ […] all black people: black people in taverns, black people in alleys, black people in gutters, schools, offices, factories, prisons, the consulate […] not always to ‘teach’ [but also] to entertain, to illumine” (Brooks 1972: 183). The book that represents this transition to a more direct, vernacular expression of collective black experience is In the Mecca (1968), the last volume Brooks published with Harper & Row before committing herself financially to publishing with African American small presses, such as Broadside Press and Third World Press.
In the Mecca consists of two sections: a long narrative title poem that was planned and drafted in the 1950s but not finished until 1968; and a second section of briefer poems written in the later 1960s entitled “After Mecca.” The title poem of In the Mecca revisits the site of a notorious South Side apartment building where Brooks briefly worked in the late 1930s. Once an elegantly modern example of urban housing, the Mecca Building had reached such a state of decline by Brooks’s adulthood that it was razed in 1952. Before its demolition, the Mecca had become a national symbol of urban decline. Brooks’s narrative reclamation of the Mecca is composed primarily of the multiple discordant stories of the building’s tenants. In foregrounding orally transmitted forms of local remembering, the title poem constructs an alternative collective memory to the more reductive sociological discourse of urban decline. This long poem evolved over a number of years: while it appeals to an increasingly militant mood of urban crisis in the late 1960s, it is also a narrative palimpsest of Brooks’s evolving socioaesthetic practice. The book’s dedication itself encompasses Brooks’s development as a writer, as she writes: “To the memory of Langston Hughes; and to James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, and Mike Alexandroff, educators extraordinaire” (Brooks 1987: 402). The dedication and title poem of In the Mecca suggest a continuity between Brooks’s early formation as a socially conscious poet and her later commitment to the Black Arts Movement. Her representation of urban public space in “After Mecca,” however, evokes the more urgently contested geography that informs her subsequent work. “After Mecca” includes such volatile poems of African American urban youth as “Boy Breaking Glass” and “The Blackstone Rangers” as well as the black nationalist celebration of “The Wall” and the visionary “Sermons on the Warpland.” Brooks’s transformation, then, suggests both a renewal of her earlier Popular Front radicalism and a point of departure for the African diasporic scope of later, less frequently noted collections such as To Disembark (1981) and The Near‐Johannesburg Boy and Other Poems (1986).
Black Arts poets such as Baraka and Brooks were hardly the only poets who became as known for their dramatic political transformations as for as their poetry in the 1960s and 1970s. The anti‐war movement radicalized numerous poets, and the Native American, Latino/a, and Asian American civil rights movements also generated activist poetries, especially by younger writers. The women’s movement became especially prominent, however, for its revisionist impact on literary history as well as its impact on established poets such as Levertov, Brooks, and, most dramatically, Adrienne Rich. Rich plays a similarly public role in the women’s movement as Baraka played in the Black Power movement. As she writes about her early years as a poet in her 1984 essay, “Blood, Bread, and Poetry: The Location of the Poet,” her transformation was as psychological as it was political:
I had been born a woman, and I was trying to think and act as if poetry – and the possibility of making poems – were a universal – a gender‐neutral – realm. In the universe of the masculine paradigm, I naturally absorbed ideas about women, sexuality, power from the subjectivity of male poets […] The dissonance between these images and the daily events of my own life demanded a constant footwork of imagination, a kind of perpetual translation, and an unconscious fragmentation of identity: woman from poet. Every group that lives under the naming and image‐making power of a dominant culture is at risk from this mental fragmentation and needs an art which can resist it.
(Rich 1993: 244)
This statement exemplifies the exploratory movement of Rich’s concerns as a poet and critic: she begins with the process of transformation in her own life as a poet and then proceeds more expansively to consider the more social and political implications of this process. Her long career likewise follows this trajectory, from the introspective lyric poet who subtly renders the “dissonance” of her everyday life as a woman to the vocal public figure who speaks for the power of art to testify on behalf of women and the oppressed more generally. The distance Rich traveled as a poet is remarkable. She experienced success at a young age, winning the Yale Younger Poets Award for A Change of World in 1951, the same year that she graduated from Radcliffe. Her poetry would subsequently appear in The New Poets of England and America. As she documents in her 1971 essay “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re‐Vision,” however, the exquisite craft of her earliest poems concealed a “split […] between the girl who wrote poems, who defined herself in writing poems, and the girl who was to define herself by her relationships with men” (Rich 1993: 40).
Rich’s poetry beyond her early formalist poems shares the thematic emphases of confessional poetry: the assertion of identity and the emphasis on a central mythology of the self. Like female confessional poets such as Sylvia Plath or Anne Sexton, the quest for self‐knowledge in Rich’s poetry involves the reconciliation of male cultural mythologies of women with her own sense of her experience. Rich’s poetry is more analytical about her experience than other female confessional poets, however, and her poetry became more political by the 1970s in the connections it makes between private and public experience. As her poetry became more radically informed by the women’s movement, she questions the very assumption that art can be separated from politics and that the poet’s identity can be separated from her writing. Her poetry increasingly became oriented toward a self‐definition that is social, that is related to the collective experience of women.
The books that Rich published in the 1970s, especially Diving into the Wreck (1973) and The Dream of a Common Language (1978), exemplify her more political purpose and remain her best‐known volumes. These books also coincide with Rich’s public self‐identification as a lesbian and her increasingly prominent role as a radical feminist theorist, especially with the publication of Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (1976). The voice that becomes identified with Rich’s poetry in the 1970s is more direct, more assertive, and more confrontational. Her poems speak from a position more committed to political action as well as to feminist analysis of self and society. Her public persona also became more political. For example, when she was awarded a National Book Award in 1974 for Diving into the Wreck, she refused to accept the award for herself: she instead accepted it on behalf of all women, reading a statement written by herself and two other nominees, Audre Lorde and Alice Walker. The statement emphasized her commitment to an ideal of cooperation among women, rather than masculine competitiveness. If this socialist feminist ideal informs her writing, her poetry became increasingly oriented to exploring and rethinking gendered consciousness, to exploring especially how language shapes perception. Notable examples include the revisionary title poem of Diving into the Wreck and her “Twenty‐One Love Poems,” a sequence of love poems between two women that simultaneously critiques the power relations of heterosexual love poetry and imagines new possibilities for reinventing love. By the 1970s, Rich’s poetry was also more likely to be written in free verse open forms, with a greater use of sentence fragments, lines of varying length, and irregular spacing to suggest a greater urgency to her writing. And while her later volumes of poetry would not have as dramatic an impact as her 1970s books, Rich continued to expand her critique of patriarchy and social injustice as a poet, activist, and feminist critic until her death in 2012. Rich not only has succeeded in inspiring and supporting subsequent generations of feminist poets, she has also succeeded in redefining the importance of earlier poets such as Muriel Rukeyser and Elizabeth Bishop through her radical feminist critical lens.
In her 1983 review of Bishop’s Complete Poems, Rich emphasized Bishop’s “experience of outsiderhood, closely – though not exclusively – linked with the essential outsiderhood of a lesbian identity” (Rich 1983: 124), an experience that was not visible to many of Bishop’s readers during her lifetime. Rich concludes in this important reconsideration of Bishop’s poetry that she was “critically and consciously trying to explore marginality, power and powerlessness, often in poetry of great beauty and sensuousness” (Rich 1983: 135). A few years before Rich’s review, John Ashbery also addressed misconceptions of Bishop as “a writer’s writer’s writer” (Ashbery 1977: 8), noting the surrealist dimensions of poems like “The Map” or “Questions of Travel,” with their “continually renewed sense of discovering the strangeness, the unreality of our reality at the very moment of becoming conscious of it as reality” (Ashbery 1977: 10). Ashbery’s insistence on the surrealist “strangeness” of Bishop’s poetry differs dramatically from Rich’s more biographical orientation toward the “essential outsiderhood” informing Bishop’s poetic exploration of marginality. Such contrasting perceptions of the modernist (or postmodernist) and feminist (or queer) implications of Bishop’s poetry have only intensified since the posthumous publication of her Collected Prose (1983), One Art: Letters (1994), and more recently, Edgar Allen Poe & the Juke‐Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments (2006). Her influence on poets as different as Jorie Graham, Louise Gluck, and Thom Gunn has also provoked reconsideration of her poetry’s significance.
The travels and travails of Bishop’s life are now well known, and they inform the renewed interest in a poet who was generally understood as an eccentric formalist and a seemingly self‐effacing alternative to the confessional poets, at least prior to the publication of Geography III in 1976. The idiosyncratic vision and formal ingenuity of her earliest poems, collected in North & South (1946) and A Cold Spring (1955), was often compared with the poetry of her mentor, Marianne Moore. With the success of more emotionally expressive and more overtly autobiographical poems such as “In the Waiting Room” and “One Art” in Geography III, Bishop’s readers reconsidered earlier valuations of her poetry, especially as she assumed a more public persona as a feminist. Bishop also became more candid about her life in her later years, especially about her painful childhood experiences, from her father’s death in her first year, to her mother’s mental illness and permanent institutionalization when she was five, to her subsequent sense of homelessness as she was moved from relative to relative, in Nova Scotia and Massachusetts. As an adult, she lived in New York and Key West before traveling to Brazil in 1951, where she subsequently lived for 15 years with her partner, Lota de Macedo Soares, who committed suicide after Bishop returned to the United States in 1967. As these details of her life became more widely known, the poet who had seemed so remote became a poet whose childhood experience of displacement, rootlessness, and alienation made her poetry more emotionally resonant, and whose adult life as a traveler and a lesbian made her poetry more cosmopolitan and socially transgressive.
One of the most striking features of Bishop’s poetry is the frequent contrast between the domestic and the strange. Her most memorable images of domesticity, of home and family, are often images that convey wonder or fright. This is especially true in poems written through the vision of a child, such as “Sestina,” but is also true of her poems more generally, with their precise attention to otherwise ordinary detail. This attention to the strangeness of the everyday is often provoked by a found object that is itself a representation in North & South, such as a book, a painting, a map, or a more abstract assemblage like that of “The Monument,” representations that raise questions about how we understand and give meaning to the world. The process of defamiliarization enacted in Bishop’s poetry resonates more politically in Questions of Travel (1965), as the opposition of North and South in her Brazil poems implies a more pronounced awareness of the economic disparities between the North American traveler and South America. The Brazil poems often question the quest for a new Eden, a quest that is undermined by the outsider’s cultural values, by the refusal to accept the separate identity of the “new world” that is encountered. From the poet’s perspective, however, the new worlds represented in her Brazil poems also pose a perceptual challenge, requiring an adjustment of vision, a recognition of differing worldviews, and consequently a heightened awareness of the ideology that the traveler brings to these worlds. For Bishop, the “unreality of our reality,” as Ashbery wrote, occurs through poems of memory as well as observation. And as the conclusion of “Questions of Travel” suggests, the implications of Bishop’s “outsider” surrealism are as “disturbing” as they are revealing: “Continent, city, country, society: / the choice is never wide and never free. / And here, or there… No. Should we have stayed at home, / wherever that may be?” (Bishop 1979: 94).
Questions of travel are also important to Ashbery’s poetry, but the surreal “strangeness, the unreality of our reality” in his poetry is considerably stranger, more unreal. While Ashbery’s poetry conveys the sense of openness, attentiveness, and movement associated with travel, we do not usually know where we are going, and we usually end up somewhere unexpected. The journey is usually full of detours, digressions, and interruptions, as it is ultimately the process of travel that matters more than the destination. Because of the radical indeterminacy of his writing, Ashbery is one the most controversial poets of the last half century. It is not surprising that perhaps the most frequently quoted lines of Ashbery’s poetry invoke the indeterminacy of his poetics: “a kind of fence‐sitting / Raised to the level of an esthetic ideal” (Ashbery 1986: 88). The influences he cites for his poetry are eclectic: “W.H. Auden […], Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Gertrude Stein, Elizabeth Bishop, William Carlos Williams at times, Boris Pasternak, and Osip Mandelstam” (Ashbery 2000: 4). Given Ashbery’s long association with avant‐garde movements in the visual arts as well as poetry, experimental writers have acknowledged and adapted his poetry, from the surrealist collage poems of The Tennis Court Oath (1962) to the more expansive disjunctive discursiveness of his 200+‐page long poem Flow Chart (1991). Given his experimentation with challenging poetic forms, however, formalist poets have also valued his poetry since his first book, Some Trees, was selected for the Yale Series of Younger Poets in 1956. The formal variety of Ashbery’s poetry is extraordinary: his poetry has included the most radical forms of collage, in which poems are comprised entirely of found language, but he has also excelled in the most demanding of poetic forms, including such inventive sestinas as “The Painter” and “Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape.” Ashbery’s poetry was prominently featured within the New York School in The New American Poetry, but he was also considered for The New Poets of England and America.6 More recently, his poetry has appeared in avant‐garde little magazines such as Sulfur as well as established publications such as Poetry and the New Yorker. Ashbery’s reputation in the academy is no less conflicted: he has been canonized as a late Romantic poet of consciousness by critics such as Harold Bloom and Helen Vendler, but his poetry has also been variously related to poststructuralist critical theory and avant‐garde poetics, from surrealism to Language writing.
Prior to Other Traditions (2000), Ashbery has not written much about his poetry, but he has written extensively about the visual arts. Like Frank O’Hara, Ashbery provides important clues about his poetry through his art criticism. As a writer whose poetry and professional life have been intensively engaged with modern painting, Ashbery has long been affiliated with the New York School. He wrote much of his early poetry while living in Paris (1955–1965), however, where he wrote art criticism for the Herald Tribune. He subsequently was an editor of Art News after he returned to New York, and he has since continued to publish art criticism in various publications. Many of his poems address painting, taking specific paintings as a point of departure or meditating on the differences between visual and literary representation. More importantly, the formal strategies of his poems resemble those of contemporary abstract art. Like abstract expressionist painters such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, or Joan Mitchell, his poetry enacts the process of composition, of association, of imagination. And like collage artists as different as Joseph Cornell or Robert Rauschenberg, he blends a surprising array of discourses into his poems, from the most abstract philosophical discourse to the most casual everyday speech, from the exalted language of aesthetics to the mundane language of commerce and popular culture. Even Ashbery’s more imagistic lyric poetry tends to interrupt its visual associations with ironic self‐commentaries, with disembodied fragments of voice, with digressions that appear irrelevant. The syntax of his poetry likewise evokes a restless mind in the process of composing, of questioning itself, of questioning his readers. In defamiliarizing not only poetic conventions, but normal speech, Ashbery also underscores the ideological dimensions of language. His play with language, especially with clichés, questions the very assumptions, modes of thought, and institutions of everyday life. As Lawrence Joseph has written in his review of Flow Chart, Ashbery’s poetry extends Wallace Stevens’s insistence on “the poetry of the contemporaneous”: “Everything, including what it means to write poetry, is fair imaginative game […] Combining configurations of present existence with indications of how meaning is discovered and formed, he imagines contemporaneity in its fullest sense” (Joseph 2011: 50). As a philosophical poet of “the contemporaneous,” Ashbery has had an extraordinary influence on contemporary poetry, including the dramatic “contemporaneity” of Joseph’s poetry.
In a 1968 lecture entitled “The Invisible Avant‐Garde,” Ashbery recollects that “in 1950 there was no sure proof of the existence of the avant‐garde. To experiment was to have the feeling that one was poised on some outermost brink. In other words if one wanted to depart, even moderately, from the norm, one was taking one’s life – one’s life as an artist – into one’s hands” (Ashbery 1989: 390). While Ashbery is primarily describing the visual arts and the example of Pollock specifically, his comments apply to poetry as well: “At that time it was the art and literature of the Establishment that were traditional. There was in fact almost no experimental poetry being written in this country, unless you counted the rather pale attempts of a handful of poets who were trying to imitate the French Surrealists” (Ashbery 1989: 390). By the time that Ashbery was giving this lecture at the Yale Art School, however, the paradox of an avant‐garde establishment was posing quite different challenges for visual artists and writers. And by the time that Ashbery received the 1976 Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, and National Book Critics Circle Award for his Self‐Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975), a new avant‐garde of experimental poetry was emerging as an alternative to the already “traditional” avant‐garde of the New American poetry. This new movement came to be known as Language poetry, and one of the most important texts that differentiated this poetry from either “mainstream” or New American poetries was Ashbery’s most “French Surrealist” book, The Tennis Court Oath.
By the mid‐1970s, Associated Writing Programs (AWP) had proliferated on college campuses throughout the United States. As Jed Rasula has written, AWP represented a hegemonic “resolution of the problem of modernism,” with the emphasis on craft, but free verse craft rather than the metrical craft that preceded modernism (Rasula 1996: 441). The new “mainstream” of American poetry, then, embraced the open form poetics of the New American poetry, but within the academy rather than outside. This institutional setting for poetry has of course been career oriented, with the pressure to “publish or perish,” but also with greater opportunities for publication, readings, and awards. While there were growing oppositional poetry communities that had emerged since the 1960s, including feminist, gay and lesbian, and ethnic communities, the academic hegemony of postconfessional free verse lyric poetry was challenged specifically by the New Formalism and Language poetry. The New Formalist poets argued for a return to traditional forms as a means to broaden the public for poetry.7 In contrast to this conservative recuperation of poetic conventions, Language poets asserted a “New American Poetry genealogy” and a commitment to “the sense of poetics as social engagement as well as methodological provocation” (Rasula 1996: 442). Language poetry emerged in the 1970s through networks of small magazines, talks, readings, and workshops primarily in the San Francisco Bay Area and New York City. It became more widely known in the late 1970s through the publication of the journal L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, edited by Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein, and The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book in 1984. The journal Poetics (1981–1999), edited by Lyn Hejinian and Barrett Watten, extended the theory and practice of Language poetry through the 1990s. The major theorists of early Language poetry, including Bernstein, Hejinian, Ron Silliman, and Steve McCaffery, argued against the speech‐based poetics of the New American poetry, insisting instead on a poetics of textuality, signification, and the materiality of written language, exemplified by poets who predated the Language movement such as Clark Coolidge, Michael Palmer, and Susan Howe as well as earlier modernists such as Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, and Objectivist poets such as George Oppen and Louis Zukofsky.8 Through their insistence on the history, theory, and practice of radically disjunctive polymodal poetics, Language writing vigorously contested the hegemony of postconfessional “official verse culture.”9
As McCaffery writes, two primary commonalities link the otherwise disparate projects of Language poetry: “a privileging of the material text over the representational function and textual opacity over transparency” (McCaffery 2013: 151). One of the best examples, and probably the most popular example, of this poetics, is Hejinian’s My Life (2013). Ostensibly an autobiographical narrative of an ordinary northern California girlhood, beginning in the 1940s, My Life is also a feminist inquiry into cultural mythologies that inform gendered subjectivity. It is also a rigorously procedural text and a resonantly lyric example of what Hejinian has characterized as the “open text,” which is “open to the world and particularly to the reader. It invites participation, rejects the authority of the writer over the reader and thus, by analogy, the authority implicit in other (social, economic, cultural) hierarchies. It speaks for writing that is generative rather than directive” (Hejinian 2000: 369). Hejinian initially wrote My Life (1980) when she was 37 years old, and it consisted of 37 sections of 37 sentences each. She revised it when she was 45 (1987) and accordingly added eight more sections and eight additional sentences per section. She has since published My Life in the Nineties (2003) at age 60, with 10 sections of 60 lines each. While each section of My Life corresponds with a year of Hejinian’s life, each section consists of a collage of sentences and sentence fragments, with unpredictably discursive modes. Like other autobiographies, it is based on memory, on the ongoing construction of the past, although it is shaped by the artifice of its form. Like other autobiographies, it is also written in prose, but the juxtapostion of sentences is “generative rather than directive.” My Life proceeds through patterns of repetition, of phrases or motifs, that we would associate with poetry or music more than narrative. And the relationship between sentences is also more associative, and more open to interpretation, than we would expect in a narrative. Through the method and language of My Life, Hejinian at once disrupts individualist expectations of the autobiographical subject and composes a life story that “invites participation” in its construction. In its procedural structure it furthermore asks fundamental questions about subjectivity and life writing, about the process of self‐creation, but also about the construction of subjectivity through language, form, and ideology. As an experimental feminist text that defies generic categorization, My Life exemplifies as well the feminist avant‐garde that emerged with Language poetry in the late twentieth century, from Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Kathleen Fraser, and Susan Howe to Rae Armantrout, Carla Harryman, and Harryette Mullen.10
In 1975 there were 79 creative writing programs in US colleges and universities, according to the AWP. By 2010 there were 852 creative writing programs (Lazer 2013: 160). This is not exactly what Robert Frost imagined when he applauded the presence of poetry in academia over a half century ago. Nor is academia the same site that Donald Allen imagined: many New American poets and, more recently, Language poets, have become professors in creative writing programs. The “mainstream” is much wider, more pluralistic, and more accommodating of experimental writing. The poetry wars of the past, including the recent past of the New Formalism and Language poetry, seem less relevant with the more inclusive ethos of journals, anthologies, and writing programs, not to mention the digital media through which poetry is as likely to be accessed now as print media. As Hank Lazer writes, “Today, the tale being told is principally one of progress, tolerance, and hybridity: a superficial sense that intense polarizations are a thing of the past and that now student writers … can freely try any style and experience with an aesthetics without fear of reprisal” (Lazer 2013: 165). Poetry matters more than ever, based on the proliferating numbers of writers and readers of poetry, in print and digital media. And despite the “tale of happy hybridity” that Lazer ironically invokes, the questions of which poetry matters and why it matters are no less urgent than they have been in the “poetry wars” of the preceding century.
SEE ALSO: CHAPTER 15 (THE BEAT MINDS OF THEIR GENERATION); CHAPTER 17 (LITERARY SELF‐FASHIONING IN THE PHARMACOLOGICAL AGE).