Copyright (c) 1995 by R.S. Gwynn
In the 1986 edition of the Dictionary of Literary Biography
Yearbook Ronald Baughman's A Field Guide to Recent Schools of
American Poetry
appeared. Following the leads of poet and anthologist Donald Hall
and critic Ralph J. Mills, Jr., Baughman noted that the Modernist
orthodoxy that
prevailed during the first half of the century met with serious
challenges at the beginning of the second: "After World War
II, most American poets
rebelled against the requirements for poetry established by Eliot
and the New Criticism and instead placed emphasis on the writer's
personality, the
writer's self. This reversal is perhaps the single most important
occurrence in the poetry of the postwar decades" (114). Baughman's
taxonomy divided
American poets among several "schools" which shared
little save that their members were contemporary with one another
and were writing in the same
language (though even that often seemed open to debate). Baughman
identified eight key groups of contemporary American poets: the
Academics, the
Concretists, the Confessionalists, the Black Mountain School,
the Deep Imagists, the New York School, the Beat Generation, and
practitioners of the
New Black Aesthetic. While readers are referred to the text of
Baughman's essay for his comments on the most prominent individual
members, a few
general statements should perhaps be made about these groups,
which seemed so vital only a couple of decades ago, indeed only
seven years ago, but
are quickly fading into the back pages of literary history.
First, most of the individual writers mentioned by Baughman
are now in their twilight, having published collected editions
that represent the summing up
of their careers. They have won the important prizes and a few
have even served as Poet Laureate, a position established in 1986
and filled since that time
by Robert Penn Warren, Richard Wilbur, Howard Nemerov, Mark Strand,
Joseph Brodsky, and, most recently, Mona Van Duyn. Two of these
senior
poets, Warren and Nemerov, have died, and, while one still looks
with expectations to the publication of books by poets like Wilbur
or Strand or by
other major older poets such as James Dickey, Gwendolyn Brooks,
William Stafford, Adrienne Rich, or Allen Ginsberg, it is not
likely that they will
depart significantly from their established manners and matters
in any new work. Throughout the 1980s one sensed that the torch
was passing to a new
generation, and as we move into the 1990s the transfer of power
is more or less complete.
Second, and perhaps more important, the members of the younger
generation of poets seem reluctant to identify themselves as members
of the existing
schools named by Baughman. It is unlikely that any contemporary
poet under fifty would refer to himself or herself as a "confessionalist"
or "deep
imagist." Most of these poets, who were learning their craft
when the schools were at their height, absorbed diverse influences
in their early careers and
have arrived at poetic styles that, with only a few exceptions,
are not readily distinguishable from each other. Indeed, the stylistic
position of the majority
of these poets occupies the middle of the road. A relaxed, conversational
idiom; a restrained rhetoric which employs local tropes only sparingly
(the
simile predominates); and fairly uniform free verse lines, more
often than not neatly arranged in uniform stanzas, characterize
the work of most
contemporary poets. The poetic barricades of this generation have
more often been raised along lines of gender, sexual preference,
or ethnic identity than
according to some aesthetic manifesto such as Ezra Pound's famous
Imagist credo. To cite only one case, thirty years ago it was
fairly safe to say that
Beat poets held in common certain hostile attitudes toward middle-class
American society and also put identifiable aesthetic principles
(or non-principles)
to work in their poetry. Today one would be reluctant to make
any such generalizations beyond noting, say, that women poets
tend to focus more on
gender-related issues than male poets do; that Native American
poets frequently share some of the same mystical, shamanistic
approaches to the natural
world; or that gay poets seem happy to reside squarely in the
tradition of protest poetry. The contents of an anthology like
St. Martin's Gay and Lesbian
Poetry of Our Time (1988) reveals that the rhetoric of the streets,
as witnessed nightly on CNN, is virtually indistinguishable from
that of much of our
increasingly politicized and fragmented poetry -- what has been
labeled the "Balkanization" of the American tradition.
Still, certain younger poets show some affinities to the schools
of the older generation, and it may be useful to discuss briefly
these poetic lines of
descent. The Academic poets of the 1950s -- Richard Wilbur, Anthony
Hecht, John Hollander -- who produced a rhymed, metrical poetry
of wit and
linguistic precision, are often seen as the forebears of today's
New Formalists -- Dana Gioia, Marilyn Hacker, Brad Leithauser,
Charles Martin, Molly
Peacock, Mary Beth Salter, Gjertrud Schnackenberg, and Timothy
Steele. While there is still no canonical anthology representing
this group, the
activities and occasional polemics of its members have garnered
quite a bit of critical attention and no small amount of controversy.
Perhaps because they
stand somewhat outside the mainstream of contemporary American
poetry, the New Formalists seem to represent an orchestrated conspiracy
in the eyes
of some hostile critics, even though there is relatively little
that connects them beyond a dedication -- itself anything but
hidebound -- to writing metrical
verse. While they have been accused, in the pages of the AWP Chronicle,
the official organ of the Associated Writing Programs, of writing
a reactionary
type of "yuppie poetry," they actually represent diverse
lifestyles and political points of view. They have little in common
as far as subject matter is
concerned, and critic Robert McPhillips has pointed out that they
also do not share much, other than their commitment to rhyme and
meter, with the older
Academic poets. According to McPhillips, they break with their
elders in their preference for popular, demotic forms of culture
-- this is, after all, the
Woodstock generation -- and, in general, their idiom and cultural
frame of reference strike the reader as somewhat less rarified
than those of the
Academics, who more often than not specialized in what critic
Robert Peters once called the "Guggenheim-year-abroad poem"
(McPhillips 200-02).
Concretism garnered some public exposure in the news magazines
a decade or so ago, but it has remained, for the most part, a
literary curiosity. An
aesthetic that uses words as visual icons formed into interesting
shapes on the page is not likely to elicit much serious critical
response, and, indeed,
many of the productions of concrete poets are perhaps more suitable
for hanging (the poems, that is, not the poets) than reading.
E. E. Cummings is the
paterfamilias of the Concretists, but Cummings's admirers tend
to forgive him his silliest typographical experiments and instead
focus on the linguistic
brilliance that characterizes his best poems. If the Concretists
have any heirs in the present scene, they are the poets of the
so-called
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E group (named after a magazine in which the work
of many of them first appeared). According to critic Marjorie
Perloff, the
avant garde poets of 1950s proclaimed that "'Form is never
more than an extension of content.' For the Language poet, this
aphorism becomes: 'Theory
is never more than the extension of practice'" (Holden 46).
Indeed, much of the work of these poets seems tailor-made for
analysis by the
deconstructionists, post-structuralists, and new historicists
who have dominated American graduate programs for the last two
decades.
The Confessional poets of the 1960s -- Robert Lowell, Anne
Sexton, Sylvia Plath, W.D. Snodgrass -- remain one of the chief
influences on the poets of
this generation, though the effects of novelty, in an age of "trash-talk"
television, have certainly worn off poets' attempts to shock with
the explicitness
of their personal revelations. When Robert Lowell, scion of Boston
gentility and winner of American poetry's most coveted awards,
revealed, in Life
Studies (1959), that "my mind's not right" in poems
detailing family dysfunction, marital woes, alcoholism, mental
illness, and psychotherapy, the
reading public, perhaps feeling that such candor from a major
poet was long overdue, was fascinated. Sylvia Plath's suicide
in 1963 caused her
posthumous collection Ariel (1965) to be valued all the more highly
by women who heard, in its bitterest moments, a cry that could
have issued from
their own lips. Anne Sexton, the middle-class housewife who went,
in less than a decade, from suburbia to the slopes of Parnassus,
inspired a whole
generation of women who came of age on the cusp of the feminist
era. Some twenty years ago, in The Confessional Poets (1973),
Robert Phillips
described the typical confessional poem, stressing its therapeutic,
personal, and alienated qualities. Most younger American poets
have at one time or
another written poems in this vein. Indeed, the autobiographical
narrative/lyric -- sometimes naked, sometimes partially clad --
has become a staple of our
poetic diet, especially when it deals with formerly taboo sexual
topics. Bruce Weigl's "The Man Who Made Me Love Him"
describes an incident of
sexual abuse to a child, presumably the poet himself; "Kalaloch"
by Carolyn Forché presents, without apology, a graphic
first-person account of
same-sex lovemaking; Pulitzer Prize-winner Rita Dove's "After
Reading Mickey in the Night Kitchen for the Third Time Before
Bed" describes how the
poet and her daughter compare their sexual organs. These are typical
reflections of the extent to which contemporary poets of the mainstream
feel free to
use their most private moments (and parts) for subject matter.
Other poets with ties to the Confessional tradition include Sharon
Olds, Alfred Corn, T.R.
Hummer, Ira Sadoff, and John Balaban, though it would be safe
enough to add that almost every poet writing today has learned
from and at times
imitated the type of poem popularized by Lowell, Plath, and company.
On the other hand, the Black Mountain School and the Deep Imagists
have retained little direct influence. The former, named after
a group of poets who
studied at Black Mountain College with Charles Olsen in the 1950s,
rallied around the banners of "projective verse" and
various arcane theories of open
form and composition by "fields." As Reed Whittemore
has sarcastically remarked in his study of William Carlos Williams,
if the good doctor's
followers, among whom the Black Mountain poets are the most prominent,
had lived in the Middle Ages they would have been alchemists instead
of
poets. It is difficult to think of a single poet writing today
who is so passionate about the metrical questions addressed by
the Black Mountain poets,
perhaps because open forms so completely dominate American poetry
today that arguing about their validity is a moot point. Indeed,
the New Formalists
have come to prominence by attacking most of the positions of
the Black Mountain school as those of an outmoded status quo.
The Deep Imagists -- Robert Bly and James Wright are the most
prominent -- have also passed from influence. They had a great
influence on young
poets writing in the early 1970s, when it seemed as though a new
poetic genre, an exotic hybrid of South American surrealism and
Midwestern alienation
amidst the not-so-alien corn, had emerged. Critic Lewis Turco
dubbed it "Blymagism" after its founder, but satirical
comments did not keep it from
sweeping the graduate poetry workshops and spawning hundreds of
poems that seemed to have been translated, under the duress of
a deadline, from an
unidentified foreign tongue. It should be noted for the record
that this sort of hallucinatory poem followed hard on the heels
of the psychedelic late 1960s
and was fueled by the rage of the era of Vietnam War protests
and Watergate; one of Bly's typical poems of the period, "Johnson's
Cabinet Watched by
Ants" (1967), describes the President's military advisors
as "dressed as gamboling lambs" (56). Such self-consciously
bizarre images (though in light of
Anthony Summers's biography one wonders if Bly was describing
J. Edgar Hoover), like black-light posters advising the young
to "tune in, turn on,
drop out," seem dated today, just as Bly, with his recent
notoriety as the chief guru of the contemporary men's movement,
has largely abrogated his
position as a poet worthy of serious consideration for the dubious
rewards of media celebrity. Nevertheless, several contemporaries
still occasionally
employ surrealistic dislocations as part of their larger strategy;
of them Reginald Gibbons, Albert Goldbarth, C.D. Wright, and the
recent winner of the
Pulitzer Prize, James Tate, seem the most successful, though many
others have used these techniques.
The New York School, led by the late Frank O'Hara, Kenneth
Koch, and John Ashbery, flowered in the late 1950s and early 1960s
among writers who
had close affinities with abstract impressionist painters like
Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. Like the Deep Imagists,
the New York poets
stressed subjectivity and the unconscious, but they infused their
own surrealism with a comic spirit much more akin to the Dadaist
experiments of Paris
in the 1920s than to the Bly/Wright brand of high seriousness.
While Ashbery, mainly on the strength of his reputation among
influential critics like
Helen Vendler, Marjorie Perloff, and Harold Bloom, remains the
most fashionable poet on the contemporary scene, relatively few
contemporary poets
betray his influence, unless we count the garrulous, free-associating
monologues of poets like T.R. Hummer, Albert Goldbarth, Lisa Zeidner,
and
Rodney Jones as being in his debt. Most of the poets represented
in The New York Poets (1970), an anthology edited by David Shapiro
and Ron
Padgett, have not advanced beyond the time and place that inspired
their early prominence.
Similarly, the poets of the Beat Generation -- Allen Ginsberg,
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder -- seem so much the products
of period and ambience
(San Francisco in the mid 1950s) that their style of "hydrogen
jukebox" protest poetry, to borrow a phrase from Ginsberg,
is distinctly dated now. With
Ginsberg, smiling in suit and tie from the pages of Time, having
been transformed into an eminence grise of sexual and other forms
of liberation and
Snyder becoming one of the chief spokespersons for ecological
concerns, the Beats, like so many other figures that thirty-five
years ago seemed
outrageous, have passed into respectability. One contemporary
poet has given the Beats a sly left-handed compliment; Dana Gioia,
who was growing up
in California when they were most prominent, has written, "Their
unfailing verbosity and heroic self-absorption proved a constant
inspiration -- showing
me everything I didn't want to do. One cannot overestimate the
importance of negative examples at certain points in literary
history when sensibilities
shift" (89). Today, it is hard to imagine, given the explicit
content of the heavy metal or rap lyrics that bombard one almost
anywhere, in an age when
Madonna's Sex graces the middle-class coffee tables of Gopher
Prairie, that Allen Ginsberg's Howl was the focus of a censorship
trial when it was first
published. More than any of the other groups, the Beats' program
has been co-opted by franchised popular culture; ten minutes of
MTV, with nuclear
bombs exploding to the pulse of screaming guitars and wails of
post-adolescent angst, far surpasses in degree anything that might
have caused the Beat
poets of the 1950s to be considered dangerous sociopaths.
The last of Baughman's schools, which he labels the New Black
Aesthetic, must today be expanded to include members of other
minority groups --
Hispanics, Orientals, Native Americans. Multiculturalism has become
one of the most vital and controversial academic issues of the
era, and the spirit of
Affirmative Action has clearly begun to influence the tables of
contents of anthologies and textbooks -- often so nakedly cynical
a corporate attempt at
political correctness for financial gain that one conservative
critic has labeled their tables of contents "canon to the
left of them." Even the latest edition of
a well established literature text like the Norton Anthology of
American Literature, Shorter Edition contains no white male poet
born since 1930. Other
than Sylvia Plath, the other recent poets included -- Audre Lorde,
Immamu Amiri Baraka, Michael Harper, Simon J. Ortiz, Rita Dove,
Alberto Ríos,
Cathy Song -- seem to have been chosen primarily , in the spirit
of affirmative action, as representatives of different ethnic
groups. As the population of
the United States (and thus of the college classrooms) reflects
the increasing diversity of ethnic backgrounds, it seems likely
that future overviews of
American poetry will be forced to include mention of more representatives
of minority cultures.
Once the schools have been discussed and their descendants
identified, what remains for the poets, and there are many of
them, who demonstrate no
discernible links to their elders? If there is a main current
in contemporary American poetry, it is probably indebted chiefly
to the most remarkable
phenomenon of all those that have helped to shape the current
state of the art -- the rise of the university creative writing
programs. In the mid 1960s
there was only a handful of graduate programs specializing in
creative writing; today, virtually every poet writing in America
has had some connection
with one, as student or teacher or as both, and that is simply
a reflection of the current economics of American poetry. Most
books published today
contain poems that have borne the scrutiny of a creative writing
class; indeed, most first books are merely revised versions of
theses or "creative
dissertations" submitted for graduate degrees. In any given
year the largest portion of new books is published by university
presses, and the chief means
of the dissemination of those books, in the absence of any real
attempt to sell poetry by the chain bookstores, is the university-sponsored
poetry reading,
which is usually followed by a book sale and autograph session
by the visiting poet. We are about to enter an era in which almost
every new book of
poems will be produced by a poet with, at the least, an M.F.A.,
who will be employed in a writing program issuing degrees to more
new poets. That
creative writing programs should have become such an entrenched
establishment, with a complex structure of hierarchies, career
strategies, and perks, in
so short a time is without precedent in the history of poetry.
Dana Gioia, in "Can Poetry Matter?", a widely discussed
article in the Atlantic, lamented this
situation, but it is not likely to change in the immediate future.
Still, it is not hard to imagine what the effects of these
market realities have been and will continue to be. For one thing,
the workshop approach to
poetry, with so many different hands whittling away at the original
version of a poem, tends to remove vitality along with rough edges.
If a poet reacts to
the verdict of his peers by removing anything that gives offense
to any member of the workshop, he or she may end with a bland
product, like a
processed, pre-packaged food, pitched to the widest possible taste
but satisfying no one in particular -- what Donald Hall, in "Poetry
and Ambition,"
labels the "McPoem." If a poet's advanced degree and
future livelihood are riding on successful completion of a workshop,
it stands to reason that he or
she will not risk offending anyone. Instead of nurturing excellence,
the workshops all too often foster blandness and mediocrity.
Likewise, the university poetry reading, where the poet must
entertain a crowd largely composed of undergraduates in search
of extra-credit points, has a
dangerous allure. Does the poet, consciously or not, water down
his poems to suit a crowd that does not have a printed text to
follow? Robert Lowell
reported such an effect in his own work when he toured California
in the late 1950s; luckily for him the result was Life Studies.
Will she drop the vatic
mantle and instead put on the baggy pants of the stand-up comic
in hopes of winning over the crowd? Nothing is easier than charming
an audience full
expecting to be bored to death. Will the easy sentiment, the pious
platitude, and the politically correct sentiment of the moment
prevail? If ever there were
an audience tailor-made for an hour of preaching to the choir
it exists in the universities. No wonder Maya Angelou is the best-known
poet in America
today and the highest-paid on campus ($10,000 per diem is her
current rate).
It is, of course, impossible to say what the future holds,
but the situation today is analogous to that of a century ago,
when there was no consensus in
either America or Great Britain about which poets, if any, were
deserving of major status. The great voices of the Romantic and
Victorian eras had
grown silent, and the founders of modernism were still in knee
pants. In his portentously titled critical work The Fate of American
Poetry (1991)
Jonathan Holden, who is the most eloquent apologist for the present
generation, argues that the "mainstream of American poetry
. . . has continued to
be, whether narrative or meditative, in a realist mode that is
essentially egalitarian, university-based, and middle class, and
to be written in a free verse
that has, by and large, vastly improved since the sixties, evolved
into a flexible medley of older prosodies so rich in echoes that
it bears out Eliot's
famous dictum that 'No verse is ever really free'" (47-48).
Whether this modest aesthetic has produced or will produce poems
that will stand the test of
time remains open to question. It may be that the rise to prominence
of the creative writing programs will be eventually be viewed
as American poetry's
quattrocento. On the other hand, the Pounds and Eliots of the
first decades of the next century may see our current situation
as merely a stultifying
orthodoxy that can only be revitalized by open revolt. Still,
if the past is any guide, of the thousands of poems produced by
the members of this
generation a few will survive for the delight and instruction
of gentle readers in distant places and times. Ars longa, vita
brevis. And, if one believes in
the mysterious continuity of literary culture, that is all that
really matters.
Works Cited
Baughman, Ronald. "A Field Guide to Recent Schools of American
Poetry." Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook. 1986
ed. Columbia: Bruccoli, 1987: 114-26.
Bly, Robert. The Light Around the Body. New York: Harper, 1967.
Gioia, Dana. "Can Poetry Matter?" Atlantic May 1991:
94-106.
Hall, Donald. Poetry and Ambition. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P,
1988.
Holden, Jonathan. The Fate of American Poetry. Athens: U of Georgia
P, 1991.
McPhillips, Robert. "What's New About the New Formalism?"
Expansive Poetry. Ed. Frederick Fierstein.
Santa Cruz: Story Line, 1989. 195-208.
Perloff, Marjorie. "The Word As Such: L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poetry
in the Eighties." American Poetry Review 13.3 (1984): 16.
See also The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage. Princeton:
Princeton UP, 1981.
Peters, Robert. Hunting the Snark: A Compendium of New Poetic
Terminology. New York: Paragon, 1989.
Phillips, Robert. The Confessional Poets. Carbondale:
Southern Illinois UP, 1973.
Padgett, Ron, and David Shapiro, eds. An Anthology of
New York Poets. New York: Vintage, 1970.
Turco, Lewis. Visions and Revisions of American Poetry.
Fayetteville: U of Arkansas P, 1986.
R.S. Gwynn