The next essay is from editor A. Poulin Jr. talking about "Contemporary American Poetry" (soon he would have a 1991 anthology of the stuff, my copy looks like this) in a piece called Contemporary American Poetry: The Radical Tradition.
And this is a good time to stop and reflect on the quite significant narcissism of those early 20th century poets labelling themselves 'modernists,' thinking the word modern would always apply to them and somehow defy the march of time. Similarly, post post-modernism (which technically could mean anything in the future) poets subsequently understood the problem and started labeling themselves 'Contemporary' like they were doubling down on a delusion. Their 'contemporary' poems are now 60 years old and as far from contemporary as poems could possibly be. I wouldn’t be surprised if poets now start calling themselves the Right-Nows. It's a straight line for there to here, narcissistically speaking,
In any case, we’re all soon Long-Agos, as are those modernists and contemporaries. But this little essay of self-congratulations actually has some interesting things in it. It attempts to define this body of “contemporary” poetry as poets writing since 1945 up to the current year (1980).
Poulin starts by exploring how all generations tend to rebel against previous ones, the previous generation's “essential beliefs….its excesses, principle atrophied into prejudice….petrified into cliché…[and] tyranny” but Poulin maintains that “the revolution doesn’t always realize a clean break….the blood, the genes remain, camouflaged by a radical façade.”
He then talks about what revolution these poets represent, their ceasing to believe the “orthodoxy of T.S. Eliot and the New Critics.”
And at this spot of the essay I have a crazy bit of marginalia right here talking about prescriptive craft advice and how it somehow corresponds to diet advice and how that makes us all fat” and I read it today thinking well maybe that’s true in some weird way, but what the hell does it have to do with this essay? Who was this person?
There is one word in this essay that is probably my least favorite essay word in these academic essays: unquestionable (unquestionably, kin to undeniably). A few sentences later there a phrase that something “is simply untenable.” All of a group, those words. Nothing is unquestionable.
He then lists the cast of New Critics,
Allen Tate
John Crowe Ramson
William Epson,
those poets who were an addendum to modernism and enforcers of Eliot's ideas, those "who transformed the experiments…into a legislative critical system…the New Critics…no longer regarded as sacred commandments”).
He lists the influences of the new poets, but during the entire essay fails to name the women who probably had more influence on experimental contemporary poetry than anyone else: Emily Dickinson and Gertrude Stein, a good example of how important women were marginalized during this period of mythmaking about contemporary poetry. Poulin credits the French and Spanish surrealists as influences, Neruda and Vallejo and the popular arts (singling out Lana Turner, Joan Baez and Bob Dylan).
Like the Modernists before them of these “contemporary” poets, Poulin says, read the English Metaphysical poets and John Crowe Ransom…and that "the most adequate and convincing poetry” for them “accommodates mixed feelings, clashing ideas and incongruous images.”
Where they parted with the Modernists was regarding intimacy, the personal revelation, removing “artistic distance between the poets and their subjects, the poets and their poems.” Contemporary poets use persona and sometimes other formal devices but focus on “individual personality” and “intimate experiences” in disagreement with T.S. Eliot who claims that “poetry was an escape from personality.”
Contemporary poets incorporate “biographical details” and make the speaker, the “I”, themselves…writing “as if that reader were a confessor, psychiatrist, intimate friend, or lover.” In fact, a lot of these poets are interested in exploring the borders and depths of the Freudian subconscious and multidimensional personality….the self’s discovery of the outer world…sexual honesty…personal illness, madness, failure and self-destruction” And here he says something about the “near hysteria of Sylvia Plath.”
Oy.
But this part is good: “…the requirements of technique and craftsmanship raise…questions about just how personal and immediate a poet can be…any poem is a fabrication and takes time and calculation to complete. Like any other art… [it] is selective, calculated, and public gesture, a formal utterance for which the poet selects a language and voice, even if they are approximate to his or her own as the poet can manage.”
Poulin also discusses irony and paradox and raises the issue of irony's problematic distance: “Irony may thwart much genuine emotion, its absence also makes genuine emotion virtually impossible.”
How’s that for a paradox?
Poulin shows how irony helps in certain cases, like for Plath and O’Hara, to “temper the intensity of suffering by undercutting the vehement…” Camp irony can find a sense of humor in Plath’s suicide or O’Hara’s descriptions of emptiness and decadence. “…[where] laughter camouflages horror."
I would also argue that irony done well can express its very own deep-seated emotion, like hidden Easter Eggs, to reward the most engaged and patient readers. But that this technique wasn't being used as much with this set of poets, more so a technique used with later Generation X and Millennial poets.
Poulin talks about levels of ambiguity where reader interpretations are encouraged (Ashbery), where punctuation and pronouns are manipulated (Merwin and Berryman). Metapoetry is discussed, and allusions after "The Waste Land."
These poets, Poulin says, are not as interested in mythology in the classical sense. They are not likely to allude to ancient Greek poets. They are having a contemporary experience and are concerned with their own survival, not mythmaking except for “the suffering, middle-aged, white ‘human American man’…[the idea that] I am my own myth.”
Poulin then categorizes these poets as decedents of the Puritans or Whitman, basically pessimists and optimists.
The Puritans (ex: Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton) are descendants of the fall of Adam, they see “humans as essentially corrupt, limited spiritually and physically and deteriorating. There poems tend to be “complex, emblematic, and metaphysical.” The Puritan poet is threatened by madness and…tempted to self-destruction.”
The Whitmans (ex: Allen Ginsberg, Louis Simpson, David Ignatow) “assert the holiness of Adamic self…a holy universe.” These poets are “often scornful of intellectualization” and believe in the “self’s limitless potential for transcendence.” There poems are often “open, loose product of emotion rather than of intellect or conspicuous craftsmanship, its language…more recognizably ‘American.’”
That’s a pretty good distinction. Poulin then lists poets inspired by the French symbolists, Chinese and Japanese poetry (Gary Snyder, W. S. Merwin, James Wright), the Spanish Surrealists (Philip Levine and Robert Bly), those who experimented with the prose poem as action painting or verbal jazz (John Ashbery, Lawrence Ferlinghetti).
He admits there was an “obsession with originality” and that
“each age discovers or fabricates one or two all-encompassing metaphors for the quality of human experience that it confronts or seeks. It was T. S. Eliot, of course, who fabricated the first encompassing metaphor for the twentieth century: the waste land was the image of human spiritual and cultural sterility…a powerful mise en scene of the modern situation, to a large extent its characters were composite ghosts, unreal men and women in an unreal city…Eliot set the scene, but contemporary poets have peopled that waste land, mostly with their individual selves.”
And they’ve done it with language, “by making poetry out of the full range of everyday speech—including obscenity, vulgarity, and slang.”
These poets are also very political and create a poetry that “responds directly” to the “broad spectrum of everyday political realities.”
Then he drops this bomb: “the political tradition was all but ignored during the first half of the century” completely ignoring the group of socialist poets of the 1920s and 1930s who wrote extensively about social conditions during the depression and against the Spanish Civil War, many of whom were blacklisted to such an extent they now literally don’t exist in the minds of New Critics and contemporary poets. There’s a whole book about this historical blacklisting called Revolutionary Memory by Gary Nelson.
Poulin talks about the “imagination of commitment” which he classifies into three groups. The first is the sociopolitical consciousness and nuclear holocaust. He lists the poets that deal with this:
- “Nick and the Candlestick” Plath
- “Advice to a Prophet” Wilbur
- “After Experience Taught Me” Snodgrass
- “Vapor Trail” and “Reflected in the Frog Pond” Kinnell
- “Vapor Trails” Snyder
- “At the Bomb Testing Site” Stafford
The second is historical events, personages:
- “Eisenhower’s Visit to Franco” Wright
- “Night, Death, Mississippi” Hayden
More specifically, the Vietnam War poets. Poulin says it is interesting that “despite the fact that many of today’s poets were active participants in World War II—or perhaps because they were—the experience did not seem to grip their imaginations as much as the conflict in Vietnam did.” He says not since World War I has there been so many poems about a single event.
He lists a few World War II poems here for contrast:
- “On the Eye of an SS Officer” Wilber
- “The Death of a Ball Turret Gunner” Jarrell
- “The Heroes” Simpson
The Vietnam poems he lists are:
- “Counting Small-Boned Bodies” Bly
- “The Altars in the Street” Levertov
- “The Asians Dying” Merwin
- “Wichita Vortex Sutra” Ginsberg
This raises questions, Poulin says, about where poetry leaves off and propaganda begins and can propaganda poetry be any good. He also notes that all the poets writing about Vietnam were noncombatants and had never “been in the embattled country in contrast to “Wilfred Owen’s poems in the trenches.”
These poets experience only “the removed reality of the media…atrocities were not witnessed, but were ‘viewed’” and that their poems deal more with “the perpetrators of war” and “the language of war” and “the policy of war.”
The third group involves sexual politics and explorations of sexuality from poets like Adrienne Rich, James Wright, Gary Snyder, Robert Duncan, Robert Bly and Anne Sexton writing a celebration of her uterus.
Poulin then talks about the ecological poems of Gary Snyder and John Logan and the meta-poetries:
- “Leaving the Atocha Station” Ashberry
- “Fresh Air” Koch
- “Riprap” Snyder
- “The Language” Creely
- “Single Vison” Kunitz
He ends talking about spirituality in poems:
- “The Sleep Child” Dickey
- “A Dubious Night” Wilbur
- “Sometime During Eternity” Ferlinghetti
- “I Am Waiting” Ferlinghetti
- “Wales Visitation” Ginsberg
- “Mary’s Song” Sylvia Plath”
- "Lemuel’s Blessing” Merwin
All in all this is a good summary of this group (which we totally need because the moniker is so unhelpful). Here's the big list I compiled from the essay:
- Sylvia Plath
- Anne Sexton
- Adrienne Rich
- Maxine Kumin
- Denise Levertov
- Robert Lowell
- Robert Bly
- James Wright
- M.S. Merwin
- Galway Kinnell
- John Logan
- Allen Ginsberg
- Louis Simpson
- Richard Hugo
- Robert Duncan
- W. D. Snodgrass
- John Ashbery
- James Merrill
- Robert Creely
- Richard Wilbur
- Kenneth Koch
- Stanley Kunitz
- Donald Hall
- James Dickey
