THE FACTS ON FILE COMPANION TO

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The Facts On File Companion to 20th-Century American Poetry

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The Facts On File companion to 20th-century poetry /[edited by] Burt Kimmelman. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8160-4698-0 (alk. paper) 1. American poetry—20th century—History and criticism—Handbooks, manuals, etc. I. Title: Companion to 20th-century poetry. II. Kimmelman, Burt. III. Facts On File, Inc.

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This book is printed on acid-free paper. CONTENTS CD

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS v FOREWORD vi INTRODUCTION xiv

A-TO-Z ENTRIES 1

APPENDIXES I. GLOSSARY 539 II. SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 542

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS 547 INDEX 550

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS CD This volume is the result of the efforts of a good many Christopher Funkhouser, and Nikki Stiller, contributed people who have my deepest gratitude, some of whom essays to this book. I am also profoundly thankful for I may neglect to mention here, fallible memory being the intelligence and time Norbert Elliot, Tom Fink, and what it is. I am beholden to Mickey Pearlman, who con- Sherry Kearns (who also contributed essays), as well as tacted me and urged me to offer my services to Facts Jeff Soloway, donated to the writing of the book’s intro- On File; to Anne Savarese, former Facts On File editor, duction. And I am grateful to Burton Hatlen for his who worked with me to conceive this project and set it wonderful foreword to the book. I must also thank the in motion; to Jeff Soloway, senior editor at Facts On many contributors to this volume, whose knowledge, File, whose patience, care, and acuity have been indis- wit, and graceful writing will surely make it a success. pensable; and to Jessica Allen, whose perspicacity in Lastly, I am, as always, most thankful for the good copyediting has been more than one could have hoped natured love and support of my wife, Diane Simmons, for. I must also thank my colleagues at New Jersey and our daugther, Jane Kimmelman, without whom Institute of Technology for their encouragement and none of this would have been possible. understanding and, in some cases, their participation— especially Robert E. Lynch and Norbert Elliot, who, —Burt Kimmelman along with Doris Zames Fleischer, Robert S. Friedman,

v FOREWORD CD 20TH-CENTURY AMERICAN participated in the dominant political mood of the POETRY: SOME GUIDEPOSTS moment, but more often, especially in the imperial epoch extending from World War II to the present, As Burt Kimmelman emphasizes in his eloquent intro- the poets have fiercely questioned beliefs and atti- duction to this volume, all of the poems, poets, and lit- tudes that most other Americans have apparently erary movements described in the pages that follow accepted as simply “common sense,” so that the poet- share a common “Americanness.” Yet the very essence ry community has seemed at times the most insis- of “Americanness” is diversity, the many in the one and tently skeptical and critical of the various American the one in the many, as Walt Whitman, grandfather of countercultures. (Robert Creeley, at the start of the all American bards, insisted: “I hear America singing, / 21st century one of the last surviving members of a The varied carols I hear” (emphasis mine). Thus it may generation of major poets that emerged in the 1950s, be useful to attempt a chart of the various kinds of was recently heard to ask, “How is it that I don’t “Americanness” at work in the poetry written in this know anyone who supports the policies of George W. country during the last 100 years. The chartings that I Bush?”) Yet regional differences have often been no will here propose are chronological as well as regional less important than the historical shifts that have and ideological, for the sense of what it means to be an occurred over the course of the 20th century, for New American, and specifically an American poet, has shift- York is not California, and New England is not the ed over time. At the beginning of the 20th century, the Southwest. We must also recognize radically different United States made its first tentative forays toward aesthetic commitments that have sometimes united, becoming an imperial power, but most Americans still sometimes separated poets across both historical thought of themselves as a people apart, purified by epochs and cultural regions. And in the late decades immersion in a New World Eden. With World War I of the 20th century, the very notion that we can the United States became a significant player on an define a single American identity has been challenged international stage, but the interwar years saw a by poets seeking to speak for a range of previously renewed sense of American uniqueness, often summed marginalized communities defined by ethnicity, gen- up in the label isolationism. Then World War II and the der, and/or sexual preference. ensuing decades saw a full-blown efflorescence of a “On or about December 1910, human nature distinctively American variety of imperialism, as the changed,” Virginia Woolf famously declared, and we nation set out to become the arbiter of the destiny of may date the birth of 20th-century American poetry to the planet. Our poets have sometimes enthusiastically the same pivotal moment. Among the tiny group of

vi FOREWORD vii

American poets whose careers carried across from the If to my list of the five poets grouped around Pound 19th into the 20th centuries, only three poets survive we add Wallace Stevens and Gertrude Stein, we have a to find a place in this encyclopedia: Edwin Arlington galaxy of major poets who collectively define the most Robinson, Adelaide Crapsey, and Jeanne Robert Foster. influential poetic movement of the 20th century, inter- Aging anthologies and histories of American literature national modernism. Pound showed no interest in preserve a few other names—William Vaughan Moody, Stevens’s poetry, but Williams came to know Stevens in Trumbull Stickney, George Santayana. However, in New York City during the World War I years, when 1905 the young Ezra Pound, H. D., and William both were members of a group of artists and writers Carlos Williams—Pound and Williams were students that met regularly at the home of Walter Arensberg, a at the University of Pennsylvania, and H. D was a wealthy art patron. Moore also moved on the fringes of friend of both—formed perhaps the first important lit- the Arensberg group, and she, too, came to know and erary fellowship of the new century. Although Pound admire Stevens’s work at this time. In his role as editor and Williams did not come to know and admire of Others magazine during the war years, Williams pub- Marianne Moore until later, Moore and H. D. were at lished Stevens’s poetry, while in the 1920s Moore least aware of one another during the year they spent solicited some of his poems for publication in The Dial. as fellow students at Bryn Mawr, so we may add Moore And in the 1930s Stevens contributed a preface to to form a unique quartet of “Philadelphia modernists.” Williams’s first Collected Poems. Thus we can perhaps Around this nexus of personal relationships a new create a subgroup of New York–area modernists poetic movement would crystallize, although each of encompassing Williams, Moore, and Stevens. Stein was the poets in question would arrive at a unique person- never a close friend of any of the poets mentioned thus al voice. In 1905 Pound and Williams were already far and an outspoken critic of some of them, although writing poetry, but in a distinctly 19th-century idiom: Williams visited her in Paris and admired her work. But They were, in a phrase from Pound’s 1921 poem while she was not part of the network of personal rela- “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley,” in search of “the sublime in tionships that linked our other poets, she is a crucial the old sense.” But by 1910 Pound was in London, figure in this story, as the most important mediator acutely aware of new poetic possibilities emerging on between Parisian modernism—cubism, fauvism, etc.— the continent. In a series of essays published in 1913 and American writers, artists, and composers. Conrad under the collective title The Approach to Paris, he Aiken, a friend of Eliot’s from Harvard, also perhaps directed American poets toward a serious reading of belongs in this list of major modernists, but to most poets such as Jules Laforgue, Tristan Corbiere, and, observers he has come to seem a lesser figure. Some above all, Arthur Rimbaud, whose work of the 1870s critics would add to the list Mina Loy, a British expatri- pointed the way toward a poetics of radical disjunc- ate who arrived in New York during the World War I tion and indeterminacy. By 1913 H. D. had also years and there met Williams and possibly Stevens and moved to London, and in that year Pound presented Moore. Laura Riding (Jackson), E. E. Cummings, and her poetry as the model of imagisme, a literary move- Hart Crane also belong on any list of major American ment consciously modeled on the various aesthetic modernist poets, but they were somewhat younger than “isms” emanating from Paris: symbolisme, unanisme, the poets mentioned thus far and began to write under etc., with cubism a first cousin in the visual arts. Then the shadow of the first generation modernists. a year or so later, T. S. Eliot, who had already written The modernism of Pound, Eliot, H. D., Moore, portions of “Portrait of a Lady” and “The Love Song of Williams, Stevens, and Stein is “international” in a basic J. Alfred Prufrock” while a student at Harvard, arrived way: Four of these seven poets chose to live in and write in London and quickly became a central figure in the from Europe. Eliot became a British citizen. After World Pound circle. (Williams detested Eliot’s poetry, and War I, Pound returned to the United States only once Eliot was indifferent to Williams’s, but they had Pound willingly, for a short visit, and then for a second time in common.) under duress, after his arrest for treason during World viii FOREWORD

War II. Stein is forever linked to Paris in the popular Today the standard classroom anthologies devote imagination, although she made an extended celebrity more space to the exponents of international mod- tour of the United States in 1934–35, and H. D. made ernism than to any other group of 20th-century only two brief visits to the United States after she took American poets, and all of them receive maximum up residence in Europe, the first shortly after World space in this encyclopedia. However, the esteem that War I and the second in the late 1950s. But even these poets enjoy today is largely retrospective, as dur- Williams, Stevens, and Moore, all of whom chose to live ing their lifetimes other poets often had larger audi- in the United States, maintained a distinctly interna- ences and received more respect from critics. The most tional perspective. All three lived in or near New York acclaimed American poet throughout much of the 20th City, the main point of communication between century was Robert Frost, who also lived during the America and Europe. Stevens, although he never went second decade of the century for a time in London, to Europe, read widely in French poetry and cultural where he brushed up against Pound. But Frost commentary, while Williams, who spent a year in returned to America and with Edwin Arlington Europe during the 1920s, was powerfully influenced by Robinson defined a New England alternative to inter- such European literary/artistic movements as cubism national modernism. Frost borrowed the title of his and surrealism. And most significantly, all seven of my first book from Longfellow, and neither Frost nor major international modernists shared with European Robinson saw any need to reject the traditional poetic modernist painters (Picasso, Matisse, Braque, et al.), forms or the lyric voice characteristic of the English composers (Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Webern, et al.), poetic tradition. Despite the dark undercurrents in and writers (Joyce, Proust, Mann, Apollinaire, Valéry, their vision of the world, both Frost and Robinson Rilke, et al.) a determination to interrogate the most enjoyed during their lifetimes an audience markedly fundamental principles of their art forms. A range of larger than the audiences of the modernists. No less formal vocabularies that had endured since the popular was another native New Englander, Edna St. Renaissance all came into question during this period: Vincent Millay, who also saw no need to reject either in painting, the illusion of three-dimensional space, the metrical line or the lyric voice. Meanwhile, in the constructed through the application of the “laws” of years during and after World War I, a group of Chicago perspective; in music, the diatonic scale with its atten- poets sought to define a populist alternative both to dant harmonies; in fiction, the linear narrative and the the radical experimentalism of the international mod- controlling authorial point of view; and in poetry, the ernists and to the formal decorum of the New England metrical line and the unitary lyric voice. The seven poets. Carl Sandburg and Edgar Lee Masters both American poets that I have identified as exemplars of employed a loose free verse modeled primarily on international modernism are very different from each Whitman’s, while Vachel Lindsay sought to revive a other in some important ways: Williams’s insistence on tradition of performance poetry. Looking out to the the “American ground” contrasts with the condescen- Pacific from his home in Carmel, California, Robinson sion toward all things American that we sometimes see Jeffers also adapted the long, cadenced Whitman line in Pound, Eliot, and H. D., while H. D.’s continuing in his search for a poetic idiom that could do justice to loyalty to the romantic tradition contrasts with the the vast and still largely empty expanses of the western ostensible antiromanticism of Pound and Eliot, et al. landscape. His poetry has remained an important But these writers were bound together not only by (in influence on later West Coast poets such as William most cases) a network of personal associations to which Everson, Kenneth Rexroth, and Gary Snyder. they were often deeply loyal but also by a desire to con- In the late 1920s and 1930s, a group of southern struct alternatives to the traditional formal vocabularies poets, often grouped under the self-chosen labels of that had defined “poetry” for their predecessors, and Fugitives or Agrarians; also affirmed a self-consciously they “made it new” (“it” here being poetry itself) in ways regional alternative to international modernism, and that continue to inspire poets of the 21st century. their example became an important force in American FOREWORD ix poetry. John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Robert include Delmore Schwartz, Elizabeth Bishop, and John Penn Warren all identified with Eliot’s social and cul- Berryman, along with Lowell and Jarrell. The members tural conservatism and intermittently adopted his iron- of this circle, in addition to certain other poets who ic, high-Mandarin tone, but they retreated from the rad- shared many of their aspirations (for example, Theodore ical formal experimentalism of Pound, Williams, and Roethke, Richard Wilbur, and W. D. Snodgrass), were, Moore—an experimental impulse also evident in the during the 1950s and 1960s, widely regarded as the Eliot of The Waste Land, although this impulse fades in most significant poets of the period. Many of these poets his later work. The southern Agrarians all taught in col- followed the example of poets such as Frost, Ransom, leges or universities and wrote criticism as well as poet- and the enormously influential British expatriate W. H. ry. (Warren also wrote a series of successful novels.) In Auden in cultivating an expertise in traditional poetic alliance with influential critics such as Cleanth Brooks forms and meters; and the metrical subtleties of Bishop, and with other poet/critics, including Kenneth Burke Berryman, Wilbur, Snodgrass, and Lowell (at least in his and R. P. Blackmur, the Agrarians became the founders earlier work) are often dazzling. Lowell, Berryman, and of a movement generally known as the New Criticism, Snodgrass share a self-lacerating irony that is sometimes which sought new ways of addressing a public that taken to be characteristic of the whole group, but once found poetry more and more opaque. Living in the again differences are as important as similarities. Neither West but in dialogue with the southern Agrarians, the Jarrell nor Bishop is primarily an ironic poet. Rather, poet/critics Yvor Winters and J. V. Cunningham also Jarrell’s poetry displays a remarkable capacity for empa- rejected what they saw as a surrender to chaos in the thetic identification with other people, while Bishop’s poetry of the high modernists. Tate and Winters were geographic imagination is unique. Most of these poets both friends of Hart Crane, whose spectacular but ulti- were, like Ransom and Warren before them, at least mately disastrous career became for them an example of intermittently academics, although again Bishop is an the dangers of modernist excess. As poets, Ransom, exception. As academic appointments carried these Tate, Warren, Blackmur, Winters, and Cunningham no poets about the country, regional affiliations here longer command much attention: all six receive only became less significant. However, Lowell and Bishop short entries in this encyclopedia. However, they are were distinctly New England poets, while Roethke stood historically significant insofar as they established a tra- within an identifiable lineage of midwestern poets (his dition of what has sometimes been called (usually deri- successors have included, for example, James Wright sively) “academic” poetry: a relatively decorous, often and Robert Bly), and Jarrell and Berryman both had formally traditional poetry written by men and women southern roots. Many influential critics (Helen Vendler, who have spent significant time in the classroom. Such for example) continue to regard the lineage defined by poetry tends to be relatively “closed” both in its forms these poets as the “mainstream” of American poetry, a and in its cultural attitudes, as it seeks to build in art a judgment also reflected in such widely used anthologies refuge from which the poet can contemplate the various as J. D. McClatchy’s Vintage Book of Contemporary disorders of modern life. American Poetry. At the start of the 21st century, further- The tradition defined by Ransom, Tate, and Warren more, many still-active poets continue to write within a passes directly to Robert Lowell, who went to Kenyon poetic mode that passes from Eliot (with the qualifica- College to study with Tate and Ransom. While there, tions noted above) and Ransom through Lowell, Jarrell, Lowell became friends with Randall Jarrell, and togeth- and their associates: for example, Frank Bidart, Alfred er Lowell and Jarrell became the center of another cru- Corn, Mark Doty, Stephen Dobyns, Edward Hirsch, and cial group of young poets who were, like the Pound cir- many others. cle in an earlier generation, bound together by bonds of The southern Fugitive poet/critics and their heirs personal friendship as well as a common aesthetic that recognized that universities were becoming positions they seem to have arrived at through exchanges among of power in American society, offering poets the possi- themselves. Eventually this new grouping reached out to bility of both a secure livelihood and a new kind of x FOREWORD public visibility, based not on the volume of their book and its relationship to the perceived world. Reznikoff sales (in the postwar period, Frost and Ginsberg were remained throughout his life loyal to Pound’s imagist probably the only significant American poets to earn aesthetic, while Zukofsky became a close friend of both enough to live on from the sale of their books) but on Pound and Williams and initiated a strenuous polemic a charismatic classroom style and triumphant reading on behalf of their work as well as the work of Moore tours. However, the dominance of the academic poets and (later in his life) Stevens. Oppen owed a manifest from the 1930s to the 1950s was challenged from the and freely acknowledged debt to both Pound and beginning by other writers who rejected the tacit con- Williams; Niedecker, too, distilled her aesthetic from servatism—whether political or aesthetic or both—of the modernists via her close friend Zukofsky; while the mainstream academic poets. In the 1930s a group Stevens and Eliot exercised a palpable influence on of left-wing poets grouped loosely around the Rakosi. The anticommunist hysteria of the postwar Communist Party, including Tom McGrath, Kenneth years pushed all of the left poets into the shadows, but Fearing, Muriel Rukeyser, and Walter Lowenfels, starting in the 1960s, poets such as Rukeyser, offered an alternative to the social conservatism of Eliot Zukofsky, and Oppen have been increasingly recog- and his various followers, southern Agrarian or other- nized as major American poets. wise, while Trotskyites such as John Wheelwright and In the postwar years, the imperial ambitions of the anarchists such as Kenneth Rexroth and Kenneth Soviet Union and the manifestly repressive nature of Patchen sought to define the possibility of an anti- Soviet society made communism an increasingly unat- Stalinist left. While the specific aura of doctrinaire tractive alternative, but a large group of American poets political commitment becomes rarer after World War continued to question the inherent perfection both of II, some later poets—for example, Philip Levine and commodity capitalism as a form of social organization C. K. Williams—have sought to preserve the engage- and of the lyric ego as a mode of poetic expression. ment with working-class experience represented by Beginning in 1951, one important such group came poets like McGrath and Fearing. In the 1930s, most of together around Cid Corman’s Origin magazine, which the left-wing poets listed above (Wheelwright was an gave an initial airing to the work of Charles Olson, exception) were content to write within a Whitman- Robert Creeley, William Bronk, Larry Eigner, Theodore esque poetic mode, a readily accessible and often Enslin, and others. Olson and Creeley quickly estab- assertively colloquial free verse idiom. But another lished themselves at the center of an overlapping poetic group of poets emerged in the 1930s who combined network, the so-called Black Mountain group, another political radicalism with formal experimentation in the one of those affinity groups, bound together both by tradition of the modernists. These were the so-called personal friendship and aesthetic commitments, which objectivist poets: Charles Reznikoff, Louis Zukofsky, have so often set the direction of American poetry. The Carl Rakosi, George Oppen, Lorine Niedecker, and the Black Mountain group numbered among its members British poet Basil Bunting. In much the same way as Paul Blackburn, Denise Levertov, Joel Oppenheimer, Pound was at the center of the modernists, Zukofsky Edward Dorn, Jonathan Williams, and Robert Duncan, was the nodal point of the objectivists: All were linked all of whom either taught or studied at Black Mountain to him by personal friendship, even though Oppen College, where Olson served as rector in the early and Niedecker, for example, apparently never met, and 1950s, or were linked to the Black Mountain Review, edit- Rakosi and Oppen did not meet until late in their lives. ed by Creeley in the mid-1950s. Duncan served as a link All the objectivists were sympathetic to the political between Black Mountain and an already established San left, and Rakosi and Oppen both joined the Francisco nexus that included Robin Blaser, Jack Spicer, Communist Party for a time. But at the same time, the and Helen Adam; and this link was solidified when objectivist poets—inspired by the example of the mod- Creeley moved to San Francisco after Black Mountain ernists, especially Pound and Williams—also stimulat- College closed in 1957. In the mid-1950s, San Francisco ed one another to pursue a rigorous testing of language also become the home base of the Beat poets, notably FOREWORD xi

Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, Diane di academic poets: a free-wheeling, process-based poetics Prima, Michael McClure, John Wieners, and Lawrence that saw the poem not as articulation of already-estab- Ferlinghetti, who published the early work of many of lished truths but as an exploration into untracked terri- these poets through his City Lights Press. Kenneth tories. (“I write poetry,” Duncan said memorably, “to Rexroth briefly served as the impresario of this San find out what I am going to say.”) During the 1960s Francisco poetry scene, which also included some other new movements sympathetic to the aesthetic of natives of the West Coast, such as Gary Snyder, Philip the New American poetry also emerged, including the Whalen, and Joanne Kyger, all of whom looked to the ethnopoetics of Jerome Rothenberg and Armand Buddhist traditions of India and Japan for spiritual and Schwerner and the talk-poetry of David Antin; all these aesthetic guidance. Relationships among the various San poets were initially based in the New York area. Francisco groups were not always harmonious, but Then the last years of the 1960s saw the emergence among them they created an extraordinarily vital poetic of a younger group of poets who continued to identify world in the 1950s, with reverberations down to the end with the Pound/Williams/Olson/Creeley lineage (or of the century. sometimes with a Stein/Pound/Williams/Creeley/ If Duncan and Creeley served as liaisons between Ashbery lineage), but who contended that their prede- Black Mountain and the San Francisco Renaissance, cessors had not gone far enough in the interrogation of Paul Blackburn played a similar role with an emerging language as a self-perpetuating ideological system. New York School of poets that included Frank O’Hara, Thus the self-labeled “Language poets” set about a John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, James Schuyler, Ted deconstruction of “meaning” itself. Once again San Berrigan, Kenneth Koch, and, for a time, Amiri Baraka Francisco and New York served as the twin centers of (then Leroi Jones). The New York School (and once this new avant garde: Ron Silliman, Lyn Hejinian, Bob again most of these poets were personal friends as well Perelman, Barrett Watten, Carla Harryman, Kathleen as literary allies) shared a distinctive aesthetic, grounded Fraser, Rae Armantrout, and others were all, at least in a witty subversion of all romantic posturing, an empa- initially, based on the West Coast, while Charles thy with abstract expressionism in the visual arts Bernstein, Fanny and Susan Howe, Bruce Andrews, (O’Hara and Ashbery were both art critics as well as Bernadette Mayer, Joan Retallack, and others have rep- poets), a delight in the vagaries of American pop culture, resented the East Coast wing of the Language poetry and a forthright affirmation of alternative sexual identi- movement. Silliman’s 1986 anthology In the American ties. In 1960 an intrepid editor, Donald Allen, ventured Tree sought to bring together the East and West Coasts to link the East and West Coasts into a movement that of the Language poetry movement, in much the same he saw as dedicated to the creation of a “New American way that Allen’s The New American Poetry brought Poetry,” and the publication of his anthology under that together the two coasts a generation earlier. The latest title represents a decisive moment in our literary histo- bicoastal vision of American poetry, like Allen’s, might ry. The 1960s challenged all the certainties of American be faulted for leaving out everything between the life: The Civil Rights movement called into question the coasts. Further, the poets that anthologists have sought degree to which America offered equal justice to its own to constrain within such categories as “the New citizens; the movement against the Vietnam War chal- American poetry” or “Language poetry” repeatedly lenged the assumption that our nation self-evidently insist on going their own ways. That John Ashbery was embodied “freedom” to all the peoples of the world; and once part of the “New York School” seems, for exam- the women’s movement questioned power relationships ple, less and less germane as a key to the understand- within not only the workplace but even the home. At ing of his work, while classifying Susan Howe as a the threshold of the decade of what has sometimes been “Language poet” doesn’t tell us much about the vision called the Third American Revolution (the Second was of American history that her work unfolds. Still, to the the Civil War), the Allen anthology defined a clear alter- end of the century, the poets of a lineage defined by the native to the social and aesthetic conservatism of the Allen and Silliman anthologies have continued to offer xii FOREWORD themselves as an avant-garde, united by an adversarial modes, from Baraka’s “projectivist” early verse, written cultural stance and questioning all a priori assumptions in dialogue with Olson and O’Hara, through the Beat about what a poem should be and do. Meanwhile, and idiom of Bob Kaufman and the beautifully modulated perhaps partly in response to the increasingly uncom- lyric voices of Robert Hayden and Rita Dove, to the epic promising tone of the manifestos issued by the aspirations of Derek Walcott, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Language poets, a counter-avant-garde often labeled Jay Wright. The names listed here represent but a small New Formalism has produced a body of poetry and sample of the rich heritage of African-American poetry. theory that returns to traditional forms and strives to This body of poetry has made an active contribution to rebalance poetry in favor of meter and rhyme. the ongoing project of African-American self-definition, Representative New Formalists include Dana Gioia, while at the same time the imaginative scope of this Mark Jarman, and Robert McDowell. poetry has demanded a fundamental reconception of Much academic discussion of 20th-century the American poetic heritage itself. American poetry has centered on the clash between, on The corpus of African-American poetry had the one hand, the “mainstream” poets, who have tend- become, by the end of the century, sufficiently large ed to receive most of the prestigious literary prizes and, and various to qualify as a distinct poetic tradition, until recently at least, to dominate the anthologies and, within an American literature increasingly defined not on the other hand, the insurgent poets of what we by its presumed unity but by its diversity. In this might now think of, with a full recognition that the spe- respect, African-American poetry has become the pro- cific names here are a bit arbitrary, as the Pound/ totype of other ethnically defined poetries. Perhaps Zukofsky/Olson/Hejinian/Bernstein lineage. Each of African-American literature moved ahead of other eth- these lineages has also found forceful critical spokesper- nic literatures in part because English early became the sons, notably Helen Vendler for the “mainstream” poets common language of black Americans. Slave owners and Marjorie Perloff for the tradition that extends from deliberately broke up African-language communities Pound to the Language poets. However, the years since because they feared the slaves would use their African World War II have also seen a broad challenge to both languages to plot rebellion. Remnants of African lan- of these lineages. Both the mainstream and the avant- guages did, however, linger on in Black English and garde traditions have defined themselves primarily have thence found their way into much African- through their contrasting approaches to poetic form, American poetry. In contrast, many Native American but a third group of poets has placed primary emphasis languages survived as active means of communication on content rather than form, as they have sought to give into the 20th century, and only relatively late in the poetic expression to the experiences of social groups century did a body of Native American poetry in that had previously been effectively silenced. As so English crystallize to define an alternative poetic tradi- often in American life, African Americans, the nation’s tion. By the end of the century, however, such writers largest and most brutally dispossessed minority, have as Simon Ortiz, Leslie Marmon Silko, Linda Hogan, been in the forefront of this effort to give voice to the Joy Harjo, and Sherman Alexie had begun to chart the voiceless. African-American poetry has often borrowed lineaments of a Native American poetic tradition. This forms and modes from the poetic possibilities afloat in tradition overlaps at times with a Hispanic-American the culture as a whole. Thus the early 20th-century poetic lineage. The situation of the Hispanic-American African-American poets Claude McKay, James Weldon poet, who may choose to reject English itself in favor Johnson, and Countee Cullen generally worked within of the rich heritage of Spanish and Latin American lit- traditional poetic forms. But with Melvin Tolson and erature, is perhaps even more ambiguous than that of Langston Hughes, African-American poetry also began the Native American poet. However, a significant to explore the new poetic possibilities opened up by the group of poets has written out of this position as mem- modernists, and in the last half of the century, African- bers of an Hispanic linguistic community (and there American writing opened into a broad range of poetic are in fact several different such communities in the FOREWORD xiii

United States, from the Chicano/Chicana world of the demanded a poetry that would speak out of and to their Southwest to the “Nuyorican” world of New York City) own distinctive experiences as women. By century’s end, surrounded and often overwhelmed by an English- the women’s movement that erupted in the 1960s had speaking world: for example, Rafael Campo, Alberto permanently transformed the politics not only of the Rios, Martin Espada, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Judith workplace and of the household but also of the poetry Ortiz Cofer, and Jimmy Santiago Baca. community. The voices of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton The emergence of an explicit ethnic consciousness (both too early silenced by suicide) became models (in among African-American, Native American, and part cautionary) for a generation of young women writ- Hispanic-American writers has also encouraged a ers, while Adrienne Rich offered a more positive, even renewed ethnic self-consciousness among other groups. heroic model: The voices of women, she and her fol- In particular, the last decades of the century saw a wide- lowers and admirers insisted, were different, and they spread recognition of a distinctively Jewish-American would be heard. The new women’s writing that found its tradition within our literature. It has come to seem no way into print beginning in the 1960s covers an accident, for example, that almost all of the objectivist immense formal range, from the Language poetries of poets of the 1930s generation shared a Jewish heritage. Lyn Hejinian, Leslie Scalapino, Beverly Dahlen, Kathleen The political radicalism of these poets was in part a Fraser, or Joan Retallack, through the neo-objectivism of function of their ethnicity, as immigrant Jews brought a Rachel Blau DuPlessis, to the more traditional poetic tradition of socialist and communist theory and prac- modes of Sandra Gilbert, Marilyn Hacker, or Carolyn tice to the United States. And when George Oppen pas- Kizer. At the same time as these new poetic voices found sionately insists that “The self is no mystery, the mystery their way into print, scholars and poet/critics began to is / That there is something for us to stand on,” his recover a whole galaxy of women poets who had been vision of the relationship between the perceiving sub- more or less buried by a male-dominated literary estab- ject and a larger mystery may owe something to the lishment: If writers like H. D., Mina Loy, and Lorine Jewish heritage. Furthermore, the objectivists’ combi- Niedecker have finally assumed their rightful places nation of a deep skepticism about language and an within the literary canon, we must thank primarily the impassioned commitment to Truth has been carried work of a remarkable generation of women scholars. forward by a group of younger poets who are also large- Further, poets such as Gwendolyn Brooks, Lucille ly Jewish: This Neo-objectivist group might include, for Clifton, Nikki Giovanni, June Jordan, Rita Dove, and example, Hugh Seidman, Michael Heller, Armand Audre Lorde have been increasingly recognized not only Schwerner, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, and even the editor as black poets but also as women poets, sharing a broad of this encyclopedia, Burt Kimmelman, who has mod- range of experiences and concerns with all women poets estly omitted any entry on his own poetry. A recogni- among their contemporaries. At the same time, the work tion of the role that ethnicity played in the work of the of feminist critics has allowed us to read in new ways objectivist and neo-objectivist poets also allows us to already canonical writers such as Gertrude Stein, bring these poets into dialogue with Jewish American Marianne Moore, and Elizabeth Bishop. This quiet rev- poets writing in more rhetorical and incantatory poetic olution effected by women poets and scholar since the idioms, such as Muriel Rukeyser, Allen Ginsberg, Allen 1960s might remind us that both American poetry itself Grossman, or even Adrienne Rich. and the ways we conceptualize our poetic tradition However, in many ways the most dynamic literary remain, as we enter the 21st century, still dynamic, fluid, movement of the late 20th century—a movement that in process—open to new possibilities, as our society as a has now carried forward into the 21st century—has whole must be, too, if we are to survive the new century. been a newly self-conscious and self-assertive tradition of women’s writing. Throughout the 20th century, —Burton Hatlen, Director women made up the primary audience for poetry, and National Poetry Foundation beginning in the 1960s women readers increasingly University of Maine INTRODUCTION CD “Make it new,” the poet and sometime evangelist of the they “seem to speak to us from out of the depths of literary avant garde Ezra Pound insisted, as the 20th their solitude; even the distanced, hieratic tone of a century was under way. “Literature is news that stays John Crowe Ransom or the elaborate patternings of a news” was another of his formulations meant to exhort Marianne Moore cannot disguise the fact that they too poets to find their own path, to break ground, to put a are engaged in a lonely confrontation with the real,” literary tradition in its proper perspective. Eras do not Gray continues (15). American poetry of the last cen- neatly begin and end on time; the fact of a new centu- tury embodied the sense of the particular, of the here ry, as told by a calendar, does not necessarily change and now, of what are markedly American—as opposed how people think and feel. Even so, in January 1900 to British—concerns and language. “For the first time,” Americans must have felt excitement at the thought of Louis Untermeyer announced in his 1919 anthology a new kind of life ahead of them (calendars do lend The New Era in American Poetry, “a great part of meaning, after all). For Pound, as well as for other American letters is actually American. We have had, of artists and intellectuals, it was easy to imagine that course, music, art and literature in this country before. their new century was to be one of great promise. The But it has not been, as a rule, a native growth; it has object of Pound’s imperatives was poetry, but, whether merely been transplanted and produced here” (3). he meant it or not, he was also putting a broader When considered as a body of work, the new national impulse into words. American poetry was idiosyncratic, not afraid of inno- In the early 19th century Alexis de Tocqueville had vation. Moreover, especially as the century progressed remarked upon American individualism, noting how and more voices other than those of principally white central it was to the growth of the new nation he was Anglo-Saxon males became audible, American poetry visiting. That element in the American character comes evolved and reflected America’s diversity. “I contain to the fore in the poetry of the United States during multitudes,” Walt Whitman sang in the 19th century, what came to be thought of as “modern” times. Richard many years ahead of his time. Gray describes 20th-century American poetry as one In 1913 Pound turned to Whitman, saying in his “of radical experiment, the personal address and fre- poem “A Pact,” “It was you that broke the new wood, / quently eccentric innovation” (15). Of course, in the Now it is time for carving.” A number of decades later, last century there were poets whom readers would not Charles Olson echoed Pound in “The Kingfishers” consider to have been experimental—Robert Frost and (1949) when he maintained, “What does not change / Edwin Arlington Robinson, for instance—yet even is the will to change.” There is such a thing as a “pecu-

xiv INTRODUCTION xv liarly American desire to start over,” Ed Folsom asserts; the “American Century.” As Parini has observed, 20th- this impulse made “twentieth-century [American] century American poetry had a love affair with the poets reticent about constructing a tradition as a back- image, not least of all because of the influence of the drop for their work” (16). Rather, these poets had to imagist and, later, the objectivist poets. Commenting invent a new kind of wheel in a process that has con- on that, he says, “even when there is an overarching tinued up to the present. Decades after Olson com- narrative,” imagery tends to be central and the poetry posed “The Kingfishers,” Adrienne Rich wrote of what exhibits “an overriding concern with concreteness” she called “The Dream of a Common Language” (xx). The breadth and multiplicity of 20th-century (Origins and History of Consciousness [1978]). As Jay American poetry are evident in its use of images, in the Parini points out (quoting Rich), the “dream is deeply very fact of their proliferation. The American language feminist, involving ‘women’s struggle to name the starts with and is embodied by things. world.’” (x) In “Transcendental Etude” (1978), Rich In the United States to be open to the new is to spoke of the “beginning” of “a whole new poetry.” To embrace the particulars of experience. A poem typical be sure, ultimately the struggle was not only taken up of this sensibility is Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” by women. From the start, Parini continues, poetry in (1913), with its “snapshot suddenness,” as Jed Rasula the United States “has been this dream of a common has put it (98). William Carlos Williams intoned, “no language” (x). ideas but in things.” His poem “The Red Wheelbarrow” What makes “common” that language Rich and (1923), Roger Mitchell has argued, shows that Williams Parini celebrate? Is it that women as well as men have not only “trusted the unadorned image to reveal beau- access to it? More elementally, is it a language that ty and truth” but also, more fundamentally, to reveal molds the foundation for a uniquely American identi- “unadorned reality itself” (30). Perhaps Williams, ty? By the end of the 20th century, a common among all modernist poets, was the most “radical” in American language had indeed come into being in his drive to start over; he was “willing to turn his back poetry as well as in the larger American culture, spo- on all existing ideas of culture and tradition” (31). Still ken by a panoply of voices and in a seemingly endless while someone like Williams was first and foremost an variety of poetic forms, which, collectively, make up a originator, he and others, such as Pound, Olson, and uniquely American sensibility. When the century Rich, adhered to a basic understanding of what it meant began there was only an inkling of such a language. In to be American. This understanding, which transcend- 1919 Untermeyer wrote, “[T]here is still an undeniable ed any particularity of image, prosodic form, or even beauty in the ancient myths, but to most of the living voice, came to be fully articulated during Williams’s poets it is a frayed and moth-eaten beauty. Their eyes lifetime. Together, these and many other poets forged do not fail to catch the glamor of the old tales, but they an American identity at the heart of which lies the fresh turn with creative desire to more recent and less shop- and the various. worn loveliness” (10). Beyond the insular world of poetry, the United States No period in the life of any nation brought forth as in the early 20th century found itself in the throes of many points of view and poetic oddnesses as did the invention. Twentieth-century America is normally American 20th century. Whatever would lie ahead, it thought of as a time and place of modernity, and, in fact, can be said that during this era—an era of both great the literary movement of modernism began with turmoil and achievement—American poetry collec- American formulations and endured, increasingly atten- tively stood as a distinctive testament to human aspi- uated, as the century evolved. It is interesting to note, ration, to human struggle and salutary accomplish- however, looking back from the vantage point of the ment, and to a condition that is especially American in 21st century, how much of the material and intellectual terms of outlook. The American trait of prizing the world normally associated with modern living was individual and adventure, the new and the diverse, was already in place by 1900. At the start of the 20th centu- a potential fully realized in what came to be known as ry, the ratio in the United States between agricultural xvi INTRODUCTION workers and factory workers was shifting dramatically. poem “How Indeterminacy Determines Us” (1962): At the same time there was a flood of immigrants. Cities, “Sight / is inward and sees itself, hearing, touch, / are the incubators of high culture, were growing quickly. inward. What do we know of an outer world?” The Skyscrapers, which actualized the metaphor of reaching point of view evoked here is a great leap away from upward to the heavens or, alternately, to the stars, were Robert Browning’s “God’s in His Heaven—/ All’s right already being constructed. Over distances, people could with the world” (“Pippa Passes” [1841]). communicate by telephone. In 1900 the U.S. per capita While communication technologies, such as televi- income (about $570) was the highest in the world; there sion and the Internet, have transformed society in were nearly a thousand colleges and universities and many ways, their effects—the dramatically social and more than 2,000 American daily newspapers, which psychological changes they have provoked—are not constituted half of all the newspapers being published fundamentally different from those created by the tele- anywhere. In that year work began on New York City’s phone and the wireless radio early in the century. Yet rapid transit subway system, the photostatic copying landing on the Moon and sending exploratory space- machine was invented, the “Brownie” camera was being ships to the ends of the solar system have ultimately marketed, and the paper clip was patented. Change was challenged definitions of what it means to be a human rampant and startling. In 1901 Guglielmo Marconi sent being; life beyond Earth can currently be contemplat- the first transatlantic wireless message. In 1906 a Stanley ed. Still this way of thinking was ushered in by the first Steamer automobile attained a speed of 127 miles per airplane flights. Transformation continues within a hour. In 1911 the first transcontinental airplane flight world predicated on transformation. The virtual reali- took place. An older—and surer—world was quickly ty created by computing, which causes a rethinking of fading away; the world of surprise had arrived. Henry individual identity and boundaries of the self—leading Adams wrote in 1900 that his “historical neck [was to the rise of cyberpoetry—calls into question those being] broken by the irruption of forces totally new” same limits that were challenged by the transformative (382, cf. Gray 30). Life was becoming more complicat- nature of viewing motion picture shows in the early ed. Adams felt that the “child born in 1900 would . . . part of the 20th century. What is important to see in be born into a new world which would not be a unity these developments is that the last century discovered but a multiple” (457, cf. Gray 30). how to understand a radically new world, one not While discoveries in science, especially in physics anticipated beforehand and not resembling anything and biology, in the later years of the 20th century that had come before, and the century produced revealed vast landscapes of possibility that inevitably unique methods of expressing this new awareness. would become the substance of poetry, these discoveries It was not so much that American poetry evolved were also presaged in the century’s early years. The idea in the 20th century in conjunction with a modern that the universe is comprised of 12 dimensions, for society. Rather, it was a task of that poetry to examine example, as is held by string theory, represents a depar- and express the meaning of this new way of the ture from classical physics, a science that still holds great world. In terms of the arts (with the possible excep- sway over everyday language—poems, in contrast, work tion of painting), the 19th century seemed not to pos- to reshape language and meaning one by one. This rift sess the sense of what was soon to arrive. Even the in the laws of nature as they were propounded by Sir poetry of Whitman and other key protomodern liter- Isaac Newton, in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, ary figures of the prior century—including Emily appeared with Albert Einstein’s theories of relativity Dickinson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar Allan Poe, (1905, 1916), then Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty and Herman Melville—did not comprehend the aes- principle (1927). Tangibility, objectivity, and subjectivi- thetic and cerebral concerns that were to arise. The ty were to be understood in new ways; predictability 20th-century American poet was writing a poetry in came to be conditional. This transformation lay at the a fully realized American language—no longer heart of, for instance, William Bronk’s conclusion to his European in its cast—about a United States that by INTRODUCTION xvii

1900 was becoming a world power. By the time Well before America was to enter World War I—a Pound had told poets, “Make it new,” the 20th centu- global conflict that left society profoundly disillu- ry was already unfolding its unique character that sioned about a human being’s capacity for destruction was, in great measure, due to intellectual realizations and degradation (as is reflected in Robert Graves’s then revolutionary, which would fundamentally alter monumental book Goodbye to All That [1929])— the conception of the world. In 1900 the ancient American society was being transformed materially, Minoan palace at Knossos was discovered, as was intellectually, and aesthetically. Invention of the self radon, the gamma ray, and quantum energy, and the and of the world in which the self resided are concepts third law of thermodynamics was postulated. In this that have always been central to American culture, same year Sigmund Freud published his influential beliefs epitomized by the American Revolution. opus The Interpretation of Dreams—without which the Invention in American poetry was a key to how socie- work of Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath (as readers see ty was to evolve in the 20th century. Something essen- her in lines like “At twenty I tried to die / And get tial changed in poetry as the new century was pro- back, back, back to you,” from her 1962 poem gressing. This development was to be spurred by cata- “Daddy”) or any confessional poet could not have clysmic events—the world wars and other military been written. conflicts, the sociopolitical upheavals of the 1930s, This was also the year that Theodore Dreiser’s novel and of the 1950s and 1960s, the landing of Americans Sister Carrie was published and that Giacomo Puccini’s on the Moon—and yet at bottom the stunning diversi- opera Tosca was first performed. And in 1901 Booker ty and originality of so much of 20th-century T. Washington’s autobiography Up from Slavery became American poetry is the result of the will to carve out a a bestseller, and Pablo Picasso began painting works territory all of one’s own. The American poet in the that are now famously categorized as belonging to his 20th century required that style and substance bespeak blue period. In 1902 Joseph Conrad published his an individuality—as if the poet made up the rules not novel Heart of Darkness, while the opera tenor Enrico only of writing but of life. Hence the work of the 20th Caruso made his first gramophone recordings. In 1903 century exhibited a dazzling array of metrics and prose Wassily Kandinsky inaugurated abstract painting with poetry and as many explorations of the individual psy- the showing of his Blue Rider. In arts and letters break- che and of world events that mark off this century as throughs were occurring year after year. The year 1913 qualitatively different from all of its predecessors. If the was especially noteworthy: Willa Cather published her European Middle Ages can be said to have been a time novel O Pioneers!, D. H. Lawrence published his novel when poets adhered to tradition and emulated what Sons and Lovers, and Frost published his first collection had come before, the 20th-century United States can of verse, A Boy’s Will. And in that same year Cecil B. be called its direct opposite. In this way Whitman was DeMille produced the feature-length Hollywood film, prescient. He looked ahead to a time when originality The Squaw Man; a Parisian opera audience rioted in would be so widespread as to be taken for granted, and reaction to a performance of Igor Stravinsky’s far- he sought an American tongue and a free verse poetic reaching musical work The Rite of Spring; and line. Racial and ethnic diversity are part of the equation Manhattan hosted the New York Armory Show, a trans- that gave rise to this collection of poetries; America is forming event for a poet like Williams, who was the great social experiment. Nevertheless, it is the drive amazed at the modern art he was able to view there, to stand alone that lies at heart of what has caused the including Marcel Duchamp’s painting Nude Descending ingenuity and range of this vast body of verse. a Staircase. Without these and other artistic innova- There were many schools and trends over the years tions, would Williams have otherwise postulated, as he between 1900 and 2000—imagism, the New York did subsequently, that a poem was a “machine made of school, Language poetry, to name but three. words,” and would the “machine aesthetic” have Remarkably, not only were there these various coales- gained ground in American poetry? cences of energy, attention, and vision among xviii INTRODUCTION

American poets, but there were also a great many poets out certain figures, as is inevitable in a project of this who did not fit easily or at all within these groupings. size. Time has helped to determine which poets from, The 20th-century poet went her or his own way and by for instance, the period of high modernism should be so doing reshaped the literary canon and the idea of included in a literary companion such as this is. what is beautiful or compelling. This process occurred When it came to deciding who from the 1970s or, say, daily as poetry burgeoned onto the page and into the the 1990s—postmodern poets—should be included, cafés, galleries, theaters, and other venues that have the decision-making process was far more difficult, served as the bases for other social and aesthetic however. To err on the side of caution, this book groupings. The example of Allen Ginsberg in 1955 tends toward inclusion (although, inevitably, a breaking ground with his reading of his long poem deserving poet may be left out, the result of imperfect Howl at San Francisco’s Six Gallery, which signaled the human endeavor or the constraints of space). All the emergence of the San Francisco Renaissance, is one of major poetic movements of the 20th century are dis- many instances of this poetic dynamic that is not pecu- cussed herein, certainly all the major poets, as well as liarly American in its substance but is distinctly many of the most pivotal and influential poems of the American in its spirit. American poetry in the 20th century. Some poets get more attention than they century was a protracted revolution in letters and, have received thus far. To cite one of several possible more broadly, in society. The poetry has been over- examples of this editorial discretion, the late mod- written by the movies, television, and the Internet. ernist, African-American poet Melvin Tolson is dis- Although the news of this revolt is no longer printed cussed at length, and his epic poem Harlem Gallery is much in newspapers or broadcast electronically, the examined, alongside the obviously necessary entries revolution itself survives—indeed, it flourishes— on such African-American poets as Gwendolyn because of the soul’s need for meaningful language that Brooks and Langston Hughes, as well as their respec- arises out of the human labor to shape language. tive poems (“The Bean Eaters” and “We Real Cool,” A A great many poets took Pound’s urgings to heart, Montage of a Dream Deferred and “The Negro Speaks and others followed his dicta even when they were not of Rivers,” respectively). Similarly while Rich is dis- conscious of the fact that they had been formalized and cussed at length (as are her poems “Diving into the enunciated by Pound. This happened despite his Wreck” and “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law”), there repugnant political and social ideas, because, poetical- is also an entry on lesser-known feminist poet Rachel ly, he spoke for his time. As its poetries attest, Blau DuPlessis (and another on her serial poem American arts and culture broke free decisively from Drafts). Going further, this volume includes an exten- Europe in the 20th century and came into its own. sive entry entitled “Female Voice, Female There was the need and urge to institutionalize in poet- Language”—one of nearly 500 entries, among which ry a distinctly American idiom, to write, as Williams are such topics as “ars poeticas,” “long and serial titled one of his books, In the American Grain (1925). poetry,” “prosody and free verse,” and “war and anti- That was in the early part of the century. By the late war poetry.” The book concludes with a glossary of century American language in poetry had reached its terms, such as, for example, iambic pentameter, to aid fullness and explored the human condition as well as the novice reader, and a bibliography for those who the condition of language itself with an unparalleled would desire further commentary. depth and variety. This volume records important and The United States is uniquely heterogeneous; so is representative articulations of 20th-century American its poetry. This country has often hosted a social van- experience and speech. guard, and this fact also has been reflected in its poet- I have striven to make this book comprehensive; ry (and in its other arts). The country dominated the yet, in its treatment of recent poets and poems, and world economically and militarily in the last century— despite the fact that the volume contains commentary this, too, has been reflected in the poetry of the era, on a disproportionate number of them, it still leaves often as praise and, at times, vituperation. This INTRODUCTION xix uniquely social, economic, political, intellectual, and Mitchell, Roger. “Modernism Comes to American Poetry: aesthetic experiment in the 20th century took root in a 1908–1920.” In A Profile of Twentieth-Century American dynamic nation, one that is arguably unprecedented. Poetry, edited by Jack Myers and David Wojahn. Its poetry justifies such a claim. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991, pp. 25–53. —Burt Kimmelman Gray, Richard. American Poetry of the Twentieth Century. New Newark, New Jersey York: Longman, 1990. Parini, Jay. The Columbia History of American Poetry. New BIBLIOGRAPHY York: Columbia University Press, 1993. Adams, Henry. The Education of Henry Adams. Boston: Rasula, Jed. The American Poetry Wax Museum: Reality Effects, Houghton Mifflin, 1946. 1940–1990. Urbana, Ill.: National Council of Teachers of Folsom, Ed. “Introduction: Recircuiting the American Past.” English, 1996. to A Profile of Twentieth-Century American Poetry, edited by Untermeyer, Louis. Introduction to The New Era in American Jack Myers and David Wojahn. Carbondale: Southern Poetry, edited by Untermeyer. New York: Henry Holt and Illinois University Press, 1991, pp. 1–24. Company, 1919, pp. 3–14.

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“A” LOUIS ZUKOFSKY (1931–1974, 1978) sky decided the work would have 24 movements, but Among the most ambitious and demanding of Ameri- instead of subordinating them to overarching formal or can long poems (see LONG AND SERIAL POETRY), the com- thematic patterns, he allowed each movement to position of “A” represents a major bridge from the high develop its own distinct form and content. The formal modernist epics of T. S. ELIOT, Ezra POUND, and James diversity of the poem is immense, including move- Joyce to a language-oriented postmodern poetry. The ments with a variety of complicated predetermined title of Zukofsky’s masterwork—the first, shortest, and forms as well as looser collage structures assembled out possibly most ubiquitous word in the English lan- of fragments from diverse textual sources. Zukofsky’s guage, tellingly highlighted with quotation marks— interest in rigorous formal models is reflected in his indicates an attention to discrete and seemingly attraction to mathematics and scientific thought, and insignificant detail that avoids heroic postures or sub- the major intellectual presences in “A” tend to be ject matter and focuses on the nuances of linguistic demandingly formalistic, with such figures as Aristotle, possibilities. As Zukofsky remarked: “a case can be Spinoza, and Bach contributing both philosophical and made out for the poet giving some of his life to the use formal ideas to the poem. The poem’s opening, “A / of the words the and a: both of which are weighted Round of fiddles playing Bach,” announces both the with as much epos and historical destiny as one man structural and thematic centrality of music, adhering to can perhaps resolve” (Prepositions 10). During the 46 a basic tenet of his OBJECTIVIST poetics: “thinking with years of its composition and irregular publication in the things as they exist, and of directing them along a sections, “A” received little recognition, but after World line of melody” (Prepositions 12). “A” explores a broad War II younger poets, such as Robert CREELEY and range of intricate musical effects that are distinct from Ronald JOHNSON, discovered the poem as a major more conventional melodic expectations in poetry. development of experimental MODERNISM in contrast to Through sound and cadence, Zukofsky hoped to give the dominant conservative modernism exemplified by abstract ideas a sense of density and substance. the work and influence of Eliot. Subsequently, “A” has The first six movements bear a striking resemblance been an exemplary model and resource for many poets to the ideogrammic or collage method of Pound’s THE of the LANGUAGE SCHOOL. CANTOS, but their themes and perspective reflect the Zukofsky began “A” at a remarkably early stage in his poet’s working-class and leftist sympathies. “A”-7 marks career. By 1928, at age 24, he had composed the first a decisive turn toward an increasingly dense and for- four sections, or movements, and would work inter- mally intricate verse that is self-consciously artificial. mittently on the poem until 1974. At the outset Zukof- The movement consists of seven sonnets in which the

1 2 ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM poet meditates on and transforms seven sawhorses suggests multiple meanings yet is stubbornly resistant which each form the letter A) into words—the poem to any definitive sense. Zukofsky countered the charge itself. The movements written up through the 1930s, of obscurity by insisting: “why deny what you’ve not / “A”-1 to -10 (excepting the second half of “A”-9), probe tried: read, not into, it” (“A” 528). the possibilities of how the modernist poet might align The massive concluding movement of “A” was herself or himself with the workers’ revolution, culmi- appropriately composed by Celia, who constructed a nating in “A”-10’s bitter reaction to the triumph of fas- compendium of the poet’s work in five voices: The first cism in Europe. The extraordinary “A”-9 is a pivotal consists of the musical score of Handel’s Harpsichord double-movement, each half written a decade apart on Pieces, which is counterpointed with selections from either side of World War II and mirroring exactly the Zukofsky’s criticism, drama, fiction, and poetry (from intricate canzone form of the medieval Italian poet “A” itself). As a final curiosity, there is an index, includ- Guido Cavalcanti, down to the complex internal and ing entries for a, an, and the, as well as topics and terminal rhyme scheme. Whereas the first half takes its names that suggest alternative readings of the poem. content from Marx on the degradation of value under BIBLIOGRAPHY capitalism, the latter half adapts material from Spinoza’s Ahearn, Barry. Zukofsky’s “A”: An Introduction. Berkeley: Uni- Ethics on the theme of love: The revolutionary hopes of versity of California Press, 1983. the prewar movements give way in the cold war to a Scroggins, Mark. Louis Zukofsky and the Poetry of Knowledge. concentration on the domestic concerns that will dom- Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998. inate the rest of the poem. The trinity of the poet, his Terrell, Carroll F., ed. Louis Zukofsky: Man and Poet. Orono, wife, Celia (married in 1939), and son Paul (born Maine: National Poetry Foundation, 1979. 1943) becomes the microcosm in which Zukofsky real- Zukofsky, Louis. Prepositions +: The Collected Critical Essays. izes his utopia despite public neglect and the social Hanover, N.H: University Press of New England, 2000. upheavals of the 1950s and 1960s. Jeffrey Twitchell-Waas The later movements of “A” become increasingly diverse and daring in their formal experimentation, as well as demanding on readers. The tumultuous events ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM Beginning of the 1960s frequently come into the poem: The assas- in New York in the late 1930s and influential until the sination of President John F. Kennedy figures promi- late 1950s, abstract expressionism was the first major nently in “A”-15; the Civil Rights movement, Vietnam international art movement to originate in the United War, and other news events appear in “A”-14 and -18; States. In painting, it combined cubism, fauvism, and sardonic allusions to the space race occur through- abstraction, expressionism, and SURREALISM. In poetry, as out. However, more often than not conventional mean- in painting, the style is marked by spontaneity, gesture, ing is submerged in the sound and play of the language. focus on process rather than product, invitation of acci- “A”-15 opens with a famous homophonic “translation” dent, and collaboration. Its influence on American from Hebrew of a passage from the Book of Job that poetry is not limited to a single group of poets, although translates the sound rather than merely the sense of the the ideas, works, and events that gave rise to abstract original text. Zukofsky also deploys this technique expressionism are closely associated with the NEW YORK extensively in “A”-21, a complete transliteration of SCHOOL, a group of overlapping and acquainted poets, Plautus’s comedy Rudens. “A”-22 and -23 are each a critics, and painters. Of the New York school poets, thousand lines of virtually impenetrable verbal texture James SCHUYLER and John ASHBERY wrote early art criti- that compresses an enormous amount of reading on cism of “action painting,” another name for the art natural and literary history, respectively. These sections movement. Frank O’HARA worked as a curator at the push to an extreme Zukofsky’s effort to create a poetic Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), but he modeled for language that embodies a maximum of sight, sound, and collaborated with more figural painters associated and “intellection” (Prepositions 171), a language that with the expressionists, including Fairfield Porter and ACKERMAN, DIANE 3

Larry Rivers. The poetry of Ashbery, Kenneth KOCH, and tence; and Schuyler’s “Morning of the Poem” estab- Barbara GUEST displays surrealism’s influence on expres- lishes its unity through an extremely natural repetition sionism; indeed, Koch and Ashbery translated surrealist and variation. The origins of the poetry are markedly works. O’Hara’s book LUNCH POEMS was part of Lawrence conceptual, based on an idea for a poem; phenomeno- FERLINGHETTI’s City Lights Pocket Poets series, which is logical, based on an attempt to capture experience; or more closely associated with the BEATs. The Beats shared collaborative, either with an artist working in another abstract expressionism’s interest in spontaneity. medium or with another poet. Poems are identified Abstract expressionist painters, including Robert with experience rather than description. Invitation of Motherwell, taught at BLACK MOUNTAIN College. “occasion” and tolerance of experiment set the stage for Painters, such as Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, and Language poetry’s application of the experience of lan- painter and critic Elaine de Kooning, studied there. The guage and reflection of process to critique “art for art’s poet Robert CREELEY, also on the Black Mountain faculty, sake.” In poetry, abstract expressionism’s extended continued to collaborate with visual artists; Charles consideration of the pictorial plane and the artistic OLSON’s theories of breath and gesture in his essay “Pro- process—where gesture and field replace the use of jective Verse” draw on abstract expressionist ideas. arrangement of objects or images to create depth— SAN FRANCISCO RENAISSANCE poets also share a rela- becomes an open, minimal, or discovered form, uses tionship to abstract expressionism: Robert DUNCAN the page as a canvas, considers the way language han- through Black Mountain, and Jack SPICER through dling changes content, and queries the unitary “I.” teaching at the California School of Fine Arts (now the BIBLIOGRAPHY San Francisco Art Institute), where abstract expres- Hoover, Paul. Introduction to Postmodern American Poetry: A sionist painters, including Mark Rothko, also taught. Norton Anthology, edited by Hoover. New York: Norton, Various abstract expressionist purposes and styles 1994, pp. xxv–xxxix. continue to cross-pollinate: Some POETRY ANTHOLOGIES Landauer, Susan. The San Francisco School of Abstract Expres- combine abstract expressionism–influenced poetics sionism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. under the term postmodernism. Critics generally con- Leja, Michael. Reframing Abstract Expressionism: Subjectivity sider there to be three generations of New York school and Painting in the 1940s. New Haven: Yale University poets. The second generation of New York school Press, 1993. poets includes such varied poets as Ann LAUTERBACH, Catherine Daly David LEHMAN, and Alice NOTLEY, as well as others asso- ciated with New York’s Poetry Project (see POETRY INSTI- TUTIONS), which, while unique, nevertheless represents ACKERMAN, DIANE (1948– ) Author of a variety of Black Mountain, Beat, and New York 16 books, Diane Ackerman is perhaps best known for school aesthetics. The third generation consists of her natural histories and creative nonfiction, most poets who have studied at the Poetry Project. famously, A Natural History of the Senses (1990). Nev- Abstract expressionism in poetry is marked by ertheless she considers herself a poet first and contin- extreme abstraction of form. Lines, even when the ues to write dazzling collections of verse, six in all. work is written in verse form, are broken by gesture, Perhaps following Henry David Thoreau’s dictum that syntax, or musical “movement.” A colloquial tone before one can write one must live, she has filled her reflecting an American idiom builds toward forming life with rich experience and far-flung adventures, each thematic unity, completing a rhythm, or developing or one culminating in a book. Consequently, her poetry creating a “return,” a minimal version of the LYRIC displays a striking breadth of subject matter (scientific epiphany. Koch and Ashbery’s delirious sestina collab- study of planets, deep-sea diving, piloting airplanes, orations retain the envoy, the concluding stanza, albeit gaucho wrangling, Arctic and jungle explorations, and a ridiculous one; O’Hara’s “Why I Am Not a Painter” so on). Hers is an accessible, usually free-verse poetry, and “The Day Lady Died” build toward the last sen- written in the first person with NARRATIVE elements, 4 ADAM, HELEN imaginatively realized in brilliant, often exotic imagery, ADAM, HELEN (1909–1993) Helen Adam and demonstrating a careful attention to rhythm and was a central figure in the SAN FRANCISCO RENAISSANCE, the sounds of words. best known for her ballads of the supernatural. Robert Born in Waukegan, Illinois, Ackerman received a DUNCAN described her ballads as the “missing link B.A. from Pennsylvania State University and an M.F.A., [that] opened the door to the full heritage of the for- M.A., and Ph.D. from Cornell University, where she bidden romantics” (435). Seemingly anachronistic, the studied with A. R. AMMONS and the physicist Carl eerie power of Adam’s ballads stands in sharp contrast Sagan. She has won the Academy of American Poets’ to the cerebral sophistication of the late MODERNISM Lavan Award (1985) and grants from the National dominant at the midcentury, and her work greatly Endowment for the Arts (1986 and 1976) and the appealed to younger poets seeking a sense of poetry’s Rockefeller Foundation (1974). primordial power. In her first collection, The Planets: A Cosmic Pastoral Growing up in Scotland, Adam published her first (1976), Ackerman began her lifelong mixing of science book of ballads, The Elfin Pedlar, at age 14. She came to and art; with Sagan as “technical advisor,” she created the United States in 1939 with her sister and lifelong “scientifically accurate” poems about the planets companion, Pat, initially living in New York City, but (Richards 5). Her second collection, Wife of Light eventually moving to San Francisco in 1953. There she (1978), continued this interest in science and began became associated with the BEATs, and especially with her poetry of geographic adventure. Lady Faustus the poets who gathered around Duncan and Jack (1983) broadened her search for experience as a “sen- SPICER. Adam was renowned for her readings, which she suist”—her term for one who rejoices in sensory expe- sang. Her published volumes included illustrations, fre- rience—recreating adventures in undersea diving, quently her own surrealistically inspired collages (see night flying, and sexuality. In “Christmas on the Reef,” SURREALISM). A major event in the poetry scene of the when her guide indicates with a sweep of his hand that period was the 1961 premiere of her ballad opera, San we have the tide within our bodies, she writes, “My Francisco’s Burning, which was later revived in New eyes watered . . . and for a moment, the womb’s dark York, where Helen and Pat settled in 1964. tropic . . . lit my thought.” Most recently, in I Praise My While Adam experimented with a range of forms, Destroyer (1998), Ackerman’s poetry unflinchingly her central preoccupation remained the narrative bal- confronts death and suffering while still holding to an lad; she expertly developed many formal variations edge from which it can praise. From the haunting elegy without straying far from the essentials of her roman- for Sagan, “We Die,” to the final sequence “Canto tic models. Although she most often reworked 19th- Vaqueros,” the voice ranges far and affirms “this life century folk and gothic material, Adam also wrote where wonder / was my job.” Perhaps responding to updated ballads depicting the darker side of contem- the dissolution of death with a rage for order, the porary urban life. She had an intimate knowledge of poetry explores these subjects with form, as in the vil- the occult, which particularly manifests itself by show- lanelle “Elegy”: “My own sorrow starts / small as China, ing women as agents of forbidden power. Her ballads then bulges to an Orient.” In a century of poetry whose depict desire as an insatiable force that lies largely hid- dominant tone was irony, Ackerman has held fast to a den in conventional life due to repression and fear, but genuine poetry of wonder. which impinges on the everyday and can burst forth as an overwhelming passion or seduction. As with BIBLIOGRAPHY William Blake’s Songs (1789–94), which are an impor- Richards, Linda. Interview. “At Play With Diane Ackerman.” tant precursor, the combination of frightening fables January Magazine (online) (August 1999), pp. 1–11. presented in a fairy-tale or childlike manner give her Veslany, Kathleen. “A Conversation with Diane Ackerman.” Creative Nonfiction 6 (July/August 1996): 41–52. work a sinister charm. Adam’s best-known poem is probably “I Love My Michael Sowder Love” (1958). A newly wed husband finds himself AFTER LORCA 5 increasingly entangled by his wife’s diabolical hair, Lorca purports to be a translation of the poetry of Fed- driving him to murder her; the hair springs up from erico García Lorca (1899–1936), but, in actuality, it her grave, singing, “I love my love with a capital T. My takes Lorca’s poetry, particularly his interest in spiri- love is Tender and True. / Ha! Ha!,” hunts down the tual mediums, as an often radical jumping-off point. husband, and strangles him. This poem demonstrates Furthermore Spicer’s use of source materials (in the Adam’s characteristic strengths: the combination of form of poetries quoted or alluded to within After horror and humor with the trancelike repetitions of the Lorca) situates him alongside 20th-century writers ballad form, the unselfconscious directness of the NAR- ranging from Ezra POUND and William Carlos WILLIAMS RATIVE presentation, the witch-wife manifesting the to Susan HOWE. husband’s fear of passion and the irrational, and the The poem’s description of tradition as “generations vengeful return of the repressed. of different poets in different countries patiently telling the same story, writing the same poem” indirectly BIBLIOGRAPHY addresses Spicer’s idea of poetic dictation. For Spicer Davidson, Michael. The San Francisco Renaissance: Poetics and Community at Mid-Century. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni- dictation is a quasi-mystical writing practice in which versity Press, 1989, pp. 179–187. the poet, like a radio, receives the poem from an “out- Duncan, Robert. “Biographical Notes.” In The New American side” source (in Spicer’s case, purportedly from Mar- Poetry, edited by Donald M. Allen. New York: Grove tians). “At the base of the throat is a little machine / Press, 1960. Which makes us able to say anything,” he explains in Finkelstein, Norman M. The Utopian Moment in Contempo- After Lorca’s “Friday the 13th” section. Here the poet’s rary American Poetry. 2d ed. Lewisburg, Penn.: Bucknell “voice” is dissolved into a poem that exceeds the poet’s University Press, 1993, pp. 82–90. own subjective control. Prevallet, Kristin. “The Reluctant Pixie Poole (A Recovery After Lorca contains perhaps Spicer’s most famous of Helen Adam’s San Francisco Years),” Electronic Poetry commentary on language in poetry, articulated as a Center. Available online. URL: http://wings.buffalo.edu/ desire to “make poems out of real objects,” to make of epc/authors/prevallet/adam.html. Downloaded March 26, 2003. the poem a “collage of the real.” Spicer wants “to trans- fer the immediate object, the immediate emotion to the Jeffrey Twitchell-Waas poem.” The poems themselves are essentially lyrical, though this lyricism is marked by line breaks that fre- AFTER LORCA JACK SPICER (1957) After quently respond not to sound or to breath (as Lorca, according to Peter Gizzi, “offers a template for described in Charles OLSON’s essay “Projective Verse”) reading [Jack] SPICER’s other books” (183); it works as but to meaning; Spicer’s line break often works to an ARS POETICA that introduces serial composition and heighten a word’s ambiguity, particularly when com- what is usually called “dictation” as theme and bined with an often erratic use of punctuation: “I method in the poet’s career (see LONG AND SERIAL crawled into bed with sorrow that night / Couldn’t POETRY) . Its attention to language, community, and touch his fingers.” The word sorrow fluctuates between poetic tradition were significant to both Spicer’s con- being the emotion that informs the speaker’s action temporaries in the SAN FRANCISCO RENAISSANCE (partic- and the lover with whom the speaker is in bed; it is ularly Robin BLASER and Robert DUNCAN) and to the similarly unclear whether “I” or “night” itself fails in later LANGUAGE SCHOOL. The book also demonstrates a the caress. Meaning’s ambiguity heightens the effect paradoxically solemn and irreverent attention to tradi- here, producing the emotion described. According to tion. While Spicer’s poetry exists within elevated tra- Blaser, it is in After Lorca that “the reader first notices ditions (the text names a number of poets as the presence of this disturbance” characteristic of influences, including William Blake, Helen ADAM, Spicer’s work, in which “all elements of order and res- Marianne MOORE, and William Butler Yeats), it simul- olution draw to themselves a fragmentation of mean- taneously critiques the very notion of tradition. After ing” (308). 6 AI

BIBLIOGRAPHY alternative is “to leap into the void.” These lines suggest Blaser, Robin. “The Practice of Outside.” In The Collected something of the mocking ambivalence that character- Books of Jack Spicer, edited by Blaser. Santa Rosa, Calif.: izes Ai’s work as it aims both to transcend and critique Black Sparrow Press, 1996, pp. 270–329. the political. Her attention to the violence of the every- Gizzi, Peter. “Jack Spicer and the Practice of Reading.” In day and of the monumental also produces a poetry that The House That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack challenges the distinctions to be made between the two. Spicer. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, Although this writing’s ability to give voice to the voice- 1998, pp. 173–225. less has implications for both identity politics and cul- Nathan Austin tural revisionism, it actually questions the assumptions of each. Ai’s tracing of the limitations of self, her mark- AI (FLORENCE OGAWA ANTHONY) ing of the boundary between the transcendent and the (1947– ) Ai’s work has been important for its abject, places notions of identity, articulation, and self- explorations of the dramatic monologue, as well as for knowledge under pressure. testing the limits and possibilities of poetic NARRATIVE. BIBLIOGRAPHY Her most significant influence is Galway KINNELL, Ai. “Interview with Lawrence Kearney and Michael Cud- though her work has been frequently compared with dihy.” In American Poetry Observed, edited by Joe David that of the poet Norman Dubie. Her fidelity to narra- Bellamy. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984, tive has produced a widely accessible and popular pp. 1–6. poetry. Her writing, however, offers a sustained cri- Ingram, Claudia. “Writing the Crises: The Deployment of tique of narrative representation, giving voice dispas- Abjection in Ai’s Dramatic Monologues.” Lit: Literature, sionately to both the silenced and the iconographic. Interpretation, Theory 8.2 (1997): 173–191. Ai was born in 1947 to a Japanese father and a “black, Wilson, Rob. “The Will to Transcendence in Contemporary Choctaw, Irish and German mother” (Ai 1). She received American Poet Ai.” Canadian Review of American Studies a B.A. in Japanese from the University of Arizona and an 17.4 (1986): 437–448. M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Califor- Nicky Marsh nia, Irvine. Her first book, Cruelty, was published in 1973, and six other books have followed: Killing Floor AIKEN, CONRAD (1889–1973) Conrad (1979), Sin (1986), Fate (1991), Vice (1999), which won Aiken was a central figure in the 20th-century explo- the National Book Award (1999), and Dread (2003). She ration of human consciousness through poetry. Work- has been the recipient of numerous grants, including ing within a modernist context and influenced by a those from the National Endowment for the Arts and the modernist preoccupation with the subjective mind Ingram Merrill Foundation. (see MODERNISM), he developed a reputation as a poet, Ai has spoken against the “the tyranny of CONFES- critic, novelist, and writer of fine short fiction. In his SIONAL POETRY—the notion that every thing every one emphasis on natural imagery, he is influenced by 19th- writes has to be taken from the self” and has suggested, century romantics, such as William Wordsworth and instead, that she wants to “take the narrative ‘persona’ Ralph Waldo Emerson. In his exploration of the mind, poem as far as [she] can, and [she has] never been one he shares affinities with his contemporaries, such as to do things by halves” (Ai 3). Her writing seeks to make T. S. ELIOT and Ezra POUND, whom he introduced in 1913. apparent the erotic and disturbing desires that sustain Aiken was born in Savannah, Georgia. After his par- American culture’s fascination with the cult of personal- ents’ death—his father killed his mother, then commit- ity: She writes with the voice of John F. Kennedy, an ted suicide—he moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, abused daughter, James Dean, J. Edgar Hoover, a pedo- to live with an uncle; he was educated at Middlesex philic priest, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and others. Of the School, in Concord, and later at Harvard University. In latter she writes: “To me the ideological high wire / is for college, he associated with contemporaries, such as fools to balance on with their illusions.” A more suitable Stuart Chase, E. E. CUMMINGS, Walter Lippman, and, ALEXIE, SHERMAN 7 most notably, Eliot. Throughout his career he won the Stallman, R. W. “Annotated Checklist on Conrad Aiken: A Pulitzer Prize (1930), the National Book Award Critical Study.” In Wake II, edited by Seymour Lawrence. (1954), and the Bollingen Prize in poetry (1956), New York: Wake Editions, 1952, pp. 114–121. among other accomplishments. Steven Frye Aiken published more than 30 volumes of poetry, short stories, novels, and criticism, all of which ALEXIE, SHERMAN (1966– ) Literary crit- involve a strong introspective and autobiographical ics and poets alike consider Sherman Alexie one of the element. His poetry experiments with musical varia- most important American Indian poets. In evocations of tion as a poetic device; as a structural principle, this contemporary American Indian life, Alexie’s poems bril- comes into fruition in the six “symphonies” published liantly render the complex cultural position of American between 1916 and 1925 (including The Jig of Forslin, Indians and the feelings that position entails. As Alexie’s House of Dust, The Charnel Rose, Senlin, The Pilgrimage character Lester FallsApart claims, “Poetry = Anger × of Festus, The Divine Pilgrim, and Changing Mind). In Imagination.” These poems often fall into one of two these symphonies, his interest in the LONG POEM thematic categories: investigations of the relationships emerged in a highly developed manner. Lines from between the speaker and others, as complicated by cen- The Pilgrimage of Festus (1923), such as “Beautiful turies of divisive race relations, and new or revised his- darkener of hearts, weaver of silence” and “Beautiful tories that mourn or celebrate American Indian life. Woman! Golden woman whose heart is silence!,” Alexie was born on the Spokane Indian Reservation involve a rhythmic echoing, variation, and repetition in Wellpinit, Washington, and began writing in col- that is musical in nature and contemporary in influ- lege. His first collection, The Business of Fancydancing, ence, drawing from composers, such as Gustav appeared in 1992 to critical acclaim. He has since pub- Mahler, Arnold Schoenberg, and Igor Stravinsky. In lished four more full-length collections as well as sev- all of the verse symphonies, Aiken places his thematic eral chapbooks, and he has achieved repute as a emphasis on the human mind, its identity, and the performer of his poetry by winning the World Heavy- flux and dynamism of its interaction with physical weight Championship Poetry Bout for four years in a reality. row (1998–2001). Yet, to the general public, Alexie During the 1930s, Aiken composed the “Preludes,” may be better known as a fiction writer, having pub- the works for which he is most remembered. In Pre- lished two short-story collections and two novels, and ludes for Memnon: or, Preludes to Attitude (1931), he as the screenwriter of Smoke Signals, the first commer- records the movement of human awareness and men- cial feature film written, directed, and acted solely by tal perception. The focus is on finite memory, and the American Indians, and The Business of Fancydancing. central locale is the individual human consciousness: In his poetry, Alexie writes in free verse and adapta- “Winter for a moment takes the mind; the snow / Falls tions of traditional forms (see PROSODY AND FREE VERSE). past the arclight. . ..Winter is there, outside, is here in Not only is writing in English a problematic issue for me.” Aiken pursued these themes in later books, such those who regard its use as signaling the loss of indige- as Landscape West of Eden (1934), The Soldier: A Poem nous language, as Robin Riley Fast explains (214–215), (1944), Skylight One: Fifteen Poems (1949), and Sheep- but the native poet may also feel that he or she can fold Hill: Fifteen Poems (1958). Increasingly Aiken has employ the dominant culture’s established poetic forms come to be considered as one of the most perceptive only “at a slant.” It thus seems fitting that Alexie’s formal poets of the modern experience. adaptations evince both a playful irreverence and a BIBLIOGRAPHY respect for such forms’ power. In “Totem Sonnets” Martin, Jay. Conrad Aiken: A Life of His Art. Princeton, N.J.: (1996), for example, Alexie presents seven varied lists of Princeton University Press, 1962. 14 items grouped into Italian or English stanza patterns. Peterson, Houston. The Melody of Chaos. New York: Long- The first sonnet lists 14 people, from Meryl Streep to mans, Green, 1931. Muhammed Ali, whom Alexie has elsewhere professed 8 ALGARÍN, MIGUEL to admire. The opening octave lists white Americans, of his work and the work of others he fosters. Algarín while the sestet presents six nonwhite people of various received a B.A. from the University of Wisconsin (1963) international origins. The traditional turn of the sestet and an M.A. from Pennsylvania State University (1965). takes us from Alexie’s heroes in the dominant culture to Although Algarín completed all of the work for a Ph.D., his heroes among marginalized cultures, whose status he refused to accept the degree because of the turbulent renders these individuals’ achievements greater while political climate of 1967 and the struggle for civil simultaneously indicating why these figures may be rights. He joined the English faculty at Rutgers Univer- fewer in number. “Totem Sonnets” thus provides just sity in 1971. Among many honors, Algarín has received one example of how Alexie “makes junkyard poetry out a Bessie Award, for outstanding creative work by inde- of broke-down reality, vision out of delirium tremens, pendent artists in dance and performance arts in New prayer out of laughter” (Lincoln 270). York City, and American Book Awards, an honor BIBLIOGRAPHY awarded annually by the Before Columbus Foundation, Alexie, Sherman. The Business of Fancydancing. Brooklyn, in 1981, 1986, and 1994. N.Y.: Hanging Loose Press, 1992. In “Sunday, August 11, 1974,” he writes of Latino Fast, Robin Riley. The Heart As a Drum: Continuance and families who, upon leaving church, “have crossed Resistance in American Indian Poetry. Ann Arbor: University themselves and are now going home to share in the of Michigan Press, 1999. peace of / the day, pan y mantequilla, una taza de café and Lincoln, Kenneth. Sing with the Heart of a Bear: Fusions of many sweet recollections.” His infusion of Nuyorican Native and American Poetry, 1890–1999. Berkeley: Univer- language and experience, here demonstrated in the easy sity of California Press, 2000. mixture of Spanish and English, and his challenge to Carrie Etter formal poetry in his long, proselike lines, typify his work and that of many young Nuyorican poets. The ALGARÍN, MIGUEL (1941– ) Miguel gritty, urban edge of the Nuyorican Café poets relies on Algarín’s most important contributions to 20th-century an audience willing to hear new voices, as Algarín American poetry are his role in the development of the explains in the introduction to Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican poetry movement, a group of writers and Nuyorican Poets Café: “[T]he importance of poetry at the artists working in the 1960s and 1970s to establish a Café, is rooted in its capacity to draw in audiences rang- voice for New York Puerto Ricans, his spoken-word ing from our immediate working-class neighbors out poetry (see POETRY IN PERFORMANCE), and his commitment for a beer and some fun to serious poetry lovers willing to an alternative arts space that has opened the artistic to engage the new poets the Café features” (18). community—particularly theater, poetry, and music— Algarín’s legacy lies in his own poetry and his vision to within the United States to artists of color. Algarín’s 14 provide a forum for other poets and artists. books and plays engage the mixture of his United States, BIBLIOGRAPHY Puerto Rican, and New York identities. In 1974, seeking Algarín, Miguel. “The Sidewalk of High Art.” In Aloud: Voices to support fellow Nuyorican writers, along with the play- from the Nuyorican Poets Café, edited by Bob Holman and wright Miguel Piñero, Algarín played host to the first Miguel Algarín. New York: Henry Holt, 1994, pp. 3–28. Nuyorican Poets Café, originally held in his living room. Esterrich, Carmelo. “Home and the Ruins of Language: Vic- The second, and current, Nuyorican Poets Café, an tor Hernandez Cruz and Miguel Algarín Nuyorican important site for poetry slams, opened in 1989, after an Poetry.” MELUS 23 (1998): 43–56. eight-year hiatus, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. J. Elizabeth Clark Born in Santurce, Puerto Rico, Algarín immigrated to New York City with his family in 1951. They learned to negotiate the difficulties of adjusting to the United THE ALPHABET RON SILLIMAN (1979– ) States while maintaining strong cultural and ethnic ties Ron SILLIMAN’s The Alphabet is a multivolume long to Puerto Rico; this experience forms the basis for much poem exhibiting the remarkable agreement of gener- AMMONS, A(RCHIE) R(ANDOLPH) 9 ous scope and attention to minutiae displayed in other We witness the author happily substituting b for w in experimental works, such as Louis ZUKOFSKY’s “A,” bp the word pairs wake/bake and walk/balk, then reaching Nichol’s The Martyrology, and Paul BLACKBURN’s THE an impasse at “wok” (although we might want to ask JOURNALS. As is true of these works, included in the him, what about, say, bok choy?). minutiae of Silliman’s poem are the minor events and Although its refusal of simple referentiality may materials of language itself, an engine propelled here inspire charges of absurdism, The Alphabet is, in fact, by the alphabet’s 26 letters, which constitute the for- profoundly connected to the world. Silliman’s process mal occasion for the poem. tracks all immediate phenomena with an attention at Silliman deploys a number of innovative composi- once visceral, philosophical, and documentary. His tional strategies in this project. The mathematical radically inclusive poetics results in work that is Fibonacci series (wherein each number of the series highly mimetic and highly autobiographical (two equals the sum of the previous two numbers: 1, 1, 2, characteristics that critics and proponents alike fre- 3, 5, 8, 13 . . . ), for example, determines the length of quently deny language writing). Such a poetics is also stanza-graphs in the volume Lit (1987). One formal highly ethical, its democratic scope prompting us to impulse marking all the constituent books of The consider what and whom we routinely edit out of our Alphabet is Silliman’s signature preference for the sen- field of vision. One of Silliman’s achievements in the tence over the traditional poetic line. Taken individu- The Alphabet is to offer us an “index of the not seen” ally, his sentences are conventional enough; the (Jones 1993). seeming disjunctions between them are what make Sil- BIBLIOGRAPHY liman’s work so dynamic. Apparent non sequiturs Bernstein, Charles. “Narrating Narration: The Shapes of Ron yield, in fact, multiple concurrent junctions, as they Silliman’s Work.” In Contents Dream: Essays 1975–1984. allow for associative links beyond the NARRATIVE segue; Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1986. that is, logical gaps between sentences allow for a vari- Silliman, Ron. Jones. Mentor, Ohio: Generator Press, 1993. ety of poetic leaps. The Alphabet performs the kind of Vogler, Thomas, ed. Quarry West 34: Ron Silliman and The generative tension, the “play of syllogistic movement” Alphabet. Santa Cruz: University of California at Santa (90), which Silliman celebrates in his critical book on Cruz, 1998. experimental poet’s prose, The New Sentence. Both Susan Holbrook works are considered seminal texts in that field of cre- ative investigation referred to as the LANGUAGE SCHOOL. In avoiding plot that could prove distracting, Silli- AMMONS, A(RCHIE) R(ANDOLPH) man’s poems invite readers to enjoy a more intimate (1926–2001) A. R. Ammons, one of the most pop- engagement with the linguistic materials on the page. ular and prolific poets of the latter half of the 20th cen- The primary logic of “Leopards in leotards,” for exam- tury, managed to be both a member of the academy ple, is concrete rather than narrative (see VISUAL and a renegade, the heir to Robert FROST in his descrip- POETRY). The way the shift of one letter (p to t) attends tions of domesticated nature and of William Carlos a radical shift in pronunciation begs more attention WILLIAMS in his generosity of spirit and freedom with than cats in tights, although they too are a welcome poetic form. A prolific poet, he wrote numerous col- curiosity. The intimate aura of The Alphabet is partly lections, including a volume called The Really Short achieved, of course, through the imminence of its Poems of A. R. Ammons (1990) and five book-length compositional moments. We are aware of the writer poems: Tape for the Turn of the Year (1965), Sphere: The writing. In Under (1993) we read, “Wake, walk, wok, Form of a Motion (1974), The Snow Poems (1977), woke, waken versus bake, balk, doesn’t exist, doesn’t GARBAGE (1993), and Glare (1997). exist, bacon.” Here the odd appearances of “doesn’t Ammons was born in Whiteville, North Carolina. exist” alert the reader to failures in procedure so that While serving in the navy during World War II, he the process of writing itself becomes part of the poem. began writing poetry aboard a destroyer escort in the 10 AMMONS, A(RCHIE) R(ANDOLPH)

South Pacific. After the war, he attended Wake Forest One of the central concerns in all of Ammons’s work University. Before he began teaching at Cornell Uni- is “the one and the many,” the search for a single uni- versity in 1964, he held a variety of nonacademic jobs. fying principle to account for the bewildering array of He paid for the publication of his first book, Omma- individual objects of which the world is composed. In teum (1955), the title of which refers to the house fly’s some ways, this concern reflects a dualism in which compound eye. Ammons’s Collected Poems 1951–1971 “the many” is the world of the senses and “the one” is (1972) won the National Book Award. Sphere (1974) some form of, perhaps spiritual, transcendence. received the Bollingen Prize. A Coast of Trees (1981) In “One: Many” (1965), he warns that people received the National Book Critics Circle Award. should, “fear a too great consistency, an arbitrary Garbage (1993) won the National Book Award and the imposition” of abstraction on the concrete details of Library of Congress’s Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt sensory experience. Drawn back to particular details, National Prize. The American Academy of Arts and he may offer such specifics as “the river is muscled at Letters made Ammons a fellow in 1978. Ammons’s rapids with trout and a birch limb” (“Visit” 1965), but other honors include the Academy of American Poets often his particulars are the particulars of type or Wallace Stevens Award (1998), the Poetry Society of species, as “The glow-blue / bodies and gold-skeined America’s Robert Frost Medal (1994), and Poetry mag- wings of flies” (“The City Limits” 1971). azine’s Ruth Lilly Prize (1995). Ammons uses the colon as a multipurpose form of His experiments with form include typing a poem, punctuation. This stylistic idiosyncrasy allows him to Tape for the Turn of the Year, on an adding machine tape. bring closure to individual clauses while suggesting at The long, narrow paper determined both the length of the same time the ongoing flow of the poem. Such the poem’s lines and of the whole poem. He used this punctuation also implies his sense that any state- medium for other poems as well, including The Snow ment—any answer—is conditional and may be dis- Poems and Garbage. Ammons’s innovative approach to solved later in the poem’s flow. form led Marjorie Perloff to argue that one of In an essay on poetry, Ammons likens a poem to a Ammons’s collections of short poems, Briefings: Poems walk in four ways. First, both walk and poem involve Small and Easy, is actually one long poem in small sec- the whole body—that is, the mind and the body. Sec- tions (Schneider 68–82). His long poems are some- ond, every walk, like every poem, is “unreproducible” times triggered by a single image, such as a photograph (Burr 17). Third, a poem, like a walk, “turns, one or of Earth from outer space in Sphere or a mound of trash more times, and eventually returns” (Burr 17). Fourth, in Garbage (see LONG AND SERIAL POETRY). A Tape for the the motion of the walk, or poem, “occurs only in the Turn of the Year, on the other hand, proceeds more or body of the walker or in the body of the words. It can’t less chronologically, something like a diary for the end be extracted and contemplated” (Burr 18). of one calendar year and the beginning of the next. This walking motion is illustrated in Ammons’s Whatever the trigger, his long poems often include poem “Corsons Inlet” (1965), which describes a self-mockery for the ambitiousness implicit in under- physical walk as “liberating,” releasing the speaker taking a long poem in the first place. “into the hues, shadings, risings, flowing bends and Ammons’s work is often humorous in a nonchalant blends of sight.” It is noteworthy that even when he way, as when a mountain says to the speaker of “Clas- tries to free himself from form, he comes back to the sic” (1971), “I see you’re scribbling again.” In addition particular forms of nature, and though he says, to his deft handling of the long poem, Ammons is also “Overall is beyond me,” he is repeatedly drawn by a known for very short, often wittily compressed poems, desire to understand that “Overall.” Perhaps the most such as “Small Song” (1971). In the 12 words of the characteristic summary statement in the poem, poem—which begins, “The reeds give,” and ends, “the Ammons writes, is “I have reached no conclusions, wind away”—Ammons both describes and demon- have erected no boundaries.” Harold Bloom, one of strates a relationship between form and identity. Ammons’s earliest and most ardent admirers, sees the ANDREWS, BRUCE 11

poet’s work as belonging to the important line of the poets of the NEW YORK SCHOOL, particularly John poetry influenced by Ralph Waldo Emerson in its ASHBERY. Andrews and the Language school followed attempts to approach an American sublime and pin- in this vein, bringing linguistic signification into an nacle of human thought and activity. Bloom describes apocalyptic phase. Ammons as “the central poet of my generation” (5), a Andrews was born in Chicago, Illinois. Educated at viewpoint many others share. Johns Hopkins and later at Harvard, where he received a Ph.D. in political science (1975), he has worked as a BIBLIOGRAPHY government official (National Institute of Education), Bloom, Harold, ed. A. R. Ammons. Modern Critical Views Series. New York: Chelsea House, 1986. an educator (Fordham University), and an entertainer Burr, Zofia, ed. A. R. Ammons: Set in Motion: Essays, Inter- (musical director for Sally Silvers and Dancers). views, and Dialogues. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan As a Language poet, Andrews has experimented Press, 1996. with many poetic forms. His desire to explore the lim- Schneider, Steven P., ed. Complexities of Motion: New Essays its of language extends beyond his poetry: Andrews is on A. R. Ammons’s Long Poems. Teaneck, N.J.: Fairleigh also a theorist and at one point coedited, along with Dickinson University Press, 1999. Bernstein, the seminal journal L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E. In Thomas Lisk one of his essays, Andrews makes the following decla- ration: “Words are mere windows, substitutes, proper names, haloed or subjugated by things to which they ANDREWS, BRUCE (1948– ) Bruce seem to point. ‘Communication’ resembles an Andrews has been a key player in the LANGUAGE exchange of prepackaged commodities. Here, active SCHOOL, both as a poet and theorist. Along with signifying is subordinated, transitive” (133). Charles BERNSTEIN and others, Andrews has, over the The poem “Stalin’s Genius” brings together past 30 years, explored the limitations of language Andrews’s fragmented style and equally fragmented within artistic expression. Employing such devices as narrative: “[A]djudicate your own spermatazoa. Fall- radical fragmentation and juxtaposition, Andrews’s out teaches us money burns, all I / can say is: Jessica poetry represents the pinnacle of the avant-garde. Christ!—garbage in, garbage out, rest assured.” A Andrews strains the limits of familiar representation, wonderfully opaque and challenging piece of writing, which makes his poetry often difficult to understand “Stalin’s Genius” provides images of sexuality, religion, but which also gives it power, as the reader must and nuclear war, all brought together under the con- become an active participant. As Bernstein claims, trol that language exerts over everyday life. Andrews Andrews’s “poetics of ‘informalism’ advocates the con- does not use language merely as a vehicle for passing tinuing radicalism of constructivist noise” (4). His along meaning; instead, he destabilizes language, cre- poetry makes reference to familiar objects; however, ating a system whereby meaning must be constructed his extreme linguistic experimentation serves to make not only by associations between separate links in the the familiar strange, breaking any neat, mathematical linguistic chain but by filling in the missing links. By equivalence between signifier and a socially con- the early 1970s, well before others, Andrews was structed signified. Meaning is no longer passed from actively forcing the reader to become a partial author poet to reader; the reader must take an assertive role of the text. in the construction of the text. Andrews thus repre- BIBLIOGRAPHY sents the culmination of a literary tradition dating Andrews, Bruce. “Writing Social Work & Political Practice.” back to Gertrude STEIN. Along with Virginia Woolf and In The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book, edited by Andrews and James Joyce, Stein popularized the practice of fore- Charles Bernstein. Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univer- grounding the mechanical structures of written com- sity Press, 1984, pp. 133–136. munication, often at the expense of an easily Bernstein, Charles, ed. Close Listening: Poetry and the Per- decipherable narrative. This project was expanded by formed Word. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. 12 ANGELOU, MAYA

Perelman, Bob. “Building a More Powerful Vocabulary: tion. Although lauded by the masses, critics attacked Bruce Andrews and the World Trade Center.” Arizona the poem. To compare “Pulse” to “The Gift Outright,” Quarterly 50.4 (winter 1994): 117–131. the poem Robert FROST read at John F. Kennedy’s inau- Andrew Howe guration, A.R. Coulthard writes, is to say “something about what has happened to American verse over the ANGELOU, MAYA (1928– ) Throughout intervening decades” (2). Angelou’s poem opens with her career, Maya Angelou has both fit into and broken three symbols repeated often: “A Rock, A River, A the mold for African-American poets. She has written Tree / Hosts to species long since departed.” Coulthard autobiography, like many black writers of the earlier implies that such stock imagery leads readers “mistak- HARLEM RENAISSANCE, and she has been associated with enly [to] believe that symbolism equates with profun- the Harlem Writers’ Guild since the late 1950s. How- dity, and such thinking may have produced Angelou’s ever, she has also transcended the limits society usually Rock, River, and Tree” (4). Her detractors notwith- sets for African-American as well as female writers, standing, Angelou moves readers who might not be having worked extensively in the Civil Rights move- schooled in Frost. “On the Pulse of Morning” has ment, written for English-language newspapers in been set to music and was recently performed by the Africa, and succeeded in stage and film by acting, writ- Winston-Salem Symphony—a clear sign of popular, if ing, and producing. not academic, recognition. Angelou continues to write Angelou was born Marguerite Johnson in St. Louis. lyric poetry that addresses questions of race and wom- Raped as a young girl, she was mute for several years. anhood in a constantly changing society. In early adulthood she had a short career in prostitu- BIBLIOGRAPHY tion, but she found her niche in performing arts. Angelou, Maya. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. New York: Angelou published her first volume of poetry, Just Random House, 1969. Give Me a Cool Drink of Water ’fore I Diiie, in 1971, Coulthard, A. R. “Poetry as Politics: Maya Angelou’s Inau- earning a Pulitzer Prize nomination. And Still I Rise gural Poem, ‘On the Pulse of Morning.’” Notes on Contem- (1978), Now Sheba Sings the Song (1987), and I Shall porary Literature 28.1 (1998): 2–5. Not Be Moved (1990) followed. Angelou has also gar- Lupton, Mary Jane. Maya Angelou: A Critical Companion. nered a Tony (1973) nomination and an Emmy Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998. (1977) nomination for her acting and a National Andrew E. Mathis Book Award nomination (1970) for I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969). ANTIN, DAVID (1932– ) David Antin is an Angelou’s work is marked by the fusion of poetry internationally celebrated poet and art critic best and autobiography. In childhood Angelou found inspi- known for the “talk poems” that he began in the early ration in LYRIC POETRY. In her first autobiographical 1970s. Unlike the standard procedure whereby a poet work, Angelou writes that, at age six, she “met and fell composes a poem first and reads it later, Antin impro- in love with William Shakespeare” (14). Shakespeare’s vises his talk before an audience, then transcribes it on whiteness, however, caused her distress. Racial tension paper. Each talk poem is what Marjorie Perloff calls an pervades Angelou’s early work. “And Still I Rise” “associative monologue” (318–319) made up of loosely (1978) indicates her ongoing struggle: “I’m a black connected narratives and driven by his encyclopedic ocean, leaping and wide, / Welling and swelling I bear knowledge and endless curiosity about the world. in the tide.” Still, Angelou has cited as an influence Antin was born in New York City. His undergradu- Emily Dickinson, whose “familiar ballad form,” Mary ate studies at the City College of New York (B.A., Jane Lupton has written, “can be heard in some of 1955) were in engineering, and his graduate studies at Angelou’s poems” (49). New York University (M.A., 1966) were in linguistic In 1993 Angelou read her poem “On the Pulse of philosophy and poetry (concentrating on Gertrude Morning” at William J. Clinton’s presidential inaugura- STEIN). During the 1960s and 1970s, he wrote art crit- “APRIL INVENTORY” 13 icism for such journals as Art News and Artforum. He is BIBLIOGRAPHY married to the artist/filmmaker Eleanor Antin. Antin, David. A Conversation with David Antin: David Antin Although Antin is seldom aligned with a literary and Charles Bernstein. New York: Granary Books, 2002, group or movement, he has had a strong interest in the pp. 61–62. ———. “Modernism and Postmodernism: Approaching the BLACK MOUNTAIN SCHOOL, the NEW YORK SCHOOL, and other poets associated with Donald Allen’s 1960 Present in American Poetry.” boundary 2 1.1 (1972): 131. Fredman, Stephen. Poet’s Prose: The Crisis in American Verse. groundbreaking anthology New American Poetry (see 2d ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990. POETRY ANTHOLOGIES). His talk poems converge with Perloff, Marjorie. The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Jerome ROTHENBERG’s investigation of oral poetry (see Cage. 2d. ed. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University POETRY IN PERFORMANCE) and Paul BLACKBURN’s transla- Press, 1999. tion of medieval poetry that was sung by a joglar, or court musician. To whatever extent the contours of Kaplan Page Harris each talk poem are premeditated, the performance before an audience is beyond his individual control. As “APRIL INVENTORY” W.D. SNODGRASS he says in an essay critiquing poets associated with (1959) “April Inventory” comes from W.D. SNOD- New Criticism (see FUGITIVE/AGRARIAN SCHOOL) and GRASS’s Heart’s Needle, a book which, Robert Phillips their heirs (namely Robert LOWELL), “poetry is made by writes, proves that Snodgrass “must indeed be recog- a man up on his feet, talking” (“Modernism and Post- nized as a cofounder of the school” of CONFESSIONAL modernism” 131). POETRY (6). The poem describes the poet turning 30 The published talk poem is a transcription that uses while in graduate school at the University of Iowa, as lowercase and no punctuation and arranges its words well as offers witty insights into why he is not a suc- in proselike blocks with nonjustified margins. cessful professor in a tenured job. He has shortcom- Between phrases are spaces that indicate breaths and ings; as he tells us, “I haven’t read one book about / A pauses during the performance, or what Antin calls book or memorized one plot.” the “pulse of the speaking” (Conversation 63). He ini- The poem includes the autobiographical element of tially described the transcription as “notations or confessional poetry; as Donald Torchiana states, scores of oral performances” (61), but more recently “Behind [the poem] lies a year of meditating that mon- he considers it “a text that was generated by talking, strous examination in literary history for the Ph.D. in that derived its life and its mode of thinking from talk- English” (104). Snodgrass engages in critical self- ing and carried the traces of its origins into the world appraisal, finding that he falls short in comparison to of the text” (62). starched-collared scholars with “the degrees, the jobs, Stephen Fredman observes that Antin can be thought the dollars.” Unlike them, he teaches as a graduate stu- of in the Emersonian tradition as a “new advocate of the dent who notices, primarily, how young the women he panharmonicon” (138). In a given talk poem, he might teaches seem, so young that he has “to nudge” himself combine social commentary, philosophical speculation, “to stare” at their attractiveness. art criticism, humor, and autobiography. He is also the Though the speaker’s inventory of his character and most uncharacteristically personal of avant-garde poets. his life yield shortcomings, these shortcomings are bal- In “what it means to be avant-garde” (1993), for anced by the good things he has done: He has taught a instance, his aunt tells him about the unexpected death girl one of Gustav Mahler’s songs, brought comfort to a of his uncle, and he discovers, “nothing within the hori- dying old man, and showed children such things as the zon of my discourse could have prepared me for that beauty of a moth’s colors or, more poignantly, how a moment.” For Antin, who is “mainly concerned with the person can love another. Having found some positives present,” this moment testifies to the continued need for in his life, the poet asserts that there is value to his per- poems that are active and restless and that keep their son other than the silver and gold used to fill cavities in boundaries open. his teeth. In other words, there is more to his identity 14 “ARIEL” than the superficial trappings of wealth, whether it be “Ariel” literally describes the physical sensation of rid- precious metals turned to dental fillings or the dollars ing a speeding horse across a landscape, while also that come with a teaching job. pointing to the transformative powers of poetic lan- As Snodgrass presents such an inventory, Paul Gas- guage. As Christina Britzolakis suggests, “the experi- ton asserts, “the poem not only records the memories ence of riding a horse becomes a metaphor for the and feelings of the poet’s thirtieth year, but also cate- process of writing a poem” (156). This process is also gorizes them implicitly according to the values he has one of self-transformation and transcendence that is chosen” (54). While the poem tells us directly what has both liberating and destructive. happened in the poet’s life as well as what the poet The poem begins in shadow and stillness—”Stasis in thinks, it also uses the confessional characteristic of darkness”—just before dawn and quickly picks up directness. Though the poem does use a strict rhyme speed. As the ride commences, rider and horse merge scheme as well as a rhythm of iambic tetrameter (see to form a single being dashing through the landscape. PROSODY AND FREE VERSE), he tells us, for example, about The countryside is a blur of “shadows” and “berries,” his ability to satisfy his lover sexually. Paul Carroll casting “dark / Hooks,” as the speaker hurtles by trying offers that “it’s a pleasure to hear a poet finally admit to catch her breath in “black sweet blood mouthfuls.” such things without beating around the bush by using The horse literally carries the speaker forward, but the metaphor” (176). Snodgrass describes his life directly, energy “hauling” the speaker along could also be and the values he finds important show that there can understood as the power of poetic language and meter. be loveliness in life beyond professional success. The poem is saturated with assonance, alliteration, and rhyme: “berries” leads to “black sweet blood,” and BIBLIOGRAPHY “Hauls me through air” leads to a perfect rhyme with Carroll, Paul. “The Thoreau Complex amid the Solid Schol- ars.” The Poem in Its Skin. Chicago: Follett, 1968, “Thighs, hair” in the next line. pp. 174–187. As the intensity and speed of the ride continues, the Gaston, Paul L. W. D. Snodgrass. Boston: Twayne, 1978. speaker shifts from the passive position of being Phillips, Robert. The Confessional Poets. Carbondale: South- “hauled through air” to taking control of the process of ern Illinois University Press, 1973. self-transformation. The speaker asserts herself as a Torchiana, Donald T. “Heart’s Needle: Snodgrass Strides “White / Godiva,” and Susan Van Dyne notes that at through the Universe.” Poets in Progress: Critical Prefaces to this point the poem shifts away from fragments toward Thirteen Modern American Poets, edited by Edward “intelligible, complete sentences,” suggesting that a Hungerford. Chicago: Northwestern University Press, new version of the self has begun to emerge (160). By 1967, 92–115. the end of the poem, the speaker leaves behind the self Gary Leising of feminine obligation and responsibility. Rider and horse, speaker and creative force are one. She lays “ARIEL” SYLVIA PLATH (1965) “Ariel” is the claim to both masculine and feminine elements: She is title poem of Sylvia PLATH’s posthumous volume, and it the phallic “arrow” and also its passive target. The con- amply demonstrates many of her greatest strengths: clusion suggests that the speaker has literally ridden emotional intensity, dazzling associative imagery, and from dusk into the sunrise and has been symbolically technical virtuosity. “Ariel” is a poem of death and transformed from a being in thrall to a powerful agent rebirth, as well as emotional, spiritual, and physical of the poetic “drive” itself. “Ariel” articulates in poetic transformation, that operates on several levels at once. form what Plath hoped to accomplish in her work: to The title alludes to Plath’s horse, which was named transcend the limitations of the prevailing order and after the “airy spirit” from Shakespeare’s play The Tem- transform the self into something completely new. pest (1611). Ariel is Prospero’s servant, and at the end BIBLIOGRAPHY of the play, when Prospero sets him free, it is clear that Britzolakis, Christina. Sylvia Plath and the Theater of Mourn- Ariel represents creative power and poetry. Thus Plath’s ing. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1999. ARK 15

Davis, William V. “Sylvia Plath’s ‘Ariel.’” Modern Poetry Stud- between the human mind and the natural world: ies 3:4 (1972). “Thinking about thinking moves atoms—however Van Dyne, Susan. Revising Life: Sylvia Plath’s Ariel Poems. mirrored: and so, as in a rainbow the architecture of Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993. light is revealed, mind is a revelation of matter” (“Beam Lisa Sewell 12”). Examining the material components of percep- tion, Johnson investigates “Linkings, inklings, / around ARK RONALD JOHNSON (1996) An elabo- the stem & branches of the nervetree” so that in rately structured long poem in 99 parts (see LONG AND observing different “sensings” the reader sees how SERIAL POETRY), Ronald JOHNSON’s ARK is both an archi- “SENSE sings” (“Beam 8”). Such inversions and dou- tecture of a romantic imagination and an imaginary ble-meanings are likewise performed in the work’s architecture. The poem is laid out as if each section of concrete poetry. For example, when reading the differ- it were part of the structure of an ark. Drawing on such ent semantic possibilities present when the line “earth- eclectic sources as the myth of Orpheus and Euridice, earthearth” is repeated over six lines shaped into a the movie The Wizard of Oz, bird songs, and the Bible, square (“Beam 24”), one fulfills the poem’s instruction ARK is a visionary poem that attempts to reconcile “TO GO INTO THE WORDS TO EXPAND THEM” human imagination and the natural laws of the universe (“Beam 28”). in musical phrases. Although Johnson himself variously In contrast, the coherence of “The Spires” and “The cited such American epics as Ezra POUND’s THE CANTOS, Ramparts” is much looser, with a greater emphasis on Charles OLSON’s THE MAXIMUS POEMS, William Carlos sound and rhythm. As Eric Murphy Selinger observes, WILLIAMS’s PATERSON, and Louis ZUKOFSKY’s “A” as signifi- the “‘Spires’ have a delicate motion quite different from cant influences, he nevertheless distinguished his work the expansive claims, illumination, and revelations of from theirs by his desire to write a poem excluding his- the ‘Foundations.’ More lines are lean and streamlined, tory, “to start all over again, attempting to know noth- composed of one or two words; and there are frequent ing but a will to create, and matter at hand” (“A Note” references to birds, mountains, stairs, and other appro- 274). In its creation of an imaginary world incorporat- priately rising phenomena” (“Ronald Johnson” 154). ing a wide range of materials pieced together, ARK While these sections continue to address much of the resembles the naïve or unschooled art of James Hamp- thematic material introduced earlier, they are more ton, Le Facteur Cheval, and Simon Rodia, whose Watts concerned with the sound of words, the “swell round Towers appears on the book’s cover. of vowels” (“ARK 52”) and play of consonants that As a textual architecture “fitted together with shards “compose sonorities / past sense” (“ARK 54”). Musical of language, in a kind of cement of music” (“A Note”), elements make up a good deal of Johnson’s language. ARK’s construction is based on the number 3 and is Although it can only be described in the published divided into “The Foundations,” “The Spires,” and form of the book, “ARK 38, Ariel’s Songs to Prospero” “The Ramparts,” each containing 33 sections. Covering is a sound performance constructed from the record- the span of one day, the first section begins at sunrise ings of different bird songs. In “The Ramparts,” each and ends at noon, the second continues on until sun- section of which is composed of 18 tercets, ARK’s syn- set, and the third ends again at sunrise. Combining tax becomes even more disjunctive as the writing center-justified linebreaks, scientific prose, and the insists on “jolt amazements of being” (“ARK 94”). Here, visual wordplay of concrete poetry, “The Foundations” as throughout, words themselves are “innumerable provides an overview of ARK’s philosophical underpin- numinosities” (“ARK 96”), and a steadily increasing nings, focusing on the interrelationship of vision, hear- tone of prophecy ends in a countdown to a rocket ing, and thought. With each “Beam” (or section of the launch, a celebratory finale that sends ARK’s architec- poem), a pun on both a ray of light and an architec- ture into the stars. In its emphasis on the vistas that tural support (perhaps alluding to Noah’s Ark), these become available when one attends to the sound and poems propose a scale of correspondence within and sight of language, ARK is a work of spiritual vision. 16 “THE ARMADILLO”

Likening the poem to a Buddhist mandala, Peter “THE ARMADILLO” ELIZABETH BISHOP O’Leary writes that ARK “is not a map of the imaginary (1965) Representative of the formal qualities of Eliz- cathedral it conceives of so much as it is a map to this abeth BISHOP’s poetry, as well as the emotional and place,” in that the work’s completion is ultimately up moral force that underlies her best work, “The to the reader (20–21). Armadillo” describes the “the frail, illegal fire balloons” Despite its romantic belief in coherence, cosmic pat- that are a traditional part of saints’ days celebrations in terns of order, and mythic archetypes, ARK is at times Brazil, where the author lived for many years. The a difficult poem to read. Pieced together as a “mosaic poem contrasts the ethereal beauty of the objects as of Cosmos” (“ARK 99”) from various sources, the they rise in the night sky to the destruction they cause poem, according to Mark Scroggins, “reconceives the when they fall in flames onto the wildlife below. As modernist poetics of juxtaposition and the ‘luminous Penelope Laurens argues, Bishop “shapes the reader’s detail,’ revising it downward, as it were, into the realm response to this beautiful and cruel event” through her of folk culture and bricolage” (148) (see MODERNISM). use of metrical variation (77). Until the final stanza, Quotations range from such sources as the Psalms, “the habitually shifting rhythms of the poem” keep the “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” (1861), Roger Tory reader “from ‘taking sides’—from becoming, that is, Peterson’s A Field Guide to Western Birds (1941), Henry too caught up either in the beauty of the balloons or David Thoreau’s Journals (1862), and Vincent van the terror of the animals” (77). Until a sudden down- Gogh’s Letters (1963). Overall ARK is characterized by draft directs one of these balloons back to Earth in the at least two potentially significant tensions: The first is sixth quatrain, they falter through the air in an irregu- between its transcendental spirituality and its faith in lar rhythm but seemingly in harmony with the natural contemporary science, and the second is between its phenomena around them, being barely decipherable romantic imagination and its innovative structure, from Venus or Mars. With characteristic attention to which, as described by Selinger, “eschews both the descriptive detail, Bishop slowly develops these grand, romantic ‘I’ and the oral, organic forms roman- ambiguous images before moving on to devote the ticism sponsors” (“Important Pleasures”). In its attempt next three stanzas of her poem to miniportraits of the to resolve these conflicts, Johnson’s ARK occupies a unwitting victims of the fiery crash: a “pair of owls,” “a unique position in 20th-century American poetry. glistening armadillo,” and “a baby rabbit.” Not until BIBLIOGRAPHY the ninth stanza, when the speaker utters the expletive Johnson, Ronald. “A Note.” ARK. Albuquerque, N. Mex.: “So soft!,” seemingly in a spontaneous response to the Living Batch Press, 1996, pp. 247–275. sight of the rabbit, does Bishop allow the reader to O’Leary, Peter. “ARK as a Spiritual Phenomenon: An identify fully with the animals. This identification then Approach to Reading Ronald Johnson’s Poem.” Sagatrieb: prepares for the final four italicized lines, which form A Journal Devoted to Poets in the Imagist/Objectivist Tradition an outcry of futile anguish and despair at the vulnera- 14 (winter 1995): 19–44. bility of the animals—and by extension of all of us—to Scroggins, Mark. “‘A’ to ARK: Zukofsky, Johnson, and an senseless destruction and suffering. Alphabet of the Long Poem.” Facture 1 (2000): 143–152. As Bonnie Costello observes, because “The Selinger, Eric Murphy. “Important Pleasures and Others: Armadillo” is dedicated to Bishop’s friend Robert LOW- Michael Palmer, Ronald Johnson.” Postmodern Culture 4.3. Available online. URL: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/ ELL, some people read it “as a critique of his way of mak- postmodern_culture/v004/4.3selinger.html. Downloaded ing art out of suffering” (75). Others, however, connect May 1994. the poem with Lowell’s decision to become a conscien- ———. “Ronald Johnson.” In Dictionary of Literary Biogra- tious objector when Allied forces started fire-bombing phy 169: American Poets since World War II, Fifth Series, Germany during World War II. Laurens, for instance, edited by Joseph Conte. Detroit: Gale Research Press, claims that “Bishop’s poem points directly to these fire 1996, pp. 146–156. bombings, which wreaked the same kind of horrifying James L. Maynard destruction on a part of our universe that fire balloons ARMANTROUT, RAE 17 wreak on the animals” (81). In this reading, the closing Armantrout often explores aspects of the poem image of the armadillo’s “weak mailed fist / clenched commonly overlooked. With six parts connected only ignorant against the sky” mirrors a soldier’s vulnerability through the title, “Tone” (1986) demonstrates how and helplessness in spite of his protective armor. After the way in which something is spoken may constitute reading “The Armadillo,” Lowell himself was inspired to its meaning. In “Poetic Silence,” Armantrout argues write “Skunk Hour,” which he, in turn, dedicated to that prose poems composed of nonnarrative declara- Bishop. Both poems, as he once remarked, “start with tive sentences (typifying much Language writing) drifting description and end with a single animal” (109). leave little room for the experience of silence. Silence, she believes, encourages further questions to arise in BIBLIOGRAPHY a poem and may even enable the unthinkable and Costello, Bonnie. Elizabeth Bishop: Questions of Mastery. Cam- bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992. conceptually paradoxical. Silence may be accommo- Laurens, Penelope. “‘Old Correspondences’: Prosodic Trans- dated by ending a poem abruptly or unexpectedly. It formations in Elizabeth Bishop.” In Elizabeth Bishop and may be created through “extremely tenuous connec- Her Art, edited by Lloyd Schwartz and Sybil P. Estess. Ann tions between parts of a poem” or through ellipsis, Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1983, pp. 75–95. self-contradiction, and retraction (34). Armantrout Lowell, Robert. “On ‘Skunk Hour.’” In The Contemporary further notes that she “may deliberately create the Poet as Artist and Critic, edited by Anthony Ostroff. effect of inconsequence” or place “the existent in per- Boston: Little, Brown, 1964, pp. 107–110. ceptible relation to the non-existent, the absent or the Sharon Talley outside” (34–35). A number of these strategies can be found in the ARMANTROUT, RAE (1947– ) Rae Arman- 1978 poem “View” (“Not the city lights. We want / — trout’s poetry is renowned for its often sparse lyricism the moon—”). Through starting with a negative propo- and sharp social observation. Although she is a key sition, Armantrout emphasizes the lack that sparks member of the San Francisco poetry community from desire. The Moon itself is elliptic, both in the sky (ren- which the LANGUAGE SCHOOL emerged, Armantrout is dered less clear by the haze of city lights) and on the suspicious of the term language-oriented, because, as she page (separated from the rest of the poem by the explains, “it seems to imply division between language dashes that surround it). The poem reinforces a sense and experience, thought and feeling, inner and outer” of cliché through the repetition of the phrase the moon, (“Why” 546). Influenced by George OPPEN, she agrees while considering philosophically the Moon’s exis- with him that “however elusive, sincerity is the measure tence. The unexpected last line, “none of our doing!,” and goal of the poem” (“Interview” 20). An ethical undermines the subject as authorizing an authoritative approach is apparent in her poetic practice, which con- source of reality. sistently draws the reader to a heightened awareness of The poem is also an example of Armantrout’s the dominant social structures underlying his or her predilection for irony, which she believes “marks the own perceptions. Armantrout’s work is also informed by consciousness of dissonance” (“Irony” 674). In other a feminist poetics that deconstructs the autonomous and works, she makes use of masquerade to dissemble cat- unified subject still found in much mainstream verse. egorical approaches, or what she calls the “morbid Armantrout was born in Vallejo, California, and glamor of the singular” (Necromance 7). grew up in San Diego. In 1989 she received a Califor- BIBLIOGRAPHY nia Arts Council Fellowship and in 1993 the Fund for Armantrout, Rae. “Poetic Silence.” In Writing/Talks, edited by Poetry Award. She has coordinated the New Writing Bob Perelman. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University series at the University of California at San Diego and Press, 1985, pp. 31–47. coedited the Archive Newsletter. Armantrout has pub- ———. “Tone.” In In the American Tree, edited by Ron Silli- lished eight collections of poetry and an autobiogra- man. Orono, Maine: National Poetry Foundation, 1986, phy, Tr ue (1998). pp. 148–149. 18 ARS POETICAS

———. “Why Don’t Women Do Language-Oriented Writ- Since cultural experience is always changing, emo- ing?” In In the American Tree, edited by Ron Silliman. tion will be redefined by each generation of writers Orono, Maine: National Poetry Foundation, 1986, drawing on their own times and sense of the world to pp. 544–546. describe their feelings. In his essay “Hamlet” (1920), ———. “Interview, conducted by Manuel Brito.” In A Suite Eliot called this process of defining emotion through of Poetic Voices: Interviews with Contemporary American bits of experience an “objective correlative” and Poets, edited by Manuel Brito. Santa Brigida, Spain: Kadle Books, 1992, pp. 13–22. observed that an emotion can be reproduced through Beckett, Tom et al. “A Wild Salience”: The Writing of Rae the personal associations one has with certain objects. Armantrout. Cleveland, Ohio: Burning Press, 2000. A sequence of objects can provoke a specific emotion Vickery, Ann. “Rae Armantrout.” Dictionary of Literary Biogra- in the reader, a principle at the heart of modern adver- phy. Vol. 193, American Poets since World War II, edited by tising, which presents a product or service with an Joseph Conte. Detroit: Gale Research, 1998, pp. 10–20. array of provocative and pleasing images to provoke a Ann Vickery feeling of need or desire. “Hamlet” went far toward defining the ways in ARS POETICAS The long tradition of writing which English and American poets might graft French poetic manifestoes that follow the original example of symbolist ideas onto their own way of writing. Eliot’s the Roman poet Horace’s Ars Poetica, has become, since argument explains how a poet may use landscape and the romantic age, a defense of new verse practices ordinary life as a screen on which to project personal against reigning poetic doctrines. William Wordsworth’s emotions and moods. Eliot had replaced the objectiv- 1800 preface to Lyrical Ballads calls attention to the ity of realistic writing for the more subtle, psychologi- need for a more common speech in lyric discourse, a cal effects of subjective lyricism, where ordinary nod to the ideals of the French Revolution and a rejec- objects are suffused with an atmosphere of shadows, tion of the aristocratic tradition that had long far-off sounds, murky lights, and other details that demanded elevated, rarefied language in poetry. Ever communicate the poet’s despair or longing, regret, or since, manifestos have indicated the shifting ground of feelings of exhaustion. By careful selection of details, social ideals as they affect the writing of new poetry, even a lamppost or a taxi can provide subtle emotional with wars, depressions, and other major social particularity. Eliot’s emotional lyricism was closely upheavals precipitating new styles of poetry. related to new styles of painting, in particular, the ren- T. S. ELIOT’s essay “Tradition and the Individual Tal- dering of landscapes in postimpressionism, as in Vin- ent,” published in 1919, is a classic example of poetic cent van Gogh’s fiery depictions of the night sky revisionism. Coming on the heels of World War I, a painted during bouts of mental illness. new psychology emerges in the essay, akin to the Ezra POUND’s formulation of imagism, which formed depth psychology developing in the works of Sig- the central tenets of the IMAGIST SCHOOL, scattered mund Freud and Carl Jung, emphasizing the collec- about in essays and notes collected in “A Retrospect” tive life of society in the form of culture and traditions (1918), reverses Eliot’s emphasis on the subjective and the individual’s use of this collective experience to imagination by placing the focus of imagination out- express one’s own nature. This larger culture resides in side the poet, in the landscape itself, where one may a poet’s mind as the memory of what one has read, find patterns emerging out of the shape of flowers and seen, felt, said, or heard, fragments of which are fused trees, the recurring shapes of wind and water, and the together into lyric statements by a strong emotion. As correspondences between the seasons and the ebb and Eliot writes in this essay, “The poet’s mind is in fact a flow of civilizations. Pound emphasized poetry’s need receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feel- for objectivity, for a language of pure description ings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the stripped bare of “emotional slither,” his phrase for self- particles which can unite to form a new compound indulgent lyricism. The term imagism suggests poetry’s are present” (8). affinity with the art of photography, a link enhanced by ARS POETICAS 19 a later movement influenced by Pound and codified as selected poems under that banner in Poetry magazine, the OBJECTIVIST SCHOOL, objectivism, with its emphasis uses the word objectivism in two ways—the ordinary on a snapshotlike clarity of vision, control of subject meaning of detaching one’s emotions from observa- matter, and strict avoidance of discursive writing. tion, and as a pun on the word objective, the lens by For Pound, poetry is a language of visual percep- which photographers view the world in magnification. tions derived from close observation of natural events. The relation between film and poetry was very rich at Not any image will do for poetry, however. Pound stip- that time, with Alfred Steiglitz, an early master of ulates that the events observed must reveal a relation sharp-focus photography, providing visual studies that among things and lead the poet to a larger perception resembled imagist lyrics in their simplicity and fore- of the presence of form uniting the details into a single, grounding of objects. Zukofsky calls attention to the composite entity. The most famous example of this relations among images, allowing the lyric to expand method is in his two-line poem, “In a Station of the from its focus on one relation to the possibility of the Metro” (1913), where he discovers that the faces of a lyric sustaining a sequence of such relations, so long as subway commuter crowd resemble the arrangement of “form” is perceived to link all of them. George OPPEN petals on a rain-soaked tree branch. In detecting the composed such a sequence in DISCRETE SERIES (1934), presence of form in unlikely juxtapositions, the poet is his experiment with an elongated, more discursive drawn to a larger perception of how certain forms mode of imagist writing. reside in the natural world and are a kind of language. Zukofsky explores the underlying animist principle Forms abound and repeat their signatures in any behind imagism, wherein matter is treated as if its con- medium or substance, from wind in the trees resem- stituent molecules were possessed of a will to cohere bling waves at sea to the overlapping petals of a rose and embrace form. In a later note to his theory, pub- and the patterns of history. His ideas about form and lished in a collection of his essays titled Prepositions poetry were influenced by Ralph Waldo Emerson’s (1967), he writes: transcendental philosophy, which argued that nature Good verse is determined by the poet’s suscepti- was both a physical and a spiritual system of energy bility involving a precise awareness of differences, and that human consciousness was mirrored in the forms, and possibilities of existence—words with natural world. their own attractions included. The poet, no less Both Eliot’s and Pound’s theories of poetry turn on than the scientist, works on the assumption that concepts drawn from modern philosophy and science inert and live things and relations hold enough and from vast overarching theories of the unity of cul- interest to keep him alive as part of nature. ture; their point of opposition is the locus of order and (“Poetry” 7) meaning. Eliot is the more conventional theoretician in locating order in the mind alone, a Christian concept, While the so-called FUGITIVE or AGRARIAN writers of whereas Pound places order in the natural world, the same period staked out a position that continued aligning his esthetics with the tradition of Greek pre- the symbolist mode of lyric begun by Eliot, there are Socratic pantheism and pagan literature. From these no corresponding statements of a poetic position by two theories, American poetry evolved along separate any of the members of this circle of southern poets— courses, one turning inward toward the poet’s subjec- but a series of textbooks written and coedited by tivity and emotional complexity, the other turning out- Cleanth Brooks and others argued that poetry’s main ward to attentive observations of the natural world. function was to render the complexities of experience Poets coming after found themselves having to choose by means of metaphor and to order the relations between a psychological poetry and a poetry that con- among events by the conventions of closed rhyming, templated the divinity of nature. stanzaic verse. Such writers rejected the notion that Louis ZUKOFSKY’s “Program: ‘Objectivists’ 1931,” form would emerge from the assembled contents which appeared as a brief preface to his anthology of alone; form was imposed onto language by the poet’s 20 ARS POETICAS imagination and skill, and it was thus independent of caust and the Vietnam War. By disrupting the pre- nature. Only by means of human artifice could nature dictable flow of syntax and narrative sense, the reader be transformed into art. is made to confront words as palpable entities rather In 1950 Charles OLSON extended the imagist argu- than as a medium of persuasive fantasies. A similar ment a notch further in his essay “Projective Verse.” argument was made by Bernstein against film as the Here he emphasizes the role of the body in composi- exploitation of violence and cruelty to attract an audi- tion, with the line length of the poem determined by ence whose exposure to such illusory experience the poet’s “breath” and with the musicality of the lan- blunts its sensitivity to reality and moral responsibility. guage arising from the poet’s aural memory of the Both in his collection of essays, Content’s Dream sounds of nature. Taking Zukofsky a step further, (1986), and in A Poetics (1992), Bernstein states his Olson suggests that the poem is a cascade of percep- intent to counter illusion and “absorptive” art by tions unfolding from the meaning of an initial image. derailing syntax, randomizing diction, and using other To sustain this sequence of perceptions embracing a devices to shock the reader back to his or her senses widening frame of experience requires that the poet and the real world. abandon self-consciousness altogether to sharpen Others in the movement have explored language as attention to the surrounding world. In a state of nearly a political construct in which only an official reality is consuming attention to the outside world, the poet will permitted expression through the patterns of normal overhear the “secrets objects share.” sentences and paragraphs. By dislocating language A self-effacing disposition toward experience is from its ordinary logic and syntax, words are liberated Olson’s way of taking the ego away from the center of from their overused functions and stand out once more the act of writing. Events should be recorded as if as unfamiliar things, as “objects,” thrust at the reader they were more important than the observer, a notion in all their complexity and ambiguity of meaning. The that was beginning to reshape the approaches in soci- language poets wage war against clichés and speech ology and anthropology, where Western values were that long ago had been preempted by advertisers and thought to have intervened and judged other cultural politicians for their own purposes. The restoration of systems too much, thus distorting their actual corrupted language is an age-old occupation of poets natures. “Projective Verse” was perhaps the first looking back at the abuse of prior generations; the goal assault upon what might be called an imperialist of the Language poets is to liberate language from its poetics after World War II, the era in which many entanglement in political and corporate power strug- native cultures were being revived after centuries of gles. These poets equate the freedom of language with European colonization. Olson’s objections to Euro- the freedom of the individual to think independently pean expansion during the last 400 years centered on and to gain access to the world as it is, not as it is por- the imposition of Western values, languages, and atti- trayed by those in power. Hence, Clark COOLIDGE’s tudes onto colonized native people; by declaring observation in his talk “Words”: “Whole edifices of himself a descendant of New World culture, an heir philosophy rising and falling on the momentary basis to Mayan and Incan art, as he did in his great poem, of what one has said” (11). “The Kingfishers” (1953), he renounced his ties to the Coolidge, like Robert CREELEY before him, has European tradition. argued that the poet has no foreknowledge of her or More recently, a number of people writing under the his acts as a writer but composes in order to discover general heading of the LANGUAGE SCHOOL, named after the possible meanings underlying her or his attention Charles BERNSTEIN’s and Bruce ANDREWS’s journal to surroundings: “I have the sensation that the most L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, asserted that language should honest man in the world is the artist when he is saying not be “absorptive” but instead resistant to a reader’s I don’t know” (“Interview” 37). The predisposition of apprehension in order to rescue poetry from the cor- knowing one’s intention means that language will nar- ruptions of language experienced between the Holo- rowly serve the purpose of proving what one knows; ARTICULATION OF SOUND FORMS IN TIME 21

Language poets would rather allow language its own Olson, Charles. “Projective Verse.” In Collected Prose of flow in order to discover hidden alternatives to one’s Charles Olson, edited by Donald Allen and Benjamin habitual perspective. This open-ended process also Friedlander. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997, pp. 239–249. agrees with Lyn HEJINIAN’s discourse on method, “The Rejection of Closure,” in which she specifically objects Pound, Ezra. “A Retrospect.” In Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, edited by T. S. Eliot. New York: New Directions, to the logic that would presume to isolate a strain of 1968, 3–14. thought from its vital connections to the rest of the Quartermain, Peter. Disjunctive Poetics: From Gertrude Stein activities of the thinking self. Her poems are attempts and Louis Zukofsky to Susan Howe. New York: Cambridge to recreate the multiple tracks of simultaneous thought University Press, 1992. and sensation that occur in any given moment of con- Zukofsky, Louis. “Program: ‘Objectivists’ 1931.” Poetry: A sciousness. Magazine of Verse 37.5 (February 1931): 268–272. Throughout the 20th century, many American poets ———. “Poetry.” In Prepositions: The Collected Critical have been engaged in an effort to distinguish the Essays of Louis Zukofsky. Berkeley: University of California American lyric from English poetry. Not only are the Press, 2000. conventions of the English lyric viewed as belonging to Paul Christensen a different cultural experience, rooted in monarchy and a close relation to Christian sacred literature, but ARTICULATION OF SOUND FORMS IN the literature itself is the record of a single race that TIME SUSAN HOWE (1987) The poetry of looks back to Rome and Athens for its legacy. As Walt Susan HOWE has often been viewed as part of the LAN- Whitman argued in his own statement of poetics in the GUAGE SCHOOL, though Howe does not consider herself preface to Leaves of Grass (1855), the diverse racial to be a language poet. Nevertheless, in her long poem makeup of America demands a more varied language Articulation of Sound Forms in Time, Howe presents an embracing the many strains of ethnic consciousness in expansive rendering of early American history, which America’s story. Other poets have argued that the pays particular attention to lesser-known figures from American Indian origins of the New World must also the past. She accomplishes this, in part, by performing be taken into account. Each attempt at restating the an act commonly used by practitioners of Language goals of American poetry widens the boundaries of poetry, namely, examining the use of language itself. The what is possible and chafes against the restraints that poem might not have been as much of an accomplish- habit and cultural norms impose upon the freedom of ment if Howe had relied solely on this self-referential the poet. process, so she pays close attention to language’s refer- ents, not just to how words and phrases act, and she BIBLIOGRAPHY plays as much with etymology as with the sonic and Bernstein, Charles. Content’s Dream: Essays 1975–1984. Los Angeles, Calif.: Sun & Moon Press, 1986. visual aspects of words. Articulation owes as much to Coolidge, Clark. “An Interview with Clark Coolidge [with James Joyce as it does to Howe’s poetic forebears (Emily Jim Cohn and Laurie Price].” Friction 7 (1984): 7–44. Dickinson and Hart CRANE) and avant-garde contempo- ———. A Poetics. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University raries (Charles BERNSTEIN and Lyn HEJINIAN). Howe’s Press, 1992. poem provides an imaginative means of re-viewing the ———. “Words.” Friction 7 (1984): 7–44. early American experience and, through its complex Eliot, T. S. Christianity and Culture: The Idea of a Christian wordplay and use of language, shows how present-day Society and Notes Towards a Definition of Culture. New America is still tied to and affected by the events and dis- York: Harcourt Brace, 1960. coveries of an earlier time. ———. “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” In Selected Essays of T. S. Eliot. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1964, Articulation consists of a short introduction fol- pp. 3–11. lowed by two sections, “Hope Atherton’s Wanderings” Hejinian, Lyn. “The Rejection of Closure.” Poetics Journal 4 and “Taking the Forest”; each contains numerous (1984): 134–143. short poems. Articulation can seem inscrutable when 22 “THE ARTS AND DEATH: A FUGUE FOR SIDNEY COX” approached as a reader would normally approach a lit- undetermined fashion?). In addition, assuming “Prest” erary work. And yet, as Rachel Tzvia Back puts it, should be read as a verb, Perloff states that “the even though “the text is enigmatic and resistant to absence of the subject or object of ‘Prest’ brings other interpretation . . . the repetition of certain words and meanings into play: ‘oppressed,’ ‘impressed,’ ‘presto’” the highlighting of others through italics or capital let- (525). It could also be the noun prest, which means “a ters signal the presence of language system, which sig- sheet of parchment.” nals the presence of meaning” (43). Indeed, there are “Prest” is clearly a very fitting beginning to what is a multiple meanings to be found in Articulation. Despite monumental poetic work—a word that, among its a seemingly incomprehensible babble, Howe has many possible meanings, could refer to a piece of meticulously constructed a map of a landscape in paper, one on which Howe has inscribed a poetic ren- which each word or word fragment is essential, repre- dering of Hope Atherton’s journey and Anne Hutchin- senting, linguistically, the confusion caused when cul- son’s tragedy (she was banned from her community for tures collide, such as what occurred in colonial religious reasons and subsequently was killed by America. Articulation contains common words with American Indians). Still, as Perloff reminds us, Howe Middle English spellings, words in various American “is not, after all, a chronicler, telling us some Indian Indian tribal languages or the English appropriation of story from the New England past, but a poet trying to these words, as well as word fragments that could be come to terms with her New England past” (533). Ulti- any combination of the above. Multiple meanings, mately, Howe is as much a part of the poems as Ather- along with the sounds of the words themselves, con- ton and Hutchinson, and we are not simply reading a struct an uneasy representation of Howe’s vision of the series of poems about the latter, but rather, in sum, a American past. long poem that illustrates one poet’s sense of history, The first group of poems in Articulation, “Hope her relationship to it, and her understanding of how Atherton’s Wanderings,” refers to the reverend Hope history is constructed through language. Atherton, an almost forgotten name in early American BIBLIOGRAPHY history. Howe gives an account of Atherton’s strange Back, Rachel Tzvia. “From the American Wilderness.” In Led story in an introduction; she writes that she will by Language: The Poetry and Poetics of Susan Howe. “assume Hope Atherton’s excursion for an emblem” Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002, much as she does with Anne Hutchinson in the second pp. 17–59. group of poems (Singularities 4). Howe, Susan. Singularities. Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan Uni- Many critics, in the years following Articulations’s versity Press, 1990. publication, have joyfully wrestled with the tight stan- Palatella, John. “An End of Abstraction: An Essay on Susan zas and strange, somewhat codelike strings of words Howe’s Historicism.” Denver Quarterly 29.3 (1995): 74–97. that make up this work. Marjorie Perloff notes of the Perloff, Marjorie. “‘Collision or Collusion with History’: The two lines that open the first poem in Articulations— Narrative Lyric of Susan Howe.” Contemporary Literature 30.4 (1989): 518–533. ”Prest try to set after grandmother / revived by and laid down left ly”—that “We cannot be sure whom ‘he’ (if Dan Coffey there is a he here) was ‘revived by,’ or whose ‘grand- mother’ is involved” (525). What we can understand “THE ARTS AND DEATH: A FUGUE here, however, is that the text consists of a certain lan- FOR SIDNEY COX” WILLIAM BRONK guage, at once disordered and full of holes (such as, (1956) In 1956 William BRONK’s book Light and What is the adjective that “ly” seeks to modify?) and Dark, published by Cid CORMAN’s Origin Press, con- capable of offering multiple interpretations (Is “ly” tained an elegy to Bronk’s mentor at Dartmouth, who meant to be a partial adverb, or is it an archaic form of died in 1952. “The Arts and Death: A Fugue for Sidney the word “lie” Are we meant to think that someone was Cox” presents three thematic ideas that Bronk contin- “laid down” and “left” to lie or “left” in a particular but ued to develop throughout his career. These ideas were ASHBERY, JOHN 23 that the real world is beyond our knowing, that life is Kimmelman, Burt. The “Winter Mind”: William Bronk and a force that defines us (rather than us defining our American Letters. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson Uni- lives), and that we make up the stories of our lives and versity Press, 1998. then believe the fictions we have created. Sherry Kearns The first idea is stated in the first stanza: “we always miss it. Not / anything is ever entirely true.” What we ASHBERY, JOHN (1927– ) John Ashbery is miss is the truth, reality. Bronk was concerned about among the most influential poets of late 20th-century the nature of reality and what could be said and known America. Associated with the NEW YORK SCHOOL, which of it. “The Arts and Death” explains, “we live in a world includes Frank O’HARA, Kenneth KOCH, and James we never understand.” At the end of his life, Bronk was SCHUYLER, Ashbery’s poetry derives from disparate still writing on this subject. Unlike the 19th-century sources, including W. H. AUDEN, Wallace STEVENS, Eliz- transcendentalists, whose work he admired, Bronk was abeth BISHOP, French SURREALISM, and American unable to experience an innate transcendent order. He ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM. Ashbery’s work has influenced believed that the nature of the real world could never a similarly wide-ranging generation of poets, from be known. Bronk originally saw this transcendental those in NEW FORMALISM to members of the LANGUAGE ignorance as a source of despair, but he eventually SCHOOL, as his poetry encompasses experimental and embraced it. investigative poetry, as well as formal and, at times, The second idea Bronk presents is that life lives us, nostalgic concerns. instead of the other way around: “[L]ife has always Ashbery was born in Rochester, New York. He grad- required / to be stated again, which is not ever stated.” uated from Deerfield Academy in 1945; he went on to Life is the active agent here; the statement of it is our- receive a B.A. from Harvard in 1949 and an M.A from selves. We are objects acted upon. Years later in the Columbia in 1951. In 1955 he went to Paris on a Ful- poem “Life Supports” (1981), Bronk writes, “Life keeps bright Fellowship and remained in France for 10 years, me alive.” Indeed, the poetic persona is not the deci- working variously as the art editor of the European sive actor in much of Bronk’s poetry. It is this technique edition of the New York Herald-Tribune, the Paris corre- that causes some scholars to see Bronk as an OBJEC- spondent for Art News, and the editor of the Paris- TIVIST, since his use of the language disturbs an English based Art and Literature. From 1960 to 1962 Ashbery speaker’s basic assumptions about subject and object. edited and published the journal Locus Solus. He has It is the poem’s subject that becomes objectified by this won most major poetry and literary awards, including use of theme. the Yale Series of Younger Poets (for Some Trees in The third dominant idea in “The Arts and Death” is 1956), Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, and that what we can say of our lives are self-created fic- National Book Critics Circle Award (for SELF-PORTRAIT IN tions. In the third stanza human lives are likened to toy A CONVEX MIRROR in 1976), Bollingen Prize (which he soldiers. By the fifth stanza Bronk says we take con- shared with Fred Chappell in 1985), and Robert FROST sciousness and, with it, “make things and persons . . . medal from the Poetry Society of America in 1995. make forms,” although, “the forms / are never real.” Ashbery’s poetry has been placed within the roman- In “The Arts and Death,” the reader finds three of tic tradition by critics, such as Harold Bloom, who Bronk’s great themes sounded for the first time understand Ashbery’s poetry as following and expand- together. The persistence of these ideas in Bronk’s life ing on the poetic traditions of Auden and Stevens. work reveals this early poem as a seminal one. Others, however, place Ashbery within a more BIBLIOGRAPHY exploratory tradition of writers, such as Gertrude STEIN Clippinger, David, ed. The Body of This Life: Essays on and Laura RIDING, and surrealist writers, such as Ray- William Bronk. Jersey City, N.J.: Talisman House, 2001. mond Roussel. Ashbery seems to place himself among Foster, Edward. Answerable to None: Berrigan, Bronk, and the these other traditions, but his self-assessments (in American Real. New York: Spuyten Duyvil, 1999. interviews, for example) often seem merely temporary 24 ASHBERY, JOHN opinions. Such contingency is appropriate given the that may be her meaning; to me, it doesn’t matter nature of Ashbery’s poetry. because the overwhelmingly spare and beautiful lan- In 1989–90, Ashbery was named the Charles Eliot guage has already satisfied me” (Other Traditions 113). Norton Professor at Harvard University. The recipient The formal concerns and digressions of Ashbery’s of this esteemed annual position (past recipients first major publication Some Trees (which Auden chose include T. S. ELIOT, Robert Frost, and John CAGE) is for the influential Yale Younger Poets series [see POETRY required to present a series of public lectures. Ash- PRIZES]) garnered few reviews, although, in retrospect, bery’s Charles Eliot Norton lectures were published in the poems introduce themes and techniques Ashbery 2000 as Other Traditions, Ashbery’s first book-length developed in the later poetry: digressions and atten- commentary on poetry (his art criticism has been col- tions (“The Instruction Manual”); playful yet serious lected in Reported Sightings: Art Chronicles, 1957–1987). references to the self or to the poem (“The Picture of Ashbery takes up poets whose work, although not well Little J. A. in a Prospect of Flowers”); disjunction known, has influenced his own. Of the six, three are (“Grand Abacus”); and formal variety (“Pantoum,” American poets (John Wheelwright, Riding, and David “Sonnet,” “A Pastoral”). Ashbery was already living in Schubert), two British (John Clare and Thomas Lovell France when the book was published and had begun Beddoes), and one French (Roussel). work on what is still considered his most controversial From these curious forebearers (as well as from other and problematic book, The Tennis Court Oath. Ashbery more conventional poets, such as Stevens and Bishop), has noted that the difficult and challenging fragments Ashbery has developed a poetic that is challenging and of The Tennis Court Oath were partly a response to his disarming, formal and casual, meaningful and acciden- living in France away from other English speakers and tal; in his lecture on Riding, Ashbery reveals something partly a result of the lackluster critical response to his of how we might read (and misread) his own poems: first book. On the assumption that he would not get a “What then are we to do with a body of poetry whose chance to publish another book, he had been experi- author warns us that we have very little chance of menting with language fragments, collage, and narra- understanding it, and who believes that poetry itself is tive disruptions, all of which are present in The Tennis a lie? Why, misread it of course. . . . All poetry is writ- Court Oath, since the publication of Some Trees. ten with this understanding on the part of the poet and The few critics, such as Bloom, who admired Ash- reader; if it can’t stand the test of what Harold Bloom bery’s first book were almost uniformly put off by the names ‘misprision,’ then we leave it to pass on to some- apparent nonsense of the second. Yet other, more thing else” (101–102). Ashbery’s poetry not only with- experimental poets have cited The Tennis Court Oath as stands such misprision (Bloom’s term for a kind of Ashbery’s most interesting and valuable book. The creative misreading), it also invites such active and par- place of The Tennis Court Oath within Ashbery’s oeuvre ticipatory readings and misreadings. is still debated: Critics who place Ashbery in the In the poem “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” we Auden/Stevens high modernist camp view the book as find that the artist is not really in control of the art any- an aberration (see MODERNISM), while those who see way, so the reader is invited to create her or his own Ashbery as a formal innovator call it his breakthrough sense of meaning, an activity not unlike the poet’s own. book (albeit a breakthrough from which Ashbery him- Ashbery compares the relationship between the artist’s self has retreated in his later works). intention and the reader’s interpretation to the party With Ashbery’s next several books, he developed a game in which “A whispered phrase passed around the continuing readership: Rivers and Mountains (1966), room / Ends up as something completely different.” The Double Dream of Spring (1970), Three Poems (which Thus the difficulty faced by the reader of an Ashbery consists of three lengthy prose poems [1972]), and poem is deciding which details—which words—are Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror are among his most important. It is possible, however, to enjoy Ashbery’s enduring works. Self-Portrait, Ashbery’s critical and poetry even if one is not sure what is going on. As Ash- popular 1975 milestone, established Ashbery’s reputa- bery says after interpreting a poem by Riding: “At least, tion as a major American poet. Following his critical ATKINS, RUSSELL 25 success, Ashbery continued to explore aspects of form ATKINS, RUSSELL (1926– ) Russell Atkins, and disjunction in books that include a bemused, who has been at the center of African-American avant- sometimes nostalgic tone, strange yet simple syntax, garde poetics since the late 1940s, has been among the odd and surrealist similes, experiments with formal most active small-press publishers, editors, and critics. innovation, and playfulness (as in, for example, one of Early on Atkins discovered, as he has remarked, that his most commonly anthologized poems, “Paradoxes “just as contemporary composers had challenged west- and Oxymorons,” from Shadow Train [1981]). ern diatonicism with chromatic dissonance, I could April Galleons (1987) contains no single long poem, distort grammar to a similar purpose” (12). Such com- unlike many of Ashbery’s collections, such as FLOW CHART mitments set Atkins outside the mainstream of popu- (1991). A single long poem, Flow Chart includes, for lar verse, with its emphasis upon CONFESSIONAL example, a double sestina within its expansive formal experience and voice, and yet his poetics of conspicu- explorations. The sestina itself is a lengthy (13 stanza) ous technique and his aversion to the dominance of meditation on death, but it begins with a concern for “natural language” in so much American verse show language: “We are interested in the language, that you his independence even from the main course of exper- call breath / if breath is what we are to become.” imental poetries. Ashbery’s poetry has a reputation for difficulty and Atkins was born on February 25, 1926, in the city obtuseness, but much of the apparent difficulty dimin- that was to remain his home, Cleveland, Ohio. He ishes if the reader accepts the transitory visions and established early correspondences with poets, such as changing mental landscapes of the poems. His tone Langston HUGHES and Marianne MOORE. In 1949 often shifts radically within individual poems, from the Hughes wrote to Atkins, advising him not to try to be a conversational to the mythic, from self-effacing to “social” poet but to write as he felt compelled. In 1951 grand statements. The poems seem to have no still Moore recited Atkins’s poem “Trainyard by Night” on point, no stable ground from which the speaker speaks; the radio, later writing to tell Atkins that his poem had this lack of stability is often itself the theme of the been the standout of the program. Atkins published his poem. Ashbery’s widely anthologized “The Instruction first of eight books of poetry in 1961. Also a composer, Manual,” from Some Trees, for example, clearly reveals playwright, and critic, he has been invited to the Bread- itself as the mental wanderings of a bored author of an loaf Writers Conference (1956), has been a writer in instruction manual. The visions of Guadalajara that the residence at Cuyahoga Community College (1973), and poem presents are mental constructions. Unlike in was awarded an honorary doctorate by Cleveland State most of Ashbery’s poems, however, the narrative’s frame University (1976). For two decades, Atkins was an edi- (the author looking out his window dreaming of tor of the Free Lance, one of the longest-lived journals Guadalajara) is visible at the beginning and end; in with a black editorship, a determinedly innovative much of Ashbery’s work, the drifting of the mind is not small magazine that grew out of the Free Lance writers presented within such a stable frame. workshop. His poetry has been set to music by the composer Hale Smith and has recently been repub- BIBLIOGRAPHY Ashbery, John. Other Traditions: The Charles Eliot Norton Lec- lished in new poetry journals. tures. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001. Atkins wrote often of his theories of “psychovisual- Bloom, Harold, ed. John Ashbery. New York: Chelsea ism” and “deconstruction,” writing of the latter as House, 1985. early as 1956, well before the term had become pop- Schultz, Susan, ed. The Tribe of John: Ashbery and Contempo- ularized in academic circles. He may have been the rary Poetry. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1995. first African-American concrete poet, and in poems as Shapiro, David. John Ashbery: An Introduction to the Poetry. early as 1947 his writing departed from the standards New York: Columbia University Press, 1979. of high MODERNISM, pointing the way for much that Shoptaw, John. On the Outside Looking Out: John Ashbery’s would follow. A late poem, “Shipwreck” (1976), Poetry. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994 shows his sense of his own independence: “With Dean Taciuch today’s sympathetics who can dare? / in the old days 26 “AT THE WELL” when sailed struck, / sank, who knew? few, compara- tableau, resisting (or lacking) the ability to articulate an tively.” Though Atkins has been nearly alone in his identity—set pieces in an (as yet) unscripted drama— aesthetic explorations, his work has attracted an they may be continuously created or recreated by the increasing number of sympathizers as it has become mind. The poem, then, though “narrative” in appear- more widely known. ance, behaves not as a literal description, but rather as self-generative play. Even though the figures are made to BIBLIOGRAPHY speak in stanza 9, their speech is immediately denied: Atkins, Russell. “Russell Atkins.” In Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series, edited by Joyce Nakamura. Vol. 16. “They / say nothing.” This highlights the closed circuit Detroit: Gale Research, 1992, pp. 1–19. of the fictional creation of others, especially the utter- Free Lance 14.2 (1970). [Special Russell Atkins issue with ances of those invented “others.” Rather than represent- commentary by Casper L. Jordan and L. Stefanski.] ing mythic presences, the mounted riders suggest the Levy, Andrew, and Bob Harrison, eds. Crayon 2 (1999). rhetorical figure of the straw man, emphasizing the Nielsen, Aldon Lynn. “Black Deconstruction: Russell Atkins inherent hollowness of an image while evoking further and the Reconstruction of African-American Criticism.” questions and tempting us to keep up the game of Diacritics 26.3–4 (1996): 86–103. inventing and reinventing their meaning. The poem Aldon L. Nielsen dramatizes the imagination as it struggles with its own process of creation, highlighting the phantasmic nature “AT THE WELL” PAUL BLACKBURN of image making. (1967) In her introduction to Paul BLACKBURN’s In the final turn of the poem’s argument (stanza 15), Selected Poems (1989), Edith Jarolim refers to his the speaker directly addresses an ambiguous audience of poem “At the Well” as a “mythic piece” (xviii); yet if it “gentlemen” observers, asking them to turn their backs is so, it is a myth caught in the act of performing— on this desert of the imagination. The terminal punctu- that is, questioning—its meaning. Martha King notes ation delays closure by a space, skipping a beat—”There that a dominant maneuver in Blackburn’s later poetry is nothing here .”—a typographical enactment and is to comment on the process of making poetry acknowledgment of the illusionism that is present even (“Reading”). Such tendencies position this late 1960s (or especially) in the poem’s final gesture. poem squarely within a postmodern tradition of self- In a foreword to Blackburn’s selected poems, M. L. reflexivity and uncertainty about one’s relation to the Rosenthal reflects that a hallmark of Blackburn’s poetry world as a whole and to others, in particular, prying is tracking “whatever musings have been set ticking the gaps between the self and nonself, between the right there in middle of things,” bounding from the lit- sense of a voice and identity and the forces (in the eral to the philosophical and back (vii). In “At the environment as well as in the unconscious) that chal- Well,” the “literal” itself is teased out, no more a “thing” lenge them. than the philosophical or psychological; all are at the The first three lines of the poem present an exotic set- service of an imagination that holds up a mirror to the ting, but they augment, amend, and revise the initial nature of the self in which it must confront, ultimately, vision as they go along: “Here we are, see? / in this vil- its self-deceptive tendencies. lage, maybe a camp / middle of desert.” The writing BIBLIOGRAPHY itself demonstrates the imagination’s attempt to find its Jarolim, Edith. Introduction to The Selected Poems of Paul moorings, thereby making the reader aware of the game Blackburn. New York: Persea Books, 1989, pp. xv–xix. we play when we read and indulge in fictional worlds King, Martha. “Reading Paul Blackburn,” Jacket Magazine. that we “make believe” are real. Stanza 2 introduces an Available online. URL: www.jacket.zip.com.au/jacket12/ antagonistic element, “these riders / on camels or blackburn-martha-king.html. Downloaded May 2003. horses,” resignedly “sitting / there” waiting for us the Rosenthal, M. L. Foreword to The Selected Poems of Paul readers to make something of them. Since the figures Blackburn. New York: Persea Books, 1989, pp. vii–viii. seated ambivalently on animal backs are presented in Tom Lavazzi AUDEN, W(YSTAN) H(UGH) 27

AUDEN, W(YSTAN) H(UGH) (1907–1973) returned to England to receive the King’s Gold medal for W. H. Auden was one of the leading poets of the 20th Poetry. In 1938 he went to China with Isherwood, and century. No other poet exhibited his range of genre, the two wrote Journey to a War (1939). style, or subject matter. His poetry drew on such var- The year 1939 began a culmination of controversial ied resources as fairy tales, Anglo-Saxon myth and changes in Auden’s life. He immigrated to the United meter, Icelandic sagas, songs (ancient, medieval, mod- States just before the outbreak of war in Europe, and a ern), ballads, LYRIC POETRY, odes, epics, satires, paro- year later he became a Christian. Once in the United dies, epigrams, elegies, meditations, arguments, and States, he became romantically involved with Chester urbane, witty conversations. Unlike poets of a single Kallmann, a young American poet, and the two lived voice, Auden mastered, then abandoned voices and together, off and on, for the rest of Auden’s life. In 1946 styles, not as a dabbler but as a talented virtuoso, with Auden became a U.S. citizen. For three decades he encyclopedic interests and a conviction that no single made New York City his home, spending his summers perspective can reveal the truth. From an early mod- in Italy and later outside Vienna. He taught at the New ernist beginning, influenced by T. S. ELIOT, his poetry School for Social Research, the University of Michigan, progressed into a middle period of Freudian and Marx- Swarthmore, Bryn Mawr, and Bennington. Of the many ist social critique and gradually into a more accessible, awards he received were two Guggenheim awards in conversational style with a broadly Christian perspec- 1942 and 1945, a Pulitzer Prize for The Age of Anxiety tive. During the 1950s and 1960s, he was a model for (1947), and a National Book Award for The Shield of American poets writing formal verse, such as John Achilles (1955). In addition to poetry, he wrote libretti HOLLANDER, Richard WILBUR, and, later, James MERRILL; for operas, including (with Kallmann) the libretto for during the later decades of the century, a period dom- Igor Stravinski’s The Rake’s Progress, and wrote many inated by free verse in CONFESSIONAL, imagistic, and essays, including those in The Dyer’s Hand and Other more romantic modes, he remained a sophisticated, Essays (1962). In 1972 he returned to England to teach urbane alternative model (see IMAGIST SCHOOL). The fin at Oxford and died the following year in Vienna. de siècle resurgence of interest in formal poetry owes Critical discussion often divides Auden’s work into an something to his long-standing example. early and a late period, his move to the United States Auden was born in York, England, into a well-to-do standing as the watershed, though such a division over- family, the son of a doctor and a nurse, becoming what simplifies his lifelong development. His first volume is he later called “a typical little highbrow and difficult Poems, influenced by Eliot’s THE WASTE LAND, and is char- child” (322). He was educated at Oxford (1925–28), and acterized by fragmentation, disjunction, ellipsis, irony, a when he was 21, Stephen Spender privately printed his haunted voice, and a visionary tone. Poems creates a first volume, Poems (1928). After graduation, he lived for landscape of abandoned mines, power stations, and a year and a half in Berlin, exploring his homosexuality industrial machines set in an unspecified time of war or in the bar and café life of the city. On T. S. Eliot’s recom- exile. After taking the reader to such a landscape, the first mendation, Faber and Faber published an expanded edi- poem ends, “Go home, now, stranger .../ This land, cut tion of his Poems (1930). His second volume, The Orators off, will not communicate,” lines that suggest the alien- (1932), established him as the spokesperson for his gen- ation and sterility of modern life. As Auden inherited eration. From 1932 to 1937, he wrote three plays with from his father an interest in medicine, illness, and diag- Christopher Isherwood, The Dog beneath the Skin, The nosis, he sought to diagnose the modern condition by Ascent of F 6, and On the Frontier. In 1936 a new collec- exploring both psychological and social causes and find- tion of his poetry appeared, Look, Stranger. (The U.S. edi- ing potential remedies in Sigmund Freud’s and D. H. tion, titled On This Island, appeared in 1937). After Lawrence’s valuing of the instinctual over the rational. traveling to Iceland with Louis MacNeice and publishing These concerns appear again in The Orators, a book- Letters from Iceland (1937) and traveling to Spain during length poem and Auden’s most difficult work. After part the civil war there and publishing Spain (1937), Auden one, “The Initiates,” parodies the official, public rhetoric, 28 AUDEN, W(YSTAN) H(UGH) clichés, and false rationalizations supporting modern life, The Time Being, A Christmas Oratorio” and “The Sea part two, “The Journal of an Airman,” offers an intimate and the Mirror: A Commentary on Shakespeare’s The account of a failed attempt to heal crisis by looking Tempest” appeared in For the Time Being (1944); the toward a revolutionary hero. Part three, consisting of “Six former was Auden’s most openly religious piece, and Odes” and an epilogue, then seems to offer hope through the latter includes a speech by Caliban that Auden felt some unspecified spiritual healing. to be among his best work. The Age of Anxiety, written As the 1930s progressed, Auden moved toward a in Anglo-Saxon meter, presents a theological barroom more casual style of plain speech and more explicit sub- conversation probing the inner life in accentual verse. jects drawn from everyday experience. This change may Nones (1951) uses syllabic meter extensively. The Shield have resulted from a desire to reach a broader audience of Achilles continued Auden’s movement toward an than MODERNISM could reach, a desire born of his deep- intimate, Horatian style—sober, often witty contem- ening commitment to Marxism, his writing of plays, and plations about ordinary life, deeply felt, carefully rea- a religious experience of agape, or universal love, he soned musings, never overcome with emotion, seeking claimed to have underwent in 1933. Characteristic is a balance of ironies and multiplicities rather than solu- the 1936 Look, Stranger. Along with a dozen songs, there tions from a single perspective. Homage to Clio (1960) appear many poems in this new style, in which the poet explores conflicts between nature and history, and speaks publicly about contemporary events. In 1939 About the House (1965) canvasses domestic life. Journey to a War included his famous sonnet sequence, Many criticized Auden’s later style as impover- “In Time of War,” also in the new style. ished—too bookish, verbose, and intellectual; offering By the close of the decade, Auden was reexamining ironic, often comical chat; a product of thinking rather his largest ideas about human being, reading Søren than feeling. But having rejected the role of spokesper- Kierkegaard, and finding personal echoes in the son of his generation and wary of the pretenses of an philosopher’s account of an intellectual’s journey easy, prophetic, bardic romanticism, he offered himself toward Christianity. His ultimate conversion to Chris- as a flawed, contemporary subject whose urbanity and tianity resolved for him the conflict between eros (the chattiness veil a carefully controlled rhetorical power. instinctual) and logos (the rational) through agape After his rebellious beginnings in modernism, his last (love transformed by grace). Another Time (1940) con- poems seem to find reconciliation with the world. veys a new warmth, confidence, and directness, and it Auden’s influence on American poetry cannot be includes many of his most famous poems, “Musée des overemphasized. As judge of the Yale Series of Younger Beaux Arts,” the elegies for Freud and William Butler Poets (see POETRY PRIZES) from 1947 to 1958, he helped Yeats, and “September 1, 1939.” “Musée des Beaux the careers of many now-eminent poets including John Arts” displays Auden’s ability to speak profoundly ASHBERY and Adrienne RICH, and his explorations and about serious subjects with ordinary, even comic discoveries in form, style, and subject matter opened detail. Commenting on the stark psychological isola- new landscapes for poets to follow. tion suffering engenders, this poem observes that even BIBLIOGRAPHY martyrdom must always take place in “some untidy Auden, W. H. The English Auden, edited by Edward Mendel- corner.../ Where the dogs go on with their doggy son. New York: Random House, 1978. life and the torturer’s horse / Scratches its innocent Carpenter, Humphrey. W. H. Auden. Boston: Houghton Mif- behind on a tree.” Four important poems in this vol- flin, 1981. ume trace his journey from humanism to Christianity: Fuller, John. W. H. Auden: A Commentary. Princeton, N.J.: “Votaire at Ferney,” “Matthew Arnold,” “Herman Princeton University Press, 1998. Melville,” and “Pascal.” Mendelson, Edward. Early Auden. New York: Viking, 1981. Also during the 1940s, four important long poems ———. Later Auden. New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux, appeared. “New Year Letter” in The Double Man (1941) 1999. is an epistle contemplating the state of Western civi- Wright, George T. W. H. Auden. Boston: Twayne, 1981. lization and offering Kierkegaardian solutions. “For Michael Sowder C B D

BACA, JIMMY SANTIAGO (1952– ) ber of honors, including the Before Columbus Foun- Jimmy Santiago Baca has been a premier Chicano dation American Book Award (1988) and the Pushcart poet and essayist. While revealing the soul-searing Prize (1988). anguish of a life forced into desperation and incarcer- Baca’s poetry is filled with tension between thematic ation, his work is also a testament to the healing opposites. In his first major collection, Immigrants in power of language. The complex heritage of Chicano Our Own Land (1979), prison threatens, but doesn’t culture is evident in Baca’s poetry. In his memoir, he succeed in canceling, the life of the spirit. Place again acknowledges William Carlos WILLIAMS’s common becomes an important protagonist in Martín & Medita- language and Walt Whitman’s long adventurous lines. tions on the South Valley (1987), wherein the barrio and Furthermore, Baca’s channeling of intense passion is the culture found there are celebrated as the founda- informed by a Spanish language tradition: “For me,” tion for a new life. Metaphors of the South Valley and he writes, “there were no schools, no writing work- the Chicano experience are warmly contrasted with the shops. But there were the voices of [Pablo] Neruda world of the comfortably fortunate, expressed through and [Federico García] Lorca, [Jaime] Sabines and images of the Heights: “Worth is determined in the Val- [Octavio] Paz . . . who in solitude begged on their ley / by age and durability” (“Meditations on the South knees all their lives for one word, one image, to Valley” [1987]). redeem their misery and celebrate their joy” (Working Baca writes in Martín, “My mind circles warm ashes in the Dark 59–60). of memories, / the dark edged images of my history.” Baca was born in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The land- His work draws on the twin streams of memory and scape of the Southwest provides a source of regenera- imagination, allowing the transformative power of lan- tion for the poet and the Chicano people he celebrates, guage to envision a future, rescuing Baca from the rav- as in Black Mesa Poems (1986). Baca’s own life was ages of prison experience and Chicanos everywhere marked by early loss. Later the dehumanizing forces of from destructive negation. prison life, as well as the sharp edge of a dominant cul- BIBLIOGRAPHY ture’s repression of a people, threatened the young Baca, Jimmy Santiago. A Place to Stand. New York: Grove man’s existence and capacity for being human. It was Press, 2001. by recourse to poetry that Baca survived, physically, ———. Working in the Dark: Reflections of a Poet of the Bar- emotionally, and spiritually. Poems fashioned in the rio. Santa Fe: Red Crane, 1992. searing crucible of his personal experiences have Moore, George. “Beyond Cultural Dialogues: Identities in received high critical acclaim. He has received a num- the Interstices of Culture in Jimmy Santiago Baca’s Martín

29 30 BARAKA, AMIRI

and Meditations on the South Valley.” Western American Lit- including the State University of New York at Stony erature 33.2 (summer 1998): 153–177. Brook. His many awards and honors include an Obie Brian A. Spillane Award for his play Dutchman (1964), the American Book Award’s Lifetime Achievement Award (1989), and the BARAKA, AMIRI (LEROI JONES) Langston Hughes Award (1989); in 2001 he was (1934– ) Amiri Baraka, also known as Imamu inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Amiri Baraka and LeRoi Jones, is a unique force in In 2002 Baraka was appointed to a controversial two- American poetry. His practice as a cultural activist year term as poet laureate of New Jersey. redefined the role of the modern American poet. He is Partly as a result of his capacity for extreme state- best known for his powerful contribution, as writer ment and sense of dramatic timing, Baraka’s work is and theorist, to the BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT of the 1960s. often seen as belonging to distinctly defined periods, Mixing the open forms of 1950s BEATs and BLACK what William J. Harris names as “Beat” (1957–62), MOUNTAIN SCHOOL poetry with the rhetorical and musi- “Transitional” (1963–64), “Black Nationalist” cal traditions of black culture, he explosively devel- (1965–74), and “Third-World Marxist” (1974– ). oped an urgent and militant African-American poetry During the Beat period, Baraka lived in Manhattan’s and poetics. Literary historian and critic Arnold Ram- Greenwich Village and Lower East Side, establishing a persad identifies Baraka as the principal modernizing reputation as a poet and critic, coediting the avant- influence on black poetry and names him, along with garde journals Yugen and Floating Bear with Hettie Langston HUGHES and others, as one of the eight writ- Cohen and Diane DI PRIMA, respectively, and associating ers “who have significantly affected the course of with avant-garde musicians, visual artists, and poets, African-American literary culture” (qtd. in Harris including Allen GINSBERG, Robert CREELEY, and Frank “Introduction” xviii). Hughes’s example and influence O’HARA. In his Autobiography, Baraka describes himself at on Baraka was profound, and the two poets are clearly this time as being ‘“open’ to all schools within the circle in sympathy in terms of formal experimentation, com- of white poets of all faiths and flags. But what had hap- mitment to audience, and historical consciousness, pened to the blacks? What had happened to me? How even to the extent that Hughes’s “Broadcast to the West is it that [there is] only the one colored guy?” (157). Indies” (1943) seems to make possible Baraka’s “SOS” As a black poet in an America then being trans- (1967), and Baraka’s “When We’ll Worship Jesus” formed by the Civil Rights movement, Baraka felt a (1975) becomes a later 20th-century treatment of growing dissatisfaction with the role of poet as disaf- Hughes’s “Goodbye Christ” (1932). Other influences fected outsider. A visit to Cuba in 1960 initiated a con- include jazz and blues music and musicians and the scious process of politicization, which eventually theory and practice of politicized black writers, includ- resulted in a vehement rejection of white aesthetics ing Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. DuBois, Aimé Césaire, and society in favor of the separatist Black Arts move- and Malcolm X. A prolific poet since the publication of ment, which Larry Neal has defined as “the aesthetic his first collection, Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide and spiritual sister of the Black Power concept” (62), Note (1961), Baraka is also a celebrated playwright, although Baraka has identified black music as being as essayist, music critic, fiction writer, and editor. fundamental to Black Arts as black revolution. Baraka was born Everett LeRoy Jones to a lower- Baraka’s black nationalist period was dramatically middle-class family in Newark, New Jersey. His early announced by his rejection of white bohemia, and his work was published under the name LeRoi Jones. In first wife, after the assassination of Malcolm X in Feb- 1967 he adopted the name Ameer Barakat (Blessed ruary 1965, and his subsequent move uptown to Prince), later “Bantuizing or Swahilizing” it to Amiri Harlem, where he founded the influential Black Arts Baraka (Autobiography 267). He attended Rutgers and Repertory Theatre/School. Later that year he moved Howard Universities before joining the United States back to Newark, where he established the publishing Air Force in 1954. He has taught at several schools, company Jihad Productions and the arts space Spirit “THE BEAN EATERS” 31

House, in addition to participating in black revolu- by the Internet circulation of his poem, “Somebody tionary politics and politicization. His best-known Blew Up America,” written shortly after the September poem of this period, “Black Art” (1966), announces his 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The poem is a blasting uncompromising poetics: “We want ‘poems that kill.’ / indictment of white greed throughout history and Assassin poems, Poems that shoot / guns.” For Baraka, became controversial because of its anti-Semitic ques- the poem becomes a lethal weapon, and poetry—in tions: “Who knew the World Trade Center was gonna rejection of W. H. AUDEN’s well-known dictum to the get bombed / Who told 4000 Israeli workers at the contrary from “In Memory of W. B. Yeats”—can and Twin Towers / To stay home that day,” and Baraka’s will make something happen. Baraka aims to replace subsequent statement that the Bush administration the silent reader of modernist poetry with a charged, had advance knowledge of the attacks. Baraka’s refusal elated, and articulate audience (see MODERNISM). His to resign as poet laureate led the New Jersey State Sen- poem “SOS” (1967), both distress call and call to arms, ate Government Committee to vote for a bill eliminat- issues an opening salvo to which black people are ing the position. asked to respond: “Black people, come in, wherever BIBLIOGRAPHY you are, urgent, calling / you, calling all black people.” Baraka, Amiri. The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones / Amiri In 1974 Baraka rejected cultural nationalism in Baraka. New York: Freundlich Books, 1984. favor of Marxism-Leninism as a way forward for black Gwynne, James B., ed. Amiri Baraka: The Kaleidoscopic Torch. revolution. In contrast to black nationalism, which he New York: Steppingtones Press, 1985. now saw as racist, Marxism-Leninism offered solidarity Harris, William J. Introduction to The LeRoi Jones/Amiri not only among oppressed blacks in the United States, Baraka Reader, edited by Harris. New York: Thunder’s Africa, and the West Indies, but also among oppressed Mouth Press, 1991, pp. xvii–xxx. classes everywhere. Although his “hate whitey” phase ———. The Poetry and Poetics of Amiri Baraka: The Jazz Aes- was more or less spent, Baraka’s passionate polemic thetic. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1985. still boiled in his first marxist volume, Hard Facts Neal, Larry. “The Black Arts Movement.” In Visions of a Lib- erated Future: Black Arts Movement Writings. New York: (1975). “When We’ll Worship Jesus” exploits black Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1989, pp. 62–78. religious rhetoric while simultaneously ripping it apart, saying that we’ll worship Jesus, “When jesus Mairéad Byrne blow up / the white house” and “when he get a boat load of ak-47s / and some dynamite.” Baraka, who has “THE BEAN EATERS” GWENDOLYN resoundingly replaced the hesitant “I” of his early BROOKS (1960) “The Bean Eaters,” the title poem poetry with the collective “we,” declares: “We can of one of Gwendolyn BROOKS’s most widely known col- change the world / we aint gonna worship jesus cause lections, fits into what Brooks herself called her “pre- jesus don’t exist.” The intensely musical “In the Tradi- 1967” category of poetry. However, the poem bridges tion” (1982), dedicated to avant-garde jazz musician Brooks’s pre- and post-1967 poetry, with its commen- Arthur Blythe, shows Baraka at the top of his form, tary on an elderly couple’s meager existence and the hooking together references to the great artistic and suggestion that these people have no opportunity for political traditions of black leadership in a loose and economic improvement. The focus on blacks as both exuberant rap: “our fingerprints are everywhere / on subject and audience prefigures the work of poets of you America, our fingerprints are everywhere.” the BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT—many of whom influenced One of the paradoxes of Baraka’s poetry is the con- her more direct poetic expression after 1967. tinued power of his poems, old and new, to stir strong Brooks labels much of her work written during her reactions despite their obvious grounding in specific pre-1967 period as “condition literature,” meaning historical contexts. His poems do not grow stale, per- that it “whined” about the “lot” of black people in an haps because of their outrageous energy and humor. effort to get whites to help alleviate certain adverse Baraka continues to be a poet of his time, as indicated societal conditions (5). Although her post-1967 poetry 32 BEAT POETRY was more consciously directed to blacks as she became BEAT POETRY The Beat poets were a group of more involved in the community, Brooks insists, friends living in New York City in the decade following “Many of the poems, in my new and old books, are World War II who, through their collaborations, exper- politically aware...even [in 1945] I could sense, iments with poetry rhythms, and questioning of the although not brilliantly, not in great detail, that what status quo, forever altered the relationship of poetry to was happening to [blacks] was going to erupt at some popular culture. The peak of their influence was dur- later time” (42). “The Bean Eaters” certainly fits into ing the late 1940s through the early 1960s, when their this sense of her early work as she describes it. Its pol- thematic explorations of sexuality and social class ush- itics lie in the resilience of the black poor, and nowhere ered in the hippie movement. Building on the free- in the poem does she appear to “whine” to white verse, stream-of-consciousness, and collage styles America. As Jacquelyn Y. McLendon points out, the explored by many modernist poets (see MODERNISM), poem “continues themes found in Brooks’s earlier the Beats integrated rhythms found in jazz clubs with poetry, especially the notion of the tiny, cramped phys- invocations of Eastern religions and Buddhist chants. ical and emotional space of the poor, which can be They differed from the poets of the IMAGIST SCHOOL by redeemed by the power of memory” (35). focusing on the immediacy of experience, as opposed The first two stanzas intertwine form with content, to the precision of images. By representing and ordinary language, and conventional line lengths and embracing the contradictions of contemporary lives on rhyme scheme to convey the humdrum nature of an the fringe, they created an especially active and acces- aging couple’s everyday life. Their dinner—”a casual sible poetry. Today the influence of the Beats is still felt affair”—is defined by the recurrence of a meal of beans, in popular culture, through the popularity of coffee eaten on “Plain chipware,” dinner plates cracked by houses, poetry slams, and spoken word poetry. years of use, and “tin flatware” that certainly will not The term beat was coined during a 1948 discussion become the stuff of heirlooms. The “old yellow pair” between writers Jack KEROUAC and John Clellon has passed the height of their lives, moved far beyond Holmes about the weariness and alienation or, as Ker- their youth, and resides in a “rented back room.” ouac was to put it, the “beatness” of their generation. Yet, in the third stanza, Brooks switches to free verse Holmes used the term twice in 1952: in a fictionalized to describe the “twinklings” of their memories. The biography called Go and in a New York Times Magazine leftovers of their lives suggest the presence once of article, “The Beat Generation” (Watson 3). The name flowers, children, and days of dressing up and having caught on, making the term beatnik synonymous with fun. With little money and no luxuries, the couple are an intellectual form of youth rebellion. Before long, the content to find joy in “remembering” how they “have concept of “beat” was commodified by popular cul- lived their day.” An unwavering devotion to well- ture, inspiring Beatlike characters on film and televi- crafted poetry attentive to the music and clarity of lan- sion shows, such as on the sitcom Dobie Gillis. Media guage is evident in this poem, as is true of other poems of the 1950s and 1960s were filled with images of the by Brooks. The Bean Eaters has achieved an iconic sta- finger-snapping, turtleneck-wearing, goateed arche- tus within her entire body of work. typal Beat, bearing little resemblance to the actual poets most closely associated with the movement. BIBLIOGRAPHY A decade before the Beatnik fad began, a small net- Brooks, Gwendolyn. “Gwendolyn Brooks.” In Black Women work of outcast students, graduates, and dropouts Writers at Work, edited by Claudia Tate. New York: Con- from Columbia University’s English department hun- tinuum, 1984. kered down in New York cafés, challenging and McLendon, Jacquelyn Y. “Gwendolyn Brooks.” In African American Writers, edited by Valerie Smith et al. New York: encouraging each other to take their own writing in Collier Books, 1991. new and surprising directions. Inspired by such poets as Walt Whitman and William Carlos WILLIAMS, the Judy Massey Dozier Beats emphasized freethinking and spontaneous writ- BEAT POETRY 33

ing. Like their BLACK MOUNTAIN SCHOOL counterparts, perceptions that could then be applied to creative they celebrated the theme of individual experience and work. Another venue of inspiration was the be-bop perception, and they saw their very lives as the active jazz scene in Harlem, the echoes of which can be heard impetus by which poems were made. in the twists and turns of their verse and prose The writers most central to the movement were rhythms. For a time Kerouac called his spontaneous Allen GINSBERG, Jack Kerouac, and William Burroughs. style “blowing,” referring to a be-bop jazz player riffing Their cohorts and muses came to include, over the off a melody with a horn. years, Herbert Huncke, Neal Cassady, Gregory CORSO, The Beats increasingly took a holistic view of writing, Gary SNYDER, LeRoi Jones (later to be known as Amiri questioning the validity of “high” art and rejecting the BARAKA), Diane DI PRIMA, Carl Solomon, Peter literary New Critical notion of “art for art’s sake” (see Orvolosky, Carolyn Cassady, Michael MCCLURE, and FUGITIVE/AGRARIAN SCHOOL). Familiar with the literary Lucien Carr. Many other writers were part of the larger canon through their studies at Columbia University, the Beat constellation, embracing the political and subver- group aimed to reclaim poetry from the ivory tower and sive possibilities of poetry and helping shape the rebel- place it squarely in jazz clubs, alleyways, and bed- youth culture that still resonates powerfully today. rooms. In this vein, their themes challenged the false The friendships among the Beat writers are as sheen of American patriotism, a holdover from World famous and enthusiastically chronicled as their actual War II’s war effort. The resulting proliferation of nuclear creative output. During the late 1940s, the Beats often weapons, the onset of the cold war, and increasing lived together in crowded New York apartments, racial tensions further contradicted America’s whole- worked together, and hit the road together to reveal in some image. By exposing the disingenuous use of prop- their writing the “real” America and Mexico. Through aganda, they offered one of the strongest modern-day their associations, they tested their own spiritual, critiques of America as spiritually bereft and bloated by physical, and sexual boundaries, challenging the limits consumerism. The Beats lived their beliefs by existing of their experience. There was a complex web of broth- hand-to-mouth and befriending criminals, prostitutes, erhood, sexual desire, and emotional tumult. and others who lived on the margins of society. Inter- Their transformative relationships were openly repre- estingly, through their immersion into the sordid parts sented in poems and novels, usually with clever yet of American life, Beat poetry emerged as largely affir- transparent aliases. And with their shared adventures as mative of human nature. Throughout their work, the both content and context for their writing, they encour- creative process is celebrated, as is the integrity of those aged and critiqued each other. As Kerouac writes of who push societal boundaries, foster a spiritual vision, Ginsberg and Cassady in On the Road, a novel that or choose to be different. openly chronicles and fictionalizes their relationships: Characteristics of Beat poetry include what Cassady “the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who called “a continuous flow of undisciplined thought” are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous (Watson 139). Spontaneity as a technique was valued, as of everything at the same time, the ones who never was a probing and honest inventory of all of the senses. yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn As Steven Watson writes of Kerouac, the Beats “tried to like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spi- convey, uncensored, [their] field of perception at the ders across the stars . . . !” (8). Cassady, whom Ginsberg moment of composition,” closing the gap between lived refers to in HOWL as the “Adonis of Denver,” was of par- experience and the written word (138). Ginsberg, a ticular personal and metaphoric interest for both him master of spontaneity, took on the Beat approach later and Kerouac. Cassady’s swagger, restlessness, and insa- than his comrades, reflecting his ongoing formal studies tiable sexual drive personified the energy of the arche- at Columbia. Both Kerouac and Williams encouraged typal West, and he became muse as much as friend. Ginsberg to let go of verse forms and develop a style of Drug use abounded, since the Beats saw it as a tool “word sketching.” Sharing characteristics with imagist for mind-expansion and the heightening of the senses, poetry and his idol Whitman, Ginsberg began to pull 34 BEAT POETRY details from his journals, arranging them in a catalogue lenges in poems such as “The Practice of Magical Evo- style, as is most vividly experienced in Howl. Opening it lution” (1958), an ironic response to Snyder’s “Praise with the line, “I saw the best minds of my generation for Sick Women” (1957). In addition to being male, destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical, naked,” most members of the group were white, proving to be Ginsberg creates a mosaic of sharpened images from his a limiting landscape for poet, playwright, and black experiences with the Beat circle and of his brilliant but activist Jones (Baraka). Although they had friendships troubled mother, Naomi. with the core Beat group, di Prima and Jones evolved In Corso’s “Bomb” (1958), published by Lawrence in directions that the other Beats did not, compelled FERLINGHETTI’s influential City Lights Books as a pullout by their own life experiences and political views. It is centerfold in the shape of a mushroom cloud, the noteworthy that Jones and his former wife Hettie mosaic style is used to create a poem on the threat of Cohen’s Totem Press published di Prima’s first poetry nuclear war that is not polemic, but aesthetically spec- collection, This Kind of Bird Flies Backward (1958). tacular. Through this technique, Corso’s poem aims to Through 1961–63, both di Prima and Jones edited the render the bomb insignificant by its own richness. poetry newsletter, the Floating Bear. Other journals Another technique of Corso’s is the interplay of voices that were important for the Beats and helped them within the poem. In “Marriage” (1959), Corso asks: reach an audience were City Lights Books, Neurotica, “Should I get married? Should I be good?” He answers Origin Press, Poets Press, Capra Press, and the Harvard himself rhetorically by proposing to “astound the girl Advocate. next door with my velvet suit and faustus hood.” He A pivotal moment in Beat history was the meeting of proceeds to propose both conventional and unconven- East Coast and West Coast Beats during Ginsberg’s tional means of courtship, generally leading toward the time in San Francisco. On October 13, 1955, Gins- unconventional. Similarly, his prose poem, “Variations berg, along with Snyder, McClure, Philip WHALEN, and on a Generation” (1959), is a mock interview between Philip Lamantia, organized a reading at Six Gallery. It the press and the Beat poets. By structuring his poems is here that Ginsberg introduced the world to Howl and as an internal or external dialogue, Corso creates a ten- secured the opportunity to publish with Lawrence Fer- sion between monolithic societal norms and the cre- linghetti of City Lights Books. Thus began the SAN ativity of the individual mind. FRANCISCO RENAISSANCE, an important movement in In contrast to Ginsberg and Corso is the compara- modern American poetry. tively spare writing of Snyder, who is seen as the Beat- Although the Beats began their association in 1943, nik Henry David Thoreau, just as Ginsberg is seen as it was not until after the Six Gallery reading that the the Beatnik Whitman. Feeling that symbol and group gained national prominence. Howl became inad- metaphor serve as a distancing device, Synder crafts vertently infamous due to a lawsuit over its 1956 pub- poems that offer a clear vision of the poet in nature. As lication. Publisher Ferlinghetti and bookstore manager the Beatnik most versed in Buddhism and environ- Shigeyoshi Murao were charged with obscenity but mentalism, he was the inspiration for Kerouac’s novel were defended broadly by the literary community. Dharma Bums (1958). And like Ginsberg, Snyder National attention was given to the trial, which even- became an icon and activist in the 1960s and eventu- tually proved a victory for First Amendment rights, as ally a respected college professor. Ferlinghetti and Murao were acquitted. During the Despite a largely progressive view on society, the year of the trial, Kerouac’s novel On the Road (1957) hit Beat writers were largely antifeminist. With the excep- the bookstores, prompting both controversy and tion of di Prima, very few women involved in the cir- acclaim. Through these events, the Beats rapidly cle were not girlfriends or wives, and even girlfriends gained national recognition. and wives were on the periphery of a sphere devoted Ironically, as the idea of the “Beat generation” took to male bonding. Moreover, much of the writing con- root in the public imagination, spawning various fash- veyed an underlying misogyny that di Prima chal- ion and music fads, the small circle to whom the term BELL, MARVIN 35 referred began to disperse. Ginsberg and Snyder “Like the willow, I tried to weep without tears.” The became involved with the hippie movement; Kerouac speaker finds that his imitations result in not being able became increasingly reclusive; Baraka became a lead to “cry right,” and the poem suggests that contemplat- artist within the Black Nationalist movement; di Prima ing nature will not yield “a natural self.” Not all of Bell’s focused on holistic medicines and cofounded The verse concerns trees, but all of it possesses a philosoph- New Poets Theater; and Burroughs traveled to Tang- ical and contemplative tone. Bell states that he, like iers after accidentally killing his wife and soon under- William Carlos WILLIAMS, is “a poet of ideas,” and he went his own censorship trial involving his novel shares with his mentors, John LOGAN and Donald JUS- Naked Lunch (1959). TICE, a concern for the psychology of loss and interest Some of the Beats burned so brightly and so in conceptualizing self-identity (78). intensely that they burned themselves out by middle Bell was born on August 3, 1937, in New York City age. Cassady died in Mexico from sun exposure and and grew up in rural Long Island. He studied with congestion shortly before his 42nd birthday. On Octo- Logan at the University of Chicago before working ber 1, 1969, less than a year after Cassady’s death, Ker- with Justice at the University of Iowa. He published ouac died of an alcohol-related illness at the age of 46. Things We Dreamt We Died For, his first book, in 1966 In contrast, both Burroughs and Ginsberg died in and has published 16 volumes of poetry to date. Bell 1997. Burroughs had delved ever deeper into his reclu- has received awards and fellowships from the Academy sive persona and paranoia, an active drug user until the of American Poets, the American Academy of Arts and end. Ginsberg, however, partook not only of the hip- Letters, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National pie movement of the 1960s, but he was celebrated by Endowment for the Humanities. Iowa named him as the punk movement in the 1970s and remained an the state’s first poet laureate in 2000. Bell’s former stu- active poet, Buddhist, and gay rights activist until the dents include Rita DOVE, Joy HARJO, and James TATE. end, ultimately, as a world-renowned figure. The Beats Tending toward the experimental, Bell’s early poems endure, much as Ginsberg predicted in Howl, “with the are noted for a nontraditional structure and style, absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of wordplay, and complicated syntax. While Bell’s writing their bodies good to eat a thousand years.” developed, his innovations became more subtle; as Richard Jackson observes of Bell’s later work, his BIBLIOGRAPHY “poems . . . make stunning leaps and turns with the Charters, Ann. The Portable Beat Reader. New York: Penguin Books, 1992. seeming ease of someone out for a walk” (45). Foster, Edward Halsey. Understanding the Beats. Columbia: In his most recent and longest poem cycle, Bell devel- University of South Carolina Press, 1992. ops his thinking through counterpoint, as he often does. Kerouac, Jack. On the Road. Reprint, New York: Penguin, Based upon the contradictions and dialectics of death 1991. and life, the Dead Man is an everyman character, who “is Watson, Steven. The Birth of the Beat Generation: Visionaries, dead like a useless gift in its box waiting.” (“About the Rebels, and Hipsters, 1944–1960. New York: Pantheon Dead Man”). As Bell writes in “About the Dead Man’s Books, 1995. Not Telling,” the protagonist “encounters horrific condi- Julie Bolt tions infused with beauty,” a phrase that embodies the entire cycle. The Dead Man appears in The Book of the BELL, MARVIN (1937– ) An interviewer Dead Man (1994), Ardor: The Book of the Dead Man, Vol. once dubbed Marvin Bell the “tree poet,” and Bell’s 2 (1997), and “Sounds of the Resurrected Dead Man’s body of work lives up to the nickname. Bell says that Footsteps,” included in Night Works (2000). his “poems have often made a distinction between what The convoluted becomes clear in Bell’s writing, but nature is and the uses we make of it” (21). “The Self and the mundane and simple turn into the complex. All the Mulberry” (1977) opens with praises for nature’s of it intertwines, producing an aesthetic of paradox simplicity, which the speaker determines to emulate: and possibility. 36 “BELLS FOR JOHN WHITESIDE’S DAUGHTER”

BIBLIOGRAPHY ironies attenuate the speaker’s grief by allowing him or Bell, Marvin. Old Snow Just Melting: Essays and Interviews. her to come to terms with the situation through an Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1983. “exercise of will and self-control” (240). Yet Elias Jackson, Richard. “Containing the Other: Marvin Bell’s Schwartz argues that the ironic understatement in the Recent Poetry.” North American Review 280.1 (Jan.–Feb. line, “But now go the bells, and we are ready,” instead 1995): 45–48. “expresses more powerfully than before the speaker’s McGuiness, Daniel. “Exile and Cunning: The Recent Poetry grief” (285). Still, as M. E. Bradford reminds us, Of Marvin Bell.” The Antioch Review 48.3 (summer 1990): 353–361. regardless of how the word ready is taken, “the experi- ence implicit in this poem’s order is only minimally Dallas Hulsey reassuring” (47). Even Warren acknowledges that “the transcendence “BELLS FOR JOHN WHITESIDE’S is not absolute,” that the speaker’s divergent emotions DAUGHTER” JOHN CROWE RANSOM are not completely resolved (240). In his analysis of (1924) In “Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter,” Ransom’s “effort to dominate the entire range of elegiac John Crowe RANSOM uses the death of a child to explore possibilities” by mixing heroic and mock-heroic ele- metaphysical questions about human life. Although ments, William Vesterman observes a similar “partial highly traditional in form, this brief elegy is often transcendence of divergent metrical association”—the anthologized for its achievement in accurately reflect- poem’s prosody in agreement with its themes and dic- ing the conflicts within the modern consciousness. The tion (see PROSODY AND FREE VERSE)—which also con- poem is often compared to Ransom’s “The Dead Boy,” tributes to the poem’s “special flavor and makes it [a] since each depicts a dead child in a coffin as family and unique compound of moral and aesthetic elements” friends struggle to comprehend not only the individual (45, 51). In the end, perhaps the poem is worth read- loss of the child but also the resulting loss of innocence ing largely because of the inability of the speaker, the for themselves. In both poems Ransom uses seemingly poet, and, finally, the reader to fully resolve the conun- sentimental situations to probe the unsentimental real- drums with which they wrestle. ities of life. BIBLIOGRAPHY As Alan Shucard, Fred Moramarco, and William Bradford, M. E. “A Modern Elegy: Ransom’s ‘Bells for John Sullivan observe, “Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter” Whiteside’s Daughter.’” Mississippi Quarterly 21.1 “reverberates with a number of striking contrasts that (1967–1968): 43–47. capture the paradoxical nature of human existence: Schwartz, Elias. “Ransom’s ‘Bells for John Whiteside’s life-death, past-present, memory-reality, astonishment- Daughter.’” English Language Notes 1 (1964): 284–285. vexation, starkness-artifice” (217). The overarching Shucard, Alan, Fred Moramarco, and William Sullivan, eds. contrast between the poem’s somber theme and its Modern American Poetry, 1865–1950. Boston: Twayne- playful tone and imagery enables Ransom to develop Hall, 1989. what Robert Penn WARREN calls the “savage irony” Vesterman, William. “The Motives of Meter in ‘Bells for behind two central clichés: “‘Heaven, won’t that child John Whiteside’s Daughter.’” Southern Quarterly 22.4 (1984): 42–53. ever be still, she is driving me distracted’; and second, Warren, Robert Penn. “Pure and Impure Poetry.” Kenyon ‘She was such an active healthy-looking child, would Review 5.2 (1943): 228–254. you’ve ever thought she would just up and die!’” (238). Ransom intensifies the horrific irony of the wish ful- Sharon Talley filled by presenting images of the naturally vital child in life, chasing “lazy geese” and taking “arms against BENÉT, STEPHEN VINCENT (1898–1943) her shadow,” which he then juxtaposes against a final Stephen Vincent Benét was an acclaimed poet of picture of the unnaturally still child in death, “lying so American democracy. Though he also wrote novels primly propped.” Warren claims that the poem’s and short stories (including “The Devil and Daniel BERKSON, BILL 37

Webster” [1936]), he remains best known for John Benét wrote passionately in democracy’s defense Brown’s Body (1928), a long narrative poem on the from World War II’s outbreak until his death. In “Night- Civil War, whose commercial and literary success mare at Noon” (1940), he acknowledges America’s fail- brought him to national attention. To open his epic, ure to fulfill its ideals, as symbolized by “the lyncher’s Benét invoked the “strong and diverse heart” of Amer- rope, the bought justice, the wasted land,” but he ica as his muse; it became his great lifelong theme. refuses to abandon the promise of democratic freedom Benét insisted that poetry “is meant for everybody, not that was “bought with the bitter and anonymous blood” only for the scholars” (34), “open to any reader who of past generations. The radio verse-drama “Listen to likes the sound and the swing of rhythm, the color the People” (1941) concludes with the commitment to and fire of words” (35). This approachability made sustain “[t]his peaceless vision, groping for the stars.” him “the most widely read serious poet of his time” As the “poet-historian of American democracy,” in the (Fenton 80), but his poems have received less subse- words of Parry Stroud (145), Benét brought America’s quent esteem than the more difficult and experimen- past to life and sought its future. tal works of MODERNISM. His influences include Robert BIBLIOGRAPHY Browning and Vachel LINDSAY. Benét, Stephen Vincent. Foreword to John Brown’s Body. New Born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, Benét published York: Rinehart, 1941. his first book, Five Men and Pompey, in 1915, during Fenton, Charles A. Stephen Vincent Benét: The Life and Times his freshman year at Yale University. In 1921 he mar- of an American Man of Letters, 1898–1943. New Haven: ried Rosemary Carr, who inspired his love poems and Yale University Press, 1958. collaborated on A Book of Americans (1933). His ballad Stroud, Parry. Stephen Vincent Benét. New York: Twayne, 1962. “King David” (1923) received the Nation’s Poetry Prize. Rebecca Melora Corinne Boggs On a Guggenheim Fellowship (1926–27) in Paris, he wrote John Brown’s Body, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1929. Elected to the National Institute of Arts and BERKSON, BILL (1939– ) A precocious Letters in that year, he won its Gold Medal in 1943. In member of the NEW YORK SCHOOL, Bill Berkson helped 1933 he became editor of the Yale Series of Younger to propel his mentor Frank O’HARA’s poetic project in Poets competition (see POETRY PRIZES). Western Star the years leading up to O’Hara’s untimely death. Berk- (1943), his unfinished long poem on the settlement of son later encouraged many younger poets who aspired the American West, won Benét a second, posthumous to the New York style and eventually relocated to Cal- Pulitzer in 1944. ifornia, where he continued to pursue a cool, laconic In John Brown’s Body Benét alternates blank verse brand of poetry. with a longer, rougher line, and he continued to use Born in New York City, Berkson was trained at Brown both traditional forms and looser, unrhymed structures and Columbia Universities and also received instruction throughout his career (see PROSODY AND FREE VERSE). at the Institute of Fine Arts and the New School, where “American Names” (1927), a ballad, joins individual he studied under Kenneth KOCH. It was in the New York identity to the national identity embodied in place- of the early 1960s that Berkson’s informal education names with its final demand, “Bury my heart at commenced, enriched by the lively scene of painters Wounded Knee.” In the 1930s Benét’s unrhymed and poets he found there. O’Hara was at the center of it poems increasingly turn from past to future with all, and he brought Berkson along for the ride. Like nightmare visions that are both monitory and elegiac. O’Hara before him, Berkson is known equally for his art “Notes to be Left in a Cornerstone” (1936) commemo- criticism and his poetry. A corresponding editor for Art rates the New York City he lived in and loved, address- in America and a frequent contributor to Artforum, Berk- ing future historians who cannot reconstruct from its son has also maintained an affiliation as professor and ruins “that beauty, rapid and harsh, / That loneliness, academic director at the San Francisco Art Institute. In that passion or that name.” the course of a long and varied career, Berkson has 38 BERNARD, APRIL received awards from, among others, the National Pound, Ezra. “How to Read.” In Literary Essays of Ezra Pound., Endowment for the Arts (1980). edited by T. S. Eliot. London: Faber and Faber, 1954. Berkson declared a debt to O’Hara in his debut col- Ward, Geoff. Statues of Liberty. London: Macmillan, 1993. lection of poetry, Saturday Night (1961), a volume Jim Cocola replete with echoes of O’Hara’s nonchalant “I do this, I do that” style, which enumerates the commonplace BERNARD, APRIL (1956– ) In the poem details of the poet’s day. But the debt was equally “Four Winds” (2002), April Bernard sums up her O’Hara’s, for he quickly absorbed the influence of poetic goal—to produce “untranslatable rainy hoot- Berkson’s unorthodox scattershot spacing, a type of ings,” a watery word-world between conclusion and staggered arrangement oriented toward breath and impression. John ASHBERY anticipates this project, speech patterns. although Bernard’s satirical wit and feminism give her While the influence between Berkson and O’Hara more in common with Sylvia PLATH. was mutual, it took Berkson decades to climb out of Born in Williamstown, Massachusetts, Bernard, a the late O’Hara’s shadow. After a stint as a professor in poet who is also a novelist, playwright, screenwriter, the same New School workshops where he had first and essayist, received a B.A. degree at Harvard Univer- honed his craft, Berkson became the editor and pub- sity, where she studied poetry under Elizabeth BISHOP. lisher of Big Sky Publications. Through this imprint he She has worked as an editor for a number of magazines produced several new volumes of poetry, including and book publishers and has taught at Barnard, Ben- Enigma Variations (1975), a collaboration with the nington, Yale, and Columbia. Her Blackbird Bye Bye painter Philip Guston. (1989) garnered the Walt Whitman Award from the Berkson’s poems are most strongly characterized by Academy of American Poets for a first book of poems. Bernard’s language is typically colorful and demotic what Ezra POUND called phanopoeia, or “a casting of images upon the visual imagination” (25). His scenes but also dreamlike and weird. In “Psalm: It Must Be the often involve rather mundane subjects, such as a mother Medication” (1993), for instance, Bernard describes a and child playing dominos, a trip to the local Italian “lion” as having thrown “his head back” to sing “two notes like a veery” (a type of bird); in “I Loved Her, restaurant, or an unexpected encounter with a movie Too” (1989), she muses, “Let’s see—you should star in a public restroom. References to everyday exis- look/nothing like me, like I used to look.” “[B]risk, art- tence are everywhere in Berkson’s poetry. In “Poem,” fully paced, and wry,” in Helen Vendler’s words on an from Lush Life (1984), Berkson describes the experience early passage (27), Bernard’s poems zigzag headily of suffering a backyard eye injury, along with the ensu- from one such image or remark to another, suggesting ing housebound convalescence. Eye bandaged and narrative without fulfilling it, their breathless brevity doped up on codeine, with evening descending, he recalling Emily Dickinson. Poem sequences and “watches sundown then ‘One Day At A Time.”’ loosely constructed sonnets are forms that Bernard Though afflicted and in pain, Berkson finds repose favors. Like her style as a whole, they mix closure and in both a beautiful sky and a situation comedy. But open-endedness, comprehension and doubt. how do the salves of nature and popular culture differ Bernard’s game of “trying to say without saying,” as in their effects on the human psyche? He seems to she describes it in “Go Between” (2002), often registers raise the question for the sake of raising it, rather than as satire—mockery of a society addicted to its own con- answering it, simply calling attention to the strange ventions. The society is patriarchal, and the possibilities proximities of the eternal and the transient in every- it represses are feminine: In “Up Attic” (1989), dulled day life. perception is a sour romantic contract: “I had been BIBLIOGRAPHY struck on the skull by an oar / And it looked like love Lehman, David. The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New to me”; in “Coffee & Dolls” (2002), warped images of York School of Poets. New York: Doubleday, 1998. femininity—“Yarn-haired, gingham-dressed floppy BERNSTEIN, CHARLES 39 dolls” in a window—help the “old guys” within to con- venting Language poetry, he sustains its aesthetic and ceal crimes. Comic as well as acerbic, aimed at herself political cantankerousness. He revels in its popular as well as her contemporaries, Bernard’s mockery failure as a sign of its disruption of the status quo. He passes easily into gentler modes of speech. Adapting views Language poetry as an intimate “conversation” traditional Christian forms of worship, she summons about the process of generating meaning rather than as herself, as David Baker writes, “to embrace and even a “particular style” (qtd. in Wood 3) driven by “gener- adore the evasive nature of things” (226), praying in ational and marketing products” (4). Continuing this “Psalm of the One Who Has No Dwelling-Place” conversation with other poet-scholars like himself, (1993), for example: “May / I rest my head in you, that such as Steve McCaffrey, he participates in creating “a is, in the uttermost parts of the sea.” She also celebrates poetry of and for the present” that opposes the com- breaks from convention. This celebratory note has mercialization and simplification of poetry and culture strengthened over the course of Bernard’s career and in late 20th-century America (3). makes for some of her loveliest recent poems: for Bernstein was born on April 4th, 1950, in New York instance, “Sonnet in E” (2002), where she decides “To City. The author of more than 25 collections of books fling the particles of person wide, awash on the blue,” and essays, he is best known for L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, realizing that she is “no longer obliged to sit like a china a magazine on experimental poetics that he edited with dog / on a table in the corner of the room.” Bruce ANDREWS from 1978 to 1981. He has taught at the State University of New York (Buffalo) and the Uni- BIBLIOGRAPHY versity of Pennsylvania. He was awarded the Roy Har- Baker, David. “Plainness and Sufficiency.” Poetry 164.4 (July 1994): 223–240. vey Pearce/Archive for New Poetry Prize of the Vendler, Helen. “Four Prized Poets.” New York Review of University of California at San Diego in 1999 for a life- Books (17 August 1989): 26–30. time contribution to poetry and scholarship. Bernstein’s poetry is characteristic for its intellectual Shaileen Beyer rigor belied by its pedestrian language. His poetry repudiates narrative, logic, image, and tradition so that BERNSTEIN, CHARLES (1950– ) From it is at once nonsensical and evocative. His 1999 poem, the late 1970s to the present, Charles Bernstein has “Don’t Be So Sure (Don’t Be Saussure),” for example, is helped develop the poetry and poetics of the LANGUAGE lyrical nonsense, but it suggests an alternative stream- SCHOOL. He is the key figure behind this literary move- of-consciousness coherence. Contesting Saussure’s ment, which includes a diverse range of poets who notion that the word is not the thing, he shows that the challenge the customary use of language. Language word may not be a reliable conduit for meaning but is poetry questions conventional “vocabulary, grammar, nonetheless an expressive one. Beginning with a cup, process, shape, syntax, program, or subject matter” the poem progresses through rhyme and association (Andrews ix). It answers to the earlier modernists, (from “cap” to “slap” to “pap”) to “Get me a drink.” such as Ezra POUND and Gertrude STEIN, who were This nonsensical exploration of sense is the hallmark known for their unconventional use of language. It is of this poet-scholar, who continues to promote his also influenced by postructuralist theories about the oppositional poetics against linguistic platitudes and rupture between language and meaning and by Marx- social power. ist notions about the class inequality embedded in lan- BIBLIOGRAPHY guage. By using language differently, Language poetry Andrews, Bruce, and Charles Bernstein, eds. The changes standard poetic forms, encourages multiple L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book. Carbondale: Southern Illinois interpretations, and contests social and economic dis- University Press, 1984. parities. Bernstein continues to develop this poetry of Perloff, Marjorie. The Dance of the Intellect: Studies in the innovation by reinventing it in different media: textual, Poetry of the Pound Tradition. New York: Cambridge Uni- acoustic, operatic, and electronic. By continually rein- versity Press, 1985. 40 BERRIGAN, TED

Wood, Tim. “Charles Bernstein: Politics, Poetics and Laugh- lization, it ends famously with the line, “The world’s ter against Tears [Interview].” The Word: The Monthly furious song flows through my costume.” Guide to the Arts in Dallas (March 2000): 7. “The world’s furious song” as it passed through Colette Colligan Berrigan’s voice has become the measure against which younger poets, especially those associated with the BERRIGAN, TED (1934–1983) One of the New York school, continue to calibrate their own central figures in the second generation of the NEW work. With the possible exception of Jack SPICER, no YORK SCHOOL of poetry, Ted Berrigan absorbed influ- avant-garde American writer of Berrigan’s generation ences from his predecessors, such as John ASHBERY and achieved so much both as a poet and as a teacher, and Frank O’HARA, but transformed what he learned into as a defender of his art. some of the most delicately modulated poems of his BIBLIOGRAPHY generation. Works from The Sonnets (1964) to “Things Foster, Edward. Berrigan, Bronk, and the American Real. New To Do in Providence” (1970) to the late lyrical poems, York: Spuyten Duyvil, 1999. such as those collected in A Certain Slant of Sunlight Waldman, Anne, ed. Nice to See You: Homage to Ted Berrigan. (1988), exhibit a subtle and graceful manipulation of Minneapolis, Minn.: Coffee House, 1991. tone that few of his contemporaries could approach. Berrigan was an important teacher of poets as well, and Edward Foster his collected talks about poetry, On the Level Everyday (1997), remains an important text for younger writers. BERRY, WENDELL (1934– ) The poetry Born into a working-class family, Berrigan grew up in of Wendell Berry offers a persistent and deliberate Providence, Rhode Island. He enlisted in the army, response to the environmental and moral crises of served in Korea, and was stationed in Tulsa, Oklahoma, 20th-century America. Focused on a sense of place where he met the poet Ron PADGETT, then a high-school defined by community, work, and respect for the land, student, who would later be closely associated with him Berry relies on pastoral and elegiac poetic forms while in the New York school. Married to the poet Alice NOT- avoiding the stylistic experimentation of many of his LEY, he was the father of Anselm and Edmund Berrigan, postmodern literary peers. His themes echo such poets both recognized as important younger poets today. In as Walt Whitman, Robert FROST, and Gary SNYDER. As a 1963 Berrigan founded “C” Press, which published poet, essayist, and novelist, Berry is an active both the journal “C” and a series of mimeographed spokesman for the virtues of sustainable farming and books by Padgett and other New York poets of their bioregionalism, or commitment to place, as a means of generation. Berrigan taught at numerous colleges and living a sincere and ethical life. universities, including Yale, the University of Michigan, Berry grew up in Kentucky and received undergrad- and the City University of New York. uate and graduate degrees at the University of Ken- Berrigan’s Sonnets are a collage of lines, some bor- tucky in 1956 and 1957. After completing a Wallace rowed from his readings. The same set of words—even Stegner Fellowship at Stanford in 1959 and a Guggen- something as plain and straightforward as “Dear Chris, heim Fellowship in Italy in 1962, Berry taught briefly hello”—appear in various contexts, each time given a in New York before returning to the University of Ken- different intonation and emphasis. The perfect control tucky in 1964. A year later he bought a 12-acre farm of cadence and tone exemplified in these early poems on the Kentucky River, in the same county in which he became Berrigan’s trademark in a wide range of writ- was born. After a dozen volumes of poetry and more ing, from his minimalist works in the late 1960s to the than 20 other books, Berry still inhabits his native more traditional lyric poems written toward the end of ground, a decision that Wallace Stegner has called “as his life (see LYRIC POETRY). Among these, “Red Shift” radical as Thoreau’s retreat to Walden, and much more (1980) is generally considered to be his major achieve- permanent” (51). Berry’s work has earned him, among ment. A defense of poetry as the prime speech of civi- other awards, the American Academy of Arts and Let- BERRYMAN, JOHN 41 ters Jean Stein Award (1987) and a Lannan Foundation impact of World War II, in an objective fashion. Berry- Award for nonfiction (1989). man’s later poetry, however, would turn far more Berry’s poetry is a reflection of his decision to return explicitly onto the subject of the poet himself, as with to the rural from the urban. In simple but moving his Homage to Mistress Bradstreet (1953), a biographical verses, he explores daily and seasonal cycles of life and ode, richly allusive, moving and meaningful to the death, while raising crops, mourning the loss of loved present day in its inquiry into the personal and spiri- ones, and praising the value of nature. Fidelity is his tual life of the Anglo-American colonial poet Anne ideal, and Berry is faithfully “married” not only to his Bradstreet. What is most remarkable about the poem is wife but also to his land, his family, and his community. its method of merging the identities of poet and sub- Staying home is Berry’s response to the crises of his ject, who is imagined to be the poet’s mistress across time, including Vietnam and the cold war in his earlier the centuries. Praising Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, poems. In “Stay Home” (1980), the fields and woods Robert LOWELL called it “the most resourceful historical surrounding his dwelling offer labor “longer than a poem in our language” (107). But Berryman’s reputa- man’s life”; the poem deliberately echoes Frost’s “The tion, that of an agonized poet of the personal, will Pasture.” Berry rewrites Frost’s refrain, “I sha’n’t be gone always be judged in the context of his mental instabil- long.—You come too,” with his own: “Don’t come with ity, alcoholism, and clinical depression, which led him me. / You stay home too.” With an ecologist’s commit- often to contemplate the idea of ending his own life. As ment to place, he hopes that others will stay home as he would write, characteristically, in Dream Song 149 well and protect their own local environments. (1968), “This world is gradually becoming a place / Berry’s voice shifts throughout his work, from mad where I do not care to be any more.” farmer to compassionate husbandman to Luddite Born John Allyn Smith, Jr., in McAlester, Oklahoma, (with a vehement critique of technology and industri- to John Allyn Smith, a banker, and Martha Little, for- alization), but his implication, as taken from his 1980 merly an elementary schoolteacher, Berryman was poem “Below,” is always clear: “What I stand for / is raised Roman Catholic, serving for a time as an altar what I stand on.” boy and attending Catholic primary schools in both Oklahoma and Florida. But Berryman’s boyhood was BIBLIOGRAPHY an unsettled period for his parents, and his writing Merchant, Paul, ed. Wendell Berry. Lewiston, Idaho: Conflu- ence, 1991. often reflected the unresolved anguish of familial prob- Nibbelink, Herman. “Wendell Berry.” In American Nature lems that arose during his youth. The family moved Writers, Vol. 1, edited by John Elder. New York: Scrib- frequently during the early years, finally settling in ner’s, 1996, pp. 89–105. Tampa, Florida, where his father, who had speculated Stegner, Wallace. “A Letter to Wendell Berry.” In Wendell unsuccessfully in real estate, shot himself to death out- Berry, edited by Paul Merchant. Lewiston, Idaho: Conflu- side his 11-year-old son’s bedroom window in 1926. ence, 1991, pp. 47–52. Several months later his mother married John McAlpin Michael Lundblad Berryman, whose name was given to the son. Berry- man was educated at Columbia University (B.A., 1936) BERRYMAN, JOHN (1914–1972) Although and later in England, where he attended Clare College John Berryman—like his poetic successor Anne SEX- at Cambridge University on a fellowship and met TON—would eventually come to be associated with the Yeats, T. S. ELIOT, Auden, and Dylan Thomas. While at CONFESSIONAL movement in American poetry, he first Columbia, he came under the influence of the profes- attracted literary acclaim for more traditional poetry sor Mark van Doren and began to publish poetry in the published in Poems (1942) and The Dispossessed Nation and taught at Wayne University (later Wayne (1948). These early books, influenced in part by his State University) in Detroit, Michigan. reading of William Butler Yeats and W. H. AUDEN, deal During his years at Columbia, Berryman won the with social crises of the times, including the wrenching Van Renssalaer Prize for LYRIC POETRY (1935). The many 42 BERSSENBRUGGE, MEI-MEI subsequent honors earned by Berryman included spirituality while probing the most deeply personal Poetry magazine’s Guarantors Prize (1948), the Russell aspects of the poet’s own inner life. Loines Award from the National Institute of Arts and In succeeding years Berryman added to the Letters (1964), the Pulitzer Prize in poetry (1965), the sequence of poems, burnishing his reputation as a Bollingen Prize (1969), and the National Book Award modern master of the colloquial American language, in Poetry (1969). until there were nearly 400 collected Dream Songs, While he was writing Homage to Mistress Bradstreet many of which were included in his important late vol- during the early 1950s, Berryman was also finishing ume, His Toy, His Dream, His Rest: 308 Dream Songs work on 115 deeply personal Petrarchan sonnets that (1968). This final collection of Dream Songs earned recounted an adulterous love affair, a poetry sequence Berryman the National Book Award. In his acceptance that would eventually be published as Berryman’s Son- speech for the award, Berryman explained his icono- nets (written in 1947, published in 1967). The love clasm and experimental style in this way: “I set up the affair, combined with the pressure of writing the son- Dream Songs as hostile to every visible tendency in nets, pressed Berryman to consider suicide and to both American and English poetry” (Mariani 443). begin his many years of psychiatric treatment. The vol- After checking into alcohol rehabilitation once in ume also established Berryman as one of the modern 1969 and three times in 1970, Berryman experienced masters of that difficult poetic form, even as his sudden “a sort of religious conversion” in 1970 (Mariani 457). shifts in thought and feeling and his disruptions of He first considered Judaism, then professed Catholi- syntax and strict form show his ongoing radical exper- cism, and eventually wrote Recovery (1971), a vague imentation with the genre, as in sonnet 44: “Bell to autobiography about alcoholic rehabilitation. Finally, sore knees vestigial crowds, let crush / One another the 57-year-old Berryman committed suicide in 1972 nations sottish and a-prowl.” by leaping from the Washington Avenue bridge in Min- During World War II, he took on teaching assign- neapolis, 30 miles from his father’s birthplace. ments at Harvard University before serving for 10 BIBLIOGRAPHY years at Princeton University at the invitation of liter- Bloom, Harold, ed. John Berryman. New York: Chelsea ary critic and poet R. P. BLACKMUR. While at Princeton, House Publishing, 1989. Berryman wrote a psychobiographical study of Conarroe, Joel. John Berryman: An Introduction to the Poetry. Stephen Crane (1950) for the American Men of Letters New York: Columbia University Press, 1977. Series. Later he became professor of humanities at the Lowell, Robert. “John Berryman.” In Collected Prose, edited by University of Minnesota (1955–72). With 77 Dream Robert Giroux. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1990. Songs (published in 1964, winner of the 1965 Pulitzer Mariani, Paul. Dream Song: The Life of John Berryman. New Prize for poetry), part of a long semiautobiographical York: William Morrow, 1990. project begun in 1955, Berryman achieved his highest James Emmett Ryan acclaim as a poet and confirmed his status as the pre- eminent voice in the confessional movement in poetry, BERSSENBRUGGE, MEI-MEI (1947– ) a modern version of the romantic impulse that places Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s intricate collagist poetry the poet and her or his emotional experience at the expands the traditions of innovative American lyric center of the poem’s concerns. In this most important and feminist experimentation. Dense abstraction and sequence of poems, Berryman unveiled the memorable concrete imagery borrowed from the realms of conti- alter egos “Henry” and “Mr. Bones,” the latter of which nental and Eastern philosophy, psychology, religion, is written as a character out of blackface minstrelsy. In architecture, art theory, conventional and alternative this long sequence of 18-line, sonnetlike poems, with medicine, physics, and other sources commingle in her their complicated syntax, strange diction, and unex- work with a painstaking account of visual experience, pected shifts in language and tone, Berryman investi- emotional states, and surreal drifts. Berssenbrugge gates the furthest reaches of human psychology and makes statements that seem absolutely authoritative, “BIALYSTOK STANZAS” 43 but these are only to be dissolved and displaced by BIBLIOGRAPHY fresh new possibilities and rich uncertainties in the Newman, Denise. “The Concretion of Emotion: An Ana- flux of long lines of verse. lytic Lyric of Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s Empathy.” Talis- The daughter of Chinese and Dutch-American par- man: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics 9 (fall ents, Berssenbrugge was born in Beijing and grew up 1992): 119–124. in Massachusetts. The author of nine books of poetry, Simpson, Megan. Poetic Epistemologies: Gender and Knowing in Women’s Language-Oriented Writing. Albany, N.Y.: State beginning with Fish Souls (1974), Berssenbrugge won University of New York Press, 2000, pp. 134–144. an American Book Award for Random Possession Tabios, Eileen R. “Mei-mei Berssenbrugge Bleeds a Poem (1979) and The Heat Bird (1983), among other awards That Transcends Heartbreak.” In Black Lightning: Poetry-in- and fellowships. Progress, edited by Tabios. New York: Asian American Berssenbrugge frequently exerts, as she puts it in Writers Workshop, 1998, pp. 133–177. “Naturalism” (1989), “an erotic concentration on a Thomas Fink vicissitude of light.” The preoccupation with ever-shift- ing perspectives on constantly changing visual impres- sions is erotic in its intensity, prolonged focus, “BIALYSTOK STANZAS” MICHAEL aesthetic pleasures, and inextricability from meditation HELLER (1979) This poem, collected in Michael on female/male and mother/daughter intimacies. Even HELLER’s volume Knowledge (1979) and reprinted in his as she marks how individuals cannot master each memoir, Living Root (2000), was originally conceived other’s subjective truths, the poet suggests that separa- by Heller in the late 1960s as a historical novel on the tions between a self’s inside and outside are arbitrary; life of Jews in the Polish city of Bialystok, from which in the long poem Endocrinology (1997), a speaker his father’s family had emigrated. In pursuing this sub- declares: “She can’t see where her sadness ends and ject, Heller joins the ranks of American Jewish poets someone else’s is.” Furthermore, the “erotic” explo- writing after the Holocaust, who can neither totally ration is fraught with many disruptions and erasures of ignore nor totally submerge themselves in the great memory. An apostrophe in “Fog” (1989) plaintively Jewish tragedy of the 20th century. questions: “If you do remember correctly, how can we The poem’s parenthetical subtitle, “from a book of compare the feeling without being influenced by what old photos,” refers to David Sohn’s book Bialystok: has happened since?” Photo Album of a Renowned City and Its Jews the World Frequently Berssenbrugge perceives “the body as a Over (1951), which Heller procured on his father’s space of culture” while also perceiving it “as nature,” advice in 1963. Most sections of the poem, then, especially when it is threatened or “taken away by dis- address photos from Sohn’s book. On the series of ease,” as in Endocrinology. In “The Four Year Old Girl” poems, Heller has said, “I am remembering then, not (1998), which alludes to a struggle against a rare for the sake of what was, but in a sense, in order to be” “genetic disease,” the juxtaposition of sentences about (15). Heller also cites Walter Benjamin on the subject genotypes, phenotypes, and selves with sentences that of photography, quoting the German-Jewish philoso- include water images foregrounds the disjunction pher’s notion that a photograph is a “posthumous between confidence in one’s stable identity and move- moment” (33). ments toward disintegration. In his commentary on the poem, Norman Finkel- The unpredictable, often disjunctive journey of sen- stein sees photography in “Bialystok Stanzas,” beyond suous, sensory thinking that Berssenbrugge’s poetry either Heller’s or Benjamin’s explicit statements, as “the embodies provides a trenchant criticism of the distor- inevitable violation of a historical space, a psychic zone tions of efforts at representation, as well as an affirma- which can maintain its dignity only in the medium of tion of desires for lucid perceptions, intimate mute memory” (77–78). Burt Kimmelman expands the interchanges and, as “Value” (1993) has it, “a moving implications of the poem to those of Heller’s entire the- frame” that “reframes the space for utopian content.” ory of poetics having to do with how words and lived 44 BIDART, FRANK experience intersect, writing that a Jew’s “first condi- has called Bidart “one of the great poets of our time” in tion” is her or his “relationship to the idea of a text” a blurb for his 2002 volume Music Like Dirt. (70). Here Heller is dealing with photographs as Of Basque-American heritage, Bidart was born in “texts.” Part 7 of the poem, subtitled “Terrible Pic- the Central Valley town of Bakersfield, California. He tures,” specifically its lines describing Jews being pho- received a B.A. degree in English from the University of tographed just before their execution, underscores this California, Riverside, and an M.A. in English from Har- point. Heller is making it clear that the extermination vard, where he studied with Lowell. He has taught at of European Jews is both a real experience and a tex- Wellesley College. Bidart’s books have won many tual one, part of the literary tradition of the Jews that prizes including the Shelley Memorial Award (1997), has bound them together throughout the diaspora. the Lannan Foundation Award for poetry (1998), and The final section of the poem, the “Coda” entitled the Wallace STEVENS Award (2001). In 2003 he was “Senile Jew,” is the only section not dealing with texts elected a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. in general or photography specifically. Describing an Bidart’s first volume, Golden State (1973), includes a interaction with his elderly grandfather, Heller asks series of indelible characters—some hateful, some about a missing boot: “Do you wear the boot? / Or does beloved, all struggling for meaning. The speaker of the he who wears the boot / Wear you?” (32). Soon the title poem, based on Bidart himself, attempts to recon- voice of the grandfather and the grandson become nect through memory with his deceased father, a diffi- intermingled. However, in ending the poem with the cult and unloving man. Yet the father escapes the son’s line, “I am the Jew,” Heller acknowledges his role in control, as he did in real life. He remains “unknowable; Jewish history as a member of a persecuted people unpossessable.” (“Golden State”). The poem exposes who is, himself, not persecuted. With this line, Finkel- both the tensions and the intensity of the father-child stein is able to tie the poem to the OBJECTIVIST SCHOOL, relationship, and it reveals the tarnish on the “Golden noting that objectivism “remains an important mode of State” of California. Jewish-American poetry because Objectivists must “Ellen West” (1977) and “The War of Vaslav Nijin- acknowledge their responsibility to the circumstances sky” (1983)—published in subsequent volumes and from which their poems arise” (78). collected in In the Western Night (1990)—bring histor- ical personages to life. Both poems vividly reproduce BIBLIOGRAPHY the voices of the title characters and of those who Finkelstein, Norman. “Dy-Yanu: Michael Heller’s ‘Bialystok Stanzas.’” Talisman: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry and interacted with them. Like “Golden State” these poems Poetics 10 (fall 1993):77–80. reflect on the tragic circumstances of individuals and Heller, Michael. Living Root. Albany, N.Y.: State University of on their historical situations. “The Second Hour of the New York Press, 2000. Night,” published in Desire (1997), meditates on long- Kimmelman, Burt. “The Autobiography of Poetics: Michael ing, pleasure, pain, and death. It begins by reanimating Heller’s Living Root.” Talisman: A Journal of Contemporary the voices of French composer Hector Berlioz and his Poetry and Poetics 10 (fall 1993):67–76. wife, actress Henriette-Constance Berlioz-Smithson. It Andrew E. Mathis then explores compulsive desire through the Ovidian myth of Myrrha and Cinyras and concludes by evoking BIDART, FRANK (1939– ) Frank Bidart an intense encounter with the ghost of a dead lover. In writes poems of great philosophical and emotional Bidart’s most recent sequence, Music Like Dirt, he depth. They show us interior landscapes of desire and focuses on the central activity of creative “making.” loss, crime and self-punishment, righteousness and Throughout his career Bidart has given readers a forgiveness. More recently they have been concerned series of greatly original poems. They stretch the limits with love and artistic creation. Although he belongs to of language and genre. They examine a darkened no poetic school, Bidart’s affinities include Robert LOW- world and even darker human natures. They pray for ELL, Elizabeth BISHOP, and Robert PINSKY. Louise GLÜCK insight that often does not come. And, as in “Lament BISHOP, ELIZABETH 45 for the Makers,” they explore the power of art to Bishop was born in Worcester, Massachusetts. Her remake life: “Teach me, masters who by making were / father, William Thomas Bishop, died eight months remade, your art.” after her birth. Her mother entered a mental institution in 1916, and Bishop lived in Great Village, Nova Sco- BIBLIOGRAPHY tia, with her mother’s family. Bishop was never again to Glück, Louise. “The Forbidden.” Proofs & Theories: Essays on see her mother. In 1918 her paternal grandparents Poetry. Hopewell, N.J.: Ecco Press, 1994, pp. 53–63. Gray, Jeffrey. “‘Necessary Thought’: Frank Bidart and the expressed concern about the rural education Bishop Postconfessional.” Contemporary Literature 34.4 (1993): would receive in Nova Scotia, so she was moved to her 714–739. aunt’s house in Massachusetts. She graduated Walnut Hill, a boarding school, in 1930 and enrolled at Vassar Steven Gould Axelrod College, where she was a classmate of the poet Muriel RUKEYSER. But it was travel, not the influence of other BISHOP, ELIZABETH (1911–1979) From contemporary poets, that was the hallmark of her life. the beginning of her life as a poet, Elizabeth Bishop In Mexico during 1942–43, she met the Chilean poet was interested in the way that our perceptions can be Pablo Neruda. She traveled down the Amazon in 1961 refined through our encounters with the natural world. with the novelist Aldous Huxley. Even in the final years Written when she was 16 years old, “To a Tree” (1927) of her life, while teaching at Harvard University, she gives us an early glimpse into her way of viewing the continued her travels to Ecuador and Peru. For her world. The tree outside her window, her “kin,” asks work, Bishop was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry nothing but “To lean against the window and peer in / in 1956 and the National Book Award in 1976. And watch [her] move about!” Personified nature is Journey is a central theme in Bishop’s poetry; “These interested in her, but what of her own interest in peninsulas take water between thumb and finger,” nature? What does she make of her life, an existence Bishop writes in “The Map” (1946), “like women feel- “Full of tiny tragedies and grotesque grieves,” as she ing for the smoothness of yard-goods.” The landscape looks back at nature? Central to our understanding of is rendered, by simile, into a domestic world: Topo- Bishop’s work is our understanding of the tense graphical features become human, embracing the tex- moment when the poet turns her gaze from herself to ture of nature. “More delicate than the historians’ are the world. As she incorporated the natural world into the map-makers’ colors,” she claims. Through a differ- her poetry, Bishop developed a voice that remains one ent kind of perception—subtler, more intuitive than of the most unique in American poetry. She captures those who work with words—the mapmaker becomes subtle moments that are deeply felt and elegantly ren- the ultimate interpreter of the external world. dered, and in this tradition she was influenced by Mar- And so it is that artistic vision, expressed by the ianne MOORE with whom, beginning in 1934, she mapmaker, is understood to be a valid guide to our maintained a lifelong friendship. In 1947 Randall JAR- travels both to the external world of nature and to the RELL introduced her to Robert LOWELL, thus beginning internal world of individual consciousness. The depth a second lifelong friendship and mutual artistic influ- of this vision is examined in “The Man-Moth” (1946) ence. Bishop’s impact is felt in the poetry of Anne SEX- in which Bishop, working in the tradition of SURREAL- TON, Sylvia PLATH, and Rita DOVE—although Bishop ISM, imagines a creature who lives under the surface of never adopted the tradition of CONFESSIONAL POETRY, as the city, emerging, “trembling,” to “investigate as high did these poets. Her poems are absorbed with precisely as he can climb.” If we catch him, we are told to hold capturing the world through language, and in this his tear, “cool as from underground springs and pure emphasis she is more closely aligned with the Meta- enough to drink.” As a visionary in his own right, the physical poet George Herbert, the romantic poet Man-Moth is the embodiment of the poet. His vision- William Wordsworth, and the Victorian poet Gerard ary tear is refreshing only because he holds himself Manley Hopkins. apart from the world, living by night and perception 46 BISHOP, ELIZABETH

alone. As Bishop makes clear in “THE FISH” (1946), elu- joy?” For Bishop, as David Kalstone proposes, “the siveness yields perception; she ends that poem, “And I actual existences that lie outside the self—geography, let the fish go.” other minds, the world as prior creation—are like “Questions of Travel” (1965) examines the tension rafts, respite and rescue from guilt” (246). Through that arises in the development of artistic vision itself. what Kalstone called her “creaturely” depiction of ani- Should vision be developed in isolation, the poet asks, mals in the natural world, a technique evident also in or should vision be broadened by experience? Recall- the appearance of the little mammal in “THE ARMADILLO” ing Blaise Pascal, Bishop wonders if we should just sit (1965), Bishop provides solace from thought and quietly in our room. The poem begins with an image attendant regret. of too many waterfalls, and the reader realizes that In Bishop’s poetry there is a need for respite. In the there is too much in the external world to be under- villanelle “One Art” (1976), the subject is loss. We are stood, much less analyzed in the brief time for obser- told to practice losing something every day, then prac- vation. Yet, the poet concedes, it would have been a tice “losing farther, losing faster.” The “fluster of lost pity not to have seen Brazil, not to have had the door keys” or an “hour badly spent” is loss of one moment in which, stopping for gasoline, she heard kind; the loss of one we love is quite another. In the “the sad, two-noted wooden tune / of disparate final quatrain of the poem, however, the poet’s voice wooden clogs” moving across the floor. In any other breaks as certainty dissolves. If the act of writing is country, she concedes, the clogs would have been taken to be a vehicle to help us cope with loss, then tested to have identical sound. The choice to open our- the vehicle is frail. The poet’s voice falters in the wake selves to experience is never free. The dilemma—to of too great a loss. gain new experiences by travel or stay in one place and “Sonnet” was published in the New Yorker after write—is made even more complex by the flawed Bishop’s death in 1979. At the end of her life, what did nature of writing itself: There is cost both in the dis- the poet think about when she turned her gaze to tracting nature of travel (which, paradoxically, yields nature? She begins the poem with a single word: experience) and in the troublesome, flawed act of writ- “Caught.” The bubble in a carpenter’s level is caught— ing (which, paradoxically, yields insight). ”a creature divided,” as too the compass needle is Bishop often built poems out of moments experi- caught, “wobbling and wavering.” The second move- enced in her journeys. In 1946 and 1947 she visited ment in the poem begins with the single word freed. The Nova Scotia. In a letter dated August 29, 1946, she mercury from a broken thermometer is free, as is the wrote to Moore of her trip by bus back to the United rainbow-bird who becomes free, “flying wherever / it States: “Early the next morning, just as it was getting feels like, gay!” But the tension remains for Bishop. The light, the driver had to stop suddenly for a big cow poem is, after all, a sonnet—one of the most challenging moose who was wandering down the road. She walked and potentially restraining of all poetic forms (see away very slowly into the woods, looking at us over PROSODY AND FREE VERSE). A longing for freedom, juxta- her shoulder.” The bus driver had commented that posed with the presence of restraint, rests at the center these were “very curious beasts” (141). It was nearly 30 of the poet’s vision. The more we examine the descrip- years before she published the memory of that bus trip tion of contrast, the more we understand the poetry of in “The Moose” (1976). The 30-year-old memory of a Elizabeth Bishop. bus ride as rendered in the poem lets us see the way BIBLIOGRAPHY the natural world provides a moment of grace, of ease- Bishop, Elizabeth. “Letter to Marianne Moore, 29 August ment from our troubling histories. If humans have an 1946.” In One Art: Letters, edited by Robert Giroux. New eternal tendency to recollect, then the presence of the York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1994, pp. 139–141. moose gives us a moment away from our thoughts. As Kalstone, David. Becoming a Poet: Elizabeth Bishop with Mari- the moose looks the bus over, the poet asks, “Why, anne Moore and Robert Lowell, edited by Robert Hemen- why do we feel (we all feel) this sweet / sensation of way. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1989. BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT 47

MacMahon, Candace W. Elizabeth Bishop: A Bibliography. Several publishing houses and workshops were Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1980. founded during the period of the movement, and sev- Spires, Elizabeth. “Elizabeth Bishop.” In Writers at Work: The eral magazines and journals emerged, all of which pro- Paris Review Interviews, Sixth Series, edited by George vided a vehicle for the literary work of Black Arts Plimpton. New York: Penguin, 1985. poets. Literary publications, such as Freedomways, Norbert Elliot Negro Digest (later renamed Black World), the Black Scholar, the Journal of Black Poetry, and Liberator, BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT The Black Arts brought Black Arts movement poets to a larger audi- movement was a controversial literary faction that ence when more established publications rejected their emerged in the mid-1960s as the artistic and aesthetic work. Two important publishing houses—Dudley Ran- arm of the Black Power movement, a militant political dall’s Broadside Press in Detroit and Madhubuti’s Third operation that rejected the integrationist purposes and World Press in Chicago—were also instrumental in practices of the Civil Rights movement that preceded helping to introduce new poets and to disseminate it. The Black Arts movement was one of the only their work. Umbra Workshop (1962–65), composed American literary movements to merge art with a of a group of black writers, produced Umbra Magazine political agenda. Because poems were short and could and gained significance as a literary group that created be recited at rallies and other political activities to a distinct voice and often challenged mainstream stan- incite and move a crowd, poetry was the most popu- dards concerning literature. Lastly, Baraka’s Black Arts lar literary genre of the Black Arts movement, fol- Repertory Theatre/School, founded in 1965, brought lowed closely by drama. Poet, playwright, activist, and free plays, poetry readings, and musical performances major figure of the Black Arts movement, Amiri to the people of Harlem, thereby carrying out the idea BARAKA (formerly LeRoi Jones) coined the term Black of art as a communal experience. Arts when he established his Black Arts Repertory The Black Power movement, from which the Black Theatre/School in New York City’s Harlem. Although Arts movement derived, sought to empower African- the Black Arts movement began its decline during the American communities economically and politically by mid-1970s, at the same time as the Black Power relying solely on resources within the black community. movement began its descent, it introduced a new It also sought to celebrate blackness and restore posi- breed of black poets and a new brand of black poetry. tive images of black people from the negative stereo- It also inspired and energized already established typing that took place in the larger society. Thus poets like Gwendolyn BROOKS and Robert HAYDEN. The slogans, such as “Black Is Beautiful,” were prominent Black Arts movement created many poetic innovations during the time. Members of organizations, such as the in form, language, and style that have influenced the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee work of many of today’s spoken word artists and (SNCC), under the leadership of Stokely Carmichael, socially conscious rap lyricists. and the Black Panther Party, founded by Huey Newton The poets most often associated with the Black Arts and Bobby Seale, demanded racial equality, not through movement include Baraka, Sonia SANCHEZ, Etheridge the methods of passive resistance associated with Dr. KNIGHT, Nikki GIOVANNI, Larry Neal, Mari Evans, Don Martin Luther King, Jr., but “by any means necessary” L. Lee (now known as Haki MADHUBUTI), Carolyn (a slogan of the party), including “violent revolution,” Rodgers, Marvin X, Jayne CORTEZ, Askia Toure, and as stated by Malcolm X. Moreover, “black cultural June JORDAN. A number of important African-American nationalism,” the belief that blacks and whites had two playwrights, fiction writers, and scholars also made separate worldviews and outlooks on life, was a promi- significant contributions to the Black Arts movement, nent idea in both the Black Power and the Black Arts creatively as well as philosophically and theoretically, movements. As a result, Black Arts movement writers by defining and outlining the objectives and criteria of experimented with methods of artistic expression that the movement and its “black aesthetic.” were characteristic of African-American culture and 48 BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT experience. First all of the poetry was infused with a Primary among them was to persuade African Ameri- certain level of black consciousness, meaning that its cans to reject the mainstream culture and the process subjects and themes reflected the quality and character of Americanization and assimilation, instead encourag- of black experience. In form, Black Arts movement ing them to embrace a “black aesthetic,” whereby black poets often rejected standard English in favor of Black people would look to their own culture and aesthetic English, a more colloquial and vernacular language values to create and evaluate African-American litera- and syntax. They peppered it with street slang and ture. The three major criteria of the Black Arts move- idiomatic phrases that were simple, direct, explicit, ment, established by Ron Karenga, were that all black and often irreverent. In addition the poetry borrowed art must be “functional, collective, and committed” greatly from black music, using rhythmical effects from (33). The functional nature of black art meant that the jazz and blues, as well as from other forms of black oral literary work must serve a purpose larger than merely speech, such as sermons, folktales, signifying (an intri- the creation of art. It had to be connected to the social cate, humorous language style that uses indirection, and political struggles in which African-American peo- innuendo, puns, metaphors, and other wordplay to ple were engaged. The second criterion, that black art persuade, argue, send a message, or insult), and the must be “collective,” meant that it must serve the peo- dozens (a form of signifying that involves trading ple; it must educate, inspire, and uplift them. Recipro- insults, primarily about a person’s relatives). Other cally, the artist must learn from and be inspired and common features of the poetry include free verse, short uplifted by the people. The artist must be prepared to line lengths, call-and-response patterns, chanting, and sacrifice her or his own individuality and, instead, free rhyming. always write with the good of the people in mind. The Black Arts movement had much in common Third and lastly, black art must be committed to polit- with another period of increased artistic production ical and social reform and supportive of the revolution among African-American writers—the HARLEM RENAIS- that will bring this about. In essence the Black Arts SANCE of the 1920s. During both periods, there was an movement’s objectives were to reach the masses of increased interest in establishing a more assertive black black people, to make them understand their message collective identity than had previously existed (during of self-sufficiency and dignity, and to inspire them to the Harlem Renaissance, it was called “the New act upon it. Negro”) and in searching for ethnic identity and her- Many of the criteria and objectives of the Black Arts itage in folk and African culture. Thus poets from both movement are discernible within the poetry itself. For periods experimented with folk elements, such as example, in “From the Egyptian” in his 1966 collection blues, spirituals, and vernacular idioms in their poetry, Black Art, Baraka makes clear that violent confronta- and venerated Africa. However, despite these similari- tion with the oppressors of black people is an immi- ties, many Black Arts movement writers were critical of nent reality as he asserts that he is prepared to murder the objectives of the Harlem Renaissance, believing it “the enemies / of my father.” Likewise, in “The True had failed to link itself concretely to the struggle of the Import of Present Dialogue, Black vs. Negro” in Black black masses. Adherents of the Black Arts movement Feeling, Black Talk (1968), Giovanni tells black people: were also critical of Harlem Renaissance writers’ “We ain’t got to prove we can die / We got to prove we reliance on white patronage, as well as their tendency can kill.” Giovanni also demonstrates the criterion of to esteem Western art, to desire mainstream recogni- commitment with “My Poem” (1968), when she writes tion, and to write with a white audience in mind. They in support of the revolution and its enduring nature, felt that this compromised black writers’ ability to be stating that “if i never do anything / it will go on.” The completely honest in their depiction and expression of didacticism of much Black Arts poetry is visible in black life and struggle. Baraka’s “A School of Prayer” (1966). In this poem, The Black Arts movement established a number of Baraka tells his black audience: “Do not obey their objectives and criteria for its creative artists to follow. laws.” “Their,” of course, refers to white society. Essen- BLACKBURN, PAUL 49 tially Baraka urges black people to rebel against white ary critics who claimed that the literature itself was authority and be wary of the words spoken by those often subordinate to the political or social message of who seek to oppress them because their purpose is to the movement. These critics saw this as detrimental to deceive black people and curtail their advancement. black literature, creating a narrowness of focus that The celebration of blackness is also noticeable in Black creatively limited the artist and the kinds of literature Arts poetry. Sanchez, perhaps the female poet most he or she could compose. In addition there was a ten- closely identified with the Black Arts movement, dency in the Black Arts movement to devise theories reclaims the dignity of black womanhood in an prior to the creation of an actual body of literature that unnamed poem in her volume We a BaddDDD People would prove the theory. Therefore the literature was (1970), when she links herself as a black woman to a driven by the theory rather than the other way around. regal African queen who will, “Walk / move in / blk Lastly, some Black Arts movement writers were known queenly ways.” Similarly, in “Ka Ba” (1969), Baraka to judge harshly any black writer who did not conform affirms the uniqueness of black expressive culture and to the criteria and objectives of the movement. Even of black people, whom he describes as “full of masks black writers of the past were not exempt from being and dances and swelling chants / with African eyes and maligned, and Black Arts movement writers often did noses and arms,” despite the present condition of criticize them without always taking into consideration oppression and degradation under which many the historical period and context in which these past African Americans live. In both of these poems, writers were composing their literature. Sanchez and Baraka seek to restore to black people a Still the Black Arts movement’s influence and con- positive representation of blackness and raise their col- tributions to American poetry were far reaching. It lective sense of identity. made literary artists rethink the function and purpose Many of the poems in Sanchez’s collection We a of their work and their responsibility to their commu- BaddDDD People exemplify experimentation with lan- nities and to society. It also influenced and continues guage. In “indianapolis/summer/1969/poem,” Sanchez to inspire new generations of poets to experiment with provides a new spelling of the words mothers a variety of artistic forms to refuse the pressure to con- (“mothas”), fathers (“fathas”), and sisters (sistuhs”); the form to Western standards of art and to write, word about becomes “bout,” the word black becomes embrace, and derive their art from within their own “blk,” and the word I becomes “i.” The changes in expressive culture. spelling, as well as the use of nonstandard English in BIBLIOGRAPHY Sanchez’s poems, are meant to capture the syntax and Baraka, Amiri, and Larry Neal, eds. Black Fire: An Anthology of vernacular speech of many within the black commu- Afro-American Writing. New York: William Morrow, 1968. nity, while the abbreviated spelling of “blk” and the Gayle, Addison. The Black Aesthetic. Garden City, N.Y.: Dou- lower case “i” are part of Sanchez’s refusal to adhere to bleday, 1971. the rules of standard English. Many Black Arts poets Henderson, Stephen. Understanding the New Black Poetry: perceived language to be a tool of the oppressor and Black Speech and Black Music as Poetic Reference. New York: therefore sought ways to make it their own. Lastly, the William Morrow, 1973. use of pejorative terminology and irreverent language Karenga, Ron. “Black Cultural Nationalism.” In The Black was also common among Black Arts poets. The police Aesthetic, edited by Addison Gayle. Garden City, N.Y.: were often referred to as “pigs,” and white people were Doubleday, 1971, pp. 32–38. termed “honkies” or “crackers.” Ama S. Wattley Several criticisms have been leveled against the Black Arts movement. One was that it tended only to BLACKBURN, PAUL (1926–1971) Paul address issues of race and to promote racial hatred. Blackburn is an indispensable figure in American Also the functional aspect of the Black Arts movement poetry, not only for his innovations in poetic form but came to be denounced by newly emerging black liter- for his other contributions to the contemporary 50 BLACKBURN, PAUL

American poetic community. His influences—which which he suggested moving to St. Mark’s Church in include Provençal troubadour poetry of the Middle 1966, helping to create the still-extant Poetry Project. Ages, Ezra POUND, William Carlos WILLIAMS, Charles From 1964 to 1965, he ran a poetry radio show at OLSON, and other figures of the BLACK MOUNTAIN WBAI. “He was an indefatigable attender of all types of SCHOOL—were many, but, in turn, his influence on poetry readings, and he carried his large double-reel late 20th-century American poetry is an essential one. tape recorder with him wherever he went; his tape col- He was an important innovator in the contemporary lection, now at the University of California, San Diego, sound and form of free verse, both on the page and in is probably the best oral history of the New York performance. He also shaped the public poetry read- poetry scene from the 1950s up until 1970,” says Edith ing as we know it today and helped make New York Jarolim (xxix). City a vital locale for poetry. Creeley, in his preface to Against the Silences (1980), Blackburn was born in St. Albans, Vermont, where says, “Paul was without question a far more accom- his mother, writer Frances Frost, left him to the plished craftsman than I” (11). Blackburn’s ear for the repressive and sometimes violent care of his grand- poetic “breath” and his eye for how words should be mother. At the age of 14, Frost took him to live with spaced on a page were indeed remarkably acute. His her in Greenwich Village in New York City. Blackburn ability, honed by his prodigious reading and translat- went to New York University in 1947, where he stud- ing, allowed him to revolutionize poetic form, inte- ied with M. L. Rosenthal and discovered the work of grating natural speech and everyday observations into Pound. In 1949 he transferred to the University of a vibrant poetic space. “Brooklyn Narcissus” (1958), Wisconsin, Madison, from where he would hitchhike “Clickety-Clack” (1958/1960)—also an example of to Washington, D.C., to visit Pound, who introduced Blackburn’s sometimes controversial attitude toward him to poets, such as Robert CREELEY. Blackburn’s first women—and “Meditation on the BMT” (1959) are book of translations of the medieval Provençal poetry, examples of the “subway poem,” a form Blackburn is Proensa, was published in 1953, and his first collec- credited with inventing. While these poems may at tion of poetry, The Dissolving Fabric, was published in first appear to be loose, almost journalistic observa- 1955, both by Creeley’s Divers Press (see POETRY tions (see THE JOURNALS), the intricate sound and place- PRESSES). In 1954 Blackburn received a Fulbright Fel- ment of words on the page reveal the poems’ craft. In lowship to study at the University of Toulouse in “Brooklyn Narcissus,” Blackburn cleverly echoes France. In 1956 he moved to Spain, where he began Robert FROST’s poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy his lifelong translations of Federico García Lorca, pub- Evening” (1923): “But I have premises to keep / & lished posthumously as Lorca/Blackburn. His other local stops before I sleep.” translations include Julio Cortazar’s Blow-Up and Other “The Watchers” (1963) shows Blackburn’s ability to Stories and Pablo Picasso’s Hunk of Skin. While Black- discover significance within the small details of life. burn neither attended nor taught at Black Mountain Ostensibly about construction workers operating a College, he briefly worked for Black Mountain Review “CIVETTA LINK-BELT” crane, Blackburn sees poetry and was grouped with the Black Mountain poets in in the crane’s “graceless geometry” and a reference to Donald Allen’s influential 1960 anthology, The New the avian crane’s meaning to the ancient Greeks: “The American Poetry 1945–1960 (see POETRY ANTHOLOGIES). crane moves slowly, that / much it is graceful.” A sense In 1967 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship. He of eternal, mythological time in human history is also taught at the State University of New York at Cortland expressed in “AT THE WELL” (1963), a poem of mysteri- and elsewhere. ous yet familiar desert figures who seem to indicate, Called by Daniel Kane “the man perhaps most somehow, the origin of human speech: “Can I offer responsible for developing a vibrant poetic community them some sound / my mouth makes in the night?” on the Lower East Side” (160), Blackburn organized a This poem is one of the most striking examples of Wednesday Night reading series at Le Metro Café, Blackburn’s “ear,” with complex off rhymes, typo- BLACK MOUNTAIN SCHOOL 51

graphical “pauses” in the form of spaces between peri- BLACKBURN, Paul Carroll, William BRONK, Larry EIGNER, ods and words, and unexpected line breaks. Edward DORN, Jonathan Williams, Joel OPPENHEIMER, Toward the end of his life, Blackburn wrote in a new John WIENERS, Theodore ENSLIN, Ebbe Borregard, Rus- poetic form that he titled “journals,” which Jarolim sell EDSON, M. C. Richards, and Michael Rumaker (a calls “Final evidence of Blackburn’s continual struggle, few of these never attended the college but are never- often with himself, to extend the boundaries of what theless associated with the college group, because of could be considered poetry’s fit subject and form” their poetic styles or their representation in certain lit- (xxxii). While in many ways the logical extension of erary magazines discussed below). Many other impor- Blackburn’s interest in chronicling everyday details, the tant intellectuals and artists were also involved in what journals did indeed extend the boundaries of poetry amounted to an artistic revolution. and what was seen as acceptable poetic vocabulary and Today Black Mountain poetry may seem to contain content, presenting acute and not always comfortable a great variety of styles and themes. Regardless, there observations on the nature of his own illness, love, and are some common characteristics to be noticed in this mortality. In many ways, The Journals (1975) were the poetry: the use of precise language, direct statement, final push toward achieving a true equality of subject: often plain (even blunt) diction, and metonymy (a fig- Nothing should be beneath the interest of the poet, as ure of speech whereby a phrase or word stands in for all is equally compelling. something with which it is closely associated) rather than metaphor or simile. These writerly tendencies BIBLIOGRAPHY evolved in reaction to earlier poetry that was strictly Creeley, Robert. Preface to Against the Silences, by Paul Blackburn. New York: Permanent Press, 1980, pp. 11–13. metered, end-rhymed, and filled with grand diction Jarolim, Edith. Introduction to The Collected Poems of Paul and monumental subject matter. The reaction by the Blackburn, edited by Jarolim. New York: Persea Editions, Black Mountain poets was a continuation of a poetic 1985, pp. xxix–xxxii. revolution begun by those in the IMAGIST SCHOOL and Kane, Daniel. All Poets Welcome: The Lower East Side Poetry later the OBJECTIVIST SCHOOL. In general Black Moun- Scene in the 1960s. Berkeley: University of California tain poets typically refrain from commenting on their Press, 2003. personal appraisal of a scene evoked in a poem, and Marcella Durand this strategy can even mean the avoidance of adjec- tives and adverbs. As Ezra Pound had pronounced BLACK MOUNTAIN SCHOOL What came early in the century (in describing the poetry of H. D.), to be known as the Black Mountain school of poetry poetry should be “laconic speech,” “Objective,” with- represented, in mid-20th-century America, the cross- out “slither—direct,” and containing “No metaphors roads of poetic innovation. The name of this poetic that won’t permit examination.—It’s straight talk” movement derives from Black Mountain College in (11). Besides its alignment with imagism and, later, North Carolina, an experimental college founded in objectivism, Black Mountain poetry can be said to 1933. By the time the poet and essayist Charles OLSON descend, especially in its embrace of individualism, became its rector in 1950, it had become a mecca for a from such 19th-century New England writers as larger artistic and intellectual avant-garde. Until it closed Henry David Thoreau and, particularly, Ralph Waldo in 1957, the college was the seedbed for virtually all of Emerson. As Edward FOSTER has written, Emerson’s America’s later artistic innovations. A vast array of writ- essay “Self-Reliance” gave the many Black Mountain ers, painters, sculptors, dancers, composers, and many poets, “despite their radical differences in personality, other people involved in the creative arts passed sensibility, and general ambitions, a common appre- through the college’s doors as teachers or students. hension about what a poem might achieve” (xiii). The The poets most often associated with the name poem could be an extension of themselves as persons, Black Mountain are, primarily, Olson, Robert CREELEY, as individuals standing apart from the ideals of an and Robert DUNCAN, along with Denise LEVERTOV, Paul orthodox past. 52 BLACK MOUNTAIN SCHOOL

Philosophically Black Mountain poetry also shares a (besides the poets named above) Jorge Luis Borges, view of reality—of the physical world and humanity’s William Burroughs (under the name of William Lee), relationship to it—derived from scientific movements Paul Celan, Judson Crews, René Daumal, Fielding of its time, movements that contradicted the view of a Dawson, André du Bouchet, Katue Kitasono, Irving stable and predictable universe set forth in earlier Layton, James MERRILL, Eugenio Montale, Samuel times by thinkers such as Sir Isaac Newton French Morse, James Purdy, Kenneth REXROTH, Hubert (1643–1727) and, later, Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). Selby, Jr., Kusano Shimpei, Gary SNYDER, John TAGGART, Olson, Creeley, Duncan, and others were interested in Gael Turnbull, César Vallejo, Philip WHALEN, Richard the modern ideas of Albert Einstein, who formulated WILBUR, and William Carlos WILLIAMS. Later issues of the theory of relativity, and Werner Heisenberg, who Origin, in the 1960s, featured work by Louis ZUKOFSKY, postulated his theory of uncertainty relations. Physical Snyder, Zeami Motokiyo, Margaret Avison, Robert reality was relative to time, according to Einstein; KELLY, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Turnbull, Corman, Dun- according to Heisenberg, it was simply indeterminate can, Francis Ponge, Frank Samperi, Lorine NIEDECKER, and incomplete. Creeley has therefore argued: du Bouchet, Shimpei, Bronk, Josef Albers, and others. The ARS POETICA, or manifesto, of the Black Moun- The world cannot be “known” entirely....In all tain movement is usually identified with Olson’s 1950 disciplines of human attention and act, the possi- essay “Projective Verse,” published in Poetry New York, bilities inherent in the previous conception of a a magazine that preceded these others, Olson’s fully Newtonian universe—with its containment and defined formula for poetry being projective or open thus the possibility of being known—have been field verse. In this essay, Olson discusses the impor- yielded. We do not know the world in that way, tance of composing poetry according to the breathing nor will we. Reality is continuous, not separable, of the individual poet or speaker of a poem and not and cannot be objectified. We cannot stand aside according to a predetermined set form of speech or to see it. (115–16) verse. There are two aspects of a poem, he maintains: The reliance in Black Mountain poetry, and its “objec- “the HEAD, by way of the EAR, to the SYLLABLE [and] tivist” forebears, on direct statement and metonymy is the HEART, by way of the BREATH, to the LINE” (55). a symptom of this basic outlook on the world. What is The breath of the poet “allows all the speech-force of unknowable finally can nevertheless be beautiful. This language.” Moreover, a poem should never have any poetry, then, poses a fundamental problem of percep- slack, or, as Olson puts it, “ONE PERCEPTION MUST tion. In “Love,” an early poem by Creeley, there are the IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY LEAD TO A FUR- sure “particulars,” such as “oak, the grain of, oak,” and THER PERCEPTION” (52). Hence the poet must “USE there are also, by contrast, “what supple shadows may USE USE the process at all points” so that a perception come / to be here.” These details hold within them- can “MOVE, INSTANTER, ON ANOTHER” (53). Per- selves a tension between the stable and the radical, the haps the essence of what Olson is saying comes from known and the continually evolving. Creeley’s belief, as quoted by Olson in this essay, that The literary magazines associated with the Black “FORM IS NEVER MORE THAN AN EXTENSION OF Mountain school, the Black Mountain Review, Origin CONTENT” (52). and, to a lesser extent, the San Francisco Review, were a The openness of the poetry Olson advocated can be haven for writers whose aesthetics and point of view seen in Duncan’s poem, “Often I Am Permitted to were found to be unacceptable by the mainstream Return to a Meadow,” which begins his volume of POETRY JOURNALS of the time. Indeed it is within the poetry entitled, fittingly, The Opening of the Field issues of these magazines that the Black Mountain sen- (1960). In this poem Duncan is involved with the per- sibility truly coalesces. Edited by Creeley and Cid COR- sonal creative process and the bid for freedom that MAN, respectively, the the Black Mountain Review and poetry (implicitly, Black Mountain poetry) makes pos- Origin published now well-known figures such as sible; writing is a “place of first permission,” Duncan BLACK MOUNTAIN SCHOOL 53 asserts. The meadow referred to in the poem’s title is poem’s outset and reprises throughout: “What does not possibly real, tangible, yet it exists, more importantly, change / is the will to change.” This concept is per- “as if it were a scene made-up by the mind”; still, it is ceivable in all things: “hear, where the dry blood talks / a place apart from the poem’s persona and, in fact, it where the old appetite walks.” is “a made place, created by light / wherefrom the Olson’s point of view is echoed in Levertov’s work. shadows that are forms fall.” Duncan’s vision of poetic In her poem “Beyond the End” (1953), human destiny reality is akin, it seems, to a classically Platonic view is constrained by natural forces, yet the point of it all is of the world in which ideal forms reside beyond not merely to “go on living’ but to quicken, to activate, human perception, with the things humanity can extend.” The “will to respond” is a force unbounded by know similar to them but not perfectly the same, reason, and so we reside always “further, beyond the much as shadows of objects are like the objects them- end / beyond whatever ends: to begin, to be, to defy.” selves. The point here is that readers suppose places What stands out in both Levertov and Olson is the pre- they inhabit “as if . . . certain bounds [could] hold cise stipulation of limits and the recognition of some- against chaos” (emphasis added), and therefore the thing outside them, which can best be evoked with poem stresses how very delicate perception is and exacting language. underscores the individual’s seeing. This use of language is nicely exemplified by Likewise, Olson creates, in his epic work THE MAX- Oppenheimer, who was a student of Olson, Creeley, IMUS POEMS (1960–83), a towering persona, Maximus, and others at Black Mountain College. Not only is his who looks out upon a vast geography informed by a work precise, coming out of his student experience, historical past. The singularity of this figure is meant to but it is also rhythmic according to the measure of a compare with the immensity of Olson’s subject, the reader’s breathing, as was stipulated in Olson’s essay. vast terrain beneath Maximus’s feet, grounded in Moreover, Oppenheimer’s signature diction is, for its Gloucester, Massachusetts, and stretching across North time, breathtakingly casual and candid, reflecting the America, and the history beginning in ancient Greece social revolution in America that was to reach its and running up through a present American time. height in the late 1960s. Oppenheimer’s poetry is There is tangibility, as when Maximus says that there located in the moments of a daily life. In his poem are “facts, to be dealt with”; on the other hand, he asks, “The Bath” (1953), the acts of living are simple, for “that which matters, that which insists, that which will instance, the act of taking a bath. His lover’s bathing, last, / that! o my people, where shall you find it, how, Oppenheimer finds, is a ritual, albeit one unremarked where”? In Olson’s work readers discover an astonish- upon but for his verse—and yet, he humorously points ing sweep of history, a breadth of vision, and the eter- out, “she wants him” (the poem’s persona thinks) nal verities laid out—yet these truths are tried by “unbathed”; he is gratified by her desire. The routine of Olson, tested, and, finally, undone. Olson is reconceiv- life is celebrated in the poem by this nexus between the ing both space (physical geography) and time (the his- two of them; there is “her continuous bathing. / in his tory of his civilization) according to the new paradigms tub. in his water. wife.” set forth by Emerson and Thoreau, Einstein and Black Mountain College was the soil for virtually all Heisenberg. Yet this grasp does not neglect the eter- later experimental poetry in America and much of nally human condition and accounts for death and suf- America’s later art and music. Grounded in the poetry fering as well as triumph and splendor. Hence in “The of Pound and Williams—as Creeley writes in his hom- Kingfishers” (1949), he observes that human beings age to Williams, “For W. C. W.” (1963): “and and are capable of precision: “The factors are / in the ani- becomes // just so”—as well as demonstrating great mal and/or the machine”; they “involve ...a discrete sympathy for the objectivist poetry of Louis Zukofsky or continuous sequence of measurable events distrib- and the others of this school, the later Black Mountain uted in time.” All the same, Olson says that what writers continued a tradition of exact perception, an endures is change itself, a theme he strikes at the avoidance of metaphor, and of a celebration of the 54 BLACKMUR, R(ICHARD) P(ALMER)

individual that would also emerge in BEAT POETRY. The heim Fellowships from 1937 to 1939 and was elected Black Mountain contribution to American poetry was to the National Institute of Arts and Letters (1956) and not merely a new version of these other movements, to the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1964). but rather it was original and, arguably, the pivotal Blackmur’s poems seem often to give the effect of moment in modern American poetic history. almost straining to find their most effective expression, using striking and subtle juxtapositions of words with BIBLIOGRAPHY a difficult syntax that requires multiple readings. Con- Carter, Steven. Bearing Across: Studies in Literature and Science. San Francisco: International Scholars Publications, 1998. sonance, assonance, and alliteration are used to subtle Creeley, Robert. A Sense of Measure. London: Calder and effect, and Biblical and other literary allusions as well Boyars, 1973. as sea imagery are common. Blackmur writes in a vari- Dawson, Fielding. The Black Mountain Book, a New Edition. ety of line, meter, and stanza forms and sometimes cre- Rocky Mount: North Carolina Wesleyan College Press, ates his own formal arrangements, while also using 1991. conventional ones, such as the sonnet. Foster, Edward Halsey. Understanding the Black Mountain In “Redwing,” the first part of “From Jordan’s Poets. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995. Delight” (1937), stark sea imagery, alliteration, and Lane, Melvin, ed. Black Mountain College: An Anthology of assonance are used in an iambic pentameter line set in Personal Accounts. Knoxville: University of Tennessee six-line stanzas to portray a seaman long ago jilted, Press, 1990. who while “wilted waits for water still.” His loneliness Olson, Charles. “Projective Verse.” In Human Universe and is offset, however, by an “excruciation that redeems,” Other Essays, edited by Donald Allen. New York: Grove Press, 1967, pp. 51–62. made possible through his work in the harsh marine Paul, Sherman. Olson’s Push: Origin, Black Mountain and environment. Blackmur writes in his more public Recent American Poetry. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Uni- mode in commenting on post–World War II political versity Press, 1978. conditions in “The Communiqués from Yalta” (1947). Pound, Ezra. Selected Letters, edited by D. D. Paige. New While the “salvo sounds” of conventional warfare have York: New Directions, 1971. been stilled, Blackmur describes a more insidious con- Burt Kimmelman flict symbolized by the sound of a metaphorical “fire raking” the hopes for an ultimate postwar peace. The BLACKMUR, R(ICHARD) P(ALMER) final lines of the poem allude to the text of Luke 23:31 (1904–1965) R. P. Blackmur’s allusive and psycho- and end with a feminine rhyme, implying a resignation logically complex poetry of the mid-20th century that such conflicts are bound to be eternal. reflects the influence of earlier poets of MODERNISM, While Blackmur wrote poetry seriously throughout such as Ezra POUND, T. S. ELIOT, and Hart CRANE. Black- his life, he is today primarily known for his critical writ- mur’s credo, that “only within order can you give dis- ings. With fellow poet-critics Robert Penn WARREN, Allen order room” (Fraser 86), is reflected in his carefully TATE, and John Crowe RANSOM, Blackmur came to be crafted poems on themes commonly explored in the associated with New Criticism (see FUGITIVE/AGRARIAN personal lyric (see LYRIC POETRY), including love, death, SCHOOL). New Criticism greatly influenced the teaching loneliness, frustration, and faith, while a number of his of literature in American universities by introducing later poems reflect more worldly concerns with the close reading techniques focusing on detailed and sub- upheavals of the mid-20th century. Showing restraint tle linguistic and formal analyses of literature, particu- and a distrust of the excessively emotional, they reflect larly poetry. Blackmur’s critical works include The Blackmur’s wariness of speaking with finality. Double Agent (1935) and Language as Gesture (1952). Blackmur was born and raised in Cambridge, Mass- BIBLIOGRAPHY achusetts. His first book of poetry, From Jordan’s Delight, Donoghue, Denis. Introduction to Poems of R. P. Blackmur. appeared in 1937, and from 1940 until his death he Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977, taught at Princeton University. Blackmur held Guggen- pp. ix–xxix. BLASER, ROBIN 55

Fraser, Russell. “The Poetry of R. P. Blackmur.” Southern work is marked by the piecemeal publication of the Review 15 (1979): 86–100. major serial poem Image-Nation (1962–93), which Sue Barker eventually appears alongside other individual poems in Syntax (1983) and Pell Mell (1988). To date, the cul- BLASER, ROBIN (1925– ) While Robin mination of Blaser’s publication history has been the Blaser claims that 1955 marks the beginning of his life- appearance of The Holy Forest (1993), which contains long career as a poet (“The Fire” 242), from as early as most of his major work from 1956 to 1993. the late 1940s, he—along with Robert DUNCAN and Even a cursory glance at The Holy Forest reveals the Jack SPICER—played an integral part in the Berkeley- foundational importance of the serial poem; works, based SAN FRANCISCO RENAISSANCE. During this period such as Image-Nations (1962–93), The Truth Is Laughter he and Spicer formulated a poetics of what they came (1979–88), and Great Companions (1971 and 1988), to call “seriality”—a formulation that expressed aes- appear all throughout and enable Blaser continually to thetic, political, social, and ethical concerns. Widely work out the correspondences and contradictions acknowledged as a seminal development in 20th-cen- between crucial issues, such as the imaginary and the tury American poetry, Blaser’s engagement with the real, self and other, and public and private. In fact the serial poem (see LONG AND SERIAL POETRY) has influ- serial poem is a process-oriented form used to make enced both American poets (such as Robert CREELEY, manifest relationships among the verse segments and Charles BERNSTEIN, Susan HOWE, Charles OLSON, and to allow these relationships to emerge in such a way Louis ZUKOFSKY) and Canadian poets (such as bpNi- that denies lyric control and allows the poem to take chol, George Bowering, and Daphne Marlatt) (see on a life of its own. CANADIAN POETIC INFLUENCES). However, despite such a In the poems of Image-Nation, image—the image as wide-ranging influence, the combination of Blaser’s a nation and the nation as an image—is one of the densely packed, philosophically informed writing with dominant tropes through which Blaser explores such his dual citizenship (Blaser is still viewed as a writer relations. As he writes in “Particles” (1969), “Greek who is “indigenous” to neither the United States nor and Roman political experience argues that to act intel- Canada) is generally acknowledged as the most obvi- ligently in the public realm requires a vision of things. ous reason for the lack of critical acclaim for his work. The words themselves, vision and things, are telling. Born in Denver, Colorado, Blaser spent his child- Vision, full of that sense of seeing and image, which hood with his father and grandmother in small com- [is] basic to knowing” (36). Images, as the source of munities throughout Idaho. After briefly attending vision, then, are necessary to present knowledge (of Northwestern University and the College of Idaho, public, private, political, social, and linguistic life) and Blaser began a nine-year-long education at the Univer- future action—without which we are left homeless, liv- sity of California in 1944. He left Berkeley in 1955 ing out less-than-human lives: “as the image wears with a M.A. and M.L.S. to take up a position in the away / there is a wind in the heart.” Drawing from the Widener Library at Harvard. It was at this point that work of philosophers Hannah Arendt, Alfred North Blaser began to establish himself as a poet separate Whitehead, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Michel Ser- from his Berkeley counterparts; as he writes in “The res, Blaser is able to bring a constellation of sometimes Fire” (1967), “I have worked since 1955 to find a line conflicting poetic concerns to his notion of image to which will hold what I see and hear, and which will tie tease out the nature of our single and twin existence. a reader to the poems, not to me” (242). In the period In “Image-Nation 2 (roaming” a scare-marked “‘you’” between his stay in Boston and his acceptance of a first sees an image of a burning horse, which then position at Simon Fraser University in British Colum- transforms into a flaming eye and a charred log; how- bia in 1966, Blaser published his first significant ever, while “‘you’” sees, “‘you’” refuses to take on the works: The Moth Poem (1964) and Les Chimères: Trans- larger task of seeing: visioning the world. Because of lations of Nerval for Fran Herndon (1965). Thereafter his the dangers inherent in moving from a superficially 56 BLY, ROBERT named position (a ‘you’ who merely observes, never to American, Spanish, German, Scandinavian, Persian, become “you” or “I”) to a position that is both named and Indian poetry into American consciousness. As a and lived, “‘you’” refuses participation in the public founder of American Writers against the Vietnam War world: “turned by that privacy / from such public per- in the 1960s and of the men’s movement in the 1980s ils as words / are, we travel in company with the mes- and 1990s, he brought the increasingly isolated world senger.” A powerful influence on Blaser’s address of the of poetry into contact with public intellectual life. Bly public and the private is Arendt, who argues in The is most often credited as a founder of DEEP IMAGE Human Condition (1958) that the loss of the public POETRY, an effort to bring the unconscious into poetry, world means the loss of both our sense of singularity despite his dislike of that term, coined by Robert KELLY. and difference and the world we hold in common. Reading the Spanish surrealists, Bly found a “profun- Blaser, however, wants to be clear that—guided by a dity of association” beyond French SURREALISM or Ezra poetics of “roaming”—the public world and its words POUND’s IMAGIST SCHOOL: “Freud’s ocean has deepened, are always there to be taken up again, to be read and and Jung’s work on images has been done. To Pound written once more. As he writes in “Image-Nation 15 an image meant ‘Petals on a wet black bough.’ To us an (the lacquer house”: “the point is transformation of the image is ‘death on the deep roads of the guitar’ or ‘the theme—/ enjoinment and departure —.” grave of snow’ or ‘the cradle-clothes of the sea’” (Pesseroff 265). Louis Simpson, another deep image BIBLIOGRAPHY poet, said that the movement Bly led was a “renewal of Blaser, Robin. “The Fire.” In The Poetics of the New American Poetry, edited by Donald Allen and Warren Tallman. New the aborted MODERNISM of the generation of 1910” (qtd. York: Grove Press, 1974, pp. 235–246. in Peseroff 269). ———. “Particles.” Pacific Nation 2 (1969): 27–42. Bly was born in Madison, Minnesota, where his fam- Nichols, Miriam. Even on Sunday: Essays, Readings, and ily farmed. After graduating from high school, he Archival Materials on the Poetry and Poetics of Robin Blaser. enlisted in the navy in the last year of World War II. Orono, Maine: National Poetry Foundation, 2002. Upon discharge in 1947, he attended St. Olaf’s College Truitt, Samuel R. “An Interview with Robin Blaser.” Talis- and Harvard University, where he studied with man: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics 16 Archibald MACLEISH and met Donald HALL, Richard (1996): 5–25. WILBUR, John ASHBERY, Kenneth KOCH, Frank O’HARA, Watts, Charles, and Edward Byrne, eds. Recovery of the Pub- and Adrienne RICH. After Harvard, Bly spent three lic World: Essays on Poetics in Honour of Robin Blaser. Van- years living alone as a “homemade monk” (Quinn 46), couver, British Columbia: Talonbooks, 1999. writing 12 hours a day, six days a week, and working Lori Emerson at odd jobs on the seventh. When MacLeish noticed that he looked a little gaunt, he put him up for a grant BLY, ROBERT (1926– ) Robert Bly is a cen- at the Writer’s Workshop at the University of Iowa, tral figure for American poetry in the second half of the where Bly taught freshman English, married, took an 20th century, known as much for his roles as editor, M.A., and won a Fulbright to Norway for 1956–57 to translator, and social critic as for poet. Bly as editor translate Norwegian poetry. It was in Oslo that he first shook up the comfortable literary establishment of the read Neruda, Trakl, and other poets outside the En- 1950s (in his magazine The Fifties, its name changing glish tradition. He returned to Minnesota and began to with each decade) by arguing passionately about write a new kind of poem for him, not like NARRATIVE poetry and politics and by criticizing other poets and POETRY or formal LYRIC POETRY in the English tradition: editors. As a translator of Pablo Neruda and César “I often walked out somewhere and sat down. Usually Vallejo, Antonio Machado and Federico García Lorca, a poem didn’t begin until something happened . . . Georg Trakl and Rainier Maria Rilke, Tomas [and] usually the second stanza didn’t begin until Transtromer and Rolf Jacobsen, Maulana Jalal al-Din something else had happened” (qtd. in Quinn 55). Rumi and Kabir and Ghalib, he has brought Latin These poems usually begin in a small moment before BOGAN, LOUISE 57 moving inward, as in “Hunting Pheasants in a Corn- Morning Poems (1997). These are buoyant elegies, field” (1962) and “Driving to Town Late to Mail a Let- however, as befitting Stafford’s personality and Bly’s ter” (1962). Bly wrote a hundred or so of these poems own fundamentally idealistic outlook. Selected Poems from 1958 to 1961 and chose 44 for his first published (1986), structured with short essays as a kind of liter- book of poetry, Silence in the Snowy Fields (1962). ary autobiography or growth of the poet’s mind, has With the storm of the Vietnam War striking in 1965, been followed by Eating the Honey of Words: New and Bly turned from the personal to the public in such Selected Poems (1999) and The Night Abraham Called to poems as “Johnson’s Cabinet Watched by Ants” (1967), the Stars (2001). “Counting Small-Boned Bodies” (1967), and “Driving BIBLIOGRAPHY through Minnesota during the Hanoi Bombings” Nelson, Howard. Robert Bly: An Introduction to the Poetry. (1967) and the book-length poem THE TEETH MOTHER New York: Columbia University Press, 1984. NAKED AT LAST (1970). The calm of the Minnesota farm Peseroff, Joyce, ed. Robert Bly: When Sleepers Awake. Ann could not serve as a private solution when there were Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984. threats to the larger community. Bly organized antiwar Quinn, Francis. “Robert Bly: The Art of Poetry LXXIX.” readings with Simpson, James WRIGHT, Galway KIN- Paris Review 154 (spring 2000): 36–75. NELL, Lawrence FERLINGHETTI, and Denise LEVERTOV, and James Persoon when his next book, The Light around the Body (1967), won a National Book Award, he famously donated the prize money to the antiwar group Resistance. This new BOGAN, LOUISE (1897–1970) Recognized poetry showed his reading of Neruda and Vallejo: as one of the finest lyric poets in the United States—in “Engines burning a thousand gallons of gasoline a addition to being a well-respected poetry critic— minute sweep over the huts with dirt floors. / Chick- Louise Bogan produced finely wrought, intellectual, ens feel the fear deep in the pits of their beaks.” and highly formal verse that places her in the tradition Hall called Bly “a born teacher,” who is wild in his of the 17th-century English Metaphysical poets. Yet “weddings of the unweddable” and “a learned, eclectic even as her form and technique were often traditional, priest” (qtd. in Peseroff 272). Bly’s concerns, whether the precise language and concentrated effect of her he is writing about rural Minnesota or the Vietnam LYRIC POETRY ranks her alongside her more modernist War, are fundamentally religious. And his purpose in contemporaries and friends as among the best in 20th- readings, famously interrupted and accompanied by century American verse (see MODERNISM). song, commentary, and repetition, is to teach. Bly’s Born in Livermore Falls, Maine, Bogan was the sec- need to make a living led him in the 1970s to begin ond surviving child of Daniel Bogan, a white-collar giving workshops, based on his deepening interest in worker in various paper mills, and Mary Helen Shields. fairy tales, first on the Great Mother (beginning in Her childhood was painful. The family moved fre- 1975) and, later, after meeting the Jungians Joseph quently, and her mother was emotionally unstable. Campbell, James Hillman, and Michael Meade, on sto- Bogan spent a year at Boston University before marry- ries of initiation for men, which resulted in A Little ing Curt Alexander, a German immigrant in the U.S. Book on the Human Shadow (1988), his best-seller Iron Army, in 1916. After giving birth to Mathilde (Maidie) John (1990), The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart: Poems in October 1917, Bogan separated from Alexander per- for Men (1992), and The Sibling Society (1996). This manently in 1919, sent Maidie to live with her parents, teaching work has been controversial and aggravating moved into an apartment in New York City, and deter- to those who find such work antifeminist. mined to make herself into an important woman of let- After the death of his friend William STAFFORD, Bly ters. By 1921 she was publishing in most of the spent a year writing in bed, often before rising, as prestigious journals of the day. She won the first of Stafford used to do, producing small elegies, poems in three Guggenheim Fellowships in 1922 (also in 1933 stanzaic form—hence the volume’s punning title, and 1937), and in 1931 she published her first review 58 BOOTH, PHILIP for the New Yorker, for which she would continue to Frank as “her one great poem in a major style and write regularly until 1969. Bogan won Poetry maga- major mode” (125), addresses emotional despair. zine’s John Reed Memorial Prize in 1930 and the Helen After divorcing her second husband and traveling in Haire Levinson Memorial Prize in 1937. She held a Europe, Bogan returned to writing about the themes Library of Congress Fellowship in American Letters in that dominated her earlier work—grief, rage, and 1944, was consultant in poetry (now poet laureate) impermanence—in what some consider her finest vol- to the Library of Congress from 1945–47, and won ume, The Sleeping Fury (1937). Works like “Italian the Harriet Monroe Award in 1948. She was elected to Morning,” “Roman Fountain,” “Henceforth from the the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1951, the Mind,” and the title poem are cited by critics for their Academy of American Poets in 1955, and the Ameri- mastery of craftsmanship and maturity of sentiment. can Academy of Arts and Letters in 1969, and she “Henceforth from the Mind” reflects Bogan’s continued shared the Bollingen Prize with Léone Adams in 1955. struggle to distance herself intellectually from raging She published three books of criticism and held several emotions: “Henceforth from the mind, / For your visiting professorships. whole joy, must spring.” The title poem, “The Sleeping Bogan’s stylized verses eschew simplistic biographical Fury,” confronts depression, personified as a sleeping interpretation. Her first book, Body of This Death (1923), child: “You lie in sleep and forget me. / Alone and abstractly addresses the themes of betrayal and imper- strong in my peace, I look upon you in yours.” manence beneath an objective tone and a precise atten- Bogan’s “The Dream,” first appearing in Collected tion to form and rhyme. She abhorred CONFESSIONAL Poems, 1923–1953 (1954), marks an outstanding POETRY. According to biographer Elizabeth Frank, the achievement of intensity of emotional impact presented first poem in Body of This Death, “A Tale,” exemplifies in timeless, traditional lyric form. By the time The Blue Bogan’s search for “a life lived passionately” and “an Estuaries: Poems 1923–1968 (1969)—which added only understanding” of such a life (56). The male speaker in 12 new poems—was released, Bogan’s critics were used the poem finds, at its end, that nothing endures except to reviewing her entire canon as an expression of her in the frozen confrontation where “something dreadful pursuit of lyric control and excellence. The 104 poems and another / Look quietly upon each other.” A similar that comprise her final selected volume are a testament confrontation is extended in “Medusa,” from the same to Bogan’s commitment to using traditional metrics to volume, which her friend Theodore ROETHKE called a achieve concentrated language and effect. “breakthrough to great poetry” (qtd. in Frank 58), while BIBLIOGRAPHY others saw in it an effort to control her depression. Bowles, Gloria. Louise Bogan’s Aesthetic of Limitation. Bloom- Resolving deep emotional response with intellectual ington: Indiana University Press, 1987. nihilism marks much of Bogan’s work. Similarly “The Collins, Martha, ed. Critical Essays on Louise Bogan. Boston: Alchemist” (1923), another of her most popular poems, Hall, 1984. asserts: “I burned my life, that I might find / A passion Frank, Elizabeth. Louise Bogan: A Portrait. New York: wholly of the mind.” Knopf, 1983. The darkness noted in her second volume, Dark Ridgeway, Jacqueline. Louise Bogan. Boston: Twayne, 1984. Summer (1929), appears most often as the uncon- Upton, Lee. Obsession and Release: Rereading the Poetry of scious, where passion and emotion lurk behind obser- Louise Bogan. Lewisburg, Penn.: Bucknell University vation and tightly controlled form. In “If We Take All Press, 1996. Gold,” psychic peace is apparently won at the cost of Sharon L. Barnes burying “treasure” “under dark heaped ground.” “Sim- ple Autumnal,” considered one the finest American BOOTH, PHILIP (1925– ) A native New lyric poems, attends to controlling the “forbidden Englander, Philip Booth has long been identified with grief” that dominated Bogan’s life as an artist and as a coastal Maine, a region whose elemental landscape and human being, while “Summer Wish,” assessed by nautical culture provide much of the imagery that BOTTOMS, DAVID 59 frames his spare, meditative poems. Though he began “Lives” (1976) he inventories nature’s progressive signs writing in the allusive, formal manner that character- of seasonal change, concluding that “We grow / to be ized academic poetry in the 1950s, Booth soon modu- old.” In an interview, Booth observed that art entails “a lated his style to incorporate the directness of ordinary searching not so much for absolute certainty as for a speech. At the same time, he continued to employ sub- way through” (Dunn 139), a path that manifests itself tle prosodic techniques—such as syllabics, conso- only in the particulars of personal growth and change. nance, and assonance—that would lend his restrained, Booth has fashioned a poetry that deftly combines selective vocabulary a robust physicality, as if each economy of expression with connotative resonance, word were braced to bear as many interpretations as evincing, in Judith Kitchen’s words, “a dependable the reader might require of it. The critic Milton R. governing sensibility” (384). Framing the immediacies Stern calls attention to Booth’s use of “hard, North of daily life within the context of their metaphysical names and things” and the “structural unity of style dimensions, his earnest but disciplined poems achieve and theme” that reveals the poet’s debt to the transcen- an uncommon degree of consistency and balance. dentalism of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo BIBLIOGRAPHY Emerson (152). Booth’s later poems, in particular, con- Dunn, Stephen. “An Interview with Philip Booth.” New sider the characteristics of work and domestic life, England Review and Bread Loaf Quarterly 9.2 (winter acknowledging the plain-spoken strain of MODERNISM 1986): 134–158. associated with William Carlos WILLIAMS. Kitchen, Judith. “The Subjective Correlative.” Georgia Review Born in Hanover, New Hampshire, Booth served as 54.2 (summer 2000): 367–387. an air force aviation cadet toward the end of World Rotella, Guy. “‘Facing the Deep’: The Poems of Philip War II and afterward took degrees at Dartmouth Booth.” Three Contemporary Poets of New England: William (where he studied with Robert FROST) and at Columbia. Meredith, Philip Booth, and Peter Davison. Boston: Twayne, He was awarded the Lamont Prize for his first collec- 1983, pp. 64–127. tion, Letter from a Distant Land, in 1956 and has Stern, Milton R. “Halfway House: The Poems of Philip Booth.” Twentieth Century Literature 4.4 (January 1959): received honors from the National Endowment for the 148–153. Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Institute of Arts and Letters. His retrospective collec- Fred Muratori tion Lifelines (1999) won the Nicholas Roerich Museum Poet’s Prize. BOTTOMS, DAVID (1949– ) David Bottoms The expanses of sea, sky, and shore that frequently has been one of the most important poets writing in appear in Booth’s poems emphasize the durability and the southern United States, although his work, like magnitude of the natural environment that circum- that of James DICKEY, a significant influence, transcends scribes human endeavor. The Earth endures with or regional themes to address fundamental problems of without our presence, and rather than searching in the human condition. Confronting the decline of a nature for answers to eternal questions, the poet, as metaphysical awareness in the modern world, his Booth suggests in “Saying It” (1985), might more pro- poetry seeks moments of grace and renovation ductively strive “to find some word for / how we bear achieved through a reconnection to primitive instincts, our lives.” As Guy Rotella has noted, in Booth’s work, a kinship with animals, and contact with nature and, “It is human response to place, not place . . . that in his later work, through regenerative moments of determines meaning and value” (92). Meaning’s source human intimacy. is thus located in our own individual reactions to the Bottoms was born in Canton, Georgia. His first external world. book of poems, Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump, Booth’s poems seem to be written in the moment, was chosen in 1979 by Robert Penn WARREN for the acutely aware of life’s transience. His short, strongly Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American accented lines convey a restrained sense of urgency. In Poets. In 1985 he received the Levinson Prize from 60 BOWERS, EDGAR

Poetry magazine, in 1988 an Ingram Merrill Founda- Suarez, Ernest. “David Bottoms: An Interview.” In South- tion Award and the Award in Literature from the Amer- bound: Interviews with Southern Poets. Columbia: University ican Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and in Missouri Press, 1999, pp. 85–103. 1999 a Guggenheim Fellowship in poetry. In 2000 he Michael Sowder served as the poet laureate of Georgia. In addition to two novels, Any Cold Jordan (1987) and Easter Weekend BOWERS, EDGAR (1924–2000) Edgar Bow- (1990), he has published five full-length books of ers’s slight poetic output in no way diminishes his well- poetry. He has taught at Georgia State University. deserved status as one of the mid-to-late 20th-century Writing a highly accessible narrative free verse, Bot- masters of blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter). toms frequently begins his poems in disarming sim- His early poems provide a sketch of a stoic voice skilled plicity, recounting the story of an individual, lived in the art of creating rhyming lyrics, while the later experience—floating in a boat down a river and being poems present a poet capable of strong emotional— startled by a tree filled with vultures (“Under the Vul- albeit controlled—feeling in strictly metered elegies and ture Tree” [1987]), breaking into an elementary school poetic sequences. In all of his work, however, Bowers at night to steal a desktop carved with his father’s name demonstrates a talent for meter and for using pastoral (“The Desk” [1987]), or learning how to bunt (“Sign imagery to highlight moral and ethical ideas. Upon for My Father Who Stressed the Bunt” [1983]). But Bowers’s death, his friend Thom GUNN summed up his through figurative devices—metaphor, simile, word- oeuvre in the Los Angeles Times: “Edgar wrote very little play, and symbolic associations—the poems enact sud- but it was always perfect” (Woo A18). den moments of recognition and connection, Born in Rome, Georgia, Bowers began studying at epiphanies that appear upon what seemed a lost, alien- the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, until the ated subjectivity. Vultures become “dwarfed, transfig- intrusion of Word War II. He worked in the counter- uring angels,” the desktop suggests what it means to intelligence corps of the army until his honorable dis- “own [his] father’s name,” and a lesson in bunting charge in 1946. War, especially its mindlessness and becomes a lesson in sacrifice. In his recent book, capacity to ruin once-beautiful places, is a common Vagrant Grace (1999), Bottoms writes, “I love to imag- theme throughout his poetry. After graduating from ine being startled / into innocence.” Through his five UNC, he went on to earn a Ph.D. at Stanford University, books of poetry, one can trace a growth of the imagi- studying under the New Critic Yvor WINTERS, who nation toward a renewed innocence reminiscent of encouraged him to write in controlled forms. Bowers William Blake—the early books informed by an aus- then taught briefly at Duke University and Harpur Col- tere, often stoic realism, and the more recent books, lege (New York) before joining the English faculty at the perhaps beginning with Under the Vulture Tree (1987), University of California, Santa Barbara, as a professor of revealing a growing faith in moments of transcendence modern and Renaissance poetry. He retired in 1991 and and possibilities of connection. In Vagrant Grace, one moved to San Francisco, where he died in 2000. feels a surer sense of belonging, as if the speaker has Despite publishing only five full-length books in his found his home in the world, a homecoming often lifetime, including Collected Poems in 1997, he was voiced in terms of the regenerative possibilities of fam- awarded two Guggenheim Fellowships (1959 and ily and the grace of ordinary life. Still in midcareer, 1969) and Yale University’s prestigious Bollingen Prize Bottoms can be expected to continue to be a powerful in poetry in 1989. His inclusion in the 1963 Five Amer- voice in both southern and American poetry of the ican Poets anthology, edited by Ted Hughes and Gunn, 21st century. led to a wide British readership. BIBLIOGRAPHY Some critics speculate that Bowers’s smaller reading Bottoms, David. “Turn Your Radio On: The Spirits of public in the United States stems from his consistent Influence,” Southern Quarterly 37.3–4 (spring-summer use of rhyme and meter and the nonconfessional, 1999): 85–92. sometimes impersonal nature of his work; these quali- BRATHWAITE, EDWARD KAMAU 61 ties also separate him from his contemporaries. He State University, Boyle was known as an activist, writing laments the pervasive use of free verse in some poems, overtly political poetry and joining in student protests. and he reacts to CONFESSIONAL POETRY in his “To the She published nearly 50 volumes in her lifetime, Contemporary Muse” (1965) by calling “honesty” a including 14 novels, 10 short-story collections, and six “little slut” and asking why the muse wants to hear collections of poetry. She twice won the O. Henry “every dirty word [he] know[s].” Award for short stories, received two Guggenheim Fel- The poems of Bowers reward intelligent readers lowships (1934 and 1961) and a National Endowment interested in formal verse, schooled in Greek mythol- for the Arts Senior Fellowship for literature (1980), and ogy and Judeo-Christian traditions, and unafraid of was awarded five honorary doctorates. In 1979 she was serious, philosophical lessons about the reality of named to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. death, memory, and nostalgia. In “Noah” (1990), a Densely metaphorical and experimental in style, poem in which he assumes the voice of the ancient fig- Boyle’s poems from the 1920s and 1930s demonstrate ure, he characterizes the sound of rushing water as her understanding of the avant-garde as a “shock of “formal, true, exact”—three words that provide an apt fresh experience” (quoted in Madden 218). Boyle mixed description of his own verse. genres freely, interrupting lyrical passages with prose paragraphs or quotations from contemporary media. BIBLIOGRAPHY Influenced by SURREALISM and the IMAGIST SCHOOL, she Woo, Elaine. “Obituaries: Edgar Bowers; Poet Won Bolllin- was a master of the startling image fragment, as in “A gen Prize.” Los Angeles Times, 5 February 2000, sec A, 18. Yezzi, David. “The Order Passion Yields.” New Criterion 19.3 Christmas Carol for Ernest Carevali” (1928), where the (November 2000): 77–84. wind becomes a horse “with nostrils like wild black pan- sies opened on the fog.” For subject matter, Boyle drew Jessica Allen from her expatriate life or focused on social ills in Europe and at home, constantly exploring cultural and BOYLE, KAY (1902–1992) Instrumental in the psychological boundaries between individuals. development of avant-garde poetry and belonging to From the 1960s onward, Boyle’s poetry followed the various communities of American expatriate artists liv- tradition of American intellectual radicalism. Many of ing in Europe between the world wars, Kay Boyle was her poems, such as “For James Baldwin” (1969), whom one of the longest-lived and most prolific writers of the she praises as a “witch doctor for the dispossessed,” lost generation (other members of this group included manifest her continued identification with the rebel and Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Gertrude outsider. In all her writing, whether documenting the STEIN). Boyle’s work reflects the concept of high MOD- 1937 Scotsboro trials or lauding war protesters in 1969, ERNISM that a poem should “exist as an object of art on Boyle lived out the belief that poetry demands both “an its own terms” (Spanier 133). Yet Boyle believed too acute awareness of words . . . and of life” (Madden 216). that “[t]he writer must recognize and . . . accept his BIBLIOGRAPHY commitment to his times” (quoted in Madden 218). Madden, Charles. “Kay Boyle.” In Talks with Authors, edited Born in St. Paul, Minnesota, Boyle moved to New by Madden. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University York at age 20. There she was befriended by such lead- Press, 1968, pp. 215–236. ing poets as William Carlos WILLIAMS and Lola Ridge, Spanier, Sandra Whipple. Kay Boyle, Artist and Activist. Car- with whom she edited the little magazine Broom. In bondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986. 1923 she left for Europe, where she remained for 18 years. During this time Boyle signed Ernest Jolas’s “Rev- Patricia G. King olution of the Word,” a manifesto proclaiming the artist’s right to “disintegrate” and thus remake language, BRATHWAITE, EDWARD KAMAU and published her first poetry collection, A Glad Day (1930– ) “One of the most important poets of the (1938). Later, as an English professor at San Francisco Western Hemisphere,” as Amiri BARAKA noted in a 62 THE BRIDGE blurb to his 1994 volume, Middle Passages, Edward painting” (Brathwaite 207), in the manner of medieval Kamau Brathwaite belongs to a select group of key and Islamic illuminated manuscripts, “when the word influential epic-making Caribbean poets and scholars could still hear itself speak” (167). who have significantly influenced American letters; His elegy for Jamaican dub poet Mikey Smith, who others include Derek WALCOTT and Edouard Glissant. was stoned to death on Stony Hill in Kingston, shows Braithwaite’s work addresses the postcolonial condi- Brathwaite at his most inventive, biting, dense, epic, tions of culture and language in the Caribbean; it also and loving: “& every mighty word he trod. the ground comments upon the worldwide African diaspora and fall dark & hole / be. hine him like it as a bloom x. what Brathwaite calls the “creolization” of West plodding sound” (“Stone” [1994]). African, European, and American Indian cultures. BIBLIOGRAPHY Brathwaite’s work, in its epic use of collage and myth, Baraka, Amiri. Commentary on Middle Passages. Brathwaite, can be compared with that of T. S. ELIOT and Ezra Kamua. Middle Passages. New York: New Directions, POUND, but his relation to American poetry is more as 1994. Back cover. an influence than an heir. Among many others, he has Brathwaite, Edward Kamau. ConVERSations with Nathaniel influenced the likes of Baraka, Rachel Blau DUPLESSIS, Mackey. Staten Island, N.Y.: We Press, 1999. and Nathaniel MACKEY, as well as the new generation of digital and video poets. Gabriel Gudding Lawson Edward Brathwaite was born in Bridgetown, Barbados. He earned a bachelor’s degree THE BRIDGE HART CRANE (1930) Hart from Pembroke College, Cambridge, in 1953. After CRANE’s epic masterpiece was begun in early 1923 and receiving a diploma of education from Pembroke Col- published seven years later. The poem offers an organic lege in 1954, he entered the British colonial service panorama of the history of the United States, beginning and traveled to the Gold Coast (now Ghana), where with Spanish conquest, exploring American Indian, he worked as an education officer. In 1962 he moved colonial, and Quaker heritages, and ending with the back to the Caribbean and began teaching at the Uni- early 20th-century reality of progress and democracy. versity of the West Indies. In the mid-1960s he The Brooklyn Bridge, the primary emblem of the poem, returned to England to complete a doctorate in phi- represents American identity as both myth and losophy at the University of Sussex (1968). In 1976 prophecy, idea and place, past and present. The epic he began to use the split first name “Edward Kamau” aims at a mystical synthesis of America, in which fact as a means of mirroring the Afro-Anglo strains of his and history become transfigured into abstract and Caribbean culture. He has also taught at New York visionary form. Crane wrote The Bridge in the spirit of University. He has written nearly 20 books of poetry Walt Whitman, whom he considered his poetic precur- and two collections of plays, produced a dozen schol- sor. He also envisioned the poem as a response to T. S. arly books, and has won many awards, including the ELIOT’s THE WASTE LAND (1922), whose modernist tech- Cholmondely Award (1970), the Casa de Las Ameri- nique he admired and to a large extent imitated, yet cas Prize for poetry and for literary criticism (1986), whose thematic skepticism and pessimism he uni- and the Neustadt International Award for literature formly rejected (see MODERNISM). By contrast, The Bridge (1994). is an affirmative and anticipatory work, expressing Inventive at every level, Brathwaite’s work is rife hope in a future regeneration of America. with neologism, pun, collage, dialect (which he terms The poem consists of eight parts, two of them addi- “nation language”), multilingualism, myth, history, tionally divided into several subsections. It integrates theory, and the manipulation of concrete aspects of various personages and locations, some of them real, text, such as font, size, and layout. He has, in fact, his some mythical, and some altogether invented. Though own distinct font, which he calls his “Sycorax ‘video each part of the epic can be read as a separate piece, style,’” with which he strives toward “a kind of cinema- each contributes to the text as a whole, which follows THE BRIDGE 63 a meticulously arranged thematic trajectory. In terms itage in “Quaker Hill,” then an infernal vision of “The of poetic language, The Bridge is vintage Hart Crane, Tunnel,” portraying a subway ride from Columbus Cir- offering an exquisite mixture of Elizabethan rhetoric cle in Manhattan to Brooklyn. The subway, because it and French Symbolist imagery, further enhanced by an runs below ground (the bridge runs above it), symbol- intense oratorical mode reminiscent of the prophetic izes a negative alternative to the affirmative side of books of William Blake. But there is also a strong for- American experience heretofore celebrated; it is a route mal influence of The Waste Land, especially in the frag- of failure, loss, and despair. The epic ends with mentary nature of certain passages and sheer “Atlantis,” in which the poet bestows no less than 12 multiplicity of voices and perspectives: Early explorers, epithets on the bridge, starting with the “Tall Vision-of- native inhabitants of the land, railway desperados, the-Voyage” and ending with “One Song, one Bridge of vagabond sailors, tenacious settlers, and others speak. Fire.” This final enraptured vision of cables, wires, The epic begins with “To Brooklyn Bridge,” a high- granite, and steel poised high in the air between two toned invocation to the bridge, identified as a “speech- banks of the East River is the poet’s union with the less caravan,” “harp,” and “terrific threshold of the Absolute. Atlantis remains a matter of potential, a prophet’s pledge,” among other things, which ascends utopian answer to the inferno of the subway tunnel; it above an irreverent and occasionally ruthless world of is an emblem of hope for a better America to be real- modern reality. The fervor of this proem is balanced ized some time in the future. momentarily by sea-swell tones of “Ave Maria,” in Throughout his short life, Crane faced the difficulty which Christopher Columbus reflects on his acciden- of working at a time in which conventional moral, tal discovery of America. Next come five sections of social, and religious structures had to a large extent “Powhatan’s Daughter,” which take up the theme of become groundless and needed to be invented anew. exploration of American soil. Here the legendary The Bridge is intended to provide a sense of direction to Indian princess Pocahontas serves as the symbol of the this temporary state of confusion and uncertainty. This physical body of the continent. “The Harbor Dawn” is is particularly conspicuous in the way Crane deals with an erotic poem that subtly transports the reader from contemporary advances in technology and science. A the 17th century to the 1920s; “Van Winkle” is a hom- new landscape filled with skyscrapers, radio antennae, age to memory attained through a poignant childhood trolleys, and steam whistles fascinated him as much as recollection. “The River,” a jazzy rendition of the cul- it frightened poets less given to the technological sub- tural confusion of the present day of the poem, takes lime. Crane believed that poetry and science had an the reader on a train ride westward toward the Missis- antithetical, but not inimical relationship; thus he aims sippi River. Finally, there comes a visionary portrayal of to produce an independent artistic vision and, at the American Indian heritage in “The Dance” and a mov- same time, to give an expression to the greatest ing description of settler experience in “Indiana,” both achievements of modern civilization. of which illustrate the conflict between American Indi- While he was laboring on the poem in his apartment ans and white settlers in the West and rather idealisti- with a direct view of the bridge, Crane was constantly cally try to make a point about spiritual co-ownership haunted by fears of poetic failure. Even after he began of the land. working on the poem seriously, he became skeptical The epic proceeds with “Cutty Sark,” which com- about his ability to carry out his plans and about the bines reminiscences of a weathered sailor and popular poem’s effect on American society. When the poem was songs from a nickel-slot pianola, and “Cape Hatteras,” finally published in 1930, the reviews were mixed. Crane’s tribute to his artistic and spiritual forebear, Certain readers immediately perceived its visionary Walt Whitman. This is followed by “Three Songs,” force and originality; others did not. Crane’s friend describing, respectively, nostalgia after impossible Yvor WINTERS accused him of having fallen victim to ideals, the power of sexual lust, and the innocence of inexact poetic verbiage and ultimately condemned the love. Next comes an exploration of New England her- whole epic as a literary wreckage. In general, however, 64 BRODSKY, JOSEPH literary history has been kind to Crane’s originality. tion to any role of social significance” but stressed the Today The Bridge is considered one of the most impor- need for societies to embrace literature, not simply lit- tant long poems of the 20th century. eracy, believing that “had we been choosing our lead- BIBLIOGRAPHY ers on the basis of their reading experience and not Brunner, Edward. Splendid Failure: Hart Crane and the Making their political programs, there would be much less of The Bridge. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1985. grief on earth” (Brodsky “Nobel Lecture”). Gilles, Paul. Hart Crane: The Contexts of the Bridge. London: Brodsky’s poems are full of people and places, more Cambridge University Press, 1986. than things; many pieces have dedicatory notations. Sherman, Paul. Hart’s Bridge. Urbana: University of Illinois He memorializes and reflects, and this is his major Press, 1972. concern in “Transatlantic” (1992), in which he gathers Piotr Gwiazda time, memory, and philosophy in a meditation on his 20 post-exile years. He proposes that time is incom- BRODSKY, JOSEPH (1940–1996) Born in prehensible unless the transformation of people into Leningrad/St. Petersburg, Brodsky was a child of the (and out of) memory can be explained. His prolonged Soviet system until he encountered Fyodor Dos- isolation from Russia reveals the gradual disappearance toyevsky’s writing and internalized the Kierkegaardian of familiar figures from his dreams, explaining why existentialist philosophy he found there and, subse- “eternal rest / cancels analysis”: Sufficient passage of quently, inserted into his own work. A poet, essayist, time resolves the persistent existence of the dead who translator, and playwright, Brodsky saw the use of lan- populated memory. A gifted lyric poet, translator, and guage for art as the only way to address the future; he essayist, Brodsky also cofounded the American Poetry found poetry “an extraordinary accelerator of con- and Literacy Project in the hope that poetry would science,” as he explained in his Nobel lecture. Of the become a more dominant art form in everyday life. For writers he read as a young man, T. S. ELIOT and Robert Brodsky, poetry is not only beautiful but also capable FROST, as well as W. H. AUDEN and John Donne, were of changing the world. the Western poets most significant to his development. BIBLIOGRAPHY He believed that “aesthetics are the mother of ethics, Brodsky, Joseph. “Nobel Lecture” (translated by Barry that beauty can save an individual from metaphysical Rubin), Nobel e-Museum. Available online. URL: nothingness” (MacFadyen Muse 162). www.nobel.se/literature/laureates/1987/brodsky- Convicted of “social parasitism” in 1964, Brodsky lecture.html. Downloaded November 2003. was sentenced to internal exile and spent 18 months in Loseff, Lev, and Valentina Polukhina, eds. Brodsky’s Poetics a labor camp; merely being a poet was not considered and Aesthetics. London: Macmillan, 1990. productive under the Soviet system. Marginally pub- MacFadyen, David. Joseph Brodsky and the Baroque. Mon- lished in his own country, Brodsky did not find a wide- treal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1999. spread public audience for his work, especially in the ———. Joseph Brodsky and the Soviet Muse. Montreal: United States, until after his 1972 expulsion from the McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000. Polukhina, Valentina. Joseph Brodsky: A Poet for Our Time. Soviet Union. Brodsky settled in the United States and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989. served as writer-in-residence and visiting professor at various colleges and universities; he was elected to the A. Mary Murphy American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (1979), received a MacArthur Foundation Award BROMIGE, DAVID (1933– ) David Bromige (1981), won a National Book Critic’s Award (1986), is a poet with affinities to the New American writing of and was poet laureate of the United States (1991–92). the post–World War II period (a group that includes Brodsky’s most prestigious acknowledgment came poets such as Larry EIGNER, Ron LOEWINSOHN, and John when he received the Nobel Prize for literature (1987). ASHBERY) as well as to the innovations of the LANGUAGE He was “someone who ...preferred his private condi- SCHOOL, and yet his poetry, with its conjoining of lyric BRONK, WILLIAM 65 and what he has termed “obsessively reflexive narrative in the lyric act. “The Point” (1974) ends by catching us and meditation,” cannot be reductively assigned to any out in just such an act: “Someone is pointing at the school or movement. “One does not inherit an audi- flames— / attention has been caught, / desire ignites— ence,” he writes in My Poetry (1980); “one builds one, we see ourselves / as someone points them out.” a reader at a time.” Like the jazz saxophonist Coleman BIBLIOGRAPHY Hawkins, whose sound was unmistakably his even as Alpert, Barry et al., eds. “David Bromige: An Interview.” Vort he, unlike so many other musicians of his generation, 3 (1973): 2–23. joined with the BeBoppers and the avant-garde that Beckett, Tom, ed. Difficulties 3.1 (1987). [David Bromige came after him, so Bromige’s writing aligns itself with Issue.] significant movements of the time, while always point- ing a way beyond those movements. Aldon L. Nielsen Born in London on October 22, 1933, Bromige moved to Canada at age 15. He returned to England BRONK, WILLIAM (1918–1999) William briefly, went back to Canada, and completed his Bronk is best known for his austere view of the world advanced education in the United States, where he has as well as for his writing style. His language—subtle, remained since. Bromige was a student at the Univer- balanced in tone and diction, essential—is possibly the sity of British Columbia when the works of Robert most distilled in all of 20th-century American poetry. CREELEY and others began to take hold among his circle In addition Bronk is always explicit visually and reso- of acquaintance, and he was at Berkeley when Charles nant musically. His work keeps alive a New England OLSON and others read at the poetry conference of poetic tradition, evoking nature and the seasons, win- 1965. During his years in the San Francisco Bay area, ter most of all, and delving into the nature of reality or Bromige worked closely with Robert DUNCAN and was truth. These concerns were firmly established early in an early associate of such poets as Ron SILLIMAN, Bob the 19th century by Henry David Thoreau (an espe- PERELMAN, Rae ARMANTROUT, and Lyn HEJINIAN. His first cially strong influence on Bronk), Ralph Waldo Emer- book, The Gathering, was published in 1965, and since son, and Emily Dickinson, and in the 20th century by then he has published 10 more major collections. His the New England poets Robert FROST and Wallace selected poems, Desire, won the Western States Book STEVENS, then later by, along with Bronk, Robert CREE- Award for poetry upon publication in 1988. LEY and George OPPEN. In Desire, Bromige altered each of his earlier poems. Bronk was born in Fort Edward, near Hudson Falls, “Affair of the Lemming” (1965), for example, lost a New York, where he lived his entire life except for his phrase and saw a change in spelling. This seems char- student years at Dartmouth College and Harvard Uni- acteristic of the often-remarked upon reflexivity of versity, a period of military service during World War Bromige’s verse. It is not so much the constant revision II, and a brief stint as an instructor at Union College. and second thoughts of a W. H. AUDEN or Marianne Even after he gained a wide readership, Bronk shrank MOORE, but a constant thinking through of our experi- from public attention and concentrated on his imme- ence in language in the world, of the multiple ways in diate surroundings. His writing expresses his refusal to which language structures our understanding of the compromise his lifestyle and point of view, as in his world, even as we use language to change the world. In poem “The Abnegation” (1971): “I will not / be less one interview, Bromige noted that “once a mode than I am to be more human.” He believes that what he becomes a habit . . . attention slackens” (Beckett 30). knows of the world is at best only a semblance of the Hence in the same way that he viewed his early book truth. Reality exists, and he is able to intuit its exis- The Ends of the Earth (1968) as a critique of the LYRIC tence, but it is finally beyond his grasp. Despite Bronk’s POETRY of the 1960s, the reworked poems of Desire asceticism, he was constantly sought out by readers enact a lyric critique of his own work. He remains and many poets who would journey to Hudson Falls to “interested” in song, in how we find ourselves caught visit; for young poets, this trip was something of a rite 66 BRONK, WILLIAM of passage. Bronk won some major poetry awards, knowledge is only a logical realization, yet the human including the American Book Award in 1982 and the condition is not predicated on reason alone. “Despite Lannan Prize for his life’s work 10 years later. When at the self-limiting fact that consciousness is aware of its Dartmouth, he met Frost, and his fellow student and inability to experience this totality, it continually strug- friend was Samuel French Morse, who became a well- gles for the achievement of its goal. Cut off from any known authority on Stevens. Bronk’s first publishing ground of belief, secure only in its desire, consciousness successes were due to the efforts of Cid CORMAN, who therefore creates a world, which despite its insufficiency printed Bronk’s work in Origin, the POETRY JOURNAL he in metaphysical terms nevertheless allows for the ren- edited, and who published Bronk’s first book Light and dering of form—the poem” (481). Dark in 1956. Bronk also enjoyed the support of Cree- There are “reassurances” in our daily lives, Bronk ley in his magazine, the Black Mountain Review in the states in his poem “The Inference” (1972): “the far 1950s, and Bronk’s second book, The World, the World- trips / the mind can make!” Our journeys occur within less, was published by New Directions in 1964 with the this world of desire, a world tantalizingly unknowable: help of Oppen and his sister June Oppen Degnan, who “There is a world we know from inference. / It isn’t was an editor at that POETRY PRESS. here and yet we go to it.” Imbued by desire, then, This network of fellow poets and editors should not human existence is never absolutely grounded in cer- suggest, however, that Bronk was in any sense a deriv- tainty, and therefore it exists without a real identity, as ative poet. On the contrary, his work is original, his Bronk explains in the preface to his book of collected poetic voice singular and unforgettable. His language, essays, Vectors and Smoothable Curves (1983). We indeed, is perhaps the clearest and most even in tone attempt to find ourselves as a way of knowing who we in all of 20th-century American poetry, devoid of are; the problem here is that no matter how “direct and unnecessary wording, yet filled with subtle agreements immediate our awareness may be it is also devoid of of sound set out in a basic iambic line. Bronk’s poetic external reference and its strength and centrality is statements purport to describe the facts of life, yet, par- uncertain” (n.p.). We are like vectors, merely “propos- adoxically, Bronk constantly writes about the elusive- als of location and force whose only referential field is ness of any fact. He finds, instead, a compromise he internal—not ultimately oriented. We can be grateful can live with. In his poem “The Rain of Small Occur- for their stabilities even aware as we are of an arbi- rences” (1955), he writes, “The world is not quite trariness with them” (n.p.). To live with these proposi- formless; we lean down / and feel the massive earth tions means we must recognize the tenuousness of life. beneath our feet.” Yet the closest to factuality Bronk To be sure, “Reality is brought to mind by the inade- can come is the poem itself, ultimately a poem that in quacy of any statement of it, the tension of that inade- its sureness—in its reliability of diction, meter, and quacy, the direction and force of the statement” (n.p.). outlook—insists on a reality beyond his comprehen- Bronk’s poem “Some Musicians Play Chamber Music sion. The best strategy for living Bronk can come up for Us” (1955), in a phrase reminiscent of Stevens, with is to embrace the present; the poem “On the Fail- claims that “all we will know are fragments of a world,” ure of Meaning in the Absence of Objective Analogs” even through the arts. In “The Mind’s Landscape on an (1971) suggests: “There is only this whatever this may Early Winter Day” (1955), a poem whose evocation of mean / and this is what there is and nothing will be.” winter rivals winter poems by Frost, Bronk writes, with What is knowable, on the other hand, is desire, and an unparalleled bleakness that, in turn, evokes a deli- Bronk spends a great deal of time examining the force cate beauty of what he calls the “winter mind, the ne’er of desire (a title of one of his books, published in 1979) do well,” his alter ego, a “poor blind” that “is always lost in life. Desire is the “single great constant” in Bronk’s and gropes its way . . . even when the senses seize the work, Norman Finkelstein writes (481). Impossibly, world.” The best comfort against the sense of being lost Bronk desires “the world,” even though knowing the are our stories and metaphors we come to inhabit. Thus world, all in all, is beyond his capacity. In any case, Bronk’s poem “The Wanted Exactitude” (1991) ends in BROOKS, GWENDOLYN 67 a single-line stanza: “let our metaphor be accurate.” BROOKS, GWENDOLYN (1917–2000) Metaphor is as close to reality as he can come. In “The While creating a poetry noted for its NARRATIVE sweep Mind’s Limitations Are Its Freedom” (1972), Bronk and verbal polish, Gwendolyn Brooks epitomized the asks, “What else but the mind / senses the final useless- ways in which 20th-century African-American poets ness of the mind?” The irony in this statement is not, of more fully developed their culture’s poetic distinctive- course, lost on Bronk, and so it might be a surprise to ness. Brooks drew on the blues, ballad, and jazz tradi- realize that his contemplation of the human mind is tions found in the work of Langston HUGHES and other joyful, even though “the mind of man” is “frail, deep / poets of the HARLEM RENAISSANCE for her first collection, in disorder” and “always pushed by the falsenesses / of A Street in Bronzeville (1945). Her early poetry, espe- unreality.” It is this unreality that is predicated by cially in Annie Allen (1949), also makes extensive and desire, and so Bronk has no choice but to embrace that innovative use of the Anglo-American canon’s forms desire. “I want to be that Tantalus,” Bronk proclaims in and diction. Brooks always had been concerned with “The Abnegation,” “unfed forever.” He asks that he be contemporary African-American culture and, in partic- spared all compassion and that his reader notice how ular, with the racial struggles of ordinary urban blacks. humankind “takes handouts, makeshifts, sops for crea- But with the publication of “THE BEAN EATERS” (1960) ture comfort.” These he refuses. and the new work in Selected Poems (1963), Brooks’s There is no place to rest in Bronk’s view of existence. poetry became more critical of white American soci- Even physical love is undermined by restlessness. He ety—a move that became more pronounced through accuses his lover, naked beside him in bed in the poem the influence of Amiri BARAKA and the BLACK ARTS MOVE- “Wants and Questions” (1985), of taunting him simply MENT. She sought to develop an explicitly African- by “[wearing] those skins and bones.” Who is this per- American poetry in In the Mecca (1968) and in her later son and who is he? As Paul Auster has commented, volumes, such as To Disembark (1981), by writing “Bronk’s poetry stands as an eloquent and often beau- specifically to blacks and by drawing on a jazz-inflected tiful attack on all our assumptions, a provocation, a free verse. Brooks’s poetic development parallels the monument to the questioning mind” (30). This is a political development of 20th-century African-Ameri- poetry of sinuous statement, and yet it is musical, can culture as it moved from considering racial integra- refined, and deeply ruminative, advancing the most tion to black separatism and multiculturalism. troubling, often unanswerable human inquiries. Brooks was born in Topeka, Kansas, but lived in Chicago from infancy. She graduated from Wilson BIBLIOGRAPHY Junior College in 1936, married Henry Blakely in Auster, Paul. “The Poetry of William Bronk.” Saturday 1939, and raised two children. Brooks wrote poetry Review (8 July 1978): 30–31. from an early age and as a teenager received encour- Bronk, William. Vectors and Smoothable Curves: Collected Essays. 1983. New edition, Jersey City, N.J.: Talisman agement from James Weldon JOHNSON and Hughes. In House, 1997. 1943 she won the Midwestern Writers’ Conference Clippinger, David, ed. The Body of This Life: Essays on poetry award. In 1950 Annie Allen received the Pulitzer William Bronk. Jersey City, N.J.: Talisman House, 2001. Prize for poetry—the first time the award had been Ernest, John. “William Bronk’s Religious Desire.” Sagetrieb: A won by an African American. Her attendance at the Journal Devoted to Poets in the Imagist/Objectivist Tradition 1967 Fisk University Black Writers’ Conference 7.3 (1988): 145–152. exposed her to the Black Arts movement. In 1968 Finkelstein, Norman. “William Bronk: The World as Desire.” Brooks was named poet laureate of Illinois, and in Contemporary Literature 23.4 (1982): 480–492. 1985–86 she was the consultant in poetry (now poet Kimmelman, Burt. The “Winter Mind”: William Bronk and laureate) for the Library of Congress. She received a American Letters. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson Uni- National Medal of Arts in 1995. versity Press, 1998. Critics often divide Brooks’s work into distinct Burt Kimmelman stages. Brooks herself divided her work into pre–1967 68 BROOKS, GWENDOLYN and post–1967 categories. Norris B. Clark describes such determination to mold or care something DEFI- Brooks’s work as moving from a concern with craft to NITE” (Brooks Part One 85). Brooks said the experi- a concern with culture, a move that also “can be char- ence was an epiphany and that she was then “qualified acterized in political language as traditional, prerevo- to enter at least the kindergarten of new consciousness lutionary, and revolutionary; or in the language of now” (Part One 86). sociologists as accommodationists, integrationists, and Brooks’s later poetry more explicitly addresses poli- black nationalists, or in racial language as white, col- tics. In the Mecca, for instance, has poems in honor of ored, and black” (qtd. in Mootry 85). Brooks’s early civil rights martyrs Medgar Evers and Malcolm X (“He work draws from the Anglo-American poetic tradition. opened us— / who was a key” [“Malcolm X”]). The vol- For her first book, Brooks wrote a sonnet sequence, ume also describes “Black / boy-men on roofs fist our “Gay Chaps at the Bar,” about black soldiers during ‘Black Power!” (“The Wall”) and develops a sequence on World War II, and Annie Allen tells the story of its title a black gang—”Sores in the city / that do not want to character by drawing on a variety of traditional Euro- heal” (“The Blackstone Rangers”). In Riot (1969), pean conventions. “The Anniad,” for instance, alludes Brooks develops a sequence about the riots that erupted to Virgil’s epic The Aeneid but also to Pope’s mock epic in Chicago after the assassination of Martin Luther The Dunciad, as it makes references to “Plato, Aeschy- King. Beginning with an epigraph from King, “A riot is lus, / Seneca and Mimnermus, / Pliny, Dionysius.” the language of the unheard,” the poem describes the Although Annie Allen won the Pulitzer Prize, some later anger behind the uprising: “Fire. / That is their way of critics saw it as an example of how Brooks did not at lighting candles in the darkness.” In “To Those of My first write for African Americans. “Annie Allen, impor- Sisters Who Kept Their Naturals,” from Primer for tant? Yes. Read by blacks? No. Annie Allen more so than Blacks (1980), Brooks celebrates black women who A Street in Bronzeville seems to have been written for “have not wanted to be white” and have not adopted whites,” complained Don Lee (17). The dispute over white hairstyles. Brooks’s concerns also focused on Brooks’s oeuvre is part of a longstanding controversy Africa in such poems as “The Near-Johannesburg Boy” among black artists and critics over how African- (1986), in which she finds solidarity in the similar American writers should preserve the integrity of their struggles of American and South African blacks: “we particular cultural experience in a society that either shall forge with the Fist-and-the-Fury: / we shall flail in exploits or ignores black life. the Hot Time.” In a 1950 essay, “Poets Who Are Negroes,” Brooks Yet it is also possible to read Brooks’s poetry as herself argues that for an artist to succeed with the demonstrating continuity rather than development masses she must fully develop her abilities: “You have through distinct political stages. From her earliest got to cook that dough, alter it, until it is unrecogniz- work, Brooks documented the lives and concerns of able. Then the mob will not know it is accepting some- urban blacks—especially their struggles against thing that will be good for it. . . . [N]o real artist is racism. The South Side of Chicago provided the setting going to be content with offering raw materials. The for much of Brooks’s poetry. In her first volume were Negro poet’s most urgent duty, at present, is to polish transplants from the South, preachers, people living in his technique, his way of presenting his truths and his apartments with only kitchenettes, women who have beauties, that these may be more insinuating, and, had abortions, an older couple, single mothers, chil- therefore, more overwhelming” (Phylon 312). But after dren, women having affairs, and men on street corners attending the 1967 Fisk conference, Brooks explicitly who call women “chicks and broads, / Men hep, can sought to develop an African-American poetic. The cats, or corny to the jive” (“the soft men” [1945]). In effect of listening to Baraka and others call for a poetry “The Ballad of Chocolate Mabbie” and in “The Ballad of about, by, and for African Americans was profound: “I Pearl May Lee” (both 1945), Brooks focuses on the vio- had never been, before, in the general presence of such lence caused by black prejudices against darker- insouciance, such live firmness, such confident vigor, skinned blacks, and in “Gay Chaps at the Bar” she BROUMAS, OLGA 69 complains about how the sacrifices of black soldiers BROUMAS, OLGA (1949– ) Olga Broumas’s during World War II will do nothing to stop their sub- poetry explores feminist and lesbian issues. It can be jugation once the war ends: “Listen, listen. The step / characterized as an investigation of the varied experi- Of iron feet again.” In “The Womanhood,” a sonnet ences shared by women, with a particular interest in sequence in Annie Allen, Brooks urges blacks to “First the way language and discourse are linked to the fight. Then fiddle” and “civilize a space / Wherein to human body. She writes in a style that is erotic, sen- play your violin with grace.” In “The Ballad of Rudolph sual, and politically charged. Her language combines Reed” from The Bean Eaters (1960), Brooks describes natural imagery, classic Greek mythology, traditional how white suburban men attack and kill the first black fairy tales, images of the body, and contemporary fem- man to move into the neighborhood. In the same vol- inist scenarios. She writes explicitly about lesbian sex- ume, Brooks devotes several poems to Emmett Till, a uality and love relationships, as well as the oppression 15-year-old black boy killed by white southerners in of women throughout history. She has also been part of Mississippi. Brooks herself underscored the continuity several significant and successful collaborative proj- of her work in 1986 when she republished the earlier ects, including with poets Jane Miller and T. Begley, anthology The World of Gwendolyn Brooks (1971) as and painter Sandra McKee. Her major influences Blacks (1986) and added her later poetry. include Adrienne RICH, W. S. MERWIN, Diane WAKOSKI, Also consistent throughout Brooks’s work is her Audre LORDE, and Rainier Marie Rilke. voice. Whether drawing on blues and ballad rhythms, Broumas was born in Syros, Greece, but has lived in using rhyme and urban slang, writing a sonnet, or the United States since 1967, when she came as a stu- developing a politically explicit free verse, Brooks’s dent through a Fulbright exchange program to study style is marked by a jazzlike use of alliteration and architecture and modern dance at the University of irregular rhyme, a penchant for the unusual word, the Pennsylvania. She received an M.F.A. in creative writing off-rhythm, and a wide-ranging ironic tone capable of with a minor in dance and printmaking from the Uni- describing, praising, and denouncing. Many of these versity of Oregon (1973). Her first collection of poetry traits are especially noticeable in what is perhaps her in English, Beginning with O, was the 1977 winner of the most famous poem, “WE REAL COOL,” in which Brooks Yale Series of Younger Poets. She has had a number of tells the story of doomed black youths. Described by fellowships and is the author of seven books of poetry, critics as baroque, elliptical, mandarin, and African, which are collected in RAVE: 1975–1999 (1999). She has Brooks’s voice is one of the most distinctive in Ameri- also translated four books of poetry by the Greek poet, can poetry. Odysseas Elytis, collected in Eros, Eros, Eros (1998). In selecting Beginning with O for the Yale prize, Stan- BIBLIOGRAPHY ley KUNITZ describes the book as one of “unabashed Bolden, B. J. Urban Rage in Bronzeville. Chicago: Third eroticism” and “integral imagination” (ix). Broumas’s World Press, 1999. Brooks, Gwendolyn. “Poets Who Are Negroes.” Phylon 2 work is erotic, musical, and imagistic with “an intuitive (December 1950): 312. sense of dramatic conflicts and resolutions” (Kunitz ———. Report from Part One. Detroit: Broadside Press, 1972. ix). She writes with lush language and poetic urgency Kent, George E. A Life of Gwendolyn Brooks. Lexington: Uni- and, often, with a tone of anger and sadness, as in this versity Press of Kentucky, 1990. passage from “Mosaic” (1983): “Anger fill me with Lee, Don. Preface to Report from Part One. Detroit: Broadside clouds I’ll cry.” In “If I Yes” (1983), she writes elegiacally: Press, 1972, 13–30. “Let me be carried / Ribbonlike from your tongue / as Mootry, Maria K., and Gary Smith. A Life Distilled. Urbana: if by language.” These passages demonstrate Broumas’s University of Illinois Press, 1987. use of figurative language, as well as her poetic range Wright, Stephen Caldwell. On Gwendolyn Brooks. Ann Arbor: and complexity. University of Michigan Press, 1996. Her poems exhibit a sacred delicacy, whereby they George W. Layng are both evocative and elegant. Broumas relishes the 70 BROWN, STERLING A. thickness of language, as equally as she luxuriates in work-song rhythms, innovations in the use of black the sensuality of the body. Often her poetry explores dialect, and an abiding interest in social realism. In his linguistic experiments that challenge dominant and first published poem, “When de Saints Go Ma’ching patriarchal assumptions. Home” (1927), the speaker recollects a sidewalk enter- tainer who finishes his repertoire with his own varia- BIBLIOGRAPHY tion of the well-known spiritual, enumerating his Hammond, Karla. “An Interview with Olga Broumas.” Northwest Review 18.3 (1980): 33–44. friends and their troubles as he sees them in “[a] gor- Horton, Diane. “‘Scarlet Liturgies’: The Poetry of Olga geous procession to ‘de Beulah Land.’” Throughout the Broumas.” North Dakota Quarterly 55.4 (fall 1987): poem, Brown riffs on the spiritual, expanding its 322–347. meaning to include particular individuals who have Kunitz, Stanley. Foreward to Beginning with O by Olga suffered in real-life ways. In the title poem of Southern Broumas. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, Road, Brown adapts the rhythm of the work song to his 1977. line—”Swing dat hammer—hunh— / Steady, bo”’—to Mark Tursi initiate a poem that details the speaker’s daily life on the chain gang even as it gives, through rhythm and BROWN, STERLING A. (1901–1989) A lineation, the sound and sense of the speaker’s toil. contemporary of Langston HUGHES and a protégé of In these and numerous other poems, Brown layers James Weldon JOHNSON, Sterling A. Brown is one of the his portrayals of folk life with memorable characters most important and influential African-American poets and penetrating rhythms, leaving a body of work that of the 20th century. Although Brown’s first collection of challenges accepted notions of what it meant to be an poetry, Southern Road (1932), was published around African American writing poetry in the midst of the the time of the HARLEM RENAISSANCE, he resisted being Harlem Renaissance. labeled a Harlem Renaissance poet, writing at one BIBLIOGRAPHY point that “[t]he New Negro is not ...a group of writ- Rowell, Charles H. “Sterling A. Brown and the Afro-Ameri- ers centered in Harlem during the second half of the can Folk Tradition.” In The Harlem Renaissance Re-exam- twenties. . . . [M]uch of the best [Negro] writing was ined, edited by Victor A. Kramer. New York: AMS Press, not about Harlem” (qtd. in Stuckey 15). For although 1987, pp. 315–337. Brown did write on occasion about urban life and Stepto, Robert B. “Sterling A. Brown: Outsider in the Harlem, in Southern Road and later writings, his pre- Harlem Renaissance?” In The Harlem Renaissance: Revalua- dominant themes have to do with the folk and folk tions, edited by Amritjit Singh, William S. Shriver, and ways of the black South. Stanley Brodwin. New York: Garland, 1989, pp. 73–90. Brown was born in Washington, D.C. His father, a Stuckey, Sterling. Introduction to The Collected Poems of Ster- distinguished minister and professor of religion at ling A. Brown, edited by Michael S. Harper. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1980, pp. 3–15. Howard University, had been a slave in Tennessee. Brown received a scholarship to Williams College, Amy Moorman Robbins from which he graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1922, and received his master’s degree from Harvard in 1923. A BUKOWSKI, CHARLES (1920–1994) professor, scholar, and literary critic as well as a poet, Charles Bukowski came to prominence in the late Brown wrote the first scholarly survey of black poetry, 1960s. He published antiauthoritarian and sarcastic Negro Poetry and Drama (1938), and was coeditor of poems in little literary, underground, and mimeo- The Negro Caravan (1941), an early anthology of graphed magazines and in small-press books. African-American literature. He was named poet laure- Bukowski’s poetry is cynically direct and brutally ate of the District of Columbia in 1984. frank. He wrote contrary to polite ideals, and his Brown’s major contributions to American poetry poetry fell outside the sanctioned limits of conserva- include his adaptations of the blues, spirituals, and tive, academic poetry. Shunning literary movements, BURKARD, MICHAEL 71 he became a hero and a model for disenfranchised bolster the bravado of his American antihero and American poets. The raw vigor of his poetry endeared underground man. Through Bukowski’s—and Chi- him to legions of fans. He remains one America’s most naski’s—adventures the ridiculous in American soci- widely read poets. ety is often exposed. The son of an American soldier and a German BIBLIOGRAPHY mother, Henry Charles Bukowski, Jr., was born in Cherkovski, Neeli. Hank: The Life of Charles Bukowski. New Andernach, Germany, and was brought to Los Angeles York: Random House, 1991. in 1922. In 1955 after prolonged alcohol abuse, he was Sounes, Howard. Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life. New hospitalized with a severe bleeding ulcer. After this York: Grove Press, 1998. near death experience, he began to write poetry. His first book was the slim Flower, Fist and Bestial Wail Michael Basinski (1960). In 1965 Bukowski met John Martin of Black Sparrow Press. Martin published all of Bukowski’s BURKARD, MICHAEL (1947– ) Michael major collections of poetry, including The Days Run Burkard is a poet whose life experiences—as a profes- Away Like Wild Horses over the Hills (1969). He also sor, psychiatric aide, and alcoholism counselor— published Bukowski’s short stories and his novels, inform his heartfelt, dreamlike poetry. Coming out of a such as Post Office (1971). After publishing more than lineage which could be said to include William Carlos 60 books in a dozen languages, Bukowski died of WILLIAMS and Robert CREELEY, Burkard’s straightforward leukemia in 1994. address and frequent use of CONFESSIONAL detail are Bukowski’s poems are obtuse, insightful, philosoph- complicated by dislocated syntax and lyrical repeti- ical musings composed as narrative vignettes. He was tion. A poet who is as interested in the musical and a master of phrase, cadence, and the use of common visual arts as he is in literature, Burkard has collabo- speech in poetry. Written in unmeasured lines and in rated with painters and composers and has written irregular stanzas, his poems read smoothly. Engaging artists from Leo Tolstoy to Paul Klee into his poems as the ordinary, his poems often offer cynical observa- familiars. As a teacher of poetry at workshops, univer- tions: “It Was Just a Little While Ago” (2001) begins sities, and colleges across the country, Burkard has with the lines, “almost dawn / blackbirds on the tele- been known for his liberating, inclusive approach to phone wire.” The next line is simply the word, “wait- thinking about writing, which emphasizes accessing ing.” The poet enters the banal scene and eats a the uncensored self and a reliance on first drafts and on forgotten sandwich, as his eyes fall upon his carelessly instinct. heaped shoes. Bukowski ends the short poem with this Born in Rome, New York, Burkard attended Hobart ironic insight, “yes, some lives were made to be / College and received an M.F.A. from the University of wasted.” Writing was Bukowski’s salvation. In his Iowa in 1973, where his peers included Barrett WAT- poem “Only One Cervantes” (1992), he writes, “writ- TEN, Denis Johnson, and Tess GALLAGHER, his second ing has been my fountain / of youth.” His poetry was wife. His first book was published in 1977. By 2001 he always in the midst of both life and death, as well as had published nine volumes of poetry and received pleasure and pain, and it was always part of both. In numerous honors, including a Pushcart Prize (2000). his poem “No More No Less” (1992), he writes, “each His work was included in the annual publication Best day is still a / hammer / a flower.” American Poetry in 1989 and 2001. Much of Bukowski’s poetry concerned the raucous Marked by an insistence on truth, Burkard’s poems exploits of the hardboiled Henry Chinaski, Bukowski’s also acknowledge that truth often comes in disguise. persona, and his greatest literary achievement. Chi- His work is heavily populated with ghosts past and naski is a hard-drinking writer, working-class gam- present—friends, relatives, lovers, historic figures, ver- bler, and womanizer. While Chinaski’s exploits seem sions of the self—and haunted by trains, rain, night, real, his adventures were embellished by Bukowski to the Moon, and the sea—the shadowy, mysterious side 72 “BURNING THE SMALL DEAD” of life. In a typically candid move, he confronts the tone, style, and subject matter and reveals an indebted- issue of his recurring themes in the poem “Why Do ness to two of Snyder’s largest influences of perceiving You Think the Sea Is So Central to Your Writing?” and honoring the natural world—American Indian and (2001): “what sideways / sea or life am I trying to Zen Buddhist philosophies. steer / clear of.” Set on Mt. Ritter in California, the poem focuses Burkard is similarly introspective when writing about upon the natural landscape in order to unveil the eco- his recovery from alcoholism: “I knew more deeply than logical interconnectedness of all things. While such before I was in trouble with drinking” (“How I Shaded” discovered connections have ecological implications, [1998]). While this and other poems traffic in melan- the poem seems more explicitly concerned with the choly, Burkard’s poetry nonetheless often reads as an spirituality implicit in honoring the natural world and affirmation of love and joy, both spiritual and physical, celebrating what Zen Buddhism refers to as “interde- manifested through honesty, as in the poem “Wanted” pendence.” In this vein, the poem documents how (2001): His desire is to create a poetry that “would talk everything that has sustained and helped a white-bark to you only, / to tell you where I have been.” pine tree over its life of 100 years “hiss[es] in a twisted BIBLIOGRAPHY bough” as the branches burn. After this realization, the Gallagher, Tess. “Inside the Kaleidoscope: The Poetry of gaze of the poem shifts to include Mt. Ritter as part of Michael Burkard.” American Poetry Review 11.3 (1982): the webbing that connects the branches to the world as 34–41. well as to the cosmos, which is represented by the two Gervasio, Michael. “My Secret Boat: The Poetry of Before.” stars Deneb and Altair and their seemingly separate, Denver Quarterly 28.3 (1994): 76–79. yet visually immediate “windy fire.” Greenberg, Arielle. “A Place for the Poems to Go: Michael In this sense, the poem is a celebration of the natu- Burkard and Diane Wald.” Rain Taxi 6.1 (2001): 36–38. ral world and the cosmos; like many of Snyder’s best Arielle Greenberg poems, it captures and honors the mysterious con- nectedness of the universe and argues for a more rev- “BURNING THE SMALL DEAD” GARY erent and conscientious attitude toward the natural SNYDER (1968) Gary SNYDER’s “Burning the Small world that nourishes and sustains human existence. Dead” is collected in his book The Back Country, pub- BIBLIOGRAPHY lished by New Directions in 1968. As in many of the Davidson, Michael. The San Francisco Renaissance: Poetics and poems collected in the book, “Burning the Small Dead” Community at Mid-Century. New York: Cambridge Univer- explores the character of a particular place, regardless sity Press, 1989. of whether that is Snyder’s home on Turtle Island in McCord, Howard. Some Notes to Gary Snyder’s Myths & California, the Pacific Northwest, or Japan. Deeply Texts. Berkeley, Calif.: Sand Dollar, 1971. influenced by Zen Buddhism and Japanese poetry and Murphy, Patrick D., ed. Critical Essays on Gary Snyder. art, Snyder applies the tenets of mindfulness as he Boston: G.K. Hall, 1991. observes small branches burning in a fire, and the David Clippinger result is a poem that charts the connectedness of the human and the natural worlds. “THE BUS TRIP” JOEL OPPENHEIMER “Burning the Small Dead” is included in the first sec- (1960) Unlike the occasionally baroque lines of tion of the book, titled “Far West,” and the poem sug- Charles OLSON, Joel OPPENHEIMER’s teacher at BLACK gests poetic affinities with other American MOUNTAIN College, or, say, the instant intimacy of many styles—namely, the visually laden poetics of the IMAGIST NEW YORK SCHOOL poets, Oppenheimer’s poems often SCHOOL, the sparse linguistic terseness of the OBJECTIVIST read with a kind of rhetorical flatness, atypical for his SCHOOL, and the poetic dynamics delineated in Charles generation. “The Bus Trip,” for example, leaves out the OLSON’s 1950 essay “Projective Verse” (see ARS POETICAS). first-person singular and other accoutrements of per- But the poem also invokes a Japanese sensibility in its sonality, such as cheerful exclamation marks, an extro- “THE BUS TRIP” 73 verted tone, and any details to contextualize place or a person. Foreshadowing the postmodern poetics yet time. to come, here, a “poetic” symbol like the Moon means While many contemporaneous poets who were nothing to the speaker. He is instead terrified by J —, thought to be of similar sensibility—such as Paul a signifier that leads to nothing, a mere letter. BLACKBURN and members of the OBJECTIVIST SCHOOL— The idea of a man being terrified by an initial makes eschewed symbolism, Oppenheimer starts his poem by “The Bus Trip” read almost like a precursor to poetry comparing the Moon to a lit clock, but a time piece of the LANGUAGE SCHOOL. The poem plays with gram- that does not mean anything to the poem’s speaker, mar, but Oppenheimer succeeds at making sense who seems to be looking at it from a bus window. The because he always grounds his experiments in a Moon is an icon of the romantic poets, and here romantic tenderness. When the speaker wonders what Oppenheimer devalues it as something irrelevant to a would happen if his wife “were not beautiful,” Oppen- 20th-century bus rider. “The Bus Trip,” then, is not just heimer writes, “what could he do and live.” a mundane perceptual account, the urban anecdote While the poem shifts in syntax, it also shifts in plot. typical of postwar poetry; it is an ideological critique of The poem starts with a description of the Moon as use- the received English poetic tradition. less. The reader then learns that this is only the obser- Yet the symbol of the Moon does not quite make vation of a man on the bus, who spends the rest of the sense. The Moon may look like a lit clock, but it is poem meditating on beauty, his wife and child, and unclear why that clock would not remind or instruct death. And, most mysteriously, the poem begins and the poem’s speaker. Also enigmatic is “J—,” an unseen ends with the same inexplicable line: “images of J— character whose images assail the speaker. By substi- assail him.” tuting dashes for J—’s full name, Oppenheimer uses a literary convention dating back to Richardson’s Pamela BIBLIOGRAPHY Thibodaux, David. Joel Oppenheimer: An Introduction. and its antagonist, Mr. B—. Pamela, the first English Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 1986. novel, used this convention to hide the real name of its villain, but in “The Bus Trip,” it is unclear if J — is even Ken Chen C C D

“CACTI” JOEL OPPENHEIMER (1985) Joel neglect, and he is then reduced to the leafless thick OPPENHEIMER’s “Cacti” appeared in New Spaces: Poems skin of the cacti. 1978–1983 (1985), with other poems about the The “puntia rufida” grows even when he is away and changes occurring in his life. Oppenheimer and his not caring for it; it puts out “bright green” shoots in defi- second wife, Helen, were divorced in 1976, and by the ance of his neglect. There are other cacti in the group, time this poem was written he was then writing his including “euphorbia,” which gives him hope to keep final newspaper columns for the Village Voice. He had living: Confronting its “terrifying beauty,” he feels that refined his poetics so that the discursive voice of his they are “equal / as we face each other.” He knows the early poems was reduced to focus on specific topics, kind of “terrible beauty” of which William Butler Yeats then to explorations of aspects of the topic. He had wrote. He is learning how to live in his circumstances, learned well the lessons of BLACK MOUNTAIN poetics and he is not complaining about his lot in life; even about open form and projecting the content of the though he is growing “older,” he is growing “stronger.” poems through its form. His poetic lines had become Toward the end of the poem, he enlarges the “conceit” shorter and organized with sophisticated rhythms. He to a statement about hurting people who demand too was looking around for a new lover, a new place to much of him and “eat / too ravenously.” He has already live, and a new imaginative place for his poetry. learned that New York City “is not nature” but is “Cacti” takes pace in Oppenheimer’s apartment in “grime,” and now, in the common experience of the West Village of Manhattan and is on one level a man/cacti, he will be friendly only to those who see the meditation about the cacti in the apartment. He looks beauty in his age as he sees beauty in the cacti. Dylan up information about them in a book and sees their Thomas created an elaborate metaphor of the “green great power for lending meaning to his life. Then he fuse” that drives flowers and people; Oppenheimer finds proposes a relationship with the cacti. He finds love a commonality with the cacti in his apartment, which he once a month; the cacti get water once a month. He, projects in the short lines and intricate rhythms. The like them, is “planted / in sandy dirt / insecurely,” but form of the poem enforces the sense of the poem—both then in the clear self-consciousness of his discursive plant and poet living forward in a hostile climate. mode and avoidance of artifice in language, he BIBLIOGRAPHY explains that “it is all / a conceit / of course.” He has Butterick, George F. Joel Oppenheimer: A Checklist of His Writ- survived, as the cacti have survived, but now he is ings. Storrs: University of Connecticut Library, 1975. learning that he has lost “all the flowering plants” Gilmore, Lyman. Don’t Touch the Poet: The Life and Times of (women, sexual pleasures) of his life because of his Joel Oppenheimer. Jersey City, N.J.: Talisman House, 1998.

74 CAGE, JOHN 75

Thibodaux, David. Joel Oppenheimer: An Introduction. a 1976 interview, that one is as often saying “nothing” Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1986. as saying something. Cage believes in using the ele- Robert Bertholf ment of chance in composing poetry. For him, chance-operations is a matter of “changing the respon- CAGE, JOHN (1912–1992) Although known sibility of the composer, in making choices to asking primarily as a composer of avant-garde music, John questions” (50). Cage’s most notable method of asking Cage’s writing has been significant in postwar Ameri- questions consisted in “reading-through” existing can poetry, particularly among his colleagues, such as texts to form poems he described as “mesostic,” a Jackson MAC LOW and Joan RETALLACK. Cage’s use of word meaning “middle-of-the-line.” This method chance-operations and other deterministic composi- involves selecting portions of texts based on key- tional procedures—that is, formal and lexical selection words, whose letters run down the page, capitalized made by predetermined systems the author creates, and vertically, as they appear in the source horizon- instead of the whims and tastes of the author fitted to tally, but with this rule: that between any two letters of preexisting verse norms—extends from a unique set of the keywords those same letters may not appear. The influences, including the American transcendentalist keyword of one such poem is “MARCEL.” The poem writer Henry David Thoreau, Japanese Buddhist is about the French artist and writer Marcel Duchamp. philosopher D. T. Suzuki, and German composer It begins with the first three letters of his first name Arnold Schoenberg. and continues in this vein: Cage was born in Los Angeles, California. Leaving after two years study at Pomona College, he spent questions i Might several years in Europe studying architecture and hAve music and writing poetry and painting in his spare leaRned time. By 1933 Cage was in New York studying music composition, and by the following year he was back These methods were equally inspired by Cage’s prac- in Los Angeles studying with Schoenberg. By 1942 tice of Buddhism, and later they incorporated a politi- Cage had relocated to New York, where he would cally anarchist content drawing on the work of Thoreau. continue to live and work, often with renowned cho- In 1978 Cage began to work as a printmaker while con- reographer Merce Cunningham, until his death. tinuing his writing and musical composition. His inter- Among Cage’s many honors and awards was his posi- est in Japanese Zen Buddhism is reflected in works of tion as Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at this later period, such as Ryoanji (1983–85), which takes Harvard University (1988–89) and his induction into its name from a Japanese Zen garden, and a 1982 book both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences of mesostic poetry Themes & Variations, which he called (1978) and the American Academy of Arts and Let- “a chance-determined renga-like mix,” referring to the ters (1989). ancient Japanese verse form of half-tankas, the renga. In Cage’s first collection of writings, Silence (1961), his later years, Cage became a proponent of the political gathers work from as early as 1937’s “The Future of ideas of architect and philosopher R. Buckminster Fuller Music: Credo” and compositions as widely cited as and the art of macrobiotic eating. His influence survives “Lecture on Nothing” that state a similar theme: “I particularly in the formal and political concerns of the have nothing to say and I am saying it and that is LANGUAGE SCHOOL. poetry as I need it.” Cage’s interest in nothing and BIBLIOGRAPHY silence stems from an early observation that human Cage, John. “Interview.” In Desert Plants: Conversations with beings can never truly escape sound of some kind and 23 American Musicians, edited by Walter Zimmermann. that both poetry and music should make use of the Vancouver, B.C.: A.R.C. Publications, 1976, pp. 50–61. entire range of perceptible material. A related convic- Kostelanetz, Richard, ed. Writings about John Cage. Ann tion regarding the process of writing is, as he put it in Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993. 76 CAMPO, RAFAEL

Perloff, Marjorie, and Charles Junkerman, eds. John Cage: of the Nation writes that “Campo’s voice carries the Composed in America. Chicago: University of Chicago traces of a host of healers, poets and prophets, a cho- Press, 1994. rus whose members include Wallace STEVENS and Patrick Durgin Mother Teresa, Richard Rodriguez and AIDS physician Abraham Verghese” (31). Campo separates himself CAMPO, RAFAEL (1964– ) Rafael Campo, from Williams and others by pursuing the larger mean- a lyric poet who is part of the neoformalist tradition ing of AIDS in the context of his proximity to and dis- (see NEW FORMALISM), uses form to make sense of the tance from his subject matter. Campo is complicit in body and its functions as he writes about the AIDS AIDS as a physician who cares for his patients and as pandemic in both poetry and prose. A physician at part of two at-risk groups: gay men and Latinos. Harvard Medical School and the Beth Israel Deaconess Simultaneously, however, he struggles to versify his Medical Center in Boston, Campo’s thematic con- distance as someone who understands AIDS and cern—a doctor who writes about his patients—is rem- empathizes with it but is ultimately removed by virtue iniscent of William Carlos WILLIAMS’s work in the early of his own HIV-negative status. and mid-20th century. Part of the growing multicul- BIBLIOGRAPHY tural canon of writers, Campo is concerned with his Beam, Jeffrey. Review of “What the Body Told.” Lambda Book multiple, sometimes conflicting identities as a physi- Report. (July 1996): 33. cian, HIV-negative gay man, and Latino. Campo, Rafael. “Does silencio=muerte?” Progressive 63.10 Born in Dover, New Jersey, to Cuban immigrant par- (1999): 20–23. ents, Campo graduated from Amherst College (1987), ———. The Poetry of Healing. New York: W.W. Norton, 1993. where he studied poetry with the poet and critic Eve Kirp, David L. “Doctor of Desire.” Nation (24 Feb. 1997): Sedgwick. He then attended Harvard Medical School, 30–32. with a year’s hiatus in his medical education (1990) to J. Elizabeth Clark pursue an M.F.A. in poetry with Derek WALCOTT at Boston University. Torn between poetry and medicine, CANADIAN POETIC INFLUENCES To he jokes that he was afraid to “come out” as a poet, speak of “Canadian influences” on 20th-century Amer- something that inevitably happened when his first ican poetry is really only to speak of developments over book, The Other Man Was Me: A Voyage to the New the latter half of the century. Prior to the 1950s, most World was selected as the winner of the 1993 National poetry written in anglophone Canada was derivative of Poetry Series Open Competition (Healing 114–115). Victorian and Edwardian British models; the innova- His early critical success was followed by literary tions being produced by modernists in the United recognitions, such as a Lambda Literary Award, finalist States and abroad were largely ignored in a country that for the National Book Critics Circle Award, finalist for remained for the most part British and colonial in its the PEN Center West Literary Award, finalist and a cultural outlook (see MODERNISM). In a 1974 issue of recipient of the National Hispanic Academy of Arts and Boundary 2 devoted to “Canadian Literature,” Robert Sciences Annual Achievement Award, and a Guggen- Kroetsch made the famous remark that “Canadian liter- heim Foundation Fellowship. ature evolved directly from Victorian into Postmodern” Campo participates in a larger literary and philo- (1), an evolution that also involves a switch from sophic tradition of healers. Jeffrey Beame writes, “The British/European to North American models and tradi- music of What the Body Told,” one of Campo’s books, tions. Due to proximity and a shared language, the published in 1996, “its healing generosity, alchemizes enormous cultural influence that the United States a balm for the weary soul, the torn body, this feckless holds over the world is felt all the more acutely in world” (33). In “Night Inexpressible,” Campo’s tight anglophone Canada. Couple this with the notorious tercets form the structure of his emotion as he American ignorance of the country of 30 million to its describes his relationship with a patient. David L. Kirp north, and it is apparent that “Canadian influences” on CANADIAN POETIC INFLUENCES 77

American poetry cannot be discussed in the same way were at the center of things. In 1961 a group of aspir- as, say, French or Russian influences: It would be more ing poets at the University of British Columbia, includ- accurate to speak of conversations. ing Davey, George Bowering, and Fred Wah, started The earliest cross-border conversations were nur- Tish: A Poetry Newsletter, Vancouver. These young poets tured through the context of the little magazine (see were students of the expatriate American professor POETRY JOURNALS). In the early 1950s, Cid CORMAN, the Warren Tallman, who had invited Robert DUNCAN to American editor of Origin, and Raymond Souster, the Vancouver to give a series of lectures in July 1961. Canadian editor of Contact, established a correspon- Duncan’s lectures were the impetus for the creation of dence that was to last for some time. According to Tish, and Tallman would later invite and host other Frank Davey, “Corman quickly became Souster’s most important American writers, such as Creeley, Olson, important and prolific correspondent: to date [1980] Jack SPICER, and Michael MCCLURE. Tish achieved some they have exchanged almost one thousand letters” notoriety in eastern Canada, partly because of its (Souster, 16). Contact was unusually internationalist in antagonistic stance to the eastern Canadian “establish- its editorial focus, an internationalism encouraged by ment” (the Toronto/Montreal axis), but also because of Corman, and it was one of the first Canadian literary a perceived American or, more specifically, Black magazines to recognize and advance the poetry of the Mountain influence. In 1976 Keith Richardson pub- Ezra POUND/William Carlos WILLIAMS line, including lished his study Poetry and the Colonized Mind: Tish, in work by Charles OLSON, Robert CREELEY, and Denise which he accuses Tallman, Olson, Creeley, and Duncan LEVERTOV. Contact was to publish 10 issues from 1952 of being cultural imperialists, and the young Vancou- to 1954, but, aside from Corman’s interest, the maga- verites their dupes in the importation of a pernicious zine did not receive the attention in the United States U.S. influence. But such influence was reciprocal: Tish for which Souster had hoped. and the Vancouver scene became important sites for Montreal poet Irving Layton, who was associated American writers: Larry EIGNER and Theodore ENSLIN with the Contact circle, was the first modern Canadian would publish in the pages of Tish, for instance, and poet to achieve some recognition in the United States. In Creeley taught for a short period in Vancouver. his essay “Canadian Poetry 1954,” Creeley anoints Lay- In 1963 a “Summer Poetry Course” was held at the ton “the first Great Canadian Poet” (232). In the early University of British Columbia, in which Olson, Cree- 1950s, Creeley and Layton began a correspondence ley, Duncan, Allen GINSBERG, and Philip WHALEN were between Montreal and Mallorca, Spain, where Creeley invited to Vancouver to give lectures, seminars, and was then residing. Their earliest letters are marked by a readings. The poetry course would eventually come to discussion of Layton’s poem “Vexata Quaestio,” which be known as the 1963 Vancouver Poetry Festival, and Creeley admired—especially, he wrote Layton, its it attracted a number of young poets from both Canada “Damn fine first verse, and all that hardness” (qtd. in and the United States, including Michael PALMER and Faas and Reed 6): The speaker fixes his “eyes upon a Clark COOLIDGE. Such intensity of activity was to tree/...Listened for ship’s sound and birdsong .” Cree- cement Vancouver’s place in a continental experimen- ley’s admiration of the verse’s “hardness” is in praise of tal poetics network; Andrew Klobucar and Michael Layton’s direct treatment of the thing (to echo Pound Barnholden have recently argued that after San Fran- [see ARS POETICAS]) and the originality of an imagery that cisco, Vancouver in the 1960s “was the primary port of refuses the ease of the simile. Creeley and Layton’s cor- call for experimental writers, especially those associ- respondence would continue for more than 25 years, ated with the New American Poetry [see POETRY and Layton published his book In the Midst of My Fever ANTHOLOGIES]” (21). in 1954 with Creeley’s Divers Press. Of contemporary writers, the poets associated with In the early 1960s, the cross-border dialogue shifted the so-called LANGUAGE SCHOOL have been most active west to Vancouver, and once again poets, such as Cree- in continuing and extending this North American ley and Olson, associated with BLACK MOUNTAIN poetry community. Toronto poet Steve McCaffery would 78 CANADIAN POETIC INFLUENCES become a central figure in this movement. In the sum- the following years the poets associated with KSW, such mer of 1977, a year before the first issue of as Jeff Derksen, Nancy Shaw, Deanna Ferguson, Kevin L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, he edited a section of the Cana- Davies, and Lisa Robertson, would achieve recognition dian journal Open Letter on “The Politics of the Refer- and admiration in the United States. Furthermore, Hejin- ent.” This section included essays by McCaffery, Bruce ian, Howe, and Andrews, to name a few, would continue ANDREWS, Charles BERNSTEIN, Ray DiPalma, and Ron SIL- to visit Vancouver as KSW’s writers-in-residence, offering LIMAN. In 1980 McCaffery would collaborate with the readings and seminars and cementing poetic relations same group of poets in the book Legend, during which between Vancouver and U.S. sites, such as San Francisco time he was a somewhat regular contributor to and New York. L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E. McCaffery’s best known work in While the poets associated with the American avant- the United States is probably Panopticon (1984). Panop- garde line from the New American poetry to the Lan- ticon features many of McCaffery’s signature devices, guage writers have shown the most interest in Canadian including a juxtaposition of images with text, as well as poetry, other dialogues have taken place outside these a “cinematic” gaze: “The focus moves to a woman writ- groupings. Adrienne RICH, for instance, came to know ing. She is middle aged. / Her pen plastic. The focus the work of the Trinidadian-Canadian writer Dionne moves to a woman reading.” These and other lines Brand in the early 1990s. Rich, who appears in dialogue recur throughout Panopticon in various permutations with Brand in a National Film Board of Canada docu- and recombinations, in a manner somewhat similar to mentary entitled Listening for Something ...Adrienne Silliman’s Tjanting (1981). McCaffery’s contemporaries Rich and Dionne Brand in Conversation (1996), recog- in the United States would also have been interested in nized in Brand’s poetry a negotiation of passage Panopticon’s self-reflexivity and the extent to which it between oppression and beauty and a demonstration draws attention to the book as a compositional unit. that, as Rich puts it, the love of the medium and the McCaffery was also a participant, along with bpNichol, love of freedom “are not in opposition” (249). While Paul Dutton, and Rafael Barreto-Rivera, in the Toronto- Brand had explored anticolonial struggles in earlier based performance poetry group the Four Horsemen, works, such as Chronicles of the Hostile Sun (1984), a whose improvisatory sound-poetry performances response to the U.S. invasion of Grenada, her 1990 earned them international recognition in the 1970s book, No Language is Neutral, was groundbreaking in and 1980s. Around this same time the sound poet bill the extent to which it combined a linguistically explo- bissett was also performing and reading for audiences rative—and aesthetically gorgeous—poetics with a con- outside Canada, including those in the United States tinued sense of political urgency. (see POETRY IN PERFORMANCE). The following generation of Canadian poets has had The Canadian involvement in the development of perhaps the strongest influence on American poetry in the Language school continued in 1982, when the final the past century, including work by Brand, McCaffery, volume of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E was published as a spe- and poets associated with KSW, but also the Québé- cial issue of Open Letter (winter 1982)—one of the first coise poet Nicole Brossard and Toronto writers, such as book-length collections of the work of writers associ- Christian Bök, Karen Mac Cormack, and Darren Wer- ated with the school. In August 1985 the “New Poetics shler-Henry, and expatriate Canadian poets working in Colloquium” was held in Vancouver, hosted by the the United States, such as Norma Cole and Alan newly formed Kootenay School of Writing (KSW), a Davies. However, it should also be pointed out that writer-run collective based in Vancouver and Nelson, this “North American” community is one based prima- British Columbia. This was the first large-scale gather- rily on the foundation of American modernist writers ing of poets associated with the Language school, and those poets associated with the New American including Andrews, Bernstein, Silliman, Barrett WATTEN, poetry and that most contemporary American readers Diane WARD, Lyn HEJINIAN, and Susan HOWE. This collo- remain unaware of some of Canada’s most important quium would revitalize the Vancouver scene, and over poets, such as Kroetsch and Phyllis Webb. Thus, THE CANTOS 79 despite the cross-border conversation that has devel- Bureau of Investigation (F.B.I.), the universities, and oped over the past 50 years, the two literatures con- cultural historians representing a wide spectrum of tinue to develop along differing, if parallel, lines. attitudes and approaches, from hostile to furtively apostolic. While agreement about the poem’s achieve- BIBLIOGRAPHY ment is still in the making, few would contest the sta- Andrews, Bruce, and Charles Bernstein, eds. Open Letter 5.1 tus of the work as a major poem of an innovative and (winter 1982). [L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, vol. 4, issue.] Brand, Dionne. No Language Is Neutral. Toronto: Coach revolutionary period of literature.(See MODERNISM.) House, 1990. Conceived originally in 1916 as a poem about history, Creeley, Robert. A Quick Graph: Collected Notes & Essays. San the first three cantos were published in a form Pound Francisco: Four Seasons Foundation, 1970. eventually deemed too literal in its historical approach. Davey, Frank. Louis Dudek & Raymond Souster. Vancouver: A second draft of the opening poems, published in Douglas & McIntyre, 1980. 1920, enriched the content by employing what Pound ———. ed. Tish 1–19. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1975. would later call his “ideogrammic method.” In essence Faas, Ekbert, and Sabrina Reed, eds. Irving Layton & Robert the ideogram, modeled on the multiple references of Creeley: The Complete Correspondence, 1953–1978. Mon- meaning embedded in a typical Chinese written charac- treal/Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1990. ter, consists of a pair of concrete particulars whose rela- Klobucar, Andrew, and Michael Barnholden. Writing Class: tion to one another generates in the reader’s mind an The Kootenay School of Writing Anthology. Vancouver: New Star, 1999. expanding series of associations. Pound cited the Chi- Kroetsch, Robert. “A Canadian Issue.” Boundary 2 3.1 (fall nese character for “sincerity,” which consists of the fig- 1974): 1–2. ures of “man” and “word,” or man standing by his word. Listening for Something...Adrienne Rich and Dionne Brand in That junction of two distinct objects creates a flow of Conversation. Directed by Dionne Brand. 56 min. National association and meaning without the means of abstrac- Film Board of Canada, 1996. Videocassette. tion or generalization. Pound’s aim in modernizing McCaffery, Steve. Panopticon. Toronto: blewointmentpress, poetry was to avoid generalities and to draw language 1984. ever closer to the world it seeks to describe. ———., ed. “The Politics of the Referent.” Open Letter 3.7 In rewriting the first three cantos, Pound began with (summer 1977): 60–107. a guiding ideogram of a man setting out to discover his Rich, Adrienne. What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry relation to the past, using Homer’s Odysseus and his and Politics. New York: Norton, 1993. Richardson, Keith. Poetry and the Colonized Mind: Tish. long voyage home after the Trojan War to Ithaca as the Oakville, Ontario: Mosaic, 1976. controlling metaphor of his exploration of history. Canto I begins with the “ideogram” of men and ships, Jason Wiens explorers and their vessels, paraphrased from Book XI of Homer’s Odyssey in a Latin translation Pound was THE CANTOS EZRA POUND (1930–1970) using at the time while researching the poem in the Ezra POUND’s long, sequential poem, The Cantos, not British Museum. Hence the controlling ideogram of only invented the form and much of the style of the travel to the land of the dead, the Kimmerian Islands 20th-century long poem (see LONG AND SERIAL POETRY), of Homer’s epic, includes Pound’s own act of traveling but seized upon themes that have come to represent in the realms of the dead through his reading of the major issues of modern society: the role of spiritu- ancient literature. While the method is not systemati- ality in art and everyday life, the uses of money, the cally allegorical, Pound’s language moves sinuously rules of conduct of business and government, and the between allegorical structures and a more ambitious value of the individual in the age of mass culture. scheme of conflating whole clusters of related themes Though long maligned as the work of a traitor to and events around a single motif or controlling image. America’s cause in World War II, The Cantos has Canto II continues the journey into the past by shift- endured the test of close scrutiny by the Federal ing the attention from ships to water itself, the waters of 80 THE CANTOS consciousness, perhaps, as he indulges in a brilliant dis- sacred perceptions and time as an erratic progression play of juggled references from literature pertaining to of periods of enlightenment through close attention to travelers on the sea, the literal ocean and the figurative nature’s ways and periods of chaos and degradation one of imagination. The literal ocean exhibits its own when such attention fades. The work is divided into magic as he describes myriad patterns of waves, each the various books marking the progressive publication showing order and structure in this seemingly formless of the poem. Book I contains the “Draft of XXX Can- and chaotic medium. The sea also stands for time and tos,” published in 1930, and develops two of the major memory and the difficulty of fixing exact meanings to themes of the poem: the quest for a leader to rescue the any “fact.” Instead the lyrical method of approaching fallen modern age and the complex identity of the something as vast as history itself is one of intuitions poem’s persona, who speaks through the voice of and the imagination’s unique capacity to discern pat- Homer’s Odysseus, Dante’s pilgrim in the Divine Com- terns among the shifting surfaces of his subject. edy, as well as Pound’s own persona as a young man The test of art, Pound seems to say in this and first encountering Venice in 1906. Modern Europe has related cantos, is the power of the artist’s attention to its own dual identity in the poem as the home of the discern a design amid the bewildering complexity of Italian Renaissance and as an industrial civilization that life. Pound believed that nature was not a body of ran- has lost much of its grandeur and importance after dom events, but instead an energy system whose World War I. processes were cyclical and structured according to the “Eleven New Cantos XXXI–XLI”, which followed in rhythms of growth, decay, and reconstruction. Under- 1934, explores the conflicts of interest underlying the lying these rhythms were certain forms that were American Revolution and the formation of a strong fed- always present in the ebb and flow of natural things, eral power. “The Fifth Decade of Cantos XLII–LI” is con- including the civilizations humans built, then allowed cerned with the powers and influences of European to decay. Such formal laws of nature were the bases, banks in the era just before the outbreak of World War Pound believed, for the arts and for culture. Among his II. Much of the discussion follows from Pound’s reading intentions in writing The Cantos was to discover how of C. H. Douglas’s book, Social Credit (1933), which nature provided a model on which the most lasting argues that government—not banks—should manage civilizations had built their moral and ethical visions. and control the creation of credit for industry and trade. The Cantos is thus a book of forms, first discovered in Pound’s involvement in fascist ideology and eco- nature and then applied to human history as a way of nomic theory drew him to the Italian dictator Benito understanding which of them contributed the most to Mussolini, whose fascist government Pound praised on making a balanced, virtuous, and creative form of gov- his twice-weekly radio show on Rome Radio. Among ernment for humankind. his commentaries were direct addresses to American Canto III completes the elaboration of Canto I’s soldiers to quit fighting and to return to the principles ideogram of travel by sea by locating the scene in of Thomas Jefferson and the unique agrarian vision he Venice, the great maritime capital of medieval Italy, and other founders of the nation once espoused. The where “Gods float in the azure air.” Here myths and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) recorded many of medium of their occurrence in the imagination, Pound’s discussions and considered them efforts to equated with the blue of sea and sky, converge to form demoralize troops in time of war, grounds for high a meditation on the decay of mythology in the present treason, which led to his indictment as a traitor and to age, with its values turned from faith to materialism. his incarceration by American forces at a detention The frescoes celebrating such mythic deities have camp in Pisa, Italy, the subject of his next book of The fallen into neglect, where “the pigment flakes from the Cantos, “The Pisan Cantos LXXIV–LXXXIV.” Consid- stone, / Or plaster flakes.” ered by many to be the best book of The Cantos, it is The Cantos may be said to follow from each of these notable for dropping the all-knowing voice of earlier three preambles, with the main emphasis on art as cantos and sharing with the reader Pound’s intimate CARIBBEAN POETIC INFLUENCES 81 thoughts as a prisoner housed among war criminals, most want forgiveness from his readers for having tried some of whom were executed in his view. The Pisan too hard to change the world. This book reprises the Cantos was published in 1948 and, controversially, major motifs of the previous books and rounds out his received the Bollingen Prize awarded by the Library of argument on the necessity of a natural religion as the Congress the following year (see POETRY PRIZES). basis of ethics and good government. Other fragments “Rock Drill De Los Cantares LXXXV–XCV” (1955) have been added in subsequent editions of The Cantos, borrows widely from various Chinese texts as Pound but the main lines of the work were established in the returns to his chief subject of the poem, good govern- 1970 edition, Cantos 1–117. ment and the principles of order and justice. Pound BIBLIOGRAPHY makes extensive use of his situation as an inmate of St. Cookson, William. A Guide to The Cantos of Ezra Pound. Elizabeth’s Hospital, in Washington, D.C., established New York: Persea Books, 2001. by Congress to confine anyone accused of threatening Flory, Wendy. Ezra Pound and The Cantos: A Record of Strug- members of the federal government. Pound’s perch gle. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1980. near the seat of government of a superpower allows Kearns, George. Guide to Ezra Pound’s Selected Cantos. New him to comment freely on the politics of the cold war Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1980. era and to compare American attitudes and policies Kenner, Hugh. The Pound Era. Berkeley: University of Cali- toward other nations from a larger perspective of poli- fornia Press, 1971. tics in world history. His comments on American for- Terrell, Carroll F. A Companion to The Cantos of Ezra Pound. eign policy are astute, often ironic assessments of how 2 vols. Orono, Maine: National Poetry Foundation, 1980–84. other nations foundered on some of the same issues— notably how to maintain an empire and how to serve Paul Christensen its own citizens when the world demands so much of its attention. CARIBBEAN POETIC INFLUENCES The “Thrones de los Cantares XCVI–CIX” (1959), as its influence of Caribbean literary and oral poetic practices name suggests, discusses the elements that make for on the culture of poetry in the United States has been good leadership, including the right instruction of important but often subtle. It is—and will be—the those who intend to lead and the “solicitude” of good result of a number of factors, which include the rising advice by those who make the important decisions. number of people of Caribbean descent living and Pound’s list of heroes is extensive in The Cantos and maintaining their cultural identity in the United States includes ancient kings of Persia, early rulers of China, and the fact that poets and poetry scholars of Caribbean the great Renaissance princes of Italy, and the visionary nationality have increasingly been invited to teach at founders of America, most notably Jefferson. Pound U.S. universities, where they come into contact with attempts to extract from each of their examples a style young American poets and poetry readers and intro- or single ethical principal, which may offer him the key duce them to poetry they might not have otherwise dis- to right rulership as the ideal philosopher king. The covered. The influence of these talented visitors and search for a new heroic ruler was, he believed, the emigrants to the United States increases to the extent responsibility of the artist to imagine, define, and offer that they achieve literary celebrity. to his fellow citizens to improve their own lives and Many American poetry readers have heard of St. system of government. Lucian poet and 1992 Nobel Laureate Derek WALCOTT. The poem’s final installment, “Drafts and Fragments Many have read his books and attended his readings, of Cantos CX–CXVII” (1969), also regarded as among lectures, and plays. Walcott’s high profile, his long the best passages of the long poem, contain some of tenure as a Boston University professor, and other fac- Pound’s most moving lyricism, the language of an old tors, such as his close association with Robert LOWELL, man full of regrets about his more impassioned out- would seem to guarantee at least that less established bursts and accusations and of someone who would poets would seek him out for the stamp of his approval. 82 CARIBBEAN POETIC INFLUENCES

Two other significant Caribbean poets who have Trinidad, Walcott writes, “Hell is a city much like Port become highly visible and influential in the United of Spain, / what the rain rots, the sun ripens some States are Jamaican poet Lorna Goodison and Barba- more” (“The Spoiler’s Return” [1981]). Goodison, in dian poet and scholar Edward Kamau BRATHWAITE. If her poem “For My Mother (May I Inherit Half Her not quite as well known or widely anthologized as Strength)” (1986), offers yet another kind of image of Walcott, both of these poets are, like Walcott, at least a ruined paradise in a glimpse of her own mother, a part-time U.S. residents, recipients of major interna- superwoman who could “feed twenty people on a stew tional literary prizes, and professors at prestigious made from / fallen-from-the-head cabbage leaves.” American universities. Their employment alone has If Brathwaite, a black nationalist visionary, sees the positioned them to mold the tastes and attitudes of a Caribbean region as a depressing wasteland for the sur- generation or more of young American poets, readers, vivors of more than four centuries of slavery and colo- and future teachers of poetry. nial domination, he also sees it as a place with hidden Brathwaite and Goodison, although more recent cultural roots that, if nourished, will regrow into nations arrivals than Walcott, are having a greater impact upon worthy of their precolonial past. For Walcott, on the readers and writers with inclinations toward themes other hand, there is no such communal hope; what he and styles outside the confines of Walcott’s Eurocen- sees in his native St. Lucia is a place utterly despoiled of trism and classical British diction and style. Goodison its old beauty and of any trace of nourishing identity. He is especially appealing to readers and writers who is neither the cultured Englishman of his education and respond best to a poetry that is more down to earth tastes nor the African of his racial heritage but finds and socially real, as opposed to Walcott’s mythic med- himself, like Robinson Crusoe, a lone survivor in an itations on history and culture, particularly those with unrecognizable land who must reinvent himself and a heightened interest in the experience and status of build a life from the materials of his imagination. Good- women. Brathwaite’s appeal is strongest among ison, a realistic feminist, is neither as hopeful for her African-American poets and readers who find a source homeland’s future as Brathwaite nor as hopeless in that of racial pride in his anticolonialist reconstruction of regard as Walcott. For her, hope seems to come from the the history of Africa and the African diaspora, but his gifts that pass from one hand to another even in the immense erudition, technical inventiveness, and mas- worst of circumstances. In their articulation of feelings tery of rhythm and sound have won him many admir- of racial pride, tragic identity, and grittiness in the face ers among poets and readers of other races, of social and economic challenges, these Caribbean nationalities, and backgrounds. poets are helping to further the politically potent sense As different as these influential Caribbean poets are of identity between American citizens of African descent in philosophy and style, they have fundamental things and colonized people around the world that has been in common, apart from their talent and literary suc- one of the principal ideologies in African-American pol- cess. First they are all descendents of transported itics of the 20th century. slaves. Second they were all raised and educated under Decades before Walcott, Brathwaite, and Goodison the aegis of the British Empire. Third they all write out arrived on the United States shores, there came of a mixed love for their homelands, one embittered by another Caribbean-born poet whose influence on the hardships their people have suffered for centuries poetry, literature in general, and race consciousness in under the racist, imperialist system of the British and the United States is beyond conjecture: Claude MCKAY, now under the scourge of economic and environmen- whose collection Harlem Shadows (1922), is credited tal decline, factionalism, violence, and class-based with launching the HARLEM RENAISSANCE. Among its prejudice that has marred their respective nations’ most celebrated offerings is the widely anthologized periods of self-rule. “And so the drought has dried my sonnet “The Harlem Dancer,” in which McKay reveals tropic,” writes Brathwaite of the sad state of affairs in his tropical sensibility and breaks new aesthetic his native Barbados (“Sunsong” [1987]), and of ground in celebrating the unappreciated dignity and CARIBBEAN POETIC INFLUENCES 83 beauty of a black prostitute who suffers abuse from a rights struggles of the 1960s. Poetry has contributed to crowd of urban lowlifes in the street: “She seemed a this ongoing revolution both through elevating the lan- proudly-swaying palm / Grown lovelier for passing guage of poor blacks to the status of literature and through a storm.” McKay can, in fact, be credited with internationally popular song (reggae) and through introducing the idea of the beauty of black people into empowering them with admirable images of their race. American culture. It is an idea that continued to show The route by which the outbreak of vernacular itself in the work of numerous African American poets poetry in Jamaica came to influence American poetry who followed him, in the ideas of Malcolm X, and in today is quite circuitous. It begins with the effect ver- the slogan, “Black Is beautiful,” which was a principal nacular wordplay had, first upon the popular culture phrase of the civil rights struggle of the late 1960s. of young Jamaicans in both the Caribbean and in En- Another poem from Harlem Shadows, “If We Must Die,” gland, then upon African-American and Latino youth remains an anthem of courageous resistance for in urban neighborhoods of the United States. McKay African Americans and was even quoted in a wartime and Bennett invested the language of the Jamaican speech by Winston Churchill. people with a cultural authority that extended beyond McKay was an artist, but he was also extremely literature and into the oral and musical popular culture political. An early black nationalist, he contributed of Kingston and London, where the largest numbers of articles to the Negro World, a weekly newspaper pub- expatriate Jamaicans lived. By the 1970s, Jamaican lished in New York by fellow Jamaican Marcus Garvey. idioms were expressed prominently in the song lyrics Although the extreme anticapitalist, antiimperialist of internationally acclaimed reggae artists, such as Bob critiques that he expressed in his political writing Marley and Jimmy Cliff, and in the verbal styles of tended to alienate literary colleagues of his time, the “toasters,” such as U-Roy, who spun records and radical content of his poetry and his fervid vision for “skanked” (talked) artfully over the instrumental the progress and independence of his race established breaks in songs to incite crowds around mobile sound him as a precursor of American black nationalist systems in the streets and neighborhoods of Kingston poets, such as Amiri BARAKA and Jayne CORTEZ (see and London. BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT), as well as their Barbadian col- If the toaster was an entertainer and not exactly a league Brathwaite. poet, he or she was a master wordsmith and oral his- McKay influenced American poetry not only torian of her or his community, and her or his art through his contributions to the Harlem Renaissance, inspired the often highly political spoken-word cre- but also in a delayed, indirect way through the influ- ations of dub poets, who recited their rhymes against a ence of his earliest poems on the literary and popular simplified and somewhat muted reggae background. culture of his native Jamaica. He never returned to his Among the first and most famous dub poets were Lin- homeland after coming to the United States in 1912, ton Kwesi Johnson (in London) and Oku Onuora (in yet he left behind two published volumes of poetry Kingston). Although dub poetry never caught on in the written in creole, the first works of literature ever United States, it had an American cousin that devel- printed in the everyday language of the Jamaican peo- oped in the streets, playgrounds, and dance clubs of ple. These poems, though unknown elsewhere, were New York’s South Bronx. It is what is known as rap or widely read and recited among Jamaicans and became hip-hop, and has extended a powerful influence not the seeds of a cultural revolution that was to be fur- only through its highly commercial manifestations in thered by the better-known creole poetry of Louise pop music and film, but also through the art of a gen- Bennett decades later; they were also given an enor- eration of young black and Latino poets who have mous boost through the continued influence of Garvey, been reciting hip-hop-oriented work to packed audi- whose ideas inspired the Rastafari religion and more ences at poetry slams in American cities since the mid- secular versions of black nationalism and black power 1990s, and, more recently, at respected literary imported from the United States at the time of the civil institutions (see POETRY IN PERFORMANCE). 84 CARIBBEAN POETIC INFLUENCES

To trace hip-hop’s inception, it is necessary to go about the 1996 National Poetry Slam, where rapper back to 1967 when a Jamaican later to be known as and now anthologized hip-hop poet Saul Williams and Kool DJ Herc packed up his reggae records and moved fellow members of the Nuyorican team stole the show thousands of miles north to the Bronx. An expert in the in a coup that established the work of young African- music-mixing techniques and crowd-inciting rhetoric American and Latino poets as a central force in the pioneered by U-Roy, Herc had put together a powerful spoken word movement. The other film is Slam Jamaican dancehall sound system to play music at par- (1998), a fictional portrayal of a hip-hop poet that stars ties and in the street. By 1974 he was a star at disco and was cowritten by Saul Williams. Winning the clubs frequented by young African Americans and Lati- Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival and the nos from the neighborhood. Herc had a problem, how- Caméra d’Or at Cannes, Slam made hip-hop poetry an ever: The Bronx crowd was not responding to the island international phenomenon. sound at that time and probably was not picking up on Still, in spite of all the enthusiasm it has generated the creole lyrics or their revolutionary message. Herc and the new poets it has created, hip-hop poetry has wanted to keep his clients—his listeners—happy. He hardly enjoyed instant acceptance by the American lit- replaced the unpopular reggae with funk, which the erary establishment. The mere fact that a new kind of crowd preferred, to dance to and, like U-Roy before poetry created and enjoyed by young blacks and Lati- him, he maintained continuity and intensity through nos in their teens and twenties has had a greater cul- the use of his verbal skills. He talked to the crowd tural impact than poetries arising from university directly, learned their names, and made up rhymes writing programs, literary journals, and major publish- about them; some from the crowd rhymed back. ers seems to have spawned snobbish denials that it is By 1980 the content of some of the rapping became poetry at all. If the randomly generated word struc- serious, aggressively taking on issues of social justice tures of John CAGE, the manic and onomonapoetic and depicting harsh scenes of life in the ghetto, just as improvisations of Jack KEROUAC’s MEXICO CITY BLUES, and the earlier spoken performance group the LAST POETS the explicitly oral and in-your-face chants of Anne had done at the height of the black power movement WALDMAN’s Fast Talking Woman have been accepted and in the late 1960s. The most politically serious of these anthologized as poetry, hip-hop poetry can hardly be first-generation rappers were undoubtedly Afrika Bam- excluded. In his introduction to the hip-hop section of baataa and his Zulu Nation, whose vision of ghetto life The Spoken Word Revolution: Slam, Hip Hop & the Poetry and political anger were comparable to that of the dub of a New Generation (2003), an anthology introduced poets in England and Jamaica. Hip-hop took on many by Billy COLLINS, a poet laureate of the United States, forms. Those geared more to music and break dancing hip-hop poet Jerry Quickley asserts that hip-hop is evolved to become the cash cow of America’s recording simply a form of poetry “like sonnets, villanelles, lita- industry. The more strictly verbal varieties retained the nies, renga, and other forms” and aptly points out that social conscience of the early political rappers and, in it incorporates “many of the technical devices of other their quest for expanded lyrical possibilities and a forms, including slant rhymes, enjambment, [and] A-B larger audience, were destined to become linked to a rhyme schemes” (Eleveld 38). broader, multiracial performance poetry culture that, In addition to the standard poetic features that though it has a life of its own, is not without links to Quickley points out, hip-hop has a signature four-beat literary poetry. However far it has come, hip-hop line which, like the sprung rhythm lines of Gerard poetry’s core connection to the other forms of hip-hop Manley Hopkins, can accommodate widely varying has remained perfectly intact. numbers of syllables to a common measure, as in these If hip-hop poetry has gained a nationwide audience lines from Saul William’s “Amethyst Rocks” (2003): “I through its impact on live audiences, it has achieved be exHALin’ in RINGS that CIRcle SATurn / leavin’ even wider exposure after being featured in two suc- STAINS in my VEINS in astroLOGical PATterns” (capi- cessful films. The first was SlamNation, a documentary talization added for emphasis). Imagine the syllables as CARIBBEAN POETIC INFLUENCES 85 saxophone notes, and you will hear an agile sort of jazz poetry of Nuyorican poets of the 1970s and 1980s and rhythm not unrelated to what Langston HUGHES and from the highly vernacular, jazz-influenced work of the later jazz poets, such as Baraka and Quincy Troupe, try BEAT poets of the 1950s and 1960s, they have also to evoke in their verses. While rhyme and rhythm of inherited much from the highly political, yet strongly this type are common and even expected in all forms of lyrical work in Spanish of some of Puerto Rico’s great- hip-hop, hip-hop poets also employ a broader palette. est poets. These include Clemente Soto-Velez and Juan They will allow themselves the liberties of free verse or Antonio Corretier, Puerto Rican nationalists who were use alternative kinds of patterning to achieve effects arrested and imprisoned by the U.S. government in the uniquely suited to their content. These unrhymed 10- 1930s, and Julia de Burgos, a pioneering feminist and syllable lines about the pain of a woman who has just tireless activist on behalf of Puerto Ricans and other vic- buried her young son, from Jerry Quickley’s “Hip Hop tims of imperialism and prejudice. Other poets who Hollas” (2003), provide an apt example: “and she did- have raised political consciousness and bolstered a n’t know hearts could break this hard / or what black sense of Caribbean identity in America’s bicultural magic makes her still draw breath.” All hip-hop is Puerto Rican community include Nicolas Guillen poetry, Quickley explains: “Not all of it is good poetry. (1902–78) of Cuba and Ernesto Cardenal (b. 1925) of But it’s all poetry” (qtd. in Eleveld 38). Nicaragua, antecedents of the popular United If the influx of the literary and oral poetic practice States–based poet Martín ESPADA. Committed as these from English-speaking nations of the Caribbean has earlier Puerto Rican poets were to anticolonialism and sewn seeds of radical politics and aesthetics in the issues of social justice, it would be a mistake to think of United States, so have the influx of poetry from the their art as mere versification of political clichés, for it Spanish-speaking Caribbean and the growing number is spiritually passionate, sensual in its sounds and of American-born poets of Hispano-Caribbean ances- images, abstract, and boldly imaginative, as in Burgos’s try who are also descendents of slaves transported “Poems for a Death That Could Be Mine” (ca. 1953): from Africa and survivors of European colonial oppres- “What does the ocean care if a river is dammed; / How sion. Nowhere is the resistance against European and is the wind tormented if a gust dies?” (Song of the Sim- Euro-American political and aesthetic dominance ple Truth, trans. Jack Agueros 1997). more evident than in the poetry written by members of The language of more recent Nuyoricans (both the community of Puerto Rican poets that sprang up Puerto Rican and non–Puerto Rican) tends to be more on New York City’s Lower East Side, or “Loisaida,” as “urban” in diction and tone than that of Burgos and her they called it, in the early 1970s and for which the generation, which is made clear in Piñero’s depiction of Nuyorican Poets Café has served as creative breeding himself as a poet with a head full of precious words ground and headquarters (see POETRY INSTITUTIONS). “strikin’ a new rush for gold / in las bodegas” (“La Victor Hernandez CRUZ, José Angel Figueroa, Pedro Bodega Sold Dreams” [1985]). This shift away from the Pietri, Miguel ALGARÍN and Miguel Piñero (cofounders literary discourse of the academy in American poets of of the Nuyorican Poets Café), Sandra Maria Esteves, Hispanic Afro-Caribbean descent parallels the evolu- and Judith Ortiz COFER are among the better-known tion of creole poetry in the formerly British-ruled poets of this group. Caribbean nations and the adoption of dialect in The newest generation of poets, slam poets, and hip- African-American poetry in general since the Harlem hop poets of varying ethnic backgrounds, who hone Renaissance. If the decades since Claude McKay their skills at open mic sessions and scheduled readings arrived here on a boat from Jamaica are any indication, at the Nuyorican Poets Café, learned much from these it would seem that growth in and cross-fertilization pioneers of Latino poetry written in English or in artful between multiple ethnic discourses in American combinations of standard English, urban black English, poetry will continue, and the influence of poets from and Spanish. Although the younger performers and the scattered nations and territories of the Caribbean writers have drawn a great deal from English Language will be a significant part of the process. 86 CARRUTH, HAYDEN

BIBLIOGRAPHY material that he has constantly returned to throughout Algarín, Miguel, and Bob Holman. Aloud: Voices of the Nuy- his career: definitions of madness, issues of authentic- orican Poets Café. New York: Henry Holt, 1994. ity, the irresolvable tension between hope and hope- Brown, Stewart et al., eds. Voice Print: An Anthology of Oral lessness. He takes great joy in writing dramatic and Related Poetry from the Caribbean. Kingston, Jamaica: monologues. By writing in the voices and dialects of Longman Jamaica Limited, 1989. others in poems such as “Marvin McCabe,” “Marge,” Eleveld, Mark, ed. The Spoken Word Revolution: Slam, Hip and “Septic Tanck [sic],” he finds both relief from his Hop & the Poetry of a New Generation. Naperville, Illinois: Sourcebooks MediaFusion, 2003. own psychological demons and a vehicle through James, Louis. Caribbean Literature in English. New York: which to express “man’s existential situation,” which Addison-Wesley Longman, 1999. David Perkins cites as the central concern of Carruth’s James, Winston. A Fierce Hatred of Injustice: Claude McKay’s poetry (386). When the character Septic Tanck says in Jamaica and His Poetry of Rebellion. London: Verso, 2000. his self-titled poem that his name is the quintessential Turner, Faythe, ed. Puerto Rican Writers at Home in the USA. name “for a poet nowadays, the / ending up place for Seattle: Open Hand, 1991. everything,” his humorous, slightly perverse, and ulti- Steven J. Peyster mately courageous logic is meant to bolster not only Carruth himself, and not only poets, but all people: CARRUTH, HAYDEN (1921– ) Among Through the specificity of the voice, Carruth reaches 20th-century poets, Hayden Carruth is one of the most toward the universal and the timeless. Of his work, iconoclastic and difficult to place. Marshall Rand Carruth writes, “Beyond passion . . . honesty, charity writes of him: “There is some of Whitman, some of and a radical attitude . . . have also been my guides.” POUND, and a bit of BERRYMAN, among others, but the BIBLIOGRAPHY well-known names (pick your own) don’t come to Perkins, David. A History of Modern Poetry: Modernism and mind after reading his poetry. Where does he fit in?” After. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard Uni- (272). Because of the enormous span of his career— versity Press, 1976–87. Carruth’s first book, The Crow and the Heart (1959), Rand, Marshall. “Carruth against the Grain.” Minnesota included poetry written as early as 1946—and his pen- Review: A Journal of Creative Writing 43–44 (1994/1995): chant for changing style, technique, and tone from 272–275. poem to poem, trying to pigeonhole Carruth’s body of Carlos Hernandez work into a single poetic school or tradition proves not only futile, but largely unproductive. The varied nature CERAVOLO, JOSEPH (1934–1988) A sec- of Carruth’s work is one of the most vital aspects to ond-generation member of the NEW YORK SCHOOL, consider in understanding his career. Joseph Ceravolo writes poetry marked by a childlike Carruth was born in Waterbury, Connecticut. He naiveté, the literary equivalent of the American primi- earned an A.B. in journalism from the University of tive style in painting. Like his mentor Kenneth KOCH, North Carolina (1943) and an M.A. in English from Ceravolo came to develop a nuanced comic voice: pri- the University of Chicago (1948). A noted editor and marily whimsical, but peppered with moments of critic, Carruth has worked for Poetry magazine, the brooding and foreboding. University of Chicago Press, and Harper’s, among other Born in Queens, New York, Ceravolo was the eldest places, and has won numerous awards, including the son of immigrants from Calabria, Italy. Following a tour Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, a National Book Critics of duty in Germany with the U.S. Army, he graduated Circle Award, and a National Book Award. from the City College of New York (1959). Ceravolo In spite of his panoramic approach to subject and began experimenting with poetry in the army, but it was style, Carruth’s poetry exhibits some important the- not until 1959, when he took a workshop with Koch at matic predilections. His 15-month stay at the Bloom- the New School for Social Research, that his distinctive ingdale Psychiatric Hospital provided him with style began to take shape. Ceravolo’s collection Spring in CERVANTES, LORNA DEE 87

This World of Poor Mutts (1968) received the Frank teurism, have been most highly regarded by Ceravolo’s O’HARA Foundation Award, and his posthumously pub- New York school peers. lished collected poems The Green Lake Is Awake (1994) BIBLIOGRAPHY earned such widespread praise as to mystify many of Myers, John Bernard, ed. The Poets of the New York School. those less sympathetic to his project. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1969. A contemporary of other experimental New York North, Charles. No Other Way: Selected Prose. Brooklyn, school poets, such as Ted BERRIGAN and Ron PADGETT, N.Y.: Hanging Loose Press, 1998. Ceravolo’s writing is nevertheless more aptly com- pared, as Koch compared it, to that of earlier van- Jim Cocola guards, such as Gerard Manley Hopkins and John WHEELWRIGHT. Ceravolo worked as a civil engineer for CERVANTES, LORNA DEE (1954– ) A a quarter of a century, and, fittingly, his poetry is as leading member of her generation of Chicana/o poets, practical as it is innovative. With as much earnestness Lorna Dee Cervantes writes poems that explore her as mirth, Ceravolo proposed to found a school called experiences in complex and strikingly imagistic ways. “Everyday Life,” with courses taught on each of the Writing in Spanish and English, she responds to poetic seasons. While often surreal (see SURREALISM), Cer- traditions throughout the Americas. Although she has avolo’s sense of landscape was deceptively keen; when overcome economic, ethnic, and gender barriers, the he describes the “June of winter” (“Drunken Winter” memory of those struggles remains in her work. [1994]), those living north of the 40th parallel are Born in San Francisco, Cervantes grew up in a poor likely to feel that strange season’s aberration in their Mexican-American community near San Jose, Califor- bones. Yet Ceravolo was also a city poet and regularly nia. Educated at San Jose State University and other depicted people in urban settings, often taking himself nearby institutions, she has taught at the University of and his family as his subject. Colorado, Boulder. Her work has won the American Whether concerned with nature or society, there is Book Award (1982), the Paterson Poetry Prize (1992), an economy of expression in Ceravolo’s poetry that is and a Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest Award (1995). almost Japanese. Though elegant at times, many of his Using memory and social observations, the poems verses are so awkward as to seem the work of a non- in Cervantes’s initial collection, Emplumada (1981), native speaker. Frequently staccato to the point of focus on friends and family members with notable unintelligibility, his poems often “do” as much or more empathy. Poems like “Uncle’s First Rabbit” and “Free- than they “say.” Sometimes they resonate, and some- way 280” recall childhood landscapes and conflicted times they frustrate, but they are always on their own family relationships, even as “Visions of Mexico While terms, and it is this strange integrity that captivates, at a Writing Symposium in Port Townsend, Washing- even when sense begins to shade toward nonsense. ton” and “Emplumada” expose a split identity that can When Ceravolo lacked a word or phrase to express be redeemed through poetry. In the first part of his meaning, he coined one, and his work is rife with “Visions of Mexico” the speaker identifies with the neologisms and grammatical acrobatics. When, in his Mexican people she observes but remains separate poem “Road of Trials” (1968), Ceravolo runs down to from them as well: “I don’t want to pretend I know “find you flewing,” he brings an immediacy to the past more / and can speak all of the names.” In the second progressive tense that the more traditional construc- part of the poem, set in Washington State, she also tion, “were flying,” lacks. Whereas one who “was fly- finds, “I don’t belong.” She heals her divided self in the ing” has flown and is finished, one “flewing” has creation of poetry, gathering her “feathers” for “quills.” completed the action and yet, paradoxically, continues In a similar way, “Emplumada” plays on the Spanish it as well. With “flewing,” Ceravolo effectively deeds words for “feathered” (emplumado) and “pen flourish” the English language a more perfect form of the imper- (plumada) in order to interweave imagery of birds, sex- fect tense. Leaps like these, easily written off as ama- uality, Aztec ceremony, and writing. 88 CHA, THERESA HAK KYUNG

The poems of Cervantes’s second collection, From the follows and subverts the traditions of Greek poetry, Cables of Genocide: Poems on Love and Hunger (1991) are feminist experimental writing, and the American long more densely textured, allusive, and wide-ranging than poem inherited from such poets as Ezra POUND, William the earlier work. Cervantes dedicates the book, in part, Carlos WILLIAMS, and Charles OLSON (see LONG AND to three women artists who depicted their personal SERIAL POETRY). anguish: Sylvia PLATH (a poet from the United States), Born in Pusan, Korea, Cha and her family moved to Frida Kahlo (a Mexican visual artist), and Violeta Parra Hawaii and then settled in San Francisco in 1964. After (a Chilean poet). Many of the poems in this volume, attending the all-girl Convent of the Sacred Heart including “Raisins” and “Ode to a Ranger,” ponder the Catholic School, Cha briefly studied at the University painful aftermath of a failed love affair. In contrast, of San Francisco and transferred to the University of “Pleiades from the Cables of Genocide” explores a vari- California, Berkeley. At Berkeley, she met Jim Melchert, ety of cultural stories, revealing the hybridizations that her ceramics instructor, who encouraged her work in inevitably follow from social change. performance, and Bertrand Augst, a professor of com- Engaged with the personal life as well as with social parative literature who introduced her to French film realities, history, nature, and myth, Cervantes’s poems theory, while she obtained a bachelor’s degree in com- construct a new identity and a new tradition without parative literature and two master’s degrees in compar- being trapped in them. They provide a great journey of ative literature and fine arts in performance. She discovery for contemporary readers. became closely involved with other artists, such as BIBLIOGRAPHY Yong Soon Min and Reese Williams, who published Arteaga, Alfred. Chicano Poetics: Heterotexts and Hybridities. Cha’s Apparatus and Dictée (1982). In 1976 Cha spent New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp. a year in Paris doing postgraduate work in film and 101–105. theory. She imbued her works with Catholicism, Pérez-Torres, Rafael. Movements in Chicano Poetry: Against Korean history, French and English languages and cul- Myths, against Margins. New York: Cambridge University tures, and the Greco-Roman classics. In 1980 Cha Press, 1995, pp. 85–95, 200–201. moved to New York to work as a writer and a Steven Gould Axelrod video/filmmaker. She received a National Endowment of the Arts grant and a postdoctoral fellowship to CHA, THERESA HAK KYUNG (1951–1982) Korea in 1981. She then worked at the Metropolitan The multimedia works of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha— Museum of Art. poet, filmmaker, artist, and writer—portray the experi- Dictée, a work that laces together different genres mental quality of language that engages multiple and crosses cultures, was first published at a time senses. The theme of dislocation is central to the way when there was an emphasis on cultural nationalism audiences experience Cha’s cross-genre work. Her writ- and the politics of identity. Scholars and critics place ings, film, and visual art connect individual and collec- Dictée in critical interpretations that highlight gender, tive memory and history. By offering varying degrees of the nation, and postmodernism. Cha’s work reimag- accessibility to readers and viewers of her work, Cha ines the Korean national history of colonialism and extends an invitation to revise her words. As she writes displacement through the bodily representations of in her preface to Apparatus (1980), “machinery ...cre- women: Korean revolutionary Yu Guan Soon, Joan of ates the impression of reality whose function . . . is to Arc, and Cha’s mother. In a double movement, the conceal from its spectator the relationship of the prose both effaces and recalls the multiple voices of viewer/subject to the work being viewed” (n.p.). Thus such characters: “Dead words. Dead tongue. From dis- Cha encouraged the active participation of the viewer use. Buried in Time’s memory....Restore memory.” and reader, thereby “making visible his/her position in Believing in culture as the site of exchange, Cha also the apparatus.” Like Sappho and Marguerite Yourcenar, challenged the conventions of storytelling, particularly Cha adapts the first-person perspective. Her lyric voice the linear form of the epic, by drawing upon many nar- THE CHANGING LIGHT AT SANDOVER 89 rative forms: second-language exercises, ideograms, The Changing Light at Sandover was written with the prayers, dreams, and historical documents. aid of a Ouija board, at which Merrill and his com- On November 5, 1982, seven days after the publi- panion, David Jackson, conversed with ghosts of the cation of Dictée, Cha, who made art out of politics, was dead and various other spirits introduced as the poem mysteriously murdered in New York City. Her case evolves. The poem contains a complex cosmological remains unsolved. system of death and rebirth, historical evolution, and cultural calamity. By poem’s end, however, it becomes BIBLIOGRAPHY clear to the discerning reader that Merrill has produced Cha, Theresa Hak Kyung. Apparatus. New York: Tanam Press, 1980. in this enormous (nearly 600-page) epic yet another Kim, Elaine H., and Norma Alarcón. Writing Self Writing tale of love and loss, in which, like Marcel Proust Nation. Berkeley, Calif.: Third Woman Press, 1994. (1871–1922) and Dante, his most evident precursors, Shih, Shu-Mei. “Nationalism and Korean American Women’s he has tried to save time from passing into oblivion Writing: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée.” In Speaking the and humankind from going astray. Other Self: American Women Writers, edited by Jeanne Cam- In the trilogy’s first book, “The Book of Ephraim,” bell Reesman. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997. Merrill tells the story of how the spirit Ephraim, whom Marie-Therese C. Sulit he and Jackson (referred to in the poem as JM and DJ) first met when taking up the Ouija board as an after- THE CHANGING LIGHT AT SANDOVER dinner parlor game in the mid-1950s, gradually JAMES MERRILL (1982) The Changing Light at evolved over a 20-year period into the “household Sandover is an elaborate, engrossing, difficult, and con- heavyweight” who urges them to bring the inspired troversial epic trilogy produced by a poet who had “WORD” to humankind in order to save the world been best known before its publication as the author of from annihilation. The annihilation prophesied in “The exquisite lyric poems of “love and loss” written for Book of Ephraim” is largely a matter of personal psy- occasions (see LYRIC POETRY). The poem is variously chic self-destruction. Merrill, or JM, is in danger of los- regarded as either a contemporary poetic triumph or as ing his life, in an aesthetic Proustian sense, by refusing an extravagant aberration by an otherwise estimable to devote himself fully to the task of writing it down, lyric master. Whatever ranking one may give it within of translating experience to art, history to myth. The Merrill’s work as a whole, the trilogy must be regarded trials that JM must undergo in order to become worthy as an indispensable addition to that relatively small set of the elaborate prophecies he is to receive in the tril- of ambitious, book-length, narrative epic poems pro- ogy are figured in terms of the Jungian quest-romance, duced by the major poetic figures of the century, such or the search for psychic wholeness. The poet’s chief as THE CANTOS of Ezra POUND and William Carlos task is to reign in his inhibiting temperamental skepti- WILLIAMS’s PATERSON (see NARRATIVE POETRY and LONG AND cism, thereby allowing himself access to the voice of SERIAL POETRY). The chief modern poetic influence on the Jungian unconscious, which is equated in the poem, however, was the late group of symbolist “Ephraim” with God. poems created by W. B. Yeats (1865–1939) in response First Merrill must integrate the various intransigent to the occult material collected in A Vision, the series of elements of his particular psychic makeup into the meditational sequences, such as “NOTES TOWARD A individual whole of a reinvigorated poet-queste; once SUPREME FICTION,” that punctuate the poetry of Wallace that is accomplished, he is prepared in book 2 of the STEVENS, and the forms and mannerisms practiced trilogy to begin the daunting task, appointed to him by and perfected by W. H. AUDEN throughout his long the spirits, of creating “POEMS OF SCIENCE” (the and varied career. Reaching further back, Merrill’s tril- Ouija board spirits’ dialogue is presented throughout ogy claims as influence the visionary prophecies of the poem, aptly enough, in capital letters). In William Blake (1757–1827) and Dante’s (1265–1321) “Mirabell,” Merrill interweaves his extensive knowl- Divine Comedy. edge of contemporary science with the Ouija board 90 CHICAGO POEMS spirits’ ominous tales of past civilizations’ downfalls, Yenser, Stephen. The Consuming Myth. Cambridge, Mass.: resulting in an overall admonishment to modern peo- Harvard University Press, 1987. ple to direct their awesome scientific achievements to Don Adams positive humanist ends. In particular this poem warns against the hubris of nuclear power, which is viewed as CHICAGO POEMS CARL SANDBURG (1916) a collective failure of belief in the value of life itself. Chicago Poems, Carl SANDBURG’s first published book of In the trilogy’s third poem, “Scripts for the Pagent,” verse, was written in the poet’s unique, personal idiom, and in the “Coda,” the poet abandons the trials and and it embodies soulfulness, lyric grace, and a love of warnings of books 1 and 2 in order to offer himself, and and compassion for the common person. These poems his reader, the consolation of a happy ending, in art, if abandon rare words and classical references of Greek not in life. Although the arguments concerning good and Roman divinities for everyday vernaculars and sub- and evil, matter and spirit, raised by the earlier books jects. As Louis Untermeyer writes in Modern American continue in “Scripts,” the poet is no longer content in Poetry (1921), speaking of Sandburg’s accomplishment, this volume with the theme of the potential for individ- “This new poetry speaks to us in our own language. Life ual and collective destruction. Rather, through his con- in its glossary, not literature. It speaks to us of what we versations with the spirits (which become “legion” in had scarcely ever heard expressed; it is not only closer “Scripts,” including archangels, poet precursors, and to our soil but nearer to our souls” (xxxi–xxxii). Sand- the ghosts of dead friends), Merrill allows his naturally burg’s poetry was made for people who had never read playful, contrary, and extravagant temperament full verse; turning to it, they found they could not only read sway, responding to all weighty argument with three it but relish it too. equivocal sections, “YES,” “&,” and “NO.” This poem is The poems undulate with a tremendous purring of more mannered than the previous two, and represents dynamos, the gossip and laughter of construction this poet’s embodiment of a highly unusual paradise gangs, the sounds and images of war, and the tireless that is both high camp and low farce. Read in relation energy of a modern city. Indebted to Walt Whitman, to the earnest psychological self-improvement of “The Sandburg’s poems are less sweeping but more varied Book of Ephraim” and the far-ramifying historical- than those of the older poet; musically Sandburg’s cultural prophecies of “Mirabell,” “Scripts” and its lines, containing few connectives or subordinate “Coda” may be seen to offer the consolation of artifice to clauses and relying instead on the dramatic juxtaposi- a poet destined to have traversed the imaginative heights tion of simple sentences, mark a great change. His style and depths revealed in the trilogy’s complex narrative. was met with vast amount of criticism, most notably in In this concluding volume, he finds himself growing Dial magazine, whose editorial fumed that the title weary of the draining task of revelation and is increas- poem was “blurted out in such an ugly fashion,” and ingly eager to return to the more mundane pleasures of “in these ‘hog-butcher’ pieces there is no discernible living. He leaves behind him, as proof of one modern evidence that culture has been attained” (Payne 231). master’s unlikely journey into realms seldom visited by In the poem “Style,” Sandburg seems to have antici- contemporary literature, an uncanny poem that will pated the criticisms, stating that if you deny his style serve as a cultural signpost and a daunting intellectual by killing it, then “you break [Anna] Pavlova’s legs, / challenge for generations of readers to come. and you blind Ty Cobb’s batting eye.” Debate of style aside, Chicago Poems offers a wide BIBLIOGRAPHY range of sensibilities. And few poems are more intense Adams, Don. James Merrill’s Poetic Quest. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1997. than “To a Contemporary Bunkshooter,” which excori- Materer, Timothy. James Merrill’s Apocalypse. Ithaca, N.Y.: ates contemporary evangelist Billy Sunday with lines Cornell University Press, 2000. such as “the same bunch backing you nailed the nails / Polito, Robert. A Reader’s Guide to The Changing Light at into Jesus of Nazareth.” And few lyrics are as quiet and Sandover. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994. tender as “Graves,” with its “Petals of red, leaves of yel- CLAMPITT, AMY 91 low, streaks of white,” leading the poet to conclude: “I of poetry include Other Skies (1947), As If (1955), and love you and your great way of forgetting.” The Little That Is All (1974). Ciardi was elected to the The 150 poems in the collection are forged with a American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1953 and passion of life, not from the mere aesthetic part of it. to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1957. Sandburg’s acerbic accusations are a result of a robust Ciardi’s often autobiographical poems demonstrate disgust of shams. Behind the force of his phrases exists craftsmanship and formal control, usually based on an the great capacity of his pity. The strength of his, at iambic pentameter line manipulated with a variety of times, intense dislike is exceeded only by the challenge metrical forms and rhyme and typically using precise of his love. but contemporary diction that forms unexpected BIBLIOGRAPHY images. Ciardi rarely repeated a form, striving to find Payne, William Morton. “New Lamps for Old.” Dial 56 for each poem the form that best suited its theme and (1916): 231. treatment. His poetry frequently reflects seriously on Untermeyer, Louis, ed. Modern American Poetry. New York: what Ciardi himself ironically called “unimportant” Harcourt, Brace, 1921. experiences, such as a child being put to bed or the Woolley Lisa. American Voices of the Chicago Renaissance. hearing of a bird’s call. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2000. In “On a Photo of Sgt. Ciardi a Year Later” (1947), Gerald Schwartz Ciardi makes a colloquial noun an adjective to create an unexpected but apt metaphor in his description of CIARDI, JOHN (1916–1986) John Ciardi his “newsreel-jawed” image. Studying the photograph was one of several poets who came of age in the mid- leads to deeper knowledge, however: the realization 20th century and turned away from the free verse of that in producing the deceptively confident image, much modern poetry to write in modes that paid “The camera photographs the cameraman” rather than closer attention to traditional poetic formal elements, photographing its subject. In “Tenzone” (1964) Ciardi such as meter and rhyme, like his contemporaries Karl takes up the time-honored literary theme of body ver- SHAPIRO, Richard WILBUR, and Randall JARRELL (see sus soul. The soul berates the materialistic, pleasure- PROSODY AND FREE VERSE). Ciardi was also a notable seeking body that “leaves in a Cadillac”; the body public man of letters. As poetry editor at the Saturday replies by chastising the soul as “a scratcher of scabs” Review from 1956 to 1972, he generated controversy that are merely illusionary. The poem enacts a dialogue with attacks on sentimental poetry and was a popular that has been interpreted as relating to Ciardi’s own lecturer on poetry to general audiences. He was the struggle between his worldliness as a public figure and author of an influential poetry textbook, How Does a his private creative self. Ciardi’s legacy is as a presence Poem Mean? The book stresses the formal analysis of in both of those spheres in his roles as critic, public poems while acknowledging the validity of more emo- personality, and poet. tional responses to poetry. He was also the director of BIBLIOGRAPHY the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference between 1955 and Clemente, Vince, ed. John Ciardi: Measure of the Man. Fayette- 1972 and the translator of an innovative edition of ville: University of Arkansas Press, 1987. Dante’s Divine Comedy (1954–70) that used an English Nims, John Frederick. “John Ciardi: The Many Lives of vernacular to capture the realism of the original. Poetry” Poetry 148 (1986): 283–299. Ciardi was born in Boston’s Little Italy (North End) neighborhood to Italian immigrant parents. After grad- Sue Barker uating from Tufts University in 1938, he earned a M.A. in English at the University of Michigan in 1939 and CLAMPITT, AMY (1920–1994) Amy Clampitt’s published his first volume of poetry, Homeward to poetry, which was influenced by John Keats, Gerard America, in 1940. Ciardi then taught at Harvard and Manley Hopkins, Emily Dickinson, and Elizabeth Rutgers before leaving academia in 1961. His 20 books BISHOP, possessed what T. S. ELIOT called “the historical 92 CLARK, TOM sense”: “a perception, not only of the pastness of the BIBLIOGRAPHY past, but of its presence” (47). Her work has been clas- Eliot, T. S. “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” In The sified as being a part of the NEW FORMALISM movement; Sacred Wood. London: Metheun, 1960, pp. 47–52. regardless of her membership in a school, critics, such Spiegelman, Willard. “What to Make of an Augmented as Willard Spiegelman, agree that Clampitt has Thing.” Kenyon Review 21.1 (winter 1999): 173–181. “secured a place for herself in our literary history that Wakefield, Richard. “A Clearly Discernible Constellation.” Sewanee Review 109.1 (winter 2001): xxv–xxviii. is, quite simply, unlike that of any other contempo- rary” (8). Nan Morelli-White Clampitt was born in New Providence, Iowa, and her early rural life engendered an encyclopedic knowl- CLARK, TOM (1941– ) With a cavalcade of edge of and empathy with nature. After receiving a irreverent lyrics, Tom Clark brought a carnival atmos- bachelor’s degree from Grinnell College, she lived pri- phere to the poetry scene in the radical 1960s. In addi- marily in New York and Maine, working at the Oxford tion his discriminating eye as an editor helped shape University Press, for the Audubon Society, and as a the tastes of his generation. Clark’s offhand but freelance writer and editor at E. P. Dutton. Her first poignant style and his sporadic output link him with critically acclaimed book of poetry, The Kingfisher, predecessors, such as Frank O’HARA, and contempo- appeared in 1983 when she was 63. Five more books raries, such as Bill BERKSON. and a posthumously published collected poems fol- Born in Chicago, Clark was trained at the University lowed. A member of the American Academy of Arts of Michigan and later at Cambridge University on a and Letters, she included among her honors Guggen- Fulbright scholarship. At just 22, he was named poetry heim (1982) and Academy of American Poets (1984) editor of the Paris Review by his mentor Donald HALL. Fellowships and a MacArthur Prize (1992). During his ensuing decade-long tenure as editor, he “Nobody can read Amy Clampitt without a dic- promoted the careers of several influential young NEW tionary” (xxii), states Mary Jo SALTER regarding YORK SCHOOL poets, such as John ASHBERY and Ted BERRI- Clampitt’s Collected Poems (1997). Clampitt selected GAN. At the same time, Clark published his first vol- each word so as to heighten a finely crafted sensory umes of poetry, debuting with Stones (1969), which experience. Describing the Maine coastline as seen was followed by Air (1970). One of his most memo- through a veil of low-lying clouds in “Fog” (1983), rable early efforts was an iconoclastic take-off on the Clampitt allows us not only to hear but somehow also IMAGIST style of Wallace STEVENS, titled “Eleven Ways of to see “the ticking, linear / filigree of birdsongs,” Looking at a Shitbird” (1966). revealing how the clicking and trilling of various bird Though his poems are capable of being caustic, they voices combine to create a lacy symphony permeating are also by turns surreal and sentimental (see SURREAL- the foggy atmosphere, each one “a blurred flute note” ISM). Surprising twists abound, as in the frequently (“Low Tide at Schoodic” [1985].) Her consideration anthologized “Going to School in France or America” of the smallest details demonstrates one of her major (1969), wherein Clark declares money to be a means themes: the significance and connectedness of the “to certain kinds of killing,” only to shift from the crit- most seemingly trivial elements of experience. Other ical to the comedic in providing the example of “drop- important ideas she treats are journeying, loss, death, ping millions of pennies / on someone from a and transcendence. helicopter.” A prolific and versatile author, Clark has In “Beach Glass” (1983), Clampitt claims, “For the produced dozens of chapbooks and larger volumes of ocean, nothing / is beneath consideration,” words that poetry. Notable among them are three volumes of col- are true of the poet herself. As Richard Wakefield lected poems published by Black Sparrow Press, notes, Clampitt maintained “an abiding belief that the including When Things Get Tough on Easy Street (1978). correspondence between the human heart and the Though irreverent as ever, Clark’s later work places a world outside is more than an illusion” (2). stronger emphasis on history and narrative. Often the CLIFTON, LUCILLE 93 poem is used as an occasion for a direct address to a returned to Buffalo and studied at Fredonia State celebrity or historical personality, such as Lenny Bruce Teachers College (now the State University of New or Henry Kissinger. York at Fredonia). She married Fred James Clifton in Clark has also enjoyed an accomplished career as a 1958 and had six children within seven years. Clifton journalist and an investigative reporter. In The Great juggled writing with the demands of being a wife and Naropa Poetry Wars, he examines a confrontation that mother, and her first poem, “In the Inner City,” was occurred at the Naropa Institute between W. S. MERWIN published in 1969 in the Massachusetts Review. Clifton and the Buddhist monk Chogyam Trungpa (see POETRY has taught at a number of schools, including the Uni- INSTITUTIONS). But in criticizing the Jack Kerouac versity of California at Santa Cruz. Returning to Mary- School of Disembodied Poetics, and, by implication, land in 1989, she joined the faculty of St. Mary’s its founding director Allen GINSBERG, Clark found him- College of Maryland, where in 1991 she became a dis- self ostracized by many in the poetry establishment. tinguished professor of humanities. Clifton received Recent works of nonfiction by Clark include prose her first National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship biographies of Robert CREELEY and Charles OLSON as in 1970 and a grant from the American Academy of well as poetic narratives on the life of John Keats and Poets in 1973. She was named poet laureate of Mary- on the history of the fur trade in the Pacific Northwest. land in 1976, a post she held until 1985. Her book Clark has also dealt extensively with the subject of Two-Headed Woman was nominated for the Pulitzer baseball in poetry and prose and in a parallel career as Prize in 1980. In 1988 she became the only author to a painter. have two books of poetry as finalists for the Pulitzer BIBLIOGRAPHY Prize at the same time: Good Woman: Poems and a Mem- Murray, Timothy. “Tom Clark: A Checklist.” Credences: A oir, 1969–1980 and Next: New Poems. In 1992 she Journal of Twentieth Century Poetry and Poetics 1.1 (1981): received the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memo- 121–165. rial Prize. Her book The Terrible Stories was nominated Perloff, Marjorie. “Poetry Chronicle: 1970–1971.” Contempo- for the National Book Award in 1995. In 1996 she rary Literature 14.1 (winter 1973): 97–131. received the Lannan Foundation Award for poetry, and Warsh, Lewis. “Review of Stones.” Poetry 65.6 (March in 1999 Clifton was named a chancellor by the Amer- 1970): 440–446. ican Academy of Poets. In 2000 her book Blessing the Jim Cocola Boats: New and Selected Poems, 1988–2000 received the National Book Award. CLIFTON, LUCILLE (1936– ) A prolific A primary strength of Clifton’s work is her ability to writer of poetry and children’s books, Lucille Clifton express themes of great depth—spiritual strength, self- has had a long and distinguished career. She was first affirmation, sexuality, African-American history—using published in the 1960s, her early work was influ- everyday diction. “I use a simple language,” she has enced by the BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT, especially by said. “I have never believed that for anything to be valid poets Amiri BARAKA (LeRoi Jones), Ishmael REED, and or true or intellectual or ‘deep’ it had to be first com- Gwendolyn BROOKS. But the themes of spirituality and plex” (137). In a voice ranging from African-American self-acceptance that infuse her later work also show idiom to Caribbean dialect, Clifton writes about her the influence of Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, family and, especially, about the lives of women. She and, most importantly, the culture and stories of explores the linkage between generations, within the African-American women passed down from mother African-American culture, and in the church, with fam- to daughter (see FEMALE VOICE, FEMALE LANGUAGE). ily, community, and religion as equal sources of spiritual Born in Depew, New York, Thelma Lucille Sayles strength and optimism. But it is the women she writes and her parents moved to Buffalo when she was a about—whether they are wives, mothers, homeless, child. When she was 16, she received a full scholarship saints, or goddesses—who stand out in her poems. to Howard University in Washington, D.C. In 1955 she Clifton “has written more poems about women’s lives 94 CODRESCU, ANDREI than any other African-American poet except Gwen- Poets in the Twentieth Century, edited by Diane Wood Mid- dolyn Brooks” (Rushing 218). Among Clifton’s ances- dlebrook and Marilyn Yalom. Ann Arbor: University of tors are Caroline Sale, a Dahomey-born woman and Michigan Press, 1985. former slave who died in 1910, and her great-grand- Patricia Valdata mother and namesake Lucille Sayle, who was hanged after shooting the white man who made her pregnant. CODRESCU, ANDREI (1946– ) A wry Rather than write bitterly about these women’s lives, sense of humor and a talent for shrewdly accurate Clifton honors their strength: “and I come from a line observations of human culture and society have made / of black and going on women” (“For deLawd” Andrei Codrescu a popular poet, novelist, essayist, [1969]). The simple phrase going on women speaks screenwriter, radio commentator, and editor. His work volumes about the courage and endurance of black is characterized by keen satire of the absurd aspects of women in a culture that has, until recently, little val- life in a materialistic society, as seen through the eyes ued them. of a person who grew up in a repressive, totalitarian Clifton’s poems often have a strong narrative thread state. His poetry shows the influence of European SUR- (see NARRATIVE POETRY), similar to stories told by REALISM played against themes of American con- women around a kitchen table, a quality that makes sumerism, a blend that places his poetry within the Clifton’s work accessible to readers of all ages and postmodern movement. Thus his writing is a mix of backgrounds. She “gives identity and substance to the European and American sensibility, influenced by everyday people in her poems by giving them names, poets like Fernando Pessoa, Walt Whitman, the BEATs, and therefore a history” (McCluskey 143). She writes and NEW YORK SCHOOL poet Ted BERRIGAN, whom Cor- of women like Miss Rosie, a “wet brown bag of a drescu refers to as a “father” (Hoover 480). woman / who used to be the best looking gal in geor- Born in Sibiu, Romania, Codrescu immigrated to gia” (“Miss Rosie” [1969]) or Aunt Nanny, who sat the United States when he was 19. His writing career “humming for herself humming / her own sweet began with the publication of his first book, License to human name” (“Slave Cabin, Sotterly Plantation, Carry a Gun (1970), while Codrescu was still learning Maryland, 1989” [1990]). Poems such as these pro- to speak English. He became a U.S. citizen in 1981 but vide a keen insight into the lives of black women, for went back to Romania after the fall of the Ceausescu whom “[r]age and shame and grief must be acknowl- government, describing his trip in commentaries on edged and harnessed for life-saving purposes” (Ans- National Public Radio and later on television. In 1983 porte-Easton 119). Clifton’s themes of healing, he founded the literary magazine Exquisite Corpse: A self-love, and self-affirmation are also evident in her Journal of Letters and Life (see POETRY JOURNALS), which many children’s books. was named for a word game invented by French surre- alists in the 1920s. He wrote the screenplay for the BIBLIOGRAPHY award-winning film Road Scholar, which premiered on Ansporte-Easton, Jean. “‘She Made Herself Again’: The public television in 1994. Codrescu has received Maternal Impulse as Poetry.” 13th Moon: A Feminist Liter- numerous awards, including three fellowships from ary Magazine 9:1–2 (1991): 116–135. the National Endowment for the Arts (1973, 1985, Clifton, Lucille. “A Simple Language.” In Black Women Writ- 1989), the Peabody Award for Road Scholar (1995), the ers (1950–1980): A Critical Evaluation, edited by Mari Evans. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor-Doubleday, 1984. American Civil Liberties Union Freedom of Speech McCluskey, Audrey T. “Tell the Good News: A View of the Award (1995), and the Literature Prize of the Roman- Works of Lucille Clifton.” In Black Women Writers ian Cultural Foundation in Bucharest (1996). (1950–1980): A Critical Evaluation, edited by Mari Evans. Codrescu is consistent in his use of humor to point Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor-Doubleday, 1984. out the ridiculous aspects of modern life, without Rushing, Andrea Benton. “Lucille Clifton: A Changing Voice mincing words: “But through a little hole in the boring for Changing Times.” In Coming to Light: American Women report / God watches us faking it” (“Against Meaning” COLEMAN, WANDA 95

[1996]). He pokes fun at the American idolatry of cap- lives of women in patriarchal societies. Though her italism by portraying God as a bored executive and poetry is in English, Cofer often incorporates select underscores the insincerity of life in a country Spanish words or phrases into her writing. Juan Bruce- obsessed by the marketplace, where to get by everyone Novoa describes this technique as a way to create “the is merely “faking it.” In his poetry, prose, and com- inter space where new meanings are negotiated in a mentaries, Codrescu wants his readers to “acknowl- process of synthesis” (96). Most often the themes of edge the paradoxical nature of the postmodern world family, identity, culture, and spirituality are woven into and to make choices to live meaningfully in that detailed poems marked by their economy of language world” (Lehnert 41). and multiple levels of signification. One of Cofer’s most prevalent themes, and the BIBLIOGRAPHY theme that speaks most directly to the condition of Hoover, Paul, ed. Postmodern American Poetry. New York: living at the turn into the 21st century, is that of mul- W.W. Norton, 1994. Lehnert, Tim. “Codrescu versus America: A Postmodern ticultural experience. Some of her poems depict the Poet Turned Loose.” Xavier Review 20:2 (2000): 31–42. clash of cultures and the fear and division that it can produce. “El Olvido” (1986) begins, “It is a dangerous Patricia Valdata thing / to forget the climate of your birthplace.” The imagery of young Puerto Ricans trying “to choke out COFER, JUDITH ORTIZ (1952– ) Judith the voices of dead relatives” in “bare, cold rooms with Ortiz Cofer emerged as an important writer of multi- no pictures on the wall” reflects the conflict inherent cultural and feminist poetry at the end of the 20th cen- in the desire to assimilate into mainland society. tury. She is representative of the latest generation of Other poems, such as “To Understand El Azul” poets who express a new, more inclusive sense of eth- (2000), represent the fusion of cultures as something nic American identity. Her method of combining positive. The opening line, “We dream in a language poetry with prose also places her at the forefront of a that we all understand,” expresses unity, and as the contemporary movement that is in the process of poem progresses Cofer fluidly integrates the imagery expanding and redefining literary genres and that of Puerto Rico with that of her adopted home in the includes Gloria Anzaldua and Theresa Hak Kyung CHA. American South. Her literary influences, which include Virginia Woolf, Cofer’s most memorable poems deal with the places Lillian Hellman, and Emily Dickinson, reflect her where the intersections of culture create something interest in a variety of genres as well as her attraction new, interesting, and even painful out of which to to the power of the female perspective. make art. Cofer was born in Hormigueros, Puerto Rico. She BIBLIOGRAPHY was raised in Paterson, New Jersey, and became a resi- Bruce-Novoa, Juan. “Judith Ortiz Cofer’s Rituals of Move- dent of Georgia as a teenager. Her first collection of ment.” Americas Review: A Review of Hispanic Literature and poems won the Riverside International Poetry Compe- Art of the USA 19.3–4 (winter 1991): 88–99. tition in 1985. In 1994 her collection of poetry and Ocasio, Rafael, and Rita Ganey. “Speaking in Puerto Rican: prose, The Latin Deli, received the Anisfield-Wolf Book An Interview with Judith Ortiz Cofer.” Bilingual Review/La Award, and in 1999 she was honored with a Rocke- Revista Bilingue 17.2 (May–August 1992): 143–146. feller Foundation Residency in Bellagio, Italy. In addi- Margaret Crumpton tion to volumes of poetry, Cofer has published a novel and mixed-genre collections of essays, stories, and poems, as well as a creative nonfiction memoir. COLEMAN, WANDA (1946– ) Wanda Cofer primarily writes NARRATIVE POETRY, and most of Coleman is a political artist whose vivid, energetic her short, descriptive poems depict the tensions of poetry depicts the everyday struggles of poor urban characters who move between cultures or the complex blacks. A poet who prefers the rhythms and language 96 COLLINS, BILLY of natural speech to poetic diction, the gritty reality of BIBLIOGRAPHY lived experience to honed imagery, Coleman was Comer, Krista. “Revising Western Criticism through Wanda instrumental—along with Diane WAKOSKI, Clayton Coleman.” Western American Literature 33.4 (winter ESHELMAN, and Charles BUKOWSKI—in the formation of 1999): 357–383. an alternative literary forum in Los Angeles during the Magistrale, Tony. “Doing Battle with the Wolf: A Critical 1970s and 1980s. It was during this time that Cole- Introduction to Wanda Colemen’s Poetry.” Black American Literature Forum 23.3 (autumn 1989): 539–554. man earned her reputation as a gifted performance ———., and Patricia Ferreira. “Sweet Mama Wanda Tells poet (see POETRY IN PERFORMANCE). Coleman draws on Fortunes: An Interview with Wanda Coleman.” Black diverse and divergent literary traditions, including American Literature Forum 24.3 (autumn 1990): 491–507. Euro-American open-form poetics and the African- American vernacular. Megan Simpson Coleman was raised in the Watts district of Los Ange- les. She began publishing poems when she was still in COLLINS, BILLY (1941– ) The critic John her teens and has written many books of poetry, includ- Taylor describes Billy Collins’s poetry as a “charming ing Mad Dog Black Lady (1979), Imagoes (1983), and mixture of irony, wit, musing, and tenderness for the African Sleeping Sickness (1990). Her collection Bathwa- everyday” (273), qualities that make him one of the ter Wine (1998) won the 1999 Lenore Marshall Prize. most accessible American poets writing in the late 20th Racism is a central concern in Coleman’s poetry, and century. Unlike many poets of his generation, Collins her hard-edged portrayals of life in the Watts ghetto— often uses humorous anecdotes as the basis for his its prostitutes, alcoholics, welfare mothers, workers, and work. This sense of humor, tempered with wise obser- children—show the damage done to individuals by vation and skillful manipulation of image and story, poverty and racism. “As a writer I feel I best serve my attracts both an academic and a nonacademic audi- readership when I rehumanize the dehumanized, when ence. Critics praise his craft, which transforms the I illuminate what is in darkness, when I give blood and apparent superficial image or idea into verse that is bone to statistics that are too easily dismissed,” she metaphysically and lyrically surprising. explains (qtd. in Magistrale and Ferreira 497). Especially Born in New York City, Collins received a B.A from interested in the experiences of black women, Coleman the College of the Holy Cross in 1963 and a Ph.D. in writes about sexuality, vulnerability, and resilience, 1971 from the University of California, Riverside. He is about “being on the bottom where pressures / are great- the author of seven books of poetry and has received est” (“Women of My Color” [1979]). The women in many fellowships and awards. In 2001 he was named Coleman’s poems work at jobs in which they are poet laureate of the United States. “reduced to rubber-tipped fingers” (“Accounts Payable” Collins’s poems often begin with conversational lan- [1979]) or to sexual commodities. In “Things No One guage and a deceptively simple idea or image. He uses Knows” (1998), the speaker is a poet who has not these as the basis for a more complex meaning that reaped much financial reward from her labors: “three emerges near the end of poems. For example, in “Vic- months behind in my rent for thirty years,” she expects toria’s Secret” (1998), a speaker pores over glossy pho- “to die poemless and to be / cremated in state ovens.” tos from a Victoria’s Secret lingerie catalog; by the end Coleman’s poems are formally innovative, and her of the poem, these glimpses of flesh symbolize one way experiments with lineation, spacing, word forms, for the speaker to forestall death. In “Going Out for sound, and integration of blues and jazz cadences Cigarettes” (1999), the speaker contemplates the tra- achieve varied effects. Her poems tend to resist closure jectory of a man who runs away from his life. and fixed meaning, eliciting instead immediate psychic Collins’s poems sometimes begin lightheartedly, yet and emotional responses. This is a poetry of action and his prevalent themes often include death, the effects of experience, fueled by anger and guided by honest, aging, disconnectedness, and the ambiguity of lan- accurate perception. guage. Though he bases much of his work on life in A CONEY ISLAND OF THE MIND 97 the real world, his more hopeful poems explore imag- found it “mostly tuneless, mostly arrhythmic” and con- inative possibility. As John Updike explains in a blurb cluded that the poet’s “idea of the new is merely a to Collins’s The Art of Drowning (1995), “they describe resuscitation of squabbles that died thirty years ago” all the worlds that are and were and some others (116). D. J. Enright dismissed as “rot” the “description besides.” In “The Blue” (1988), Collins illustrates this of these poems as ‘true mirror-images of our era’s tor- characteristic poetic stance as his speaker makes a mented face’” (720). Gerald McDonald, however, leap into that “other world”: “A jaded traveler with an defended the poems for the way “They mirror [the] invisible passport, / I am at home in the heaven of the time and express an attitude toward it,” and he praised unforeseen.” them for their “rhythm, lyric strength and immediacy Collins’s lyrical mastery and his use of the everyday of communication” (1937). as well as the oft imagined allow him to examine what In the first and last sections of Coney Island, lines seems to be the ordinary with extraordinary detail start at various points across the page to stress their and illumination. musicality. Poem 2 reaches forward and backward in time, with nonsense language and impossible BIBLIOGRAPHY images, such as “elephants in bathtubs /...strum- Taylor, John. Review of Picnic, Lightning, by Billy Collins. Poetry 17.5 (February 2000): 273. ming bent mandolins.” This hallucinatory quality is Weber, Bruce. “On Literary Bridge, Poet Hits a Roadblock,” consistent in the “Coney Island” and “Gone World” New York Times. Available on-line. URL: http://www. sections that open and close the book, where Fer- nytimes.com/library/books/121999collins-publish-war. linghetti reveals he “fell in love with unreality” html. Downloaded June 2001. (poem 20). In poem 4, Ferlinghetti’s World War II Beckie Flannagan military experience, specifically his arrival in Japan soon after the atomic bombing, enters the poem in CONCRETE POETRY See VISUAL POETRY. its depiction of “an inedible mushroom button / and an inaudible Sunday bomb.” Even more politically, A CONEY ISLAND OF THE MIND the absurdist “Dog,” which makes the simple substi- LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI (1958) Lawrence tution of a dog for a man who has the freedom of the FERLINGHETTI’s poems in A Coney Island of the Mind, a streets, makes clear Ferlinghetti’s activity as a moral collection of 49 pieces, are typical of much of the watchdog. The dog sees what anyone might see, avant-garde poetry being composed in the mid-1950s, including the city’s homeless and derelict. Like any with an eclectic selection of personal references, as well anarchist dog, he has no tolerance for uniformed as allusions to the arts and politics. Their vocabulary, authority figures, but it is what the dog hears while part of a midcentury shift in poetic sensibility, seeks to roaming the streets that is particularly distressing, re-create ordinary speech, a goal articulated and especially “to a sad young dog like himself / to a seri- sought earlier by E. E. CUMMINGS and William Carlos ous dog like himself.” The shared Beat disdain for WILLIAMS. Ferlinghetti, who published Allen GINSBERG’s corrupted politics cannot be silenced or made tooth- controversial HOWL, was a central figure of the SAN less; the politician is dismissed as nothing more than FRANCISCO RENAISSANCE, a West Coast parallel to the a suitable scent marker for the dog’s territorial New York BEATS. He embraced jazz poetry, also found perimeter. Central to Ferlinghetti’s work is this in Beat literature (most notably in Jack KEROUAC’s MEX- relentless attention, as Michael Skau observes, to ICO CITY BLUES). “virtually every issue which has become politically Ferlinghetti’s book received mixed reviews. Hayden prominent since the mid-1950s” (1). CARRUTH was especially harsh, judging the book equiv- BIBLIOGRAPHY alent to the “Sentimentality, fakery, [and] prop card- Carruth, Hayden. Review of A Coney Island of the Mind, by board slums on a Hollywood lot” (115). While Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Poetry 93 (November 1958): Ferlinghetti sought to achieve musical verse, Carruth 107–116. 98 CONFESSIONAL POETRY

Enright, D. J. Review of A Coney Island of the Mind, by fessionals at the same time as he was beginning work in Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Spectator 20 November 1959: the mode. Sylvia PLATH and Anne SEXTON attended Low- 720–721. ell’s poetry workshops in the late 1950s; Sexton and W. McDonald, Gerald D. Review of A Coney Island of the Mind, D. SNODGRASS had both showed Lowell their poems, by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Library Journal 83 (15 June and he drew from what was happening in their poems 1958): 1937–1938. as he worked on his own. Sexton learned from Plath Skau, Michael. ‘Constantly Risking Absurdity’: The Writings of Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Troy, N.Y.: Whitston, 1989. how to articulate hatred in her poems. Snodgrass pub- lished Heart’s Needle in 1959, the same year Lowell’s Life A. Mary Murphy Studies came out. Sexton followed with To Bedlam and Part Way Back in 1960. These three works together CONFESSIONAL POETRY During the 1950s claimed the ground first marked out by Theodore and 1960s, confessional poetry took shape as a logical ROETHKE in The Lost Son in 1948. These are confessional progression of one aspect of BEAT POETRY, focusing on books, not simply collections that contain a few confes- the extremely subjective and private experience of the sional pieces. Plath “identified with what Sexton wrote; poet. The practice was opposed to, and a reaction she also admired her innovative techniques” (Wagner- against, what had gone immediately before: the erasure Martin 159). In an interview near the end of her life, of self espoused by such poets as W. H. AUDEN and Plath “criticized British poetry for its gentility and T. S. ELIOT. These poets had attempted a complete praised American poetry for its immediacy. She stated detachment from the speaking subject; the confes- that the subjects of the best poems must be both real, sional poets immersed themselves (some might say based on genuine emotion, and relevant” (224). Sexton, wallowed) in it. In Eliot’s MODERNISM, poetry exists as a Snodgrass, Plath, Stanley KUNITZ, and Maxine KUMIN all thing apart from its writer, and the writer is supposedly wrote about their surgeries and hospitalizations. The immaterial to interpretation of the poem; in confes- testimonial nature of these confessions includes any- sionalism, however, the “I” is central and is an explicit thing that affected the poet, detailing the impact of expression of personal experience. Confessional poetry other people’s behavior as well. In other words, the con- has existed as long as poetry itself, but what marks the fessions were not secret in any sense, nor were they mid-20th-century American emergence of an identifi- confined to the thoughts of the poet. They were some- able school is the aesthetic conviction that William times very public declarations of what others had to Carlos WILLIAMS’s claim was right: There is no subject confess, including “Lowell detailing his father’s financial unsuitable for poetry. Whereas other poets in other bust, Kunitz confessing his father’s suicide, . . . Sexton times were generally too polite or genteel to mention and Roethke their father’s drinking habits, [Allen] GINS- certain matters either directly or even metaphorically, BERG his mother’s madness” (Phillips 14). the confessionals sometimes shockingly engaged Confessional poetry is not mere prosaic whining. directly with the most unseemly subjects: mental and While the subject matter is nontraditional, the tradi- physical illness, domestic breakdown, sexual satisfac- tional literary devices remain available, even indispen- tion or frustration, and functions of the female body— sable, to any treatment of those subjects. Therefore menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth, miscarriage, Sexton can offer up her conclusion that “life is a trick, abortion. This was a movement that had a woman’s life is a kitten in a sack” (“Some Foreign Letters” voice as much as a man’s, expanding on Edna St. Vin- [1960]). There is no more shocking and compelling cent MILLAY’s unladylike declarations of the 1920s and way than this simile to express the conviction that life 1930s (see FEMALE VOICE, FEMALE LANGUAGE). is a gigantic fraud, nothing more than drowned inno- As with any school, confessional poets knew each cence and promise. It goes much farther than straight- other and, in some cases, studied together in work- forwardly remarking how disappointed by life one can shops. Robert LOWELL taught at Boston University, and be. Likewise Ginsberg does not say in passing that he there encountered the poems of other developing con- misses and remembers his mother, Naomi; he makes CONFESSIONAL POETRY 99 the reader lonely for her when he describes his mother rience is not validated; for every speaker there must singing with her mandolin. Ginsberg’s marvelous also be a listener. There is some private satisfaction in poem for his mother, KADDISH, openly exhibits his love articulation of the wound, but there is no confession and tolerance for her and does not shrink from the until someone hears. repulsiveness of his mother’s abject body, but instead While confessional poetry as a phenomenon has not describes the horrid surgical scars and shows her generated a great deal of critical interest—perhaps naked in a way few men or women could. There is a because the period has never really ended—the indi- particular courage in the public suffering of confes- vidual poets most certainly have. Fittingly, biographers sional poets, a courage that makes it possible to have embraced them with a vigorous enthusiasm approach the mother’s naked body, a courage to show driven to probe still further behind the confessions. the speaking poet naked before the world too, not nar- The greater danger is that readers might believe what a cissistically but dejectedly naked. Confession is an act confessional poet writes to be true. Use of the “I” and of ownership, but of sorrows and burdens more than the “you” is a powerful choice because those pronouns joys. Where joy is present, it is a lost or passing joy, carry the weight of eyewitness testimony and speak such as Ginsberg’s adoring 1956 recollection of Neal directly from one person to another or allow a third Cassady—”So gentle the man, so sweet the moment, so person (the reader) an eavesdropper’s access to private kind the thighs . . . That my body shudders and trem- conversation. The strength of eyewitness accounts is bles with happiness, remembering” (“Many Loves” that it is very difficult to argue with personal experi- [1996])—a memory of joy, of a body no longer ence, to tell people they did not see what they saw or embraced, written with the courage of a midcentury feel what they felt. However, poets make creative use of homosexual man. experience; perhaps a poem is what it appears to be, Losses and sufferings such as these speak directly to perhaps not, but it is always fictionalized to some the losses and sufferings of the reader. Little wonder, degree. And each poem has to be questioned on its then, that the force required to accomplish such a feat own merit and contents. Plath’s much-discussed poem might exact a tremendous cost from the speaker at the “DADDY” is a perfect example of the necessity of careful same time that it serves a therapeutic purpose. Randall interpretation. Plath understands that sometimes the JARRELL attempted suicide, and, after more than one best way to make a reader understand how a poet feels attempt each, John BERRYMAN, Plath, and Sexton all suc- is to make the reader feel that way too, rather than to ceeded, while Lowell and Roethke both had prolonged describe what is felt. In sum, confessional poetry has struggles with mental illness. In HOWL (1956), Ginsberg all the complexity of any other poetry. confesses that he “saw the best minds of [his] genera- Harry T. Moore complains that confessional poetry tion destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked.” is fixed “too exclusively upon the pain, anguish, and As part of that postwar generation, the confessional ugliness of life at the expense of its pleasure, delight, poets, in spite of their obvious measure of destruction, and beauty” (xiii), but if poets experience more pain practiced a poetry that in some sense hearkened back than pleasure, then quite naturally that is what will to the early English Romantics. Their poems are not dominate the tone of what they write. Further, Moore open wounds on the page. Their work is a crafted concedes that we encounter “more garbage disposals response to their overwhelming emotional impulses. than Grecian urns” (xiii) in twentieth-century daily They use the sharply defined sensory prompts and the life; surely, it is as much a wonder that a poet finds a everyday language of the common person learned from way to package the garbage in a beautiful way, as to the IMAGIST SCHOOL. The profound intimacy of the reflect artistically on classical art. No other group of poetry demands such an accessibility. After all, there is poets working in the mid-20th century has been so no good in a confession no one comprehends. Crucial showered with formal recognitions. Karl SHAPIRO to accomplishing the purpose of the poet is the confi- (1945), Lowell (1947 and 1974), Roethke (1954), dence that someone will understand. Otherwise, expe- Kunitz (1959), Snodgrass (1960), Berryman (1965), 100 COOLIDGE, CLARK

Sexton (1967), Kumin (1973), and Plath (posthu- press books. Poems, such as “ounce code orange,” mously, 1982) all won the Pulitzer Prize. Certainly, for which consists of five lines and eight words, show the confessionals, tangible and public reward of this Coolidge’s early objectlike language constructs. As Tom kind is a fitting part of the process of confession; it ver- Orange writes, the poem “illustrates arrangement and ifies a listener, validates the confession, and vindicates density at work: the placement of words on the page the confessor. with attention to their sound and semantic values” (54). Coolidge’s longer experimental works from the BIBLIOGRAPHY 1970s, including The Maintains (1974) and Polaroid Moore, Harry T. Preface to The Confessional Poets, by Robert Phillips. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University (1975), extend his improvisatory language investiga- Press, 1973. tions in a way that Barrett WATTEN has compared to the Phillips, Robert. The Confessional Poets. Carbondale: South- practice in SURREALISM of automatic writing. ern Illinois University Press, 1973. Coolidge’s poetry of the late 1970s and 1980s takes Sexton, Anne. The Complete Poems. Boston: Houghton Mif- a turn into more immediately accessible forms of flin, 1981. expression. In THE CRYSTAL TEXT (1986) he writes, “To Wagner-Martin, Linda. Sylvia Plath: A Biography. New York: grasp the relation of words to matter, / mind, process, St. Martin’s Press, 1988. may be the greatest task.” This meditative work also Yezzi, David. “Confessional Poetry & the Artifice of Hon- poses the question: “How much of poetry is unpro- esty.” New Criterion 16.10 (June 1998): 14–21. voked thought?” The work of Coolidge never ceases to A. Mary Murphy expand the boundaries of language art in a writing process that is as inventive as it is prolific. COOLIDGE, CLARK (1939– ) Clark BIBLIOGRAPHY Coolidge is a leading figure in the poetry of language- Baker, Peter. “Language, Poetry and Marginality.” In Obdurate oriented experimentalism. His early work associated Brilliance: Exteriority and the Modern Long Poem. Gainesville: him with both the NEW YORK SCHOOL and BEAT POETRY, University of Florida Press, 1991, pp. 150–161. and he has since come to be seen as a strong precursor Coolidge, Clark. “Letter to Peter Baker.” In ONWARD: Con- to the LANGUAGE SCHOOL. Coolidge’s writing also dis- temporary and Poetics. New York: Peter Lang, 1996, plays his deep immersion in improvisatory jazz and the pp. 256–258. visual arts. Writing across a range of forms, from short Orange, Tom. “Arrangement and Density: A Context for Early objectlike poems to seemingly endless longer forms, Clark Coolidge.” New American Writing 19 (2001): 50–64. including poetically charged prose, Coolidge talks of Watten, Barrett. “Total Syntax: The Work in the World.” In hoping to achieve the “Everything Work,” which Total Syntax. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985, pp. 65–114. would use language to record the ever-changing range and expanse of language and consciousness (256). Peter Baker Coolidge was born in Providence, Rhode Island, where he attended Brown University (1956–58). In the CORMAN, CID (1924–2004) Cid (Sidney) 1960s he lived in New York and San Francisco, where Corman was a prolific writer whose reputation as the he had a brief career as a jazz drummer. From 1970 to author and translator of poems of acute brevity and 1997 he lived in the Berkshires on the border between compression is exceeded only by his importance as an New York and Massachusetts, and since 1997 he has editor and literary facilitator. His poems are steeped in lived in Petaluma, California. He has taught at the what he calls “the [Ezra] POUND and [William Carlos] Naropa Institute’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied WILLIAMS, [Wallace] STEVENS and [Marianne] MOORE Poetics since 1977. He was a fellow at the American mainstream” of American MODERNISM (Charters 137). Academy in Rome in 1984–85. In their attention to the details and disjunctions of In 1970 Harper & Row published Coolidge’s Space, everyday life, his poems can be situated alongside the a collection which draws in part on three earlier small- OBJECTIVIST poetry of Louis ZUKOFSKY and George OPPEN. CORMAN, CID 101

They are also influenced by his long association and (Allen xii). Subsequent series of Origin were published correspondence with Charles OLSON, Robert CREELEY, between April 1961–July 1964 and April 1966–Janu- and Larry EIGNER. Corman’s poems have been com- ary 1971, Corman financing the rebirths of his maga- pared to Japanese examples, such as the haiku of zine through sales from his private collection of letters Basho¯, whose work Corman has published in several and manuscripts. volumes of free translations. A tireless cheerleader for Corman’s experience with Origin gave him a new con- poets and poetry alike, Corman was the author of more fidence in his own poetry. He inscribed a copy of The than 100 books (often from his own small presses), Precisions (1955) to Olson with the request to “be patient including more than 70 volumes of poetry, several vol- that I may learn, having such good teachers.” But these umes of essays, and translations from many languages, poems are more reminiscent of Williams or Stevens than notably Japanese and French. Olson’s encyclopedic style, as we see in “The Possessed”: Corman was born in Boston and studied at Tufts “I walk slowly through the closeness / drawing each University, graduating in 1945. His first book of detail out.” In Kyoto Corman began his translations and poems, subluna (1944), was privately printed. Corman adaptations of classical Japanese poetry, committing pursued graduate studies at the University of Michi- himself, as he wrote in the preface to Cool Melon (1959), gan, where he won an Avery Hopwood Prize for poetry to the recording of “perception mounted on perception (1947) and at the University of North Carolina, Chapel in the joy of language.” These qualities are visible in his Hill. In 1947 he returned to his parents’ Boston home best-known book of this period, Sun Rock Man (1962), “bursting with a desire to foment a poetic community,” written after a stay in Matera, Italy. The poem “the after- soon founding a series of poetry discussion groups thought” seems at first like a parody of Williams, since based in public libraries (Corman xvi). Corman was the poet watches old women “gabbling” out loud, hold- among the first to promote radio as a medium for ing onto trussed chickens. But accuracy of perception is poetry, creating and hosting This Is Poetry, a weekly not the sole point of the poem: Detail leads instead to show broadcast on WMEX Boston from 1949–52, fea- whimsical analogy and a bittersweet moral about turing live readings by poets, such as John Crowe RAN- “doing / what isnt done.” SOM, Theodore ROETHKE, Stephen Spender, and Richard Corman’s subsequent collections demonstrate this WILBUR. Corman won a 1954 Fulbright grant to study same mordant humor, often combined with a feeling for at the Sorbonne, Paris. In 1957 he moved to Kyoto, the sublime. The 1999 collection nothing doing contains Japan, where he lived on and off ever since. examples of both tendencies, as in an untitled three-line In 1951 Corman founded Origin magazine (see poem that describes poetry’s potential to be “that con- POETRY JOURNALS), the publication with which he is versation we could // not otherwise have.” Meanwhile indelibly associated. Corman claimed that “the story of the poem “alighieri” deflates Dante and exalts art in Origin is, in many ways, that of my own development seven lines that point out the irony inherent in the West- as a poet” (xv). Origin ran quarterly until 1957 and ern tradition’s most famous evocation of hell—Dante’s soon became a significant venue both for emerging The Inferno—as being, in the end, “a / comedy.” new American poets (recalling the significant anthol- It would be a mistake, however, to dismiss these dis- ogy by that name edited by Donald Allen and pub- armingly slight poems as lacking ambition or meditative lished in 1960 [see POETRY ANTHOLOGIES]) and major force. Of, a multivolume collection that Corman began works of American and European modernism. Origin publishing in 1990, brings together the many languages and, later, Origin Press (founded in 1956) published and cultures among which he lived and wrote about in younger poets as different as William BRONK, Robert five books of 750 poems each. Corman described it as DUNCAN, Denise LEVERTOV, and James MERRILL (see his “new Bible . . . written in a way that even a child POETRY PRESSES). Allen, in his seminal anthology, cites could enjoy” (Rowland n.p.). His poems are often Origin, along with Creeley’s Black Mountain Review, as overtly concerned with the relation between words and one of “the two important magazines of the period” the world, containing profound and disturbing insights. 102 CORN, ALFRED

“The Twitch,” from book one of The Despairs (2001), Corn was born in Bainbridge, Georgia, and attended links eroticism and martyrdom while skewering the Emory University (B.A., 1965) and Columbia Univer- Czech poet Miroslav Holub. After citing a Holub apho- sity (M.A., 1970), where he studied French literature rism about the possible length of a “moment,” Corman and was attracted to the more avant-garde French writ- compares this abstract idea to the “twitch” of an orgasm, ers of the time. He has won the Gustaf Davidson Prize then asks the reader to “tell that to Joan / at the stake.” (1982) from the Poetry Society of America, as well as Paraphrasing a Corman poem is very challenging: He many fellowships from various foundations. describes his work as “direct poetry: if you have to ask Autobiography is an important element of Corn’s somebody to explain the poem then I’ve failed” (Row- work, not just in Autobiographies (1992) but also in land n.p.). This directness is rooted in the magical Notes from a Child of Paradise (1984), a three-part poem banality of words, where the building blocks of writing of 100 sections, obviously modeled on Dante’s Divine pay “homage // to themselves / as human” (For Dear Life Comedy, which recounts his courtship, marriage, and [1975]). Corman was devoted to the complex simplicity growing awareness of homosexual feelings. Yet Corn is of human expression. As he writes in an often-quoted not a particularly CONFESSIONAL poet. He insists on plac- poem from nothing doing: “There’s only / one poem: / this ing his life within a historical, social, or literary context, is it.” which gives it shape. In his long poem “1992,” Corn intercuts the story of his life with vignettes of a nurse, BIBLIOGRAPHY an out-of-work house painter, a teenage dishwasher, Allen, Donald M. Preface to The New American Poetry, edited by Allen. New York: Grove Press, 1960, pp. xi–xiv. and other ordinary folk. The interpolated biographies Charters, Ann. “Cid Corman.” Dictionary of Literary Biogra- have a particularly documentary style, which although phy. vol. 5, American Poets since World War II: Part I: A–K, not as severely reduced to evidence as in Charles edited by Donald J. Greiner. Detroit, Mich.: Gale REZNIKOFF’s Testimony, which is drawn from legal docu- Research, 1980, pp. 136–142. ments, nonetheless holds a special regard for fact. Thus Corman, Cid, ed. Introduction to The Gist of Origin in the account of Dolores Curtis in 1949, he records 1951–1971 / an anthology, edited by Corman. New York: that her radio is a Zenith, that her boyfriend’s car is a Grossman Publishers, 1975, pp. xv–xxvii. Packard, that her boyfriend wears Lucky Tiger hair Rowland, Philip. “Cid Corman in Conversation.” Flashpøint tonic, and that they eat at the Shangri-La Drive-In, 4. Available on-line. URL: http://www.flashpointmag.com/ where they order a Schlitz beer. corman1.htm. Downloaded February 2002. In addition Corn is interested in writing dramatic Matthew Hart monologues. Usually historical figures, the personae vary from Madame de Sévigné to Corn’s Revolutionary CORN, ALFRED (1943– ) Alfred Corn is War ancestor, from Byron to Frances Trollope and most often associated with such cosmopolitan poets as Johann Sebastian Bach. An inveterate traveler, Corn Richard HOWARD, James MERRILL, and J. D. MCCLATCHY, has poems set across the United States, Europe, and whose sophistication and elegance are among their the Middle East. Corn’s work is also informed by his most distinguishing features. But although Corn’s deep religious faith; besides eight volumes of poetry, he lyrics can contain ornamentation, his finest works has edited Incarnation (1990), a collection of essays by often have a directness derived from Walt Whitman contemporary writers on the New Testament. and William Carlos WILLIAMS. In his first book, All Roads at Once (1976), he writes of his “wanting simple BIBLIOGRAPHY order,” and his second volume, A Call in the Midst of the Abowitz, Richard. “The Traveler: On the Poetry of Alfred Corn.” Kenyon Review 15.4 (fall 1993): 204–216. Crowd (1978), takes its title from Whitman. Like Martin, Robert K. The Homosexual Tradition in American Williams’s PATERSON, A Call in the Midst of the Crowd Poetry. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979. alternates between LYRIC POETRY and prose fragments gleaned from historical sources. David Bergman CORSO, GREGORIO NUNZIO 103

CORSO, GREGORIO NUNZIO (1930–2001) was to be a site of resistance to everything negative Gregory Corso met Allen GINSBERG in 1950 in a Green- (Stephenson 13). wich Village bar; with Ginsberg and Jack KEROUAC, he One of his best known poems, “Marriage” (1960), is formed the poetic nucleus of the BEAT movement, a light-hearted soliloquy on whether or not to marry, which would overhaul the form and content of Amer- and whether to meet the parents with his disheveled ican literature. Frequently living and traveling appearance and lack of social graces. He envisions a together internationally over the next few decades, wedding crowded with the bride’s relatives and friends, these three and others unavoidably developed similar but with only a token number of his friends because styles and methods concurrently, demonstrating they are social outsiders. The poem makes very clear, marked influence on each other. Together they pro- though, that becoming an insider, through the duced unrefined works of such immediacy that the respectability of marriage, is not without its appeal. He energy and language of experience were, and still are, imagines a beautiful bride in domestic bliss, but a explicit and shocking in their poetic rejection of moment later he also imagines utility bills, crying boundaries, such as appropriate subject matter, form, babies, and television. He even fears that the lovely and vocabulary. bride will be transformed into “A fat . . . wife screech- Corso was born in New York City’s Greenwich Vil- ing over potatoes Get a job.” Bills and responsibility are lage. Abandoned as a small child, he was raised in a a frightening spectre for a bohemian poet. He series of foster homes until he was 11, when he went to embraces the fantasy of family life but is wary of what live briefly with his birth father. He was a runaway and reality might develop after the wedding. a street kid, first arrested in early adolescence for steal- Corso’s poems are widely allusive, often imagistic ing food. Corso’s prison career included reform school, (see IMAGIST SCHOOL) and surreal (see SURREALISM), and New York’s infamous jail nicknamed the “Tombs”, and full of common speech alongside archaisms. “Bomb” a three-year term for armed robbery when he was only (1960) is a poem shaped like a mushroom cloud, and 17. Although his formal education ended after elemen- it collapses geography and time (so we see the Greek tary school, Corso used his time in Clinton Prison to god “Hermes racing [the American track star Jesse] educate himself; reading voraciously from the prison Owens”) to create multiple meetings of figures from library, he absorbed an eclectic assortment of writers, history and myth. The poem marshalls the weapons of which established an idiosyncratic foundation for his history from sticks to knives to guns and proclaims a own work. He also studied an old dictionary, which love of the bomb, which was shocking in the 1950s; it might explain an unusually dated language in some of also prophesies an ominous future, considering human his poems. Although widely hailed in the American nature. The obvious contradictions of humanity are intellectual underground, Corso never received any made clear: He lists things that are at stake in nuclear major literary awards. struggle, from Goldilocks to Mozambique, and Because of his poverty, street life, imprisonment, reminds readers that “earth’s grumpy empires” would and lack of parenting and education, Corso grew into willingly sacrifice it all. “a tangled man” (Skau 2), an undisciplined adult, with Nevertheless Corso’s poems show a fervent belief in an unpredictable personality. He “didn’t talk—he’d just beauty and goodness. Although his poems have a raw, blurt out or shout some sentence” (Cassady 281), as ill unsophisticated quality, as might be expected from an behaved as a recalcitrant child. Corso antagonized undisciplined poet, he is consistent—even while treat- everyone, gambled, borrowed money incessantly, ing subjects of brutality—in that “the theme and ele- developed a 20-plus-year drug addiction, had at least ment of delight are manifest in virtually every poem, one mental breakdown requiring hospitalization, mar- every play and prose piece” (Stephenson 8). Living his ried three times, and fathered five children. He was life outside structured norms, Corso wrote poems that also a “poetic wordslinger ...a poet’s Poet . . . Captain are rigorous in their rejection of formulaic predictabil- Poetry” (Ginsberg xii). For Corso, the duty of the artist ity; there are no firm, fast rules or boundaries in his life 104 CORTEZ, JAYNE or art. In Corso, as in the work of other Beat writers, her life, as in her work on the 1997 conference “Yari there is the ever-present spontaneous impulse and joy Yari, Black Women Writers and the Future.” In 1954 in freedom. Corso wrote three short plays, a variety of Cortez married composer and musician Ornette Cole- short prose pieces, and a single novel (The American man. Their son, Denardo, has taken an active role in his Express [1961]), but it is as a poet, in eight books of mother’s works, combining poetry with music. Cortez verse, that he is most known. has also been one of the most prolific recording jazz poets, releasing a series of recitations to jazz accompa- BIBLIOGRAPHY niment. The marriage to Coleman ended, and in 1975 Cassady, Carolyn. Off the Road: My Years with Cassady, Ker- ouac, and Ginsberg. New York: Penguin, 1991. she married visual artist Melvin Edwards. Edwards has Ginsberg, Allen. “On Corso’s Virtues.” In Mindfield, by Gre- contributed artwork to many of Cortez’s most signifi- gory Corso. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1989. cant books. Cortez migrated to New York in 1967. Miles, Barry. The Beat Hotel: Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Corso in Among her awards are the American Book Award Paris, 1958–1963. New York: Grove, 2000. (1980) and the Langston Hughes Medal (2001). To date Skau, Michael. “A Clown in the Grave”: Complexities and Ten- she has published seven major collections of verse. sions in the Works of Gregory Corso. Carbondale: Southern Cortez weds intensely physical imagery to progres- Illinois University Press, 1999. sive politics and a free-verse line built out of the Stephenson, Gregory. Exiled Angel: A Study of the Work of rhythms of blues and jazz. In “Poetry” (1996), she Gregory Corso. London: Hearing Eye, 1989. contrasts her aesthetic to poems that “are like flags / A. Mary Murphy flying on liquor store roof.” Hers is an “unsubmissive blues,” a poetry, like the dance of Josephine Baker CORTEZ, JAYNE (1936– ) A poet who first described in “So Many Feathers” (1977), that earns a came to wide notice during the rise of the BLACK ARTS “rosette of resistance.” MOVEMENT, Jayne Cortez’s work brings forth the dias- BIBLIOGRAPHY poric influences of negritude and negrismo, jazz- Bolden, Tony. “All the Birds Sing Bass: The Revolutionary inflected traditions of contemporary black American Blues of Jayne Cortez.” African American Review 35.1 verse. She has pursued her own course through the (2001): 61–71. most innovative of 20th-century modes of composi- Melhem, D. H. Heroism in the New Black Poetry. Lexington: tion, following Léopold Senghor in the movement University of Kentucky Press, 1990. from SURREALISM to an African-derived poetics they Nielsen, Aldon Lynn. “Capillary Currents: Jayne Cortez.” In both prefer to call “super realism.” She writes at a cer- We Who Love to Be Astonished: Experimental Women’s Writ- tain moment in history, like the Aimé Césaire of her ing and Performance Poetics, edited by Laura Hinton and poem in tribute to him (1996), a “moment of no com- Cynthia Hogue. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, promise” when “his poetry became poetry unique to 2002, 227–236. poetry.” In 1969 she published her first volume of Aldon L. Nielsen poetry, Pissstained Stairs and the Monkey Man’s Wares. Cortez was born on May 10, 1936, in Fort CRANE, HART (1899–1932) Hart Crane was Huachuca, Arizona. Like Jay WRIGHT, she is a poet literary heir to Walt Whitman, an authentically Amer- whose career underscores the contributions of the ican male voice expressing his vision of America; thus American Southwest to African-American literature. he became ancestor to the BEAT poets, particularly Allen She spent most of her youth in Los Angeles, where she GINSBERG, who traced his own poetic lineage through did important early work among musicians and artists Whitman and Crane. Crane’s poetry was also affected in such venues as the Ebony Showcase and the Watts by his contemporaries, such as Wallace STEVENS, T. S. Repertory Theater Company. During this same period, ELIOT, and Ezra POUND; he admired Robert FROST and she traveled to Mississippi to participate in voter regis- E. E. CUMMINGS, whom he occasionally copied, as he tration drives. Her activism has continued throughout also did William Carlos WILLIAMS. During the first half CRANE, HART 105 of his writing life, Crane’s style variously employed, as Cleveland, where he had grown up, to New York, a Edward Brunner has said, an “Eliotic ennui,” “sumptu- city that had a mythical fascination for him, to Cuba, ous imagism” (see IMAGIST SCHOOL), “Gusto of a where his family had a vacation home, to an isolated Poundian sort,” and characters reminiscent of “a Wal- farm in Connecticut, and back again to all of them lace Stevens seascape” (“Hart Crane”). Among Crane’s repeatedly, all the while hoping and believing that a close friends were Allen TATE, who once called Crane change of space would enable him to be a more disci- “the greatest contemporary American poet” (qtd. in plined writer. Likewise he never was able to sustain Mariani 113) and later wrote the introduction for himself financially by maintaining a regular day job, Crane’s first book, White Buildings (1926), Jean TOOMER, always complaining that whatever kind of work he and Yvor WINTERS, who later negatively reviewed had at the time was beneath him and did not pay him Crane’s second book, THE BRIDGE (1930). From Eliot, enough, whether it was working in his father’s Ohio Crane sought to learn as much technique as possible, factory or writing ad copy in New York. His emotional and with Pound he shared a desire to protect ancient relationships waxed and waned as swiftly as his phys- myth from religious revisionism. ical ones. Tate explained, as Paul Mariani relates it, Harold Hart Crane was born in Gainesville, Ohio. that “Crane always saw things in terms of his own He never finished high school, and although he occa- insatiable ego” (213). sionally made plans to pursue a degree, he never did Crane’s early writing was influenced by MODERNISM, so. His first publication appeared when he was only 17 but he soon began to develop a clear voice of his own, years old. After he started publishing his poems, he maintaining all he had absorbed of technique but began using his middle name at his mother’s sugges- embracing new ideas as poetry became liberated from tion—it was her maiden name; his father called him its highbrow constraints. He incorporated elements of Harold for the rest of his life. His parents’ conflicted common speech and believed that jazz had an impor- relationship was a major element in Crane’s unsteady tant role to play in the maturation of American poetry, mental development, and the issue of his name is an not only because it was an American musical form, but indication of the extent of their efforts to manipulate also because it could accommodate both heights and him. As an only child, Crane bore the full force of his depths. Crane was convinced that the task of the poet parents’ machinations, especially his mother’s, during was to confront the historical moment through experi- their marriage and after their divorce. This fact played ence, not detached observation, and to articulate the no small role in the adult Crane’s general disparage- experience in a neoromantic fashion. As a young poet ment of women, which is made especially plain in his he emerged from Eliot’s influence and in fact disliked lack of respect for the work of female poets—with the THE WASTE LAND, but he never left Whitman behind. The single exception of Emily Dickinson. Paul Mariani sug- first movement of Crane’s six-part “Voyages” (1926) gests that Crane grudgingly acknowledged Marianne echoes the second movement of Whitman’s “Song of MOORE (243), but dismissed Edna St. Vincent MILLAY as Myself” in its unobserved speaker who watches others “too derivative” (84); Crane likewise discarded what he frolic on the beach. Written when Crane was 22, this categorized as the “scullery permutations of Amy LOW- first section nevertheless has a tone of hard-earned ELL” (qtd. in Mariani 243). The only formal, financial worldly wisdom: The speaker warns that “there is a recognition he ever received was the conditional line” of acceptable behavior beyond which these patronage of Otto Kahn, a New York banker and arts bathers must not go. If they do, they will learn what he patron, beginning in late 1925, and a Guggenheim Fel- already has learned: “The bottom of the sea is cruel.” lowship in 1931. “Voyages” developed as a love sequence to Crane’s Unfortunately Crane was never able to establish a longest-lasting relationship. Crane was gay, and secure and permanent relationship of any kind for although he was careful to keep the gender of the himself. He was constantly in motion—emotionally, poem’s beloved unspecified, he speaks in this set of physically, and mentally. He relocated frequently, from poems to the dearest of his many male sailor lovers 106 CRAPSEY, ADELAIDE when he asks, “Permit me voyage, love, into your Inextricable from each other, Crane’s literary gift and hands” at the close of the third movement. psychological curse developed concurrently. He first Crane’s enduring friend, Waldo Frank, agreed with attempted suicide when he was 15, approximately Tate’s early opinion that Crane’s significance to Ameri- when he started writing. From then on his life was a can poetry could be based on “For the Marriage of fight to the death. The majority of his work was writ- Faustus and Helen” (1923) alone. Certainly the poem is ten in the early 1920s, and as he deteriorated mentally Crane’s entrance into his own voice. If the three-part he wrote less and less. By his late twenties he was an poem is an “uneven, erratic, volatile performance, more alcoholic, vividly so in the effects of drink on his body, defiant than poised, more assertive than assured” and while he unabashedly believed in his own genius, (Brunner Failure 2), it is so because Crane himself was he was incapable of helping himself. He alienated all of just such a performance. Like him, the poem exudes his friends through his incessant borrowing and outra- energy and might be forgiven for its lack of maturity, geous behavior. Crane arrogantly took the position that because of its promise. In part I, Crane brings Faustus the world quite simply owed him a living in return for and Helen forward into a very American, very 20th- his brilliance. Well aware that “he was killing the poet century world of “baseball scores” and “stock quota- within him with his drinking” (Mariani 368), Crane’s tions,” where the intellect is in danger of stagnation, drive to self-destruction was monumentally strong. becoming “Too much the baked and labeled dough.” In Early in his writing life he declared in “Legend,” “I am part II Crane then announces his preference for “New not ready for repentance” (1926), and by the time he soothings, new amazements” and demonstrates it with was ready the only redemption still available to him a new diction filled with “Glee” and “Brazen hypnotics,” was the taking of his own life. In keeping with his fas- where people dance all night “Beneath gyrating cination with heights, his lust for sailors, and his awnings.” The third and final movement of the poem is youthful proverb, “The bottom of the sea is cruel,” he even more urgently sensual and erotic; it speaks of leapt from a ship voyaging home from Mexico in 1932. “Anchises’ navel, dripping of the sea” and “the voltage BIBLIOGRAPHY of blown blood and vine.” The poem ends with a gath- Brunner, Edward. “Hart Crane: Biographical Sketch,” Mod- ering momentum emblematic of the newness and vital- ern American Poetry. Available on-line. URL: www.eng- ity Crane felt in his poetry and in his country. lish.uiuc.edu/maps. Downloaded December 2003. The poem is an important one not only because it ———. Splendid Failure: Hart Crane and the Making of the represents Crane’s break with his own poetic past, but Bridge. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1985. also because it articulates a clear direction for his future. Mariani, Paul. The Broken Tower: The Life of Hart Crane. New In spite of, or perhaps because of, the poem’s somewhat York: W.W. Norton, 1999. undisciplined images and shape, “For the Marriage of A. Mary Murphy Faustus and Helen” is an announcement made in a clear excited voice. Crane developed a framework for his CRAPSEY, ADELAIDE (1878–1914) “We famous work The Bridge in the same year “Faustus and should not let them disappear,” Yvor WINTERS said of Helen” appeared, but it was a design too conventionally Adelaide Crapsey’s poems in the 1930s, when her grounded in chronology and history. The breakthrough name was still known but was already in danger of came when he conceived a new plan that discarded the extinction (331). Indeed the many critics who discov- idea of summing up America’s accomplishments. ered her slim posthumous volume, Verses (1915, 1922, Instead, Crane would write of the past as still in process. 1934) noted the ephemeral quality of her poetry and The rewritten, 1926 version of the poem was “a breath- the personality behind it. Artists and poets as different taking achievement” (Brunner Splendid Failure 186), but as Marsden Hartley, Carl SANDBURG, and Lola Ridge Crane meddled with his own masterwork, making addi- praised Crapsey’s work with articles and poems. The tions and reorganizing the poem in 1929. Some schol- reasons for praise, however, were the emotional effect ars believe the end result is flawed. of her works, not initially her innovative form, the CREELEY, ROBERT 107 cinquain. And her Japanese-influenced imagism, inde- details of nature point to a gradually expanding spiri- pendent of Ezra POUND’s work and influence, was tual revelation that parallels the cinquain structure. eclipsed by more influential poets (see IMAGIST BIBLIOGRAPHY SCHOOL). Nevertheless her poems remain popular and Alkalay Gut, Karen. Alone in the Dawn: The Life of Adelaide are widely imitated. Crapsey. Athens: University of Georgia, 1988. Crapsey was born in Brooklyn, raised in Rochester, Butscher, Edward. Adelaide Crapsey. Boston: Twayne, 1979. New York, and educated at Vassar College, where she Winters, Yvor. In Defense of Reason. Denver: Swallow, 1947. met Jean Webster, who wrote Daddy Long-Legs and other novels about the New Woman, the emancipated, Karen Alkalay-Gut enlightened, and educated woman of the 1890s, with the character of Crapsey in mind. Crapsey’s plans for CREELEY, ROBERT (1926–2005) Robert further studies and a career in writing were repeatedly Creeley stands among the company of contemporary interrupted by recurrent, undiagnosed weakness and American poets who think carefully, in the process of the financial setbacks caused by her minister father’s making a poem, about what poetic language can and conviction for heresy. She taught at various schools, cannot achieve. Despite affinities with several other including Smith College, but her career was cut short modernist precursors (see MODERNISM), Creeley is less by a diagnosis of tuberculosis, from which she died concerned with the presentation of sensory observation more than a year later. A manuscript of verses and than William Carlos WILLIAMS and Louis ZUKOFSKY, and other uncollected poems and her incomplete study of he turns away from the lush, extravagant imagery and English metrics were published in the years following metaphors of Wallace STEVENS by embracing a more her death. minimalist or pared-down style. Creeley’s poetry fea- One of her most popular poems, frequently tures a spare, partly colloquial (but never chatty) and reprinted and discussed, is “To the Dead in the Grave- partly formal diction, a compression of narrative and Yard under My Window” (1914), an autobiographical lyric gestures, a use of precise quatrains (as well as cou- work expressing great desire for an active life, despite plets and tercets), and a preference for metonymy or the enforced rest determined by treatment for tubercu- rather contiguity over metaphor that is based on anal- losis and the knowledge of her impending death. But it ogy. His syntax, full of qualifications, sometimes strains is for her cinquains that Crapsey is most frequently traditional grammatical rules. Creeley is a master of sur- mentioned. Analogous to the Japanese forms of haiku prising, artful enjambment. Like Williams, he breaks and tanka, the cinquain is constructed of five lines of lines in unexpected places that emphasize the “hinges” different lengths. The first and last lines consist of two of language—prepositions and transitional terms, as syllables or one stress, the second line has four sylla- well as underappreciated articles and other words often bles or two stresses, the third line six syllables or three thought to contain no meaning in themselves. Though stresses, and the fourth line has eight syllables or four his stylistic traits differ considerably from BLACK MOUN- stresses. The result is a visual, rhythmic, and auditory TAIN SCHOOL poets like Charles OLSON, Robert DUNCAN, experience that gives the effect of increasing anticipa- and Denise LEVERTOV, with whom he is historically affil- tion that ends in completion. Her cinquains often iated, he shares their advocacy of a poetry that openly seemed to anticipate some of the principles and struc- explores all possible experience against one with a uni- ture of William Carlos WILLIAMS in their determination fied theme and closed form that might shut out realms to force the reader to pay attention, attempting to of experience evoked by language. engage the reader in optimistic anticipation and see Creeley was born in Arlington, Massachusetts. At through the wasteland to hope. “Look Up,” she begins age two, he lost his left eye in a car accident, and two her poem “Snow” (1914), and “Listen,” she commands years later his father, a physician, died suddenly. After in “November Night” (1913), to the way the leaves fall. attending Harvard University for a year, he served as In these and other poems, the attention to the delicate an ambulance driver in Burma during the last two 108 CREELEY, ROBERT years of World War II. He returned to Harvard after the direction / of its words.” In Creeley’s work there is war but soon left without obtaining a degree. In the often an acute consciousness of the division between 1950s Creeley extablished a strong connection with the I/eye in the midst of experience and the self that Olson, Cid CORMAN, and other members of the Black tries to stand outside of the experience to perceive and Mountain school. He became an instructor of poetry at comment on the “I” and its activities. Exploration of Black Mountain College and simultaneously earned his language’s effects is also extremely evident in Echoes B.A. there. He also edited the Black Mountain Review. (1994), which features various title-poems and other Creeley later earned an M.A. in English at the Univer- pieces entitled “Echo.” Creeley’s preoccupation with sity of New Mexico, where he also taught. reverberation as reiteration often traces the breach in Creeley’s first collection of poetry was Le Fou space and time between the representing word and the (1952); his first widely distributed book, For Love: thing, concept, or flux the word is trying to capture, as Poems, 1950–1960, was published 10 years later. well as the gap between an experience in process and Besides his many books of poems, he has published a a stable understanding of it. After imagining that novel, two books of short stories, and several books “time” can magically “pass vertically” to enable one to of essays. Creeley, who was a professor of English have a full understanding of events, the speaker in one from 1967 until 2000 and held endowed chairs in such “Echo” speaks of acoustic after-effects as “shreds poetry at the State University of New York at Buffalo of emptying / presence.” and Brown University, is the recipient of two Guggen- Like such OBJECTIVIST predecessors as Zukofsky, heim Fellowships, a Rockefeller Grant, the Shelley George OPPEN, and Williams, and like the Black Moun- Memorial Award, the Robert Frost Medal, and numer- tain School’s Olson, Creeley examines how the clash of ous other honors. He was also the state poet of New an individual’s particular, often peculiar, circumstances York (1989–91). and her or his desire to shape experience influences Several early poems, written shortly before the full the dynamic process of perception. While he begins flowering of the U.S. women’s movement, evince anx- “The Window” (1967) with the assertion, “Position is iety about the erosion of male confidence in love rela- where you / put it,” the “heaviness” of “the slow / tionships. In “The Gift” (1962), “the lady” dismisses a world” seems overwhelming by the poem’s end, as man’s gift of “precious understanding” with the retort, evinced by a poignant autobiographical allusion: “I “is / that all, is / that all.” “The Whip” (1962) stages a can / feel my eye breaking.” A logical extension of conflict in the mind of a man who is in bed with one Creeley’s interest in the unpredictable processes of per- woman but haunted by another and seeks an “exor- ception and reflection is his experiment with the serial cism” of the latter by the former. In “Words” (1967), form in Pieces (1969), A Day Book (1972), and long the speaker tries to represent his sense of unity with sequences in later books (see LONG AND SERIAL POETRY). the beloved, but dislocation in time and space, as Joseph Conte argues that such texts are energized by “a underscored by Creeley’s characteristic enjambment— conflict . . . between the continuum of experience and ”You are always / with me”—ironically undermines the ability of the poet to record only fixed moments, or the effort, and he goes on to present further obstacles a series of such moments. ...Creeley is not interested to such unity, as emerging experience replaces what in what the series says, but in the diverse ways in came before. which one thing finds its place with another” (93,97). Well before it became fashionable to do so, Creeley’s Much of Creeley’s poetry seeks to measure what is poetry explored the extent to which the self is shaped common, hence shareable, in human existence. In “I by the workings of language. The opening lines of “The Know a Man” (1962), recognition of how “the dark- Pattern” (1967) articulate the gap between the correct ness sur- / rounds us” breeds a longing to communi- use of the first-person singular and the way in which cate with others about this common ground of language creates the self: “As soon as / I speak, I / uncertainty and “what” to “do against / it.” Whereas the speaks.” The self’s freedom is constrained by “the speaker would respond by taking aggressive action CRUZ, VICTOR HERNÁNDEZ 109

(purchasing a “goddamn big car”), his friend stresses Butterick, George F., ed. Charles Olson and Robert Creeley: the importance of self-preservation. The sense of frag- The Complete Correspondence. Nine volumes. Santa Rosa, mentation that Creeley explores is an important bond Calif.: Black Sparrow Press, 1980–90. with his audience, even as he tries to share a sense of Clark, Tom. Robert Creeley and the Genius of the American small bits of coherence. In an untitled poem (1969) in Common Place: Together with the Poet’s Own Autobiography. New York: New Directions, 1993. Pieces, “pieces of cake” are “crumbling / in the hand Conte, Joseph. Unending Design: The Forms of Postmodern trying to hold / them together” as an offering to “the Poetry. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991. seated guests.” Tender regard for human struggles for Edelberg, Cynthia Dubin. Robert Creeley’s Poetry: A Critical self-actualization is often present; among the 24 dis- Introduction. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico crete quatrains of “Eight Plus” (1988) is the injunction: Press, 1978. “Wish happiness / for most of us, / whoever we are, / Paul, Sherman. The Lost America of Love. Baton Rouge: wherever.” Another aspect of the common place is Louisiana State University Press, 1981. embodied in an arresting maxim in “Credo” (1998): “I Thomas Fink believe in belief.” For Creeley, as for many others, life’s tremendous uncertainties, “a void of pattern,” and the CRUZ, VICTOR HERNÁNDEZ (1949– ) certainty of death are so powerful that an absence of A prodigy who first came to wide public attention as a belief would lead to overwhelming despair. poet while still in his adolescence, Cruz has proved his Indeed, the confrontation of human mortality is a staying power with a succession of significant publica- major area in which thinking about the “common tions culminating in his volume of selected poems, place” occurs in Creeley’s later work. Various poems Maraca (2000). One of the few American poets gener- written after his mother’s death grope, in retrospect, ally considered important in the evolution of both toward a sense that the mother and son shared a deep African-American and Latino verse, his innovative bond that their reticent, imperfect communication poetry defies easy classification. Equally the progeny of could not destroy. At the beginning of “Histoire de both BEAT POETRY and the BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT, Cruz’s Florida” (1998), the speaker invites his “brother face” poems straddle the realms of English and Spanish as that remains “behind the mirror” to make use of what- readily as they leap generational boundaries. ever is left of life “to come out /...to play.” The Born in Aguas Buenas, Puerto Rico, Cruz migrated to poem’s “play” involves juxtapositions of passages about New York’s Lower East Side when he was six. He began death and dying gleaned from the poet’s memories of to write seriously while still a teenager, publishing his conversations, television narratives, details of Florida own first collection, Papo Got His Gun (1966), on a history, famous quotations, and news stories alongside mimeograph machine and calling his enterprise Calle images and gestures marking the continuation of life, Once Publications. A selection of these poems was the “practice” of “survival” through simple routine and reprinted in a special section of Evergreen Review the ordinary perception. following year, and Cruz was soon to publish his first With its hesitations, qualifications, and provisional major work with Random House, his collection Snaps clarifications, Creeley’s poetry—which has strongly (1969). Though Cruz had left high school before grad- influenced later experimental writers, such as the poets uating, he was later to tutor students at Columbia Uni- of the LANGUAGE SCHOOL—affords the pleasures, anxi- versity and taught a poetry workshop at Berkeley. He eties, and challenges of sensuous thinking about fun- was a founder of the East Harlem Gut Theater in 1968 damental uncertainties and searching for signs of and worked closely with the poets of the legendary common ground. Umbra group. He has been widely anthologized, and BIBLIOGRAPHY Cruz’s subsequent books of poetry and prose include Altieri, Charles. Self and Sensibility in Contemporary Ameri- Tropicalization (1976), By Lingual Wholes (1982), Red can Poetry. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Beans (1991) and Panoramas (1997). He has been the Press, 1994. recipient of two Creative Artists Program Service grants, 110 THE CRYSTAL TEXT in 1974 and 1978. In both 1979 and 1980, he was “To grasp the relation of words to matter, / mind, invited to appear in the One World Poetry Festival held process,” we read on the poem’s second page, “may be in Amsterdam, and he is featured in the Bill Moyers PBS the greatest task” (8). For the OBJECTIVIST poet Louis television series, Language of Life. ZUKOFSKY, the test of poetry is “the range of pleasure it In a blurb that appeared on the cover of Cruz’s first affords as sight, sound, and intellection” (xi), three cat- book, and that has reappeared on Maraca, Allen GINS- egories that roughly correspond to matter, process, and BERG saluted the advent of a new talent as “Poesy news mind in these lines. But while the perfect objectivist from space anxiety police age inner city, spontaneous poem, for Zukofsky, is itself a complete object that urban American language as [William Carlos] WILLIAMS achieves what he calls a “rested totality” (13), wished.” The excitement attendant upon those early Coolidge’s poems are restless and ongoing processes Cruz poems accrues still to his poems of later life, as he that reflect the improvisational nature of his work continues to build a poetics out of the rhythms of a (stemming from his time as a jazz drummer and his multilingual American idiom. As he writes in deep affinity for the spontaneous be-bop prosody of “Nebraska,” a poem from his 1973 collection Mainland: Jack KEROUAC). The meditative qualities of The Crystal “In this part of Mexico / Se habla inglish.” Steadily Text have precedents in his earlier works. In the early resisting the political pressures toward a false mono- 1970s Coolidge began a close friendship with the artist culturalism, Cruz nonetheless achieves a remarkable Philip Guston. The two engaged in regular discussions singularity. His is, as he writes of Vladimir Nabokov in about the nature and function of art and writing; Maraca, “A nationality of language / spread on butter- Coolidge recorded some of these observations in note- fly wings / Crossing borders.” books, which provided material that went into not BIBLIOGRAPHY only Coolidge’s collaborations with Guston (Baffling Sheppard, Walt. “An Interview with Clarence Major and Means) but also the opening pages of The Crystal Text. Victor Hernández Cruz.” In New Black Voices, edited by Critic Krysztof Ziarek identifies the crystal as a Abrham Chapman. New York: New American Library, metaphoric link among language, the being of self, and 1972, pp. 545–552. the material world. In an interview, however, Coolidge Wallenstein, Barry. “The Poet in New York: Victor Hernán- says the crystal is a not a metaphor and that he “was dez Cruz.” Bilingual Review 1 (1974): 312–319. interested in the crystal in the sense of what the crystal Aldon L. Nielsen might do to things, to me, to the writing, to the day, to the mood, to whatever might come along” (41). In THE CRYSTAL TEXT CLARK COOLIDGE other words, the poem is less about the crystal—only a (1986) Though sometimes associated with the LAN- fraction of the text mentions the crystal itself—and GUAGE SCHOOL, Clark COOLIDGE arrived at his poetics in more the thoughts, objects, and associations the crystal advance of that group and has demonstrated a medita- occasions. Or, as the poem states: “The crystal is but tive or reflective tendency in works like Melencolia one nexus in the drain / of possibles” (94). (1978) and Mine: The One That Enters the Stories (1981). The Crystal Text extends this tendency. A 150- BIBLIOGRAPHY page thought-excursion on the relations between lan- Coolidge, Clark. “From Notebooks (1976–1982).” In Code guage, perception, and the material world occasioned of Signals, edited by Michael Palmer. Berkeley, Calif.: North Atlantic, 1983. by a colorless quartz crystal, it was published simulta- ———. “Interview with Edward Foster.” Talisman 3 neously with Solution Passage: Poems 1978–1981 (1989): 16–46. (1986), a nearly 400-page collection of short lyrics and O’Brien, Geoffrey. “Say What?” Villiage Voice 31.25 (June lyric sequences (see LYRIC POETRY). “Either of these 1986): 45. books,” Geoffrey O’Brien observed, “by itself would be Ziarek, Krysztof. “Word for Sign: Poetic Language and a peak; to be given both at once seems a natural won- Coolidge’s The Crystal Text.” Sagetrieb 10 (spring & fall der” (45). 1991): 145–166. CUMMINGS, E(DWARD) E(STLIN) 111

Zukofsky, Louis. A Test of Poetry. Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan triple rhyme over the course of the poem’s three ballad University Press, 2001. stanzas. He extends the iambic trimeters of the second Tom Orange and third quatrains by one syllable, using feminine or light endings. This method gives the work a strong, CULLEN, COUNTEE (1903–1946) Coun- unpretentious rhythm that suits the poem’s recollec- tee Cullen was a central figure in the HARLEM RENAIS- tion of a childhood incident when a boy in Baltimore SANCE in the 1920s and one of this period’s finest returned the narrator’s smile with a racist epithet. practioners of LYRIC POETRY. Publishing his first volume Like “Incident,” “The Black Christ” (1929) turns of poetry, Color, with Harper & Brothers in 1925, on a racial insult. In rhymed couplets accented by Cullen was one of the most promising and popular periodic triplets, Cullen explores Christianity and young African-American writers to emerge during an racism, forces that the first line of the poem labels era that produced such writers as Langston HUGHES and “God’s glory and my country’s shame,” by equating Jean TOOMER. crucifixion with lynching. The skillful application of Cullen’s poetry is known for its formal lyricism formal mastery to unique thematic concerns charac- influenced by the romantics, religious concerns, and, terizes Cullen’s lyric achievements. notwithstanding the author’s declarations otherwise, BIBLIOGRAPHY racial themes. Although he differed with his peers, Baker, Houston A., Jr. Afro-American Poetics. Madison: Uni- such as Hughes, over the relationship of racial identity versity of Wisconsin Press, 1988. to poetry (a view articulated in Caroling Dusk, the 1927 Early, Gerald, ed. My Soul’s High Song: The Collected Writings anthology of African-American poetry that he edited), of Countee Cullen, Voice of the Harlem Renaissance. New racial matters figure prominently in many of his best- York: Anchor, 1991. known works. Perry, Margaret. A Bio-Bibliography of Countee P. Cullen. West- Cullen was adopted as a child by Reverend Freder- port, Conn.: Greenwood, 1971. ick Cullen, an activist Harlem pastor, and Carolyn Shucard, Allen. Countee Cullen. Boston: Twayne, 1984. Belle Cullen. After writing a senior thesis on Edna St. Ira Dworkin Vincent MILLAY and graduating Phi Beta Kappa from New York University, he continued his studies at Har- CUMMINGS, E(DWARD) E(STLIN) vard, where he received an M.A. in 1926. During his (1894–1962) E. E. Cummings was both a painter undergraduate years, the literary prodigy won the Wit- and a poet whose art was affected by literary MOD- ter Bynner Poetry Award and prestigious contests ERNISM, as well as by postimpressionist and Cubist art sponsored by Crisis, Opportunity, Palms, and Poetry he encountered during his university days. Particular magazines. According to many people who knew influences included Gertrude STEIN’s lively Cubist liter- Cullen, the Harlem social event of the decade was his ary experiments, her word portraits of things in TENDER 1928 wedding to Yolande DuBois, the only child of the BUTTONS (1914), and Pablo Picasso‘ s visual practice of era’s leading intellectual and activist, W. E. B. DuBois. Cubism. Likewise he internalized Ezra POUND’s IMAGIST A few years after their 1930 divorce, Cullen began criteria after reading Pound’s “The Return” (1912), the teaching French at Frederick Douglass Junior High anthology Des Imagistes (1914), and AMY LOWELL’s School, where he worked until his untimely death. Sword Blades and Poppy Seeds (1914). This background The poet’s dilemma concludes his oft-cited sonnet becomes hybrid in Cummings’s striking verbal images “Yet Do I Marvel” (1925): “Yet do I marvel at this curi- arranged as visual images on the page, not as concrete ous thing: / To make a poet black and bid him sing!” shapes of things, but as representations of the sense “HERITAGE” (1925), one of the longer works in Color, and delivery of the words. emphasizes the challenges posed by its query, “What is Cummings was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Africa to me?” In the widely anthologized “Incident” His father taught sociology at Harvard College before (1925), Cullen moves from a single to a double to a leaving to become a Unitarian minister and taught his 112 CUMMINGS, E(DWARD) E(STLIN) son about the woods and everything in them; Cum- his New Hampshire farm and was inspired by the care- mings’s mother introduced him to poetry and hoped taker’s idiosyncratic use of language to experiment he would become a poet. He received a thorough edu- with unconventional use of punctuation and capital- cation at home and at Cambridge Latin School before ization (Kennedy Cummings 28). He did not, however, he entered Harvard College in 1911 at the age of 17. use lowercase letters for his own name, signing his By the time he left five years later, graduating magna books and paintings with the uppercase “E. E. Cum- cum laude with an A.B. (1915) in literature, especially mings” whenever he did inscribe his signature. His Greek and English, and an A.M. (1916), “he was one poems include shocking moments, such as his discus- of the best-educated American literary figures of his sion of “pubic lice” (“my specialty is living said” time, T. S. ELIOT, Archibald MACLEISH, and Ezra Pound [1938]) or a “twot” (“red-flag and pink-flag” [1940]), being his only rivals” (Kennedy Cummings 15). Cum- but his innovations are the most noteworthy. He is a mings had written poetry since he was a child. He and liberating poet to read because he shows by example some friends, one of whom was John Dos Passos, pre- that language is meant to serve, not to be served; he pared a manuscript of their poems, which was pub- bent and broke the mechanical conventions of lan- lished while Cummings was in France during World guage to meet his literary needs. Cummings’s neolo- War I. In a poem that focuses on thoughtless readiness gisms, or word inventions, include the adjective to obey and the illusion of glorious war, Cummings’s smallening (“a clown’s smirk in the skull of a baboon” commentary asks the ironic question, “why talk of [1931]), the adverb smoothloomingly (“what a proud beauty what could be more beaut- / iful than these dreamhorse pulling [smoothloomingly] through” heroic happy dead” (“next to of course god america i” [1935]), and the verbed noun septembering (“my father [1926]). Falsely accused of espionage when serving as moved through dooms of love” [1940]). He would also an ambulance corps volunteer in France, Cummings incorporate phonetic utterance, such as “jennelman” (“a and a friend were imprisoned on the basis of the salesman is an it that stinks Excuse” [1944]), com- friend’s letters espousing pacifism and because of pressed spacing for effect in “Bothatonce” (“she being Cummings’s refusal under interrogation to say he hated Brand” [1926]), and odd punctuation for effect as in the Germans. Subsequent imprisonment led to his “slo-wly;bare,ly nudg. ing(my / lev-er” (“she being novelistic account of the experience in The Enormous Brand” [1926]). His whimsy and satire combine to Room (1922). describe a man who was “dressed in fifteen rate ideas / After moving to New York, Cummings exhibited wearing a round jeer for a hat” (“a man who had fallen his paintings and published his poems in avant-garde among thieves” [1926]). Other earmarks of a Cummings magazines during the 1920s. He began to write natu- poem are the childlike exuberance found in words, such ralist and realist poetry, “sonnets and free-verse as “mud- / luscious” or “puddle-wonderful” (“IN JUST-” vignettes that presented nightclubs, crowded tene- [1923]); in phrases, such as “leaping greenly spirits of ment districts, ethnic retaurants, prostitutes and their trees” (“i thank You God for most this amazing” customers, bums, drunks, and gangsters” (Kennedy [1950]); and in the disrupted syntax of such lines as “a Cummings 34). Formal recognition came to Cum- pretty girl who naked is” (“my youse needn’t be so mings in the form of a Dial Award (1925), the Charles spry” [1926]). Eliot Norton Professorship at Harvard (1952–53), a Cummings’s love poems exhibit his most delicate National Book Award special citation (1955), the and endearing touch. He says, as a result of one Bollingen Prize (1958), and election as a member of woman’s kisses, “the sweet small clumsy feet of April the National Academy of Arts and Letters, among came / into the ragged meadow of my soul” (“if i have other honors. made,my lady,intricate” [1926]). Here we see the Known for his play with language, including the use woman as the breath of spring itself (a favorite subject of lowercase letters, Cummings had been charmed by for Cummings) breezing into the beleaguered life of a the correspondence he received from the caretaker on man who feels himself in tatters. Physical affection is CUNNINGHAM, J(AMES) V(INCENT) 113 also important to this poet, who declares, “kisses are a CUNNINGHAM, J(AMES) V(INCENT) better fate / than wisdom” (“since feeling is first” (1911–1985) J. V. Cunningham, a master of the epi- [1926]). He warns us, “beware of heartless them / gram and the short poem, was closer in style and spirit (given the scalpel,they dissect a kiss;” (“one’s not half to the classical and Renaissance poets Horace, Martial, two. It’s two are halves of one:” [1944]). He says with Ben Jonson, and Robert Herrick than to the modernists wonderment that “your slightest look easily will or the descendents of Walt Whitman (see MODERNISM). unclose me” (“SOMEWHERE I HAVE NEVER TRAVELLED, His small body of work, characterized by brevity, com- GLADLY BEYOND” [1931]), since he is a man who has plexity, and exactitude of statement, was, by his own tightened himself like a closed fist. At the opposite admission, unfashionable, and his poetry is compara- pole from his love lyrics are his biting political ble with that of Yvor WINTERS and Edgar BOWERS. remarks. He writes of a man brutally treated for his Born in Cumberland, Maryland, Cunningham grew moral objection to military service, a man “whose up in Billings, Montana, and Denver, Colorado, where warmest heart recoiled at war” (“i sing of Olaf glad and he attended a Jesuit high school. During the depres- big” [1931]), but who faces violence and dies at the sion, he traveled the Southwest, writing for trade jour- hands of his own side for his resistance. nals. In 1931 Cunningham entered Stanford, earning a During his lifetime, Cummings published 10 books B.A. in classics (1934) and a Ph.D. in English (1945). of poetry, from Tulips and Chimneys (1923) to 95 Poems In 1953 he joined the faculty at Brandeis, where he (1958), plus two volumes of collected poems. 73 remained until retirement in 1980. The Poems of J. V. Poems (1963), Etcetera: The Unpublished Poems of E. E. Cunningham, edited by Timothy STEELE, was published Cummings (1983), and Complete Poems 1904–1962 in 1997. (1991) were published posthumously. His nonfiction Cunningham’s theory of poetry, developed through- writings, in addition to the autobiographical novel The out his Collected Essays (1976), influenced the NEW Enormous Room, are Eimi (1933), based on his travels FORMALISM movement. Cunningham claimed romantic in the Soviet Union, and i: six nonlectures (1953), from definitions of poetry erected pretensions no poem his tenure as Norton professor at Harvard. Cummings could satisfy and limited the kinds of poetry that could also published three dramatic works, a collection of be written. According to him, the situation worsened absurd/Dada pieces (see SURREALISM), and a book of his when the modernists championed free verse, pro- paintings and drawings. Cummings’s style remained claiming meter monotonous and artificial, leaving the fundamentally the same throughout his writing career, poet with only associations, images, and moods. Cun- but he was by no means stagnant; while his aesthetic ningham considered a good poem a system of proposi- convictions did not change, he persistently worked at tions and “the definitive statement in meter of crafting and perfecting his method. Thus, through his something worth saying” because meter, “the ground genuine care, his poems have a lasting, delightful bass of all poetry,” allows a poet to more subtly and freshness about them. accurately convey a wider range of meanings and feel- BIBLIOGRAPHY ings than can be conveyed by nonmetrical language Fairley, Irene. E. E. Cummings and Ungrammar: A Study of Syn- (431, 250). He preferred “verse” to “poetry” (see tactic Deviance in His Poems. New York: Watermill, 1975. PROSODY AND FREE VERSE): “Verse is a professional activ- Friedman, Norman. E. E. Cummings: The Art of His Poetry. ity, social and objective, and its methods and standards Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1960. are those of craftsmanship.” The virtues of verse, he ———. (Re)valuing Cummings: Further Essays on the Poet. wrote, “are civic virtues. If [verse] lacks much, what it Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996. does have is ascertainable and can be judged” (406). Kennedy, Richard S. Dreams in the Mirror: A Biography of E. Cunningham considered poetry “amateurish, religious, E. Cummings. New York: Liveright, 1980. and eminently unsociable” because “it dwells in the ———. E. E. Cummings Revisited. New York: Twayne, 1994. spiritual life, in the private haunts of theology or A. Mary Murphy voodoo” (406). 114 CYBERPOETRY

In the early poem “For My Contemporaries” (1942), There are different types of cyberpoetry. These types Cunningham details his conversion from poetry to may be defined by the techniques or processes accord- verse in rhymed, dimeter lines: “I now make verses / ing to which they are written and by the way they are Who aimed at art.” Unlike the mad “ambitious boys” historically related. One type is procedural poetry. Early with their “spiritual noise,” Cunningham prefers the procedural writing practices, such as those of SURREAL- sanity of verse, which he says cured him of poetry’s ISM, preceded the advent of popular computing but madness. Like the CONFESSIONAL poets, Cunningham anticipated many of the means of making cyberpoetry. could turn the matter of his life into poetry, but he For example, a surrealist poem might have involved managed it elegantly and acerbically, as in the late epi- choosing words written on pieces of paper drawn from gram “The Lights of Love” (1942): “The ladies in my a hat, while a cyberpoem might involve randomizing or life, serially sexed, / Unscrew one lover and screw in sorting words using a computer program. A second the next.” type of cyberpoetry is multimedia poery. Concrete Stoical, abstract, tightly formal, and rhymed, Cun- poetry, which uses the graphic possibilities of the page ningham’s poems spurn the conventions of modern (see VISUAL POETRY), and sound poetry, which uses lan- poetry. He nearly single-handedly revived the classical guage as it is pronounced, can be “put in motion” by epigram and, with Winters and Bowers, introduced the multimedia poetry. A third type is hypertext poetry, urbane plain style—the “styleless style” notable for its which links objects in a poem in a variety of ways. Early compression, directness, seeming simplicity, and lack hypertext poems and early computing philosophies of ornamentation, unusual syntax, conceits, and figu- define many of the concepts cyberpoetry embodies rative language—into American poetry. today. Machine languages and English continue to BIBLIOGRAPHY evolve, and cyberpoetry evolves along with them. Barth, R. L. “The Vacancies of Need: Particularity in J. V. Cunningham’s To What Strangers, What Welcome.” Southern PROCEDURAL POETRY Review 18 (1982): 286–298. Throughout the 20th century, some poets have used Cunningham, J. V. The Collected Essays of J. V. Cunningham. procedures to produce poems rather than relying on Chicago: Swallow Press, 1976. “inspiration.” The dada movement employed chance as Winters, Yvor. Forms of Discovery. Denver: Swallow, 1967, a method. More recently, a group called the Ouvroir de pp. 299–311. littérature potentielle (Workshop of potential litera- Richard E. Joines ture), or OuLiPo, uses processes based on mathemati- cal algorithms to write new literature. The art CYBERPOETRY Cyberpoetry is one of the many movement Fluxus has produced mail art, which uses terms used to refer to relationships between poetry and the mail as a medium for a flow of art and which has technologies, particularly computer technologies. The led to the development of on-line chat, network, e- prefix cyber was derived from the scientist Norbert mail, and FTP exchange of poetry. These movements Weiner’s 1947 coinage cybernetics, from the Greek for all use procedures of various sorts to manipulate mean- “one who steers.” Cyberpoetry is concerned with ing through art. machine control of the writing process, delivery of For example, composer and poet John CAGE wrote poetry in more than one medium, and machine-medi- “mesostic” poems, which are procedural poems related ated interactivity between audience and reader or writer to concrete poetry (see VISUAL POETRY). This method and text. Most cyberpoetry is art or institutional poetry involves the use of an array of typefaces and sizes from and is presented on the Internet or available on storage Letraset letter stickers, which graphic designers used media such as CD-ROMs. However, most poetry on the before computers were used for typesetting. Cage cre- Internet is not cyberpoetry. Few poems on the Web ated his mesostics by generating numbers using the I embrace new media in ways important to their form, Ching to help him compose the poem. He later content, or interpretation, as cyberpoetry does. replaced this procedure with computer programs built CYBERPOETRY 115 to his specifications, operating on texts he chose. In The interpretation of multimedia cyberpoetry fre- this way he reduced human intention in the writings. quently depends upon decisions the artist makes to Jackson MAC LOW, an artist associated with Fluxus, cre- define the level of access users have to the work. Some ates “diastic texts,” which, like mesostics, are related to multimedia cyberpoetry is like short film: Audience acrostic poems. Diastic texts “read through” and select experience is controlled, and interaction is limited. words from one text (the “text bed”) with a piece of Other multimedia cyberpoems are like computer that text (the “seed text”) chosen by the maker. For games: The audience juxtaposes, rearranges, or “clicks example, to make his poem “Words nd Ends from Ez,” through” words to make more than one poem within a Mac Low used Ezra POUND’s CANTOS as a text bed and controlled environment. Multimedia cyberpoetry can Pound’s name as a seed text: The first word of Mac be more dependent upon poets’ and audiences’ techni- Low’s diastic poem is the first word in The Cantos cal skills, creativity, design skills, and software and beginning with e, the first letter of Ezra Pound’s name. hardware purchasing power than procedural poetry or The second selection is a fragment consisting of the patois poetry. next z in The Cantos and the letter in front of it (so that UBUWEB online is an important archive hosting his- “z” is the second letter of the fragment). The under- torical sound poetry, such as the artist Kurt Schwitters’s standing of fragments was important to Pound in the wordless “Ur Sonata” (1922–32), alongside contempo- writing of The Cantos; thus this diastic comments on its rary multimedia cyberpoetry. Other websites feature source. Charles O. Hartman created DIASTEXT, a videos of contemporary poets and performance artists, computer program that mimics some of Mac Low’s such as Tracie Morris. Some poets who wrote sound, diastic procedures. Hartman and Hugh Kenner used performance, and visual works that challenged rela- DIASTEXT and other programs to create poems from tionships of text to language to word to page are now text beds. Mac Low himself began to use DIASTEXT embracing the new challenges of the screen, including rather than his manual process. Steven McCaffrey, Anne Tardos, and Joan RETALLACK. Electronic availability of literature makes creating procedural poems based on existing texts easy. “Poem HYPERTEXT AND CYBERTEXT generator” programs use text beds, dictionaries, and Hypertext poetry links electronic objects in a variety of concordances to generate their “computer written” ways so that users can navigate through a poem along poems. Other programs manipulate input words into various textual paths. The reader/operator has a choice forms of light poetry, such as the limerick. Influenced of one or more links to follow or actions to perform by procedural poetry, “cyberpoets” closely examine the from within a hypertext. Hyperlinks literally and figu- possibilities of analogy, metaphor, and logic to deter- ratively connect electronic objects, such as pages of mine new procedures to generate new poems. Thus coded text and pages of graphics files, allowing man- procedure in this particular sort of new cyberpoetry ual or automatic navigation from one object to another. replaces traditional form. Programmed links can vary the objects linked and the means of linkage. Pop-up links allow the display of MULTIMEDIA POETRY more than one set of objects at the same time. Authors Multimedia cyberpoetry uses sound, graphics, and text may use links to join a set of “written” objects to each in ways important to the poem’s form and content. A other or to join objects within the text to objects out- cyberpoem audio track is generally not a soundtrack side the hypertext. In this way a simile or metaphor in for the poem or a recorded performance of the poem. a poem might be a linked reference in a hypertext. A It adds another level of meaning. For example, the given poem might be extremely disjunctive or audio portion of “Projects for Mobile Phones” (2000) extremely linear, depending on choices the reader by Alan Sondheim uses the sounds of mobile phones makes as she or he clicks links to experience objects in to divide the poem into “calls” or “exchanges” rather an order the author cannot completely determine and than sections. the reader cannot completely anticipate or decide. A 116 CYBERPOETRY company called Eastgate created a computer program movement as a type of talk. Brackets enable her to for composing electronic literature called Storyspace. It express multiple words within her coinage. This enables writers of prose and poetry to develop writings method is also used to highlight literary-critical con- containing links and graphics without coding. Early cerns, such as the ways that languages convey mean- Eastgate poets, such as Stephanie STRICKLAND (Tr ue ing, the ways that languages exist, and the multiple North [1998]) and Robert Kendall (A Life Set for Two, interpretations offered even within single words. [1996]), continue to write hypertext poetry. Many poets now possess the technical skills, machinery, and COMPUTING ENVIRONMENTS, software, or they collaborate with programmers and INTERACTIVE POEMS designers, to create hypertext poetry. These languages are frequently used in on-line envi- While hypertext poetry presents poets and readers ronments that allow real people or created characters with opportunities to consider linear and nonlinear to interact. Electronic environments are also con- narrative and reader response beyond the limited anal- ducive to collaboration and enhance the interactive ogy, metaphor, and logic in procedural poetry, cybertext quality of poetry. Chat rooms allow written conversa- poetry moves beyond the link and investigates reader tions in real time online. MOOs (Multiple User Dun- response on a deeper level. Interacting with cybertexts geons Objected Oriented), which are similar to early involves readers’ queries, assumptions, and actions, computer game environments called MUDs, or “multi- which change readers’ perceptions of the cybertext dur- user dungeons,” based on the game “Dungeons and ing the course of the interaction. Critic Espen Aarseth Dragons,” allow characters with various sorts of attrib- suggests that cybertext is similar to traditional oracles, utes to interact through typed commands. MOOs have where the user asks a question and then interprets the been used as on-line classrooms. Bulletin boards, results in order to achieve a “reading.” where messages are posted and read, and listservs, where e-mails sent to an address are forwarded to each LANGUAGES AND member of a group, allow electronic communication SPECULATIVE LINGUISTICS over time. MOOs, MUDs, chat, and listserv environ- Cyberpoetry transcends national boundaries, since it ments allow cyberpoets Miekel And, Alan Sondheim, does not rely on a single language or set of letter forms. and others to manipulate the ways that a poet, narra- In this way it is similar to international concrete poetry tor, speaker, or character may write or be written in a and visual poetry. However, high-level programming poem and the time reading or writing a poem may languages are English-based. Computers are operated occupy. For example, some collaborations are based by predominantly English words. Some poets, such as on historical collaborative forms, such as Japanese John Cayley, employ this linguistic interchange and renga, with progressive stanzas written by different physicality by writing poems that execute as code. poets, and surrealist “exquisite corpses,” with progres- Cyberpoems can employ the substance of the Internet sive lines written by poets who have not read the pre- or of virtual reality, or they can perform actions in the ceding lines. real world. Mary Anne Breeze (a.k.a. “mez”), Strickland, and CYBERPOETRY DISSEMINATION other poets mix English with its computer languages to Popular and long-established listservs and other places increase the meanings of words. Breeze’s work is char- on the Internet containing cyberpoetry include Sond- acterized by the use of tags and symbols familiar to heim and Laurie Cubbison’s WRYTING, for collabora- computer users. Brackets and parentheses indicate tive writing, where Sondheim, Shiela E. Murphy, Peter multiple words within a single word. For example, Ganick, Ivan Arguelles, and others write poems dots ordinarily separate a file name from a file exten- together; Charles BERNSTEIN’s POETICS, for discussions sion, which identifies the type of file. In Breeze’s main of poetics and innovative post–LANGUAGE poetry; Annie site title, “mo[ve.men]toin,” the dots label or categorize FINCH’s WOM-PO, for women’s poetry; and John Kin- CYBERPOETRY 117 sella’s POETRYETC, for international poetry in English. ELO (Electronic Literature Organization). Available on- On-line hubs of American cyberpoetry and poetry line. URL: http://www.eliterature.org. Downloaded include Loss Pequeño Glazier’s Electronic Poetry Cen- December 2002. ter and Michael Neff’s Web del Sol. The website Poetry Landow, George P. Hypertext: The Convergence of Contempo- Daily offers a new poem each day. Most of its poems rary Critical Theory and Technology. Baltimore: Johns Hop- kins University Press, 1992. are traditional, and not cyberpoetry, but the dissemi- North American Centre for Interdisciplinary Poetics. Avail- nation of traditional poetry on-line offers poets an able on-line. URL: http://www.poetics.yorku.ca/. Down- introduction to reading and writing cyberpoetry. loaded December 2002. Perloff, Marjorie. Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of BIBLIOGRAPHY Media. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Aarseth, Espen. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. Catherine Daly C DD

“DADDY” SYLVIA PLATH (1965) Written father into a range of monstrous figures—Nazi, vam- during the final months of her life, “Daddy” is one of pire, devil—and resurrects him in the husband, “A Sylvia PLATH’s most famous poems. It may also be one man in black with a Meinkampf look,” whom she of the best-known examples of CONFESSIONAL POETRY in must kill as well. 20th-century literature, demonstrating both the posi- In the end, the speaker seems to triumph: “Daddy, tive and negative connotations associated with the daddy, you bastard, I’m through.” But it is unclear term. It has been praised by critics, such as George whether the speaker is through with the father or has Steiner, for successfully “translating a private, obvi- gotten through to him. For along with rage and vitriol, ously intolerable hurt into a code of plain statement, of the speaker expresses affection for the father and a instantaneously public images which concern us all” desire to connect with him. Nursery rhyme cadence (218). Some scholars, such as Helen Vendler, consider and relentless repetition of “oo” sounds create a sense of the poem an outstanding example of the possibilities of helpless entrapment that conflicts with the assertive LYRIC POETRY. Feminist critics have found it to be an and aggressive stance of the speaker, underscoring the effective exploration of feminine rage against male impossibility of ever genuinely achieving clear disen- power structures. Other readers, however, protest that gagement. As Jacqueline Rose notes, it is clear “that “Daddy” indulges in self-aggrandizement because the such an ending is only a beginning or repetition” (224). speaker aligns her suffering with that of Jewish victims While the conflict “Daddy” expresses has most of the Holocaust. “Daddy” elicits conflicting responses often been understood as personal rage, as Barbara from readers, for it is a poem that explores and enacts Hardy has suggested, by turning the father into a one of the contradictions at the heart of identity: the Nazi, Plath is able “to promote the private concern to need for, but impossibility of, self-definition. a public status” (222). Certainly Plath makes shocking Like much of Plath’s work from this period, use of the Holocaust in this poem, but it is clear that “Daddy” expresses anger and bitterness, blending she aims to disturb and disrupt; the shock is part of terse statements with repetitive phrasing and violent her poetic point. imagery. The poem rehearses Plath’s unresolved feel- BIBLIOGRAPHY ings about her father, who died when she was only Hardy, Barbara. “The Poetry of Sylvia Plath.” In Women eight, through a speaker who attempts to exorcise Reading Women’s Writing, edited by Sue Roe. Brighton, ritualistically the father’s malevolent and domineer- United Kingdom: Harvester Press, 1987, pp. 209–226. ing spirit: “Daddy, I have had to kill you.” Presenting Rose, Jacqueline. The Haunting of Sylvia Plath. Cambridge, herself as his victim, the speaker transforms the Mass. Harvard University Press, 1992.

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Steiner, George. “Dying Is an Art.” In The Art of Sylvia Plath: ited notions of femininity, by conceiving a self always A Symposium, edited by Charles Newman. London: Faber in the process of construction. In A Reading (1–7), she and Faber, 1970, pp. 211–218. writes, “this interminable work is women’s work, it is Lisa Sewell never done, it is there again and again. I live here, an unreconstructed housewife” (1985). The “house” is the DAHLEN, BEVERLY (1934– ) Working in “here” where the speaker lives, the writing/reading the broadly defined avant-garde tradition, Beverly process itself. Like the poem, her identity is indetermi- Dahlen experiments with form in her poetry while nate, fluid, and multiple; the speaker can write and drawing from a range of sources for her thematic con- rewrite herself. cerns, including art, philosophy, psychology, and criti- Dahlen’s desire to know, the primary impetus of A cal theory. Robert DUNCAN offered both inspiration and Reading, is tied up with a profound sense of language’s support for Dahlen’s early work. Like H. D. and limited abilities actually to reveal or represent reality: Gertrude STEIN before her, Dahlen brings intellectual “language language it is all made of language” (1989). breadth to her feminist exploration of the relationship The way to proceed, then, is by direct engagement between thought and language. Interested in examin- with language, its play and endless possibilities. ing the operations of language itself, Dahlen is most BIBLIOGRAPHY often associated with the LANGUAGE SCHOOL of poetry. DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Dahlen was born on November 7, 1934, in Port- Practice. New York: Routledge, 1990. land, Oregon. She earned a B.A. from California State Perelman, Bob. “Facing the Surface: Representation of Rep- University, Humboldt, and attended San Francisco resentation.” North Dakota Quarterly 55.4 (fall 1987): State University for postgraduate studies. Dahlen’s 301–311. verse and essays have appeared in numerous journals, Simpson, Megan. Poetic Epistemologies: Gender and Knowing and she has published six collections of poetry. Her in Women’s Language-Oriented Writing. Albany: State Uni- major poetic work, A Reading, is published in three versity of New York Press, 2000. volumes: A Reading (1–7) (1985), A Reading (11–17) Megan Simpson (1989), and A Reading (8–10) (1992). Conceived as a lifelong project, A Reading suggests DAVIDSON, DONALD (1893–1968) Don- that writing is a process of discovery rather than mere ald Davidson is the third member, with John Crowe description. Dahlen’s subject in the work’s untitled, RANSOM and Allen TATE, of the tripartite leadership of numbered sections is, in the broadest sense, herself: a the literary group known as the southern FUGITIVES/ self comprised of lived experience, an unconscious, AGRARIANS. Although Davidson is perhaps the least language, culture, and history. Modeled after Sigmund known of this group of poet-critics, he was a vital Freud’s (1856–1939) method of free association in force in the development of a body of poetry and a psychoanalysis and composed in verse as well as distinctive critical vision that sought to incorporate prose, A Reading resists any final conclusions. Anglo-Saxon and southern traditions within a mod- Through this “interminable reading. the infinite analy- ern context. sis” (1985), Dahlen is trying to reveal the contents of Born in Campbellsville, Tennessee, Davidson the unconscious itself. And because “there is nothing entered Vanderbilt University in 1909, eventually in the unconscious which corresponds to no” (1985), earning a master’s degree and becoming a literature A Reading is all inclusive as well, roping in memory, professor. At Vanderbilt he became part of a coterie dreams, myth, literary theory, psychology, and a range that formed the southern Fugitives and, between 1922 of other poetry. and 1925, published an influential literary magazine Dahlen is especially concerned with Western defini- called the Fugitive. His works of poetry include The tions of gender that sharply distinguish between male Outland Piper (1924), The Tall Men (1927), and Lee in and female. She resists these, as well as fixed and lim- the Mountains and Other Poems (1938). 120 DAVIDSON, MICHAEL

Davidson’s conception of poetry embraced the oral nial. Davidson’s wry depiction of the oblivious tradition as an element essential to the community, passersby suggests the risks faced by ignoring tradition necessary both for identity and survival. Poetry, there- as the speaker criticizes those who would turn tradi- fore, must always give form to communal experience, tion into mere convention because they do not under- thus providing a medium through which traditions are stand their cultural foundation. preserved. For the Fugitives-Agrarians, this belief BIBLIOGRAPHY derived from the southern sensibility that included a Cowan, Louise. The Southern Critics. Irving, Texas: Univer- strong attachment to the traditional values of loyalty to sity of Dallas Press, 1972. family, place, and God. Contrary to many of the other Davidson, Donald. Still Rebels Still Yankees and Other Essays. Fugitives, however, who tended to bemoan the Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1957. encroaching loss of such traditional attachments in the modern world, Davidson emphasized their enduring Carol Marion presence. His best poem, “Lee in the Mountains, 1865–1870” (1934), depicts Robert E. Lee while pres- DAVIDSON, MICHAEL (1944– ) Robert ident of Washington College—far from Appomattox DUNCAN, in a blurb that appeared on Michael David- and the Confederate surrender. Lee contemplates the son’s first book-length collection, The Mutabilities southern virtues that guided his actions during the (1976), wrote that Davidson “is the full heir of the New “War between the States” and considers how they con- American Poetry (see POETRY ANTHOLOGIES) that has its tinue to guide his life. He concludes that although the roots in the late works of William Carlos WILLIAMS and Civil War may have been lost, the significance of cul- Wallace STEVENS. He has developed beyond the work of tural traditions was not. Thus the poem emphasizes my own generation.” Duncan’s statement signals the importance of such loyalty, as the narrator observes Davidson’s success in combining the most important that God waits “To bring this lost forsaken valor . . . midcentury advances in poetics with the new commu- Unto all generations of the faithful heart.” nities that would soon come to be known as poetries Some of Davidson’s distinctive traits include his of the LANGUAGE SCHOOL. insistence on the necessity of a relationship between Born in Oakland, California, Davidson has been a high art and folk art, the need for a writer to preserve lifelong Californian despite his many visits to other regional ties, and a preference for the committed lyric parts of the world. He earned a B.A. at San Francisco and the heroic voice rather than the more obscure, State University in 1967 and went on to complete a impersonal style of the poets of MODERNISM. Moreover Ph.D. at the State University of New York, Buffalo, in he recognized the difficulty of the southern writer: He 1972. He has been the recipient of a National Endow- was both unable to embrace the modern trends that ment for the Arts grant (1976) as well as two grants scorned southern heritage and unwilling to endorse a from the California Council for the Humanities (1979, backward-seeming culture. His figurative compromise 1980). In 1993 and 1995, he also received awards from was to embrace southern qualities, including what he the Fund for Poetry. In addition to his work as a poet, identified as “exuberance, sensitiveness, liveliness of Davidson is an internationally recognized critic and imagination, warmth and flexibility of temper” (Cowan scholar. Long associated with the Language poets, he 52). These traits can be seen particularly in “Randall, traveled with other associates from that community to My Son” (1955), “Sanctuary” (1938), and “Hermitage” the Soviet Union and subsequently published Leningrad (1943), all of which use narrative within the poetry, (1991), jointly authored with Lyn HEJINIAN, Ron SILLI- commemorating familial and cultural events in the MAN, and Barrett WATTEN. His major works of poetry process. One notable poem, “On a Replica of the include The Prose of Fact (1981), The Landing of Rocham- Parthenon” (1955), refers to contemporary Nashville, beau (1985), Post Hoc (1990), and The Arcades (1998). Tennessee, and its full-scale replica of the Greek In a special issue of Occident devoted to Davidson Parthenon, built to commemorate the state’s centen- and Michael PALMER, David BROMIGE remarks that the “THE DAY LADY DIED” 121

“satirical, scandalous and life-affirming elements in claims for it; it is about the day itself, and not explic- Davidson’s poetry co-exist in a happy solution” (42); itly about the death of Billie Holiday (or Lady Day) that happy solution is readily evident in Post Hoc: until almost the end. “nothing in the desert / is left over / even the sand / is Implicitly, however, the poem points to its conclu- an example.” Equal parts philosophy and lyric, David- sion through the variety of specific references to son’s poems make music of their own self-inspection: African and African-American subjects. The first of “between them / difference forms on a slide / like a these occurs when O’Hara has his shoes shined, pre- chair made out of flesh / in the phrase ‘I’ll think on it.’” sumably by a black man because of the poem’s explicit (“The Last Word on the Sign” [1990]). Not since Louis situation in place and time, America in 1959. He also ZUKOFSKY has an American poet placed such lyric mentions Ghanaian poets seemingly in passing and weight upon such a simple preposition: Is the speaker includes Jean Genet’s (1910–86) play Les Nègres among on the chair, thinking, or is the speaker thinking of the the books he considers purchasing. It is only from the chair? Seldom has a final pronoun been so deliciously perspective of the jazz bar, the renowned Five Spot, at ambiguous, and yet it shows us how our language the end of the poem that the poem’s investment in race supports our every day. Bruce Campbell notes that becomes clearly visible. O’Hara, yielding to his per- there is “a fine distinction between poetry (or art) and sonal preferences, also salts his account with all man- philosophy, but it is the kind of distinction which can ner of things French: brands of cigarettes, names of be used” (111). From Discovering Motion (1980) playwrights and poets, even a national holiday (which through Analogy of the Ion (1988), Davidson has made again neatly suggests his somewhat-secret subject’s a practice of turning such distinctions back upon identity). The poem is filled with very specific names themselves, demonstrating for readers how that kind and places. O’Hara does not go into an unidentified of useful practice of poetry might sound. shop to buy an unnamed item for an anonymous BIBLIOGRAPHY friend; rather he states that “in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN Campbell, P. Michael, ed. Occident: Special Issue on Michael I get a little Verlaine / for Patsy” and through these Davidson and Michael Palmer. CIII.1 (1990). details grants readers intimate entry into the poem’s places and events. By the time he arrives in the past— Aldon L. Nielsen in his memory of Billie Holiday singing—a reader is there with him, “leaning on the john door in the 5 “THE DAY LADY DIED” FRANK O’HARA SPOT,” just as that reader has already eaten lunch, (1964) This postmodern elegy for Billie Holiday is bought liquor, and sweated in the summer heat. an example of Frank O’HARA’s tendency to write occa- In this poem O’Hara captures an experience every- sional poems and often to write them on the occasion one knows, and does so best because he does it of death. It is also a prime example of what he called through a specific surreal experience. He demonstrates “I do this, I do that” poems, wherein the speaker cat- how mundane activities can become significant retro- alogues events in a running commentary (Gooch spectively, how things that otherwise would never be 288). O’Hara likened his poems to “unmade tele- remembered are magnified by their proximity to some- phone calls” (qtd. in Gooch 150), and, indeed, this thing that makes the world stop breathing. And he poem has, at the end of the second line, the implied listener found in a dramatic monologue when the gently makes a reader remember a moment when it speaker confirms something to the listener (the recip- seemed impossible that the world could go on shop- ient of the “telephone call”) as though the listener has ping and shining its shoes because something cata- spoken. In fact, the poem’s “call” was merely delayed clysmic has happened. a few hours because O’Hara read it that same evening BIBLIOGRAPHY to the friends he buys gifts for, according to the poem’s Ellridge, Jim, ed. Frank O’Hara: To Be True to a City. Ann account. The poem is, on the surface, what its title Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990. 122 “THE DEATH OF THE BALL TURRET GUNNER”

Gooch, Brad. City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O’Hara. icance of the positions up and down. Whereas the former New York: Knopf, 1993. generally signifies life or spirituality and the latter death, A. Mary Murphy in Jarrell’s poem, the gunner ascends only to realize his own demise. Dawson suggests that the six-mile altitude “THE DEATH OF THE BALL TURRET of the gunner’s plane stands as a symbolic inversion of a GUNNER” RANDALL JARRELL (1945) grave’s traditional six-foot depth (238). Finally, the tran- Shocking the reader with its concise, gruesome ending, sition to wakefulness from sleep is generally character- this is among the most powerful and successful Amer- ized as a journey from dream or nightmare to clarity or ican poems about World War II. The poem briefly tells sanity. The gunner, however, awakens from his “dream the story of a young airman who is horrifically killed of life” only to discover the nightmare of aerial and, during a mission. Because he “washed out” of pilot ultimately, mortal combat. training, Randall JARRELL never experienced aerial com- BIBLIOGRAPHY bat. He did, however, train bomber crews. It was prob- Cornelius, David K. “Jarrell’s ‘The Death of the Ball Turret ably through the carrying out of his instructional Gunner.’” In Critical Essays on Randall Jarrell, edited by duties that Jarrell became familiar with the ball turret, Suzanne Ferguson. Boston, Mass.: G.K. Hall, 1983, p. 240. a small Plexiglas bubble protruding from the underside Dawson, Leven. “Jarrell’s ‘The Death of the Ball Turret Gun- of a bomber plane. ner.’” In Critical Essays on Randall Jarrell, edited by Suzanne Sitting in an upside-down position in the revolving Ferguson. Boston, Mass.: G.K. Hall, 1983, pp. 238–239. turret, with his knees drawn up to his chin, the gun- Douglas W. Texter ner, resembling a fetus in the womb, would operate two machine guns. The bubble’s exposed location and DEEP IMAGE POETRY Deep image poetry relatively flimsy construction made the turret and its was part of the post–World War II, New American operator vulnerable to machine-gun and cannon fire poetry inspired by the BEATs and the BLACK MOUNTAIN from fighter planes. A gunner also faced danger from SCHOOL. The “deep” of deep image refers not to some “flak” (exploding shells fired from ground-based anti- attempt at political or philosophical “profundity” but to aircraft artillery); as the last line of Jarrell’s poem makes the “direction of seeing” (Rothenberg 31). It refers to the poignantly clear, a direct hit from “flak” could, quite inwardness of the poetry, which plumbs the self in order literally, liquefy an unfortunate gunner: “When I died to express, and perhaps transform, the world. The depth they washed me out of the turret with a hose.” of the image is the measure of how far it can provide a The poem confronts both its speaker and readers link between the internal and external worlds. with what Leven Dawson terms “a series of paradoxes or The term deep image poetry refers to poems pro- reversals” (238). For example, the gunner emerges from duced by a loose collection of poets spread geographi- one womb—a natural, life-nourishing space provided cally across the United States and chronologically over by his mother—only to enter another, the turret into a period that included most of the 1960s and the early which the state, in need of “human resources,” summar- part of the 1970s. Mainly it refers to three groups sur- ily deposits him. This second womb, though, does not rounding Robert KELLY, Jerome ROTHENBERG, and provide nurturing and sustenance; instead, it offers only Robert BLY. What the three groups shared and what combat, fear, and, ultimately, death. Indeed, David K. distinguished deep image poetry from other contem- Cornelius expands the metaphor of turret as womb by porary forms of poetry was, in the words of Dennis asserting that the poem’s final line suggests an abortion Haskell, the “rational manipulation of irrational mate- (240). Jarrell’s use of the phrase washed out also suggests rials” (142). The deep image poets tried to avoid highly an aviator’s having failed in training. In the gunner’s polished philosophical poetry in favor of a poetry that case, however, his very success in completing training expressed the chaos of the psychological world. speeds him toward the ultimate failure, his own destruc- Given the manifold forms of psychological chaos, tion. In addition the poem inverts the traditional signif- there is no such thing as a typical deep image poem. DEEP IMAGE POETRY 123

However, the description of the eponymous night in HOWL and Other Poems (1956) had inspired the Beat Robert Kelly’s “Of this night” (the first poem in Armed poets. Since it was founded for neither ideological nor Descent [1961]) as something that comes alive with a programmatical reasons, deep image poetry could “roar of things out of the streets” is typical of the inter- comfortably include a bewildering variety of styles, penetration of the internal world of the psyche and the content, and even personnel. It is evident in the pages external world. In this case the idea or feeling of of Trobar that, with no explicit membership criteria, “night” has just been explicitly “covered with skin”— poets became deep image poets by association. Not made into something internal that can exist outside— many of the larger group of Beats, apart from Gary SNY- but it is still a confused and “savage” personification. DER, were in any way affiliated with deep image, but “This night” takes its life from the internal life of the many of the influential poets formerly associated with poet and provides, as a consequence, “an entrance to a the Black Mountain school can be found in the pages living house”—an entrance by way of the night and the of Trobar, including Olson, Creeley, Paul BLACKBURN, poem, to the inner world of the speaker. Robert DUNCAN, and Edward DORN. Individual poets had been writing poetry that could Since the size and orientation of the three inter- be called deep image poetry for some years, but they woven groups gathered around Rothenberg, Kelly, and were not identifiable as a coherent group until several Bly was continually changing, the membership of the of them were included in Donald HALL’s 1964 anthol- “movement,” even at a given point in time, is difficult ogy Contemporary American Poetry (see POETRY to delineate. It is important to note, however, that the ANTHOLOGIES). Rothenberg had coined the term in three groups comprised separate poets and groups of 1960: It is a significant part of a published letter to poets whose ideas, writing and thoughts converged— Robert CREELEY in which Rothenberg explains the prin- they were not members of a single group that splin- ciples underlying his own poetic practices. Kelly tered through specific disagreements. Each of the picked up on the term, and deep image poetry is the groups had its own journal, but the poets in each subject of two theoretical notes in Kelly’s Trobar jour- group wrote, spoke, and contributed work to each nal as well as, arguably, the primary content of the other regularly. POETRY JOURNAL. The first of these groups, the neosurrealists, was No single event marked the end of deep image gathered around Rothenberg and the journal he edited, poetry, but as the 1970s wore on the term became Poems from the Floating World. Although he did not more open to parody and met with increasing disap- manifest this at the time, he later said that he always proval from both critics and early exponents, who felt thought of the journal as an ongoing anthology of deep that the earlier styles, subjects, and tones of the poetry image poetry. Including David ANTIN, Armand SCHWER- had become superficial and clichéd. In 1976 Robert NER, and Jackson MAC LOW, this group was particularly PINSKY articulated this feeling in his book The Situation interested in tapping into “a general subjective life” of Poetry, which critiqued the debased deep image (Haskell 142). In their schema, deep image poetry is an poems that were by that time standard in contempo- attempt to bring the personal (the specific) and the rary books and magazines. Although this critique external (the general) into communication by using the marked a decisive blow to those who were still identi- image. Their poetry, especially that of Rothenberg, dis- fying themselves as deep image poets in the late 1970s, played a symbolist belief that the hidden world could in 1979 it was still possible for Haskell to refer, in an be perceived through its external manifestations and article in Southern Review, to deep image poetry as part that an image unifying the inner and outer could be of the “current state of American poetry” (137). found inside one’s own observations. No single acknowledged manifesto defined deep Rothenberg was fascinated by the potential of a image poetry in the way Charles OLSON’s 1950 “Projec- deeply inward image to link the specific self to the tive Verse” had declared the intentions of the Black general world. He quotes from French poet Charles Mountain School (see ARS POETICAS), or Allen GINSBERG’s Baudelaire to make his point that “the poem ‘will 124 DEEP IMAGE POETRY

contain, at one and the same time, the object and the Bly and James WRIGHT were the main figures in the subject, the external world and the artist himself’” third group, which founded and published the Fifties (32). His poem series “Whichever Road I Took, I (the journal subsequently became the Sixties and, Somehow Kept Coming Back to the Place Where I briefly, the Seventies). According to Michael DAVIDSON Had Started” (1961), published across Trobar 2 and and Haskell, this group also included W. S. MERWIN, 3, narrates the journey of a self in a “strange country” Galway KINNELL, Hall, Mark STRAND, and Louis SIMPSON. and the difficulty of relating to others in it. The series Bly was only reluctantly a deep image poet. He did not ends with “A word of greeting [that] passes when we like the term and preferred to call it “leaping poetry” to touch,” suggesting that, with the word of greeting, distinguish it from the work of the IMAGIST SCHOOL, the artist has somehow achieved a correspondence which he thought was misguided. Bly was particularly between the internal and external world. interested in trying to combine inward reflection with The second group formed around Kelly and Trobar. a lightness and an energy that would then have a pos- Despite more optimistic intentions, Trobar was pub- itive impact on and insight into the external world. He lished only five times between 1960 and 1964, but it preferred to define the poetry in terms of its energy provided a central forum. It was edited by Robert and instead of its chosen image. Joan Kelly along with George ECONOMOU and was ded- Bly thought of the image as a “physical thing”—“a icated to deep image poetry. In addition to poetry by body where psychic energy is free to move around.” Economou, Kelly, and Rothenberg, the output of this For Bly “leaping” meant expressing energy in jumps of group included work by Diane WAKOWSKI, Rochelle association that mapped out an image through a poem OWENS, Clayton ESHLEMAN, LeRoi Jones (Amiri BARAKA), (“Looking” 4). He felt that contemporary poets were so Maragaret Randall, and Gerrit LANSING (all of whom overwhelmed by rules that they were no longer capa- contributed to two or more issues of Trobar). This was ble of recognizing the power of a thought: “It’s as if a an even looser grouping than the neosurrealists. Tro- bull woke up one day with so much energy, he ignored bar published two of the only theoretical notes (writ- the fence posts and barn door of his pasture and cre- ten by Kelly and Rothenberg) that discuss what might ated Assyria instead!!” (“Infantilism” 259). Despite the be meant by deep image poetry and what might be fact that the energy of “the bull” (the image) might let gained by its adoption, and so the journal makes for it define “Assyria,” his direct predecessors were eclectic reading. obsessed with the “fence posts” and were unable to see In his 1961 “Notes on the poetry of deep image,” the “bull.” For Bly “the bull” embodied the energy of a Kelly makes clear that context is crucial: “Nothing can poem and defined it far more than the delineating be known unless it is known in situ” (14). At the heart “fence posts” of convention. The poet’s mandate was of his project is a hope that, by placing images in a not to dwell within barn doors but to leap with the bull poem where the context allows them to resonate to map new realms symbolized by “Assyria.” through each other, deep image poetry can effect the Bly claims that this “fantastic freedom of associa- “transformation of the perceived world.” For Kelly tion” was evident in “ancient art” (“Looking” 6), but it deep image poetry comes from an attempt, in lan- was gradually excised from mainstream English poetry guage, to link together percepts, the basic units of per- after “Chaucer and Langland” (4). All three groups ception—an impression of the senses in the mind. The were influenced by the Spanish example of duende image is “the clothed percept” (16). Perhaps closer to (Federico García Lorca’s elusive term meaning some- Olson than either Bly or Rothenberg, Kelly claims that thing between “inspiration” and “energy”) and by the image is inextricably related to the line: “the image examples of associative ability that come to us through is the measure of the line” (16). It is not a single image modern psychologists like Sigmund Freud and Carl that imbues the poem with power but the sequence of Jung, older poets like Friedrich Hölderlin, Novalis, images for which the lines have been created: “The line and William Blake, and contemporary poetry in other is cut with the image in mind” (16). languages, most notably from Spanish—especially “DESIGN” 125

Pablo Neruda, César Vallejo, Antonio Machado, and The deep image movement was roughly contempo- Lorca, many of whom Bly translated for publication. rary with the war in Vietnam and became caught up in As part of its psychologized interest in the mind, many aspects of it. The protests and social changes deep image poetry was heavily influenced by foreign around the end of the Vietnam War had transformed thinkers, writers, and spiritualists. Rather than trace its the practice of the leading deep image writers in ways genealogy from contemporary English poetry, it saw that varied from one to the other. As these originators itself as an inheritor of poetic/prophetic practice that, as moved on to follow their own diverging stylistic and has been mentioned, it shared with contemporary sur- political paths, derivative poets and poetry were left to realist poets in French and Spanish and that stretched carry on deep image poetry. With the ending of the back through Martin Buber and Jung to visionaries like war, a new paradigm was needed for American society Blake and Jacob Boehme. This was a positive decision and its poetry; although Haskell could still write of it in favor of writers whose subjects and tone were more in the present tense in 1979, deep image poetry had appealing, but it was also part of a rebellion against the already ended by then as a viable movement. strictures of New Criticism (see FUGITIVE/AGRARIAN BIBLIOGRAPHY SCHOOL) and its accompanying poetry. Bly, Robert. “Infantilism and Adult Swiftness: An Interview Bly rebelled not only against established ideas of with Ekbert Faas.” In Talking All Morning. Ann Arbor: poetry but also against establishment politics. He wrote University of Michigan Press, 1981, pp. 251–283. exuberant poems whose images leapt from personal ———. “Looking for Dragon Smoke.” In Leaping Poetry: An psychology to the national psyche to global events. Ini- Idea with Poems and Translations. Boston: Beacon Press, tially these were humorous—such as when he describes 1972. how he had behaved when he was president: crushing Davidson, Michael. “American Poetry.” In The New Princeton snails barefoot, sleeping in his underwear, eating Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, edited by Alex Pre- Cubans with a straw (“Three Presidents” [1968]). minger and T. V. F. Brogan. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Increasingly, however, as with many deep image poets, University Press, 1993. pp. 47–66. his poems became infused with a bitterness about the Haskell, Dennis. “The Modern American Poetry of Deep Image.” Southern Review 12 (1979): 137–166. involvement of the United States in Vietnam. Kelly, Robert. “Notes on the Poetry of Deep Image.” Trobar 2 Among other poems from Bly’s The Light around the (1961): 14–16. Body (1967), both “At a March Against the Vietnam Rothenberg, Jerome. Pre-faces & Other Writings. New York: War” (23) and “Driving through Minnesota During the New Directions, 1981. Hanoi Bombings” (27) trace the movement of the ———. “Why Deep Image?” Trobar 3 (1961): 31–32. image from the internal world to the domestic political world to global consequences. In “At a March” the Dan Friedman speaker’s personal vision of feet moving turns into a collective burden—a “cup of darkness” inherited from “DESIGN” ROBERT FROST (1936) “Design” the Puritans, “As they went out to kill turkeys.” Inex- is one of many poems in which Robert FROST’s speakers orably the same feet carry the reader to the time when, express alienation from nature. John Lynen asserts that using the “cup of darkness,” the same collective makes Frost’s conception of nature differs from those of his war, “Like a man anointing himself.” “Driving” also romantic and Victorian predecessors: “By insisting on traces the connections between a Minnesota summer the gulf separating man and nature, [Frost] directly and the Hanoi bombings. The ramifications of parties opposes the romantic attempt to bring the two together. in Minnesota are felt as hangovers that end up “In While the romantics sought a place for sensations, feel- Asia.” Self-disgust mixes with self-love in America so ings, and values within physical nature, he conceives of that although “We were the ones we intended to the physical world as a distinct level of being” (181). In bomb!” an inexorable chain of events and images “Design,” Frost sees nature as inscrutable and frighten- means that it is the “small rice-fed ones” who suffer. ing. This view is related to an alienation from society 126 DICKEY, JAMES

and even from self that characterizes many American “primitive” poets, such as Theodore ROETHKE and poems of the 20th century. Robert Penn WARREN, James Dickey early on exhibited, The poem is an Italian sonnet, consisting of an octave in tone and diction, a kinship with the FUGITIVE/AGRAR- (eight lines describing a scene or situation) and a sestet IAN SCHOOL, but his driving rhythms also echoed the (six lines of commentary). The octave describes a micro- popular poetry of Edgar Allan Poe and Robert Service. cosmic scene, in which a spider on a flower holds up the Visionary and surrealistic, grounded in the southern severed wings of a moth it has caught in the night. Frost landscape both geographically and metaphysically, employs sardonic similes and metaphors that belie the Dickey was ideologically and stylistically at odds with gruesome character of the scene: One comparison asso- antimilitaristic contemporaries like Robert BLY, with ciates the spider’s actions with playfulness. Moreover the whom he publicly feuded, and CONFESSIONAL poets like speaker remarks that such elements of destruction and Robert LOWELL, Sylvia PLATH, and Anne SEXTON, whom disease seem quite natural. As Mordecai Marcus he dubbed the “school of gabby agony” (“Lecture”). observes, “Design” is “[p]erhaps the most often initially The distinctive margin-to-margin lines he developed in misunderstood of Frost’s poems . . . because of its appar- his later work, which use space—rather than line ent matter-of-factness and mock cheerfulness” (152). breaks or punctuation—to indicate pauses and high- In the sestet, Frost’s speaker asks a series of questions light rhythm, derive from the influence of Walt Whit- about the scene and its purport. The flower is normally man and Hart CRANE. blue: Why is the one on which the spider caught the Dickey was born in Buckhead, Georgia. His father, moth an anomalous albino? Why did the moth alight on Eugene Dickey, was a lawyer who encouraged a love of this flower? Was it drawn in the dark by its whiteness? oratory in his second son through the reading of Why did the spider choose to climb this flower? Frost’s famous legal trials aloud. His mother, Maibelle Swift use of verbs suggests a force—divine intervention, fate, Dickey, who frequently quoted Alfred, Lord Tennyson natural law—that governs all occurrences. Frost seems and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, was an invalid who to imply that they are not merely happenstances at all. whistled as she lay in bed, a practice that would inspire His word for this force is design. He implies with his one of Dickey’s greatest poems, “Buckdancer’s Choice” rhetorical questions that the microcosm of the spider, (1965): “Warbling all day to herself / The thousand flower, and moth may be extrapolated to the macrocosm variations of one song.” Dickey attended Clemson of human fate. It is perhaps this recognition that proves A&M (now Clemson University) in South Carolina for most frightening to the speaker and, by extension, to the one semester before enlisting in the U.S. Army Air reader. As the critic Lionel Trilling once observed in a Corps in 1943. He served as a bombardier in the 418th speech in Frost’s honor, “I think of Robert Frost as a ter- Night Fighter Squadron in the South Pacific through rifying poet. . . . The universe that he conceives is a ter- 1945, flying in approximately 100 combat missions rifying universe. Read the poem called ‘Design’ and see between 1943 and 1945. During the long idle periods if you sleep the better for it” (qtd. in Lynen 189–190). between missions, he began to read poetry seriously; when the war ended, he enrolled at Vanderbilt Univer- BIBLIOGRAPHY sity, earning a B.A. in 1949 and an M.A. in 1950. It was Lynen, John. “Frost as Modern Poet.” In Robert Frost: A Col- at Vanderbilt that he began to write poetry. Dickey lection of Critical Essays, edited by James M. Cox. Engle- wood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1962, pp. 177–197. joined the faculty at Rice Institute in the fall of 1950 Marcus, Mordecai. The Poems of Robert Frost: An Explication. but was recalled to active military duty in the Korean Boston: G. K. Hall, 1991. War four months later. After serving two years, he returned to Rice, where he taught until 1954, when he Edwin J. Barton received a Sewanee Review fellowship, which he used to travel to Europe and concentrate on his writing. DICKEY, JAMES (1923–1997) Emerging from At the age of 34, he sought a new career in New no specific “school” but clearly allied with modern York and entered the advertising field while continuing DIGGES, DEBORAH 127 to write poetry, eventually relocating to Atlanta. Upon without me. / My sight is the same as the sun’s.” being a awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for Through his heightened awareness to his surround- 1961–62, Dickey abandoned advertising and traveled ings, the speaker enters a visionary state wherein the to Positano, Italy, where he wrote Drowning with Others physical world reveals the metaphysical. In this state, (1962), his first full-length volume of poetry. Upon his he grasps “The source of all song at the root.” In this return to the United States, he served as poet-in-resi- poem and in much of Dickey’s work, the speaker is dence at several colleges and published two more vol- actively engaged with the world around him and is fre- umes of poetry. The second of these, Buckdancer’s quently in conflict—with nature, family history, mili- Choice (1966), won the National Book Award, the tary enemies, lovers, his own body—but he is also Melville Cane Award from the Poetry Society of Amer- marvelously attuned, literally transforming himself ica, and a National Institute of Arts and Letters Award. into the objects, events, animals, and people he Dickey served as consultant in poetry for the Library of observes and envisions. While his work often deals Congress from 1966–68. From 1968 until his death, with dark subjects—bestiality, death, rape, adultery, he taught at the University of South Carolina. In 1977 voyeurism, execution, firebombing—it always affirms he wrote and read “The Strength of Fields” for Jimmy the life force and the power of the imagination to trans- Carter’s inaugural celebration, and in 1988 he was form existence. One of his best-known poems, inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Let- “Falling” (1981), is based on the death of a flight atten- ters. During his career he published three novels, dant who was sucked from a plane. Dickey transforms including the extremely successful Deliverance (1970), this bizarre and tragic event into a mythical visitation, several books of criticism, and two children’s books, in with the flight attendant—from whose point of view addition to his many volumes of poetry, the last of the poem is imagined—reimagined as a fertility god- which, The Eagle’s Mile, was published in 1990. dess blessing the earth with her death: As the farmers Dickey was dubbed “the unlikeliest of poets” by Life walk toward her broken body, they move “Toward the magazine in 1966—a characterization he reinforced flowering of the harvest in their hands.” through his frequent and electrifying readings (O’Neill BIBLIOGRAPHY 68). He called his tireless attempts to bring poetry to Baughman, Ronald. Understanding James Dickey. Columbia: the people—through readings, interviews, teaching, University of South Carolina Press, 1985. his role as consultant to the Library of Congress, and Dickey, James. “The Energized Man.” In The Imagination as casual encounters—”barnstorming for poetry” (“Lec- Glory: The Poetry of James Dickey, edited by Bruce Weigl ture”), and his ideal of the poet was a man of action— and T. R. Hummer. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, both master and student of the natural world—the 1984, pp. 163–165. “energized man” (“The Energized Man” 163). Dickey ———. “Lecture.” Lecture given as part of the American described the energized man as “the man with vivid Poetry Course at the University of South Carolina, senses, the man alert to the nuances and meanings of Columbia, S.C., spring 1994. his own experience, the man able to appreciate and O’Neill, Paul. “The Unlikeliest Poet.” Life 61 (22 July 1966): 68–70. evaluate the relation between words in the right order” (“The Energized Man” 163–164). Although Dickey Melissa Johnson emphatically stated that he was not this man, he is evoked in Dickey’s poetry. DIGGES, DEBORAH (1950– ) Deborah In “Sleeping Out at Easter” (1960), the speaker is Digges writes highly wrought and musical LYRIC POETRY transformed into the energized man through his con- that connects personal revelation to historical contexts tact with nature as he camps out in his backyard with and social consequences. Her poems combine com- his child. He is able to see beyond the dark night, his plex syntax, formal music, and erudition with a deep human fear and alienation, and to tap into a larger and startling compassion for all forms of life. At times understanding of the universe: “One eye opens slowly her poetry evokes the dense ecstatic music of Gerard 128 DI PRIMA, DIANE

Manley Hopkins and Dylan Thomas, but she brings a musical ear and keen eye: “they balance on a car door distinctly feminine sensibility to this synthesis of song riding rat-chewed coach seats, / they roller-spread a and intense feeling. Peppered with allusions to the sky.” In Rough Music, the formal elements are more dif- natural sciences, philosophy, astronomy, archaeology, fuse, but they help to contain the ratcheting up of and ancient and contemporary history, her poems are emotion. As Baker suggests, in these poems, technical challenging but engaging as she shifts mercurially strategies provide “a series of frames by which to con- between celebration and despair, rumination and tain grief and to ‘atone’ for disaster or destruction with ecstasy, rebellion and remorse. Theodore ROETHKE has discipline” (201). influenced her work, and her eye for significant detail In her poetry, Digges draws on public rituals and recalls Elizabeth BISHOP, though Digges is more direct forms to make sense of private, often painful experience. in her exuberance and less restrained in her sorrows. Her willingness to delve intensely into emotional tur- Digges was born and raised in Jefferson, Missouri. moil is balanced by a skillful and inventive use of form. Her first book, Vesper Sparrows (1986), received the BIBLIOGRAPHY Delmore Schwartz Memorial Prize in 1987. Her third Baker, David. “Line by Line.” Kenyon Review 18:3–4 (sum- book, Rough Music (1995), won the Kingsly-Tufts Prize mer–fall 1996): 191–205. in 1996. Besides her poetry, Digges has translated the Boruch, Marianne. “Comment: The Feel of a Century.” work of Cuban poet Maria Elena Cruz Varela and is the American Poetry Review 19:4 (July–August 1990): 17–20. author of two memoirs, Fugitive Spring (1992) and The Graham, Jorie. Review of Vesper Sparrows, by Deborah Stardust Lounge (2001). She has also been awarded a Digges. New York Times Book Review (28 September number of fellowships. 1986): 32. Early in her career, Digges was praised for her Lisa Sewell “effortless music” and “passionate intuition,” by Jorie GRAHAM, and she retains these qualities throughout her DI PRIMA, DIANE (1934– ) Diane di work (31). In Vesper Sparrows and Late in the Millen- Prima is arguably the most well-known female BEAT nium, Digges demonstrates her ability to merge formal writer. However, her work extends beyond the affilia- writing with personal concerns, as in “The Rockettes,” tion with the Beats to address nature and ecological a modified villanelle about her mother, and “Hall of concerns, family and children, revolutionary politics, Souls,” a brilliant sestina about cycles of birth and loss American Indian mysticism, and Buddhism. She (see PROSODY AND FREE VERSE). embraced feminism early (see FEMALE VOICE, FEMALE Rough Music marks a decisive shift in Digges’s work. LANGUAGE), and although she appears at times to depict The volume mourns a broken relationship but, as women in a submissive position to that of men, she, in David Baker writes, “without self-pity or blame, with- fact, advocates an active participation for women, a out the rehearsal of confessions or accusations” (201). role, as she says in Memoirs of a Beatnik (1969), that Digges reveals her considerable erudition with allu- will “initiate the dance” (5). sions to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charles Darwin, Sig- Di Prima was born in New York City. In the early mund Freud, medical procedures, and medieval 1950s, she left Swarthmore College for Greenwich Vil- rituals, but she also injects the poems with a rougher lage, where she met Allen GINSBERG, Jack KEROUAC, and cadence and harsher, grittier imagery. “Broom” ritual- LeRoi Jones (Amiri BARAKA). With Jones, she founded izes loss by focusing on an ordinary household object the newsletter the Floating Bear; she also helped to and imaginatively transforming it into “an oar that found Poets Press and the New York Poets Theater. She parted waters, raft-keel and mast, or twirled / around has lived and taught in California since the 1970s and and around on the back lawn, / a sort of compass.” has published more than 30 books of poetry and Writing about graffiti-making street gangs in “Tombs of prose, including This Kind of Bird Flies Backward the Muses,” Digges displays her ability to identify with (1958), Revolutionary Letters (1968), and the book- those outside her immediate experience as well as her length poem LOBA (1978; expanded 1998). In 1993 she DISCRETE SERIES 129

received the National Poetry Association Lifetime Ser- OBJECTIVIST SCHOOL; Discrete Series (1934), however, vice Award and in 1994 the Aniello Lauri Award for brought him individual attention. Measured purely by creative writing. word count, Discrete Series is shorter than this entry. In Although she experiments with rhyme and standard its original form, the white space around the poems meter in her early poetry, di Prima generally follows the gives the words a concrete presence that Louise GLÜCK free verse form that other Beat writers employed (see refers to as “restraint, juxtaposition, nuance” (29). PROSODY AND FREE VERSE). The subjects of her poetry Indeed, the first thing that strikes the reader of Discrete vary from the role of the artist to issues of motherhood. Series is how the few words of the poetry cling to visi- In the first of “Three Laments” (1961), the speaker crit- bility against the overwhelming white of the page. In icizes the rigidity she sees in the academic tradition as the original edition (as opposed to its placement in she considers wistfully that she might have become a later collections), where the words are distributed over well-known writer; unfortunately “the chairs / in the 30 pages, there are rarely more than four words per library / were too hard.” And, in “Song for Baby-o, line or 10 lines per page, and there are never more than Unborn” (1961), the speaker vows that, although the 50 words on a page. world can be a harsh place, she will guide her child to The ostensible subjects of the poems are everyday see “enough to love / to break your heart / forever.” objects and people in Oppen’s New York life. A car, The Loba poems blend American Indian myth with elevator signs, tug boats in the harbor, refrigerators— characters from Greek, Hebrew, and ancient mytholo- Oppen finds them all noteworthy. This tangible, gies, such as Lilith and Persephone. Di Prima invents empirical world of objects that Oppen describes is an archetypal wolf goddess (“Loba”) as a model for mirrored by the sparse, hard words that comprise a women united by their cultural marginalization. Each poetry joined together more physically than gram- woman is a part of every other; the speaker says, “I am matically. Oppen explained that he took the title of you / and I must become you.” The poems also posi- his work from mathematics, where the term discrete tion the Loba as a form of creativity that is both “fem- series refers to “a series of terms each of which is inine and maternal” (Friedman 207), one that can empirically derived, each one of which is empirically “chant / a new / creation myth.” Like the Loba, di true” (161). Each page, each poem, indeed, each Prima offers a vision of power for women. word is so concrete as to have been “empirically derived” and placed in the series as a constitutive BIBLIOGRAPHY term to be read on its own. This discrete nature Butterick, George. “Diane di Prima.” Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 16. In The Beats: Literary Bohemians in Post- makes it difficult to know how many poems there are war America, edited by Ann Charters. Detroit: Gale in the series or whether the poetry is even divided Research, 1983. into “poems.” Friedman, Amy L. “‘I saw my new name’: Women Writers of Out of print for many years in its original form, the the Beat Generation.” In The Beat Generation Writers, edited series is available in both the 1975 Collected Poems, by A. Robert Lee. London: Pluto Press, 1996, pp. 200–216. where the poems are crammed into 12 pages, and the Libby, Anthony. “Diane di Prima: ‘Nothing Is Lost; It Shines New Collected Poems (2002), where the poetry is pagi- in Our Eyes.” In Girls Who Wore Black: Women Writing the nated more like the original. The series itself is punc- Beat Generation, edited by Ronna C. Johnson and Nancy tuated by numbers and lines in bold type that both M. Grace. Piscataway, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, Collected Poems take to be titles. According to this 2002, pp. 45–68. schema, the contents page (notably absent from the Gordon Beveridge original volume of Discrete Series) would list seven poems: an untitled preface; two pairs of poems, each DISCRETE SERIES GEORGE OPPEN (1934) numbered 1 and 2; the longish “Party on Shipboard,” Prior to publishing his first volume of poetry, George which takes up more than half the book; and the short OPPEN was mainly known for his association with the final poem, called “Drawing.” 130 DISCRETE SERIES

The organization in later collected poems volumes is room. He brings them out “past the window-glass” logical, but it reduces the tension between the terse- onto the “world, weather-swept, with which / one ness of the words and their sparing distribution. Just as shares the century.” The confusing phrases of genteel depression-era society called for new groupings and conversation and description that continually interject new understandings of old groupings, the ambiguity of themselves into one another give way first to a sweep- these pages lies in the problem of deciding how the ing alliteration and then, on the next page, to a whole individual words, pages, and poems constitute them- new start: “1 / White.” Oppen alludes to the previous selves as a group (or series) and what the ramifications ways of writing but rejects them in favor of a new of those arrangements might be for the silence and beginning—a numbering that begins over again and a space that the words implicate. blank page of “White.” Written during the Great Depression, just after The “White” refers not only to a new page (turning Oppen had returned from France to New York, Dis- over a new leaf) but also begins a description: “White. crete Series addresses the “bad times,” in which anony- From the / Under arm of T // The red globe.” The “T” mous “cars pass” and a syntactically and semantically of these lines refers to a type of contemporary elevator disconnected “man sells post-cards” (32). Oppen’s signal comprised of one white and one red light bulb careful minimalism makes the poem’s general sense, or under the bars of a T-shaped figure. The indicated specific referents, difficult to pin down. Even a seem- direction of the elevator depended on which light was ingly straightforward “T” has been variously under- illuminated. By referring to the two bulbs, Oppen stood as a subway sign, a Pierre Bonnard nude, or a begins a movement from the vague rhetoric of T-shape sign showing the direction of an elevator. “weather-swept” centuries to the cold, hard question of Whether “T” refers to one, all, or none of these, it cer- whether we are going up or down. The elevator signal tainly also refers to the poems themselves, as they is a symbol for the whole building and for the culture emerge from the white space under the right arm of the that created it, a figure for the uncertainty and hope of fancy T of the opening word of the book—”THE.” This that culture. detail exemplifies the type of crafted ambiguity that Although the opening is striking, it is in the closing caused Oppen to be, from the beginning, both obscure movement that Oppen’s care and skill with words is at and appreciated. its most evident. Here, in what the older Collected Poems Oppen brings daily life into the poem without sub- calls “Drawing,” the relation between the layout of the suming it in his own thoughts: The tug never ceases to words and the taut economy of meaning is most closely be a tug; the car remains a car. The intensity of the expressed through the triple wordplay on “the / Paper, poetry lies in the performative assertion of the impor- turned” (35). The verb turned answers the apparently tance of objects, as well as the poem’s corollary that rhetorical question of the previous page, “what will / words are objects. Oppen refuses to accede to simple Bring us back to / Shore,” in a threefold manner. metaphorical, symbolic, or grammatical strategies, First the paper turns like a winch, providing an which makes the poetry difficult to read. Despite its alternative winding motion to the “rope” that coils “on impenetrability, Discrete Series was well received, win- the steel deck” as it pulls the barge to shore. The ning an important review from William Carlos paper, in this case standing metonymically for the WILLIAMS. The work’s reception was also helped by a poem, turns (that is, it skillfully fashions language) preface provided by Ezra POUND (whose acquaintance around the “tug” and “two barges” and the “shore” Oppen had made in France), in which he compared and, instead of pulling one to the other, contains the Oppen to Williams and referred to him as “a serious “entire volume,” reuniting them once again. Second craftsman” (vi). the paper is “turned” in the same way that wood is Beginning with a parody of languid conversation turned on a lathe by a craftsperson to produce a beau- typical of the writing of Henry James, Oppen takes tiful object. Third, moving the onus from the author readers away from the prudish gentility of a drawing to the reader (who turns the pages), the word is a per- DOBYNS, STEPHEN 131 fect description of how the discrete series is encom- puts her in an especially risky position: Unlike men— passed by the act of reading—”the / Paper, turned, represented by Jacques “Cousteau with his / assiduous contains / This entire volume.” Oppen impresses, team”—this underwater explorer proceeds on her despite the economy of the “entire volume,” through journey alone. his ability to include the mundane and concrete in a The diver-poet begins her quest only after “First minimal, almost elegiac form without betraying the having read the book of myths.” These myths, estab- everyday use of everyday words. lished by custom and reinforced by language and the verbal arts, proclaim that women are inferior to men. BIBLIOGRAPHY In referring to “myth” and a “book,” Rich confirms the Glück, Louise. “On George Oppen.” In Proofs & Theories. Hopewell, N.J.: Ecco Press, 1994, pp. 29–33. power of literature to form self-knowledge and to Oppen, George. “George Oppen.” Interview by L. S. Dembo. determine cultural values, and the poem as a whole Contemporary Literature 10.2 (1969): 159–177. points to the faith she has in her own literary efforts to Pound, Ezra. Preface to Discrete Series, by George Oppen. correct our mistaken perceptions about ourselves and New York: The Objectivist Press, 1934, vi. the flaws in our social systems. The poet claims, “The Williams, William Carlos. “The New Poetical Economy” words are purposes. / The words are maps,” suggesting Poetry 44 (July 1934): 220–225. that conscientiously used language can guide us to a Dan Friedman place of understanding and living that is superior to the current one. Rich again mentions at the poem’s end “DIVING INTO THE WRECK” ADRI- the book of myths, this time naming it as one “in ENNE RICH (1973) Adrienne RICH’s collection Div- which / our”—that is, women’s—“names do not ing into the Wreck won the National Book Award in 1974, appear.” The world and the stories that inform it have marking one of the first times that a mainstream Amer- not changed, but the poet returns, confident that she is ican institution recognized the achievement of radical part of a community of women, armed with a new feminist poetry. Its title poem presents, through the knowledge about the ideal for them, and determined extended metaphor of a sea diver, an exploration of to make it a reality. what it means to be a woman and, specifically, a BIBLIOGRAPHY woman-poet. The sea symbolizes the mind of the cre- Atwood, Margaret. Review of Diving into the Wreck, by Adri- ative woman, and the “wreck” is its all-but-destroyed enne Rich. In Reading Adrienne Rich: Reviews and Re- potential, which the explorer must discover and reclaim. visions, edited by Jane Cooper. Ann Arbor: University of Around the time that Rich wrote “Diving into the Michigan Press, 1984, pp. 238–241. Wreck,” she began to identify herself explicitly as a Templeton, Alice. The Dream and the Dialogue: Adrienne feminist and political poet, looking more and more to Rich’s Feminist Poetics. Knoxville: University of Tennessee her art to reinforce bonds between women and to Press, 1994. reveal injustices as the first step toward social change. Jeannine Johnson Like many of Rich’s poems, “Diving” focuses more on observation and revelation than on recommending DOBYNS, STEPHEN (1941– ) Despite his specific political action. Nevertheless the poem implies 21 novels, Stephen Dobyns considers himself a poet. In that the new knowledge the diver discovers will be put a letter to Contemporary Authors, he writes, “Although I to use in altering the cultural “scene” to which she sometimes write fiction, I do it only as a diversion. I returns at the end of the poem. Because the poet seeks consider myself entirely a poet, am concerned with it a truth that runs contrary to social norms, the quest on twenty-four hours a day,...feel that myself and any which she embarks is a dangerous one: She wears a poet is always at the beginning of his craft.” Dobyns’s 10 protective suit, carries a knife, and momentarily finds books of poetry hold 30 years of discerning narrative herself “blacking out” as she enters the unfamiliar and are colored by the dissolution, irony, and tender- world of the sea. Furthermore her status as a woman ness that have, at turns, dominated his perspective. 132 DORN, EDWARD

Despite his productivity, Dobyns—who in Louise Stitt, Peter. “The Uncertainties of Narrative.” In Uncertainty GLÜCK’s words is a “cross between Jonathan Edwards and Plentitude: Five Contemporary Poets. Iowa City: Univer- and Quentin Tarantino”—has received little critical sity of Iowa Press, 1997. attention except from “other poets, among whom he Aimee Fifarek has the status of a hero.” Born in West Orange, New Jersey, and raised in DORN, EDWARD (1929–1999) Edward Dorn Detroit, Dobyns earned degrees at Wayne State Univer- is identified with the BLACK MOUNTAIN SCHOOL of poetry sity and the University of Iowa before pursuing brief and shares this group’s use of free verse, which avoids careers as an English teacher and a reporter for the regular metrics and rhyme (see PROSODY AND FREE Detroit News. Overwhelmed by the violence on which VERSE), and of precise and blunt language, filtered he had to report, both in Detroit and coming out of the through his personal and sometimes idiosyncratic poet- Vietnam War, he quit his newspaper job to produce his ics and his impassioned politics. As a student at Black first book of poetry, Concurring Beasts, which was the Mountain College, Dorn worked closely with Charles Lamont Poetry selection for 1971. During his career he OLSON, who stimulated his interest in place and geogra- has received a number of honors, including the Poetry phy as themes and in non-Western cultures as alterna- Society of America’s Melville Crane Award for Cemetery tive and more authentic modes of living. Coming of age Nights (1987); his volume Black Dog, Red Dog was as a poet in the 1960s, Dorn’s poetic voice was that of a selected for the National Poetry Series in 1984. self-exile standing skeptically outside mainstream cul- The violence of many of Dobyns’s poems is sharpened ture, intensely distrustful of wealth and authority and by his unflinching description of snapshot scenes, from its abuses and acutely aware of their effects on national one boy forcing another at gunpoint to expose himself and personal life. Dorn wrote disparagingly of the com- (“The Gun” [1984]), to the body of a man in a stream mercialism of American culture and of hypocritical gov- killed for the sport of Santiago police (“Pacos” [1984]). ernmental exploitation of foreign cultures, minorities, But stunning moments of passion ameliorate Dobyns’s and the environment while also writing poignantly disgust with the bleakness around him. In “Leaving observant poems on personal and family relationships Winter” (1984), he writes of the coming of spring in his in a career that produced more than 25 books of poetry, Santiago back yard, where the blue of the sky leaves him as well as fiction, essays, and translations. His poems of “unable to catch my breath. I ask myself, What new / place provide what Tom CLARK has characterized as pain is this? Then I realize I am happy.” unique “apprehensions variously geological, geograph- Throughout his work, Dobyns has unexpected ical, cultural, social, historical, continuously interlaced” gleams of hope that vie for supremacy with his dark of locales in Idaho, England, the American Southwest, imagination and self-deprecating sense of humor. In and other places (46). Dorn’s GUNSLINGER (1967–75), an “I’m Muscle, I’m Brawn” (2000), the narrator Heart episodic and often humorous tale of a mock heroic ironically contemplates “the human condition—how quest through the West in search of Howard Hughes, is courtesy and compassion go right to the bottom.” a major American narrative poem that reflects the Dobyns is a somewhat reluctant poet of the human tumultuous time of its writing (see NARRATIVE POETRY). condition, in all of its quirky and unexpected glory. Formally it is significant in its movement from earlier poetry that presents itself as the creation of one con- BIBLIOGRAPHY sciousness to the more multivocal poetics of the late Bosselaar, Laurie Ann. “An Interview with Stephen Dobyns.” 20th century, which self-consciously draws on and cites Ploughshares 24.4 (winter 1998–99): 64–73. Dobyns, Stephen. “Stephen Dobyns.” Contemporary many sources. Authors Online. Available on-line. URL: Dorn was born in Villa Grove, Illinois, and grew up www.galenet.com. Downloaded February 2002. in rural poverty there during the Great Depression. Glück, Louise. “Storytellers.” American Poetry Review 26.4 His father, a railroad brakeman, deserted the family (1997): 9–12. when Dorn was an infant, and Dorn’s poetry often DORN, EDWARD 133 reflects this early experience of economic and social unknowingly kept “things going, owing that debt.” vulnerability. Dorn attended the University of Illinois Internal rhyme, colloquial diction, and the use of ital- from 1949 to 1950, then moved to North Carolina to ics to emphasize ironically a phrase borrowed from attend the nontraditional arts-oriented Black Moun- wartime propaganda are used in fashioning a pointed tain College. Dorn completed a bachelor’s degree in but accessible poem of both personal and social com- 1955. After leaving school he led a nomadic life, liv- mentary. “An Idle Visitation” from The North Atlantic ing in Washington’s Skagis Valley, New Mexico, and Turbine (1967) first introduced the character of the Idaho, at times barely supporting his family through Gunslinger, later expanded into what became Dorn’s manual labor, but all the while writing poetry. He best-known poem. Dorn’s capsule description of the taught at the University of Idaho from 1961–65, pub- Gunslinger’s “impeccable personal smoothness” lishing his first book of poetry, The Newly Fallen, in implies the satirically heroic, prototypical individualist 1961. As a Fulbright lecturer, Dorn was in residence of the mythical American West. Punning humor is at the newly founded University of Essex for most of brought about by enjambment in the lines—for 1965–70 and, while there, wrote the first book of instance, “or simply a retinal block / of seats”—and is Gunslinger, which expanded to five parts from 1968 to intertwined with the thematic concern of the difficulty 1975. Dorn then taught at universities from Illinois to of perceiving reality, creating a tonal and formal insta- California before settling at the University of Colorado bility characteristic of the poem and its later expansion in 1977, where he headed the creative writing pro- to a book-length work. “Christopher Beach” character- gram until his death. His Collected Poems: 1956–1974 izes Dorn’s more playful and difficult style, with its was published in 1975. shifting perspectives and evasion of fixed meaning, as Dorn wrote a loosely structured free verse, the lines a “dissolving of voices” that signals Dorn’s movement shaped to amplify the content of each poem, a style towards a more postmodern style of writing (215). influenced by Olson’s “Projective Verse” (see ARS POETI- In later works Dorn often wrote in a caustic, bitterly CAS). Irregular metrics and frequent enjambment give humorous, satirical style. In “Homo Sap” from Abhor- an asymmetrical rhythm and dissonant quality to the rences (1990), Ronald Reagan is dubbed “the great poems and are used to provoke surprise and humor. Teller,” and the national obsession with youth is casti- Lengths of poems range from epigrammic to entire gated as one of a number of vacuous “life-style frauds” books, with the poetry’s tone alternately vulnerable, in “Ode of the Facelifting of the ‘statue’ of Liberty.” And caustically critical, sensitively attentive, and parodic, in one of his last poems, “Chemo du Jour: The sometimes changing abruptly within works. Dorn’s Impeachment on Decadron” (1999), Dorn mixed his creative diction, employing references to popular cul- experience of treatment for pancreatic cancer with a ture, philosophical theory, historical figures, archaic critique of the Clinton presidency, assuming the role of cultures, nonsense words, and drug and other jargons, poet as cultural commentator until his death. It was produced striking juxtapositions and combinations of this role that defined Dorn’s life and poetry. words; Dorn himself characterized his writing as com- BIBLIOGRAPHY ing in “clots of phrase” (5). Puns, internal rhyme, and Beach, Christopher. “Migrating Voices in the Poetry of unusual and ambiguous uses of punctuation also are Edward Dorn.” Contemporary Literature 32.2 (1991): typical of his poetry. 211–228. In “On the Debt My Mother Owed to Sears Roe- Clark, Tom. Edward Dorn: A World of Difference. Berkeley, buck” from Hands Up! (1964), a poem of place as well Calif.: North Atlantic Books, 2002. as personal and political implications, Dorn connects Dorn, Edward. Interviews, edited by Donald Allen. Bolinas, domestic economies to those of the Second World War. Calif.: Four Seasons, 1980. Arrested opportunity and unwitting complicity are Wesling, Donald, ed. Internal Resistances: The Poetry of Edward suggested in Dorn’s description of his mother as “part Dorn. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. of that stay at home army,” one who necessarily but Sue Barker 134 DOTY, MARK

DOTY, MARK (1953– ) Mark Doty has writ- While living in New York, Doty met Wally Roberts, ten openly and passionately about being gay and about with whom he lived until Roberts’s death from AIDS. the personal grief he has felt in the AIDS epidemic, but This experience of love, loss, and caregiving found his concerns and sensibility have never been confined voice in My Alexandria (1993), Doty’s third book, by identity politics or by championing a particular whose touchstone is the poetry of C. F. Cavafy, Atlantis group or movement, although such a poem as “Homo (1995), and his memoir Heaven’s Gate (1996). In these Does Not Inherit” (1995) is an unflinching indictment works Doty searches for a means of transcending the of religious homophobia. Like Marianne MOORE, an mutability or decomposition of the world. In his more important influence, he responds to the natural world recent work, Sweet Machine (1998), he has sought ways with a precision and discrimination that may include to ground himself in the material world by enjoying allegory or autobiography. In “Difference,” from My quotidian experiences, such as a sidewalk turtle seller, Alexandria, a volume selected for the 1993 National and in Source (2001) he searches for the “generous, Poetry Series, he writes about a jellyfish that looks like cold nothing” from which everything is derived. “a plastic purse swallowing itself,” a description as odd BIBLIOGRAPHY and accurate as any of Moore’s metaphors. Moreover Doty, Mark. Still Life With Oysters and Lemon, Boston: Bea- his call at the end of the poem to look “unfettered” at con 2001. “alien grace” suggests the moral, aesthetic, and per- Jarraway, David R. “‘Creatures of the Rainbow’: Wallace sonal terms that underlie Moore’s poems. Nevertheless Stevens, Mark Doty and the Poetics of Androgny.” Mosaic Doty’s work contains sinuousness, a consolation, even 30.3 (Sept. 1997):169–183. a hedonism, not found in Moore. In his book-length Wunderlich, Mark. “About Mark Doty.” Ploughshare 25.1 essay, Still Life with Oysters and Lemon (2001), he points (spring 1999):183–189. out that people are not “born knowing how to love the David Bergman world,” but, insofar as they do, it is because they have learned “that pleasure is to be honored” (5). DOVE, RITA (1952– ) Rita Dove is one of the Born in Maryville, Tennessee, Doty moved fre- most prominent figures in contemporary African- quently through the South, since his father, an army American poetry. From 1993 to 1995 she was the first engineer, was repeatedly transferred. His mother was African American to serve as United States poet laure- religious, and his poetry is often informed by the aus- ate and the youngest person ever to hold the office. A terely grand eloquence of devotional literature. He literary descendant of African-American poets attended Drake University in Iowa (B.A., 1978) and Langston HUGHES, Robert HAYDEN, and Gwendolyn received an M.F.A. from Goddard College (1980). He BROOKS, Dove frequently examines in her poetry the has taught at many colleges and universities, including particulars of family relationships and American race Brandeis University, the University of Utah, and the relations past and present, most often in short narra- University of Houston. He has won the National Book tive poems. Still, overall, the varied subject matter and Critics Circle Award (1994), the T. S. ELIOT Prize the range of references in Dove’s poetry makes her (1996), the Lambda Literary Award (1996), and the work difficult to categorize. In addition to her numer- Ambassador Book Award (1996); he has also received ous volumes of poetry, Dove has published a book of a number of fellowships from various foundations. In short stories (Fifth Sunday [1985]), a novel (Through the addition to his poetry, Doty has published three work Ivory Gate [1992]), a verse drama (The Darker Face of of prose: Heaven’s Gate (1996), which won the the Earth [1994]), and a book of her poet laureate lec- PEN/Martha Albrand Award, and Firebird (1999), both tures (The Poet’s World [1995]). autobiographies, as well as Still Life with Oysters and Dove was born and raised in Akron, Ohio. In 1986 Lemon. He has also published, under the pseudonym Robert Penn WARREN (who was then the first U.S. poet M. R. Doty, several verse collections written with his laureate) selected Dove for a Lavan Younger Poet former wife. Award from the Academy of American Poets. Since DOVE, RITA 135 then Dove has won many prizes and awards, includ- It is worth noting that, although in past generations ing, for her most famous book, the poem cycle Thomas America’s literary critics and audiences might have been and Beulah (a collection based on the lives of Dove’s more likely to praise an African-American poet’s willing- grandparents), a Pulitzer Prize in 1987. Dove was only ness to turn away from social issues toward the type of the second African-American poet (after Brooks) to poetry more concerned with art, history, or other win a Pulitzer. In 1999 Dove was reappointed as spe- aspects of high culture, Dove has garnered great acclaim cial consultant in poetry for the 1999–2000 bicenten- for books that deal most deeply with race. Thomas and nial year celebration of the Library of Congress. Since Beulah constructs a social background of inequality and 1989 she has taught at the University of Virginia. racial tension while telling the stories of the title charac- Although the historical particulars of slavery, segre- ters’ lives. In “Roast Possum,” Thomas reads to his gation, and American race relations are frequent con- grandchildren from an old encyclopedia, omitting racist cerns of her poetry, Dove’s work also demonstrates her details, such as the encyclopedia’s claim that, although wide-ranging interest in world history, culture, and black children were intelligent, this intelligence religion. Poems that deal directly with the wrongs of “clouded over at puberty, bringing / indirection and lazi- racism may appear alongside poems that forsake visi- ness.” In “The Great Palaces of Versailles,” reading a ble social concerns in favor of examining individual library book’s account of how French ladies would defe- characters or events separated from modern America cate in the beautiful gardens of Versailles reinforces Beu- by geography or history. This broad range of reference lah’s distaste for white people as she irons clothing for is evident even in Dove’s early work. In The Yellow white customers: “Nothing nastier than a white person // House on the Corner (1980), Dove’s first book of poems, She mutters . . . in the backroom of Charlotte’s Dress for example, the poems “The Transport of Slaves from Shoppe.” Dove’s acclaimed 1999 collection On the Bus Maryland to Mississippi,” “The House Slave,” “The with Rosa Parks deals extensively with characters and Slave’s Critique of Practical Reason,” and “Kentucky, events related to the Civil Rights movement, particularly 1833” appear along with “Robert Schumann, Or: the 1955–56 bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama. Musical Genius Begins with Affliction” and “The Bird Dove’s poetry avoids making grand statements about Frau.” This dual interest in African-American identity race and racism; instead, Dove works through individ- and unrelated issues that are more obviously within ual characters, specific events, and the ways those the traditional realm of American poetry—a tradition events shape the lives and minds of the characters. In that tended to avoid confronting racial injustice—per- the introduction to her Selected Poems, Dove writes, sists throughout Dove’s work. “The mystery of destiny boils down to the ultimate— Dove frequently divides her books into separate sec- and ultimately unanswerable—questions: How does tions that cohere more or less thematically, which helps where I come from determine where I’ve ended up? readers make sense of the vast thematic differences Why am I what I am and not what I thought I’d be? between such poems. Most critics consider Dove’s will- What did I think I’d be? Where do I reside most com- ingness to address such widely varying subject matter a pletely?” (xxi). Dove’s is clearly not protest poetry in the great strength. The diversity of subject matter in Dove’s standard sense. It is not didactic, not a poetry that poetry reminds readers that an African-American writer directly proclaims things about the historic injustices of need not choose between social engagement and the race relations in America. Instead Dove’s presentations kind of historical, imaginative, and multicultural of individual characters and their experiences provide a awareness often identified with literary MODERNISM. As more subtle rendering of race and racism along with literary critic Therese Steffen explains, Dove’s work eloquent reminders that her poetry is inspired by other “documents and enriches the American European liter- things as well: Dove says, “I’m very interested in getting ary and humanist dialogue. Particularly intriguing and inside a person’s head, with all of those intricate fruitful is Dove’s fusion of African-American, German, thoughts; then that person can never be lumped into a and Greek backgrounds” (163). stereotype again” (Mullaney 33). 136 DRAFTS

BIBLIOGRAPHY associate with a limiting, traditionally masculine poet- Dove, Rita. Introduction to Selected Poems. New York: Vin- ics. With their collagelike structure and refusal of nar- tage Books, 1993. rative unity, the poems therefore can be considered an Mullaney, Janet P. “Rita Dove.” In Truthtellers of the Times: effort to recover previously lost female voices buried Interviews with Contemporary Women Poets. Ann Arbor: beneath patriarchal discourse and recognizable only in University of Michigan Press, 1998. fragments. As Linda Kinnahan writes, “the practice of Therese Steffen. Crossing Color: Transcultural Space and Place deciphering meaning that resides in and under layers in Rita Dove’s Poetry, Fiction, and Drama. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. of writing often becomes the subject of [DuPlessis’s] poetry.” DuPlessis also borrows from diverse feminist Sean Heuston philosophies as well as from the Jewish practice of midrash, a tradition of marginal notation and com- DRAFTS RACHEL BLAU DUPLESSIS (1991, mentary (14). 1997, 2001) A feminist revision of the long poems of While Drafts takes up a wide range of subjects from MODERNISM (see LONG AND SERIAL POETRY), Drafts is an the global to the deeply personal—from the Gulf War open-ended series of poems that Rachel Blau DUPLESSIS to the poet’s own experiences with motherhood— has been writing and publishing (in journals and in memory and its exile are recurrent motifs. The poems book form) since the mid-1980s. Influenced by various frequently circle back to a focus on the text and its projects, such as THE CANTOS of Ezra POUND, “A” by Louis ability to represent experiences accurately. In “Draft 6: ZUKOFSKY, and H. D.’s HELEN IN EGYPT, DuPlessis’s poems Midrush,” Duplessis makes attempts at first “sighting,” carry on an avant-garde tradition of formal innovation then “citing / the writing under the writing”; yet, as far and linguistic experimentation. Yet Drafts strongly ahead as “Draft 21: Cardinals,” the poet still questions emphasizes the ways in which language shapes identity, “What to ask, of what past or path. / Some texts con- particularly in terms of gender (see FEMALE VOICE, FEMALE jure memory” (135). Challenging on intellectual and LANGUAGE). In this regard, Drafts shows influence from personal levels, Drafts encourages reassessment of the LANGUAGE SCHOOL poets and experimental women writ- ways in which texts shape one’s perception of the ers, such as Susan HOWE and Kathleen FRASER. world and of the self. Drafts represents a lifelong project for DuPlessis, BIBLIOGRAPHY who is dedicated to the concept of ongoing revision. DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. “Haibun: ‘Draw your/ Draft.’” In H. DuPlessis’s is a poetics of process that resists the final- D. and Poets After, edited by Donna Krolik Hollenberg. ity associated with the epic poem, traditionally viewed Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2000, pp. 112–129. as the masterwork of the male poet. In resistance to Keller, Lynn. Forms of Expansion: Recent Long Poems by notions of closure, the form of Drafts emphasizes its Women. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1997. provisional nature. DuPlessis refers to the project’s Kinnahan, Linda. “Experiments in Feminism.” Review of unfinished quality as a “rhetorical texture one might Drafts 1–38, Toll, by Rachel Blau DuPlessis. Women’s describe as a flow of interruption across a surface” Review of Books 19.8 (2002): 14. (123). And, as Lynn Keller points out, DuPlessis con- Megan Swihart Jewell ceives of the serial form, in particular, as “speculatively instructive” and “subject to change according to imme- THE DREAM SONGS JOHN BERRYMAN diate response, in the process of or in the means of (1969) In The Dream Songs, John BERRYMAN brought investigation,” oftentimes one that explores the female together his two previous collections of “dream songs,” as author (276). 77 Dream Songs (1964), which was awarded the Employing visual and irregular typography, as well Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1965, and His Toy, His as the repetition of words and phrases, Drafts chal- Dream, His Rest: 308 Dream Songs (1968), which won lenges normal, linear reading practices, which Du- the National Book Award for poetry in 1969. After Plessis and other experimental women writers Berryman’s death in 1972, a further collection THE DREAM SONGS 137 appeared under the title Henry’s Fate and Other Poems, politics, Humphrey Bogart and Hoot Gibson in enter- 1967–1972; among the previously uncollected poems tainment, Bodhidharma and St. Simeon in religion, and fragments in that book are 45 dream songs from Robert Oppenheimer and Albert Einstein in science, among the hundreds of songs Berryman had elected August Strindberg and Raïner Maria Rilke in literary not to include in books published during his life. The history; he encompasses whole national groups— Dream Songs is difficult to situate among other works French, Egyptian, Sudanese, Swedes, and “Paks”—in in the American 20th century, because the book simply an overall cataloguing reminiscent of Walt Whitman. is unlike anything else produced during the period. A central concern in many songs is Berryman’s However, it does take its place alongside noteworthy address to his fellow poets, both ancestors and con- long poems (see LONG AND SERIAL POETRY), such as Hart temporaries. Pound, Robert FROST, Wallace STEVENS, CRANE’s THE BRIDGE, Ezra POUND’s THE CANTOS, and Williams, and R. P. BLACKMUR all have a place in these William Carlos WILLIAMS’s PATERSON. pieces as writers to whom the author expresses a debt, Berryman’s prefatory note to the single-volume edi- and Randall JARRELL, Delmore SCHWARTZ, Sylvia PLATH, tion explains that the poem concerns itself with “an Yvor WINTERS, T. S. ELIOT, and Crane are grieved and imaginary character . . . named Henry, a white Ameri- mourned. Karl SHAPIRO calls the poems collectively can in early middle age sometimes in blackface, who “elegies (laments, drinking toasts, historical ascrip- has suffered an irreversible loss” (vi). This Henry is not tions, exhortations, curses, dedications, eroticisms, to be confused with Berryman, a distinction made dif- epitaphs, love poems, descriptions, imitations)” (4). ficult by the fact that Henry’s experiences, sorrows, and Adrienne RICH describes 77 Dream Songs as “a creepy, travels are very similar to Berryman’s own. Berryman’s scorching book” with an “often surrealistic quality” disclaimer frees him from whatever constraints he (see SURREALISM), which Berryman’s brilliance success- might perceive if he were working in the explicit auto- fully anchored in Henry (538). The Times Literary Sup- biographical mode of his usual CONFESSIONAL POETRY. plement’s reviewer vociferously disagreed, declaring The songs are further complicated in terms of the that the book “was garbled, and the reviewers who said speaker’s identity by the fact that Henry slips between so and later took it back are foolish” (680); the same pronouns when speaking of himself, using both “I” and writer described His Toy, His Dream, His Rest as “a dis- “he”; the presence of Henry’s unnamed friend, who orderly desperate, and besotted funeral for Berryman’s speaks only occasionally and who calls Henry “Mr. literary heroes” (680), particularly condemning the Bones,” also distorts questions of self in the poem. “thumping exercise in bad taste” of the elegy for Louis The songs share the same structure; each one is MacNeice. Berryman’s confessional contemporary, made up of three six-line stanzas occupying no more Robert LOWELL, admitted that initially the songs are than a page—a controlling device similar to Jack KER- dense with “darkness, disorder and oddness,” but with OUAC’s MEXICO CITY BLUES. The rhythms of Berryman’s patience “the repeated situations and their racy jabber songs are “like jazz scat and . . . like jazz wailing,” become more and more enjoyable,” eliciting either notes Frederick Seidel (257), another feature in com- laughter or tears (3). mon with Kerouac’s Blues. The songs are delivered in Whether Berryman’s songs are “a brave original widespread experiments with speech, including min- work” (Seidel 259), “dazzling even when they befud- strel-show dialect, baby talk, disrupted syntax, and dle” (257), or a self-indulgent incoherent jumble, they “comical, boozy private language” (Seidel 257), and possess an awe-inspiring scope and vision that they they seek an American idiom, as has the work of many succeed in rising to at least some, and perhaps even American poets, particularly since Pound and Williams most, of the time. Larry Vonalt believes that The Dream in the 1920s. The songs’ subject matter, aside from Songs is “one of the most significant religious poems of “Henry’s” life, is drawn heavily from current events and the twentieth century,” concluding that it “depicts the ranges all over the world. Berryman’s name-dropping emptiness and confusion of our world” (467) and is “a includes Dwight Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson in complex and meaningful investigation of love and 138 DUGAN, ALAN death” (469). Certainly the fact that “There sat down, Dugan was born in Brooklyn, New York, and grad- once, a thing on Henry’s heart / só heavy” (#29), a grief uated from Mexico City College in 1949. His first that never got up, is the source of these sorrowful book, Poems (1961), won the Yale Series of Younger songs. Henry is “scared a lonely” (i.e. “scared and Poets Award. Other prizes followed: the Prix de Rome, lonely”) (#40), afraid of himself most of all; he thinks the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of it “easy be not to see anyone” (#40). Admissions such America (1982), the award in literature from the Amer- as these deserve a listener, because of their courage and ican Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (1985), vulnerability, in spite of their confusing inaccessibility. a Pulitzer Prize, and two National Book Awards, most Henry might experience the more conventionally recently for Poems Seven: New and Complete Poetry poetic desire for a woman, “Filling her compact and (2001). Married to the artist Judith Shahn, he taught at delicious body / with chicken páprika” (#4), a woman Sarah Lawrence College (1967–71) and at the Fine whose virtue is saved only by the fact that she and Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Henry are in the company of five other people, but he While most of his poems confront the banalities of still has that thing sitting on his heart, and, as long as war and everyday life, Dugan deals with these incon- it sits, Henry needs to talk out his own therapy: “He veniences with acid humor and epigrammatic irrever- stared at ruin. Ruin stared straight back” (#45). It may ence. Like his British contemporary Philip Larkin, be that these songs are Berryman addressing his own Dugan is determined to “walk out bravely into the ruin, trying to stare it down, even though he is “scared daily accident” (“Morning Song” [1961]). Yet the pes- a lonely.” simism of poems like “Adultery” (1967) provides the dark background for such lyrical triumphs as “Love BIBLIOGRAPHY Song: I and Thou” (1961), “Lament for Cellist Jacque- Berryman, John. Note to The Dream Songs. New York: Far- rar, Straus & Giroux, 1969, v–vi. line DuPré” (1989), and “Poem for Elliot Carter on his “Congested Funeral: Berryman’s New Dream Songs.” TLS 90th Birthday” (2001), which offer the hard-won con- (26 June 1969): 680. solations of love and art. Lowell, Robert. “The Poetry of John Berryman.” New York His matter-of-fact titles reflect a down-to-earth reti- Times Book Review (28 May 1964): 3. cence and a belief that poetry should always be at least Rich, Adrienne. “Mr. Bones, He Lives.” Nation (25 May as good as good prose. Showing less attention to meter 1964): 538–539. and rhyme than to terse phrasing and exact lineation, Seidel, Frederick. “Berryman’s Dream Songs.” Poetry 105 Dugan’s classical concision is reflected in his martial (January 1965): 257–259. imagery and frequent allusions to Greek culture. In Shapiro, Karl. “Major Poets of the Ex-English Language.” “Fragment on the British Museum” (1963), Dugan Book World 3 (26 January 1969): 4. does not mind that “faces are chopped off” because the Vonalt, Larry P. “Berryman’s The Dream Songs.” Sewanee Review 79 (July 1971): 464–469. “reasonable patterns” thus exposed allow us to appre- ciate the “stone thought of the stone / figures.” Dugan’s A. Mary Murphy poetry itself shows a higher respect for art’s struggle with its medium than for mere personal expression. DUGAN, ALAN (1923–2003) Alan Dugan is While no one would question its honesty, Dugan’s a loner in American poetry, avoiding all schools of both poetry can appear self-indulgent and nasty, especially in poetry and thought, even though he has been associ- the poems that seem closest to the poet’s own experi- ated with the CONFESSIONAL poets for his unflinching ence. In “Internal Migration: On Being on Tour” (1983), use of personal experience. Although his poetry has the poet whines about being paid for reading his work been dropped from recent academic anthologies, at such places as “Asshole State University at Dugan has influenced many young poets to work for Nowheresville”; in the age of creative writing programs, the “hard-earned affirmation,” in the words of William such rants have become a genre, but the complaint is a Martz (244). sin against hospitality that Dugan would never commit DUNCAN, ROBERT 139 in one of his classical moods. In Dugan’s homages to the “Playa Naturista” (1999), describe successful struggles ancients and other artists, especially musicians, how- toward women’s bodily self-acceptance. ever, his poetry reaches the poignancy that comes from Contemplating feminist community, Duhamel wor- facing the most difficult beauties of life. ries about how women’s values could be transformed BIBLIOGRAPHY into servitude to male “needs.” In “Feminism” (1996), Gery, John. “‘Pieces of Harmony’: The Quiet Politics of Alan the Girl Scout organization’s way of trying to equate Dugan’s Poetry.” In Politics and the Muse: Studies in the Poli- “empathy” and “power” is both applauded and ques- tics of Recent American Literature, edited by Adam Sorkin. tioned. “Assumptions” (1993) catalogues commonali- Bowling Green, Ky.: Popular Press, 1989, pp. 206–221. ties of experience that foreground race, class, and Martz, William J., ed. The Distinctive Voice: Twentieth-Cen- gender differences and suggest ways to diminish tury American Poetry. Glenview, Ill.: Scott, Foresman, unproductive conflict. 1966, 243–244. Poems such as “My Grandmother Is My Husband” Richard Collins in The Woman with Two Vaginas (1995), which are adaptations of Inuit tales, explore implications of the DUHAMEL, DENISE (1961– ) To the tra- crossing of gender roles. Suggesting that anatomy does dition of American feminist poetry (see FEMALE VOICE, not preordain gender, such poems comically question FEMALE LANGUAGE), Denise Duhamel contributes irrev- whether such gender-crossing role reversals can sub- erent and playful humor, multifaceted irony, surreal vert male-dominant arrangements. fantasy, startlingly precise social and physical descrip- Recent Duhamel poems explore class distinctions tion, and intriguing weaves of compelling narratives. and social dimensions of attempts to bolster one’s ego As in Kinky (1997), which features dozens of refash- while playing on the chattiness, name-dropping, and ionings of the Barbie doll, Duhamel crafts energetic self-referentiality of the NEW YORK SCHOOL of poetry. feminist revisions of irksome myths of male dominant “Mia and Darger, Ashbery and Gina” (2001) meditates culture. Her poetry spotlights the intricate weirdness on mortality, on “how artists take the suffering of oth- and mystifications of numerous cultural symbols. ers/...and try to make it art,” on their guilt and fas- Duhamel was raised in Woonsocket, Rhode Island. cination in doing so, and on how they cannot make In the 1990s, beginning with Smile! (1993), she pub- actual their most interesting ideas before others do. lished five collections of poetry, and her Queen for a Even at its most comic, Duhamel’s poetry offers Day: Selected and New Poems appeared in 2001. She has poignant social analysis, and even at its grimmest, it also collaborated with Maureen Seaton on two books provides humorous touches that prevent difficult of poetry. Duhamel’s poems have appeared in the truths from having a paralyzing effect. 1993, 1994, 1998, and 2000 editions of the Best Amer- BIBLIOGRAPHY ican Poetry. She earned a National Endowment for the Duhamel, Denise. Interview by Sonia Parkes. Inkshed 26 Arts Fellowship in 2001. (January–June 1994): 16–20. Duhamel often portrays the female body as a site of Fink, Thomas. “A Different Sense of Power”: Problems of Com- cultural struggle. “Bulimia” (1993) investigates how a munity in Late-Twentieth-Century U.S. Poetry. Madison, woman internalizes male-dominant notions about the New Jersey: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2001, body and scrambles to realize conflicting desires for pp. 74–93. release of energy and self-control. Using bulimia to Thomas Fink control her appearance, the speaker obsessively works to make her bulimic routine invisible. “The Limited DUNCAN, ROBERT (1919–1988) With Edition Platinum Barbie” (1997) critiques fashion Charles OLSON and Robert CREELEY, Robert Duncan industry misogyny: “A model whose legs truly make defined the BLACK MOUNTAIN SCHOOL of poetry. All three up / more than half her height,” Barbie weighs “less poets discovered their mature styles in the journal than a quart of milk.” However, other poems, such as pages of the Black Mountain Review and Origin (see 140 DUNCAN, ROBERT

POETRY JOURNALS), and all three originated a poetics Branches (1964), Bending the Bow (1968), The Truth based on the generation of poetic forms from within and Life of Myth (1968), Ground Work: Before the War the poem—form was a projection of content. Duncan (1984) and Ground Work II: In the Dark (1987). From was also part of the SAN FRANCISCO RENAISSANCE; accord- 1961 to 1963, Duncan wrote an extended study of ingly he was associated with Kenneth REXROTH—but modernism and H. D.’s poetry, which appeared in not with the related BEAT poets Allen GINSBERG, chapters as The H. D. Book. Duncan received a series of Lawrence FERLINGHETTI, and Gregory CORSO, who dom- awards, including the Harriet Monroe Memorial Prize inated the public views of the period. Duncan assumed (Poetry magazine), 1961; the Levinson Prize (Poetry the inherited traditions of high MODERNISM. He took magazine), 1964; the National Poetry Award, 1985; Ezra POUND, H. D., and D. H. Lawrence as his masters, and in the same year the American Book Award from along with James Joyce, William Carlos WILLIAMS, Mar- the Before Columbus Foundation. ianne MOORE, Dante, and Walt Whitman. Duncan After finishing the book Letters (1956), Duncan claimed he was a derivative poet who combined vari- began writing the poems for The Opening of the Field ous poetries and traditions into a poetics known as a (1960). This volume was conceived and written as a “grand collage,” an assemblage of multiple ideas. unified book and sequence of poems working varia- Duncan was born in Oakland, California. His tions on themes of the dance, spiritual wonder, the mother died in childbirth, and a family who believed goddess of poetry, and writing poems. These themes in occult theosophy adopted him. The family soon appear in the first poem, “Often I Am Permitted to moved to Bakersfield, where Duncan attended high Return to a Meadow.” The meadow is an invention that school in preparation for enrolling at the University of is as real as an actual meadow: “Wherefrom fall all California, Berkeley, in September 1936. After reading architectures I am.” Through a series of appositions, XXX Cantos (see THE CANTOS), he became a serious stu- the poem expands the possible meanings of the “field” dent of Pound’s poetry. Between 1938 and 1946, he as a place of inspiration where the Muse, the First spent most of his time in the East, living in Philadel- Beloved as an avatar of Persephone, or Brigit, “Queen phia, New York, Boston, Provincetown, and Wood- under the Hill,” appears. The vision is not unlike a cir- stock, while returning to Berkeley for short periods. In cle of children dancing in a ring, which Duncan 1946, when he met Robin BLASER and Jack SPICER in explains, refers to an Atlantean dream of his child- Berkeley, he was already a published and experienced hood, and finally a “place of first permission, / ever- poet. His first book of poems was Heavenly City, lasting omen of what is.” The vision in the field gives Earthly City (1947). With Blaser and Spicer, he permission for continuing imaginative invention. The launched the “Berkeley Renaissance” of poetry. In poem contains layers of meaning as carefully placed as 1951 he began living with Jess Collins, an artist, and an image in a complex collage. also entered a period of high creativity in poetry, art, In The Opening of the Field, Duncan began a serial and poetics. The two men collaborated on a series of poem called “The Structure of Rime,” which continues books, Caesar’s Gate (1955), A Book of Resemblances in subsequent books (see LONG AND SERIAL POETRY). The (1966), and Names of People (1968); Letters (1958) series is a sequence of poems without a defined end- transformed Duncan’s poetry from rhetorical struc- ing. In Roots and Branches (1964), the series combines tures to a poetry that created form based in the musi- with other long poems in parts, “A Sequence of Poems cal structures of lines. From 1955 to 1956 Duncan for H.D.’s 73rd Birthday,” “Apprehensions,” and “The and Collins lived on Mallorca. In 1956 Duncan taught Continents,” to make a book of poems that challenge at Black Mountain College, then returned to San Fran- and explore the various forms poetry can take. The cisco to become assistant director of the Poetry Center field, or meadow, as a metaphor for the multiple pos- at San Francisco State University. He published his sibilities of poetry, continues into the poems of the fol- first trade book, The Opening of the Field (1960); other lowing book, Bending the Bow (1968). In this book pamphlets and books followed, including Roots and Duncan began another serial poem, “The Passages DUNN, STEPHEN 141

Poems,” which becomes a place for prophecy and spir- ened life of the mind, as the theme of entering a itual exercises, where he can talk about the obligations “foyer,” the entrance to a new language, tries to lift the of a spiritualistic poetics. The serial poems are imbed- gloom of the dark to reassert human vision and worth. ded in the context of the other poems, and here the In the late poem “Passages, the Dignities,” Duncan idea of a large collage poem takes the form of a “grand takes stock of his life in poetry; his ties with Olson— collage,” collecting and modifying ideas and images in ”Wisdom as such must wonder”; and his relationship shifting relationships with other contexts. with Blaser, “the moth’s / ephemeral existence.” Despite The conflicts raised in the cultural and poetry com- the “black Night that hides the elemental germ,” he munities by the war in Vietnam dominate poems such perceives that the persistence of “the extending scale of as “Up Rising, Passages 25” and “The Soldiers, Passages imagined humanity” has a difficult time surviving in 26.” That theme continues in the following book, the bleak contemporary world. The elegiac mode of his Ground Work: Before the War (1984). This volume col- early poems now reaches points of despair about the lects groups of poems published separately: “Tri- possibilities of humankind redeeming itself. The final bunals,” “Poems from the Margins of Thom GUNN’s poem of the volume, “After a Long Illness,” recounts Moly,” “A Seventeenth Century Suite,” and Dante the failure of Duncan’s kidneys that controlled his life Études. Duncan stands before the war as he would from 1984 onward, even as the darkness of war and stand before a mirror contemplating the themes of cor- spiritual suppression controlled society. Only “the rupt manipulation of government against the will of imagination knows” the vision in the meadow, the bril- the people, the destruction of natural geography and liant “pool of thought” that redeems life itself. Duncan’s the spiritual landscape, and the grimness of war sup- imagination transforms the elegiac lament of his early pressing human desire. “Passages 35, Before the Judg- poetry into that “grand collage” of poetry powerful ment” is Duncan’s prophecy about the power of war enough to gather the persistent wisdom of humanity over the human will. Duncan summons the support of into a prophecy of fulfillment, surrounded by the dark- ancient gods of wisdom, “The Golden Ones,” who ness of corrupted political systems. “move in invisible realms” to fight against political BIBLIOGRAPHY leaders, in whom “stupidity thickens,” and to reveal Bertholf, Robert J. Robert Duncan: A Descriptive Bibliography. the laws of eternal goodness “against the works of Santa Rosa, Calif.: Black Sparrow Press, 1986 unworthy men, unfeeling judgments, and cruel Cuddihy, Michael, ed. Ironwood no. 22 (1983). [Robert deeds.” The intensity of this prophecy also shows up in Duncan: Special Issue] Duncan’s everyday life. As shown in “The Torn Cloth,” Faas, Ekbert. Young Robert Duncan: Portrait of the Poet as his friendship with Denise LEVERTOV was shattered Homosexual in Society. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Black Sparrow under the strain of political and poetic protests. “Years Press, 1983. of our rapport,” he writes, were wrecked by “War and Johnson, Devin. Precipitations: Contemporary American Poetry the Scars upon the land.” The Dante Études, on the as Occult Practice. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan Univer- other hand, trace the origins of Duncan’s poetics in sity Press, 2002. Dante’s ideas of empire and human worth. The volume Paul, Sherman. The Lost America of Love. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981. ends with Duncan’s dynamic affirmation of human Terrell, Carroll F., ed. Sagetrieb 4.2/3 (1985). [Robert Dun- love in “Circulations of the Song.” can Special Issue] The theme of the darker meaning of life in a con- stant state of war continues into the final volume, Robert J. Bertholf Ground Work II: In the Dark (1987). Again, poems appear in groups—”Veil, Turbine, Cord & Bird,” “Reg- DUNN, STEPHEN (1939– ) That Stephen ulators,” “Structure of Rime: Of the Five Songs”—as Dunn’s work is difficult to categorize may account for well as separately. In “To Master Baudelaire,” the his slow but steady rise to recognition. After working French poet becomes a model for defining the sick- himself out of his IMAGIST training, he eventually found 142 DUPLESSIS, RACHEL BLAU his mature voice in a discursive, abstract, but highly ground includes the Oklahoma City bombing, a accessible style. Dunn has forged his own way, writing philosopher-speaker is imagined sipping a drink in the lyric poems composed of an appealingly intimate voice ambivalent quiet of afternoon; meanwhile: “Far away, and a restrained, if pulsating, emotional fabric (see men were pulling bodies from debris, / a moan the LYRIC POETRY). sweetest, most hopeful thing.” Born in New York City, Dunn received a B.A. in his- Although Dunn admits the darkness of human tory from Hofstra University and an M.A. from the cre- experience, hope usually wins out in his work. Suffer- ative writing program at Syracuse University. A prolific ing a career crisis, the eponymous character of “The writer, he has won many awards and fellowships. His Guardian Angel” knows that his guardianship has been book Different Hours earned him the Pulitzer Prize for useless. But even though he cannot keep the poor from poetry in 2001. being thrown in the street or stop insults from hitting Dunn has been criticized for flatness of language, their targets, the angel tries to convince himself that and it is true that he avoids rhetorical and linguistic “everything he does takes root, hums / beneath the sur- extravagance. A poet of the local and the ordinary, faces of the world.” Dunn is suspicious of high passion and purple ver- BIBLIOGRAPHY biage. The quiet intimacy of his voice gains power Elliott, David L. “Precarious Balances.” Mid-American Review from his use of anecdotal material as a basis for philo- 15.1–2 (1995): 6–17. sophical reflection. Kitchen, Judith, and Stan Sanvel Rubin. “‘Only the Personal Where Dunn’s poetry gauges the nuances of emo- Matters’: A Conversation with Stephen Dunn.” Literary tional states, he risks courting the maudlin or senti- Review 30.4 (1987): 559–570. mental. But he successfully avoids this trap in the Vendler, Helen. The Music of What Happens. Cambridge, dialectical movement of his poetry: An idea is pro- Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988. posed, then qualified, with the goal of swerving away Jayme Stayer from the conclusive and toward the paradoxical. Dunn’s verse is controlled without a reliance on tra- DUPLESSIS, RACHEL BLAU (1941– ) ditional forms, though the line break and the stanza Rachel Blau DuPlessis is a poet-scholar known for fem- have always held weight as formal elements in his inist experimentation (see FEMALE VOICE, FEMALE LAN- work. One recurring form is a tercet, or three-line GUAGE). Her work is associated with the LANGUAGE stanza, with a truncated second line. Over this unique SCHOOL and the OBJECTIVIST ideals of George OPPEN and stanzaic form, Dunn brushes loose-limbed sentences, Louis ZUKOFSKY, especially in its attention to the rela- enjambed and punctuated to bump gently and swerve; tionships between poetics, language, and lived social the meter then bubbles up from syntactical groupings practices. Additionally DuPlessis’s poetry continues the rather than from variations on a set beat. Note, for experimentation of modernist writers, including example, how this rhythmic effect is created in one William Carlos WILLIAMS, Ezra POUND, and H. D. (see such tercet, from “Diminuendo” (1996), which begins: MODERNISM). “These were among the unreachables; emblems / of DuPlessis was born in Brooklyn, New York, and how they felt / once, about each other.” remained a New Yorker through her childhood and A recurrent theme of Dunn’s poetry is how we live college years. In 1973 DuPlessis settled in the Philadel- together in a fallen world. Hence, the aesthetic dimen- phia region, where she has been a professor of English sion is deeply informed by the moral. But that moral at Temple University. She has published seven books of dimension is empathic rather than didactic or political poetry since 1980, including a long, continuing proj- in nature. Characteristically, Dunn questions the effi- ect, DRAFTS. She has received a Pennsylvania Council of cacy of political gesturing in art; yet, a true poet of the Arts grant for poetry (1990), a Fund for Poetry paradoxes, he does not absolve himself of complicity award (1993), and Temple University’s Creative in the world. In “Loosestrife” (1996), whose back- Achievement Award (1999). DUPLESSIS, RACHEL BLAU 143

Formal innovation in DuPlessis’s poetry calls atten- ever, in her refusal of authoritative writing practices tion to reading and language practices. At times Du- that position the poet as the bearer of truth who Plessis’s page resembles a painter’s canvas layered with enlightens worthy readers, often by relying on a sin- texts. “Writing” in Tabula Rosa (1987), for example, gle, lyric voice and the objectification of others. includes regular type, bold handwriting, and repro- Instead DuPlessis favors layered meanings and dis- duced collages of text, and it describes this as an “inter- ruptions to form a theme that encourage a dialogue play between selection, / imbedding, and loss.” between poet and reader. This open form, along with DuPlessis regularly disrupts her own writing with the a merging of the everyday with the historical, is used awareness that utterances are always partial, yet she rev- to encourage careful attention to social practices and els in possibilities of language as she plays with words related belief systems. and syntax. “Draft 6: Midrush,” for instance, makes a DuPlessis’s poetry is at once unsettling and invigor- theme of loss and the irrecoverable (“‘Where are they ating, highlighting the problems involved in represen- now / dead people?’ / ‘Nowhere’”), but it regularly uses tation while challenging the reader to participate in phrases that resonate with multiple meanings, as in “had meaning-making. In her writing closure is temporary, to be set rite” or “How even is with odd.” DuPlessis’s because more can always be said. poetry acknowledges the limits and possibilities of lan- BIBLIOGRAPHY guage while proposing a poetics of process. Hatlen, Burton. “Renewing the Open Engagement: H. D. This play with form and language is intimately and Rachel Blau DuPlessis.” In H.D. and Poets After, edited related to the political nuances of DuPlessis’s poetry. by Donna Krolik Hollenberg. Iowa City: University of As Burton Hatlen explains, DuPlessis “writes always Iowa Press, 2000, pp. 130–162. as a feminist” (131). Often, then, the poetry recog- Lazer, Hank. “‘Travelling many direction’d crossings’: The nizes and resists patriarchal traditions that render Poetry of Rachel Blau DuPlessis.” In Opposing Poetries. Vol. women voiceless, as in this ironic quote from “Draft 2, Readings. Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press, 2: She”: “‘I be good girl with my magic / markers.’” 1996, pp. 34–59. DuPlessis’s feminism is expressed more subtly, how- Laurie McMillan C E D

EADY, CORNELIUS (1954– ) Cornelius morning glee” of his identity and vocation, his sense Eady’s poetry offers a misleadingly casual, even jaunty that, as a professional black American poet, he has chronicle of its times that can turn razor sharp in an beaten some tall odds. Nevertheless rage is present in instant. In poems spoken through many masks, in his poems, too, not always disguised by the blues syncopated rhythms and colloquial sentences studded perspective. “Anger” (1997) responds bitterly to net- with striking figurative language, he conveys an exu- work coverage of the riots that followed the acquittal berant engagement with the world, even when the of the police officers charged in the beating of Rodney experiences the world offers are painful ones. In this, King. Brutal Imagination (2001) places Susan Smith’s he might aptly be called a blues poet—not because he infamous accusation of an imaginary black man after often writes in blues form, as did Langston HUGHES, but murdering her own children in 1995 in the context of because his poems are full of the mordant wit and decades of demeaning or demonizing popular images occasional swagger that, along with grief and struggle, of African-American men. inform the spirit and knowledge of the blues. He Eady sees the job of the poet as revelation and dis- shares with the BLACK ARTS poets the conviction that in covery—“I am a person / who can’t keep a secret” music especially we find a quintessentially black Amer- (“Publicity Agent” [1980])—and what he reveals is ican culture expressed, but Eady, like Michael S. certainly not limited to African-American concerns. HARPER, presents his perceptions without the formal His poems articulate discoveries that all readers can and verbal aggressiveness typical of that movement. recognize, particularly about the complexities of fam- Eady was born and raised in Rochester, New York. ily life. With a gift for scene and a novelist’s interest He published the first of his six books of poems in in contexts and concepts developed gradually and 1980, and his second, Victims of the Latest Dance Craze, deliberately, Eady creates poems and sequences of won the 1985 Lamont Prize from the Academy of poems that tell their secrets less by confession than American Poets. An active teacher throughout his by dramatization. career, Eady has taught at the State University of New Eady’s poems are most notable for their energy and York, Stony Brook, and American University. flexibility of voice, for their democratic respect toward Eady’s African-American identity is central to his subjects and readers alike, and for their outward-looking work, as it is central to the jazz, blues, and Motown perspective that links private with public concerns. figures and titles that dominate his profuse musical BIBLIOGRAPHY references. “Gratitude” (1991) celebrates the “loose- Carroll, Rebecca. Swing Low: Black Men Writing. New York: seed-in-the-air glee . . . this rooster-pull-down- Crown Publishers, 1995.

144 ECONOMOU, GEORGE 145

Peters, Erskine. “Cornelius Eady’s You Don’t Miss Your Water: asks metaphysical questions, such as “Was man made Its Womanist/Feminist Perspective.” Journal of African stupid to see his own stupidity? / Is God by definition American Men 2.1 (summer 1996): 15–31. indifferent, beyond us all?” William Waddell The critical response to Eberhart largely echoes Gal- way KINNELL, who speaks of Eberhart’s “powerful, lov- EBERHART, RICHARD (1904– ) Richard ing and exuberant wakefulness to the world and its Eberhart’s poetry includes meditations on landscape things and creatures,” and Daniel Hoffman, who points and, widely conceived, on spiritual aspects of the out Eberhart’s “depth of perception” and “spiritual human experience. A contemporary of T. S. ELIOT and sense of revelation” (qtd. in Lund 13). other poets of MODERNISM who often shunned formal BIBLIOGRAPHY poetry, Eberhart often wrote in form. According to Brooks, Cleanth. “A Tribute to Richard Eberhart.” South Bernard Engel, Eberhart is “not a follower of William Atlantic Review 50.4 (Nov. 1985): 21–33. Carlos WILLIAMS, Ezra POUND, Robert FROST or any of Engel, Bernard F. Richard Eberhart. New York: Twayne, 1971. the other influential figures in the generation immedi- Lund, Elizabeth. “Poets Offer Tribute to a Life Lived in ately preceding his own. Wordsworth, Blake and per- Verse.” Christian Science Monitor, 3 December 1996, 13. haps Gerard Manley Hopkins are, Eberhart feels, his Gregory Byrd real poetic ancestors” and he can be considered both a transcendentalist and a visionary poet (24). ECONOMOU, GEORGE (1934– ) George Eberhart was born in Austin, Minnesota. He worked Economou started his career at the forefront of the New a variety of jobs, including deckhand on a steamship, York spoken-word scene and, most recently, has trans- tutor to the son of King Prajadhipok of Siam (1931–32), lated the medieval poem Piers Plowman. Thus, like Ezra gunnery instructor in the U.S. naval reserve (1942–46) POUND, Economou examined the old and the new, the and various college teaching positions. He lived a great anachronistic and slang—and found that they were deal of his life in New England, especially New Hamp- often indistinguishable. Also like Pound, Economou shire, where he was a professor of English at Dartmouth was influenced by the Provençal troubadours; he edited College. Among his many awards are a 1966 Pulitzer Paul BLACKBURN’s translations of them, and the name of Prize for Collected Poems, 1930–1976 and the position of Trobar, a magazine he founded and edited with Robert consultant in poetry at the Library of Congress from KELLY, devoted to DEEP IMAGE POETRY, refers to the Old 1959 to 1961, the position which is now known as poet Provençal word for poetry—literally, “to find” or “to laureate of the United States. His first book, A Bravery of invent.” The terms are descriptive: Economou used Earth, was published in 1930, and his most recent vol- what he found in medieval poetry to invent the new ume of poetry is New and Selected Poems, 1930–1990. oral poetry of modern New York (see POETRY IN PER- Eberhart’s poems meditate on the relationship of the FORMANCE). Like many poets of his generation—Jerome cosmos to the lived experience of the individual. In ROTHENBERG and Blackburn—Economou saw poetry as “The Groundhog” (1936), the speaker meditates upon “something said, spoken” and not something that a dead groundhog’s decomposition. The death disturbs “merely lands on the page” (“Some Notes” 657). him deeply for his “senses shook, / And mind outshot Born in Great Falls, Montana, Economou taught at our naked frailty,” but two years hence the field where Long Island University and the University of Okla- the groundhog died is “Massive and burning, full of homa. He also cofounded the Chelsea Review and life.” Thus does the poem “bring the theme of death to received fellowships from the National Endowment for intense life—a life that involves us who are human the Arts (1988, 1999). At Columbia University, his beings” (Brooks 3). Another of Eberhart’s most famous “ambitious” dissertation described the Goddess Natura poems is “The Fury of Aerial Bombardment” (1947), in in medieval allegory (Witke 132); it was subsequently which he laments the deaths of the young men he published as The Goddess Natura in Medieval Literature taught as a gunnery instructor. As in other poems, he in 1972 (and reprinted in 2002). 146 EDSON, RUSSELL

In his poems, Economou declares war against pom- ing literary conventions related to rhyme, rhythm, and posity. He describes his poems as “composition / not line, choosing instead a structure more malleable and eloquence” (“Ameriki: I” [1977]). And what does natural. Although in 1848 Edgar Allan Poe produced Economou think of eloquence? There is “no such “Eureka—A Prose Poem,” it was the length of a thing / behind any forehead.” Repetition, jittery type- novella. American prose poetry truly begins with Rus- setting, and onomatopoeia make Economou’s voice sell Edson. As Edson points out, in 1960s America, jump off the page. His poems initially sound self-con- “the term prose poetry seemed more related to French sciously brash, a young man’s poems, spoken not in toast or French fries” (qtd. in Johnson 30). Now a book English but in American, as in “Your Sexability Ques- of prose poetry has won the Pulitzer Prize (Charles tionnaire” (1977). Yet Economou can also write with SIMIC’s The World Doesn’t End [1990]), and many writ- an almost innocent tenderness, such as in “Nights of ers embrace the form, including Robert BLY and the Half-Eaten Moon” (1969), a poem to his wife (poet Michael Benedikt. Unquestionably Edson has played Rochelle OWENS). The speaker waits all night for his an important role in broadening the scope of contem- lover, and when she appears from the darkness, porary American poetry. Economou writes, he “awoke in your arms / and never Edson was born in 1935. He received a Guggen- let go.” The goal of these poems is the same as in much heim Fellowship in 1974. To date Edson has published performance poetry—you are supposed to hear 15 books and three pamphlets, all written exclusively Economou sound like himself and no one else. Yet in the prose poetry format. Economou’s work, in all his down-to-earth geniality, In an Edson poem, all is possible and nothing cer- also shows a more impersonal concern with history— tain, except perhaps the pervading feelings of isolation that is, he can sound exactly like others too. In his Piers and alienation that torment his characters. Often Plowman, he often sounds like Hopkins: “Christ keep Edson provides his own surreal illustrations, comple- you and your kingdom, king.” menting his content with humor and poignancy. We The translator and the troubadour come together in may find a woman replacing her husband with a stone, Economou’s most ambitious work, Century Dead Center a suitor whose knees crumble as he proposes marriage, (1997). The poem begins by asking, “Is it half our cen- toilets swallowing people. However, Edson shows that tury,” since “the black hole at its center?” He is referring no matter how bizarre the scenario, it scarcely com- to the Holocaust (our century’s center) but also to the petes with the lunacy of reality. In “A Machine” (1961), “dead center,” where our ideas begin to unravel. a poem that now seems especially prophetic, a son pleads, “Father, if you would only stare at the machine BIBLIOGRAPHY for a few hours, you would learn to love it, to perhaps Economou, George. “Some Notes towards Finding a View of the New Oral Poetry.” Boundary 2 3. iii (spring 1975): devote your life to it.” In comparison the father’s fears 653–656. that the machine will nest on their roof and produce Nash, Susan Smith. “Century Dead Center.” World Literature “baby machines” are benign. Today 72 (spring 1998): 377–378. A more overt social commentary, “The Philoso- Witke, Charles. Review of Goddess Natura in Medieval Litera- phers” (1985), shows a mother countering her son’s ture, by George Economou. Speculum 51.1 (Jan. 1976): proclamation, “I think therefore I am,” by pronouncing 132–134. instead, “I hit therefore I am,” ultimately knocking her Ken Chen son unconscious. In Edson’s world, philosophy is worthless: A weakling is bullied by an old woman, EDSON, RUSSELL (1935– ) Russell Edson powerless against the antiintellectualism of the mod- has proven instrumental in popularizing and legitimiz- ern, and still violent, world. ing the prose poetry genre in America. Charles Baude- Edson’s vision of dominating machines, dysfunc- laire and Arthur Rimbaud, 19th-century French poets, tional families, and a rational absurdity rests on a form originated the prose poem when they challenged exist- that allows all manner of literary techniques—poetic, ELIOT, T(HOMAS) S(TEARNS) 147 rhetorical, syntactical. In a 1999 interview with Edson, lines and even between the letters of “A n i m a t e s ,” Peter Johnson noted that writers still “treat the prose which may be the poem’s title or its first word, lead the poem like a one-night stand.” Edson’s response? “If one eye back through the poem, filling its gaps with multi- cannot accept failure and scorn, how is he to make his ple syntactic layers. “A n i m a t e s,” like “distance” art? It’s like wanting to go to heaven without dying” may be noun or verb or, on closer inspection, a collec- (Johnson 30–31). tion of letters which animate the “phone wires,” com- BIBLIOGRAPHY municating the equal weight given hills, animals, Edson, Russell. “An Interview with Russell Edson,” by roads, wires, words, and letters in what Eigner terms Peter Johnson. Writer’s Chronicle 31.6 (May/summer “the discovery and initiation of attention” (6). 1999): 30–36. In his essays, Eigner expresses a consistent concern Upton, Lee. “Structural Politics: The Prose Poetry of Rus- with the human need to measure an incommensurate sell Edson.” South Atlantic Review 58.4 (November world and a sustained ecological approach. As poet of 1993): 101–115. the suburban environment, Eigner’s contribution to Nancy Effinger Wilson nature writing is unique, reflected in the unified qual- ity of his trademark minimalism—a result of exacting EIGNER, LARRY (1926–1996) Over a career attention to the measures of his writing, as well as of spanning 36 books of poetry, one prose collection, and the enormous physical effort each poem cost him, but a volume of essays and letters, Larry Eigner developed also of an ethical imperative Eigner felt was common to a singular poetry, engaged equally with questions of the lot of humans, and the special prerogative of perception and inhabitation in the world, as with poetry, to do more with less. explorations and experimentations in language. His BIBLIOGRAPHY poetry is associated with two particular schools, BLACK Eigner, Larry. Areas Lights Heights: Writings 1954–1989, edited MOUNTAIN and what is now called the LANGUAGE SCHOOL. by Benjamin Friedlander. New York: Roof Books, 1989. Eigner was born in Lynn, Massachusetts. The classic Friedlander, Benjamin. “Larry Eigner.” In Dictionary of Liter- Eigner phrase, “the self is some head you can’t go ary Biography. Vol. 193, American Poets since World War II, around” (“Rambling (In) Life” [1989]), retains some lit- edited by Joseph Conte. Detroit: Gale Research, 1998. eral, biographical weight: A forceps injury sustained at Watten, Barrett. “Missing ‘X’: Formal Meaning in Crane & birth developed into cerebral palsy, as well as a spastic Eigner.” Total Syntax. Carbondale: Southern Illinois Uni- condition until the age of 35, when cryosurgery froze versity Press, 1985. the poet’s left side. Wheelchair-bound, Eigner spent Jonathan Skinner much of his life at home in Swampscott, Massachu- setts, with his parents or with his brother in Berkeley. ELIOT T(HOMAS) S(TEARNS) With the windows open and “only [his] right finger to (1888–1965) T. S. Eliot is one of the 20th century’s type with,” Eigner composed most of his poems, letter most important poets, whose work is a part of what is by letter, in the same “sun parlor,” in which, “facing the known as the modernist movement in poetry. Critic small audience, [his] first one,” he made his bar mitz- C. K. Stead has gone so far as to claim that Eliot took vah (Eigner 127). In 1984 Eigner’s Waters/Places/A part, along with Ezra POUND, in “invent[ing] MOD- Time received the San Francisco State University ERNISM” (39). Eliot not only influenced the so-called Poetry Center Award. Lost Generation that followed World War I but may be At first sight an Eigner poem seems little more than seen as a herald of the “principal tidal movement of an elliptical notation of the quiet, weekday business a poetry in English in the twentieth century” (Stead 4–5). suburban backyard offers up to perception: “A n i m a Eliot’s early influences were French, including philoso- t e s // squirrels and phone wires and birds / how many pher Henri Bergson, while his poetic maturation came roads distance the hills” (untitled poem [2001]). But as a result of reading Arthur Symons’s The Symbolist Tra- typographical features, notably the spacing between dition in Literature (1899) and the poetry of the French 148 ELIOT, T(HOMAS) S(TEARNS) symbolists Jules Laforgue and Charles Baudelaire. As character, revealing the psychological complexity of an American poet, however, it is hard to deny his culture through what amounted to studies and por- American poetic predecessors Walt Whitman and traits of people. The poems in Prufrock largely survey Ralph Waldo Emerson as inspiration, as well as novel- characters of the “decorous” set, such as Miss Nancy ist Henry James, whose journalistic style, based on Ellicott of “Cousin Nancy” and Miss Helen Slingsby of objective observation, Eliot adopted and remade into “Aunt Helen.” By focusing on character, Eliot reveals his own, with the help of Pound. Eliot’s recreating of the vacuity of a culture ravaged by world war and these continental and American influences led to a rev- unable to be restored by its impotent citizens. In “The olutionary new style of writing and reading poetry Boston Evening Transcript,” the speaker “wearily” fetches that, according to Leroy F. Searle, “opened the way to the paper for his Cousin Harriet and says that the read- more explicitly speculative and theoretical studies of ers of this paper “sway in the wind like a ripe field of literature” and provided an early model for New Criti- corn.” Incapable of achievement, like unpicked corn, cism (see FUGITIVE/AGRARIAN SCHOOL) (529). their only movement is slight and meaningless. The Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri. He attended reader imagines that they will rot on the stalks. Harvard University (1906–10) and studied at the Sor- Eliot may also be suggesting that the literature of the bonne (1910). There he read the symbolists, who day is guilty of such meaninglessness, even his own believed that language, particularly the use of symbol, poetry. “THE LOVE SONG OF J. ALFRED PRUFROCK” is the is the vehicle for transcendence and allows the reader’s study of a man who is aware of the debased state of his imagination, by use of association, allusion, and alle- culture and wants to change it, yet he is also a product gory, an alternate reality. He returned to Harvard to of this culture, living an empty life, which is measured pursue a dissertation on F. H. Bradley, whose book out “with coffee spoons.” Prufrock aspires to the Appearance and Reality (1893) made an impression, by heroic, but he cannot enact change; he cannot “disturb Eliot’s own account, on Eliot’s prose style. Eliot even- the universe” and tell what he knows of the apparent tually settled in London (without a Ph.D.) in 1914, dissolution of civilization. The poem implies that Eliot, where he met Pound and T. E. Hulme, whose writings like Prufrock, also fails to write of the despair he sees; and theories on imagism extended the symbolist influ- he is “deferential,” perhaps because he is a new poet ence; the IMAGIST SCHOOL’s “dry hard image” became the trying to find both confidence and an effective method new vehicle for transcendence (Stead 38), enacting to deliver his message. Eliot may be comparing himself what Bergson called a true understanding of experi- to Prufrock, who like his forebear James, is “meticu- ence that is reflected by an immediate datum of con- lous,” “full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse.” sciousness. In other words, truth is found in the The Waste Land is the seminal example of Eliot’s contemplation of whatever is present. Eliot was con- modernist style and theory. The poem is a collage of firmed in the Church of England and became a natu- disparate images that recall both the ancient and con- ralized British citizen in 1927. These experiences temporary to demonstrate how much civilization has greatly affected his writing, especially in poems like lost and, perhaps, to make a path for redemption. Eliot THE WASTE LAND (1922) and the FOUR QUARTETS (1943). uses an impersonal, objective technique that defined Eliot was presented the Dial Award in 1922 for The poetry as an escape from emotion and personality and Waste Land. He was also awarded the Nobel Prize in lit- allowed for the recapture of what he termed the “his- erature, as well as the British Order of Merit, in 1948, torical sense” (Prose 38) by employing a “dissociation and the American Medal of Freedom in 1964. of sensibility” (Essays 248) that denies contemporary In his first collection of poems, Prufrock and Other influence in order to regain the past magnificence of Observations (1917), Eliot demonstrates the admiration civilization by way of literary history and tradition. he held for James who, in Eliot’s opinion, was able to Eliot’s fragmented poetry mimics the fragmentation control his work yet remain impersonal. To accomplish of culture. And yet Eliot’s poetry makes sense of the this invisible control as James did, Eliot turned toward fragments that it collects by involving human thoughts, ENSLIN, THEODORE 149 dialogue, and activity. This modern poem acts as a new been lost. His steady development of what Stephen version of the Boston Evening Transcript, a report of the Spender describes as “ritual” and the observance of the apathy, ennui, and the “unreal” quality of civilization, as ritual separates Eliot from the other poets, as ritual represented by the various voices that speak the poem. becomes for Eliot and his readers the “foremost aim of Eliot continued to have newspapers in mind as he drew living” that joins “the living with the dead” as well as on the dialogue and concrete activities of people for “the present with the past” (7). what he called “objective correlatives” that express a BIBLIOGRAPHY particular emotion solely through the use of external Eliot, T. S. Selected Essays. 3d ed. New York: Harcourt, 1950. facts (Essays 124). Eliot gives us, in fragments, his ver- ———. Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, edited by Frank Ker- sion of the Anytown’s Daily Herald, and he seemed to be mode. New York: Harcourt, 1975. acutely aware of his journalistic method. He originally Searle, Leroy F. “New Criticism.” In Johns Hopkins Guide to titled the The Waste Land “He Do the Police in Different Literary Theory and Criticism, edited by Michael Groden Voices,” a reference to a line in Charles Dickens’s Our and Martin Krieswirth. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univer- Mutual Friend (1865), in which an orphan named sity Press, 1994. Sloppy reads the newspaper aloud to an old woman. Spender, Stephen. T. S. Eliot. New York: Viking Press, 1975. In spite of Eliot’s own critical justification for his Stead, C. K. Pound, Yeats, Eliot and the Modernist Movement. intellectual and impersonal style, he maintains a per- New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1986. sonal aspect in his work, embodied in the sometimes John R. Woznicki narrative quality of his study of people. He replicates the pattern of The Waste Land in his last major poetic ENSLIN, THEODORE (1925– ) Theodore work, Four Quartets, a collection of four poems based (Ted) Enslin is one of the most prolific poets of the late loosely on the last quartets of Beethoven which are the- 20th century. His work has often been associated with matically entwined with each other. The progression of the OBJECTIVIST and BLACK MOUNTAIN SCHOOLS. His lyri- these poems illustrates Eliot’s midlife conversion to cal verse, however, although esteemed by writers and Anglicanism. They embody a subjective and didactic critics alike, is not widely known because Enslin is not impulse, ultimately attempting to help readers tran- a self-promoter, has no academic affiliation, and has scend the despair of the world. published almost exclusively with small POETRY PRESSES. In their musical quality, these poems are spiritual, Enslin’s professional obscurity also underscores his inspirational, and intended to evoke action. The world generous spirit, which infuses each poem with uncom- is the place, as suggested in the third of the quartets, promising singularity and intimacy. He writes neither “The Dry Salvages,” where “music [is] heard so deeply / for a partisan audience nor for a literary market trend, that it is not heard at all, but you are the music.” Eliot but simply for the sheer pleasure of discovery that ultimately believed it was up to him to transcribe that poetry discloses between writer and reader, which he music, the world, for his readers. describes as “the only joy” in writing (Taggart Tr uck He writes in “Little Gidding,” the last of the quartets, 118). Influenced by the works of Cid CORMAN, George that “the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive OPPEN, William Carlos WILLIAMS, and Louis ZUKOFSKY, where we started.” Eliot spent his artistic career theo- Enslin’s writing has also been compared to that of rizing and writing in an innovative style, yet borrowing Robert CREELEY, Larry EIGNER, Lorine NIEDECKER, and content from history. It is a career representative of Charles OLSON. modernism—although it projects the individual poet Enslin was born in Chester, Pennsylvania, to parents embarking on a lifelong romantic quest for the regen- who were classical scholars and educators. During the eration of self. In this way Eliot follows Whitman and war years, he studied musical composition in Cam- Emerson in the sustained American tradition of the bridge, Massachusetts, with Nadia Boulanger and authentic poetic impulse, to seek, find, and, instead of Francis Judd Cooke and later attended the New Eng- create a new, in Eliot’s case, to reconstitute what has land Conservatory of Music. Enslin moved to Cape 150 ESHLEMAN, CLAYTON

Cod in 1946, then to Maine in 1960, where he cur- Born in Indianapolis, Eshleman has lived in Mexico, rently resides, writes, and crafts walking sticks. Enslin Japan, Peru, and France. In 1967 he founded the influ- won the Niemann Award (1955) for his weekly news- ential magazine Caterpillar and in 1981 started Sulfur, an paper column, “Six Miles Square,” in the Cape Codder. interdisciplinary magazine of poetry and art (see POETRY Origin Press published his first book, The Work Pro- JOURNALS). Among many awards, he was a recipient of posed (1958). Enslin has since produced more than 70 the National Book Award in 1979 for his cotranslation volumes, including To Come, To Have Become (1966), of César Vallejo’s Complete Posthumous Poetry. He has which won the Hart CRANE Award, The Weather Within taught at Eastern Michigan University. His first book of (1985), and Re-Sounding: Selected Later Poems (1999). poetry, Mexico & North, was published in 1962. Although landscape figures significantly in Enslin’s Eshleman’s chief preoccupation is with the caves of poetry and poetics, he considers himself neither a poet southern France, the birthplace of human image- of nature nor a regional writer. Three major, intercon- making. The hybrid, primordial pictures inscribed on nected themes inform this poet’s oeuvre: music, obser- the cave walls underground serve as metaphors for vation, and discovery. Enslin recalls that, as early as Eshleman’s conception not just of poems but of 1959, he became aware that his musical training “was poem-making. As stated in “Notes on a Visit to Le Tuc something that [he] was using in the writing of poetry” D’Audoubert” (1983), “image is crossbreeding,” and (Nowak 396). Love and Science (1990), for example, such operations take place within the mind’s most reflects a patient attunement to the poem as lyric, object, turbulent zones. Eshleman recounts in the introduc- and gift by embracing the cadence of things both pres- tion to Fracture (1983) how he “began to see prehis- ent and absent, sonorous and silent: “as a movement toric psychic activity as a swamp-like churning, in from itself the sound . . . is discovery” (#49). which construction and destruction were twined forces” (12). An Eshleman poem develops in a similar BIBLIOGRAPHY fashion. Its images or thoughts never follow a linear Foster, Edward, ed. Talisman 12: Theodore Enslin Issue. Jersey progression, but grow in an organic, free-associative City, N.J.: Talisman House, 1994. way, in which origins and ends are indistinguishable Nowak, Mark. “Interview.” In Theodore Enslin: Then, and Now: Selected Poems. Orono, Maine.: National Poetry from each other. Such free association is enacted at Foundation, 1999, 389–418. the sentence level, where words are often generated Taggart, John. “An Ongoing Conversation.” In Songs of by permutations of previous ones. All this produces a Degrees. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1994, reflection of an endlessly proliferating, intercon- pp. 179–187. nected world. “Short Story” (1994) opens, ironically, ———., ed. Truck 20: Theodore Enslin. Saint Paul, Minn.: “Begin with this: the world has no origin.” Truck Press, 1978. A translator of, among others, Antonin Artaud, W. Scott Howard Aimé Césaire, and Vladimir Holan, Eshleman’s sympa- thies lie with the outsider and transgressor—visionar- ESHLEMAN, CLAYTON (1935– ) Clay- ies pitted against the oppression of monolithic culture. ton Eshleman is important to the story of American lit- While his long-term project has been to unearth sub- erature not only for his own poetry, which is terranean materials, it is also to unmask the way in substantial, but also for his activities as magazine edi- which atrocities are linked, inexorably, to the prosper- tor and translator. His work is related to movements in ities of Western life. It is, as Eshleman describes it in poetry, visual art, even psychology. His influences “Short Story” (1994), “A poetry so full of claws / as to include poet Charles OLSON, painter Francis Bacon, tear the reader’s face off.” and psychologist James Hillman. By turns visionary, BIBLIOGRAPHY gothic, daily, political, grotesque, sexual, and comic, Christensen, Paul. Minding the Underworld: Clayton Eshleman Eshleman’s poems provoke on multiple levels simulta- and Late Post-Modernism. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Black neously, demanding that readers reevaluate their lives. Sparrow, 1991. ETHNOPOETICS 151

Eshleman, Clayton. Introduction to Fracture. Santa Barbara, Espada’s poetry is marked by an attention to the Calif.: Black Sparrow, 1983. continuing effects of history on the individual—as Sattler, Martha. Clayton Eshleman: A Descriptive Bibliography. migrant, laborer, dispossessed, and disenfranchised— Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1988. and by an ironic reimagining of fate. In “Imagine the David Chirico Angels of Bread” (1996), for instance, reversals of for- tune abound: “squatters evict landlords,” “refugees ESPADA, MARTÍN (1957– ) Martín Espada deport judges,” peasants “uproot the deed to the earth is recognized for his contributions to political poetry that sprouts the vine.” “The New Bathroom Policy at in both English and Spanish. An important part of English High School” (1990) depicts a principal who what has been called the Latino Renaissance, Espada’s bans Spanish in the bathrooms in order to relieve his poetry is a unique intermingling of advocacy, narra- constipation. Lyrical and bold simultaneously, Espada’s tive, writings from the margin, and formal innovation, poetry in its most populist forms confronts the realities which is clearly influenced by questions of Latino- of history’s speechless and marginalized masses. His American identity and the history of colonialism in more speculative poetry contemplates metaphysical the Americas. Espada has argued that political convic- questions about his family and his past. tions and poetry must relate: “The question is not BIBLIOGRAPHY whether poetry and politics can mix. That question is Creeley, Robert. Foreword to Trumpets from the Islands of a luxury for those who can afford it. The question is Their Eviction, edited by Martín Espada. Tempe, Ariz.: how best to combine poetry and politics” (100). Bilingual Press, 1994. Drawing on Pan-American traditions, Espada has Espada, Martín. Zapata’s Disciple: Essays. Cambridge, Mass.: been influenced by the works of Pablo Neruda, South End Press, 1998. Ernesto Cardenal, Eduardo Galeano, and Walt Whit- Gonzalez, Ray, ed. Touching the Fire: Fifteen Poets of Today’s man and their respective traditions of NARRATIVE Latino Renaissance. New York: Anchor Books, 1998. POETRY of protest. Ratiner, Steven. “Martín Espada: Poetry and the Burden of Espada was born in 1957 to a Puerto Rican father History.” Christian Science Monitor (6 March 1991): 16. and Jewish mother in Brooklyn. Trained as a lawyer, Shorris, Earl. Latinos: Biography of a People. New York: W.W. Norton, 1992. Espada published his first collection of poetry, The Immigrant Iceboy’s Bolero, in 1982. His collections of Snehal Shingavi poetry include Rebellion Is the Circle of a Lover’s Hands (1990), which won the Paterson Poetry Prize and a ETHNOPOETICS The term ethnopoetics signi- PEN/Revson Foundation Fellowship (1993), and Imag- fies an informal movement in poetry and scholarship. ine the Angels of Bread (1996), which won the American Coined by Jerome ROTHENBERG, it refers narrowly to Book Award (1997). He has edited several anthologies collaborations among poets, anthropologists, linguists, of poetry, including El Coro: A Chorus of Latino and and literary scholars during the late 1960s and 1970s. Latina Poetry (1997), which won a Gustavus Myers Ethnopoetics has come to designate writing that Center Outstanding Book Award, and he has published reflects a heightened awareness of the artfulness of oral a prose collection, Zapata’s Disciple (1998), which won and traditional poetries and the ways in which diverse an Independent Publisher Book Award (1999). He has verbal arts illuminate world cultures; this writing can also received the PEN/Voelker Award for poetry, two also reflect innovative theorizing and the practice of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts transcription or translation . (1986), and a Massachusetts Artists Foundation Fel- POETRY ANTHOLOGIES edited by Rothenberg—Shaking lowship (1984). Throughout 1994 Espada read several the Pumpkin (1991) and Technicians of the Sacred of his poems as part of National Public Radio’s All (1985)—helped bring attention to oral poetry and Things Considered program. He has taught at the Uni- other ancient literary forms generally neglected within versity of Massachusetts, Amherst. literary and academic circles. The availability of 152 ETHNOPOETICS ethnopoetic texts influenced the translation, study, and ancient text; in fact, Schwerner has created a poetic fic- making of poetry by writers associated with ethnopo- tion, conjuring up both the original and the “transla- etics, as well as some associated with the BLACK MOUN- tion,” complete with footnotes, indecipherable TAIN SCHOOL and BEAT POETRY; more recent trends passages, and an imagined scholar/translator. As toward multiculturalism, POETRY IN PERFORMANCE, and ethnopoetics enriches our understanding of traditional cross-cultural poetics reflect the influence of ethnopo- poetries in formal, philosophical, and spiritual terms, etics. During the 1970s the journal Alcheringa/Ethnopo- it alters received ideas about the Western canon and etics balanced translations of traditional world poetry privileged literary forms, thereby enlarging the domain and contemporary creative work by poets, including of poetry. Moving beyond a canon centered on the David ANTIN, George ECONOMOU, Robert KELLY, George “classics,” writers influenced by ethnopoetics study, Quasha, Rothenberg, Armand SCHWERNER, and Gary absorb, and are influenced by a wider range of sources, SNYDER, some of whom were earlier associated with the including Aztec, Mayan, Zuni, Navajo, Egyptian, short-lived DEEP IMAGE school. Anthropologists and lin- Yoruban, Ashanti, Indian, Tibetan, and other poetries. guists involved included coeditor Dennis Tedlock, Ethnopoetic scholarship may involve analysis, trans- Stanley Diamond, Dell Hymes, and Nathaniel TARN. lation, or transcription of texts gained from living tradi- The marginalization of traditional world poetries tional poets, singers, and storytellers, or it may take up prior to ethnopoetics can be partially attributed to the previously collected ethnographic texts and retranslate poverty of available translations. An ethnopoetic trans- them to expose their aesthetic and culturally informa- lation requires more than mastery of the language. tive dimensions. Some of the most valuable ethnopoetic From the scholarly side, ethnopoetics emphasizes the texts have entailed collaboration between formally necessity of acquiring deep knowledge of the cultures trained scholars and traditional artists. Finding the Cen- and performance context of the poetry; in retranslating ter (1978) presents an exemplary collection of poetic the 16th-century Mayan Popol Vuh, for example, Ted- narratives performed by Walter Sanchez and Andrew lock not only learned the Quiché Maya language and Peynetsa, two traditional Zuni tellers from New Mexico; collaborated with contemporary Mayans but appren- Tedlock produced the book by making an audio ticed himself to an indigenous spiritual leader. recording, translating, then transcribing the pieces for Ethnopoetics scholars developed influential methods performance. The result is a book that allows one to of transcription and total translation that aim to carry read the works and feel nearly present in the perform- over the qualities of oral performance to the printed ances. Also from the American Southwest, Yaqui Deer page, thereby improving translations on the formal Songs, Maso Bwikam: A Native American Poetry (1987) level as well. By making the artfulness of traditional is a remarkable collaboration between scholar Larry poetries more apparent on the page, this innovation Evers and singer Felipe S. Molina. It presents cycles of influenced contemporary poets. traditional songs in bilingual format, which one may Two classic examples of the innovation inspired by read along with an audio cassette of the singing. Most ethnopoetics are Fast Speaking Woman (1975) by Anne powerful, however, is the way it conveys the sense of WALDMAN and THE TABLETS (1968, 1989, 1999) by how the performers and native audience think of this Schwerner. Waldman’s book of poems uses techniques art by contextualizing the songs with interviews and of repetition and parallelism learned from the work of conversations between Yaqui singers and participants in an oral poet, Maria Sabina. Ethnopoetics allows Wald- the deer song performances. man to craft poems that convey an appropriately As motto for ethnopoetics in all its facets, the first chantlike power not possible using either traditional words of Rothenberg’s first anthology—“Primitive English prosody (rhyme and meter) or the looser, means Complex”—serve as a simple measure of its speech-oriented patterns of free verse (see PROSODY AND continued influence. Valuing marginalized art—the so- FREE VERSE). Schwerner’s The Tablets appears, at first called primitive, preliterate, tribal, or uncivilized— glance, to be an English translation of a recovered ethnopoetics anticipates multiculturalism. As an EUROPEAN POETIC INFLUENCES 153 exploration of oral poetry and traditions, it resonates cism (England), expressionism (Germany), futurism with the recent reemergence of performance poetry. (Italy), cubo-futurism (Russia), dadaism (Switzerland), The intense, interdisciplinary collaborations of and SURREALISM (France) utterly changed the way Amer- ethnopoetics in its first phase have subsided, but a ican poets wrote and thought (see IMAGIST SCHOOL). And conversation between poetry and the new interpretive as the work of European poets continues to be trans- anthropology began with the advent of the journal lated, so do the ideas of such groundbreaking poets as XCP: Cross-cultural Poetics in 1997. In the work of indi- Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Stéphane Mal- vidual poets, ethnopoetic concerns continue to be larmé, Guillaume Apollinaire, Rainer Maria Rilke, Fil- reflected, as when, for instance, Clayton ESHLEMAN ippo Tommaso Marinetti, Vladimir Mayakovksy, delves into the prehistoric imagination in Hotel Cro- Velemir Khlebnikov, Anna Akhmatova, Tristan Tzara, Magnon (1989), Cecilia Vicuña remembers lost threads and Federico García Lorca continue freshly to inspire. of the Quechua in Unravelling Words and the Weaving of “America is my country, and Paris is my home town,” Water (1992), Snyder imagines his place in North wrote Gertrude STEIN (61), who moved to Paris in 1903 America through Asian art in Mountains and Rivers and who was part of a huge migration of American writ- without End (1996), Nathaniel MACKEY converses with ers who emigrated to Europe in the 1900s to 1920s. the Dogon in School of Udhra (1993), Simon ORTIZ calls Stein was at the forefront of the burgeoning modernist up the trickster in postindustrial America in Woven sensibility and one of the first collectors of work by Stone (1992), and Edward Kamau BRATHWAITE forges a “new” painters, such as Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso poetic Nation Language embodying the African nommo (see MODERNISM). In her works, such as TENDER BUTTONS in Middle Passage (1993). Whether captivated by the (1914), she applied to her own writing many of the oral artfulness or some other feature brought to light same Cubist techniques that Picasso was using in his art. by ethnopoetics, 20th-century poets working in this However, when seeking the conduits through which the domain continue to share an excitement for the way it European revolution in thought and aesthetics found its expands the vision of the possible for poetry. way to American shores, American poet and editor Ezra POUND may be the most important. With British poets BIBLIOGRAPHY T. E. Hulme, Richard Aldington, and F. S. Flint and fel- Alcheringa/Ethnopoetics. 9 vols. 1970–80. low American emigré H. D., inspired by the poetry of Rothenberg, Jerome, and Diane Rothenberg, eds. Symposium of the Whole: A Range of Discourse towards and Ethnopoetics. French symbolist poets Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Jules Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. Laforgue (called “the father of free verse” [see PROSODY AND FREE VERSE]), and Arthur Rimbaud, Pound intro- Kenneth Sherwood duced imagism in London in 1912. Imagism was the first movement to bring to American poets symbolist ideas EUROPEAN POETIC INFLUENCES A about using new language, verse forms, and images to signal comment that captures Europe’s influence on express the rapid changes of the “modern” world. 20th-century American poetry is Frank O’HARA’s Symbolism became a major influence on many poignant observation: “My heart is in my / pocket, it is American poets, including T. S. ELIOT, who incorpo- Poems by Pierre Reverdy” (“A Step Away from Them” rated many symbolist ideas into his own poetry, partic- [1956]). While many 19th-century American poets ularly his epic poem, THE WASTE LAND, as well as Hart looked across to Europe for culture, the extent to which CRANE, Wallace STEVENS, Allen GINSBERG and other BEAT their 20th-century counterparts were influenced by poets, and John ASHBERY, Kenneth KOCH, and O’Hara, European poetry and poetics was more than significant. members of the NEW YORK SCHOOL. The poetry critic The intellectual and cultural ferment of Europe in the Marjorie Perloff feels that the “French connection” is early 20th century sparked a revolution in American the missing link in understanding the two primary poetry that has continued to the present day. Move- strains of contemporary American poetry; she argues ments such as symbolism (France), imagism and vorti- that American poetry stemmed from a divergence in 154 EUROPEAN POETIC INFLUENCES thought between Eliot and Pound, influenced respec- Cubo-futurism in Russia is another movement more tively by Mallarmé and Rimbaud (4). recently discovered by American poets. The cubo- “[I]magism all but fizzled out in England where in futurists abandoned traditional metrical structures America it transformed itself to become a complex tra- in favor of new rhythms and powerful new images, dition of free verse that left few poets untouched,” says and presented the poet as a revolutionary figure. Geoffrey Thurley (110). Because of some inherent Mayakovsky, who inspired Ginsberg, is the best problems in imagism, and perhaps because of its over- known; however, Khlebnikov was the primary innova- enthusiastic reception by American poets, such as Amy tor of the cubo-futurists, and his ideas were important LOWELL, Pound abandoned it to found vorticism with in the development of postmodern poetry and its non- British writer Wyndham Lewis. Vorticism demanded linear, dissociative qualities. Perloff maintains that that poetic images be like vortexes—moving, swirling Khlebnikov, because of his many innovations in poetry, sources of energy. Pound himself was much like a vor- is a major influence on “an important thread of twen- tex, through whom much European poetry was chan- tieth-century poetry from Russian Futurism and Dada nelled to the United States and to American poets, such to Aimé Césaire and [Edmund] Kamau BRAITHWAITE, to as Stevens, Marianne MOORE, and William Carlos Mac Wellman and Steve McCaffery, Susan HOWE and WILLIAMS. Pound was the “foreign correspondent” for Maggie O’Sullivan” (126). One of Khlebnikov’s impor- three of the most important POETRY JOURNALS of the tant innovations was the idea of zaum, “a poetic lan- time, Poetry, the Dial, and the Little Review, and he guage beyond (za) mind or reason (um),” achieved became a primary supporter for European writers, such through intense wordplay and multidimensional, non- as William Butler Yeats and James Joyce. sequential language (Perloff 123). Events such as the 1913 Armory Show in New York Interestingly the irreverent and iconoclastic move- City, where Williams was among the crowds viewing ment of dadaism, founded in Zurich in 1916 by Tris- avant-garde artwork by Marcel Duchamp, Henri tan Tzara, had a protomanifestation in New York City. Matisse, and Francis Picabia for the first time, also Alfred Stieglitz published work by what became the introduced modernist ideas to the United States. As “New York dada” group—Man Ray, Picabia, Djuna Williams recalled later, “There had been a break some- Barnes, Marsden Hartley, Marius de Zayas, and oth- where, we were streaming through, each thinking his ers—in a literary journal titled 291. “291 was in a sense own thoughts, driving his own designs toward his self’s the prototypical Dada journal, except, of course, that objectives. Whether the Armory Show in painting did Dada did not yet exist,” write Guy Bennett and Béatrice it or whether that also was no more than a facet—the Mousli (31). Picabia started his own journal, titled 391, poetic line, the way the image was to lie on the page whose list of contributors “reads like a who’s who of was our immediate concern” (138). the early 20th century avant-garde,” explain Bennett More radical movements, such as dadaism and futur- and Mousli (33), including Apollinaire, André Breton, ism, which occurred between the two world wars, were Jean Cocteau, Robert Desnos, Duchamp, Paul Éluard, to have a more delayed influence on American poetry. Max Jacob, Man Ray, René Magritte, Pound, Eric Satie, Futurism, an early movement founded by Filippo Iom- Tzara, and others. The only American journal officially maco Marinetti in Italy in 1909, inspired many other affiliated with dadaism, titled New York Dada, was literary movements in Europe. However, his writings edited by Ray and Duchamp in 1921. However, it was were not translated until recently—this may be due to not until the 1960s that dadaism found a more recep- futurism’s disturbing links to war and nationalism. tive audience. The Beat poets, John CAGE, and Jackson Futurism’s indirect contributions to American poetry MAC LOW used dada’s tools of collage, discontinuity, and are nevertheless undeniable, despite Marinetti’s seem- chance, while poets associated with the New York ing eclipse by more lyrical Italian writers widely trans- school created delicious juxtapositions between low- lated in the 1950s, such as Giuseppe Ungaretti, brow elements of culture, such as comic books, with Salvatore Quasimodo, and Eugenio Montale. traditional poetic forms, such as the sestina. EUROPEAN POETIC INFLUENCES 155

Surrealism reached an even wider audience, and, in individual American poets. Many poets translated their fact, it is difficult to find a postwar American poet who findings themselves, and some European poets who does not show at least some awareness of it. Surrealist had emigrated to the United States became translators poets, such as Breton, Desnos, and Éluard, abandoned of their native language (see POETRY TRANSLATION). The established rules of poetry and prose to create new German poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s gravity and medita- images and associations, advancing the primacy of the tive qualities were particularly seductive to American imagination. The surrealist writer was a spiritual poet-translators of a certain generation, such as explorer—process was more important than product. ROBERT LOWELL, Randall JARRELL, and Robert BLY (Heep “Thus while rejecting, as vehemently as the Dadaists, 4). Langston HUGHES and W. S. MERWIN both translated all fixed categories, dogma (including revolutionary Lorca, whose tragic death captured many poets’ inter- dogma), and rationalizations that threatened to impov- est. George ECONOMOU, MERRILL, Robert PINSKY, and W. erish man and diminish the options open to him, the H. AUDEN all translated the Greek poet C. P. Cavafy, and Surrealist is confident in the capacity of the mind to Muriel RUYKEYSER translated the Swedish poet Gunnar sustain itself in the midst of chaos,” claims Robert Ekelof. Some poetic translation relationships include Short (302). These ideas proved irresistible to many ROSMARIE WALDROP and Edmond Jabès, Clayton ESH- American poets, particularly the Beats, who adapted LEMAN and Antonin Artaud, Paul BLACKBURN and Lorca, the surrealist technique of “automatic writing” into and Robert HASS and Czeslaw Milosz. Joseph BRODSKY, their own “spontaneous prose.” born in Leningrad in 1940, was exiled in 1972 after Ashbery, Koch, and O’Hara together revitalized inter- serving in a labor camp. Brodsky then emigrated to the est in European writing at a time when the United States United States, where he worked to make poetry more was experiencing postwar isolation, and Ashbery, who central to American culture, even serving as poet laure- lived in Paris in the 1950s and 1960s, was particularly ate from 1991 to 1992. Jerome ROTHENBERG continues diligent in reviving neglected European writers, such as to produce multinational anthologies containing over- Raymond Roussel, Max Jacob, and Reverdy. Their timely looked work by poets, such as Kurt Schwitters (see reintroductions paved the way for younger American ETHNOPOETICS). Charles SIMIC, born in Yugoslavia, has poets to continue translating important works, such as translated Yugoslav poets, such as Vasko Popa, and Apollinaire’s poem “Zone,” which was retranslated by Anselm HOLLO, born in Finland, translates Finnish Ron PADGETT in the 1970s. Says Ginsberg, who wrote a poets Paavo Haavikko and Pentti Saarikoski. homage to one of his favorite poets, entitled “At Apolli- The list of American poets who traveled across the naire’s Grave”: “The point of the Apollinaire poem was to Atlantic to visit or live in Europe—from Stein, Pound, show my literary antecedents with the hope that others H. D., Eliot, Crane, Cummings, Hughes, Countee would go out and read them. . . . Everybody said, ‘Oh, CULLEN, Claude MCKAY, Ashbery, Koch, Mathews, Pad- Ginsberg is imitating [Kenneth] PATCHEN and Carl SAND- gett, Alice NOTLEY, and others—is as impressive as Euro- BURG.’ There was no notion at all of the European tradi- pean poets who have traveled the reverse route. tion. The montage, free association, nonpunctuated Zone American poetry can identify many of its roots in what style that I used in that poem was largely missed” (qtd. is not American, just as American identity itself consists in Sawyer-Lauçanno 265). In 1992 Padgett published of different, but essential “foreign” influences. To explore the complete poems of Swiss poet Blaise Cendrars, this hidden debt that American poetry owes to Euro- whom he had been translating for decades. Harry MATH- pean poets is to continue to revitalize our own language. EWS, a close friend of Ashbery’s, became closely involved BIBLIOGRAPHY with the European group of Oulipo, whose complicated, Bennett, Guy, and Béatrice Mousli. Charting the Here of rigorous, and playful forms inspired many contemporary There: French & American Poetry in Literary Magazines from writers to explore new techniques (see CYBERPOETRY). 1850–2002. New York: Granary Books, 2002. There are many poets who were not part of any Bradbury, Malcolm, and James McFarlane, eds. Modernism, major literary movement and who were “discovered” by 1890–1930. Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1978. 156 EVERSON, WILLIAM

Heep, Hartmut. A Different Poem: Rainer Maria Rilke’s Ameri- the wave-battered Pacific coast served as models for can Translators Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell, and Robert Bly. Everson’s own work. New York: Peter Lang, 1996. Born in Sacramento and raised in California’s San Perloff, Marjorie. The Poetics of Indeterminancy: Rimbaud to Joaquin Valley, Everson’s early life was rural and mod- Cage. Princeton, N.J.: Northwestern University Press, 1983. est. He began to write poetry in high school, and after ———. 21st-Century Modernism: The “New Poetics”. Malden, graduation he attended Fresno State College, dropping Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 2002. Rothenberg, Jerome, and Pierre Joris, eds. Poems for the Mil- out in 1935 to devote himself to writing, growing lennium: The University of California Book of Modern and grapes, and learning the printer’s trade. A conscien- Postmodern Poetry. Vols. 1 and 2. Berkeley: University of tious objector, Everson spent World War II in a civilian California Press, 1995. public-service camp. After the war he moved to Berke- Sawyer-Lauçanno, Christopher. The Continual Pilgrimage: ley, where, championed by Rexroth, he gathered American Writers in Paris, 1944–1960. New York: Grove increasing recognition for his poetry. In 1948, after Press, 1992. experiencing a religious epiphany during a Christmas Short, Robert. “Dada and Surrealism.” In Modernism, mass, he converted to Catholicism and three years later 1890–1930, edited by Malcolm Bradbury and James was accepted as a lay brother in the Dominican order, McFarlane. Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1978. receiving the name Brother Antoninus, the name under Stein, Gertrude. What Are Masterpieces? New York: Pitman, which he would write until—unable to accept the con- 1970. Thurley, Geoffrey. The American Moment: American Poetry in dition of celibacy—he publicly resigned from the order Mid-Century. London, England: Edward Arnold, 1977. in late 1969. From 1971 until his retirement in 1981, Williams, William Carlos. The Autobiography of William Car- he was poet in residence at University of California, los Williams. New York: Random House, 1951. Santa Cruz. His poems are collected in three volumes: The Residual Years (1997), The Veritable Years (1998), Marcella Durand and The Integral Years (2000). Everson’s best-known poem, “Canticle to the Water- EVERSON, WILLIAM (BROTHER birds” (1950), illustrates his acute sensitivity to the ANTONINUS) (1912–1994) By virtue of intricate music of language—“Clack your beaks you early literary friendships with Robert DUNCAN and Ken- cormorants and kittiwakes”—as well as his ability to neth REXROTH, William Everson is often counted infuse earthly things with divine presence: “Send up among the poets of the SAN FRANCISCO RENAISSANCE. He the strict articulation of your throats, / And say His saw his life and work proceed in three phases: the first name.” After Everson left monastic life, he continued a quest to understand his place in the physical world, to explore the physical manifestations of spirituality, the second a rejection of that world in an effort to including, as critic Albert Gelpi observes, the erotic achieve union with God, and the third a period of syn- aspects of mysticism. While some critics found Ever- thesis, or reconciliation of the former two. Moving son’s work melodramatic, few poets since the romantic between the polarities of acceptance and renunciation era have so fully engaged the paradoxes and conflicts that characterized his personal life, Everson’s poems that at once torment and enliven the human psyche. combine a deep knowledge of psychoanalysis and the- BIBLIOGRAPHY ology with autobiographical candor to investigate what Bartlett, Lee. William Everson: The Life of Brother Antoninus. he called, “The divisible selves, / Ill eased with each New York: New Directions, 1988. other.” (“The Chronicle of Division” [1946]). Narra- Carpenter, David A. The Rages of Excess. The Life and Poetry of tive, CONFESSIONAL, keenly descriptive, and presented William Everson. Bristol, Ind.: Wyndham Hall Press, 1987. with, in David A. Carpenter’s words, “incantatory Gelpi, Albert. “‘I Am Your Woman’: The Erotic Mysticism of intensity and insistence” (173), his poems travel the William Everson.” Religion and the Arts 2:2 (1998): rugged physical and emotional trails famously broken 149–181. by Robinson JEFFERS, whose expansive evocations of Fred Muratori C F D

FEARING, KENNETH (1902–1961) “No work has been described as “hard-boiled” (Barnard other American poet speaks to us more directly and 43); he was often regarded as a communist poet, but consistently about the era of the Great Depression,” the his family has attested that Fearing was not political, critic Sy Kahn has written about Kenneth Fearing and when questioned by the Federal Bureau of Inves- (134). A product of his times, his poetry reflects the tigation (FBI), Fearing denied being a member of the circumstantial and emotional history of depression-era party (Ryley xx). culture. Certain adjectives consistently describe Fear- Fearing recorded images he saw around him, ing’s work: dark, ironic, urbane, and satirical. A promi- whether they were of taxis, subways, and billboards or nent rebel poet in the 1930s and 1940s, as well as a breadlines, money-lenders, and crooked politicians. novelist, Fearing named Walt Whitman as a major He, like Whitman, spoke for the common person, influence (Barnard 47), and many associate his later using a simple vocabulary and long, all-encompassing poems with the conventions of Carl SANDBURG and the lines that display a prosy, distinctly American style. high modernist style (see MODERNISM) of T. S. ELIOT Fearing differs from Whitman, however, in tone. While (Ryley xxix–xxx). Whitman’s poems are songs of hope, Fearing’s are of Fearing was born in Oak Park, Illinois. After almost loss and desperation. For Fearing, the America that completing a degree at the University of Wisconsin (he Whitman painted with such promise had become a was later awarded an honorary degree), he moved to corrupt wasteland. New York and supported himself through freelance Ultimately, in poems like “Devil’s Dream” (1938), writing, largely using a pseudonym and writing pulp Fearing helps readers deal with the impossible circum- fiction for magazines. Later, however, he garnered stances of their individual and universal tragedies: acclaim for his seven books of poetry and eight novels, “Because it is not, will not, never could be true / That one of which, The Big Clock (1946), became a national the whole bright, green, warm, calm world goes: / best-seller and a hit movie. He gained critical success CRASH.” Despite Fearing’s pessimism, during his time, for his poetry with his second collection, Poems his poetry was popular and far-reaching; he reflected (1935). Awarded Guggenheim Fellowships in 1936 the pain, struggle, and physical and emotional hunger and 1939, he also received an American Academy of of an entire generation. Arts and Letters Award in 1940. BIBLIOGRAPHY Often using 1930s slang and pop-culture images, Barnard, Rita. The Great Depression and the Culture of Abun- Fearing centers his poems on city life, deception, cap- dance: Kenneth Fearing, Nathanael West, and Mass Culture in italism, and the demoralization of modern people. His the 1930s. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

157 158 FELDMAN, IRVING

Kahn, Sy. “Kenneth Fearing and the Twentieh Century and shouts at him ‘You idiot / do you know how to do Blues.” In The Thirties: Fiction, Poetry, Drama, edited by anything right?’” The painful conversation continues Warren French. Deland, Fla.: E. Edwards, 1967, pp. with the son accepting his “father’s dead heart, com- 133–140. monplace, appalling,” while the father’s “misery and Ryley, Robert M. Introduction to Kenneth Fearing: Complete maiming / return in the son’s chest to their brutal beat- Poems. Orono, Maine: National Poetry Foundation, 1994. ing.” Many of the poems in Beautiful Dead Things, “Bad Kelly D. Whiddon Brunch,” for example, describe the perimeters of male- female relations. FELDMAN, IRVING (1928– ) Irving Feld- The fine collection All of Us Here, as its title indi- man remains a poet’s poet, although much of his work, cates, reveals the same insistence on the primary while thorny, is not beyond the intelligent reader. Influ- importance of man relating to man, to woman, woman ences on him include William Butler Yeats and Rainer to child, each to each. In “They Say to Us” (1986), a Maria Rilke, their solemnity later tempered by Jules family is looking at a stack of photographs, “the living Laforgue and Tristan Corbiere (“Conversation”). But and the dead who mingle here / as nowhere else.” To Feldman has remained his own poet. The very idea of a Feldman, “This ritual is profound, / solemn, reli- school of poetry is “repugnant” to him, he explains, and gious—‘those who participate feel themselves’ as the diversity of his work shows, he finds it difficult weighty” and are “judicious, like gods.” In his work even “to join himself” (“Conversation”). His earlier Feldman “continually engages the problems of the work is delicately lyrical, as exemplified by the meta- human condition” (Schweizer 42). physical poem “X” (1972), but the later work has a BIBLIOGRAPHY rugged thoughtfulness. Feldman can write about any- Feldman, Irving. Conversation with Nikki Stiller. New York thing: a quarrel, baseball, smoking cigarettes, Nazi City, N.Y., 6 January 2002. atrocities. All of his work, as he puts it in Teach Me, Schweizer, Harold, ed. The Poetry of Irving Feldman. Lewis- Dear Sister (1983) is “required, requested, rich / in soci- berg, Penn.: Bucknell University Press, 1992. ety, in obligations.” The poet stands apart to observe, but is still bound—uncomfortably, fretfully—by myriad Nikki Stiller ties to the rest of life. Feldman was born in Brooklyn, New York, to a FEMALE VOICE, FEMALE LANGUAGE working-class Jewish family. He began teaching at the The ascribing of a specific meaning in American poet- State University of New York, Buffalo, in 1964. Among ics to female voice and female language coincided with his most important works are New and Selected Poems the emergence of the American second-wave feminist (1979), The Life and Letters (1994), and Beautiful Dead movement. Although this movement had important Things (2000). He was twice nominated for a National poetic precursors—poets such as Elizabeth BISHOP, H. Book Award. D., Amy LOWELL, Mina LOY, and Marianne MOORE had The titles of Feldman’s poems—”Assimilation,” “The long been concerned with questions surrounding gen- Nurses,” “Family History,” “Geneologies,” “The Human der and the role of the woman poet—attention to the Circle” and of his books Teach Me, Dear Sister (1983) specifics of a female voice and a female language and All of Us Here (1986)—point to this poet’s insis- gained real critical and creative momentum in the tence on the primary importance of human relations in postwar period. The second-wave feminist movement, his work. Many of these poems derive their significant heralded by the publication of such works as Betty metaphors from our exchanges, inventions, interac- Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique in 1963, brought tions, as well as from our dramas and their conse- about profound changes in American society’s organi- quences. In “The Heir” (1979), for example, a bereaved zation of, and attitude toward, gender difference. Fem- son is trying to replace his own heart with that of his inist critics and activists resisted the division between dead father; he struggles with the corpse that “sits up public and private and exposed the patriarchal FEMALE VOICE, FEMALE LANGUAGE 159 assumptions that supported a broad host of male-dom- ton and Plath provided intimate and painful insights inated cultural practices in the workplace, the family, into the visceral frustrations and contradictions of education, religion, medicine, and sexuality. The dis- midcentury femininity in marriage, motherhood, sexu- covery of a woman’s individual voice and the produc- ality, and poetic ambition. Plath’s posthumously pub- tion of a collective woman’s language were both vital to lished collection, ARIEL (1965), was influential for its these processes. One of the first woman poets to be rendering of the pychological struggle for a female identified with this historical and aesthetic moment voice. In poems such as “Ariel,” “LADY LAZARUS,” and was Muriel RUKEYSER, whose influential poem “The “DADDY,” the authorial voice is forged from a fusion of Poem as Mask” (1968) articulated the divisions— the extremes of femininity. The sexualized climax of “myself, split open, unable to / speak, in exile from the poem “Fever 103,” for example, describes the poet myself”—that the discovery of a woman’s voice and as a “pure acetylene / Virgin / attended by roses.” The language was intended to heal. combination of autobiographical honesty and open This emergence of a female voice in American form that these poets pioneered for a feminist poetics poetry can be traced to three broader shifts in is evident in the work of later poets, such as Louise post–World War II American poetics. First feminist GLÜCK and Sharon OLDS. poetry was assisted by the move in American poetics The third development in American poetry that con- toward open form and free verse. The poet Adrienne tributed to the development of a female voice was the RICH famously described how her early work was writ- changes in the public circulation of poetry, initiated by ten with the “asbestos gloves” of formal constraints that movements such as BEAT writing in the 1950s and then she eventually had to discard in order to find a voice by the antiwar and Civil Rights movements in the and a language that could speak “to and of women” in 1960s. These movements, within which women poets, poems written from a “newly released courage to such as Diane DI PRIMA and Denise LEVERTOV, were name, to love each other, to share risk, and grief and active, highlighted the public possibilities of contem- celebration” (176). The need for this voice is suggested porary poetry through readings, performances, and the by the angry frustrations of such poems as Rich’s 1968 distribution of broadsides and small POETRY JOURNALS. “The Burning of Paper Instead of Children,” which Feminist poetry, in such works as Judy Grahn’s The ends with an inelegant faltering—“the typewriter is Common Woman (1978), sought to use the female voice overheated, my mouth is burning, I cannot touch you in poetry as a basis for the collective empowerment of and this is the oppressor’s language.” Rich demon- a female audience. Women’s poetry was important in strates the productive possibilities of a female language these contexts, as Kim Whitehead has recently sug- in the fluid and tender eroticism of “Twenty-One Love gested in The Feminist Poetry Movement, for its direct Poems” (1977), which frankly articulates lesbian contribution to the public life of the feminist move- desire. Rich was also an influential figure for combin- ment as it sought to become a site of cultural produc- ing poetic writing with prose and feminist theory, and tion. Whitehead demonstrates the ways in which her critical work includes seminal essays, such as “Of feminist poetry’s sensitivity to the “matrix” of poetic Woman Born” (1976) and “Compulsory Heterosexual- meaning allowed it to serve “as a kind of political clar- ity and Lesbian Existence” (1980). ion call to women to take notice and take action; the The second important influence on the develop- consciousness-raising groups and organising cells of ment of a feminist poetics in the late early 1950s and radical feminism proved to be especially fertile early 1960s was the increased attention paid to the role grounds for preparing women to hear this call” (18). of the poets themselves within their poems. Sylvia The development of a female voice and a female PLATH and Anne SEXTON worked with the poet Robert language in poetry has received much critical atten- LOWELL in the mid-1950s and were influenced by his tion from a growing academic community of feminist move, in the collection Life Studies (1959), toward writers and theorists. In the 1970s and 1980s critics, what has been since labeled CONFESSIONAL POETRY. Sex- such as Suzanne Juhasz and Alicia Ostriker, read the 160 FEMALE VOICE, FEMALE LANGUAGE possession of a female voice in poetry—defying what prevalent in the feminist poetry movement. Although Juhasz described as the double-bind of the woman many of these poets were committed to this move- poet: “if she is a ‘woman’ she must fail as a poet; ‘poet’ ment, their commitment was often complicated by an she must fail as ‘woman’”—as both deeply subversive identification with the Civil Rights and BLACK ARTS of the masculine norms of American poetics and as MOVEMENTs that emphasized both an alternative set of affirming of the alternative possibilities of women (3). political priorities and an alternative deployment of These critics were also important for constructing, voice and language in literature. Jordan’s work was along with anthologizers, such as Florence Howe, a influential for creatively exploiting and reconciling the genealogy and critical tradition for the female voice tensions between her feminist perspective and her that was able to incorporate retrospectively the work fidelity to an African-American oral tradition. Poems of earlier poets such as H. D., Emily Dickinson, and such as “Getting Down to Get Over” (1973) disrupt Anne Bradstreet. This largely celebratory critical tradi- narrative and identification in their emphasis upon the tion examined the way in which the voice of women complexities of a woman speaker occupying a variety poets was used to breach the cultural silences about of culturally specific oral registers. Alternatively Chi- female anger, female sexuality, sexuality and body, cana poets, such as Gloria Anzaldua and Lorna Dee motherhood, and domesticity. A second generation of CERVANTES, drew attention to the bilingual and interlin- academic critics, such as Jan Montefiore, drew upon gual pressures upon an American female voice. Texts, the emerging field of poststructualist theory in order such as Anzaldua’s Borderlands (1987), written in Eng- to examine the relationship between women’s poetry lish and Spanish, highlight the limitations of the and the disruptive presence of the “feminine” in lan- monolingual assumptions upon which much “Ameri- guage. This shift involved moving away from examin- can” speech-based poetry was predicated. ing the role of women’s poetry in the feminist Feminist experimental writing in the 1980s and movement to examining, instead, the philosophical 1990s often emphasized the idea that a female voice nature of the relationship between language and the and language implied an overly simple understanding subject speaking or being spoken of. of language itself. This writing, which emphasized the By the mid-1980s, however, feminist critics had complicated meanings available in written language begun to question the implications of feminist assump- rather than the assumed simplicity of its spoken form, tions about what constituted a female voice or lan- claimed an alternative tradition of feminist poets, one guage. The models of identity politics that assumed that included modernists, such as Gertrude STEIN, and gender to be either an inherent or homogenous char- OBJECTIVISTs, such as Lorine NIEDECKER. These poets, acteristic were gradually reproached for their essential- often associated with the LANGUAGE SCHOOL, included ist implications—for assuming, to cite an example, Rae ARMANTROUT, Rachel Blau DUPLESSIS, Kathleen that women possessed inherent biologically deter- FRASER, Carla HARRYMAN, Lyn HEJINIAN, Susan HOWE, and mined characteristics. In addition to this, models of Leslie SCALAPINO. These poets share an interest in poetry based on the text, rather than on the voice, understanding gender and femininity as things con- began to receive increased critical attention. structed by society rather than as foundations that can The first of these concerns was most clearly articu- be “discovered” through a female voice or language. lated by feminist critics seeking to make apparent the This writing often relinquished a concern with either implicit racial exclusions of the feminist movement, the lyrical “I” or the processes of feminine écriture in which had failed to consider sufficiently the distinct favor of a more fragmented writing style that was experiences of women of color. The work of such poets intended to explore the multiple meanings available in as Gwendolyn BROOKS, Lucille CLIFTON, Nikki GIOVANNI, language. This writing required readers to be engaged Audre LORDE, June JORDAN, and Sonia SANCHEZ ques- actively in the production of meaning, to pay attention tioned, in a variety of ways, the assumptions about to the visual and material aspects of language, and to form, self, community, and gender that had been question the meaning and assumptions supporting FERLINGHETTI, LAWRENCE 161 narrative and identification. Hejinian’s book-length ences of the 1940’s” (Cherkovski 83). His publisher in poem My Life (1987) became one of the most success- the future was to be James Laughlin at New Directions, ful examples of this. This lengthy poem, in which each an avant-garde publishing house on the East Coast as stanza corresponds to a year of the poet’s life, compli- City Lights was on the West (see POETRY PRESSES). cates poetic autobiography’s reliance on narrative and Through Kenneth REXROTH, Ferlinghetti met other lyrical self-knowledge by stressing the physicality, the artists and writers, with whom he became part of the patterning, and the unreliability of memory. At the SAN FRANCISCO RENAISSANCE. Among his notable edito- same time this attention to the sensuality of memory, rial decisions at City Lights were to publish Allen GINS- suggested in repeated phrases, such as “a pause, a rose, BERG’s HOWL and Other Poems, which resulted in an something on paper,” enriches what this form can be infamous and successfully defended obscenity trial, assumed to contain. The scrutiny given in such exper- Ginsberg’s KADDISH and Other Poems, and Gregory imental writing to the politics of representations of CORSO’s Gasoline, each of a major work of midcentury women in a variety of social and historical contexts American poetry. Ferlinghetti strove to extend the City means that, despite its controversial relationship to Lights list beyond BEAT and San Francisco Renaissance many of the assumptions about second-wave feminist works, and therefore he also published translations of poetry, it remains committed to many of aims of the new poetry from around the world. women’s movement as they have developed during the Born in Yonkers, New York, Ferlinghetti had an past 30 years. early childhood fraught with upheaval. His father died before Lawrence, the youngest of five sons, was born. BIBLIOGRAPHY His birth mother broke down under the difficulties she Juhasz, Suzanne. Naked and Fiery Forms: Modern American faced and was institutionalized for a number of years. Poetry by Women, a New Tradition. New York: Harper & Row, 1976. Separated from his brothers, Ferlinghetti was subse- Montefiore, Jan. Feminism and Poetry: Language, Experience, quently abandoned without warning by his foster Identity in Women’s Writing. London: Pandora, 1987. mother and left in the care of her employers. Thomas Ostriker, Alicia. Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Wolfe’s literary appeal led Ferlinghetti to choose Women’s Poetry in America. Boston: Beacon Press, 1986. Wolfe’s alma mater, the University of North Carolina, Rich, Adrienne. Adrienne Rich’s Poetry and Prose, edited by for his postsecondary education, and he graduated Albert Gelpi. New York: W. W. Norton, 1993. with a bachelor’s degree in 1941. After naval service in Simpson, Megan. Poetic Epistemologies: Gender and Knowing World War II, he earned a master’s degree from Colum- in Women’s Language-Orientated Writing. Albany: State Uni- bia in 1947 and a Ph.D. at the Sorbonne in 1949. His versity of New York Press, 2000. dissertation examined “The City as a Symbol in Mod- Whitehead, Kim. The Feminist Poetry Movement. Jackson: ern Poetry,” and urban geography is a significant figure University Press of Mississippi, 1996. in Ferlinghetti’s creative work. Nicky Marsh His poetry consistently considers his personal and public concerns: identity and society. Ferlinghetti, like FERLINGHETTI, LAWRENCE (1919– ) many poets of the postwar period, discovered the ther- Lawrence Ferlinghetti is significant to the development apeutic value of writing his way through personal expe- of 20th-century American poetry as both a poet and riences as a means to understanding himself and his publisher. He opened the San Francisco bookstore and world, and his background provided him with an publisher City Lights Books in 1953 in partnership abundance of material to be resolved. “A chief subject with Peter Martin and bought Martin’s interest in the of Ferlinghetti’s poetry is often Ferlinghetti himself” business in 1955, the same year he published his own (Skau 52), a statement applicable to the work of virtu- first book; by then, he had developed “a unique style, ally every other writer who emerged in the same period. owing more to E. E. CUMMINGS and Kenneth PATCHEN Ferlinghetti’s social and political activism, as well as his than either T. S. ELIOT or Ezra POUND, his great influ- commitment to and participation in the arts, received 162 FINCH, ANNIE numerous acknowledgements. In 1998 he was declared Silesky, Barry. Ferlinghetti: The Artist and His Time. New York: poet laureate of San Francisco, while City Lights Book- Warner, 1990. store has been granted historic landmark status. His list Skau, Michael. ‘Constantly Risking Absurdity’: The Writings of of recognitions for lifetime achievement includes the Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Troy, N.Y.: Whitston, 1989. American Book Award (1998), the National Book Crit- Smith, Larry R. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Poet-at-Large. Carbon- dale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983. ics Circle Ivan Sandrof Award (1999), and the Ameri- can Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) Earl Warren Civil A. Mary Murphy Liberties Award (1999). Urban people, their sounds and issues, populate Fer- FINCH, ANNIE (RIDLEY CRANE) linghetti’s poetic cityscapes. He explains that “The Long (1956– ) Annie Finch is important to several tra- Street” (1959) “passes around the world / filled with all ditions of writing outside MODERNIST free verse and its the people of the world.” Colloquial speech, set in a descendants (see PROSODY AND FREE VERSE), and she is consciously constructed musical background occasion- often associated with NEW FORMALISM and women’s ally represented by idiosyncratic arrangement of lines poetry (see FEMALE VOICE, FEMALE LANGUAGE). Her for- across the page, addresses fundamental concerns of the mal verse emphasizes direct, unmediated relationships poet’s social conscience: the abuse of political and eco- between a poetic self and the world over the complex nomic power. Ferlinghetti reveals an anarchist ideology and ambivalent attitudes toward knowledge, self, and and a tireless social and ecological activism. He saw the language favored in much contemporary poetry. Poems upheaval of the 1960s as a possible route to a solution about seasonal events, life cycles, relationships, and of these social ills, particularly the dissolution of the the interpenetration of the natural and the cosmic system of nations (Cherkovski 181); one of the appeal- draw upon the often overlooked tradition of American ing features of 1960s radicalism was liberated sex, and women poets, including Emily Dickinson, Sara TEAS- “sex is a major process and product in Ferlinghetti’s DALE, and Carolyn KIZER. view of a transformed social order” (Skau 12). Born in New Rochelle, New York, Finch earned a B.A. These goals are conflated in his 1965 poem “The Sit- from Yale University, an M.F.A. from the University of uation in the West, Followed by a Holy Proposal,” in Houston, and a Ph.D. in English from Stanford. She has which he declares “blessed be the fruit of transcopula- published two books of poetry, Eve (1997) and Calen- tion” and “blessed be the fucking world with no more dars (2002), as well as critical studies, including The nations.” In Ferlinghetti’s work there is a real hope in Ghost of Meter: Culture and Prosody in American Free Verse the strength of human energy, real “Wild Dreams of a (1993), An Exaltation of Forms (2002, with Kathrine New Beginning” (1988). His literary body of work Varnes), and New Formal Poets (2003, with Susan includes his novel Her (1960); a collection of short Schultz). The founder and moderator of WOM-PO, a plays titled Routines (1964); travel writings from jour- national internet listserv on women’s poetry, Finch once neys to Italy, France, and Mexico; translations of remarked that her scholarship is motivated by her need French and Italian poetry; and a dozen books of his to create a critical context for women’s poetry (135). She own “little charleychaplin man” poetry, as he termed it has taught at Miami University in Ohio. in the poem “Constantly risking absurdity” (1958), Finch’s poetry combines her interests in the femi- starting with Pictures of the Gone World (1955) through nine and in form. For example, in Eve, poems such as to How to Paint Sunlight (2001). “Running in Church,” use an array of poetic forms, Ferlinghetti paints, writes, speaks, and works in from chants to triple meters in order to invoke pat- order to keep corruption from finding a place to hide terns and traditions of female power. Here the lines, and to provide beauty and conscience with a voice. “You made the long corridors ring, tintinnabular / BIBLIOGRAPHY echoes exploring the pounded cold floor,” employ Cherkovski, Neeli. Ferlinghetti: A Biography. Garden City, dactylic rhythms to emphasize a free feminine pres- N.Y.: Doubleday, 1979. ence within the church’s patriarchic, constrained FINKEL, DONALD 163 space. In Calendars this interest in the feminine man- books of poetry, he has been nominated twice for the ifests in an attention to the interpenetration of natural National Book Critics Circle Award (1975 and 1981), seasons and major life events. From “A Wedding on has been a finalist for the National Book Award (1970), Earth” to “Belly,” a poem to her unborn child, Finch and won the Dictionary of Literary Biography’s Year- infuses fresh feeling into occasional verse while book Award in 1994. Finkel’s 1991 collection of trans- embracing such poetry’s domestic and communal lations, A Splintered Mirror: Chinese Poetry from the function. “Elegy For My Father” most palpably Democracy Movement, brought English-speaking read- invokes these themes as it portrays the poet’s deceased ers an important perspective on the Chinese dissident father merging into the cosmic world: “Night, take his movement of the 1980s. left hand, turning the pages. / Spin with his dry inde- Finkel’s early subject matter included jazz musicians, pendence, his arms.” junkies, and St. Simeon Stylites, the fifth-century saint Finch’s current writing still embraces a female voice whose 40 years on top of a pillar provided Finkel with but with a new spin. Her poems and essays invoke the a hero for his second book, Simeon (1964), in which he sentimental poetry of minor American women writers as introduced the technique of building a long narrative or a critique of the traditional lyric and its emphasis upon character study through series of connected lyric originality and self-expression. Where most critics have poems. With his fourth book, Answer Back (1968), he dismissed this verse as conventional and artless, Finch would add another element to his lyric-narratives, that tries to reinvent the poetess tradition as an avant-garde of found lines. As with his earlier street tough-classicist postmodern poetry that is as radical and interesting as melange, Finkel now began the collaging of lines from other contemporary experimental schools. philosophy, science, popular culture, and, in the case of BIBLIOGRAPHY Answer Back, correspondence with a prisoner, with his Finch, Annie. “Confessions of a Postmodern Poetess.” In By own tightly crafted, image-rich voice. Herself: Women Reclaim Poetry, edited by Molly McQuade. The subjects of Finkel’s lyric sequences include cave St. Paul, Minn.: Graywolf Press, 2000, pp. 213–225. exploration, experiments in communicating with pri- “Finch, A.R.C.” Contemporary Authors New Revision Series mates, and a bizarre round-the-world sail that never 94, edited by Scot Peacock (2001): 134–137. went anywhere. Perhaps the unifying subject of all of Natalie Gerber these is a meditation on the limits of our humanity. A trip to the South Pole in 1970, as part of a scientific FINKEL, DONALD (1929– ) Donald Finkel expedition, produced Finkel’s most arresting subject, created a voice that combined a New York City street and most powerful extended metaphor, in Adequate toughness with a classicist’s cultural reference and a Earth (1972) and “Endurance” (1978), about the metaphysician’s concern with experience and its impli- Ernest Shackleton expedition to the pole. Finkel has cations. His metaphysical bent, along with his early recently addressed issues of aging in “A Question of inspiration from jazz and visual art, connect him to the Seeing” (1998) and “Burden “ (2001), which describes NEW YORK SCHOOL, but he drew away both geographi- a poet’s descent into Alzheimer’s “as if words were the cally and thematically. Like Alan DUGAN, he became a burden / he’d been bearing, all his life.” maverick presence on the American poetic landscape, as BIBLIOGRAPHY much defined by his differences from major trends as by Cargas, Harry James. “Interview with Constance Urdang and his similarities. Finkel himself cites Robert FROST as his Donald Finkel.” Webster Review 1.2 (1974): 57–70. most important influence (“Conversation”). Howard, Richard. Alone with America: Essays on the Art of Born in New York City, Finkel has spent much of his Poetry in the United States Since 1950. New York: life in the Midwest. After earning a B.S. and M.A. from Atheneum, 1980, pp. 158–175. Columbia University, he attended the University of Richards, Tad. Telephone Conversation with Donald Finkel, Iowa Writers Workshop. In 1960 he became poet in Saugerties, N.Y.: 7 August 2002. residence at Washington University. The author of 14 Tad Richards 164 “THE FISH”

“THE FISH” ELIZABETH BISHOP (1946) from “the elimination, or conquest, of the enemy, but “The Fish,” one of Elizabeth BISHOP’s best-known the embracing, subsuming, and internalizing of him” poems, first appeared in her collection North and South (110). The poem represents an epiphany about beauty, (1946). With its detailed descriptions of an animal, heroism, and the ethics of aesthetic sensitivity. “The Fish” displays the influence of Marianne MOORE, BIBLIOGRAPHY who herself has a poem titled “THE FISH,” but its strat- Costello, Bonnie. Elizabeth Bishop: Questions of Mastery. Cam- egy of anecdotal first-person narration resembles not bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991. Moore’s MODERNISM, but instead the lyrics of Bishop’s Spiegelman, Willard. “Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘Natural Heroism.’” midcentury contemporary Robert LOWELL. In Elizabeth Bishop, edited by Harold Bloom. New York: Bishop begins with the simple statement, “I caught Chelsea House, 1985. a tremendous fish”; on its most basic level, the poem Ben Johnson recounts catching, observing, and releasing a fish. Like much of Bishop’s poetry, however, straightforward tone begs deeper investigation. “The Fish” contains 76 lines “THE FISH” MARIANNE MOORE (1918) A of meticulous, inventive description, such as how the prominent figure in imagism (see IMAGIST SCHOOL), Mari- fish’s “skin hung in strips / like ancient wallpaper” and anne MOORE relies on carefully constructed images to its eyes resemble “old scratched isinglass.” The speaker convey an idea or a feeling. In “The Fish” she develops pores over this battered creature with a painter’s sight stunning visual imagery that, on the surface, describes an and helps the reader to see many strange and wonder- undersea world while, on a deeper level, also represents ful details. ideas as diverse as language’s complexities, the poet as The poem is not only about the fish, however; it is observer, and the power and endurance of the sea. also about the speaker who has caught it. In the first The poem depicts with precision the vitality of the half of the poem, she appears to be masterfully in con- undersea world, examining with detached observation trol of her situation. Her actions are denoted by simple how life and light interact to reveal all that is seemingly verbs, such as “I caught,” which suggest a detached invisible beneath the surface of the sea. “The Fish” has perspective on the situation, contrasted by the fish, been widely celebrated for its aesthetics by such poets which “hung a grunting weight” and is infested with as T. S. ELIOT, Wallace STEVENS, and Donald HALL, but parasites. In the second half of the poem, there is a readers differ widely in their analysis of its meaning. shift in tone. The verbs used for the speaker now sug- Darlene Williams Erickson observes, “Moore seems to gest her psychology: She “admired” the fish and “stared lead her readers to ambiguity. Like the abstract painter, and stared” at it. Here the speaker looks, just as before, she demands that her audience participate in the lines, but she looks because something about the fish com- turning them slowly until meaning takes shape within pels involuntary fascination. The fish has a “weapon- the parameters of her images” (136–137). Individual like” lower lip from which hang “five old pieces of readers themselves must perform the work of wading fishing line,” which tells us that the fish has been into the sea of Moore’s overwhelmingly visual images. hooked five times before but has always survived. The As with so many of her poems, Moore revised “The fish is a battle-scarred warrior. The speaker no longer Fish” at least three times, experimenting with line merely observes the fish, but she also admires it. length and syllabic meter. First written in 1918, “The At the end of the poem, the boat fills with a sense of Fish” was composed of six lines with syllables distrib- “victory” as the “rainbow” of oil on the water seems to uted according to a 1,3,8,1,6,8 pattern. In her revision spread everywhere. The speaker lets the fish go. Her of the poem 12 years later, Moore condensed each sense of “victory” stems not from catching the fish, stanza to five lines with a 1,3,9,6,8 syllabic pattern and which happens at the start of the poem, but from a an aabbc rhyme scheme, thus dramatically reshaping change that occurred during her meditations on it. As the layout of the poem to enact more visually the Willard Spiegelman argues, victory does not come swelling waves of the sea. Hugh Kenner describes these FLETCHER, JOHN GOULD 165 as “little intricate grids of visual symmetry” and particular poems or stages of his work, his poetry as a remarks: “It is a poem to see with the eye, conceived in whole suggests a larger goal. Fletcher’s understanding 1 a typewriter upon an 8 /2 x 11” sheet of paper” (18). of the artist’s duty is clear in the following statement A distinctly modernist poem (see MODERNISM), “The from his book on the painter Paul Gauguin: “to affirm Fish” creates an image with both form and content for the dignity of life, the value of humanity, despite the the eye to track, and as a result it relies as much upon morbid prejudices of Puritanism, the timid conven- the reader’s sight as upon the music of the language. tionality of the mob, despite even his own knowledge However, Moore guides the reader into subsurface of the insoluble riddle of suffering, decay and death” depths by blurring the boundary between title and (180–181). This visionary focus informs all of poem. The verb wade, which opens the poem, literally Fletcher’s work. invites readers to enter into an exploration of the image. Fletcher was born in Little Rock, Arkansas. He Once in the poem, readers, like the fish and like the attended Harvard from 1903 to 1907 and traveled poet, glide through a catalogue of visual undersea through the American Southwest and Italy before mov- images, the poet’s language illuminating the unseen ing to London in 1909. While abroad, he self-pub- world of the sea like the sunlight that moves “with spot- lished his first five collections of poetry, met many of light swiftness / into the crevices.” These images of light the imagist poets, including Ezra POUND and Amy LOW- and motion are balanced by the rocky “defiant” cliff, ELL, and contributed work to the imagist POETRY whose presence suggests both a terrible power and the ANTHOLOGIES. In the late 1920s, while lecturing in the will to endure. Yet the images maintain an ambiguity United States, he encountered the southern Fugi- characteristic of Moore’s poetry and elude formulaic tive/Agrarian poets John Crowe RANSOM, Donald DAVID- decoding. “The poem pretends that it works visually,” SON, and Allen TATE. His poetry appeared in the Fugitive Taffy Martin notes, “whereas it should warn readers that magazine, and he contributed his essay “Education, images in poems are not always what they seem to be” Past and Present” to the Agrarian anthology, I’ll Take (95). Ultimately the paradox of “The Fish” is that it My Stand (1930). He returned to Arkansas in 1933. invokes the visible even as it explores, both literally and Fletcher published 24 books of poetry and prose dur- metaphorically, that which evades sight. ing his lifetime, and his Selected Poems received the 1938 Pulitzer Prize. BIBLIOGRAPHY Fletcher’s poetry underwent many formal shifts dur- Erickson, Darlene Williams. Illusion Is More Precise than Pre- cision: The Poetry of Marianne Moore. Tuscaloosa: Univer- ing his career. His symbolist-inspired first books con- sity of Alabama Press, 1992. tain traditional forms, such as heroic couplets and Kenner, Hugh. “The Experience of the Eye.” In Modern Crit- sonnets, while his imagist poems are usually in free ical Views: Marianne Moore, edited by Harold Bloom. New verse and emphasize direct treatment of the poetic York: Chelsea House, 1987, pp. 11–24. subject and concise description (see PROSODY AND FREE Martin, Taffy. Marianne Moore: Subversive Modernist. Austin: VERSE). His religious and philosophical poetry employs University of Texas Press, 1986. elegies and the religious epic, while his final collections Terry Lynn Pettinger combine free verse and traditional forms to address southern Agrarian concerns. In fact elements of south- FLETCHER, JOHN GOULD (1886–1950) ern MODERNISM run throughout his work, although John Gould Fletcher was a modernist poet from the they are most prevalent in his later poems. Consider American South. Because of his experimentation with how he juxtaposes an image of death with images of different subjects and poetic techniques, and because the natural world in the title poem of South Star of his affiliation with different poetic movements, his (1941): “Over the hill where so many men found the work has been described as religious, mystical, sym- dignity to die,” winter “Turns over its burning heap of bolist, impressionist, IMAGIST, and southern FUGITIVE/ leaves and brown, dried grasses again.” Fletcher uses AGRARIAN. While these classifications may be applied to images of nature to mirror “something of the despair 166 FLOW CHART and sadness of the Old South and its lost cause” with his community of readers, most of whom “have (Stephen 134). charted his development as a writer with something of Fletcher’s poetry is grounded in his sense of history the systematic organization of a flow chart” (Mora- and the possibilities for the future. While his poetic marco 40). explorations take many forms, they are always in serv- The knowledgeable reader of Ashbery’s “life work” ice to his visionary goals. will recognize that, in Flow Chart as in his earlier texts, BIBLIOGRAPHY Ashbery is fascinated by what constitutes authorship. Carpenter, Lucas. John Gould Fletcher and Southern Mod- Ashbery as an authorial persona appears only to assert ernism. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1990. that a conception of Ashbery as a reliable presence is Fletcher, John Gould. Paul Gauguin, His Life and Art. New impossible: “I called John but he couldn’t come to the York: Brown, 1921. phone.” The author as the determiner of a poem’s Stephens, Edna B. John Gould Fletcher. New York: Twayne, “meaning” is unavailable here—the reader, holding a 1967. phone with no one on the other end, imposes mean- Ce Rosenow ing on the text. Ashbery, aware that he does not have the power to transmit a specific meaning via his FLOW CHART JOHN ASHBERY (1991) In poetry, acknowledges the crucial role that an almost the book-length poem Flow Chart, John ASHBERY syn- arbitrary, highly subjective interpretation plays in thesizes themes typical of his decades-long career: the determining what a poem is about. There is no privi- instability of meaning and of the objective “I,” the leged meaning, as every potential reading of Flow poet’s struggle with his literary predecessors, and mor- Chart multiplies according to how many times one tality. Flow Chart especially laments the end of the reads or speaks the poem. poet’s role as spokesperson for an organized tribe. The The shaky quality of meaning as it is transmitted aging poet sets himself adrift on a river of language that through language is directly connected to Ashbery’s streams luxuriously and maddeningly toward no end awareness of writing within a tradition, especially a at all, “the plaited lines that extend / like a bronze poetic tradition, in which truth is imagined as a real chain into eternity.” possibility as opposed to merely another social and lin- Flow Chart can be read as a postmodern travel nar- guistic construct. The “anxiety of influence”—critic rative. The poem alludes, for example, to the story of Harold Bloom’s theory that states successful writing is Noah’s Ark and refers throughout to the theme of determined by an individual poet’s heroic rejection of “beginning / and something also in the way of return- a literary predecessor, or “father” figure—is in effect ing,” thus placing itself within the context of epic travel throughout Flow Chart. Ashbery comically acknowl- narratives, including The Odyssey, The Iliad, and edges Bloom, an early and vocal Ashbery supporter, in Dante’s Divine Comedy. Unlike its predecessors, how- the line “Should he have been feeling more anxiety? ever, there is no closure offered in Flow Chart, as the Nah,” and he then proceeds to incorporate and strug- “river god” never returns to anything resembling gle with themes specific to predecessor poets. home. Most important, the travel that takes place in Poets, including William Carlos WILLIAMS, Walt Flow Chart is not so much in the physical world as it is Whitman, William Blake, and John Keats, are alluded within the interior world of language, meditation, and to throughout Flow Chart. Whitman (author of Leaves narcissistic reverie. of Grass), in particular, is evoked, yet all of the many Why is this long poem called Flow Chart? A flow references Ashbery makes to Whitman’s grass insist on chart is a diagram that charts the operations of a portraying the grass as withered. The elegiac tone, sequence of events. Thus one can imagine the poem while tempered with humor, is unmistakable. charting the course of a consciousness moving on a con- Referring to Whitman’s declaration in Leaves of tinually eddying river of language. The metaphor of Grass that the poet “contain[s] multitudes,” Ashbery the flow chart also reestablishes Ashbery’s connection asks, “But if all space is contained within me, then / “FOR THE UNION DEAD” 167 there is no place for me to go, I am not even here, and many cultural and social changes in the America of the now.” The act of assertion for Ashbery is, at the same 1950s. The poem laments the loss of the morally time, an act of negation. For the postmodern poet, the upright and civically conscientious tradition of 19th- capacious Whitmanic acts of tallying and encompass- century Bostonian (and, by extension, American) cul- ing are transformed into ones of gesturing and redis- ture, while it looks with foreboding at the present age tributing. The democratic impulse in Whitman is, in of deteriorating social ethics, impending space travel, Ashbery, a failed experiment. and threatening nuclear war. Real fish in the old city Ultimately, though, Flow Chart is as much an elegy aquarium (torn down to create a parking lot) become, for the death of what might be called a “collective by the poem’s end, “giant finned cars nosing forward spirit” as it is an elegy for the aging body. As James like fish.” Colonel Robert Shaw (1837–63), com- McCorkle recognizes in discussing the role of subjec- mander of the first African-American Civil War regi- tivity in Flow Chart, “The awareness of mortality . . . ment in a free state, however, plays the prominent role, surfaces throughout the poem. . . . The ambiguity of symbolizing traditional values—morality, self-sacrifice, the ‘you’ persists in the passage from Flow Chart, but duty, and honor—of the bygone age with which Lowell what it offers is not a strict dispersal or indeterminacy aligned himself. Shaw was killed in the assault of Fort of identities but an inclusiveness or community that Wagner, South Carolina. Lowell’s respect for Shaw is in faces suffering and a crisis of hope” (111). Flow Chart opposition to his loathing for the advancing culture of manifests the universal preoccupation with mortality. forgetfulness and historical indifference, a sentiment The poem thus manages, in the best Whitmanic sense, epitomized by a “commercial photograph” on Boylston to contradict itself. Even as it muddies the notion that Street depicting “Hiroshima boiling / over a Mosler there is a stable author writing the text, Flow Chart nev- Safe.” This poignant image of the capitalist exploitation ertheless succeeds in foregrounding itself as a work of war atrocities also serves as a demented, contempo- specific to an aging poet. rary version of a war memorial. Lowell was commissioned by the city of Boston to BIBLIOGRAPHY write the poem for the annual Boston Festival; the Gardner, Thomas. Regions of Unlikeness: Explaining Contempo- poem was to be recited in the Boston Common, where rary Poetry. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999. Kevorkian, Martin. “John Ashbery’s Flow Chart: John Ash- Augustus St. Gaudens’s statue of Shaw stands. Mean- bery and the Theorists on John Ashbery Against the Crit- while Lowell’s wife at the time, Elizabeth Hardwick, ics Against John Ashbery.” New Literary History 25 was at work on an edition of the letters of William (1994): 459–476. James (1842–1910), who had delivered the speech at McCorkle, James. “Nimbus of Sensations: Eros and Reverie in the original unveiling of the statue. Finally, Shaw him- the Poetry of John Ashbery and Ann Lauterbach.” In The self was linked, by marriage, to ancestors of Lowell and Tribe of John: Ashbery and Contemporary Poetry, edited by had been celebrated previously in a poem by James Susan M. Schultz. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Russell Lowell (1819–91), also related to the poet Press, 1995, pp. 101–125. (Hamilton 278). This poem, therefore, brought Moramarco, Fred. “Coming Full Circle: John Ashbery’s Later together many of Lowell’s ambitions and obsessions, Poetry.” In The Tribe of John: Ashbery and Contemporary giving him the opportunity to write his own memorial Poetry, edited by Susan M. Schultz. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1995, pp. 38–59. to a past he saw as glorious. The poem is among the strongest examples of Low- Daniel Kane ell’s transitional period, when he wavered between the highly gothic and formally wrought elegiacs found in “FOR THE UNION DEAD” ROBERT LOW- Lord Weary’s Castle (1946) and the explicit candor and ELL (1959) “For the Union Dead,” the title poem of raw autobiography of the later and formally looser Robert LOWELL’s fifth full-length collection of poetry, Notebook (1970). Echoes of Ezra POUND become pro- represents a growing apprehension surrounding the gressively muted by his ever deepening relationship 168 FORCHÉ, CAROLYN

with free-verse champion William Carlos WILLIAMS, as the Academy of American Poets. Her anthology Against well as by his rivalry with fellow poets Theodore Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness (1993) ROETHKE and John BERRYMAN. Ultimately it is Lowell’s presents the voices of 145 poets across the globe. The own mental instability, marked by annual, manic emo- Angel of History (1994) won the Los Angeles Times tional swings, that most pervasively informs his best Book Award, and she received other honors as well. poems, poems capable of entertaining at once gothic The search for a communal voice highlights all of highs and CONFESSIONAL lows. The free verse quatrains Forché’s work, as she uses the events of the 20th cen- of “For the Union Dead”—haunted by both his early tury to forge connections among individuals and expe- formal training and his turbulent relationship with riences. In “A Lesson in Commitment,” Forché submits Bostonian culture—remain the form most associated that “no single voice lifts pure from the cacophony of with Lowell and helped mark him as the preeminent voices.” In her lyric poem “Ourselves or Nothing” American poet of his time. (1981), the process of memory acts as the vehicle for connection, manifesting a movement between the lyri- BIBLIOGRAPHY cal “I” and the communal “we”: “I have come from our Hamilton, Ian. Robert Lowell: A Biography. New York: Ran- cacophonous / ordinary lives.” As a poet, Forché fore- dom House, 1982. Hobsbaum, Philip. A Reader’s Guide to Robert Lowell. Lon- grounds the paradox between a socially conscious don: Thames and Hudson, 1988. intellectual and a solitary poet whose experiences stretch her poetic sensibility. Chad Davidson BIBLIOGRAPHY Forché, Carolyn. “El Salvador: An Aide-Mémoire.” Granta 8 FORCHÉ, CAROLYN (1950– ) Carolyn (1983): 222–237. Forché once remarked, “I had been told that a poet ———. Interview by Constance Coiner and Stathi Gour- should be of his or her time. It is my feeling that the gouris. Jacaranda Review (winter 1988): 47–68. twentieth-century condition demands a poetry of wit- ———. “A Lesson in Commitment.” Tri-Quartery 65 (win- ness” (“El Salvador” 236). Drawing from a variety of ter 1986) 30–38. poetic forms (see PROSODY AND FREE VERSE), Forché’s Marie-Therese C. Sulit work revises these forms to suit the 20th-century human condition, mediating the horror of war and its FOSTER, EDWARD (1942– ) Edward Fos- effects on identity and the body. From the elegy and ter is a leading contributor to American experimental LYRIC POETRY to free verse, Forché’s work reflects a pro- LYRIC POETRY. His Gnostic poems—poems in which found affinity with poets Anna Akhmatova, Adrienne what is known is received through, rather than pro- RICH, and Pablo Neruda, among others. posed by, language—are deeply and often darkly rooted Born in Detroit, Michigan, Forché comes from a in the New England transcendental tradition. They sur- working-class, Eastern European background with a face, as Foster has written of Ralph Waldo Emerson, “as strong Catholic upbringing; she has been greatly influ- part of an emerging language...offered as the process enced by the historical events of the 1960s, such as the of meaning rather than as conclusive insight or finality” Civil Rights movement and the Vietnam War. (Answerable 20–21). While Emerson, Manoah Bodman, Throughout her poetry, Forché increasingly identifies and Wallace STEVENS are clear early influences on his with an international audience and embodies an ecu- work, Foster cites Jack SPICER, William BRONK, and Con- menical spirituality, drawing especially from the Kab- stantine Cavafy as the “‘gods’ in [his] pantheon” balah and Buddhism. Gathering the Tribes (1976) won (Answerable 126). the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. Enabled by a Foster was born and raised in rural Williamsburg, Guggenheim Fellowship, she traveled to El Salvador in Massachusetts, leaving for Columbia University, where 1978, where her experiences produced The Country he earned a Ph.D. in 1970. As a Fulbright lecturer in between Us (1981), which won the Lamont Award from Turkey, he grew to love that country’s exotic culture, FOSTER, JEANNE ROBERT 169

finding sources there for many poems. Foster’s numer- ———. “Edward Foster.” In Contemporary Authors Autobiog- ous early publications were critical and biographical. raphy Series, Vol. 26, edited by Shelley Andrews. Detroit: His first book of poetry, The Space between Her Bed and Gale Research, 1997, pp. 109–30. Clock, was published in 1993. His fifth book, The Olson, John “Revving the Real.” American Book Review 21.6 Angelus Bell (2001), won critical acclaim, as has his lat- (September/October 2000): 13. est, MAHREM: Things Men Should Do for Men (2002). Lisa Bourbeau Codirector of the Russian/American Cultural Exchange Program, he has received a number of FOSTER, JEANNE ROBERT (1879–1971) grants and awards. Additionally, as founding editor in Jeanne Robert Foster’s poetry contrasts the importance 1987 of the POETRY JOURNAL Talisman and in 1993 of of the individual and the natural world against the Talisman House Publishers, Foster has provided an devaluation of human life and the exploitation of arena for many extraordinary poets writing outside nature inherent in what the 20th century came to the mainstream. define as progress. Her dramatic narratives and mono- Foster’s work, while meticulously engineered to rev- logues recreate the hardships and joys of a people elatory movement through cadence and tonality, simul- whose birthright was “a low-roofed farmhouse or a log taneously acknowledges the work’s source, one that shanty” (n.p.). Seemingly a regionalist poet of the precedes consciousness and personality, yet uses these Adirondack area, Foster embodies a modernist trend as a means through which its intent can be manifest in toward understatement, powerful use of images, and language. Foster explains this best in his own words: introspection apparent in the work of Ezra POUND, her “There is a god in the wind, and a wind in the god, and, mentor. Although Foster’s publicized connection to the as Ted [BERRIGAN] says, you attend to the gods. It is the modernist movement has been limited to third-party wind that shapes our course along the road and, invis- references in studies of such literati as the William But- ible, announces its presence in the act, the curve that is ler Yeats, Ford Madox Ford, Pound, patron of the arts the poem” (Answerable 113). In “Family and Friends” John Quinn, and painters Gwen and Augustus John (2001), for example, Foster writes of “a film / where (see MODERNISM), Foster was at the movement’s center, ancient looks / educate the eye.” Around a complex having worked as an editor for the Review of Reviews core of contradictions, Foster layers lean but luminous (1910–33), transatlantic review (1923–24), and This imagery, allowing the reader access into the experience Quarter (1925). Foster’s first publication was a collec- that informs it through grainy half moments captured tion of poetry, Wild Apples in 1916, followed by four in the language, then released. more publications in her lifetime and one posthumous Termed “inveterately Apollonian” by John Olson volume, Adirondack Portraits (1986). (13), Foster can well be compared to Apollo, the mas- Foster was born Julia Elizabeth Oliver in Johns- culine god of light, divination, and form: “I met / the burg, New York, and she learned early to survive in young boy once to contradict his stare” (“The Blessed the beautiful, punishing wilderness of the Adiron- Wall Comes Down” [2001]). Here, as elsewhere, in dacks. By 1910 she was working as a model for illus- Foster’s work, the dominant cultural distribution of trators Harrison Fisher and Charles Dana Gibson as authority and power is confronted by homoerotic well as the painter André Derain and developing as imagery. Through unswerving integrity and anarchistic a journalist under Review of Reviews publisher Albert rigor, Foster’s lines, like these from “Hadrian’s Will” Shaw. Her encounters with modernity sent her back (2001), “have the wings / that lead us back / to angels imaginatively to her mountain heritage for ways in the street.” to cope with the demands of a new world: “Dig deep, BIBLIOGRAPHY you new men and you new women, / Into the Foster, Edward. Answerable to None: Berrigan, Bronk and the past /...find the American that was, / Or lose in the American Real. New York: Spuyten Duyvil, 1999, pp. World-Game” (Neighbors of Yesterday, Epigraph, 20–21, 113. 1916). Struggling to affirm the value of human life, 170 FOUR QUARTETS

Foster locates modern tragedy in a disregard for the Eliot’s original ambitions for the project were quite individual and destruction of the natural resources modest and almost accidental. The first poem of the that nourish us: “But lovely things vanish; / They are sequence, “Burnt Norton” (1935), had its genesis in a going as the feet of destruction / And progress climb series of outtakes from his verse drama Murder in the the high peaks.” (“Neighbors”). Cathedral (1935). Eliot gradually shaped these frag- While her early poetry depended on end-rhyme and ments into a coherent poem which explored “what iambic pentameter, Foster settled into the natural might have been and what has been,” with regard to cadences of Adirondack speech—laconic, simple in his own personal maturation. form, broad in its tones, evoking the rhythms of the During the war Eliot’s concerns of place and time Psalms—to interpret a modern world in free verse (see enlarged and with these changes emerged “East Coker” PROSODY AND FREE VERSE). Alfred Kazin cited her “mat- (1940), a poem as much devoted to family history as ter-of-fact plainness” as reminiscent of Robert FROST’s in to individual history. By tracing his lineage back to a creating “artfully conversational pastorals” (n.p.). Like Somerset hamlet in England, his adopted home, Eliot Frost, Foster rejects nostalgic escape, employing a sub- announced that “in my end is my beginning.” tly critical, ironic stance to comment on the purpose of Such closure is denied in “The Dry Salvages” life through its vicissitudes: “The hopelessness is in the (1941), in which simple approaches to meaning melt tragedy / Of those / Who cannot feel repentance or into a mere muddle of detail. Here Eliot is at his most regret” (“Country Tragedy” [1916]). unfocused, concluding “that the past has another pat- BIBLIOGRAPHY tern, and ceases to be mere sequence —.” Foster, Jeanne Robert. Foreword to Neighbors of Yesterday. Clarity comes only through the religious lens of “Lit- Schenectady, N.Y.: Riedinger and Riedinger, 1963. tle Gidding” (1942), a country parish arrived at “to Kazin, Alfred. Foreword to Adirondack Portraits: A Piece of kneel / Where prayer has been valid.” This sense of Time, by Jeanne Robert Foster, edited by Noel Riedinger- reverence gives Eliot the strength to relate his personal Johnson. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1986. experience to the larger world about him and to com- Cathy E. Fagan prehend his place anew, more fully than ever before. Many of Eliot’s contemporaries criticized Four Quar- tets as uneven, and some declared them insincere. FOUR QUARTETS T. S. ELIOT (1935–1943) George Orwell, for instance, dismissed them as an An extended poetic sequence concerned with the enervated, half-hearted retreat into orthodoxy. Had nature of time and place, the Four Quartets were pub- Eliot fully rejected atheism and nihilism? Even today a lished by T. S. ELIOT in the years leading up to and dur- ing the Second World War. Recalling the spiritual debate continues to rage over the true philosophical resolve established by his poem “Ash Wednesday” and religious import of Four Quartets. (1930), they stand in stark contrast to his experimental Despite the controversy, Four Quartets has been cel- works, such as “THE LOVE SONG OF J. ALFRED PRUFROCK” ebrated widely, then as now, and was instrumental in (1917) and THE WASTE LAND (1922). propelling Eliot to the Nobel Prize for literature in Each of the Four Quartets is set in a specific season 1948. Sensitive to subtleties of sound and sense, the and locale. Further, each is divided into five carefully product of a complex mind imbued with an evolving crafted movements, with a catalogue of Christian sym- historical consciousness, Four Quartets stands as one of bolism recurring throughout. For this arrangement Eliot’s finest portraits of 20th-century humanity. they are often hailed as the crowning achievement of a BIBLIOGRAPHY poet who abandoned his modernist roots (see MOD- Eliot, T. S. For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays on Style and Order. ERNISM) by assuming a stance that was “classicist in lit- Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1929. erature, royalist in politics, and Anglo-Catholic in Gardner, Helen. The Composition of Four Quartets. London: religion” (Eliot vii). Faber, 1978. FROST, ROBERT 171

Lobb, Edward, ed. Words in Time: New Essays on Eliot’s Four known in Italian as distacco, an emotional distancing Quartets. London: Athlone, 1993. from a situation or exchange. As in painting, the poet Jim Cocola momentarily stops to observe how the words, spaces, lines, or phrases have amassed and occur in relation to FRASER, KATHLEEN (1935– ) Kathleen one another before deciding how to proceed with the Fraser has been an important voice in the rich tradition poem. of women writers within the avant-garde. Her own Fraser shifted from traditional lyric form to writing poetry often addresses issues of influence and location. based on the sentence as well as the informal genres While Sylvia PLATH was an early role model, Fraser also of the journal and the letter. Visually inventive, her became attracted to the linguistic attention of Barbara later work extends Charles OLSON’s concept of “field GUEST’s compositions and the precision and silence in poetics” in attempting graphically to represent the the work of Lorine NIEDECKER, Jack SPICER, and George dynamics of speech and thought. Fraser also coined OPPEN. While Fraser’s work first reflected the accessi- the term devolution to describe the process of listening ble, self-expressive LYRIC POETRY of the BLACK MOUNTAIN through existing written forms, of revisualizing and and NEW YORK SCHOOLs, she began investigating how a reassembling them in order to depart from the known more complex, specifically female sense of time and to the new or previously uncontainable. Fraser interiority might be articulated. She used the word ges- remains an important feminist presence in contempo- tate to define a poetic form of “unnumbered discrete rary poetry. phrases, unfolding and proliferating as rapidly or as BIBLIOGRAPHY slowly as one’s perceptions do” (Translating 44). Fraser, Kathleen. Translating the Unspeakable: Poetry and the Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Fraser graduated from Innovative Necessity. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Occidental College in California and moved to New Press, 2000. York City. There she attended workshops directed by Kinnahan, Linda. Poetics of the Feminine: Authority and Liter- Stanley KUNITZ, Robert LOWELL, and Kenneth KOCH. ary Tradition in William Carlos Williams, Mina Loy, Denise Fraser herself taught at the Iowa Writers Workshop Levertov, and Kathleen Fraser. New York: Cambridge Uni- (1969–71) and Reed College (1971–72) before versity Press, 1994. becoming professor of creative writing at San Fran- Ann Vickery cisco State University, where she directed the Poetry Center (1973–76) and founded the American Poetry FREE VERSE See PROSODY AND FREE VERSE. Archive. She edited HOW(ever) (1983–92), a journal focusing on contemporary and modernist women’s FROST, ROBERT (1874–1963) Robert Frost poetry, and founded its successor, HOW2, in 1998. In occupies a unique position in American poetry. He is 1964 Fraser won the Frank O’HARA Poetry Prize and more widely known than any other 20th-century the American Academy’s “Discovery” Award. Other American poet, yet his reputation among critics of liter- awards include two National Endowment for the Arts ary MODERNISM has tended to lag behind the reputations poetry grants (1971 and 1978) and a Guggenheim of his contemporaries, such as T. S. ELIOT, Wallace Fellowship (1981). STEVENS, and William Carlos WILLIAMS, even as his book In “this.notes.new year” (1997), Fraser incorporates sales have surpassed theirs and his popular acclaim has a typographical error into her writing, beginning an grown. In his use of New England settings and weather investigation of “error”: “She wanted a ‘flow’ she to explore questions about nature, reality, and human thought, but in the translation it was corrected, dis- consciousness, Frost situated his work in a line of placing the o and substituting a. She could give herself descent from 19th-century American poets, such as to an accident. She was looking out the window.” Here Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and the speaking subject is allowed to be unreliable. At the Emily Dickinson. Later 20th-century American writers, same time, the poem tracks an alternative perspective such as William BRONK, Robert CREELEY, George OPPEN, 172 FROST, ROBERT

and Galway KINNELL, have continued to explore these Frost’s disavowals of free verse poetry in favor of issues and extend this tradition. meter and rhyme (including his oft-quoted declaration Although Frost is strongly identified with rural New that he would as soon play tennis with the net down as England, he was born on March 26, 1874, in San Fran- write free verse) set him apart from the vast majority of cisco, California, where he lived until shortly after his his modernist poetic contemporaries, as did his delib- father’s death in 1885. Frost’s family then moved to the erate self-presentation as a crusty Yankee farmer who mill town of Lawrence, Massachusetts, where his pater- existed beyond the pale of the literary establishment nal grandparents lived. Obviously life in a busy mill (see PROSODY AND FREE VERSE). Like Lentricchia, Richard town was very different from life on the isolated farms Poirier calls for a reconsideration of Frost’s status where Frost and his family lived for much of his young among modernists, asking, “what can we learn from adulthood, especially in the years before rural electricity, the fact that in the first quarter of the [twentieth] cen- telephones, automobiles, and paved rural roads. By the tury Frost was considered—and I think still ought to time Frost moved to the rural New England of his be—an exponent of the new?” (5). Poirier warns read- poems, he was 25 years old and married, with a young ers and critics that Frost “is likely to be most evasive daughter. He had worked in mills (11 hours a day, six when his idioms are so ordinary as to relax rather than days a week) and had made two abortive attempts at stimulate attention” (xxii). Frost’s idiom itself was an college (one semester at Dartmouth in 1892 and he was important aspect of his innovation. Comparing A Boy’s at Harvard from 1897 to 1899). In 1912 Frost and his Will and North of Boston highlights the differences in family moved to England, where they lived until 1915. diction that separate the two books. A Boy’s Will (with By the time he returned to America at age 40, Frost had a few notable exceptions, such as the brilliant sonnet published his first two books of poetry, A Boy’s Will “Mowing”) sounds somewhat old-fashioned and stilted (1913) and North of Boston (1914), to favorable reviews. next to the colloquial speech and dramatic dialogues of It is important to note that this success came years North of Boston. The latter book abounds with exam- before modernist touchstones, such as Eliot’s THE WASTE ples of another aspect of Frost’s innovation, namely his LAND (1922) or James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), drastically subject matter. Early in the 20th century, as the United changed the literary landscape. Frost went on to win States continued to grow more industrial and urban, four Pulitzer Prizes (1924, 1931, 1937, and 1943), to rural life had primarily negative connotations, such as receive honorary degrees from dozens of colleges and poverty, disease, illiteracy, general backwardness, and universities in the United States and England, to visit insanity. In such poems as “The Death of the Hired Nikita Khrushchev in Moscow during the height of the Man,” “A Servant to Servants,” “Home Burial,” and cold war, and, at the age of 87, to read his poetry at the “The Fear,” North of Boston challenged the prevailing presidential inauguration of John F. Kennedy. ideas about the proper subject matter of poetry. Frank Lentricchia explains the tendency of literary In order to understand why critics have thought of critics to think of Frost as something other than mod- Frost as premodernist, it also helps to know a few ernist by pointing out the problem with oversimplify- things about Frost’s age, in both senses of the word. ing modernism in retrospect: “I understand how odd it Frost was significantly older than the other major must appear to include Robert Frost in modernist American modernist poets. During Frost’s formative company. One of the reasons for the oddity is that we years as a young poet, the dominant type of verse in have forgotten the heterogeneous character of mod- America was what has come to be known as “fireside ernist literature” (xiii); he continues later, “If the poetry poetry.” The era of modernist poetic experimentation of modernism could include Frost, Stevens, [Ezra] had not yet arrived, and widespread small, specialized, POUND, Marianne MOORE, and Langston HUGHES, then experimental literary magazines did not yet exist. Most perhaps the phenomenon of modernism embraced a poetry was published in mass-market magazines and diversity of intentions too heterogeneous to satisfy the newspapers; this meant that in order to get his or her tidy needs of definition” (77). work published a poet had to appeal on some level to FROST, ROBERT 173 a general audience. Fireside poetry—so-called because ence, as is evident in a 1913 letter to John Bartlett. Frost it was suitable for the whole family to read together in writes that he does not want to be merely “a success front of the fireplace or in some other cozy domestic with the critical few who are supposed to know....I setting—was explicitly instructive and moralistic, and want to be a poet for all sorts and kinds” (668). it often contained maxims that readers could detach By the autumn years of his life, Frost was a national from the poems and use in everyday life. celebrity. Still he felt that serious literary critics contin- Frost’s poetry often contains clear, memorable, seem- ued to underestimate him despite (and, in part, ingly detachable tag lines that appear to function because of) his popular acclaim. Lentricchia comments according to the conventions of fireside poetry. The that “judging from the reaction to him from high mod- famous final lines of “THE ROAD NOT TAKEN” (1915), in ernist quarters, Frost buried his subtleties right out of which the poem’s speaker has encountered two diverg- sight. For by choosing to fashion a transparent instead ing roads and takes “the one less traveled by,” which of a forbidding surface, he succeeded in telling his “has made all the difference,” the final line of “Hyla highbrow critics that his writing was undergirded by Brook” (1917)—”We love the things we love for what no challenging substance” (71). The penultimate poem they are”—and the final lines of “Two Tramps in Mud from In the Clearing (1962), Frost’s final book, reminds Time,” (1936), which declare that only when love and readers and critics of his concern with being misinter- need are unified “And the work is play for mortal preted or underinterpreted, and it does so in the mem- stakes” is an action performed “For Heaven and the orable, seemingly simple style that brought him great future’s sakes,” exemplify this tendency in Frost’s poetry. fame and led many critics to overlook the complexities Although these quotations may appear to be simple and of his work. The poem, an untitled two-line fragment, didactic, while Frost is providing the kind of direct warns readers that Frost’s poetry is deceptively compli- reassuring messages that readers of fireside poetry came cated and that conventional education alone will not to expect, he is simultaneously undermining these mes- prepare readers to understand it fully. sages. “The Road Not Taken” contains hints and con- In the decades since Frost’s death, his poetry has tradictions that work against the comforting certainty of inspired numerous poets who have wanted to explore its final lines. “Hyla Brook” is a poem about loving a the potential of formal, metrical verse in a poetic land- brook that is literally no longer a brook; understanding scape dominated by free verse. Nobel laureates Seamus this makes it difficult to accept the simple declaration of Heaney, Derek WALCOTT, and Joseph BRODSKY collabo- loving things for what they are. The final lines of “Two rated on a 1997 book called Homage to Robert Frost; Tramps in Mud Time” appear ready-made to be carried poets Mark JARMAN and Dana GIOIA, along with other away from the poem and used as portable wisdom; poets who are identified with the movement called although they sound absolutely convincing, it is not at NEW FORMALISM, have also been more attentive to Frost’s all clear exactly what they mean on a literal level. Frost complexities and his astonishing technical virtuosity enjoyed duplicity and further enjoyed toying with audi- than most academic critics. At the present, a genera- ences by hinting at the hidden implications beneath his tion of younger scholars is expanding on the work of poems’ surfaces; he also maintained an adversarial atti- the handful of excellent scholars who have long recog- tude toward literary scholars and critics, who, he nized frost’s achievement, and this ongoing reconsider- thought, too often failed to notice the intellectual com- ation of his work suggests a coming increase in Frost’s plexities of his work. In “On Taking Poetry,” his 1955 in academic circles. Bread Loaf English School Address, he said, “I suppose BIBLIOGRAPHY a poem is a kind of fooling,” continuing later, “these Frost, Robert. “On Taking Poetry.” In Robert Frost: Collected things are said in parable so the wrong people can’t Poems, Prose, and Plays, edited by Richard Poirier and Mark understand them and so get saved. . . . That meant so Richardson. New York: The Library of America, 1995. professors won’t understand it” (819). From the begin- ———. Letter to John H. Bartlett, July 4, 1913. In Robert ning, Frost very much wanted to appeal to a mass audi- Frost: Collected Poems, Prose, and Plays, edited by Richard 174 FUGITIVE/AGRARIAN SCHOOL

Poirier and Mark Richardson. New York: The Library of to write in free verse, which shifted the Fugitives’ tradi- America, 1995. tional foundation (see PROSODY AND FREE VERSE). Lentricchia, Frank. Modernist Quartet. New York: Cambridge In 1922 the Fugitives began publishing a little mag- University Press, 1994. azine. In the first issue, they explained that they named Parini, Jay. Robert Frost: A Life. New York: Henry Holt and their journal the Fugitive because they intended to “flee Company, 1999. from nothing faster than from the high-caste Brahmins Poirier, Richard. Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1977. of the Old South,” meaning that they rejected the tendency among southern writers to romanticize the Sean Heuston antebellum South. At first they considered only con- tributions from within the group, and they chose to FUGITIVE/AGRARIAN SCHOOL The use pseudonyms in the first two published issues, but Fugitives, a group of poets from Nashville, Tennessee, they took offense to the suggestion that the entire jour- led the vanguard for modernist verse in the South in the nal had been written by one person, presumably Ran- 1920s (see MODERNISM). In contrast to the IMAGIST move- som, under a variety of different names. As the ment centered in England, the Fugitives emphasized magazine became more established, they printed traditional poetic forms and techniques, and their poems from outside contributors, including Hart poems developed intellectual and moral themes focus- CRANE, John Gould FLETCHER, Robert Graves, Laura RID- ing on an individual’s relationship to society and to the ING, William Alexander Percy, Carl SANDBURG, and natural world. The Fugitive group met relatively briefly, Louis Untermeyer, but the vast majority of poems in from the end of World War I to the late 1920s, and they each issue came from members of the Fugitive group. published a journal of verse, the Fugitive, for only three At the height of its membership, in 1924, the group years (1922–25). As poets, fiction writers, social critics, listed all of its members on the masthead of the Fugi- and literary theorists, however, the leading members of tive: Walter Clyde Curry, Davidson, William Yandell the group—John Crowe RANSOM, Allen TATE, Donald Elliott, James M. Frank, William Frierson, Hirsch, DAVIDSON, and Robert Penn WARREN—have had an enor- Stanley Johnson, Merrill Moore, Ransom, Alec Brock mous impact on modern literature. Stevenson, Tate, Warren, Jesse Wills, and Ridley Wills. Initially the men who became the Fugitives met reg- At age 19, Warren was the youngest member of the ularly for friendly conversations that ranged over his- group and a literary prodigy who would become one of tory, religion, philosophy, art, and poetry in the home the 20th century’s finest poets. of an eccentric Jewish aesthete, Sidney Mttron Hirsch. During the period of the Fugitive’s publication, how- Most of the members were professors from Vanderbilt ever, Ransom and Tate were the most mature and most University, and they naturally gravitated toward Ran- dominant poets, and their contrasting styles defined som, a young English professor, Rhodes scholar, and Fugitive verse. Deeply influenced by the metaphysical war veteran who had recently published his first vol- poets and French symbolism, Ransom’s poems fre- ume of poems. Eventually Ransom and the other mem- quently describe images of decay and decadence. For bers of the group began exchanging poems, and their example, the poem “Piazza Piece” (1927) juxtaposes poems reflected Ransom’s artistic influence. His poems, the voice of death, personified as a gentleman in a such as “BELLS FOR JOHN WHITESIDE’S DAUGHTER,” tended dustcoat, with a beautiful, vital young lady preoccu- to develop abstract, fantastic images in a detached tone pied with ideas of love; the man tells the woman, “Your and to explore the relationship between the intellect ears are soft and small / And listen to an old man not and the imagination. Later, a precocious undergradu- at all.” In spite of the evidence of mortality in her pres- ate, Tate, joined the group, and he added a dynamic ence, specifically roses dying on a trellis, the maiden sense of poetic energy to the group’s collective style. fatuously refuses to hear the gentleman in a dustcoat. The most thoroughly modernist writer, Tate encour- For her, death has less consequence than romance, yet aged the Fugitives to experiment with poetic form and she, like the lovely roses, will inevitably die. FUGITIVE/AGRARIAN SCHOOL 175

In contrast to Ransom’s bleak poems, Tate’s intellec- the South in the wake of World War I. But in 1925, the tually challenging and formally adventurous poems same year that they chose to end the Fugitive, an event explore the artist’s relationship to society. In one of his occurred that led them to reconfigure their notions of best early poems, “Mr. Pope” (1928), Tate imagines the southern identity. That year John T. Scopes was arrested crippled 18th-century British poet Alexander Pope for teaching evolution in a rural Tennessee school, and enduring the pity of his contemporaries, who feel sorry the ensuing trial pitted Clarence Darrow, a famous lib- for his physical deformity but who fail to understand eral attorney, against William Jennings Bryan, an evan- that his poetic art transcends the mortal coil. Tate gelist and perennial presidential candidate, as they describes Pope as a snake wrapped around a tree, hiss- argued science versus scripture. Some of the Fugitives, ing verses of wit and rage. In the poem’s final lines, the especially Ransom, Tate, and Davidson, objected to the image of the coiled snake changes into an emblem: ridicule heaped upon the South, much of it from “Around a crooked tree / A moral climbs whose name Mencken. They reconsidered their earlier position on should be a wreath.” The last line of Tate’s poem the idea of progress and its impact on southern culture, alludes to the ancient practice of crowning the accom- and they began to wonder if change, specifically the plished poet with a wreath of laurel, symbolizing his shift from an agricultural society to an industrial soci- rhetorical skill and his value to society. ety, would benefit the South. Ransom and Tate engaged in a spirited debate about In 1930 four of the original Fugitives—Davidson, the nature of modern poetry in the Fugitive. In an edi- Ransom, Tate, and Warren—and eight other southern torial column, Ransom describes the modernist tenden- intellectuals, including Fletcher, Andrew Lytle, and cies to emphasize images over themes and language Stark Young, collected a group of essays that addresses over form. He claims that stripping poetry of meter the social and economic changes in the South. I’ll Take reduces it to prose, which undercuts its social value and My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition by dissolves its artistic integrity, and he sees the modern “Twelve Southerners,” who have become known as the poet as forced to choose between the inherent value of Agrarians, reexamines the values of the Old South in traditional formal poetry and the vulgar inanity of free the 20th century. The essays maintain that an indus- verse. In a rebuttal column, Tate offers a solution to trial society commodifies people, regarding them in Ransom’s dilemma. He suggests that the new mode of economic terms as laborers, investors, or consumers, versification is an extension, rather than an abandon- thus destroying individualism and damaging all levels ment, of the established tradition. He explains that of society—religion, art, education, community, and writing in free verse requires as much artistry to accom- even family. At the time of its initial publication, soon plish effective poetry as formal verse, and he claims that after the collapse of the stock market, I’ll Take My Stand the modern world, in which cultural standards have received little recognition, and the few critics who did become more relative, requires a more flexible form of notice it dismissed the Agrarians as a group of conser- rhetorical expression. In many respects, Tate’s argument vative reactionaries. But later generations have found echoes T. S. ELIOT’s essay “Tradition and the Individual the collection to be an especially prophetic analysis of Talent” (1919), and, indeed, he found Eliot profoundly an individual’s relationship to an industrial society and influential (see ARS POETICAS). an intriguing articulation of the values, good and bad, The Fugitives thought of themselves as peculiarly of the American South. southern poets. When they began their discussions, Three of the original Fugitives also played impor- however, they felt critical of the southern writers’ ten- tant roles in the development of contemporary literary dency to mythologize the Old South. Instead they theory. In 1941 Ransom published a book titled The intended to create an artistic vision for the Modern New Criticism that outlined a revolutionary method of South. Influenced by the South’s most outspoken critic, literary criticism. He explained that critics should H. L. Mencken, a powerful journalist, they embraced focus their attention directly on the work, rather than the social, economic, and intellectual changes sweeping on history or the details of an author’s life. Meaning, 176 FULTON, ALICE he contends, emerges from the relationships among the and coedited the Southern Review. He wrote many nov- words within the writing or the form of the text, not els and short stories, winning a Pulitzer Prize for All the from the external context of a literary work. New Crit- King’s Men (1946), as well as several books of social and icism had an enormous effect on literary scholars in the literary criticism. But his reputation rests on his poetry, United States, and numerous critics aligned themselves which won two more Pulitzer Prizes for Promises with the movement, including R. P. BLACKMUR, Kenneth (1957) and Now and Then (1978). In 1985 he became Burke, and Yvor WINTERS. Ransom’s technique also the first poet laureate of the United States, and his Col- influenced the former Fugitives Tate and Warren. Tate lected Poems appeared in 1999. The lyrics “Bearded wrote numerous elegant essays on literature in the New Oaks” (1942), “There’s a Grandfather’s Clock in the Critical style that have been collected in Essays of Four Hall” (1974), and “The Ballad of Billie Potts” (1944) Decades (1968). Warren and fellow Vanderbilt alumnus and the long poems Brother to Dragons (1953) and Cleanth Brooks, a former student of Ransom, estab- Audubon: A Vision (1969) are among his most famous lished New Criticism as the dominant mode of literary works. Together, they taught or influenced numerous criticism in America with their series of college text- poets and writers, including John BERRYMAN, James books—Understanding Poetry (1938), Understanding DICKEY, Randall JARRELL, and Robert LOWELL. Fiction (1959), and Modern Rhetoric (1949). Although BIBLIOGRAPHY Warren divided his attention between creative writing Cowan, Louise. The Fugitive Group: A Literary History. Baton and literary criticism, Brooks devoted his career to the Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1959. development of literary study, and he became the finest Davidson, Donald, ed. The Fugitive: April, 1922–December, practitioner of New Criticism. 1925. Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1967. Ransom, Tate, and Warren—the three writers most Pratt, William, ed. The Fugitive Poets: Modern Southern Poetry closely associated with the Fugitive group and the in Perspective. Nashville: J. S. Sanders & Co., 1991. Agrarian movement—had extremely prolific and pro- Rubin, Louis. The Wary Fugitives: Four Poets and the South. ductive careers as writers, teachers, and editors. Ran- Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978. som taught at Vanderbilt University and Kenyon Twelve Southerners. I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the College, where he founded the Kenyon Review. He pub- Agrarian Tradition. 1930. Reprint, edited by Louis Rubin. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977. lished a few collections of poetry, including Chills and Fever (1924), Two Gentlemen in Bonds (1927), and David A. Davis Selected Poems (1969), and, in addition to The New Crit- icism, he wrote two books of intellectual inquiry, God FULTON, ALICE (1952– ) Alice Fulton’s without Thunder (1930) and The World’s Body (1964). work is deep, complex, and fun. It exploits elements of Among his most frequently anthologized poems are several types of poetry, particularly LYRIC POETRY and “Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter,” “Janet Waking” otherwise avant-garde forms, with postmodern femi- (1927), and “Blue Girls” (1927). Tate taught at several nism at the core (see FEMALE VOICE; FEMALE LANGUAGE). universities, including the University of the South and Her engagement with the material aspect of words con- University of Minnesota, and he briefly edited the nects her to the LANGUAGE poets, but emotion and auto- Sewannee Review and Hound and Horn. He wrote a biography separate them from her. Often compared to novel, The Fathers (1960), biographies of Stonewall Emily Dickinson, she shares with Dickinson a cryptic Jackson and Robert E. Lee, and several books of poems. and personal use of language. His Collected Poems appeared in 1977. His most fre- Fulton was born and raised in Troy, New York, and quently anthologized poems include “ODE TO THE CON- earned an M.F.A. from Cornell University in 1982. FEDERATE DEAD,” “The Swimmers” (1953), and “The Her many prizes and awards include MacArthur Mediterranean” (1936). Warren taught at Louisiana (1991) and Guggenheim (1986) grants. After teaching State University, University of Minnesota, and Yale Uni- at the University of Michigan for 18 years, she moved versity; while at LSU, he and Cleanth Brooks founded on to Cornell. FULTON, ALICE 177

The impact of studying with A. R. AMMONS can be ness emerges in “The Gone Years” (1983), about the seen in Fulton’s exploration of science in concentrated death of her father, but even in the midst of sorrow language with maximalist verse—that is, typically, long there is wry humor. The speaker imagines her father poems made up of fragments, disparate diction, style, moving “over the snow, leaving / the snow unmoved” and line length, which mix concrete observations with and says, “The snow has no imagination.” This twist on abstract questions or conclusions and are stylistically unmoved is characteristic of Fulton’s ability at exacting reminiscent of Charles OLSON’s MAXIMUS POEMS or multiple meanings from words. Ammons’s “Corsons Inlet.” The natural world leads her With Powers of Congress (1990), Fulton’s tone deep- to questions that seem philosophical rather than ened, and she began to write longer, less semantically poetic. Some readers have called her “difficult,” ordered works. Humor still abounds in Sensual Math because she expresses abstraction as well as emotion (1995) and Felt (2001), but it is incorporated into with such expansive compression. Fulton’s aesthetic of poems of what Fulton calls “cultural incorrectness.” ambiguity, of probing boundaries, is exemplified by Each book is a long interconnected poem. In “The what she calls “fractal poetry” and by her own inven- Profit in the Sell” (1995), she uses the evolution of a tion, the “bride sign” (==), which marries but separates bee-imitating orchid to question the difference what it comes between, like a hinge. Feeling as a For- between “real” and “artificial,” and, in the process, she eign Language (1999) elaborates fractal poetry—a upends typical attitudes toward these perceived oppo- poetry of accumulation. Reliant on chaos theory, frac- sites. This subversion of cultural assumptions drives tal poetry is Fulton’s attempt to apprehend order in much of Fulton’s writing. apparently disordered free verse. Fulton’s early short lyric poems show her talent for BIBLIOGRAPHY creating ambiguity with puns and enjambment, her Keller, Lynn. “The ‘Then Some Inbetween’: Alice Fulton’s Feminist Experimentalism.” American Literature 71 (June humor, and her engagement with the world. Titles of 1999): 311–340. these early poems indicate Fulton’s jazzy lighthearted- Marsh, Alec. “A Conversation with Alice Fulton.” TriQuar- ness and rollicking adventures in language: “How to terly 98 (winter 1996/97): 22–39. Swing Those Obbligatos Around” (1983) and “My Sec- ond Marriage to My First Husband” (1986). Serious- Wilma Weant Dague C G D

GALLAGHER, TESS (1943– ) Tess Gal- grants (1976 and 1981) and a Guggenheim Fellow- lagher’s poetry continually revisits seemingly unre- ship (1978–79). markable events to explore issues of identity and In “Amplitude” (1987), a Christmas visit to Port relationship. With its focus on details of daily life and Angeles prompts a reflection on her ambivalent rela- its use of personal experience, Gallagher’s writing tionship to childhood memories and the decaying mill reflects the influence of the CONFESSIONAL POETRY of her town. As she and her brother pass the cemetery where immediate predecessors, including ROBERT LOWELL her father is buried, she is surprised to find them in and Sylvia PLATH; like contemporaries Louise GLÜCK, “Ray’s Mercedes”–: “in the guise of those we’d learned Jorie GRAHAM, and Sharon OLDS, Gallagher uses indi- to / hate as having more than their share.” In this poem vidual experience consciously to evoke larger patterns we see Gallagher’s recurrent themes of beginning and of history and humanity. persevering, of departure and return, and of the self The oldest of five children, Gallagher was born and and its doubles, which are always grounded in com- raised in Port Angeles, Washington. Having worked mon human experience rooted in place and time. As it for the Port Angeles Daily News since the age of 16, she is here, the time of Gallagher’s poetry is often that of began her studies at the University of Washington in memory and of elegy, as she recalls events in her own journalism but changed her focus after studying cre- life and in those of friends and family, who become the ative writing with mentor Theodore ROETHKE. She poet’s doubles. Use of concrete images—here the received a B.A. (1968) and an M.A. (1970) from the urban landscape—and of common speech—“‘Let’s / go University of Washington and an M.F.A. from the Uni- Sis,’ handing me the Scaggs tape” [“Amplitude” 1987]) versity of Iowa’s Writers Workshop (1974). Writer reflect not only Gallagher’s working-class upbringing Raymond Carver, with whom the poet had a long- and background in journalism, but also the increasing standing relationship and later married, was perhaps drive, over the course of her career, toward narrative. the single most significant collaborator, influence, and Throughout her career, Gallagher’s poetry has explored inspiration of her literary career. She has published 10 issues of the self—and of the relationship between self collections of poetry to date, including Instructions to and other—through the studied investigation of com- the Double (1976), Willingly (1984), Amplitude: New mon human experience. and Selected Poems (1987), Moon Crossing Bridge BIBLIOGRAPHY (1992), and My Black Horse: New and Selected Poems Bromley, Anne C. “The Home of Uncertainty in the Poetry (1995). She has received numerous awards and prizes, of Tess Gallagher.” Northwest Review 26.3 (1988): among them two National Endowment for the Arts 96–102.

178 GARBAGE 179

Gallagher, Tess. “My Father’s Love Letters.” In A Concert of brevity, explaining that “what I want to say is saying”; Tenses: Essays on Poetry. Ann Arbor: University of Michi- he digresses, takes detours, hits dead ends, but he gan Press, 1986, pp. 1–23. always manages to return to his primary subject. As a Maggie Gordon result the poem boasts a music of its own, undergoing a series of rhetorical rises and falls in a kind of contin- GARBAGE A. R. AMMONS (1993) Garbage is uous verbal stream. The colon remains Ammons’s a book-length poem by A. R. AMMONS, written in late favorite punctuation mark, providing linkages between spring of 1989. It is one of a series of long poems phrases and sections. There is also a great range of tone Ammons composed during his prolific career and cer- and vocabulary in Garbage; the poem is both serious tainly one of the most outrageous. The manner in and funny, urbane and folksy, profound and witty, which the poet interprets the visible world through the filled with technical words, such as lecithin, and strik- prism of his never-resting, larger-than-life speaker-self ingly imaginative phrases, such as roseate rearend. suggests that his major precursors are Walt Whitman Eventually the poem adds up to 18 sections of and, in a somewhat different sense, Wallace STEVENS. unrhymed, heavily enjambed two-line verse units. Garbage is also akin to John ASHBERY’s long poems in its Each section runs several pages and is written in a lan- tendency to absorb disparate portions of ordinary guage that sometimes sounds like a conversation with experience and furnish a transcript of seemingly unre- hypothetical readers and sometimes like a conversa- hearsed and uninterrupted mental process. tion the poet might be having with himself. The central symbol of the poem is a mound of rub- Ammons begins his poem in medias res. An inner bish seen off Highway I-95 in Florida. An enormous voice chides him for wanting to lead a simple and landfill induces the poet to examine modern practices quiet life while the world is waiting for a great poem of waste disposal and, eventually, to reconsider human of the age. The time has come to recover “values relationship with nature. The geometrical shape of the thought lost.” The poet then asserts that garbage, garbage dump appeals to him as a hierarchical image, symbolized by the mound of waste he had seen among other things, with the top corresponding to recently among the flatlands of Florida, must be the unity, the base to diversity (as a poet, Ammons is fasci- poem of our time because it keeps us from dangerous nated with tracing connections between the one and delusions. He intends to write a scientific poem, the many). Garbage is also a poem about old age—at asserting that nature dictates our values, all values, 63, Ammons contemplates his retirement, poor health, and that it is a place where we both begin and com- and inevitable death. Fittingly enough, the poem is plete our earthly existence. The grief of failure, loss, dedicated to “bacteria, tumblebugs, scavengers, / and error makes us approach nature with humility wordsmiths—the transfigurers, restorers.” Garbage and seek spiritual renewal in it. The mound is the received the National Book Award in 1993. “gateway to beginning” because only there does the Garbage is written in an improvisatory mode. In a real change occur. method similar to that of Tape for the Turn of the Year Throughout the poem Ammons reflects on his own (1965), Ammons writes on a wide roll of adding vocation, language, art, and its relationships with machine tape and tears off sections of it in lengths of a human existence. He likens the garbage mound to a foot or more. Although aware of the arrogance that poetic mind, in which language and its inexhaustible goes with trying to get something right the first time, energies constantly replenish themselves and take a Ammons decides that the poem should attempt to do new shape. He says that life, like art, should make just that—to be a more or less an immediate transcript shape, order, meaning, and purpose. He offers essen- of his continuous meditations on the subject of human tial suggestions to humankind: Do not complain too waste, even if this means that some passages will have much, count your blessings, take action, and keep the to appear as abstract, prosaic, or dull. On a few occa- mind “allied with the figurations of ongoing.” Overall sions, Ammons almost apologizes for his lack of the whole poem is a celebration of human life and its 180 GILBERT, JACK relationship with nature; among other topics Ammons revered by many contemporary poets. Gilbert once explores in his multifaceted poetic commentary are said, “I have no need to publish. My writing doesn’t food, beauty, ugliness, holiness, fear of death, matter come first. My life comes first” (qtd. in Adamo 157). and spirit, and joys of transcendence. But for Gilbert, his life is his work. Eschewing Garbage contains a strong environmental message, careerism, he has established himself as a poet’s poet as Ammons questions the practices of disposal of by magnifying the possibilities for elegiac poetry. organic and inorganic waste and their consequences to Gilbert was born and raised in Pittsburgh. He has the planet at large. He is aware of the dangers of pol- spent much of his adult life abroad. In 1962 Gilbert was lution, arguing that it shuts us in “as into a lidded ket- awarded the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award for tle.” He anticipates global crises that bring and will Views of Jeopardy. In 1975 he became chief lecturer on continue to bring nations together at international con- American literature for the U.S. Department of State. ventions, such as those held in Rio de Janeiro and His second book, Monolithos (1975), won the American Kyoto in the 1990s. Above all, he makes us conscious Poetry Review Prize and was nominated for a Pulitzer of the reality of garbage, which grows around us, Prize and a National Book Critics Circle Award. The strives for our attention with its appearance and smell, Great Fires (1994) also met with great critical acclaim. and, ultimately, encompasses us as well. Gilbert’s work engages a wide variety of landscapes: The poem also shows Ammons as a superb nature Pittsburgh, Italy, Greece, and Japan, among others. His poet. The main characteristics of his verse—visionary passionate commitment to physical place, in addition to range, meticulous observation, sensible descriptions of his well-crafted descriptions of his emotional landscape, places and people (more of places than of people)—are help Gilbert transcend the easy category of CONFESSIONAL all present here, emphasizing the poet’s conception of poet that some critics apply. Janet Moore explains this nature as a benign, generous, scrupulous, and inex- transcendence best when she writes that his “poetry is orable force to which we are all subjected. Like his about the reciprocal relationship between experience famous shorter poem “The City Limits” (1971), and language; it shows how these relationships are par- Garbage affirms the recuperative radiance that informs allel” (1). Gilbert extends the elegiac project that began all things even in the landscape of waste and death, with romanticism into the realm of a less certain, more which is, for Ammons, the very heart (or bowels, per- troubled, world. He does not, however, allow a post- haps) of the natural world. Notwithstanding its focus modern cynicism to undermine that project. on the lowly, dirty, and smelly, Garbage is still a poem In “Michiko Nogami” (1994), he laments the loss of about praise, celebration, and redemption. Like Sphere his wife, “a dead woman filling the whole world.” In (1974), one of its book-length predecessors, the poem “Tear it Down” (1994), he argues, “We find out the achieves a truly cosmic vision through a resourceful heart only by dismantling what / the heart knows,” and interlocking of nature and art. insists that poetry should respond to loss with well- BIBLIOGRAPHY earned audacity—an audacity that comes from the Kirschten, Robert, ed. Critical Essays on A. R. Ammons. New power of experience and the power of language. This York: G.K. Hall, 1997. insistence is the generative force behind his poetry. Schneider, Steven P., ed. Complexities of Motion: New Essays Gilbert’s work moves beyond cosmetic attention to on A. R. Ammons’s Long Poems. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh mechanics—that is, formalism for its own sake—while Dickinson University Press, 1999. avoiding an indulgence of the self. His work trans- Piotr Gwiazda forms experience into engaging poetic figures. BIBLIOGRAPHY GILBERT, JACK (1925– ) Jack Gilbert’s Adamo, Ralph, and John Biguenet. “An Interview with Jack reputation comes more from the quality of his work Gilbert.” New Orleans Review 22.3 (1996): 153–177. than from the quantity. Although he has only pub- Hoey, Allen. “Between Truth and Meaning.” American Poetry lished three volumes of poetry since 1962, he is Review (January–Feburary 1998): 37–45. GINSBERG, ALLEN 181

Moore, Janet. “Jack Gilbert: Now Getting Overview.” Hollins Most of Gilbert’s poetry takes the reader “on a journey Critic 35.1 (1998): 2–14. into psychic recesses and through family and personal Ron Brooks history,” in the words of Bruce Bennett (38). In Summer Kitchen (1983), domestic activities produce odes to GILBERT, SANDRA (1936– ) Sandra Gil- flowers and vegetables. Exploring perception in Blood bert’s poetry is very much about maintaining emo- Pressure (1988) and memory in Ghost Volcano (1995), tional balance and integrity in the face of adversity and Gilbert discovers the gain of love in the former and, in loss. Gilbert is primarily known for advancing feminist the latter, explores grief as she mourns the loss of her theory; she wrote, with Susan Gubar, The Madwoman husband by wrongful death. A confessional mode of in the Attic (1979), a seminal study of 19th-century lit- poetry restores balance as it asserts the power of erature that gave feminism a strategy for understand- metaphor to heal, to reconnect self to world. Kissing the ing the conflicts of women writers. Some of her poetry, Bread: New and Selected Poems (2000) yields a sequence influenced by Sylvia PLATH, has an ironic, bitter tone. of verses that expresses romance in mathematical terms Many of her poems express personal history in a CON- stretched beyond the limits of ratio. Gilbert’s work is an FESSIONAL style derived from Robert LOWELL. Gilbert efficient machine for combat in times of personal crisis also creates surrealistic portraits and adventures that as well a means to celebrate family values. stretch empirical limits (see SURREALISM). BIBLIOGRAPHY Gilbert was born and raised in New York City, the Baker, Wendy. “Sandra M(ortola) Gilbert.” In Dictionary of only child of Angela Caruso of Sicily, a grammar school Literary Biography. Volume 120, American Poets since World teacher, and Alexis Joseph Mortola, a Parisian of Russ- War II, edited by R.S. Gwynn. Detroit: Gale Research, ian decent and a civil engineer. She graduated from 1992, pp. 79–83. Cornell with a B.A. in English (1957), married Eliot Bennett, Bruce. “Dissatisfactions and Contents.” New York Gilbert in 1957, and became the mother of three chil- Times Book Review (12 March 1989): 38. dren. She received an M.A. at New York University in Bernard Earley 1961, then a Ph.D. from Columbia in 1968, and she has taught at several prestigious universities. Gilbert GINSBERG, ALLEN (1926–1997) Allen has published six scholarly books and six books of Ginsberg is the one person in American poetry whose poetry. She has received awards from National Endow- name belongs alongside the prominent and influential ment for the Arts (1980–81) and the Guggenheim writers of almost every mid-20th-century literary Foundation (1983), and she was named Woman of the movement, including BEAT POETRY, CONFESSIONAL Year by Ms. magazine (1986). POETRY, the SAN FRANCISCO RENAISSANCE, and even the Gilbert’s poetry brings balances to a world that can NEW YORK SCHOOL. However, he is most well known as be harsh. In the Fourth World (1978) after “[taking] pos- the central figure among the Beats, and he lived and session of the house” and replacing her collected books worked intimately with Jack KEROUAC, Gregory CORSO, with “black paper backs,” the speaker receives a letter Peter Orlovsky and William S. Burroughs. Ginsberg’s of dismissal, which gets personified as a “badtempered controversial poem HOWL (1956) was published by old uncle” with whom the children become familiar Lawrence FERLINGHETTI, who subsequently defended (“Getting Fired, or ‘Not Being Retained’”). Images gain the poem in the infamous obscenity trial that secured surreal proportions in “The Giant Rat of Sumatra.” its place, and its poet’s place, in literary history. At one When Sherlock Holmes finds no solution to imminent time or another, Ginsberg knew well or was at least death, he and Watson favor friendship while the Giant acquainted with almost everyone writing poetry of any Rat devours London. In “The Third Hand” (1984), consequence, from the first public performance of imagination stirs the mundane “like a new metaphor in Howl at San Francisco’s Six Gallery to the end of his every bubble.” Gilbert’s metaphors transform hum- life. When Howl was published, it boasted an intro- drum experience into inspiration. duction by William Carlos WILLIAMS, and Ginsberg 182 GINSBERG, ALLEN likewise subsequently championed the work of all his student days that he met Kerouac and Burroughs, who friends. His tireless efforts to publish the work of oth- likewise were students at Columbia; he also met Neal ers as well as his own poems, as Ezra POUND had done Cassady, with whom he had his first homosexual rela- among his circle, is responsible for much of the impact tionship and who served as muse for both Ginsberg and of Beat writing on American literature and culture. Kerouac. In 1948 Ginsberg experienced an auditory Without Ginsberg, although the Beat sensibility would encounter with William Blake, beginning with a voice have developed, there would be no cohesive Beat Gen- external to himself reciting the poem “Ah! Sunflower,” eration as we recognize it today. from Blake’s 1826 Songs of Experience. In subsequent Ginsberg was born in Newark, New Jersey, to polit- days he also experienced visions which he connected ically active Marxist parents. Louis Ginsberg was a with Blake, and thus he began his very long experimen- published and anthologized poet. By the time Allen tation with hallucinogenic drugs in the attempt to recap- was four, when the family relocated to Paterson, New ture his Blakean vision and to explore the far reaches of Jersey, Naomi Ginsberg had been hospitalized follow- eternity. In 1953 he turned his attention to Buddhism. ing a nervous breakdown. His formative years, laid the Many writers on both coasts did, but Ginsberg and Gary foundations for a life of political activism and literary SNYDER are the most notable of those who made genuine production because his parents modeled these values philosophical and ideological commitments for a life- for him; his childhood also predisposed his develop- time. With the addition of this final component part of ment as a man of extraordinary tolerance and explo- his equation, Ginsberg was fixed as a gay Marxist Bud- ration because of his mother’s mental instability and dhist Jew, visionary political poet, and activist. His writ- his parents’ openness to new and liberal ideas. Most ing and his life clearly proclaim and embrace each and explicitly, these factors are found in KADDISH, Ginsberg’s all of these aspects of his self. eloquent mourner’s cry for his mother. Ginsberg grad- Ginsberg’s one-time friend, Norman Podhoretz, uated from Columbia University with a B.A. in 1949, remembers “the amazing virtuosity that enabled [Gins- and he returned as a visiting professor for 1986–87. He berg] to turn out polished verses in virtually any style” was a distinguished professor at Brooklyn College, the (26) during his Columbia days; what came after, how- City University of New York, late in life, and ever, seemed to Podhoretz “hysterical and unmodu- cofounded (with Anne WALDMAN) the Jack Kerouac lated” (27). In spite of this general complaint, the School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute, former friend admires the metrical rigor, cleverness, in Boulder, Colorado. Ginsberg’s many awards and and the imaginative originality of Howl and some of the honors include being elected King of May by university other poems of that period (27) (see PROSODY AND FREE students in Prague (1965), an American Academy and VERSE). Along with incorporating the pacing and lan- Institute of Arts and Letters Award for literature guage of common speech advocated by Williams and (1969), a National Book Award (1974) for The Fall of Pound into contemporary verse, Ginsberg looked to America, election to the American Academy of Arts and and utilized Whitman is experimentation with line Letters (1992), and the French medal of the Chevalier length; as his consciousness expanded thanks to Bud- de L’Ordres des Arts et Lettres (1993). dha and Blake, so too did his poetic constructions. In Ginsberg’s neoromanticism traces its American line- spoken performance, Ginsberg’s, long lines demand age from Walt Whitman through Hart CRANE, but it careful breath control to be delivered in rhythmic full- reaches back to England’s William Blake for the origins ness, similar to what Charles OLSON prescribed in his of its mystical and visionary impulses. His early poems formative 1950 essay “Projective Verse” (see ARS POETI- adhered to the conventions of traditional poetry, includ- CAS), but in form they owe more to Whitman and Ker- ing rhyme, as it was practiced by his father. But while he ouac. For Ginsberg, poetry became a physical was at Columbia, his life and his work were expanded undertaking, as well as an emotional, intellectual, and and transformed more by experiences outside the acad- spiritual one; the presentation and reception of the emy than those inside the classroom. It was during his work requires all facets of the human in the same way GIOIA, DANA 183 that production of the work does. Ginsberg’s poetry, at To some, Ginsberg’s graphic sexual references border every stage of the process and product, is concerned on pornography, but no one comes to Ginsberg for dis- with the whole person—body, mind, and spirit. The cretion and decorum. Readers come to him for the result is a poetry that possesses not only a wildness in freshness and relief of his daring and for “a big artistic its all-inclusive scope but also a control in its depend- tipsy kiss” (“City Midnight Junk Strains” [1973]). ence on conscious attention to rhythm and image. BIBLIOGRAPHY Ginsberg not only traveled endlessly, giving read- Ginsberg, Allen. Liner Notes to Holy Soul Jelly Roll—Poems ings, he also recorded stylistically diverse perform- and Songs (1949–1993). Performed by Allen Ginsberg. CD. ances, from Blake to punk, both spoken and sung. Rhino Records, Inc. Compact disc. Among the recorded treasures is his first performance Hyde, Lewis, ed. On the Poetry of Allen Ginsberg. Ann Arbor: of “America” (1956) given on the same night in 1956 University of Michigan Press, 1984. that he gave the first full reading of Howl. Ginsberg Lardas, John. The Bop Apocalypse: The Religious Visions of Ker- said of “America,” which neither he nor Kerouac ouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs. Urbana: University of Illi- thought “was much of a poem,” that it consists of nois Press, 2001. “one-liners in different voices, sardonic schizophrenic, Miles, Barry. Ginsberg: A Biography. New York: Simon and the tone influenced by [Tristan] Tzara’s Dada mani- Schuster, 1989. festos” (n.p.). Nevertheless those “one-liners” are a Podhoretz, Norman. Ex-Friends: Falling out with Allen Gins- berg, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Lillian Hellman, Hannah kind of Ginsberg manifesto. The voice, however “sar- Arendt, and Norman Mailer. San Francisco: Encounter donic schizophrenic” it may be, is a voice madly in Books, 2000. love with its country at the same time as it is demon- Schumacher, Michael. Dharma Lion: A Biography of Allen strably disappointed and angry with it. This voice Ginsberg. San Francisco: City Lights, 1994. anachronistically insists that “Sacco & Vanzetti must not die,” prophetically declares its “ambition is to be A. Mary Murphy President despite the fact that [it is] a Catholic,” and historically catalogues American political impulses GIOIA, DANA (1950– ) Perhaps the best- and actions, from communism to capitalism to racism. known poet associated with NEW FORMALISM, Dana Gioia It is a voice that never forgets to whom it is speaking. is a prominent advocate for the restoration of meter, And then, suddenly, it realizes that America is not rhyme, and traditional formal structures to American some external entity but that each American is Amer- poetry (see PROSODY AND FREE VERSE). He is a prolific ica, that each is responsible for what America does essayist, critic, editor, translator, cultural commentator, inside and outside its borders. Every line is dense with and librettist whose own poetry consistently embodies events and ideologies grounded in the collective the conservative aesthetic values he champions in his American consciousness, and the poem is propelled prose. His 1991 essay “Can Poetry Matter?” gained from line to line with the relentless and legendary national attention for its claim that poetry had lost American energy expressed in Ginsberg’s scattergun touch with the wider American culture and had approach to national documentary. become the exclusive property of professional enthusi- One of Ginsberg’s “Cosmopolitan Greetings” (1994) asts. Scholarly in scope but not pedantic in tone, Gioia’s is the maxim “Candor ends paranoia.” Certainly there poetry encompasses a wide spectrum of subjects, from is no more open and honest poet than Ginsberg, living classical myth in “Juno Plots Her Revenge” (2002) to or dead. Freedom resides in the truth, available to jazz in “Bix Beiderbecke” (1986) to the natural land- everyone, because “Ordinary mind includes eternal scape of “Rough Country” (1991) to personal grief in perceptions.” Ginsberg’s entire adult life was engaged “Prayer” (1991), yet, in nearly every piece, he attempts in advocacy, and, as Barry Miles has said, his “greatness to achieve grace and clarity through the fusion of for- as a writer is partly the result of the enlargement of mal design with—as he writes in “The Next Poem” sympathy that he demands for society’s victims” (533). (1991)—the “music ...of common speech.” 184 GIOVANNI, NIKKI

Of Sicilian and Mexican parentage, Gioia was born large, diverse audiences; others position her a notch and raised in Hawthorne, California, near Los Angeles. below a first guard of “great” poets. Regardless of the He received a B.A. in English from Stanford University value they attach to Giovanni’s popularity, however, in 1973 and in 1975 earned an M.A. in comparative critics and reviewers agree that Giovanni is one of the literature from Harvard, where he studied with Eliza- most widely read and appreciated contemporary Amer- beth BISHOP. Returning to Stanford for a master’s degree ican poets. One of the first African-American poets of in business administration in 1977, he worked as a her generation to be published by a large mainstream corporate executive until 1992. His poetry collection publisher, Giovanni entered the canon of American Interrogations at Noon (2001) won a 2002 American poetry early in her career. Her candid voice and her Book Award. In January 2003 he was appointed chair- socially conscious persona continue to inspire black man of the National Endowment for the Arts. female poets as well as upcoming writers in general. While Gioia’s poems showcase his metrical skills, Giovanni was born Yolande Cornelia, Jr., on June 7, their diction is rarely ornate or lavish. More often they 1943, in Knoxville, Tennessee. A 1967 honors graduate are subtle and muted in their explorations of “the of Fisk University, Giovanni also attended the Univer- modest places which contain our lives” (“In Cheever sity of Pennsylvania and Columbia University. Before Country” [1986]). As Bruce F. Murphy notes, “Gioia’s is taking a permanent professorial position at Virginia a public poetry that retains a sense of privacy, and a Polytechnic Institute and State University, she held feeling for the limits of language” (291). Greg Kuzma other academic appointments and worked as a full-time takes a more negative view of the poet’s conservative writer/publisher. Giovanni is the recipient of more than metrical style when he says that Gioia’s iambic pen- 30 honors and awards, including Ford Foundation and tameter is executed “so much and so loosely that there National Endowment for the Arts grants (1967; 1968), is a humming monotony to the poetry” (114). a National Association for the Advancement of Colored The difficult balance between form and feeling is People (NAACP) nomination for Woman of the Year most explicitly realized in the elegiac lyrics written (1989), the Langston HUGHES Award (1996), and hon- after the death of Gioia’s infant son, which range from orary doctorates from—among others—Smith College the rhymed quatrains of “All Souls”’ (1991) to the (1975) and Indiana University (1991). more expansive, variable lines of “Planting a Sequoia” Giovanni began her career during the BLACK ARTS (1991). Restraint and metaphor are used to channel MOVEMENT, and while she did not allow her art to be otherwise overpowering emotions. In a later poem, completely absorbed by it, Giovanni’s early writing “Corner Table” (2001), he writes, “What matters most / clearly reflects the central issues that characterized the Most often can’t be said.” Still Gioia effectively movement. It is her refusal to give up individuality in expresses what matters to him through the time-tested favor of a streamlined common cause, however, which methods that poets have relied upon for centuries. has remained a more prominent marker of her work BIBLIOGRAPHY over the years. An excellent example of an artist/ Kuzma, Greg. “Dana Gioia and the Poetry of Money.” North- activist who has honed rather than outgrown the revo- west Review 26.3 (1988): 111–121. lutionary voice, Giovanni continues to be an inspira- Murphy, Bruce F. “Music and Lyrics.” Poetry 179.5 (February tion for those dedicated to using poetry as a means of 2002): 283–295. social change. Walzer, Kevin. “Dana Gioia and Expansive Poetry.” Italian From early battle calls, such as “The True Import of Americana 16.1 (winter 1998): 24–40. the Present Dialogue, Black vs. Negro”—the 1968 Fred Muratori poem that sports the often-cited lines “Nigger / Can you kill”—or her signature poem “Nikki-Rosa” (1968) GIOVANNI, NIKKI (1943– ) The term pop- to more recent statements, such as “I couldn’t see how ular poet is often used to describe Nikki Giovanni. Some I could grow if I thought of myself as anything other employ this term to refer to her positive reception by than Nikki” (Fowler 136), Giovanni foregrounds the GOLDBARTH, ALBERT 185 power of self-definition. “[A]nd if this seems / like Poetry (1994), Meadowlands (1996), and Vita Nova somewhat of a tentative poem,” she remarks in “Cate- (1999). Additional awards include the Lannan Literary gories” (1972), “it’s probably / because I just realized Award (1999), the Bollingen Prize (2001), and a that / I’m bored with categories”; in Cotton Candy wealth of fellowships. In 2003 she was named poet (1978), she adds, “I am tired of being boxed.” laureate by the Library of Congress. Conversational, playful, mischievous, perhaps also Glück’s lyrical voice is mystical and magical (see careless or in need of fine-tuning, Giovanni’s poetry LYRIC POETRY). General themes include motherhood, addresses race, gender, love, sex and sexuality, mother- sex, and family. She draws heavily on classical myth, hood, childhood, personhood, even popularity and biblical stories, and fairy tales, eliciting a profound prominence. And “Nikki Giovanni”—whether as sense of the sacred that persuades readers to acknowl- poetic personality or engaged artist/activist—continues edge forces beyond their control as they question their to draw considerable audiences nationwide. own place in the universe. Glück is a master of per- sona. Meadowlands, for example, is a revisioning of BIBLIOGRAPHY Homer’s The Odyssey, in which Telemachus is percep- Fowler, Virginia C. Nikki Giovanni. New York: Twayne, 1992. tive (“I know / what he wants: he wants / beloved”) and Evans, Marie, et al. “Nikki Giovanni.” In Black Women Writers (1950–1980): A Critical Evaluation, edited by Mari Evans. Circe is wise and experienced (“every sorceress is / a Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor-Doubleday, 1984, pp. 205–229. pragmatist at heart”). While many of her persona poems are mythological in nature, she demonstrates a Sabine Meyer wide range of voices. “Gretel in Darkness” (1975) revisits the story of Hansel and Gretel years after the GLÜCK, LOUISE (1943) Louise Glück’s work witch has been thrown into “that gleaming kiln” and is best known for its intense lyricism and its brilliant explores the struggle to keep history alive in a use of persona and myth. While her first book, First- postholocaust world growing increasingly forgetful. born (1968), with its painful exploration of family con- The Wild Iris has three major speakers: the flowers, the flict, is reminiscent of CONFESSIONAL POETRY, Glück gardener, and a god of the garden. herself views the confessional mode as alienating to The poems in her earliest two works were, by and readers. Her later works rely more heavily upon com- large, persona poems and thrilled as many critics as munally held archetypal and mythic themes for insight they troubled; however, her brilliant use of rhyme and into the personal. Despite its autobiographical tenden- meter overall overshadows any problems. If anything cies, the overall voice of the poet easily brings the binds Glück’s poetry together it is the simple and ele- reader to a mythic and universal space. Glück was gant specificity of language where archetypal and influenced by William Butler Yeats, by the modernists mythic themes create a new vision of a shared culture T. S. ELIOT and Ezra POUND, and by postmodernist and its history. Robert LOWELL’s Life Studies (1959) (see MODERNISM). In BIBLIOGRAPHY respect to her myth-making and her belief in the power Dodd, Elizabeth. The Veiled Mirror and the Woman Poet: H. of poetry to sustain life, she is perhaps most philosoph- D., Louise Bogan, Elizabeth Bishop, and Louise Glück. ically aligned with William Carlos WILLIAMS. Columbia, Mo.: University of Missouri Press, 1992. Born in New York City and raised on Long Island, Vendler, Helen. “Flower Power: Louise Glück’s Wild Iris.” Glück’s publications include Firstborn, The House on New Republic (May 24, 1993): 35. Marshland (1975), The Garden (1976), Descending Fig- ure (1980), The Triumph of Achilles (1985), which won Salita S. Bryant the 1985 National Book Critics Circle Award, Ararat (1990), which received the 1992 Rebekah Johnson GOLDBARTH, ALBERT (1948– ) Arguably Bobbitt National Prize, The Wild Iris (1992), winner of the most prolific poet of the post–World War II, baby- the 1993 Pulitzer Prize, Proofs and Theories: Essays on boom generation, Albert Goldbarth has earned 186 GRAHAM, JORIE acclaim for his encyclopedic range of arcane subject into eloquent feeling and places brashness at the serv- matter, his allusive wit, and his ability to establish ice of spacious passions.” (46) meaningful connections among seemingly unrelated Eschewing prosody and traditional stanzaic forms events, people, and things. Critic David Baker states for wide, randomly enjambed lines and densely packed that Goldbarth’s poems exploit “the points of collision pages, Goldbarth has been faulted for his lack of atten- between the comic and the solemn, and between the tion to poetic niceties, but the reviewer Ben Downing, fabular or mythic and the personal” (173). By linking, by regarding the poet as a distant heir to the hyperbolic for example, the rituals of ancient cultures, the Walt Whitman—“He too harbors multitudes” (286)— exploits of alchemists and early astronomers, 1950s and the linguistically adventuresome James Joyce, sug- science fiction movie plots, and memories of his urban gests that the anarchic propulsion of Goldbarth’s poems Jewish upbringing, Goldbarth assembles unpre- resists conventional stylistic constraints. dictable narratives that lend a sense of cultural inte- Idiosyncratic and daunting in their breadth, Gold- gration and continuity to our own personal histories. barth’s poems discourage imitation, but they stand as His exuberant, densely textured monologues have laboratories of thought that evoke a sense of wonder prompted comparisons to the work of Walt Whitman at the world’s infinite profusion of coincidences and and Allen GINSBERG. disparities. Born in Chicago, Goldbarth received his undergrad- BIBLIOGRAPHY uate degree from the University of Illinois and in 1971 Baker, David. “Heiroglyphs of Erasure.” Kenyon Review earned an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa. He has 19.3–4 (summer/fall 1997): 173–179. taught writing at the University of Utah, Cornell and Barber, David. “Life Studies.” Poetry 166.1 (April 1995): Syracuse Universities, the University of Texas, and 46–51. Wichita State University. Among his numerous honors Cording, Robert. Review of Original Light: New and Selected are a National Book Award nomination for Jan. 31 in Poems 1973–1983, by Albert Goldbarth. Carolina Quarterly 1975, the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1991 36.2 (winter 1984): 91–95. for Heaven and Earth: A Cosmology, and two National Downing, Ben. “The Wizard of Wichita.” Parnassus 21.1–2 Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships (1996): 277–296. (1979–80 and 1986–87). In the past 30 years, he has Fred Muratori published more than 20 volumes of poetry and several collections of essays. GRAHAM, JORIE (1950– ) Jorie Graham Throughout his career, Goldbarth’s poems have draws on a LYRIC POETRY tradition that includes T. S. resembled grand scavenger hunts in which, as he ELIOT’s meditations on time and transcendence, Wal- writes in “The Saga of Stupidity and Wonder” (1996), lace STEVENS’s rhythmic and imagistic richness, and the tiniest facet of knowledge, if “gripped right and Elizabeth BISHOP’s descriptive acuity. She scrutinizes the studied long, contains the telescoped / story of every- flux of phenomena that comprises the perceivable thing,” echoing in microcosm the forces and patterns world, as well as the ways in which we attempt to beneath natural and historical processes. But unlike understand it. Meditating on large philosophical prob- many academically minded poets, he demonstrates his lems and their everyday effects, Graham explores the erudition and ultimate seriousness of purpose with relations of mind and body, materiality and spirituality, engaging comic brio and irreverence, as in “The subjectivity and objectivity. In lavish and complex Voices” (1993), which begins, “The dead will speak poems that dramatize the difficulties of their own mak- through anything. / Give them a rock and they’ll call it ing, she scrutinizes the very processes of looking and a PA system.” Goldbarth’s penchant for comedic show- describing that she employs. She is attentive to the manship and pop culture trivia is tempered, in the gaps, delays, and distances inherent in perception. In a words of David Barber, by “a deep and abiding soul- statement that characterizes Graham’s poetic stance, fulness, a generosity of spirit that elevates clowning the speaker of her poem “Opulence” (1993) describes GREGER, DEBORA 187 her study of an amaryllis blooming as a “stringent self- Vendler, Helen. “Jorie Graham: The Nameless and the Mate- analysis— / a tyranny of utter self-reflexiveness.” rial.” In The Given and the Made. Cambridge, Mass.: Har- Born in New York City, Graham was raised in Italy vard University Press, 1995. and educated at the Sorbonne. In her twenties, she Barbara Fischer moved to New York to study filmmaking but decided to pursue writing instead, studying at Columbia Uni- GREGER, DEBORA (1949– ) Debora Greger’s versity and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. cosmopolitan poetry offers lively explorations of the Her poetry collection The Dream of the Unified Field human-made inheritance from the past, especially the was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1996. She has history of art—painting, sculpture, tapestry, literature. taught at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and Harvard Yet she treats, as well, such equally intentional but less University. often celebrated cultural icons as a gift shop in the cel- Graham’s early work reflects her cosmopolitan lar of the John Keats house, Holiday Inns, and the upbringing. In “I Was Taught Three” (1980), the nuclear research facility at Hanford, Washington, where speaker’s recognition of herself as an “I” coincides her father worked. Her poetry is richly and often wittily with her awareness of the Italian, French, and English allusive, descended from the MODERNISM of Ezra POUND names for the chestnut tree outside her window. and T. S. ELIOT, and reminiscent of the style of James Many poems in her early books are set in European MERRILL, whom Greger admired. Occasionally her lan- landscapes, chapels, and museums and engage the guage may seem overwrought, but far more often her challenges of this aesthetic and historical legacy in excellent ear provides great pleasure. The complex syn- taut, honed images. Adopting a more expansive and tax and rhythms characteristic of her poems enforce edgy form in such poems as “Self Portrait as Apollo their meditative pace. The regularity of her unrhymed and Daphne” and “Orpheus and Eurydice” in The End stanzas—her most frequent pattern, whether couplets, of Beauty (1987), Graham reimagines mythological tercets, or quatrains—provides strong formal structure, characters to stage and interrogate conflicts within with or without regular meter. the self. Her major work, especially in Region of Born in Walsenberg, Colorado, Greger was raised Unlikeness (1991) and Materialism (1993), examines mostly in Richland, Washington. She has published six and challenges conventions for point of view, voice, volumes of poems, the first, Movable Islands, in 1980. narrative, and closure. In these volumes Graham She has received a number of fellowships and in 1987 exploits the tensions of what Willard Spiegelman calls won the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Acad- her mode of “fugal intertwining” (274), a process of emy of American Poets. repeating and varying anecdotes, images, and motifs. Greger’s poems confront the boundary between the In her most recent books, these meditations assume a world humans have made and the world of raw matter darker skepticism as Graham turns to the eros and that precedes us. She reminds us that we live in the violence that ensnare a fractured, fatigued, postmod- former, the world of interpretation, no matter how we ern imagination. may long for plain and direct experience. Moments of Graham confronts large themes of beauty, history, fully realized direct experience may be “movable and desire through the minutiae of lived experience. island[s] of joy” (“Crossing the Plains” [1980]), but if As she grapples with the underpinnings of the lyric we speak of them at all, the experience recedes into a enterprise, Graham explores the complex ways we per- frame of interpretation and arrangement. Fictions, his- ceive and experience the world. tory, memory—these are the forms we give to our expe- BIBLIOGRAPHY rience almost instantaneously. All too quickly, as in Jarman, Mark. “The Grammar of Glamour: The Poetry of “Queen of a Small Country” (1986), it is “as if the pres- Jorie Graham.” New England Review 14.4 (1992): 251–261. ent / were already being told in another person.” These Spiegelman, Willard. “Jorie Graham’s ‘New Way of Look- “perfected” narratives become equivalent to landscape ing.’” Salmagundi 120 (fall 1998): 244–275. and architecture: They are the places where we live. 188 GREGG, LINDA

Greger’s work suggests indeed that these shaping the autobiographical CONFESSIONAL modes than with a acts of fiction-making may be what best defines and more restrained, often imagistic, even philosophical sustains us. One way of making that point is to allude poetics. to Scheherazade, the character in the Arabian Nights; Born in Suffern, New York, Gregg grew up in who staves off her own murder by enthralling a tyrant bucolic Marin County, California. She has traveled with stories, an act figuratively represented in the title extensively, and much of her poetry finds its settings in poem of Greger’s third book, The 1002nd Night (1990). far-flung places. She has taught at Princeton University, She does it another way in “A Return to Earth” (1996) the University of Iowa, the University of Houston, and by representing the grandeur and precariousness of all the University of California, Berkeley, and she has been human making in the boundary city of Venice, “a city the recipient of the Jerome J. Shestack Poetry Prize afloat on a promise of nothing / from an unforgiving (1999), an National Endowment for the Arts grant sea.” Humans have their own ways of creating—in her (1993), a Whiting Award (1985), and a Guggenheim volume God (2001), an ironic deity has retired to Fellowship (1983). Florida and muses upon (and is amused by) our paral- Crafted out of intense moments of feeling and lel or substitute creations—and Greger’s poetry both observation, Gregg’s language is at once ardent, aus- questions and celebrates them. tere yet agile and musical. The poems are compact, with life cut down to its essentials—a woman hanging BIBLIOGRAPHY up clothes, someone cutting bread, stone steps lit by Collins, Floyd. “Mythic Resonances.” Gettysburg Review 11.2 the Moon. As the poetry tends toward solitude and (summer 1998): 344–361. contemplation, her language tends toward simplicity Greger, Debora. “The New New Poetry Handbook.” In and purity. The frequent nominative fragments reduce Where We Stand: Women Poets on Literary Tradition, edited by Sharon Bryan. New York: Norton, 1993. language to an almost ascetic noticing and naming— ———. “Out of the Woods.” Southwest Review 83.2 “Sun in the air above water. / Sunlight on a rock wall.” (1998): 157–163. (“Heavy with Things and Flesh” [1999])—and the use of the verb be rather than verbs of action. Things William Waddell appear in bright light as though announcing their being in the world—intently, visually, as in the poem GREGG, LINDA (1942– ) Linda Gregg has “Greece When Nobody’s Looking” (1991): “The earth been called by Czeslaw Milosz “one of our best poets” bleached pale by two thousand years. / Poppies and (127), and Joseph BRODSKY, on the jacket of her book weeds blooming in the tough fields.” Ordinary facts Sacraments of Desire (1991), described her poetry’s are trimmed to an essential mystery and take on “blinding intensity,” which “stains the reader’s psyche mythic tones. the way lightning or heartbreak do.” The voice in this Yet the voice invests the landscape with emotion. In poetry speaks with an almost classical reserve even as “Glistening” (1991), the speaker has poured water over it probes moments of ecstasy, exile, suffering, and loss her body and says: “I stand there a long time with the in places of “sand and dirt, rocks / and heat, life and sun and the quiet, / the earth moving slowly as I dry in death” (“There is No Language in This Country” the light.” “Wrapping Stones” (1999) begins with the [1991]). The speaker’s eye gazes on bamboo, thistle, speaker lamenting lost love and compares love to “the and pain with nearly clinical powers of perception salmon that have not come back.” All of Gregg’s work and precision shared by poets like Louise GLÜCK, Eliz- casts its eye unflinchingly upon life’s fierce realities and tells in chiming phrases of both the loss and the beauty abeth BISHOP, H. D., and Emily Dickinson. Thus although influenced by feminist poetics and commit- found there. ted to exploring existential questions from a woman’s BIBLIOGRAPHY perspective (as in, for example, “Not a Pretty Bird” Logan, William. “The Way of All Flesh.” New Criterion 18.10 [1999]), her poetry often has less in common with (June 2000): 63–73. GROSSMAN, ALLEN 189

Milosz, Czeslaw, Introduction to A Book of Luminous Things : tools of writing, from his IBM Selectric typewriter, with An International Anthology of Poetry, edited by Milosz. New its Courier font, to the medium of the book itself. Gre- York: Harcourt, Brace, & Co. 1998. nier’s inscription of the entire writing process culmi- Peter Rennick. “What Poetry Demands: The Spiritual Jour- nated in Sentences (1978), a collection of 500 poems ney of Linda Gregg.” Hayden’s Ferry Review, 26 printed in Courier on 5 × 8 index cards loosely stacked (spring/summer 2000): 39–55. in a collapsible box. As the cards are unpaginated, Michael Sowder readers are free to create their own order of reading. Sentences’s nonhierarchical structure requires of the GRENIER, ROBERT (1941– ) Robert Gre- reader a more active role in the production of meaning, nier’s poetry explores the textuality of language by a move that ostensibly democratizes the relationship drawing attention to words and even letters as mate- between reader and writer. rial objects. Sparsely arranged on the page, Grenier’s In the late 1980s, Grenier’s interest in everyday early, minimalist work transforms everyday experi- materiality led to his abandonment of print altogether ence into language games, as with these brief, untitled for the “scrawl”: four-color handwritten poems that, poems: “if raining it’s raining” (Sentences Towards Birds upon first viewing, resemble a child’s drawings. Per- [1975]), “AWW // Nobody talks at work” (CAM- plexing both critics and peers alike, the scrawl poems BRIDGE M’ASS [1979]), and “WHAAT // someone stand at the edge of articulation. According to Ron SIL- walking” (OAKLAND 1980). Each poem’s playful LIMAN, the scrawl extends Grenier’s attention to partic- enactment of the aural and visual texture of words ulars into the realm of the microscopic: “This is as frees language from its utilitarian function as a mere close to the origin of thinking/feeling as we are ever vehicle of communication. Building on the poetics of likely to find ourselves in a poem” (59). William Carlos WILLIAMS, Gertrude STEIN, Louis ZUKOF- BIBLIOGRAPHY SKY, and Robert CREELEY, Grenier rejects the romantic Perelman, Bob. “Here and Now on Paper: The Avant-garde tradition of transcendence for a poetics of materiality, Particulars of Robert Grenier.” In The Marginalization of applying Williams’s famous dictum, “no ideas but in Poetry: Language Writing and Literary History, by Perelman. things,” to language itself as the poem’s most immedi- Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996, pp. 38–57. ate object. Ratcliffe, Stephen. “Grenier’s ‘Scrawl.’” Listening to Reading. Born in Minneapolis, Grenier received a bachelor’s Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000, degree from Harvard in 1965, where he won the Har- 119–132. vard Monthly Prize for most promising writer in Silliman, Ron. “‘thought or feeling forming.’” verdure 3–4 Robert LOWELL’s advanced writing course. In 1966–67, (2001): 57–60. while pursuing an M.F.A. at the Iowa Writers’ Work- Tim Shaner and Michael Rozendal shop, Grenier traveled to France and England on an Amy LOWELL Travelling Scholarship. Grenier has made GROSSMAN, ALLEN (1932– ) Allen Gross- the San Francisco Bay area his home since the late man writes in a style at once prophetic and personal, 1960s, and he has twice been awarded a National influenced by Walt Whitman, Hart CRANE, Allen GINS- Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1980 and 1985). BERG, and William Butler Yeats (on whom Grossman In 1971 Grenier cofounded with Barrett WATTEN This has written criticism). Grossman believes that poetry is magazine, which proved to be an “originary moment” the medium of individual people, through which the in the development of the LANGUAGE SCHOOL, in the “countenance” described in the poem may become words of Bob PERELMAN (38). In the first issue, Grenier immortal: Poetry makes people “present to one famously declared “I HATE SPEECH,” a statement another” by showing them as “capable of love,” and the aimed at the then-dominant “workshop voice poem” poem is not about the poet, but about the poet’s practiced at Iowa (Perelman 43). During this period beloved, whose countenance it represents. Poems facil- Grenier expanded his material focus to include the itate relationships that “give and obtain the world 190 GUEST, BARBARA simultaneously”; they take part in a dialogue that cre- BIBLIOGRAPHY ates its subject (The Sighted Singer). Bromwich, David, “Prophetic Dreaming.” Parnassus 8.1 Grossman was born in Minneapolis. He received a (1980): 144–149. doctorate from Brandeis University in 1960 and Durante, Janice Floyd. “A Conversation with Allen Gross- remained there as a professor. He taught as a visiting man.” Boulevard 6.2–3 (fall 1991): 71–83. professor in Israel at the Universitat HaNegev and as Grossman, Allen, with Mark Halliday. The Sighted Singer: Two Works on Poetry for Readers and Writers. Baltimore: the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. Johns Hopkins University. His first book of poetry, A Stern, Gerald, “Grossman’s Lament.” American Poetry Review Harlot’s Hire, was published in 1959. The many honors 21.4 (July–August 1992): 7–12. and fellowships he has received include: three Push- cart Prizes (1975, 1987, and 1990) and the Bassine Rachel Trousdale Citation of the Academy of American Poets (1990). In 1993 he was elected a fellow of the American Academy GUEST, BARBARA (1920– ) Barbara Guest of Arts and Science. is an erudite, cosmopolitan poet, whose sensibility is at Grossman’s poetry is at once intensely personal, home in the byzantine coils of art’s complications. Her focusing on his own life and the lives of his parents, work shares Wallace STEVENS’s propensity to investigate and philosophical, addressing existential and historical the movement of the lyric imagination as it both cre- problems. Poems, such as “The Loss of the Beloved ates and exceeds reality. Each Guest poem meditates on Companion” (1979) and “A Little Sleep” (1982), build the process of its composition and is highly conscious on Walt Whitman and Ginsberg in examining the of the vision it constructs, but this makes the work union of the sexual and corporeal self, where “sex and more elusive than clear. Guest is a NEW YORK SCHOOL imagination are one” (“The Loss of the Beloved Com- poet and continues this group’s project of translating panion”). Resting more in ideas than in images, his modern visual art’s subversion of ordinary perception poems explore states of being: He is interested in how into literary forms. It is particularly in modern paint- spirit is expressed in the human body and the fate of ing that Guest finds and expresses her commitment to the dead. Jewish and Homeric imagery blend with the the aesthetic. Painting is an inextricable part of her physical details of the human body to represent a LYRIC POETRY’s complicated and witty style; it inspires world populated by family, lovers, and angels. His the fluidity of Guest’s metaphorical transformations as poetry contains an element of lamentation—for the well as her inventive use of space, focus, and line. dead, for the unborn, for the impossible. It draws Guest has stated that, as a young poet, painting gave upon modern poets for its concerns with the nature of her a sense of “being unconfined to a page” (190), and reality and upon the reactions and conditions of his her lyrics—whether scattered and fragmented or own body for its images. densely built—move into worlds confined only by Grossman’s parents, Louis and Beatrice, appear in their commitment to innovative perception. But for all his poems as both emblems of the poet’s origins and her innovation, Guest never relinquishes the lyric’s warnings of his eventual fate. The five-part poem potential for beauty; she simply reimagines the possi- “Poland of Death” (1988) superimposes Louis’s death bilities of its appearances. Guest’s sustained attention onto a picture of the Holocaust. While Louis Grossman to reinventing the lyric has influenced the work of died in America, his ghost joins the ghosts of the Jews such poets as Marjorie WELISH, Ann LAUTERBACH, and who died in the concentration camps. This blending of Mei-Mei BERSSENBRUGGE. the private (the death of the poet’s father) and the Guest was born in Wilmington, North Carolina, and larger metaphysical-historical concern (the fate of the spent her childhood in Florida and California. After victims of the Holocaust) is typical of Grossman’s graduating from the University of California, Berkeley, work. The physical particulars of the body reflect and she settled in New York City and connected with the explain the otherwise unknowable spiritual world. emerging New York school and the painters of ABSTRACT GUEST, BARBARA 191

EXPRESSIONISM. Guest’s poem “History” (1962), which is rhythms of the American Midwest to the regal desires dedicated to Frank O’HARA, captures the sense of possi- for romance. bility alive within the New York school’s playful and For all its emphasis on fictional experiments and adventuresome camaraderie. Guest has been the recip- shifting personas, Guest’s work maintains ties to the ient of many prestigious awards. In 1989 Fair Realism real. The first two lines of “Fair Realism” (1989) won the Lawrence J. Lipton Prize, and in 1993 her col- describe a swift and far-fetched transformation, but the lection Defensive Rapture won the San Francisco State stanza settles into sobriety with the statement “an University Poetry Center Book Award. Guest has emphasis falls on reality.” The poem moves back and received two Americas Awards for the best collections forth between images that suggest a comforting reality of poetry: her Selected Poems won in 1995, and Quill, and those that suggest the artifice of artistic represen- Solitary APPARITION won in 1996. In 1999 Guest was tation. Guest’s poem shows that these distinctions can- awarded the Robert FROST Medal by the Poetry Society not be sustained, as they are continually meeting and of America. transforming one another in language. Just the same, Guest has collaborated with a number of visual the poem does acknowledge both the emotional and artists, producing books that call attention to her compositional necessity of realism, however perceived work’s porous flexibility and its careful, sensitive or defined, as it is “part of the search, the journey / responsiveness to pictorial forms. An early poem enti- where two figures embrace.” tled “Heroic Stages” (1962), dedicated to the painter Guest’s work is dense with journeys, foreign lands, Grace Hartigan, attests to Guest’s talent for finding her borders, departures, and arrivals, but these are images work’s lyric contours within the imaginative landscape for the process of finding the place where the sensual- of another. Typical of Guest’s witty and indirect cri- ity of the world and the engaged, imaginative intellect tiques, “Heroic Stages” qualifies as a poem of feminist meet. In “Dissonance Royal Traveler” (1993), Guest subversion, as the “heroics” of abstract expressionism investigates the compositions that arise as the mind were announced in the art world in explicitly mascu- tries to understand the abstraction of music; this line terms. Guest renders—and celebrates—multiple process “loosens” “the hoof of the earth” from its “gar- aspects of Hartigan’s heroism: its continually elusive rison.” Readers brave enough to follow Guest into the transformations, its risky remapping of the world. shifting map of her poetry will see a world unleashed Guest compares the poets, who are “held to the routes into its imaginative potential. by the tender-eyed peasants,” to the painters “who BIBLIOGRAPHY have drawn deep lines on the globes.” For Guest, DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. “The Gendered Marvelous: Barbara painting and the lyrics that follow painting’s heroic Guest, Surrealism, and Feminist Reception.” In Scene of lead have the power to make the world and the self, as My Selves: New Work on the New York School Poets, edited Welish has said, “complicated with potentiality” and by Terrence Diggory and Stephen Paul Miller. Orono, “interestingly fictional” (562). Maine: National Poetry Foundation, 2001, pp. 189–213. Like John ASHBERY and O’Hara, Guest draws Guest, Barbara. “The Forces of the Imagination.” In Ameri- freely—and often surprisingly—from literature, art, can Women Poets in the 21st Century: Where Lyric Meets and philosophy, as well as from pop culture, creating Language, edited by Claudia Rankine and Juliana Spahr. juxtapositions that shine with surprise and unveil the Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2002, pp. 189–191. odd, the touching, and the elegant existing just at the Lundquist, Sara. “Implacable Poet: Purple Birds: The Work edge of the ordinary. In a long poem entitled “A of Barbara Guest.” In American Women Poets in the 21st Handbook of Surfing” (1968), Guest delves into Cal- Century: Where Lyric Meets Language, edited by Claudia ifornia beach culture with a combination of lyrical Rankine and Juliana Spahr. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan sophistication and biting sarcasm. Her collection The University Press, 2002, pp. 191–217. Countess of Minneapolis (1976) devotes itself to dis- Welish, Marjorie. “On Barbara Guest.” In Moving Borders: covering the possibilities for linking the everyday Three Decades of Innovative Writing by Women, edited by 192 GUNN, THOM

Mary Margaret Sloan. Jersey City: Talisman House, 1998, isfaction.” In “On the Move,” a motorcycle gang in gog- pp. 561–565. gles and leather jackets has “donned impersonality” and Kimberly Lamm overcome existentialist doubt through force of will. They combine instinct with pose, and though restless- GUNN, THOM (1929–2004) Anglo-Ameri- ness may never lead to wisdom, Gunn writes that in “a can poet Thom Gunn’s finest poems are formal master- valueless world,” one becomes “both hurler and the pieces that elegantly balance emotion and reason in a hurled, / One moves as well, always toward, toward.” chaste, plain style, although their subjects are rarely Poets, he argues, are the toughest toughs. In “To Yvor chaste or plain. Gunn inherited from William Shake- Winters, 1955,” Gunn compares Winters’s training of speare, John Donne, Fulke Greville, and Ben Jonson the dogs to his training of poets with a “boxer’s vigilance.” In dexterity to handle contemporary subject matter in tra- Winters, power, an “exercised intelligence,” keeps “both ditional, formal verse, and from Thomas Hardy, Yvor Rule and Energy in view, / Much power in each, most in WINTERS, and Robert DUNCAN, he learned to evaluate his the balanced two.” experience rationally and expand the range of verse. My Sad Captains (1961), which marks Gunn’s tran- Gunn was born in Gravesend, England. At Cam- sition away from strictly formal verse, begins with “In bridge, he attended F. R. Leavis’s lectures and wrote Santa Maria del Popolo,” whose speaker waits for the Fighting Terms (1954). British critics connected Gunn Sun to light Caravaggio’s painting Conversion of St. Paul with Philip Larkin and others who became known as and finds Saul’s arms outstretched, “Resisting, by part of “the Movement”: These poets displayed a distaste embracing, nothingness.” “Innocence” explores a sol- for romanticism and MODERNISM; eschewed rhetoric, dier’s “Courage, endurance, loyalty, and skill” as he dis- symbolism, and allusion in favor of urbanity, rationality, interestedly watches a Russian partisan burn in his and emotional restraint; and wrote using traditional boots. In the first section, Gunn writes in traditional forms. In 1954 Gunn received a Stegner Fellowship at metrical verse, but in the second he turns to rhymed Stanford University and studied under Winters. Gunn and unrhymed syllabic verse (where the number of syl- received an M.A. at Stanford and taught at the Univer- lables per line is fixed but the accents vary). The nine sity of California, Berkeley, until 2000. Gunn’s many syllable lines of “Waking in a Newly Built House” awards include the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize (1992) announce the change of style, if not of theme. The and a Lila Acheson Wallace/Reader’s Digest Award speaker’s perception of things is a calm awareness of (1992). His criticism has been collected in The Occasions “their precise definition, their fine / lack of even poten- of Poetry (1982) and Shelf Life (1993). tial meanings.” Gunn himself called Fighting Terms overly studious From the 1960s through the 1980s, Gunn wrote and literary, but its depiction of love as a series of mil- primarily in free verse. Touch (1967) contains “Misan- itary maneuvers or a game of cynical poses struck read- thropos,” a poem about “the last man” to survive a ers and critics. These formal poems with their nuclear holocaust. In Moly (1971), which Gunn con- plain-style sententiae (striking, often highly moral say- sidered his best book and most critics consider his ings) more closely resembled Renaissance verse than worst, Gunn wrote poems—in metrical verse—about the incipient CONFESSIONAL and DEEP IMAGE modes. In taking LSD. In “Street Song,” which draws on Eliza- “A Mirror for Poets,” Gunn expresses nostalgia for the bethan ballads, a drug dealer entices customers to sam- violence, misery, and politics of Elizabethan England, ple his wares, promising them power and access to a when there were “Wheels, racks, and fires / In every different world: “I’ll get you anything you need,” he writer’s mouth and not mere rant.” sings, “Keys lids acid and speed.” The Sense of Movement (1957) explores self-fashioning Gunn first used explicitly homosexual subject mat- in a world without meaning. In “Lines for a Book,” ter in The Passages of Joy (1982); his sexuality appeared Gunn sides with history’s “toughs”—“those exclusive by disguised in Jack Straw’s Castle (1975), which includes their action / For whom mere thought could be no sat- the beautiful love poem in rhymed quatrains “The GUNSLINGER 193

Bed,” a poem about an inept hustler at a gay bar GUNSLINGER EDWARD DORN (1968–1975) (“Fever”), and “The Geysers,” about hot springs in Cal- “A pageant of its time” is how Edward DORN described ifornia. Some critics, such as Donald Davie, who Gunslinger (qtd. in Elmborg 1), his book-length poem praised Gunn’s stoic examinations of modern life in written during the Vietnam War years that both reflects traditional verse, attacked him for what they saw as and critiques the era. Dorn incorporated into the poem abandoning his craft for contemporary informality and a broad cultural mix of the 1960s and 1970s in chron- decadence. However, Gunn’s experiments in style and icling the episodic adventures of the somewhat myste- subject matter helped prepare him to chronicle the rious, mock heroic Gunslinger on a journey through tragedies and social changes of the 1980s and 1990s in the American Southwest, ostensibly to find the eccen- some of the most technically and emotionally realized tric billionaire Howard Hughes. In the process Dorn writing of his career. parodies and refashions the myth of the West, playing In The Man with Night Sweats (1992), Gunn explores on its promise of freedom and its ongoing economic the pleasures of his domestic reality alongside the exploitation while exposing and imploding myths of social ravages of AIDS. In “The Hug,” Gunn celebrates American individualism, Western rationalism, and friendship, not romantic love, between two men who their corollary philosophical and economic systems. fall asleep, drunk, and wake in a “secure firm dry Gunslinger follows in a tradition of long American embrace.” The book contains excellent epigrams, poems with a focus on place, including William Carlos including “JVC,” written in memory of J. V. CUNNING- WILLIAMS’s PATERSON and the MAXIMUS POEMS of Charles HAM. In exquisite elegiac verse, Gunn explores the dig- OLSON (see LONG AND SERIAL POETRY). Dorn was crucially nity of men facing AIDS, as in “The J Car.” “In Time of influenced by Olson while a student at Black Mountain Plague” considers the historical coincidence of desire College during the time Olson served there as rector; and death. In the heroic couplets of “Courtesies of the influence from the BLACK MOUNTAIN SCHOOL and Olson Interregnum,” Gunn expresses guilt and relief for can be seen in Dorn’s “open field” verse, its lines freed being “Excluded from the invitation list / To the largest from rigid forms, to be shaped by their content, his use gathering of the decade.” Gunn continues to explore of fragmentation and juxtaposition, the citation of his- aspects of his life in formal and free verse in Boss Cupid torical sources, the poetry’s difficult allusive and per- (2000). In “Saturday Night,” Gunn remembers the gay sonal meanings, and its interest in non-Western club scene of the 1970s and “Stepping out hot for love cultures. Dorn, however, is especially eclectic in his or stratagem.” He regrets that the “Dionysian experi- sources and ambiguous in his tone, and he destabilizes ment” never built a new utopian city, but it was, at character and narrative in ways not seen in earlier least, an attempt to translate “common ecstasy” into a poetry. “paradisal state / Against the wisdom pointing us Dorn’s use of language in the work is manic and away.” whimsically creative, with the kind of puns, personal Gunn’s reputation now rests on his poems about jokes, and striking phrases to be found in his other AIDS, but he will continue to be read for his formal poetry. This linguistic inventiveness is evident starting mastery and for his rational stoicism and deeply felt with characters’ names, which, as with the Gunslinger emotions. himself, are cartoonish and sometimes playfully stereo- BIBLIOGRAPHY typical. Characters that initially accompany the Gun- Davie, Donald. Under Briggflats. Berkeley: University of Cali- slinger include his talking horse Claude Levi-Strauss, fornia Press, 1989. named for the noted anthropologist, a saloon keeper and Gunn, Thom. Thom Gunn in Conversation with James Camp- madam called Lil, and a character known as “I.” Along bell. London: BTL, 2000. the way, the hitchhiker Kool Everything, a 1960s hipster Morrison, Blake. The Movement: English Poetry and Fiction in traveling with a barrel of LSD, Dr. Jean Flamboyant, a the 1950s. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980. caricature of an academic, and Taco Desoxin and Tonto Richard E. Joines Pronto, Hispanic and Native American characters, are 194 GUNSLINGER added. A lack of quotation marks or other attribution written in a sustained burst of activity and each reflect- makes following who is speaking sometimes difficult, ing its different times and Dorn’s changing poetic prac- and characters also sometimes change names for poetic tices and experiments. Collected into one volume in and philosophical reasons, such as to question the 1975 as Slinger, a new complete edition of the poem impulse of naming or to undermine assumptions about was published in 1989 as Gunslinger. characters and narrative sequence. Travel is a common theme in Dorn’s poetry, and the Dorn’s use of a mix of high and popular culture poem addresses both geographic and ontological jour- sources in Gunslinger is one of the poem’s most dis- neys. The Gunslinger and his companions move across tinctive characteristics. Often called a mock epic, Gun- the Southwest, a transition symbolic of an authentic slinger alludes to John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), indigenous culture dangerously exploited by capitalis- Virgil’s Aeneid (17 B.C.), Lord Byron’s Don Juan tic interests; they travel between actual places, such as (1819–24), Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock Mesilla, the absurdly named Truth or Consequences, (1714), and other 18th-century satire, while also citing and the geographical oddity of the Four Corners area, and parodying poets and writers from William Shake- and fictional locations, such as Universe City, a pun on speare, William Blake, Walt Whitman, T. S. ELIOT, and university. Questioned about the trip in book I, Claude Ezra POUND to James Joyce, Jack KEROUAC, and Carlos replies that they will move “Across / two states / of Castaneda. Arcane scientific and philosophic refer- mind.” Dorn here creates both visual and verbal ences abound to thinkers, such as Martin Heidegger humor, placing “Across” literally across the page at its and Levi-Strauss. Written during a time when popular right-hand margin, and plays on two meanings of culture was becoming a powerful force (and the West- “states.” The character “I” is shown to travel the great- ern a popular genre), the poem frequently cites con- est philosophical distances. He starts the journey liter- temporary culture, from advertising and drug lingo to ally embodying the mythological unified self of television game shows and the comedy Mr. Ed to the Western philosophy, trusting in logic and rationality, Beatles and the Rolling Stones. This use of popular cul- initially attempting to find the “meaning” of events, for ture has prompted Marjorie Perloff to contend that one which he is repeatedly mocked. When “I” dies in book of the primary concerns in Gunslinger is “the archaeol- II, he is embalmed with LSD, symbolizing an alterna- ogy of mass-produced myths” and that the poem thus tive way of experiencing reality, which exposes to him has “more in common with Pop Art” than with the per- the limitations of the Western worldview. By book IIII sonal LYRIC POETRY prevalent in America at the time (the title itself a pun on “I”), he is transformed, now (vii). This self-aware and often parodic use of eclectic castigating Western logic: “Entrapment is this society’s / sources reveals the poem as one making a transition to sole activity, I whispered / and Only laughter can blow a more postmodern style of poetry; its mix of satirical it to rags.” and serious intent, its resistance to conventional or Dorn’s ambivalent fascination with powerful, quest- consistent meaning, and its use of multiple font styles ing characters is seen in his use as villain the eccentric and sizes call attention to the poem as a material object entrepreneur Howard Hughes, characterized as “hus- and as a text per se, other hallmarks of postmodern tling the future” with an exploitative, imperialistic atti- work. These same qualities can also present formidable tude implicitly linked to the war. Using informal barriers for readers, making the poem difficult to inter- diction to convey deflating humor, Hughes is pret on initial readings. described with animal imagery as “proud, brother, as a The character of the Gunslinger first appeared in dog / With two tails,” his face sporting reptilian “slick Dorn’s “An Idle Visitation” (1967). Most of that poem lids.” Hughes uses language and vague “data banks” to was incorporated into book I of a longer work entitled control those under him, symbolizing sinister hidden Gunslinger, published in 1968, at the height of the Viet- electronic and media powers. Underscoring this devi- nam War. The complete poem eventually grew to con- ousness is the change of his name within the poem to tain four books and a fifth part called The Cycle, each Rupert, then Robart (literally, rob art). GUTHRIE, RAMON 195

In the end the Gunslinger is no epic hero, as he From the 1920s on, the Guthries spent part of each year sleeps through the potential confrontation with in France and part in America. He was made an Officier Hughes, and the poem ends anticlimactically with the of the French Academy (1949), and later Officier dans characters dispersing. The ending reflects Dorn’s own l’ordre des Palmes Academique (1963). In 1970 he was growing pessimism over the effectiveness of the coun- awarded the Marjorie Peabody Waite Award of the terculture as a political force and foreshadows his later National Institute of Arts and Letters. more cynical poetry. In its time and after, however, In his first two volumes, Guthrie used traditional Dorn won new readers and a measure of fame with the meters and medieval French personae. The title of the unique, hip Gunslinger. first, Trobar Clus (1923), is a Troubadour term for a style characterized by twisted syntax and deliberately BIBLIOGRAPHY obscure diction. The second, A World Too Old (1927), Elmborg, James K. A Pageant of its Time: Edward Dorn’s Slinger and the Sixties. New York: Peter Lang, 1998. includes a few poems from the first book, as well as Foster, Thomas. “Kick[ing] the Perpendiculars Outa Right others of similar style and subject matter. From 1930 Anglos’: Edward Dorn’s Multiculturalism.” Contemporary to 1963, Guthrie taught French at Dartmouth College, Literature 38 (spring 1997): 78–105. publishing only an occasional poem. Jenkins, Grant. “Gunslinger’s Ethics of Excess Subjectivity, At the instigation of the scholar M. L. Rosenthal, Community, and the Politics of the Could Be.” Sagetrieb Guthrie put together the manuscript for Graffiti (1959). 15.3 (winter 1996): 206–242. Graffiti retains some of the jaunty allusiveness of his Perloff, Marjorie. Introduction to Gunslinger, by Durham, earlier poetry, but it adopts a more flexible and collo- N.C.: Duke University Press, 1989, pp. v–xvii. quial style. In “Ezra Pound in Paris and Elsewhere,” Sue Barker Guthrie uses the formulation, “and yet” followed by three dots, “ . . . there are no gods, sere Herakles // And GUTHRIE, RAMON (1896–1973) After yet. ...” In Maximum Security Ward, “as yet” becomes a bringing out six books between 1923 and 1929, catch phrase for the mystery of hope. including two novels, Ramon Guthrie descended into Asbestos Phoenix (1968) shows Guthrie working in relative poetic silence for 30 years. When his poem his own style with full confidence, writing musical MAXIMUM SECURITY WARD appeared in 1970, he was 74 free verse that alludes to French literature and culture, years old. His work might be seen as the last flowering classical mythology, and quantum physics, among of MODERNISM, showing the influence of Ezra POUND other things. Though often wry and witty, the poems and T. S. ELIOT, and paying homage to Wallace STEVENS, suggest a longing for transcendence in a world that William Carlos WILLIAMS, and Pound. defeats our hopes. Although his early biographical information is Guthrie began his masterpiece during a time when mostly unverified, Guthrie’s life seems to have been he was being treated for cancer. He transformed his eventful. Born in New York, he was brought up in hospital ward into Maximum Security Ward and in this poverty in Hartford, Connecticut, after his father book created a coherent vehicle for expressing a sensi- deserted the family. He served during World War I, first bility shaped by post–World War I angst, joy in life, as an ambulance driver, then as a machine-gunner in and an innate toughness of mind. the aviation section signal corps. He survived a plane crash, shot down four enemy planes, and received a Sil- BIBLIOGRAPHY Diller, George E., ed. Ramon Guthrie Kaleidoscope. Hanover, ver Star and two citations for bravery. When the war N.H.: Stinehour Press, 1963. ended he studied at the Sorbonne. In Paris he met Mar- guerite Maurey, who would become his wife in 1922. Thomas Lisk CHD

HACKER, MARILYN (1942– ) When Mari- the Lenore Marshall Literary Award in poetry (1991 lyn Hacker began publishing her poetry in the late and 1995) and the John Masefield Memorial Award 1960s, free verse had become the poetic standard (see (1994). Hacker has taught at a number of colleges and PROSODY AND FREE VERSE). The rise of MODERNISM had led universities, including Brandeis, Barnard, Columbia, to a rejection of received forms by many poets. Hacker’s and the City College of New York. formalism was further complicated by the belief of many In her sonnet sequence Separations (1976), Hacker in the women’s movement that only a rejection of the directly addresses her use of received poetic forms. In male poetics of formalism would enable a woman writer “Sonnet VI,” rhyme is her “homely lover” and meter the to find her own voice (see FEMALE VOICE, FEMALE LAN- sound of this lover’s boots that “scuff up the stairs.” In GUAGE). That Hacker, a lesbian and social activist, chose the sonnet’s final couplet, Hacker imagines that others to embrace rather than reject what was then viewed as a may some day come to love her “homely lover” too. In “masculine” use of the language was courageous, and “Ballad of Ladies Lost and Found” (1985), Hacker this act inspired many women poets who came after her. demonstrates how received form can be reclaimed by Born in New York City, Hacker attended the Bronx women writers. Hacker’s poem is a witty response to High School of Science, skipping her senior year to François Villon’s “The Ballad of Dead Ladies” (1461) enroll in New York University at 15. She left college and answers that poem’s ubi sunt theme (“where are and married the science-fiction writer Samuel Delany those who have passed now?”) by showing that the in 1961, later returning to graduate in 1964. Hacker women have always been here, not dead but lost, and Delany had one child, Iva, about whom Hacker because they were overlooked. In Hacker’s poem the has written with grace and beauty; they subsequently women are found through the poet’s act of naming each divorced. Hacker’s first book of poetry, Presentation of them within the verse: “Make your own footnotes; it Piece (the 1973 Lamont Poetry Selection of the Acad- will do you good,” Hacker writes, telling women to emy of American Poets), was published in 1974 and continue to name themselves, to place themselves in won the National Book Award. The author of nine the world so that they do not become lost—or unheard. books of poetry, Hacker has served as editor for a num- BIBLIOGRAPHY ber of publications, including the feminist journal 13th Campo, Raphael. “About Marilyn Hacker.” Ploughshares 22.1 Moon (1982–86) and Kenyon Review (1990–94), and (spring 1996): 195–199. has translated the contemporary poetry of Venus Finch, Annie, and Marilyn Hacker. “An Interview on Form.” Khoury-Ghata and Claire Malroux from the French American Poetry Review 25:3 (May/June 1996): 23–27. into English. Among her numerous other awards are Wendy Galgan

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HADAS, RACHEL (1948– ) Rachel Hadas she emphasizes the incompleteness of death as having combines both traditional and postmodern poetic “no closure” and shows poetry as an “unfinished busi- forms with a background in classical Greek, infusing ness,” which fosters rebirth. commonplace topics with elegiac and transformational Hadas’s poetry situates miracles or transformations elements (see PROSODY AND FREE VERSE). Her poems deal in the midst of everyday experiences. As she says in with universal issues of mortality, metamorphosis, and “Fleshly Answers” (1998), “We are passing through the rebirth but also include personal moments of emo- world. / This is some of what it does to us.” tional vulnerability. Hadas has been influenced by BIBLIOGRAPHY James MERRILL, who turned away from the MODERNISM Benfey, Christopher. “From the Greek.” Parnassus 16.2 of T. S. ELIOT to a poetics of transcendence. (1991): 405–414. Born and raised in New York City, Hadas, the Clark, J. Elizabeth. “An Interview with Rachel Hadas.” Min- daughter of a renowned classics scholar, studied the nesota Review 55–57 (2002): 80–83. classics at Harvard and then spent four years in Greece, Helle, Anita. “Elegy as History: Three Women Poets ‘By the developing friendships with poets Merrill and Alan Century’s Deathbed.’” South Atlantic Review 61.2 (spring Ansen. Her arrest, trial, and subsequent acquittal for 1996): 51–68. the arson of an olive oil press prompted her return to Joyce C. Smith America for graduate study at Johns Hopkins (M.A., 1977) and Princeton (Ph.D., 1982). Her awards HALL, DONALD (1928– ) Donald Hall’s include a a number of fellowships and a prize in liter- poetic career, including 14 published volumes, has ature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts been a series of experiments in the extent to which he and Letters (1995). She has taught at Columbia, would achieve detachment. Hall’s evolving confidence Princeton, and Rutgers Universities, as well as at the in his capacity for engagement appears in his move- Sewanee Writers Conference. ment toward a poetry of experience that ultimately Her lifelong interest in Greek culture has permeated makes few claims upon obscure psychological motiva- her poetry, supplying a variety of classical elements, tions or disconnected visual phenomena. Whereas in and has led to translations of Euripides, Seneca, Tibul- many of his earlier works Hall’s preoccupation with lus, and Konstantine Karyotakis, while her involve- poetic craft generates an impression of diffidence or ment in the intellectual life of New York City has even anxiety, he later finds that the comfort of subjec- contributed important personal topics. Christopher tivity enables him to speak effectively in the cogent Benfey has called Hadas “an urban poet and an urbane voice that characterizes his prose writings. Though his one” and compared the poems in Pass It On (1989) to first poems were imitations of Edgar Allan Poe, Hall Randall JARRELL’s late poetry (406). Assuming the voice quickly developed sensitivity to the dangers of exces- of an educator who passes on knowledge, she incor- sive influence, and his own poetic practice avoids evi- porates personal memories of her father as well as her dence of direct influence. Though wishing to be his own teaching experiences. One poem, “Teaching Emily own man in terms of poetic originality, Hall is a great Dickinson,” reveals her students’ reactions: “She sings practitioner of poetic cooperation, and one of the the pain of loneliness for one. / Another sees a life of major phases of his creative life was his marriage to the wasted youth.” poet Jane KENYON. Other significant associations have In an anthology of poems by both AIDS students been with Robert BLY and John ASHBERY, along with and herself, Unending Dialogue: Voices from an AIDS Yvor WINTERS and Theodore ROETHKE. Poetry Workshop (1991), and in her own later volume, Hall was born in Hamden, Connecticut. He attended The Empty Bed (1995), Hadas gained recognition for Harvard University, where he took courses from John poetry dealing with issues of mortality. Her elegies sug- CIARDI and Archibald MACLEISH. Later he studied at gest that the void caused by death can somehow be Oxford, where he received the Newdigate Prize (1952) mitigated by language. In “Literary Executor” (1995), for poetry. In 1953 he became poetry editor for the 198 HALL, DONALD

Paris Review, in which he began a series of interviews (1978), he tacitly endorses Whitman’s commitment to with distinguished writers, himself interviewing Ezra personal expression via a narrative or anecdotal voice. POUND, T. S. ELIOT, and Marianne MOORE. Since then his Living in the old farmhouse and writing for a living, long poetic career has earned him numerous honors, Hall developed confidence in his own poetic voice. By including the Lenore Marshall Award (1986), the the time Hall published The Happy Man (1986), his National Book Critics Circle Award (1988), the Robert poetry had reached a new level of critical acceptance, FROST Medal from the Poetry Society of America and, two years later, Hall’s next poetry collection The (1990–91), and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize (1994). He One Day (1988) met with enthusiastic reviews. Old and has also won a Caldecott Medal (1980) for children’s lit- New Poems (1990) continued the tradition of the per- erature, and he has twice been poet laureate (1984–89 sonal poet making his art from experience, as did Hall’s and 1995–99) of the state of New Hampshire. next book The Museum of Clear Ideas (1993). Having In 1955 Hall published Exiles and Marriages, a book adjusted very well to his literary life in the New Hamp- of poems which was well received by critics, establish- shire farmhouse, Hall became more productive than ing him in the literary, academic world as a young poet ever. After nearly 20 years of this life, however, Hall’s of promise. The poem “Epigenethlion: First Child,” tranquil existence was interrupted by the discovery which includes the lines beginning “My son, my exe- that his wife had leukemia, and he devoted his energies cutioner,” is still Hall’s most famous poem. In the light to her until her death in 1995. of his later career, the relatively strict formality and After Kenyon’s death, Hall sought the consolation of laconic frankness of these lines, resembling the work of his poetic art. In Without (1998), he published a mov- A. E. Housman more than that of any American con- ing poetic account of his experiences during Kenyon’s temporary, almost seems to be the work of a different physical decline. In The Painted Bed (2002), Hall has poet. Still the poem reflects the profound impact of continued to write of the changes that his life under- fatherhood, the implications of which engage Hall’s wit went as a result of her death, but here he shows signs and imagination to good effect. The poem employs the of coming to terms with grief and with age. His accept- witty “conceit” of 17th-century metaphysical poets in ance of these realities is set out in the poem “Affirma- its elaborate pun on “executioner” (a fearsome term tion” (2002), in which, after enumerating, in the usually referring to a hangman) and “executor” (one present tense, as though they were universal truths, the who makes sure that a will is put properly into effect), disappointments and failures of life, Hall concludes, “it words sometimes used interchangeably until the 19th is fitting / and delicious to lose everything.” Although century. The speaker calls his baby “our instrument” Hall’s poetic works may eventually come to be and tells the child, “Your cries and hungers document / regarded as less significant than his prose, his poetry Our bodily decay.” consistently reflects intelligence, sensitivity, and insight Hall’s A Roof of Tiger Lilies (1964) signaled a new and, taken as a whole, reflects a remarkable personal poetic phase, one in which the poet sought to generate journey through the obstacle course of his era’s profes- images and effects that would enable the reader to sional and imaginative challenges. explore the possibilities of the prerational realm of BIBLIOGRAPHY consciousness. In 1972 Hall married Kenyon, who Cramer, Jeffrey S. “With Jane and Without: An Interview persuaded him to give up his professorship at the Uni- with Donald Hall.” Massachusetts Review 39.4 (winter versity of Michigan and move to his grandparents’ old 1998–1999): 493–511. house in rural New Hampshire. This decision had a McDonald, David. “Donald Hall—Interview.” American powerful effect on his subsequent work, as it reestab- Poetry Review 31.1 (January/February 2002): 17–20. lished his connections to his family’s past and to his Truesdale, Vance, with Meredith Walker. “‘I do it all because own childhood. By 1978 Hall, newly energized by I love to do it’: Donald Hall at Clemson.” South Carolina reading Walt Whitman, had resumed his poetic Review 21.1 (fall 1989): 23–32. engagement with experience, and, in Kicking the Leaves Robert W. Haynes HARJO, JOY 199

HAMILL, SAM (1943– ) Like others in the long as we live, as “long as the tongue can open to the generation of American poets born in the 1930s and vowel,” it remains the poet’s responsibility to praise the 1940s, Sam Hamill practices free verse (see PROSODY beauty of the world. For when we stand at death’s AND FREE VERSE), usually writing short lyrical poems door, ready to pass into the “other world,” we will (see LYRICAL POETRY). He belongs to a tradition of late “suddenly know the earth.” As Hamill explains in 20th-century poets who were strongly influenced by “Cloistered” (1987), “to know and not to speak / is the classical Chinese and Japanese verse, among them greatest grief.” In clipped, tender lines, often as solemn Gary SNYDER and Lucien Stryk. His translation of Lu as scripture, Hamill’s verse satisfies this dual duty of Chi’s Wen Fu: The Art of Writing (1987) summarizes the witnessing and praise. principles of his own poetics, while his mid-length BIBLIOGRAPHY elegy “Requiem” (1984) indicates the pivotal influence Shenoda, Matthew. “A Life in Poetry: Sam Hamill.” Blooms- of Kenneth REXROTH. Combined with his appreciation bury Review 21.6 (November–December 2001): 3–30. for tradition is a powerful radicalism, more evident in Stryk, Lucien. “Why Zen?” American Poetry Review 22.6 his prose and grassroots political endeavors. (November–December 1993): 25–26. Hamill was born probably somewhere in northern Walzer, Kevin. “A Radical Classicist: The Poetry of Sam California, left by his father with an adoption agency, Hamill.” In The Resurgence of Traditional Poetic Form and and raised on a farm in Utah. He joined the U.S. Marine the Current Status of Poetry’s Place in American Culture. Corps, spending time on Okinawa, where he became a Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 2001. Zen Buddhist and a conscientious objector. His first Jeffrey Encke collection, Heroes of the Teton Mythos, was published in 1973 by Copper Canyon Press, an independent pub- HARJO, JOY (1951– ) Storyteller, musician, lishing house that he had helped found a year earlier. and poet, Joy Harjo is known for a style that juxta- Hamill’s Destination Zero: Poems 1970–1995 received a poses the present, past, and future. Although spoken Pushcart Prize following its publication in 1995. In by a lyric “I,” her poetry challenges the limitations of 2003 Hamill garnered significant media attention by personal LYRIC POETRY, as well as stereotypical views of editing an anthology-as-protest against the American Indians (the name Harjo refers to American Indians) invasion of Iraq, Poets against the War, for which he and of the nature of reality. The “American Indian received more than more than 13,000 submissions. A consciousness” through which she writes, “has to do prolific poet, Hamill is also an essayist and translator with a way of believing or sensing things. The world from ancient Greek, Latin, Japanese, and Chinese. is not disconnected or separate but whole. All per- His collection Petroglyphs (1976) and Triada (1978), sons are still their own entity but not separate from a book-length poem blending elements of American everything else” (Bruchac 22). Among those she history and American Indian myth, engage broad cul- names as poetic influences are Galway KINNELL, Car- tural and historical themes, addressing, for instance, a olyn FORCHÉ, Audre LORDE, June JORDAN, Simon ORTIZ, young nation’s failure to abide by its own principles as and especially Leslie Marmon SILKO (Coltelli “Circular it expanded westward, marginalizing and absorbing Dream” 68). indigenous cultures. Along the same lines, the poems Harjo, a member of the Muscogee tribe, was born in elegize a loss of respect for the land. Starting with ani- Tulsa, Oklahoma. She later moved to the Southwest to mae (1980), Hamill’s poetry turns inward, addressing attend the American Institute of Indian Arts in Santa such themes as the relations between men and women Fe, New Mexico. She earned a B.A. in poetry at the and the poet’s own masculinity. As his work progresses, University of New Mexico in 1976 and an M.F.A. in Hamill weaves his historical, natural, and aesthetic creative writing at the University of Iowa in 1978. perspectives into a unified vision. Harjo published her first full-length collection, What “Requiem,” which Kevin Walzer claims “may be Moon Drove Me to This?, in 1979. In 1990 In Mad Love Hamill’s single finest poem” (139), maintains that as and War received an American Book Award and the 200 HARLEM GALLERY

Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award, and The Woman HARLEM GALLERY MELVIN TOLSON Who Fell from the Sky (1994) won the Oklahoma Book (1965) Harlem Gallery is a poem in 24 cantos (parts), Arts Award. In 1991 she received the Josephine Miles written by Melvin Beanous TOLSON, and divided accord- Award for excellence in literature. She has received a ing to the Greek alphabet. The book-length poem is number of other honors. told through a narrator, called “Curator.” Themes For Harjo, time is a “mythic spiral,” as she refers to include social revolution through art and ironies of it in “Hieroglyphic” (1990). Actual events, communal racial identity. Karl SHAPIRO has called Harlem Gallery history, and stories share equal importance in reveal- the lyrical answer to T. S. ELIOT’s THE WASTE LAND, ing her major themes: the struggle of American Indi- because the poem describes the problems and social ans, people’s relationship with the natural world, the woes that plague the America that Tolson sees. Shapiro importance of belonging to place, identity, loss, and notes that Harlem Gallery has been described as a comic especially the relationship among all beings, things, poem, slapstick, crude, and funny: “It is massive, a kind and ideas (Coltelli “Introduction” 8). In “The Myth of of Odyssey of the American Negro, that like other Blackbirds” (1994), Harjo brings together various works of its quality in the past, will turn out to be not realities and times to create a spiral of experience: only an end in itself but the door to poetry that every- There is a journey she and her friend make in the one has been looking for” (14). Rita DOVE says, “the present to a “brutal” Washington, D.C., the story of a whole of Harlem Gallery, in fact, is very much like the “man from Ghana, who wheeled our bags” and who mythic ‘bad man’ heroes in black oral tradition”; she “loves the poetry of the stars,” as well as “the ancestors calls Tolson’s hero “the archetypal black artist” (xxi). who became our grandparents” and the mythic The poem originally was written as “Harlem Gallery: “blackbirds who are exactly blackbirds.” By repeating Book 1, The Curator,” the first book in a five-volume and juxtaposing such images, Harjo creates poetry history of the black man in America. Tolson died that is both timely and timeless. The “man from before the volume was finished. The book evolved Ghana” and the “brutal city” are recognizable as pres- from A Gallery of Harlem Portraits, which Tolson wrote ent-day images but also become mythic when set in 1930. “Book II: Egypt Land” was planned to be a alongside the ancestors and the blackbirds. Harjo delineation of slavery. “Book III: The Red Sea” was to often brings several important themes together in a be an analogy of the Civil War. “Book IV: The Wilder- single poem—to, as Janice Gould says, “transcend ness” was to discuss Reconstruction, and “Book V: The [the] ordinary world, to name, in language that seems Promised Land” was to be the arrival to America of the almost sacred, that visionary land to which she trav- black man. els, of which her extraordinary awareness is so much The Curator, akin to Ralph Ellison’s protagonist in a part” (10). Invisible Man (1952), is a black intellectual ex-professor of art who introduces the reader to the highbrows, BIBLIOGRAPHY middlebrows, and lowbrows, a description of the class Bruchac, Joseph. “The Story of All Our Survival.” In The Spi- ral of Memory: Interviews, edited by Laura Coltelli. Ann systems in society. The Curator is nameless, a way of Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996, pp. 20–35. criticizing the role of the intellectual in the black com- Coltelli, Laura. “The Circular Dream.” In The Spiral of Mem- munity. Tolson condemns both black intellectuals and ory: Interviews, edited by Coltelli. Ann Arbor: University black bourgeoisie (middle-class) for disassociating of Michigan Press, 1996, pp. 60–74. themselves from their folk background, and so-called ———. Introduction to The Spiral of Memory: Interviews, black values, opting instead to assimilate into white edited by Coltelli. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan American society . The Curator witnesses daily activi- Press, 1996, pp. 1–13. ties of black middle-class cultural figures. Another Gould, Janice. “American Indian Women’s Poetry: Strategies character, Dr. Nkomo, and the Curator learn about of Rage and Hope.” Signs 20.4 (summer 1995): 797–816. black Americans in a white-dominated society. Barbara J. McGrath Through their journey, the reader is introduced to HARLEM RENAISSANCE, THE 201 three artists: John Laugart, a half-blind destitute of the braggadocio” (Dove xxii). For instance, the painter; Hideho Heights, the poet laureate of Harlem; poem’s seventh canto, “Eta,” employs black speech to and Mister Starks, the conductor of the Harlem Sym- describe a furor that is wreaking havoc on the black phony Orchestra. American community: “The black widow spider gets The first five parts of Harlem Gallery, Alpha through rid of her man / gets rid of her daddy as fast as she can.” Epsilon, set the tone for the themes of exploration into Robert Spector, in his review of Harlem Gallery on the everyday life of black America and the role of the the occasion of the book’s debut in 1965, said that black artist in white American society. The next four there is a “somethingness that stirs in all [of Tolson’s] parts, Zeta through Iota, reveal philosophical commen- characters: desires, ambitions, frustrations and fail- taries on the subjects of art, the gap between the races, ures” (29). There are several theories about the title. and what is considered happiness for black Americans, There is the play on peanut gallery, for instance—a as told by Curator and Dr. Nkomo. Following is Kappa term given to the cheaper balcony seats in a movie the- through Xi, focusing on the colorful character Hideho ater where black Americans were forced to sit. And Heights. The next two parts, Omicron and Pi, are there is the proselytizing of the notion that an art reflections about art, historical figures, and biblical pas- gallery is a symbol of the series of portraits and faces sages. The last four parts, Phi through Omega, “reflect that humans wear, oftentimes disguising who they on art and the problem of the black artist,” Joy Flasch really are. Throughout this epic journey of black Amer- reports, noting that this portion of the poem “recalls the ican life, as Shapiro calls Harlem Gallery (15), Tolson enslavement and suffering of Africans brought to Amer- continues to employ his unique style of storytelling. ica and issues a warning to the white man to beware of He struggles, through the narratives of the artists in the the power of the black minority in this country” (126). gallery, to tell the plight of black America, showing that Harlem Gallery concludes with the Curator meditating he feels misunderstood by the one group to whom he on the state of the black artist and his survival in a dedicates his works—all black writers. white-dominated society. BIBLIOGRAPHY The formatting of the poems runs according to what Dove, Rita. Introduction to “Harlem Gallery” and Other Poems is described as Tolson’s “S-Trinity of Parnassus” notes of Melvin B. Tolson, edited by Raymond Nelson. Char- Flasch (102): sight, sound, and sense. Sound refers to the lottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999, pp. xxi–xxii. oral nature of the poem, as Tolson intended his work to Flasch, Joy. Melvin B. Tolson. New York: Twayne, 1972, pp. be read aloud, sense to the meaning and the sensory 102, 126. aspect of language, while sight entices the reader to Shapiro, Karl. Introduction to Harlem Gallery: Book I, The examine closely the style in which the lines are written. Curator. New York: Twayne, 1965, pp. 14–15. Also commenting on this style of writing, Dove main- Spector, Robert Donald. “The Poet’s Voice in the Crowd.” tains that “with allusions to Vedic gods and snippets in Saturday Review (7 August 1965): 29. French and Latin, much of Harlem Gallery is fused with Yvette R. Blair street jive and language told in folk tale” (xxi). The first manuscript of the poem was written in free HARLEM RENAISSANCE, THE verse, deviating from the American standard of iambic (1919–1934) Between 1919 and 1934 African- meter (see PROSODY AND FREE VERSE), modeled after American artists flocked to New York City, specifically Edgar Lee MASTERS’s Spoon River Anthology. Following to Harlem. This era was to become one of the most two decades of failing to publish his work, Tolson prolific periods of African-American writing. What rewrote the piece, patterning it after the style of such Alain Locke called in 1925 a “New Negro Movement” writers as Eliot, Ezra POUND, and William Butler Yeats. was later defined by historians as the Harlem Renais- The vignettes, make use of alliteration and allegories, sance. Among the poets who gained popularity during while paying homage to black vernacular “with mim- this era were Langston HUGHES, Claude MCKAY, Countee icry, exaggerated language, spontaneity and the persona CULLEN, Jean TOOMER, Arna Bontemps, Anne Spencer, 202 HARLEM RENAISSANCE, THE

Gwendolyn Bennett, Helene Johnson, Angelina Weld huge influx of African Americans to the North became Grimké, and James Weldon JOHNSON. Many leading fic- known as the Great Migration. Many of these people tion writers also emerged during this period, including settled in Harlem, which was rapidly becoming known Zora Neale Hurston, Rudolph Fisher, Jessie Redmond as a center for artistic opportunity. Fauset, Nella Larsen, and Wallace Thurman. Moreover In his essay “The New Negro,” Alain Locke, the first many of the poets of this era also wrote fiction. The African-American Rhodes scholar, attempted to direct Harlem Renaissance also included the creative works the spirit of unrest he saw rising in many black com- produced by brilliantly talented, prolific dancers, munities as a result of these changing conditions. Riots musicians, visual artists, and photographers. were breaking out across the country. McKay’s famous Several conditions enabled this renaissance: Booker sonnet “If We Must Die” (1919) addresses this revolu- T. Washington’s death, World War I, deteriorating tionary spirit: “If we must die, O let us nobly die, /... southern racial conditions, greater publishing oppor- Pressed to the wall, dying but fighting back!” tunities, and Marcus Garvey’s influence on racial pride. Locke’s solution was the creation and display of tal- When Booker T. Washington, a former slave and ented art, which would become the black ticket into founder of Tuskegee Institute, died in 1915, W. E. B. the social fabric of white America. Placing the future in DuBois, the first African American to take a Ph.D. from the hands of young artists like McKay, Locke charged Harvard and one of the principal organizers of the them to produce the uncompromising art essential to National Association for the Advancement of Colored the reconstruction of African-American identity. John- People (NAACP), replaced him as the principal son agreed that “nothing will do more to change [the] spokesperson for African Americans. Although he held mental attitude and raise his status than a demonstra- tremendous respect for Washington, DuBois disagreed tion of intellectual parity by the Negro through his strongly with his conciliatory attitude toward racial production of literature and art” (9). injustice in the South. DuBois endorsed more urgent In this art blacks would be more authentically rep- demands for social change. resented. No more minstrel figures, such as the When World War I ended in 1918, returning black mammy and coon, comic grotesque figures that repre- soldiers, especially those who had been recognized in sented black females as asexual nurturers and black France for their heroic achievements, were angered by males as comic buffoons. Crisis, a publication of the racial conditions that remained unchanged in the NAACP, as well as Opportunity, the publishing arm of United States. When in 1917 Woodrow Wilson pro- the Urban League, held writing contests to inspire claimed U.S. involvement in the war as a means to young artists. Other outlets included the black social- make the world safe for democracy, many African- ist publication the Messenger, and white publishers American soldiers had felt certain that U.S. discrimina- and patrons who became more receptive to black art tion would be dismantled. Confronted by the same as well. racial injustice and violence they left, many black vet- A variety of styles and literary devices, including erans joined their anger with a rising spirit of unrest dialect, strict standard English, high and low culture, that was beginning to pervade the country. parody, irony, and satire, fill the pages of Harlem Racial conditions in the South were becoming Renaissance writings, creating a window into the rich unbearable for African Americans, especially in rural diversity of perspectives alive in African-American areas. Workers faced unfair sharecropping arrange- communities. Yet artists continued to debate the best ments, lynching, and segregation, as well as inferior way to represent blacks, which classes to foreground in schools and living conditions. Many began moving their work, and whether or not to use dialect. In addi- north with the hope of finding greater economic tion writers struggled against the mean-spirited images opportunity in the industrial cities of New York, of blacks as promiscuous. Some artists considered Chicago, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, and Pittsburgh. downplaying the theme of sexuality, which, when used Soon African-American professionals followed. This unwisely, could only fuel the harmful effects of this HARLEM RENAISSANCE, THE 203 stereotype. Others, like Hughes, insisted that artists a literary project, his poetry, influenced by his religious must not be servants to outside approval. In his upbringing, is meditative and spiritual with a deep sense famous essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Moun- of racial pride. tain” (1926), Hughes responds to a fellow artist’s dis- While the movement often seemed to be dominated missal of his own culture in favor of uncritical by men, women also managed to leave their enduring acceptance of white Western culture as standard. mark on the poetry of the era. Georgia Douglas John- Declaring the artist’s inability to realize full creative son attended to racial themes, yet was equally drawn to potential without respect for his own culture, Hughes romanticism, sentimentalism, and issues concerning issues a bold mandate to all young black artists: the human condition. Angelina Weld Grimké treated racial themes with a lyric sensibility. Much of Anne We younger Negro artists who create now intend Spencer’s work is concerned with gender more than to express our individual dark-skinned selves race. Race-conscious Gwendolyn Bennett wrote lyrics without fear or shame. If white people are pleased that focused on the “grace and loveliness” of the we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. We descendants of Africans (Gates 1227). Helene Johnson know we are beautiful. And ugly too. . . . If col- was described as “one of the younger group who has ored people are pleased we are glad. If they are taken . . . the ‘racial’ bull by the horns” (Johnson 279). not, their displeasure doesn’t matter either. We Other important writers of the period include Eric build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we Walrond, Sterling A. BROWN, and Dorothy West. Wal- know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, rond wrote of his experiences as a West Indian in free within ourselves. (309) Harlem, Brown continued Hughes’s emphasis on the Toomer was the first artist to enjoy widespread critical poetics of blues culture, and West examined the acceptance of his first work, Cane (1923), success that wealthy class of blacks, writing and publishing well charged the confidence of other Harlem Renaissance into her nineties. writers. The collection, containing a novella, poetry, and In opposition to the radical modernist movement short fiction, as well as drawings, is most noted for its and such poets as Ezra POUND and T. S. ELIOT, Harlem focus on the strength and beauty of rural black women, Renaissance poets did not view the entire modern such as Fern. In his free verse Hughes treats themes of world as a wasteland (see THE WASTE LAND). Instead a black pride, black unity, racial violence, black poverty, sense of optimism pervaded their work, unlike the black womanhood, African heritage, and integration. He fatalism and pessimism found in many works of MOD- also transcribed blues, jazz, and gospel into poetic verse. ERNISM. Like blues music, the poetry transformed Such innovation gained him the reputation of “poet lau- hopelessness with love and laughter, the words and reate of the Harlem Renaissance.” In one of his most images infused with the power of persistence. famous poems, the musician and his sounds come alive Historians David Levering Lewis and Nathan Hug- on the page: “Thump, thump, thump, went his foot on gins argue that the Harlem Renaissance failed in its the floor. / He played the chords then he sang some mission to challenge inequitable conditions for blacks more.” Johnson explored the sermonic tradition in his in North America through art. Literary critic Houston poetry, maintaining black verbal art forms, while McKay A. Baker, Jr., disagrees: He insists that such faith in the and Cullen cast their poetry in the traditional form of power of art could be “a mark of British and American the sonnet. Cullen, perhaps more closely aligned with modernism,” but that British and white American European-inspired poetic verse, nonetheless indulged in scholars would dismiss such efforts by labeling the social protest with his poems “HERITAGE” (1925) and “Yet movement a failure (14). Certainly if the success of the Do I Marvel” (1925), which questions God and the par- movement can be gauged by its influence on genera- adox of a black poet: “Yet do I marvel at this curious tions to follow, the Harlem Renaissance was a tremen- thing; / To make a poet black, and bid him sing!” dous success. Not only did the movement have an Although Bontemps once collaborated with Hughes on impact on individual artists, but the BLACK ARTS MOVE- 204 HARPER, MICHAEL S.

MENT of the 1960s looked to the Harlem Renaissance the faculty of Brown University. Dear John, Dear for guidance and direction. Coltrane, his first book of poetry, was published in 1970 and was nominated for the National Book Award. BIBLIOGRAPHY He received the Black Academy of Arts and Letters Baker, Houston A., Jr. Modernism and the Harlem Renais- Award for poetry (1971) and the Melville-Cane Award sance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. from the Poetry Society of America in 1977. Additional Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., et al., eds. “The Harlem Renais- honors include the Robert HAYDEN Poetry Award from sance.” Norton Anthology of African-American Literature. New York: W.W. Norton, 1997. the United Negro College Fund (1990), the National Hughes, Langston. “The Negro Artist and the Racial Moun- Institute of Arts and Letters Creative Writing Award tain.” In Voices from the Harlem Renaissance, edited by (1972), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1976), and a Nathan Huggins. New York: Oxford University Press, National Endowment for the Arts grant (1977). He was 1995. selected as the first state poet of Rhode Island (1988). ———. “The Weary Blues.” In Norton Anthology of African- Although Harper’s point of view is very personal, American Literature, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., et cultural issues of black America are the primary sub- al. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997. ject of his body of work. Several poems recount inci- Johnson, James Weldon, ed. The Book of American Negro dents of racism, not only against blacks but also Poetry. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1922. against Hispanics and American Indians. Other poems Karenga, Maulana. Introduction to Black Studies. Los Angeles: are tributes to Coltrane, Parker, Bud Powell, Bessie Kawaida Publications, 1982. Lewis, David Levering. When Harlem Was in Vogue. New Smith, and other musicians. A strong sense of family York: Oxford University Press, 1981. informs many of Harper’s poems, particularly the McKay, Claude. “If We Must Die.” In The Book of American poignantly rendered poems about the death of his Negro Poetry, edited by James Weldon Johnson. New York: newborn son. In “Reuben, Reuben” (1970), Harper Harcourt, Brace & World, 1922. shows how music can be a salve for those in pain. His ———. A Long Way from Home. New York: Lee Furman, son’s death leaves the speaker in a forlorn state, with “a 1937. pickle of hate / so sour” that he cannot access song or Toomer, Jean. Cane. New York: Liveright, 1923. melody. For solace he reaches out for music. He finds Zinn, Howard. A People’s History of the United States. New that jazz provides comfort and something else. Where York: HarperCollins, 1980. there is emptiness, “the music, jazz, comes in,” giving Judy Massey Dozier voice and expression to the speaker’s unutterable grief. In his willingness to address difficult social issues in a HARPER, MICHAEL S. (1938– ) Michael strikingly personal way, Michael Harper plays an S. Harper is an African-American poet whose work is important role in moving poetry forward. He chose the influenced not only by other writers, such as Sterling cadence of everyday language and music over the met- A. BROWN, Robert HAYDEN, and Ralph Ellison, but also rics of traditional verse, creating a poetic language that by jazz and blues, especially the music of John is true to the world he portrays. Coltrane and Charlie Parker. Harper says he resisted traditional forms (see PROSODY AND FREE VERSE), because BIBLIOGRAPHY metrical verse “forced an accommodation to the Harper, Michael S. Afterword to Songlines in Michaeltree: New and Collected Poems. Urbana: University of Illinois mechanics of the count.” Instead, the rhythm of his Press, 2000, pp. 371–372. poems is modeled more after jazz and the way its ———.“Don’t They Speak Jazz?” In The Generation of “music was announced . . . in the auditory registers of 2000: Contemporary American Poets, edited by William phrasing” (“Afterword” 371–372). Harper’s poetic lan- Heyen. Princeton: Ontario Review Press, 1984, guage is uniquely conversational and musical. pp. 89–92. Harper was born in Brooklyn, New York. He stud- Stepto, Robert B. “After Modernism, After Hibernation: ied at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and in 1970 joined Michael Harper, Robert Hayden and Jay Wright.” In HASS, ROBERT 205

Chant of Saints: A Gathering of Afro-American Literature, associated both with the “swoon” and with acquiring Art, and Scholarship, edited by Michael S. Harper and knowledge from the pool. The final line, “A conserva- Robert B. Stepto. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, tive make,” contextualizes the act of “making out” with 1979, pp. 472–476. the human-made. While Harryman questions the nat- Linda Levitt uralness of such sexual knowledge, she poses the pos- sibility of an area beyond the social, which might be HARRYMAN, CARLA (1952– ) A key bridged by writing. Often playfully intertextual and participant in West Coast LANGUAGE writing, Carla Har- formally adventurous, Harryman’s writing challenges ryman’s work incorporates elements of poetry, prose, the reader to reconsider the boundaries of the poem. philosophy, theater, and popular culture. Harryman BIBLIOGRAPHY delves into how consciousness comes into being. Harryman, Carla. Interview by Megan Simpson. Contempo- Megan Simpson writes that Harryman “has explored rary Literature 37.4 (winter 1996). narrative transgressions in the Freudian plot, fairytale, Simpson, Megan. Poetic Epistemologies. Albany: State Univer- pornography, children’s stories, and games.” For Har- sity of New York Press, 2000. ryman it may be possible to “construct, alter, reawaken cultural practice by picking up threads that have been Ann Vickery neglected or underused as well as by charging into the unknown” (Simpson 516). HASS, ROBERT (1941– ) While Robert Harryman was born in Orange County, California, Hass’s work has, from the start, been blessed with great and educated at the University of California, Santa popularity, the praise his work has garnered has not Barbara, and San Francisco State University. In San always been unmitigated. When his first book of poetry, Francisco she edited the journal Qu and cofounded Field Guide, appeared in 1973 as part of the prestigious Poets’ Theater (1978–84). She has received awards Yale Series of Younger Poets, it received much acclaim. from the Detroit Arts Fund (2001), the Fund for However, the book has since been criticized from two Poetry (1992, 1994, and 1999), and the Wallace very different angles. Ira Sadoff, for example, wrote in Alexander Gerbode Foundation (1993), among oth- the Chicago Review that the book “tapped Hass’s power ers. Her dramatic work has been performed in a vari- of observation carefully and engagingly” but that he nev- ety of venues, including Memory Play at the LAB, San ertheless had reservations about the book “stemm[ing] Francisco (1994), and Performing Objects Stationed in from some sense of chilliness that seemed to pervade a the Sub World at Oxford Brookes University (2001) number of the poems, as if [they] were wrought by an and Zeitgeist Theater in Detroit (2002). She has taught intellect distant from its subject matter” (134). In Robert at Wayne State University. Miklitsch’s Hollins Critic article on Hass, though, the Through conceptualizing a “bridge” or “middle,” book is found most wanting when it is least intellectual: Harryman questions the philosophical distinctions “Hass’s imagination,” claims Miklitsch, “is essentially between reason and instinct, human and animal, exter- discursive and meditative” (3). If Sadoff sees in Hass’s nal and internal. Her texts may reveal a comic, ironic, book an IMAGIST-influenced poetry marred by intellec- or surreal edge. In “Typical Domains” (1995) she writes, tual distance, Miklitsch sees an intellectual poetry too “Of course I think about sex a lot more than I should. / often reigned in by mere description. Both critics are One evening I put one foot in the clear water. A fish right in seeing Hass as a poet who combines the imagis- rose to the surface and said, / ‘Euphoria never lasts.’” tic and sensuous with the intellectual and speculative. In Poetry and prose interweave in a fantasy concerning fact it is through this ability to hold the intellectual and sexual knowledge and its conventions. When the the sensuous side by side, in tension with one another, speaker “tests the water,” she is warned of the tempo- that Hass achieves his significance in American poetry. rary nature of its pleasure by symbolic fish, which fit- Hass was born in San Francisco; with the excep- tingly expires. The speaker’s subsequent “falling” is tion of a few years in upstate New York, he has lived 206 HASS, ROBERT in the Bay Area his entire life. He was a student at St. ticular virtue as a poet that he finds a way to balance Mary’s College of California, from which he received philosophical sophistication with lush, specific his B.A. in 1963. He continued his studies at Stan- description. ford, from which he received his M.A. and Ph.D. in Ten years after Praise, Hass published his third col- English literature in 1965 and 1971, respectively. At lection of poems, Human Wishes (1989). Many of his Stanford he was active in the student protest politics characteristic themes, including landscape and the of the Vietnam era’s antiwar movement, and he relationship of words and things, appear again, but the remained involved with the movement after taking book is formally quite different from his earlier work. his first academic appointment at the State University Many of the pieces take the form of prose poems, for of New York, Buffalo, where he taught from 1967 to example. Others, such as “Berkeley Eclogue,” feature 1971. Later teaching appointments included St. interruptions by an unidentified interlocutor who Mary’s College (1971–89) and the University of Cali- seems, at times, to be interrogating the speaker of the fornia, Berkeley (1989 to the present). Hass served poem, breaking into the narrative with questions, such two terms as United States poet laureate (1995–97). as “What for?” and “And then what?” More striking, While best known as a poet, Hass has in many ways though, is the way in which some of these poems take fulfilled the ideal of the man of letters, writing essays Hass’s questions about whether or not language can and reviews and editing. In fact he has received a accommodate experience a step further by deliberately National Book Critics Circle Award for the critical shattering narrative continuity and the consistency of essays he gathered together in Twentieth Century Plea- perspective and statement. sures (1984). Like Human Wishes, Hass’s fourth book, Sun under In his forward to Field Guide, Stanley KUNITZ claims Wood, contains both poems and prose poems, and, as that “Hass’s poetry is permeated with the awareness of in Human Wishes, the poems of Sun under Wood often his creature self, his affinity with the animal and veg- contain the voices of interlocutors. “Faint Music,” for etable kingdoms, with the whole chain of being” (xii); example, begins with the line “Maybe you need to many of the poems celebrate the animal sensations. write a poem about grace,” while “Interrupted Medita- In addition to its strong emphasis on the “creature tion” consists of a dialogue between the speaker and an self” and the physical world, Field Guide takes up lan- older man who shares many characteristics with Hass’s guage itself as one of its great themes. The poems longtime friend and collaborator Czeslaw Milosz. often concern themselves with proper names, some- Some of the most important poems in Sun under Wood, times to stress their transience: “some days it’s not so though, return to that great perennial theme of Hass’s hard to say / the quick pulse of blood,” writes Hass at poetry, language: “English: An Ode,” for example, uses the end of “Graveyard at Bolinas” (1973). At other etymology to explore both the history and the politics times, though, Hass implies that names can be reas- of English as it becomes a global language. From Field suring, giving us the illusion of control over that Guide through to his most recent work, Hass never which is named. feels that language is simply the poet’s medium: It is his Praise (1979) continues Hass’s meditations on the topic—and his muse. relationship of language to experience. The volume BIBLIOGRAPHY contains two of Hass’s most celebrated poems, “Medi- Gander, Forrest. “Robert Hass.” Dictionary of Literary Biog- tation at Lagunittas” and “Picking Blackberries with a raphy. Vol. 105, American Poets since World War II, Friend Who Has Been Reading Jacques Lacan,” both edited by R. S. Gwynn. Detroit: Gale Research, 1991, of which question the relationship of words to things. pp. 104–113. These two poems are notable for the way they incor- Kunitz, Stanley. Foreword to Field Guide, by Robert Hass. porate complex ideas of language from structuralist New Haven, Conn.: Yale, 1973, pp. xi–xix. and poststructuralist linguistics without resorting to Matthias, John. “Reading Old Friends.” Southern Review 22 jargon or arid diction. It is characteristic of Hass’s par- (spring 1986): 391–406. HAYDEN, ROBERT 207

Miklitsch, Robert. “‘Praise,’ the Poetry of Robert Hass.” Hayden began teaching at Michigan, his renown was Hollins Critic 17.1 (February 1980): 2–13. quietly extensive, both in the United States and abroad: Sadoff, Ira. “Robert Hass’s ‘Praise.’” Chicago Review 31.3 In 1966 he had received the Grand Prize in poetry at (winter 1980): 133–136. the First World Festival of Negro Arts in Senegal, and Robert Archambeau from 1976 to 1978 he served as poetry consultant to the Library of Congress, a position that would later be HAYDEN, ROBERT (1913–1980) Robert Hay- known as poet laureate of the United States. den once declared, “Nothing human is foreign to me” As a poet Hayden came into his own after the peri- (114), and his poetry demonstrates the extent of this ods of MODERNISM and the HARLEM RENAISSANCE and yet reach. Hayden’s voice ranges from an ex-slave (“A Let- before the advent of the BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT. Due to ter from Phillis Wheatley” [1978]) to a white man timing and temperament, Hayden’s poetry was, in reflecting on lynching Blacks (“Night, Death, Missis- many ways, at odds with the latter group, and he sippi” [1962]) to someone considering the compli- aspired, like Cullen before him, to be known not as a cated operations of love (“THOSE WINTER SUNDAYS” black poet but simply as a poet. His most common [1962]) to a visitor from outer space evaluating the subjects are related to African-American history and conditions of contemporary America (American Journal experience—as in “Middle Passage” (1962) and [1978]). Hayden is much more interested in people “Mourning Poem for the Queen of Sunday” (1962)— and places than in ideas or abstract concepts, and his and he declared in his famous sonnet “Frederick Dou- poems often focus on folk themes, figures from glass” (1962) that the title figure should be African-American history, and the ordinary human remembered “not with legends and poems and wreaths needs that art can fulfill. Hayden’s language is unpre- of bronze alone, / but with the lives grown out of his tentious yet unfailingly accurate, and he has the life.” Yet he was criticized by many in the Black Arts uncommon ability to disguise craft as spontaneity. movement for his dedication to aesthetic values and Hayden’s style is generally restrained, and he is assidu- for what some perceived as his racial conservatism or ous in his attentiveness to verbal detail: In this, he indifference to political matters. Hayden never denied owes something to W. H. AUDEN, with whom Hayden the importance of race—for himself or for American studied while a graduate student. Other early models society—and he consistently denounced and worked for Hayden’s poetry include Carl SANDBURG, Edna St. to remedy racial injustices. He bristled, however, at the Vincent MILLAY, Jean TOOMER, Hart CRANE, Langston attempt to “delimit poets, to restrict them to the polit- HUGHES, and Countee CULLEN. This admixture indicates ical and the socially or racially conscious” (120). He Hayden’s inclinations toward both formalism and continued, “I can’t imagine any poet worth his salt innovation, toward high culture as well as folk, and it today not being aware of social evils, human needs. creates a poetry that, as he would have wished, defies But...I resist whatever would force me into a role as easy categorization. politician, sociologist, or yea-sayer to current ideolo- Hayden was born in Detroit, Michigan, and named gies” (120). Asa Bundy Sheffey. His eyes were damaged at birth; he Hayden’s concept of poetry was much broader than suffered from severe nearsightedness his entire life. one that would identify verse as nothing more than a Before he was two years old, his birth mother turned tool for political change. He described poetry as a form him over to the care of her neighbors, the Haydens, a of prayer or worship, and for him it was an affirmation devout Baptist couple who renamed the boy Robert of the need to blend spirituality with work: “[T]he Earl and raised him (though they never legally adopted truly revolutionary poets are always those who are him). Hayden graduated from Detroit City College committed to some integrative vision of art and life” (1936) and received an M.A. from the University of (Hayden 70). This “integrative vision” follows, in part, Michigan (1946). He taught at Fisk University from his Baha’i faith, which Hayden espoused as an (1946–69) and at Michigan (1969–80). By the time adult, and it is seen in such poems as “Words in the 208 H. D.

Mourning Time” (1970), “Monet’s ‘Waterlilies”’ (1970), her early career epitomize the tenets of the IMAGIST “The Peacock Room” (1972), and “The Tattooed Man” SCHOOL. In her middle career she was criticized for (1978). Like most of Hayden’s poems, these are reflec- growing beyond that movement, despite a similar tive but begin with and remain linked to a particular move away by its cofounder and staunchest advocate, place or person. These meditations allow him to wit- Ezra POUND; in her later years she was overlooked for ness the mingling of the familiar and the mysterious, as maintaining within her poetry too many elements of “The seen, the known / dissolve” in the present and imagism. However, over five decades of work, she pro- become part of that which “forever is” (“Monet’s vided a large scope and represented, as part of and in Waterlilies”). But if art offers a momentary reprieve, it addition to an attempt to establish a voice for women, always returns us to life, with all its violence and a truly modernist vision: a reaction against Victorian uncertainty, and to ourselves. Still, art makes it possi- life, the recognition of a fragmented modern age, and ble for Hayden, as he laments the assassinations of a return to myth to establish meaning in that new age Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy, to under- (see MODERNISM). stand that their deaths, like all of our griefs, are part of H. D. was born Hilda Doolittle, the only surviving the “process” by which “our humanness must be daughter of Dr. Charles Leander Doolittle and Helen achieved” (“Words in the Morning Time”). Eugenia Wolle Doolittle, in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Although Hayden was active as a professional poet Her mother was a musician and was active in the for more than 40 years, the demands of his teaching Moravian Church. Her father was an astronomer and schedule and his commitment to revision made for a mathematician who was eventually appointed director relatively small body of published work. Ten volumes of the observatory at the University of Pennsylvania. of Hayden’s poetry have been published, the most This combination of influences—art concatenated with readily available of which is Collected Poems (1985, symbols, rituals, and secrecy from her mother’s side 1996). He also edited several poetry collections, and and with science from her father’s—were perhaps the the introductory essays to them, along with other writ- strongest forces working to create the poet H. D. would ings and interviews, are included in Collected Prose become. In Philadelphia she met Pound; the two were (1984). In all of Hayden’s work, we see the imprint of briefly engaged to be married, but the greater effect of the “humanness” toward which he strove, as well as Pound upon H. D. was to encourage her expression evidence that as individuals we are “smaller than myth” through poetry. H. D. was also introduced to William (“Astronauts” [1978])—the poems and stories that we Carlos WILLIAMS during this time. In 1911 she sailed to create—but that collectively we are much more. Europe and never returned to the United States to live. BIBLIOGRAPHY Through Pound she met other poets and authors, Goldstein, Laurence, and Robert Chrisman, eds. Robert Hay- including F. S. Flint and Richard Aldington; they soon den: Essays on the Poetry. Ann Arbor: University of Michi- formed the imagist movement. In 1912, while sending gan Press, 2001. out her first three poems for publication, Pound Hayden, Robert. Collected Prose. Ann Arbor: University of launched Hilda Doolittle’s new persona (and career) by Michigan Press, 1984. scratching at the bottom of one page “H. D., Imagiste.” Williams, Pontheolla. Robert Hayden: A Critical Analysis of She won the Guarantors Prize from Poetry magazine in His Poetry. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987. 1915 and the Libre Prize from the Little Review in Jeannine Johnson 1917. H. D.’s poems of these early years epitomized the tenets laid down by the imagists; “Oread” (1914), one H. D. (HILDA DOOLITTLE) (1886–1961) of her more frequently anthologized poems, exhibits For many years, H. D.’s critical reputation suffered, the concrete, concentrated, musical line of the imagist largely because her initial success as part of an early poem: “Whirl up your pointed pines . . . on our 20th-century literary movement overshadowed her rocks.” It was by this standard that H. D. was judged— later work and more important themes. The poems of at first enthusiastically, but progressively less so—for H. D. 209 the rest of her career. At the end of her life, though, a The collection Red Roses for Bronze (1931) was a new appreciation began after she received the Brandeis personal and critical disappointment. H. D. turned to University Creative Arts Award for poetry in 1959 and fiction and cinema in the early 1930s when the well the Award of Merit Medal for poetry from the Ameri- of poetry dried up. These influences, combined with can Academy of Arts and Letters in 1960. The ensuing H. D.’s interests in the occult and psychoanalysis (she feminist movement of the 1970s and increased critical was a student and patient of Sigmund Freud), helped attention in the 1980s cemented H. D.’s place in Amer- H. D. formulate her new destiny as a kind of poet- ican poetry. prophet and provided her with the inspiration for a In addition to establishing H. D.’s renown, her early resurgence in poetry during the 1940s. The greatest experience with imagism gave her the discipline with expression of this new energy came in The Walls Do which to control the excesses of her emotions and dis- Not Fall (1944), an evocation of the horrors of World till them into a tightly crafted poetry that probably War II. In this long poem, the speaker, walking could not have existed without that discipline. In these through bomb-ripped downtown London, must and later poems, H. D. employs Greek myth to chan- attempt to ascertain meaning—if it can be found— nel her emotional responses to nature and to attempt amid the destruction: “thoughts stir, inspiration stalks to unify a fragmentary modernist existence, but also as us / through gloom.” Within this new wasteland lies a a poetic mask behind which the person/poet hides. spirit of regeneration, perhaps analogous to H. D.’s Her poems of the 1910s, especially those found in her own personal poetic flowering after the relative dor- first volume, Sea Garden (1916), employ imagery from mancy of the 1930s. Though battered, “Still the walls the natural world and Greek place-names and on do not fall,” and the possibility of transcendence for the H. D.’s memories of the gardens near the American poet and people lingers on the horizon: “we are voy- home of her youth. They also explore the individual agers, discoverers . . . possibly we will reach haven, / consciousness and are structured on polarities and heaven.” Tribute to the Angels (1945) and The Flowering dualisms, such as hardness and softness, darkness and of the Rod (1946) continued the theme of triumph over light, land and sea, lightness and weight. These oppo- death through the power of love as a spiritual force for sites point toward the dualisms in H. D.’s own life and peace (these were collected together with The Walls Do in the work that followed this period. Not Fall into Trilogy in 1973). The years during and immediately after World War For H. D., survival and transcendence are found in I brought an end to the formal imagist movement and the figure of the woman, and she continued to explore the first phase of H. D.’s poetry. After a series of per- a new role for women in the myths that made up much sonal tragedies and traumas, she began to refocus upon of her poetry. To this figure she devoted much of her the role of women and her own identity as a woman. energy in the 1940s and 1950s, culminating in her “Helen” (1923) is representative of this period, pre- epic poem, HELEN IN EGYPT (1961). Based on an obscure senting an alternate view of the woman who, accord- alternative tale of Helen of Troy, H. D. weaves elements ing to misogynist myth, began the Trojan War. “All of her own life, including love, wartime experience, Greece hates” Helen, though they worship her beauty; mysticism, psychological analysis, and the search for they see only “God’s daughter, born of love / the beauty identity, into a tapestry that accomplishes a modern, of cool feet.” Forgetting that she is not born of “love,” feminist revision of the male-centered Greek epic story. but of Zeus’s rape of Leda, these Greeks lust after her Echoing her earlier poem, she begins with “Helena, and wish her dead in the same moment. For the hated of all Greece,” the woman who is seen as the brutality of war, they blame the woman. Like some of cause of so much misery and destruction. This Helen, H. D.’s earlier work, the poems of this period recall though, is brought to Egypt by Zeus (rather than Euripides and Sappho, but they go further in masking remaining in Troy), and the quest to understand why the poet behind myth so as better to express the per- this has happened eventually becomes a search for self- sonal, albeit obliquely. understanding, an answer to the question—“Helena? 210 HECHT, ANTHONY

Who is she?” In the three sections of the poem, Helen use of personae, or “screens,” through which a poem’s begins by investigating temple hieroglyphs, enters into meaning is mediated. Hecht’s continued embrace of a liaison with dead Achilles, brought back by her traditional meters and forms is consistent with his power, and then relives her life with Paris. Discovering statement in On the Laws of the Poetic Art (1995) that a that “she herself is the writing,” that she is the hiero- poem “must rely on more than the strength of its con- glyph in need of deciphering, Helen eventually reaches victions. It will have to persuade us that those convic- that understanding of herself. Seemingly the poet H. tions were arrived at under the pressure of long D. has come to that point as well, reconciling the thought, and were expressed with an artfulness that oppositions in her own life, and presents Helen as a took into account that almost nothing in this world model for all those persons (women in particular) who can be simplified into good and bad, right and wrong” are engaged in such a search. (58). Hecht’s poetry, typical of the late 20th century, Today H. D. remains, closely identified with the wrestles with questions of goodness and morality in a imagist movement. However, much critical attention post-Holocaust world that cannot be navigated suc- also is focused on the mature work that employs cer- cessfully with simple answers. tain aspects of imagism but then goes beyond the sin- Hecht was born and raised in New York City. He gle, concrete image to a more extensive exploration of decided to become a poet during his first year of stud- the changing roles of women in the 20th century, the ies at Bard College when his instructor, Lawrence Leiter, origins and meaning of the poet’s and readers’ identi- introduced him to the works of poets, such as Auden, ties and psyches, and all of our places within a frag- T. S. ELIOT, Dylan Thomas, and Wallace STEVENS. Hecht mented, modern society. For the most part, she received a B.A. in 1944 and served in the army from accomplishes this through a thoroughly modernist 1943 to 1946. His experiences in infantry and counter- recasting of the Greek classics. Her readers, especially intelligence during World War II strongly affected his women, other poets, especially American poets, and sense of the world, as is reflected in much of his poetry those exploring the dualities of their own identities can dealing with wartime themes. Upon returning to the look to H. D.’s poems to find a kindred soul. United States, Hecht studied under Ransom at Kenyon BIBLIOGRAPHY College and then under Allen Tate in 1947. Hecht’s first Friedman, Susan S., and Rachel Blau DuPlessis, eds. H. D. book, A Summoning of Stones, was published in 1954, Centennial Issue. Contemporary Literature 27.4 (1986). and his next book of poetry, The Hard Hours, won the [Special Issue] Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1968. Hecht subsequently Guest, Barbara. Herself Defined: The Poet H. D. and Her published more volumes of poetry, in addition to works World. New York: Doubleday, 1984. of translation and literary criticism. He has won numer- Robinson, Janice S. H. D.: The Life and Work of an American ous fellowships and awards, including the Bollingen Poet. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982. Prize in poetry (1983). Joseph Schaub Hecht’s oeuvre is marked by its versatility of subject matter and approach. Perhaps his most memorable HECHT, ANTHONY (1923–2004) Anthony poems are those that peer unflinchingly at the horrors Hecht is known for elegant and formal verse that of World War II and the Holocaust. “More Light! More refuses to settle for easy answers as it both confronts Light!” (1967), for example, juxtaposes a 16th-century the bleakest moments in human experience and burning at the stake with a 20th-century narrative: acknowledges the unexpected bounties of nature. When a Pole refuses a Nazi’s order to bury alive two Hecht’s poetics stem from a New Critical, or formalist, Jews, the Nazi has the Jews begin to bury the Pole tradition (see FUGITIVES/AGRARIANS and NEW FORMALISM) alive, thus coercing the Pole’s cooperation. The poem’s associated with John Crowe RANSOM, Allen TATE, and W. despair rests in the crumbling of any moral stronghold; H. AUDEN. Such poetry is often characterized by unre- no one in the poem remains innocent, and no moment solved ambiguities, surprising juxtapositions, and the of hope or transcendence offers a way out of the situa- HEJINIAN, LYN 211 tion. Instead the poem sets the roles of victim and searching out and exposing the false and phony, punc- oppressor into a tension that is never resolved. Nar- turing the heroic gesture” (Hirsch 54). Although the rated in a matter-of-fact style that does not offer com- woman does not speak in either poem, the casual tone mentary on the events, the poem nonetheless provokes of the speaker in Hecht’s poem allows Hecht to criticize an emotional yet reflective response. Arnold’s use of her as “a sort of mournful cosmic last Other poems, though not always as shocking, con- resort” (54) without himself using the woman as a pas- tinue to negotiate the line at which innocence begins to sive source of comfort in a disappointing world. disintegrate and slip into a dark side that cannot be Through his long career, Hecht has used formal meter ignored. “A Hill” (1967) moves from a crowded Italian and language to structure concrete, often narrative, piazza into a vision of a desolate hill upon which the treatments of wide-ranging subjects, regularly returning speaker remembers gazing for hours in the midst of to the most difficult questions of living responsibly in a winter. Descriptive details of the vision, from trees world that seems rarely to offer truly ethical choices. resembling “old ironwork gathered for scrap” to “a Often focused on everyday matters, Hecht’s poetry piece of ribbon snagged on a hedge,” work together to attends to that which is jarring or extraordinary, but suggest that traditional signs of life or comfort are which is nonetheless usually ignored. merely useless remnants of a crumbling and futile civ- BIBLIOGRAPHY ilization. Even after the vision is gone, the “plain bit- German, Norman. Anthony Hecht. New York: Peter Lang, terness” of it haunts the speaker. “The Deodand” 1989. (1979) also upsets a state of naïve comfort by intro- Hirsch, Edward. “Comedy and Hardship.” In The Burdens of ducing unresolved complexities. The poem meditates Formality: Essays on the Poetry of Anthony Hecht, edited by on a Renoir painting that depicts women playing Sydney Lea. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989, dress-up with Algerian clothes. This seemingly inno- pp. 53–61. cent scene, the poem implies, is one that relies on colo- Laurie McMillan nial exploitation and the torture of a French legionnaire, the latter described vividly so as once HEJINIAN, LYN (1941– ) Lyn Hejinian is more to complicate positions of victim and victimizer. associated with the LANGUAGE SCHOOL, a community of Hecht’s poetry offers such juxtapositions again and writers partly established in the San Francisco Bay area again, moving toward a morality that neither hides in the mid-1970s interested in how language creates from evil in a false sense of security nor sharply delin- meaning. Her poetry challenges conventions of lan- eates the good from the bad; instead, implications of guage and struggles with questions, such as “How can various positions are vigilantly played out in an we know anything?” Hejinian’s innovative use of lan- attempt to depict truthfully the complexities of life. guage explores the processes of human thinking and is This is not to suggest, however, that Hecht’s poetry influenced by the work of the American avant-garde presents itself as the final word on any topic. Instead, writer Gertrude STEIN. through humor, the use of detailed situations, and a Hejinian was born in San Francisco, California. She tendency to ruminate on other works of art, Hecht’s graduated from Harvard in 1963—the first year that poetry constantly reads the world afresh and suggests women were given Harvard degrees. In 1968 she that these readings too will give way when pressed. returned to the West Coast, where her first books of “The Dover Bitch” (1967), a poem often anthologized poetry were published in the 1970s. She has been the alongside Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” (1867), editor and publisher of Tuumbra Press and since 1981 exemplifies these tendencies. A man speaks about the the creator and coeditor (with Barrett WATTEN) of Poet- woman addressed in Arnold’s poem, but his take on ics Journal. Her translations of the Russian poet Arkadii her is much more earthy and less traditionally poetic Dragomoschenko (and his translations of Hejinan’s than is Arnold’s, demonstrating the way many of poetry into Russian) have received critical praise. Hecht’s poems “deflate a certain type of rhetoric, Among many honors, she has received an award for 212 HELEN IN EGYPT independent literature by the Soviet literary organiza- HELEN IN EGYPT H.D. (1961) Second only tion Poetics Function (1989) and a fellowship from the to her masterful Trilogy (1944), Helen in Egypt is H. D.’s Academy of American Poets for distinguished poetic most complex and innovative work, taking prominent achievement at midcareer (2000). part in the revival of epic usually associated with the Hejinian’s work deliberately challenges the reader’s long poems of Ezra POUND and William Carlos WILLIAMS expectations: Her prose looks like poetry, her poetry (see LONG AND SERIAL POETRY). From her earliest IMAGIST like prose. Her writing relies on quirky juxtapositions lyrics, H. D. fuses modernity with the gods and heroes and repetition to mimic the path of the mind thinking, of ancient Greece. Her resuscitation of Hellenistic and her sentences require an associative, not logical, mythology coincides with similar efforts by D. H. mode of thought. Prevalent themes in Hejinian’s work Lawrence and Pound to cultivate a classical heritage for involve finding strangeness within the familiar. For modern poetry, to “make it new” (to use Pound’s example, in The Cell (1987), Hejinian writes, “It is the famous phrase) by realigning the discontinuity and writer’s object / to supply the hollow green / and yel- fragmentation of contemporary culture with the cycles low life of the / human I,” using unlikely pairings of of ancient myth (see MODERNISM). As with T. S. ELIOT nouns and adjectives to excite the human “I”/eye. She and Wallace STEVENS, a deepening spiritual awareness also explores the influences of writing on the subjec- attends H. D.’s mature poetry as she moves beyond tive speaking “I” in an effort to describe the role of lan- imagism. Her sparse line partakes in the modernist guage in the construction of the self. rebellion against verbosity, and her verbal precision In My Life (1987), her best-known work, Hejinian influenced poets like ROBERT LOWELL and Sylvia reworks traditional forms of autobiography. The origi- PLATH, whose early verse draws its dense symbolism nal prose poem, written when Hejinian was 37, was and condensation from such poems as Helen in Egypt comprised of 37 sections, each containing 37 sen- and Trilogy. Helen in Egypt employs the medieval form tences. The more recent version, updated when Hejin- of prosimetrum, alternating prose and verse segments, ian was 45, expands the poem to 45 sections of 45 which allows the poet more control and structure over sentences and reflects Hejinian’s belief that writing, the modulations of free verse than later practitioners, like the self, exists in a continual state of development. such as Charles OLSON and Louis ZUKOFSKY, exercised. Oxota: A Short Russian Novel (1991) invokes the 14-line Published shortly before H. D.’s death, Helen in sonnet form and is based on Hejinan’s own travels in Egypt represents the culmination of nearly 30 years of Russia. Her experiments with odd juxtapositions and thought. As with Trilogy, she originally planned only the visual layout of language on a white page can be the first part, “Palinode,” but Helen’s “theatre of seen in Writing Is an Aid to Memory (1978). reverie” grew to epic proportions (Twitchell-Waas 11), and H. D. completed sections two and three, “Leuké” BIBLIOGRAPHY and “Eidolon,” by 1954. Helen in Egypt elaborates a Altieri, Charles. “Lyn Hejinian and the Possibilities of Post- modernism in Poetry.” In Women Poets of the Americas: brief fragment by Stesichorus of Sicily, a Greek poet Toward a Pan-American Gathering, edited by Jacqueline whose palinode (an ode of “apology” or “reversal”) Vaught Brogan. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre contends that the gods mystically transported Helen Dame Press, 1999, pp. 146–155. into Egypt during the Trojan War; the Helen for whom Jarraway, David R. “My Life through the Eighties: The the Trojans and Greeks fought was an illusion. On a Exemplary LANGUAGE of Lyn Hejinian.” Contemporary literal level, H. D.’s poem reclaims Helen’s own femi- Literature 33.2 (summer 1992): 319–336. nine voice, lost amid contending patriarchal mytholo- McCaffery, Larry. “A Local Strangeness: An Interview with gies, and represents the heroine’s attempt to Lyn Hejinian.” In Some Other Frequency: Interviews with understand her simultaneous existence as illusion and Innovative American Authors. Philadelphia: University of reality. “What flame over Troy,” she asks; “was I ever Penn Press, 1996, pp. 121–145. there?” Allegorically the poem traces the awakening of Terry Lynn Pettinger a poetic consciousness as it grapples with symbolic HELLER, MICHAEL 213 manifestations of the divine. Helen awakens from reasserts the mystery of the timeless “Absolute” and “dream or trance” in part 1, moves “as one in a dream” its incarnations in the particularity of personal his- in part 2, and proclaims in part 3: “I am awake. I see tory, the human content. Finally able to discern the things clearly.” interlocking patterns of universal myth and individ- The poem follows Helen’s attempt to unravel the ual memory, Helen finds that “the simple path refutes mystery of an erotic encounter with Achilles on a des- at last the threat of Labyrinth” and yields “the clue to olate Egyptian shore, where the lovers share in a mys- the rest of the mystery.” H. D. suggests that the tic union, accompanied by a visionary “flash in human condition, neither transcendent nor intellec- heaven . . . that blinds the sun.” In H. D.’s symbology tual but “numb with memory,” is irreducible to vision Egypt represents hermetic mystery, and Helen’s contact or intellect and that self-knowledge only comes by there with the “Dark Absolute” of love and death is an discerning the complex mysteries that link us to other intersection of time and timelessness, a mystery con- people and to the past taining the secrets of the “indecipherable Amen- Like Wordsworth’s The Prelude (1805), the mod- script,” the living hieroglyphs which would reveal its ernist epic’s great precursor, Helen in Egypt records the personal and universal meaning. Despite Helen’s efforts growth of a poet’s mind. H. D.’s vision of unity is unri- to forget it, the riddle of this meeting persists: She valed by her modernist contemporaries, who often wonders, “Must I forever look back?” Haunted by the emphasize frustration and alienation. Her interest is portent of her vision, Helen travels from Egypt to spiritual redemption and renewal, but unlike Leuké, the white island where the aged Theseus helps Lawrence’s and Eliot’s promethean and ascetic extrem- her to decipher her own mind, a living hieroglyph, by ities, H. D.’s vision recognizes our psychological vul- integrating myth and memories of past lovers into a nerability. Although H. D.’s insistence on unity is at single reborn creative consciousness: “My Psyche, dis- odds with much of contemporary literary and cultural appear into the web.” “All myth,” Theseus tells her, theory, her focus on eros and the recovery of a “lost” “the one reality, dwells here,” and with the figurative voice prefigures feminist thought and the contempo- rebirth of Leuké—“her island, her egg-shell”—Helen rary revision of historical narratives. Helen in Egypt assays to “bring the moment and infinity together in stands among the most complete and complex of the time,” to read the riddle of the psyche. For H. D. modernist long poems, representing the crowning Greece symbolizes the intellect, and, under the spiri- achievement of H. D.’s poetic and spiritual vision. tual aide of Theseus, Helen brings the scripts of her BIBLIOGRAPHY memories under the light of consciousness. As she DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. H. D. The Career of That Struggle. prepares a return to Achilles, her inward struggle Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986. finally transcends the self’s narcissistic maze, what she Friedman, Susan Stanford, ed. Signets: Reading H. D. Madi- calls “the threat of Labyrinth.” Her entreaty for reunion son: Wisconsin University Press, 1990. with Achilles—“There is one prayer, may he find the Twitchell-Waas, Jeffrey. “Seaward: H. D.’s ‘Helen in Egypt’ as way”—culminates in an empathetic vision of vulnera- a Response to Pound’s ‘Cantos’.” Twentieth Century Litera- bility and love. Following this liberation from the self’s ture 44.4 (1998): 464–483. labyrinth, the poem’s third section traces Helen’s suc- Anthony J. Cuda cessful attempt to reconcile herself and Achilles, to interpret the intricacies of the “one image, one picture” HELLER, MICHAEL (1937– ) Michael that embodies their mystic union. Heller has been publishing poetry and establishing If the Helen of “Palinode” is paralyzed by visionary himself as a sort of modern-day, poetic Spinoza. His awe, and Theseus’s Helen undertakes an intellectual work is influenced equally by Jewish tradition and analysis, then “this third Helen,” H. D. reveals, “is mysticism as by philosophy in the poststructuralist concerned with the human content of the drama.” mode. Early influences on Heller’s poetry include Beyond the intellect’s sovereignty, the third part George OPPEN, Carl RAKOSI, and Louis ZUKOFSKY of the 214 “HERITAGE”

OBJECTIVIST SCHOOL, and Heller’s work carries on this canized name, lengthening and legitimizing, it serves as legacy. Heller’s other principal influence is the secular, an iconic reminder of his roots, instead of his new life. German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin. Heller has stated that he wants the influence of his Heller was born in New York City but spent a part poetry to be “widest, total, [and] transformative”: of his youth in Miami. His poetic approach is informed “Poets are the Cosmic Monsters and fascists of lan- by his descent from a distinguished line of Polish rab- guage, or they are irrelevant” (“Interview”). Heller’s bis, as well by the nonreligious household in which he quest for wideness, totality, and transformation contin- was raised. Heller’s first full-length volume of poetry ues to the present day, as he sets himself a course to was Accidental Center (1972), followed by Knowledge balance linguistic control and the urge to surrender to (1979), which includes the notable sequence “BIA- the events of his time. LYSTOK STANZAS”; other volumes followed, including the BIBLIOGRAPHY memoir Living Root (2000). Heller has received a num- Gardner, Thomas. “‘Speaking the Estranged of Things’: On ber of awards and honors, including the Alice Fay Di Michael Heller.” Talisman: A Journal of Contemporary Castagnola Prize from the Poetry Society of America Poetry and Poetics 10 (fall 1993): 92–95. for his critical work on the objectivist poets, Convic- Heller, Michael. Interview by J. M. Spalding, Cortland tions Net of Branches (1985). Review. Available on-line. URL: www.cortlandreview.com/ “Like [Charles] REZNIKOFF,” Burt Kimmelman has features/october98. Downloaded May 2002. written, “Heller has also explored his Jewish heritage, at ———. Living Root: A Memoir. Albany, New York: State Uni- the heart of which lies the concept of textuality” (111). versity of New York Press, 2000. Heller expresses his sense of Jewish culture and influ- Kimmleman, Burt. “Michael Heller.” In Dictionary of Liter- ence as follows: “The history of the Jews as given in the ary Biography. Fourth Series. American Poets since World War II, edited by Joseph Conte. Detroit: Gayle Research, Pentateuch, half-‘fact’ and half ‘fiction’ or ‘legend,’ 1996, pp. 108–119. establishes primarily, via this very indeterminacy, the possibility of being endlessly rethought” (Living Root Andrew E. Mathis 33). Beyond the specifically Jewish, Heller’s work strug- gles with the growing divide between language and “HERITAGE” COUNTEE CULLEN (1925) experience, teasing out the relationships between Countee CULLEN’s poem “Heritage” was first published spaces and emotions. In the title piece of In the Builded in the special March 1, 1925, issue of Survey Graphic Place (1989), Heller uses the setting of New York, magazine edited by Howard University philosophy which the poet dubs a “broken world,” fragmented professor Alain Locke. Later that year, the New Negro, both on the level of vision and being, to interpolate an expanded version of the March Survey Graphic, romantic love. The speaker and his lover “are joined as reprinted the poem. In between these two HARLEM REN- one in the street-lamp’s light, / A corrosive light: dis- AISSANCE landmarks, Cullen’s first book, Color, was solve, dissolve.” Heller would claim that what’s most published. Color features a version of “Heritage” that is fragile and alive in love is also what’s most open and 26 lines longer than the New Negro version, with the alive in one’s use of language,” Thomas Gardner has stanzas reordered, the punctuation drastically altered, commented on this poem. “[B]oth follow from a skep- and a dedication to his close friend Harold Jackman tical acknowledgment of limits, an acceptance of the added. By and large, the Color text has been the source fact of isolation” (93). These limits can also be seen in for subsequent republications of “Heritage.” such a poem as “The American Jewish Clock” (1989), Immediately celebrated, “Heritage” was antholo- in which Heller depicts his immigrant grandfather, gized nearly a dozen times once it appeared in the once named “Zalman,” now called “Solomon,” and his 1931 second edition of James Weldon JOHNSON’s The failure to assimilate with American culture: “In the vast Book of American Negro Poetry. Despite its canonization / benumbed space of us, a little more sound to place “Heritage” is a somewhat controversial work. Some him”; the empty sound, the extra syllable in his Ameri- readers consider it derivative of white primitivist writ- HIRSCH, EDWARD 215 ing that romanticized and celebrated a supposedly nat- HIRSCH, EDWARD (1950– ) Edward ural world antecedent to western European ideas of Hirsch’s eclectic influences range from the intelligence civilization. But for others the poem presents a more of Wallace STEVENS to the English romantic concern profound reflection on African-American identity. with emotion, from the inclusive sympathy of Walt For writers, such as the novelist Nella Larsen, who Whitman to Federico García Lorca’s exploration of the used it as an epigraph for her novel Passing (1929) and irrational. Comfortable with both free and formal verse the activist intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois, who used it in (see PROSODY AND FREE VERSE), Hirsch has called the aes- his examination of race in Dusk of Dawn (1940), the thetic dichotomy between the two “a large mistake in italicized refrain that concludes the first and third stan- American poetry” (Marshall 57) because poets need zas became an archetypal interrogative: “What is Africa access to the range of possibilities offered by language. to me?” The repetition of the query and the use of fre- Born in Chicago, Hirsch has published six books of quent rhetorical questions suggest that the long poem poems and three books of prose. His first collection, is more interested in earnest meditation on modernity For the Sleepwalkers (1981) won the Lavan Younger than in unproblematic resolution. Poets Award (1983) and the Delmore Schwartz Memo- The 128-line poem is composed of 61 rhyming rial Award (1985). He received a National Book Critics couplets, but two rhyming triplets, both set in the Circle Award (1987) for his second collection, Wild middle of stanzas, and the variation in stanza length, Gratitude (1986). Other major honors include a Rome suggest something other than a conventional inquiry. Prize (1988) and a MacArthur Fellowship (1998). Like the poet, the reader may “find no peace” in the Hirsch has said that “someone else’s experiences lines of “Heritage.” make available your own feelings” (Suarez 63). He Even references to the “primal” and the “savage” that applies this philosophy by taking on personae that range might be associated with racist literary descriptions of from blue-collar workers to well-known writers. In On Africa are used by Cullen to establish a sophisticated Love (1998), for instance, Hirsch speaks in formal verse contrast with the poet’s modern predicament. A refer- through such figures as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Denis ence to “Jungle boys and girls in love” contrasts with Diderot, and Tristan Tzara, a diversity that illustrates the philosophical inquiry about the past: “What is last breadth of his learning. These poems also reveal the year’s snow to me / Last year’s anything?” The speaker poet’s own voice behind the masks. They are, as James tries to recognize himself in the romantic image of Longenbach notes, “not so much spoken by different lovers but sees only a past symbolized by vanishing figures as written out of an overwhelming sympathy for snow, the memory of which remains intangible. different sensibilities, foreign selves” (160). In its lyrical exploration of African-American iden- Lament and praise, Hirsch has said, are two funda- tity, “Heritage” remains an important work of the mental poetic impulses. His frequent return to the topic Harlem Renaissance. The poem assimilates popular of insomnia permits him to engage in both. Darkness racial iconography as it explores the poet’s predicament. affords an opportunity for the elegiac in “Four A.M.” BIBLIOGRAPHY (1994), which describes that hour as “nausea at middle Kirby, David. “Countee Cullen’s ‘Heritage’: A Black ‘Waste age” and “the very pit / of all the other hours.” But the Land.’” South Atlantic Bulletin 36.4 (1971): 14–20. coming of morning in “Dawn Walk” (1986) sparks Powers, Peter. “‘The Singing Man Who Must be Reckoned thanks “to the soothing blue gift / Of powdered snow!” With’: Private Desire and Public Responsibility in the His poems struggle to balance a desire for transcen- Poetry of Countee Cullen.” African American Review 34.4 dence with a concern for individual suffering. Although (2000): 661–678. he has called poetry “similar to prayer” (Mariani 56), Ira Dworkin his need to return always to the difficult work of ordi- nary living is expressed in “Earthly Light” (1994), HIP-HOP POETRY See CARIBBEAN INFLUENCES; which concludes that “it is not heaven / but earth that POETRY IN PERFORMANCE. needs us” because Earth is “so fleeting, so real.” 216 HOFFMAN, DANIEL

Hirsch’s poetry reaches beyond the self but not the “City of Satisfactions.” The train stops by a siding beyond compassion for humanity’s many selves. Disci- in the desert. The area is messy, and he sees a stone, a plined by form and painstaking craft, his poetry box, a lid, and a casket. Before getting back on the grounds itself in the difficult pleasures of understand- train, the speaker muses, “If only I could make this ing and connecting with other people. broken top / Fit snug back on this casket.” The speaker is isolated by his own discontent and luxury. In “The BIBLIOGRAPHY Poem” (2000), a poem arrives, having “stumbled James Longenbach. “Edward Hirsch: Eating the World.” Yale Review 86.3 (1998): 160–173. across the harsh / Stones, the black marshes.” Hoff- Mariani, Paul. “A Conversation with Edward Hirsch.” Image: man’s singing transforms a distant barbarity into A Journal of the Arts and Religion 28 (2000): 52–69. knowledge and luminosity. Marshall, Tod. “The Question of Affirmation and Despair: BIBLIOGRAPHY An Interview with Edward Hirsch.” Kenyon Review 22.2 Olson, Ray “Daniel Hoffman. Beyond Silence: Selected (2000): 54–69. Shorter Poems, 1948–2003.” Booklist (April 1, 2003): Suarez, Ernest. “Edward Hirsch.” Five Points: A Journal of Lit- 1369. erature and Art 4.2 (2000): 58–74. Sylvester, William. “Barbarous Knowledge, Daniel Hoffman.” Bryan Walpert College English (1970): 62–68. ———. “Daniel Hoffman’s Poetry of Affection.” Voyages HOFFMAN, DANIEL (1923– ) Daniel Hoff- (winter 1970): 110–119. man’s poetry has an unobtrusive iambic flow, often William Sylvester with rhymes, which echo those of William Butler Yeats, but Hoffman’s song is closer to speech. Conflicting HOGAN, LINDA (1947– ) Following the emotions in his poems are often comprehended American Indian tradition of storytelling and myth- through visual imagery. Hoffman’s work also has affini- weaving, Linda Hogan’s writings reflect the traditional, ties with that of William Jay Smith and Stephen DUNN. indigenous respect for and affiliation with animals, Hoffman was born in New York City. His first book, land, and plants. Hogan, a novelist and essayist as well An Armada of Thirty Wales (1954), was selected by W. as poet, is a contemporary voice of American Indian H. AUDEN for the Yale Series of Younger Poets. He has concerns. Hogan is deeply rooted in the natural world; been chancellor of the Academy of American Poets the health of the environment is her main interest, and (1972) and a consultant to the Library of Congress her poetry focuses on issues ranging from endangered (1973–74); among other honors he has received a species and wildlife rehabilitation to nuclear testing. Memorial Medal from the Hungarian PEN (1980) for She also explores science, spirituality, ritual, and geno- his translations of Hungarian poetry. cide with a decidedly feminist, matriarchal voice (see Hoffman’s themes center around the conflicts of FEMALE VOICE, FEMALE LANGUAGE). Her poetry is signifi- individuality in the context of group pressure, as in the cant in that it joins such voices as Louise Erdrich’s and title poem of The Center of Attraction (1974). An Leslie Marmon SILKO’s in bringing the noteworthy con- impromptu crowd has gathered to see if a man will cerns of a traditionally oral and underrepresented cul- jump to his death from a bridge pylon. A few urge him ture into mainstream verse. to go ahead. The man lights a cigarette, looks down on Born in Colorado, Hogan grew up in Oklahoma and the crowd, “and sprinkles / Some of his ashes upon Colorado. From a military family, she moved around them.” He starts climbing down. The crowd immedi- and did not grow up within the Chickasaw Indian com- ately loses interest and disperses: “It was his aloneness munity so important to her work. The first in her fam- that clutched them together. / They were spellbound ily to attend college, she also received an M.A. at the by his despair.” In “The City of Satisfactions” (1963), University of Colorado in 1978. Her poetry includes an individual in the comfort of a train “Laved in the Calling Myself Home (1979), Daughters, I Love You superdome observation car by Muzak” speeds toward (1981), Eclipse (1983), Seeing through the Sun (1985), HOLLANDER, JOHN 217 which won the 1986 American Book Award and the work is packed with allusions. His poems display a Juniper Prize, Savings (1988), and The Book of Medicines remarkable knowledge of prosody (see PROSODY AND (1993), winner of the 1993 Colorado Book Award. Her FREE VERSE). In his wit, inventiveness, and capability award-winning fiction includes two volumes of short with a range of complex verse forms, Hollander’s stories and two novels. Her other honors include the poetic practice shows the influence of W. H. AUDEN. He Lannan Foundation Award for poetry (1994), a is often linked to formalist poets who were his con- Guggenheim grant (1990), a National Endowment for temporaries, such as Anthony HECHT and James MER- the Arts Fellowship (1986), the D’Arcy McNickle Tribal RILL, and his interest in poets from the 17th Historian Fellowship (1980), and a Lifetime Achieve- century—he edited the Selected Poems of Ben Johnson ment Award from the Native Writers’ Circle of the (1961)—clearly informs his writing. Americas (1998). In 1980 Hogan was honored with a Hollander was born in New York City. After receiv- community service award, indicative of her commit- ing his A.B. and M.A. from Columbia University, he ment to combine community and environmental con- earned a Ph.D. from Indiana University in 1959. cerns. Her primary project is called “River of Words,” Auden chose Hollander’s first book, A Crackling of which seeks to foster responsible stewardship of the Thorns, for the Yale Series of Younger Poets in 1958. environment by blending empirical lessons in painting, Hollander won Poetry magazine’s Levinson Prize in writing, and ecology for school-age students. 1974 and the Bollingen Prize in 1983. He has received Hogan’s identification is as a tribal member—not an many other honors, including a fellowship in 1990 individual. She positions herself as spokeswoman of from the MacArthur Foundation. communally held tribal stories. For her the dead and the Hollander’s poems employ a voice that is philo- living form a continuous chain of existence across time. sophical and reflective, often engaging paradoxical As she says of a miscarried child in “Crossings” (1993), themes. In “The Great Bear” (1958), for example, he “he was already a member of the clan of crossings.” considers his inability to see a bear in the constella- Hogan also envisions the continual presence of the dead tion Ursa Major as a sign that the universe has no in “The Grandmother Songs” (1993) when she says, meaning, concluding, “If it were best, / Even, to have “once, flying out of the false death of surgery, / I heard a it there...there still would be no bear.” Visions from grandmother singing for help.” Hogan’s work is wary of the Ramble (1965) describes the speaker’s childhood a white culture whose science risks damaging the con- and the present, in what Richard HOWARD considers a tinued existence of the human race. In poems, such as key theme in Hollander’s work, “a contradiction “Mountain Lion” (1993) and “The Fallen” (1993), between remembering and forgetting . . . between, in Hogan links deaths of American Indians to the destruc- its largest accommodation, life and death which tion of animal species. Such potential annihilation leads affords only in the poem a moment of release” (241). Hogan to explore fertility and sexual reproduction in the The poems, however personal, never seem CONFES- rich and complex language that is indicative of her con- SIONAL; the craft is more important than being self- cern for both the physical and emotional environments. revealing or shocking. BIBLIOGRAPHY The commitment to the poem itself, often evident in Alaimo, Stacy. “Skin Dreaming.” In Ecofeminist Literary Criti- a precision of form, has always been crucial to Hollan- cism: Theory, Interpretation Pedagogy, edited by Greta Gaard, der’s work. His knowledge of prosody is evident in and Patrick Murphy. Urbana: Illinois, 1998, pp. 123–138. Rhyme’s Reason (1981), his primer on poetic forms, and Coltelli, Laura. Winged Words: American Indian Writers Speak. his concern with the look of a poem on the page Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990. appears in Types of Shape (1969), in which the poems Salita S. Bryant embody the objects they describe, such as a lightbulb or a cat (see VISUAL POETRY). HOLLANDER, JOHN (1929– ) John Hol- Hollander’s carefully written, thoughtful verse deals lander is often referred to as a difficult poet whose with everyday events through a range of allusions and 218 HOLLO, ANSELM difficult formal techniques. In his work the craft of the many experiences. He captures lyrically the details of poem highlights the poem and hides the poet. the everyday and its moments of perception. Robert BIBLIOGRAPHY GRENIER once called Hollo’s poetry “erratic, comedic, Howard, Richard. “John Hollander: Between the Deed and ‘tribal,’ and profound” (216). This description captures the Dream Is the Life Remembered.” In Alone with Amer- Hollo’s evocation of mythic elements, comedy, and his ica: Essays on the Art of Poetry in the United States since almost surreal vision of human life, which, even 1950. New York, Atheneum, 1980, pp. 238–275. though it appears as otherworldly at times, always Lehman, David. “The Sound and Sense of the Sleight-of- remains grounded in everyday language. For example, Hand Man.” Parnassas: Poetry in Review 12:1 (fall/winter in “when you met him he was a man” (1995), a man 1984): 180–212. becomes a “postage stamp”; this is a world where “mice Gary Leising fall from the sky.” This poem shifts rapidly and unex- pectedly, following the poet’s mind through humor, HOLLO, ANSELM (1934– ) Anselm Hollo random thought, and historical references. As in all of has been an important experimental poet in the second his poetry, Hollo gives each poem its own form as it half of the 20th century. His work was influenced by traces the unconscious. the BLACK MOUNTAIN poets, especially Charles OLSON BIBLIOGRAPHY and Robert CREELEY, and he was a major influence on Alpert, Berry. “Anselm Hollo: An Interview.” Vort 2 (1972): the LANGUAGE group that included the poets Charles 2–20. BERNSTEIN, Bruce ANDREWS, and Ron SILLIMAN. Hollo’s Bielyi, Sergei, and Anton Hofman. “Anselm Hollo.” In Con- poetry is filled with the unexpected; each poem is a temporary Poets. Vol. 9. Detroit: Gale Research, 1983, singular event, as he states, an “emotional, intellectual p. 270. entity” (Bielyi 270). His playfulness with form and his Grenier, Robert. “I Had No Idea.” Sulfur 23 (spring 1988): stress on the emotional and intellectual aspects of 216. poetry, combined with his many years of teaching, William Allegrezza reading, and traveling, have given him a wide interna- tional audience. HOLMAN, BOB (1948– ) Bob Holman has The son of a translator and university professor, been hailed as “Ringmaster of the Spoken Word” and Hollo was born in Helsinki, Finland. He was educated “the dean of the scene” by the New York Times (Richard- in Finland and the United States, where he was an son B2); he once called himself “Plain White Rapper” exchange student in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. In 1966 he (Holman). His commitment to the oral traditions and immigrated to the United States and has remained here pleasures of the spoken word have given his work the since. He has published more than 30 volumes of eclectic feel of hip-hop, dada poets, rap, shamanism, poetry, including Sojourner Microcosms: Poems New and and stand-up comedy all intertwined (see POETRY IN PER- Selected 1959–1977 (1977), and he is an award-win- FORMANCE). Bluntly political and uncompromisingly ning translator from and into Finnish, Swedish, Ger- direct, Holman’s work challenges notions of poetry as a man, French, and Russian. He is also a journalist. His rarefied commodity of the intellectual community and awards include a National Endowment for the Arts insists upon the relevance of poetry to lives lived out- Poet’s Fellowship (1979), the Finish Government Prize side of ivory towers. Holman’s efforts to encourage the for translation of Finnish literature (1996), and a craft and art of the spoken word have resulted in his Gertrude STEIN Award for innovative poetry (1996). popularization of poetry slams, his productions of Pub- Hollo’s poetry is filled with energy and the unex- lic Broadcasting System’s Words in Your Face and The pected. Humor, both whimsical and satirical, abounds United States of Poetry, and his cofounding of the poetry in his work. His poetry is playful in form and sub- record label Mouth Almighty/Mercury Records. ject—versatility is one of his assets—and throughout Holman was born in LaFollette, Tennessee. He has his work he displays an open spirit and tolerance for taught at Bard College, and he founded the Bowery HOLOCAUST 219

Poetry Club in New York City. He is perhaps one of HOLOCAUST CHARLES REZNIKOFF (1975) America’s most active poets and has traveled the world Charles REZNIKOFF’s Holocaust is a long narrative poem performing his work and supporting the work of other about the Nazi extermination of the Jews, divided into spoken-word artists. As well as producing seven 12 sections that recall the traditional 12 books of the books, two edited anthologies, and numerous CDs, he classical epic (see NARRATIVE POETRY and LONG AND has won three Emmy Awards (1988 and 1992), been SERIAL POETRY). Like the traditional epic, Holocaust con- nominated for a Grammy Award (1999), and hosted tains not only the history of a single person but also of several Internet sites dedicated to spoken word per- an entire culture. In addition, also like most epics, formances and poetry. Holocaust recounts a journey into the underworld; Holman’s poetry is specifically intended to be heard. indeed, one may say that all the action of Holocaust His insistence upon poetry as a sensory experience, takes place in a very real hell, the territory and institu- rather than an intellectual one, gives his work an tions controlled by Nazis. Unlike an epic, however, immediacy that changes from one work to the next in Holocaust contains little heroic behavior, although it an extremely articulate, emotional, and rhythmic honors a great deal of suffering and courageous stream of consciousness. Holman’s oeuvre is not endurance. Unlike The Iliad, it records no victory, focused on a singular theme, nor can it be argued that although its last pages foreshadow the defeat of the it embodies a governing dictum, other than poetry is to Nazis as they retreat from advancing Russian troops. be enjoyed, not endured. Indeed “Poem 3/2” (1990), Unlike The Odyssey or The Divine Comedy, it presents begins, “There’s No Big Message except hope you’ve no return home, and unlike The Aeneid or Paradise had a good time while reading this.” Lost, it celebrates no founding of a new people. “The Death of Poetry I” (1990) starts by lamenting Holocaust grows out of two of Reznikoff’s long-stand- the elevation of poetics to an elitist art form: “It sucked ing concerns. The first is his concern as a Jewish Amer- itself into the coffin spasm. . . . It was enforced tradi- ican with the fate of the Jews and what he sees as a tion of emptiness”; the poem ends by celebrating the dying Jewish culture. In 1921 Reznikoff published his return of a democratic poetic performance accessible verse play Uriel Accosta about a Portuguese Catholic of to everyone: “Hey, amigos, let’s go for it / Right out here Jewish ancestry, who returns to Judaism but finds him- in public.” Holman’s work refuses literary hierarchies, self at odds with both the Inquisition and the rabbis. dismisses convoluted metaphors, and erodes notions For Reznikoff, Accosta, as the novelist and poet Paul of what is, and what is not, poetry. There is something Auster has observed, was “neither wholly assimilated of the passion of the streetcorner prophet about Hol- nor fully unassimilated, [but occupied] the unstable man’s work, an insistence that a poet, any poet, is sim- middle ground between two worlds” (156). Thus in ply someone with something to say and the courage to producing a book-length poem detailing Nazi attempts say it clearly. to exterminate the Jewish people, Reznikoff pursued themes that had concerned him from the beginning of BIBLIOGRAPHY his writing career. Reznikoff’s other concern, which Foster, Edward Halsey. “Bob Holman, Performance Poetry and the Nuyorican Poets Cafe.” Multicultural Review 2.2 finds its fruition in Holocaust, is with long documentary (1993): 46–48. works that record, in objective terms, social injustices. Gioseffi, Daniela. “An Interview with Bob Holman: ‘Mouth His multivolume Testimony: The United States (1965, Amighty’ on the Cutting Edge of Multiculturalism’s 1968, 1978, 1979) recounts from legal records inci- Future.” Voices in Italian America (spring 1998): 1–10. dents occurring between 1885 and 1915. Holman, Bob. “Bob Holman, Plain White Rapper.” Morning Reznikoff’s methods in Testimony and Holocaust are Edition. National Public Radio, 1989. derived from at least three sources: his brief training as Richardson, Lynda. “A Poet (and Proprieter) Is a Beacon in a reporter, his involvement with other OBJECTIVIST writ- the Bowery.” New York Times 12 November 2002, B2. ers, and his work as a lawyer and as a writer for Cor- Kathryn Ferguson pus Juris, an encyclopedia of law for lawyers. In 1910 220 “HOUSEWIFE” he entered the newly established school of journalism to explain why male prisoners who were usually rele- at the University of Missouri. He left after a year, but gated to “sorting out belongings” had been reassigned to his training in journalism certainly reinforced his ten- “undress the children.” Presumably had they not been dency to stick to the facts. By 1930 he had met Louis orphans, their mothers would have undressed them for ZUKOFSKY, George OPPEN, and Carl RAKOSI, with whom their executions. he formed the objectivists, a group of writers united by Reznikoff’s restraint emphasizes the indescribable their Jewish background, left-wing politics, and desire cruelty and horror of the Nazi atrocities. It suggests to use language as an object with certain physical and that there is no way to imagine the feelings of those historical properties. In 1912 Reznikoff entered New involved—not the SS men, not the children, and least York University’s law school and passed the bar in of all the young men assigned to undress the children 1916, but he was not interested in practicing law. In before they were sent—as those young men surely 1928 he began work at Corpus Juris, where for several knew they would be—to their deaths. Any attempt to years he summarized law cases According to articulate more than the facts would falsify the horror Reznikoff’s wife, Marie Syrkin, “He worked painstak- with melodrama. To dress the narrative in anything ingly examining the minutiae of a case and phrasing other than the objective language of ordinary speech his analysis not on the prescribed legal jargon but would deflect attention from the crimes and thereby ‘accurately’ according to his own standards” (45). mitigate the offenses. Reznikoff understood that, to These three influences informed Reznikoff’s austere transform testimony into poetry, he had to employ style, which is at once meticulously accurate and fully techniques so subtle they would disappear to all but colloquial. Reznikoff typically limits his narratives to the the most attentive readers. sort of testimony allowed in courts of law—that is, to BIBLIOGRAPHY what people saw, heard, and did. He limits references to Auster, Paul. “The Decisive Moment.” In Charles Reznikoff: states of mind. Reznikoff was assisted in achieving this Man and Poet, edited by Milton Hindus. Orono, Maine: distance by taking incidents from the U.S. government’s National Poetry Foundation, 1984, pp. 151–165. records of the Nuremberg Military Tribunals and the Hindus, Milton, ed. Charles Reznikoff: Man and Poet. Orono, trial of Adolph Eichmann in Jerusalem. Yet the effect of Maine: National Poetry Foundation, 1984. such restraint is not dispassion. For example, part VIII, Rothchild, Sylvia. “From a Distance and Up Close: Charles “Children,” opens with a report on two freight cars filled Reznikoff and the Holocaust.” In Charles Reznikoff: Man with children arriving at a death camp and explains how and Poet, edited by Milton Hindus. Orono, Maine: “young men sorting out the belongings of those taken to National Poetry Foundation, 1984, pp. 289–296. the gas chambers / had to undress the children—they Shevelow, Kathryn. “History and Objectification in Charles were orphans.” The young men then took the children Reznikoff’s Documentary Poems, Testimony and Holo- caust.” Sagetreib 1.2 (1982): 290–306. “to the ‘lazarette’” where they were shot by the German Syrkin, Marie. “Charles: A Memoir.” In Charles Reznikoff: Schutzstaffel (SS). Reznikoff refuses to speculate on the Man and Poet, edited by Milton Hindus. Orono, Maine: psychological state of the children, the young men who National Poetry Foundation, 1984, pp. 37–67. are “sorting out the belongings,” or the SS men who shoot the children. He leaves details unexplained: Why David Bergman were the children shot instead of gassed? Yet such writ- ing is far from purely factual. He emphasizes the “HOUSEWIFE” ANNE SEXTON (1962) One hypocrisy of the Nazi concern for children by placing of the most common and unnoticed aspects of Anne the word lazarette, a diminutive French term for a chil- SEXTON’s poetic technique is the reinvestment of clichés dren’s washroom, in quotation marks to highlight the with meaning. Paying close attention to details usually unsuitability, of the word to disguise blood-bath reality. overlooked, Sexton examines apparently tired phrases, He carefully separates with dashes the fact that the chil- and in this way she revitalizes commonplace situations dren were orphans, not to evoke greater sympathy but and people. “Housewife” is a pure illustration of this. HOWARD, RICHARD 221

Beginning with the term housewife, Sexton investigates becomes an enlarged version of the mother from the way in which women become married to houses whom the woman first learned love, the one who pro- rather than to their partners, another manifestation of a tected her from invasion but also imprisoned her, thus psychological double bind that is universal for women. preventing her from actual human contact. The subject of the woman defined by her relationship In this model there is neither need nor possibility of to her husband and home was imbued with eroticism by masculine relationship and support. Men become mere William Carlos WILLIAMS in his “The Young Housewife” invaders, fulfilling their Freudian role of marrying their (1916). Seen by the poet, the housewife is an object of mothers, but female existence is dominated by mater- amorous curiosity. But in Sexton’s poem, the external, nal incorporation. Whether or not a woman is a house- objective view moves inward. William’s speaker passes wife, within the framework created by the poem, her by the housewife, but in Sexton’s poem readers move identity is determined by this psychological truth. from the sociological, objective observation about “some BIBLIOGRAPHY women” to the universal and empathic understanding Alkalay-Gut, Karen. “Sexton, ‘Housewife.’” Explicator 47 that all women share a similar situation. The distance (winter 1989): 52–54. between the housewife and the speaker diminishes as Bixler, Francis. Original Essays on the Poetry of Anne Sexton. the poem moves from the extreme example of the obses- Conway: University of Central Arkansas Press, 1988. sive housewife to encompass all women and all rela- tionships. Furthermore the point that “A woman is her Karen Alkalay-Gut mother” is glossed by the conclusion as “the main thing,” as if this were the central truth of female reality. HOWARD, RICHARD (1929– ) Richard The fact that women do not marry their fathers, or their Howard brings to poetry a subtlety of psychology, rich- mothers, but actually become their own mothers, incor- ness of language, sensitivity to social structure, and porating their nurture and caring in an existence alien- density of cultural reference of the sort to be found in ated from others, is a universal truth here. the prose work of Henry James, whose travel writing In a simple 10-line, 60-word poem, to move from he edited. His formidable talents make his work quite the comic figure of the ingenuous and compulsive demanding and have led to its being ignored and mis- housecleaner to the assertion of the discovery of a understood. While it is true that Howard makes few major truth seems initially eccentric. However, the concessions to the uninformed, he never parades poem reveals a logical and inevitable progression. learning for its own sake. Similarly while the work The phrase “some women marry houses” is the first assumes a cosmopolitan sophistication, it is filled with in a series of surprising turns in this poem. Beginning passion; one of his interests is the manner in which with the assumption that women marry houses, not erotic desire finds its way into the least likely of places men, Sexton moves seamlessly into understanding that and takes the most unexpected of forms. Formally the housewife is searching for identity and protection. complex, his poems’ intricate structures mirror the As the lines become longer and more discursive, they complexity of thought and character. Many of his reveal the attraction in this attachment: The house’s poems are dramatic monologues, and Robert Browning “skin” shields the housewife from the outside world, is his clearest influence, but his use of syllabics and from danger and individuality. The skin encloses the complex allusions owe their debt to Marianne MOORE. romantic and vital “heart” and the sensual and com- Adopted by a well-to-do German-Jewish family in municating “mouth.” But the extended metaphor Cleveland, where he was born, Howard attended grows less appealing, more graphic: A pun of “liver” Columbia University and the Sorbonne. Taught French refers to the house inhabited by people, “livers,” and as a child, he has become one of the most respected the indelicate organ of bile. A less-balanced metaphor translators of French, with more than 150 titles to his of “bowel movements,” however, reduces the house to credit, as well as the 1983 American Book Award for a rigid mechanical frame for the woman. The house his translation of Charles Baudelaire’s Les fleurs du mal. 222 HOWE, FANNY

In 1982 the French government designated him a is recognized as an innovator in the analytic lyric, a type Chevalier de l’Ordre National de Mérite for his service of experimental poetry that does not abandon the lyric to French literature. Howard’s concern for continental form (see LYRIC POETRY). Her poetry is concerned with thought and writing has not meant that he has ignored questions of spirituality and grace in a modern, material the American scene. His monumental study Alone with world; she deftly balances abstract, encoded language America (1969, 1980) examines the major poets who and a moral vision firmly rooted in lived experience. have emerged in the United States since 1950. He was Commenting on her development as a poet, Howe has awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 1996 and served written, “The language of the other—the sound of what as president of the PEN American Center (1978–80). is only half-understood, always out of context, not He was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1986. mine . . . what you might call Mystification—became a Much of Howard’s poetry has taken the form of dra- hidden credo of mine . . . [t]he paradigm . . . was the matic monologues and dialogues, but even his more per- essence of code, of hiddenness.” (“Artobiography” 197). sonal lyrics involve a conversation with the world. Some She has been compared to Emily Dickinson for her com- of the speakers in his poems are famous personages of pressed, metaphysical lyrics and to her contemporary the past. Untitled Subjects (1969), for which he won the Rae ARMANTROUT for her use of experimental, abstract Pulitzer, contains the voices Sir Walter Scott, John language to explore political themes, occasionally con- Ruskin, and William Thackery. But we also hear in his cerning gender and sexuality, but also dealing with poems from an unnamed secretary, an anonymous vicar, poverty, violence, and religious faith. the daughters of John Milton, a nanny, various wives, Howe was born and raised in Cambridge, Massachu- and a royal taxidermist. In “The Masters on the Movies” setts. Her mother was an actress and playwright at the (2002), he imagines what Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Abbey Theater in Dublin before starting the Poet’s The- and others who lived before motion pictures became an ater in Cambridge; her father was a law professor at industry would make of this alternative narrative form. Harvard University and a civil rights activist. Her sister, “The Masters on the Movies” suggests the kind of free- Susan HOWE, is also a poet. Fanny Howe has published floating dialogue between personality, history, and cul- more than 14 books of poetry and numerous works of ture that is Howard’s continual delight and obsession. fiction, including several novels for adolescents. She Such a meditation presupposes a past that is in constant has received two National Endowment for the Arts contact with the present, a sensibility in which the grants (1970 and 1991) and was chosen to be a fellow canonical crosses and converses with the coarse and of the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College in 1975. common. Howard’s James, who died in 1916, having Howe writes frequently about the desire for paradise seen Bette Davis in Now, Voyager, released in 1942, wryly and for an end to all forms of human oppression, elab- alludes to the film’s concluding lines: “we don’t reach the orating in a statement on her poetics: “Words which sun, we shall at least / have been up in a balloon.” consciously aspire to the future are heightened by the desire to rise above, be free of, the tyranny of history. BIBLIOGRAPHY They aim for a heightened place—a paradise” (“The Haughton, Hugh, and Adam Phillips. Introduction to Ecstatic”). Her 1986 collection, Introduction to the Selected Poems of Richard Howard. London: Penguin, 1991, pp. vii–xvi. World, comprises a series of untitled, 10-line medita- Summers, Claude, and Ted-Larry Pebworth. “‘We Join the tions on morality and spiritual awareness, all con- Fathers’: Time and the Maturing of Richard Howard.” structed of self-consciously chance or arbitrary Contemporary Poetry 3.4 (1978): 13–35. language. She combines, as she writes in the prefatory prose poem, “Wishes,” “chance with deliberate David Bergman choice. . . . Lines as branches, us all swinging from.” The culminating effect of this strategy is not one of HOWE, FANNY (1940– ) Associated with the technical play merely for its own sake, but rather of a LANGUAGE SCHOOL in contemporary poetry, Fanny Howe singular austerity, a kind of metaphysical purity, HOWE, SUSAN 223 arrived at through the sheer presence of language. She Howe turned to the genre of artists’ books, hand- closes the collection, “freedom is synonymous with made works that treat books as visual objects rather less, not more” (“After-Thoughts”), arguing ultimately than collections of print. Her artists’ books combine for an existence purged of human-made excesses. images with lists of words. In the late 1960s she was In this and other collections of her poetry, Howe’s introduced to Olson’s poetry by her younger sister, meticulously crafted and compressed writings often Fanny HOWE, also a practicing poet. In 1988 she began blur accepted boundaries between poetry and prose, to teach poetry at a variety of universities. and the reader thus experiences in multiple registers Howe’s visual arts background has affected her the poet’s profound moral vision. poetry. She shows special concern for the appearance of words on the page (and has lamented the difficulties BIBLIOGRAPHY of finding a publisher willing to take seriously her pre- Howe, Fanny. “Artobiography.” In Writing / Talks, edited by cise placement of words). Howe uses character format- Bob Perelman. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985, pp. 192–206. ting and spacing carefully, as in this example from ———. “The Ecstatic.” Ironwood 24 (1984): 17–20. Defenestration of Prague (1983): Vickery, Ann. “Finding Grace: Modernity and the Ineffable in E n d l e s s PROTEANL i n k a g e s the Poetry of Rae Armantrout and Fanny Howe.” Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses 37 (November 1998): 143–163. The spacing between the letters of the first and last words suggest they are currently in flux, perhaps Amy Moorman Robbins spreading outward from the center like the edges of the universe. Yet the conjunction between the middle HOWE, SUSAN (1937– ) Susan Howe is word and the first letter of the last word emphasizes associated with the LANGUAGE SCHOOL of poetry. Her links that remain in the midst of flux. work is opaque, complex, and multifaceted, distrust- Sometimes Howe crosses out a word but allows it to ful of language as a structure, yet fascinated with remain, crossed out, in the poem. At other times, two words and the printed page. Howe claims the work of words appear superimposed, one over the other, or Charles OLSON influenced her interest in writing crowded closer together than normal so that the space poetry, although her work compares in complexity between lines is truly diminished, causing a distortion with another Language poet, Lyn HEJINIAN, and in the separation between the two words; they verge Howe’s emphasis on extraverbal visual layout of her toward becoming a single sign, rather than two. The poems links her work with that of Language poet idiosyncratic spacing and alignment resemble the Charles BERNSTEIN. poetry of E. E. CUMMINGS, though Howe’s work is never Howe was born and grew up in Cambridge, Massa- merely typewriter trickery (a criticism that has been chusetts. Her father was a liberal-leaning law professor leveled at the work of this older poet). at Harvard. Her mother had an interest in drama, which In her most experimental poems, instead of evenly influenced Howe to attempt a theater career after high spacing all of the lines horizontally, Howe arranges school. She has described herself as a failure in the the- words and lines to cross over other words and lines at ater, turning then out of desperation to art school at the unexpected angles. This is especially apparent in The Boston Museum School of Fine Arts, from which she Bibliography of the King’s Book; or, Eikon Basilike (1989); graduated in 1961. Howe pursued an art career, moving portions of the poem “break out of all form com- to New York in 1964 and working in a variety of media, pletely,” Howe says, resembling advanced algebraic based primarily on collage techniques. The energy and formulas or visual art (Foster 24). Indeed some of experimentation of the New York downtown art scene these more overtly visual poems create structures sim- in the 1960s influenced her work, especially the interest ilar to those of the earlier abstract-expressionist and shown by minimalist and conceptualist artists in writing minimalist painters with whom Howe interacted in as an adjunct to their art. New York in the 1960s (see ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM and 224 HOWL

VISUAL POETRY). For one page of Eikon, scattered lines of BIBLIOGRAPHY text cross the page much like Jackson Pollock’s drips of Foster, Edward. “An Interview with Susan Howe.” Talisman: paint on a canvas; the page opposite is the exact same A Journal of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics 4 (spring poem, but turned upside down. 1990): 14–38. Many of these visually experimental works are not Howe, Susan. “Fragments toward Autobiography,” Modern meant to be read aloud, yet Howe does do readings American Poetry. Available on-line. URL: Department of English, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. 24 and is highly attuned to the aural nature of poetry, as May www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/g_l/howe/auto- suggested by one of her book titles, Articulation of bio.htm. Downloaded December 2003. Sound Forms in Time. In fact, in the late 1970s Howe Perloff, Marjorie. “‘Collision or Collusion with History’: hosted a radio program on poetry, featuring readings Susan Howe’s Articulation of Sound Forms in Time.” In by and conversation with other poets. By the late Poetic License: Essays on Modernist and Postmodernist 1990s some of her work had become available on the Lyric. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, World Wide Web, in both visual and aural forms. 1990, pp. 297–310. Another characteristic of Howe’s poetry is its involve- Sam McBride ment with previous historical and literary documents. Howe often reacts to preexisting texts or incorporates those texts into her work. This appropriation allows HOWL ALLEN GINSBERG (1956) Seized by both Howe’s voice and the voice of the earlier writer to United States Customs Agents in 1957, banned, and be heard. The poet with whom Howe feels the greatest labeled obscene by the federal government, Allen GINS- bond is Emily Dickinson, whose work she greatly BERG’s Howl is a poem and a book as well as a moment admires. Howe’s My Emily Dickinson (1985) was her in American literary history. Howl is exactly what the effort to meet the long-deceased Dickinson in the virtual poem’s title indicates: an unrestrained, mournful, space of writing. Howe went a step further in Melville’s instinctive exclamation. It is a cry of rebellion and a Marginalia (1989), which reacts to notes Herman reaction against the military-industrial complex that Melville wrote in the margins of another author’s book. the Eisenhower administration both warned against Howe’s interest in working from preexisting docu- and presided over. Howl draws on traditions of ments has centered around work by American authors: prophetic and CONFESSIONAL poetry to communicate its Dickinson, Melville, and Mary Rowlandson’s captivity themes of apocalypse and redemption. In the intro- narrative, for example. She has spoken of an interest in duction to Howl, William Carlos WILLIAMS writes, an American voice, though she has also explored her “Poets are damned but they are not blind, they see with Irish background. the eyes of angels.” Ginsberg openly embraced the idea Tempering Howe’s experimentation and interest in of poet as visionary and bardic martyr. He found inspi- history is an awareness that can only be described as ration for Howl in the legacy of the British romantic feminist, though Howe avoids that label. This aware- poet William Blake, as well as the long lines and scat- ness shows itself in skepticism of the validity of the ological imagery of Walt Whitman and the sponta- literary canon, in an understanding that historical neous poetics of Jack KEROUAC. True to the bardic documents tend to erase women, and in her affinity origins of poetry, Howl is meant to be read aloud and for Emily Dickinson. Women, she says, find them- looks to the meter and timing of jazz to achieve its selves in the gaps and spaces of history and literature. effect. Ginsberg’s poetry shocked and disrupted the Thus when Howe adds that her own work is equally comfortable, stable, predictable verse preferred by the concerned with gaps and spaces, she implies that New Critics and challenged white middle-class values gender is central to her poetry (see FEMALE VOICE, of suburbia, consumerism, and heterosexuality (see FEMALE LANGUAGE). FUGITIVE/AGRARIAN SCHOOL). For its subject matter and Combined, all these elements of Howe’s poetry force for its unpredictability, some critics have argued that her audience to read between the lines. Howl is not poetry, and even if one were to consider it HOWL 225 a poem, it should certainly not become part of the The third section of the poem commemorates Gins- American Canon—a set of texts that can be said to berg’s friend Carl Solomon—to whom the poem is define the cultural values of a nation. In spite of criti- dedicated. The rhythm shifts from exclamation to cism, Howl galvanized an undercurrent in post–World incantation: The phrase “I’m with you in Rockland” is War II America. Its popularity and its influence con- not only the organizing principle here but also a coun- tinue into the 21st century. terpoint to the images of isolation in the first section In all, Howl consists of three major sections and a and the ranting madness of the second. With the footnote. The entire poem pivots at the brink of mad- exception of the direct address greeting, “Carl ness and pulls redemption from insanity. The opening Solomon!,” in the first line, the staccato rhythms and section of the poem elevates the artistic intensity of exclamation points disappear. Section three contains BEAT figures, such as Kerouac, Neal Cassady, and no punctuation other than the measured pause of the William S. Burroughs to a spiritual level. Art is reader’s own breath. Its rhythm is the gentle rocking of equated with salvation, and the terror of the cold war a child and the soothing of nerves. Protest is presented doctrine—MAD (mutual assured destruction)—is in absurd, almost humorous fashion as the poet and ever present. The stanzas evoke images of isolation, Solomon hug and kiss the United States as if it were a disillusionment, rebellion, ecstasy, and sexuality. child with a cough. Images collide as ghostly figures listen to the “crack of The movement from beat to beatitude is a consis- doom on the hydrogen juke box” and burn cigarette tent theme in much of Beat Generation poetry. The holes in their arms to protest the “narcotic tobacco final section, “Footnote to Howl,” signals the ascent haze of Capitalism.” from madness and transforms lament into exaltation The second section of the poem begins with a ques- via the refrain, “Holy.” The poet as prophet is most tion: “What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed powerful when prophesying the apocalypse, and the open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagina- poem closes with joyous images of redemption. The tion?” Ginsberg’s answer is Moloch, who is elsewhere poet, the Muse, and her followers have come out on mentioned in the First Book of Kings in the Old Testa- the other side of madness and everything is holy: ment as a false god to whom the young were sacrificed. “Holy the bop apocalypse.” Just as the consistent pattern of the first section is Many of the famous excerpts from Howl are found in “who” plus a verb (“who vanished,” “who wandered,” the first section, but to read only this section is to “who lit,” “who studied”), the name Moloch organizes understand only half the apocalypse and none of the each stanza in the second section and is the metaphor redemption. In his annotations to Howl, Ginsberg with which Ginsberg names and locates the objects of quoted the Greek philosopher Pythagoras, who wrote, his rage. The first section relies on long lines to the “When the mode of the music changes the walls of the point of breathlessness; the stanzas of the Moloch sec- city shake.” Ginsberg challenged his audience as read- tion are equally long, but the rhythm is truncated with ers, as human beings, as citizens, and as a culture. He exclamation points. As emotions intensify, Moloch asked that readers shake their cities not only with transforms from sphinx to monster with a “cannibal poetry and madness, but also with tenderness and dynamo” for a breast and a “smoking tomb” for an ear. honesty. His vision was ultimately one abounding with As in the first section, the resistance to post–World great love and resilient hope. War II conformity and cold war politics is clear. The fate of Moloch and its victims is prophesied to be a BIBLIOGRAPHY “cloud of sexless hydrogen.” By the end of the second Lardas, John. Bop Apocalypse. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001. section, madness is the poet’s only recourse from the Tytell, John. Naked Angels. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, influence of society and the devouring energy of 1976. Moloch. The final short phrases communicate more hysteria than reason: “the wild eyes! the holy yells!” Frank Gaughan 226 HUGHES, LANGSTON

HUGHES, LANGSTON (1902–1967) Lang- his grandmother in Lawrenceville, Kansas. His grand- ston Hughes is best known as a HARLEM RENAISSANCE father had been an abolitionist and Republican politi- poet whose lyrics celebrate and document 20th-cen- cian. Hughes’s mother had to travel to find work; as a tury African-American life. Committed to expanding result, Hughes had an itinerant, often impoverished poetry’s capacity to promote racial justice, his work childhood, attending school in Topeka, Cleveland, and consistently spoke to and communicated with people Lincoln, Illinois. A poet and amateur actress, his left to the margins of literary and political representa- mother fostered Hughes’s enthusiasm for literature and tion. In The Big Sea (1940), the first of his autobiogra- theater. He recalled, “My mother used to take me to see phies, Hughes articulates his belief that literature all the plays that came to Topeka like Buster Brown, should be a direct engagement with people: “[T]here Under Two Flags, and Uncle Tom’s Cabin. We were very came a time when I believed in books more than in fond of plays and books” (325). Hughes’s talents were people—which of course, was wrong” (332). An recognized early. In high school he published verse immensely prolific writer, Hughes worked in a variety and short stories in Central High Monthly Magazine and of literary genres: poetry, plays, autobiographies, the Belfry Owl, became editor of his high-school essays, short stories, novels, and musicals. Hughes’s annual, and was elected class poet. Many of his fellow voice—familiar, direct, and appealing—remained con- classmates were children of European immigrants; sistent throughout his astonishing literary output. And they exposed him to left-wing periodicals, such as the yet his poetic persona had a supple flexibility, as a wide Liberator and the Socialist Call, as well as European variety of characters speak and sing in his lyrics. In the philosophers, such as Frederich Nietzche, and writers, work that draws on dialect and folk performance, one such as Guy de Maupassant. can hear the echoes of Paul Laurence Dunbar, whom After graduation, Hughes spent an unhappy year Hughes read and emulated as a child. Hughes also with his father. As his train to Mexico crossed the Mis- shared Walt Whitman’s faith in poetry’s potential for sissippi, Hughes composed “THE NEGRO SPEAKS OF recording history and inspiring a democratic and RIVERS,” which was published in W. E .B. DuBois’s inclusive American culture. Sympathetic and musical journal the Crisis. Hughes was 19 years old, and “The portrayals of working people demonstrate the influ- Negro Speaks of Rivers” marked the beginning of a ence of Carl SANDBURG, whose work Hughes greatly distinguished writing career. In 1926 Hughes wrote admired. Hughes’s use of jazz syncopation as a compo- “The Weary Blues,” which won the first prize in poetry sitional principal was encouraged by the active rhymes in Opportunity magazine’s literary contest. After meet- and rhythms of Vachel LINDSAY’s poetry. ing such Harlem Renaissance stars as Alain Locke, As a cultural icon and a literary ambassador, Hughes Arna Bontemps, Zora Neale Hurston, and Carl Van was a crucial role model for young artists. He provided Vechten (who helped him arrange a book contract), practical and moral support to younger poets, such as Hughes published The Weary Blues (1926), and his Russell ATKINS and Amiri BARAKA, among many others. landmark manifesto “The Negro Artist and the Racial His incorporation of themes and techniques from jazz Mountain” (1926). and the blues paved the way for such poets as Sherley Hughes’s talent and productivity were consistently Anne Williams and Michael S. HARPER, who weave recognized with awards and honors. With the success together jazz rhythms and political critique. In 1964 of his novel Not without Laughter (1930), Hughes Hughes edited the anthology New Negro Poets: USA, received a Harmon Foundation Medal. In 1936 marking his dedication to keeping the canon of African- Hughes won a Guggenheim Fellowship, in 1941 a American literature open to innovation and change. Rosenwald Fund Fellowship to pursue playwriting, in Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri. His father 1946 an award for distinguished service as a writer moved to Mexico early in his life and became a busi- from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in nessman and landowner there. Following his father’s 1960, in the midst of the Civil Rights movement, departure, his mother moved Langston to the home of received the Spingarn Medal, the highest award of the HUGHES, LANGSTON 227

National Association for the Advancement of Colored teenagers was wrongfully accused of raping a white People (NAACP). A year later he was inducted into the woman and sentenced to death, and the Spanish civil National Institute of Arts and Letters. war, emphasized the necessity of direct and radical “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” (1921) is one of political action. Poems, such as “Good Morning Revo- Hughes’s finest poems. Arnold Rampersad writes that, lution” (1932), which was published in New Masses, with this poem, “the creativity of Langston Hughes . . . announced Hughes’s commitment to Marxist ideals: In suddenly created itself” (“Origins” 180). It is a deeply this poem revolution is personified as a friend who affirmative poem, and Hughes recalls that before writ- will help workers own the means of production, ing it, “I had been thinking about my father and his therefore eliminating hunger and greed, instability strange dislike of his own people” (351). This poem and oppression. “Goodbye Christ” (1932) is perhaps foresees Hughes’s role as a celebrated figure in the Pan- Hughes’s most controversial poem. It condemns African movement, as the speaker describes his Christ as an outmoded and fictitious figure that has involvement in and proximity to the great rivers of been oversold to those who wield power through Africa (the Euphrates, the Congo, and the Nile) as well influence and violence. In Christ’s place, he will insert as the Mississippi. The poem is built through a series “A real guy / Marx Communist Lenin Peasant Stalin of repetitions and the expressive refrain, “My soul has Worker ME —.” When the poem appeared without grown deep like the rivers.” Hughes orchestrates the his permission in the Saturday Evening Post in 1940, it image of the river with ease and elegance; it is a figure not only inspired controversy but protests too. Later, for the spirit, suffering, and achievement that resonates under pressure from the forces of McCarthyism, a in the land and history of African people. “The Weary period of anticommunist suspicion in which many Blues” (1925), another infectious poem from Hughes’s people were questioned about their political affilia- early body of work, describes the emotional effect of tions before Senator Joseph McCarthy’s committee on hearing a blues musician play on Lenox Avenue in subversive activities, Hughes renounced “Goodbye Harlem. As the poem progresses and enacts the slow Christ” as a youthful mistake. melancholic cadence of the blues, the musician’s song Yet he did not renounce poetry. In fact when asked and the poet’s lyric become one. Near the end of the to testify before McCarthy in 1953, Hughes had poem, a couplet attests to the song’s dramatic effect: recently published one of his strongest and most inno- “And far into the night he crooned that tune. / The vative poetic works, MONTAGE OF A DREAM DEFERRED stars went out and so did the moon.” (1951). An elegant and panoramic epic of urban black While Hughes was primarily a poet of joy, as his life, Montage displays Hughes’s sharpened call and poetry developed it identified specific sources of response skills, his full repertoire of lyrical voices and injustice and delved further into anger. The poem styles, and his knowledge of modernist literary move- “Mulatto” (1926) begins with the reprimand, “I am ments, such as the work of those in the IMAGIST SCHOOL your son, white man!” A condensed drama, the poem (see MODERNISM). The rhymes in Montage spark with enacts the hateful epithets and denials the boy wit; the rhythms are interjected with bitterness of receives in response to his declaration, incorporating unrealized dreams. A sensitive portrayal of voices lines that voice the white man’s objectifying views of embedded in a specific place and time, Montage is black women: “What’s a body but a toy?” In The Big played for the ears of all Americans, as it continually Sea (1940), Hughes describes working on “Mulatto” asks: “Ain’t you heard” of our “dream deferred”? every night for an entire summer and reading the Deliberately accessible but deceptively simple, poem at James Weldon JOHNSON’s home. Listeners Hughes’s work reveals the complexities particular to were moved and considered it a breakthrough in composing a life within the socioeconomic frames of Hughes’s work (Rampersad 394). In the 1930s, racism and insists upon the importance of African aspects of Hughes’s work began to change as events, Americans’ contributions to and participation in Amer- such as the Scottsboro trial, in which a group of black ican literature, art, and history. 228 HUGO, RICHARD

BIBLIOGRAPHY to poetry, such as returning to childhood experiences Hughes, Langston. The Big Sea: An Autobiography by Langston for the source of adult anxieties. In 1981 the Academy Hughes. In The Langston Hughes Reader: The Selected Writ- of American Poets awarded Hugo the Edgar Allan Poe ing of Langston Hughes. New York: George Braziller, 1958, Fellowship for distinguished poetic achievement. He pp. 317–398. was twice nominated for the National Book Award and Rampersad, Arnold. The Life of Langston Hughes. Volume 1: was once runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize. 1902–1941, I, Too, Sing America. New York: Oxford Uni- Hugo was haunted in his adult life by the austerity versity Press, 1986. ———. The Life of Langston Hughes. Volume II: 1941–1967. of his childhood, and his dysfunctional relationship New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. with his grandmother produced recurrent anxiety ———. “The Origins of Poetry in Langston Hughes.” Mod- throughout his life regarding women. In such poems as ern Critical Views: Langston Hughes, edited by Harold “The Milltown Union Bar” (1973), Hugo charts a psy- Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1989, pp. 179–189. chological progression from a displaced childhood to Trotman, C. James, ed. Langston Hughes: The Man, His Art, an uneasy adulthood, where the only comforts are and His Continuing Influence. New York: Garland, 1995. alcohol and the honest camaraderie of fellow drunks. Kimberly Lamm Hugo repeatedly balanced the grimness of his vision with the promise that suffering is made more tolerable HUGO, RICHARD (1923–1982) Although through community. Hugo was also a regional poet. he started his writing career relatively late in life, His work is often compared to that of William Richard Hugo became distinguished as one of the pre- Wordsworth, although the intensity of Hugo’s investi- eminent poets of the American Northwest. After study- gations into his feelings has been described as more ing (along with David WAGONER) under Theodore postmodern than romantic. In any case his poetry suc- ROETHKE at the University of Washington in the late cessfully captures the fractured spirit of the Pacific 1940s, Hugo wrote several books of what became Northwest and the Big Sky country of Montana—its known as the CONFESSIONAL style of poetry. His first book provincial sensibility, the lonesome starkness of its of poems, A Run of Jacks (1961), published when he was landscape, and the desperate lives of its inhabitants are 38 and working as an executive at the Boeing Company, all presented against a backdrop of inimitable and sub- established him as poet who, with intense psychological lime natural beauty. His most famous and most often acuity, captured the lonesome emptiness of the rural anthologized poem, “Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg,” Northwest. It was largely on the basis of its success that is emblematic of his talent for well-crafted and self- in 1964 he was invited to become professor of English conscious poetry about destitute and defeated people and creative writing at the University of Montana, where living in dying Western towns. Lines, such as “The last he remained on the faculty until his death. good kiss you had was years ago” and “the tortured try Hugo was born in Seattle, Washington, and grew up of local drivers to accelerate their lives,” tersely capture in an area on the southwest outskirts of town near the the gritty reality of the rural West. In spite of the Duwamish River called White Center. When he was somber and existentialist overtones of this poetry, the only 20 months old, his teenage mother abandoned view is not altogether dismal; throughout Hugo’s work him to be raised by his maternal grandparents, who there persists the notion that sympathetic relations were stern and reserved Lutherans. He joined the U.S. with other people can be redemptive, as illustrated in Army Air Corps six months after Pearl Harbor was these lines from “Indian Girl” (1975): “We touch each bombed and flew 35 bombing missions in Italy before other by forgetting stars in taverns, / and we know the 1945. After the war he attended Roethke’s poetry sem- next man when we overhear his grief.” inars and began to amass a body of work that would Hugo called his approach “pyschogenic,” by which later be incorporated into his early books of poetry. He he meant that the poem should originate from, and be entered psychoanalysis in 1955, through which he dis- a reflection of, the self confronting its surroundings and covered techniques to help solidify his own approach struggling to make sense of feelings inspired by the HUGO, RICHARD 229 world. His poetry is more largely governed by feeling from a poem called “Glen Uig” in his collection The Right than by imagery, metrics, or any kind of systematic pre- Madness of Skye (1980): “Believe you and I sing tiny and cision, and it is for this reason often classified as post- wise and could if we had to eat stone and go on.” modern. A later poem, “Note to R.H. from Strongsville” BIBLIOGRAPHY (1977), is one of the best illustrations of Hugo’s self- Allen, Michael S. We Are Called Human: The Poetry of Richard conscious method of wrestling with demons in order to Hugo. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1982. produce a poem that captures an emotional state of Holden, Jonathan. Landscapes of the Self: The Development of mind: “When I’m alone, no sound, the vodka / and the Richard Hugo’s Poetry. New York: Associated Faculty room begin a roaring of their own.” In “Second Press, 1986. Chances” (1980), another poem from the same collec- Hugo, Richard. The Triggering Iown: Lectures and Essays tion, Hugo documents psychological problems he on Poetry and Writing. New York: Norton, 1979. experienced that persisted after he became famous. Pinsker, Sanford. Three Pacific Northwest Poets: Stafford, Hugo died of leukemia and is buried in St. Mary’s Hugo, and Wagoner. Boston: Twayne, 1987. Cemetery in Missoula, Montana. His epitaph is taken Aaron Parrett C I D

“THE IDEA OF ORDER AT KEY WEST” For all her attempts to reach out to the sea and com- WALLACE STEVENS (1936) The poetry of Wal- mune with it, the singer finally and inevitably manages lace STEVENS often takes as its theme the question of only a human impression of the sea. human epistemology—the study of what we know and The last two stanzas of the poem introduce an imag- how we know it. This question is central to 20th-cen- ined interlocutor, whom the speaker questions. He tury poets, most particularly to the so-called high asks why those walking along a quay, illuminated by modernists (see MODERNISM). “The Idea of Order at Key the lights of boats in slips, perceive the sea to be West” approaches this question by meditating on the divided in quadrants of light, as if the never-resting problem of mimesis, or whether or not art can suc- ocean could be so contained and organized. In answer, cessfully imitate and represent reality. Above all the the speaker concludes that humans have a “rage for poem questions the relationship between human lan- order,” an uncontrollable desire to master and recreate guage and nature. the natural world in their own image and according to The poem is written in blank verse (unrhymed their own perceptions. iambic pentameter), which is well suited to philosoph- Although this need for order prevents human beings ical meditation, because it is the closest in rhythm and from reproducing the world of nature, Stevens calls the meter among traditional verse forms to natural English rage “Blessed.” The singer’s attempt to order the sea speech. The speaker of the poem begins by describing enables her to sing “beyond the genius of the sea”— a woman walking along the shore of Florida’s Key West that is, to transcend nature and become the maker of a and singing a song of the sea. But from the first line the world in sound and language that is uniquely human. speaker insists that the woman’s song does not accu- As critic Harold Bloom writes, the poem is finally rately represent the sea, because human sounds and equivocal and ambivalent about the relationship language cannot imitate the nonhuman sounds and between art and nature: It “affirms a transcendental rhythms of the ocean. Her song contains words that poetic spirit yet cannot locate it, and . . . also remains seek to imitate the sea, but the sea remains alien and uneasily wary about the veritable ocean” (104). inscrutable. BIBLIOGRAPHY Stevens proposes that because language is a human Bloom, Harold. Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate. invention, attempts to represent the natural world Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1976. through language are merely artifice, a type of decep- Cook, Eleanor. Poetry, Word-Play, and Word-War in Wallace tion through which humans attempt to organize and Stevens. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988. control what they cannot truly perceive or understand. Edwin J. Barton

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I DON’T HAVE ANY PAPER SO SHUT UP, to expose abuses. In addition, as Bob PERELMAN points (OR, SOCIAL ROMANTICISM) BRUCE out, Andrews’s poems illustrate the philosopher ANDREWS (1992) I Don’t Have Any Paper strongly François “Lyotard’s archetypal command to postmod- displays Bruce ANDREWS’s avant-garde conviction that ern intellectuals to ‘wage a war on totality’” (10), to political art, in order to effect social change, must force- refuse a singular point of view. Andrews therefore fully alter the reader’s consciousness while simultane- denies to readers the central perspective associated ously inviting her or his active participation. An with a traditional, unified narrative—one that pro- embodiment of LANGUAGE SCHOOL philosophy involving motes the speaking self above all else. As Andrews sees the materiality of language, the poem contains syntacti- it, this is a privileging of the white male perspective cal and semantic disruptions, shocking colloquial and historically has served to erase expressions of race, phrases, and ironic juxtapositions. As much themati- gender, and class difference. cally concerned with politics as with enacting social cri- BIBLIOGRAPHY tique, I Don’t Have Any Paper aims at the radical kind of Perelman, Bob. “Building a More Powerful Vocabulary: writing Andrews believes possible only when one Bruce Andrews and the World (Trade Center).” Arizona accepts the notion that language is not pure, or trans- Quarterly: 50.4 (1994): 117–131. parent, but reflects dominant political ideologies. The Megan Swihart Jewell broken-up rhythms and irregular lines work, much like the poetry of Charles OLSON, to shift focus to how lan- guage constructs one’s perception of the world; yet, as IGNATOW, DAVID (1914–1997) David in the poems of Clark COOLIDGE, these techniques Ignatow’s poetry speaks for the common people. Walt simultaneously underscore the arbitrariness of language Whitman was an especially strong influence on Igna- and its connection to ongoing political abuses. tow, although, to some extent, this influence is indirect, Comprised of 100 experimental prose poems (see via the intermediate force of William Carlos WILLIAMS. PROSODY AND FREE VERSE), each about three pages in Ignatow knew and corresponded with many Ameri- length, I Don’t Have Any Paper is often cited as Andrews’s can poets, among them Williams, Charles REZNIKOFF, most accessible work; the volume is also noted for its Gregory CORSO, Charles OLSON, Allen GINSBERG, Louis aggressive, at times hostile, tone. With such titles as ZUKOFSKY, Robert CREELEY, Denise LEVERTOV, and Har- “America Shops,” “Communism Is a Morale Problem,” vey SHAPIRO. Like Whitman and his many followers, and “This Unity Sounds Posturepedic to Me,” I Don’t Ignatow strove for simplicity and personal immediacy, Have Any Paper uses wordplay to reveal the hypocrisy usually assuming the pose of the common, unliterary and vacuousness of consumer culture, as well as to observer. And, again like Whitman and Williams, he underscore the fragmented nature of national identity. sought for his effects through a deceptive simplicity Andrews employs parody to illustrate how political and surprising paradox. His numerous works, strongly beliefs reveal themselves in everyday speech; he fre- autobiographical, deal with social as well as personal quently combines sexual and scatological puns with issues in quietly meditative free verse. financial jargon, and he rewrites popular slogans to Ignatow was born in Brooklyn, New York, and spent expose imperialist desires for blind gratification. practically all his life in the New York metropolitan area. Phrases, such as “Sink the boat people!” (“Help Defeat Ignatow worked for a time as a journalist with the Your Country”), “Tear-gas the middle class. Blonds have Works Progress Administration (WPA) Federal Writers’ more enemas” (“Learn to Be Dispensible”), and “‘Control Project. His first collection of poetry (Poems) appeared in the budget & you have them by the predestined—” 1948. In a career that lasted more than 50 years, Igna- (“Oh, Glaze Me Big!”), attack American values, exposing tow authored 17 books and served as editor for various them as contributors to and perpetuators of oppression. literary journals. He taught in several institutions of By means of ironic pronouncements, Andrews’s higher learning in the United States (including the New speaker takes on the voices of those in power in order School for Social Research, Southampton College, 232 IMAGIST SCHOOL

Columbia University, and York College of the City Uni- recall ever seeing a poem that came out of someone versity of New York). He received several honors during else’s book, that came out of literature” (28). His exal- his career—two Guggenheim Fellowships (1965 and tation of the pedestrian and the ordinary are closely 1973), a National Institute of Arts and Letters Award akin to what Whitman critics often call “the glory of (1964), and the Bollingen Prize (1977). the commonplace” (Aspiz 105). Of particular interest in The Gentle Weight Lifter, Say Ignatow’s son, David, was an institutionalized schiz- Pardon (1961), and Figures of the Human (1964) is ophrenic, which caused his father great anguish, as Ignatow’s emphasis upon the poetic parable. Rescue the portrayed in “Sunday at the State Hospital” (1970). Dead, Ignatow’s 1968 collection, revealed his interest When visiting in the mental hospital, the son cannot in the serious themes of social reform, family relation- manage to eat the food the father has brought for him. ships, and human kinship with nature. In Facing the The poet’s “past is sitting in front of” him, unable “to Tree (1975), The Animal in the Bush (1977), and Tread bring the present to its mouth.” Another sort of the Dark (1978), he examines death and the art of anguish is displayed in “Play Again” (1970), a poem poetry. Later collections include Whisper to the Earth written in response to the report late in 1962 in the (1981), Leaving the Door Open (1984), Shadowing the New York newspapers of a nine-year-old child being Ground (1991), and Against the Evidence: Selected raped on a roof and hurled 20 stories to the ground. Poems, 1934–1994 (1993). The Notebooks of David Igna- The poet’s outrage is held in check through the use of tow was published in 1973, and The One in the Many: fantasy, the desire that the child can once again play— A Poet’s Memoirs in 1988. not on a roof, but on a stairway: “When we played it Because Ignatow, like Whitman, lived most of his was to love each other / in games.” Here, as elsewhere life in New York City, and because he was stamped in his poetry, the poet exposes a tenderness amid the indelibly as a New Yorker, he observed that in many of brutalities of modern city life. his poems the style of his writing demanded “receptiv- BIBLIOGRAPHY ity to anger, sarcasm, satire, brutality, indifference and Aspiz, Harold. “The Body Politic in Democratic Vistas.” In anguish, anguish with which all is presented.” (Terris Walt Whitman: The Centennial Essays, edited by Ed Folsom. “Preface” ii). The posthumous volume At My Ease Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1994, pp. 105–119. (1998) contains numerous poems that depict city Moran, Daniel Thomas. “With Ignatow at Whitman’s Birth- life—weaving in and out of taxis, subways, and place.” Starting from Paumanok: Newsletter of the Walt crowds, meditating on chance meetings, and observa- Whitman Birthplace Association (spring 1998): 1. tions of strangers’ work—all reminiscent of Whitman’s Shapiro, Harvey. “Tribute to David Ignatow.” Poetry Society of Leaves of Grass. In a 1956 poem, “For Walt Whitman,” America Journal 58.1 (spring 1998): 28–29. Ignatow coyly compares his own emotional and poetic Terris, Virginia R. Preface to At My Ease: David Ignatow’s life to that of his model, taunting Whitman for being Uncollected Poems of the Fifties and Sixties, edited by Terris. Rochester, N.Y.: BOA Editions, 1998, p. ii. someone who might not like, when riding on a subway ———., ed. Meaningful Differences: The Poetry and Prose of train, to be “pushed out / by your camerados.” Basi- David Ignatow. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, cally, as Ignatow confesses to Whitman, the younger 1994. poet feels that his life “betrays” the older poet. In another poem, “Walt Whitman in the Civil War Hospi- James T. F. Tanner tals” (1990), Ignatow attempts to empathize with Whitman’s sufferings as he transmutes the hospital IMAGIST SCHOOL (IMAGISM) Imag- experiences into meaningful poetry, accepting—with ism is a term associated with an eclectic group of Eng- praise—the inevitability of death. lish and American poets working between 1912 and Ignatow deliberately strove to avoid a “literary” 1917, among them some of the most important writ- style. Shapiro, close friend and fellow New Yorker, ers in English of the first half of the 20th century: Ezra says, “I remember his early manuscripts and can’t POUND, Amy LOWELL, William Carlos WILLIAMS, H. D. IMAGIST SCHOOL 233

(Hilda Doolittle), D. H. Lawrence, Ford Madox Ford, encouraged sentimental optimism concerning the ulti- and Richard Aldington. Never a wholly American mate perfectibility of humankind and which led, in movement, imagism nevertheless had a dramatic turn, to art that was soft and weakly expressive. In its effect on several subsequent generations of self-con- place he advocated poetry built around the “hard, dry sciously American writers and poets, perhaps most image,” along with a view of human beings as finite, fal- directly on those associated with the OBJECTIVIST and lible, and corrupt. This view would later strike a chord BLACK MOUNTAIN SCHOOLS of poetry. Even poets not for- in members of the post–World War I Lost Generation, mally associated with imagism, such as T. S. ELIOT, and it can be seen in the interwar themes of such major Conrad AIKEN, Marianne MOORE, and Wallace STEVENS, novelists as F. Scott Fitzgerald and John Dos Passos. or overtly hostile to aspects of imagist aesthetics, such Following Hulme, the imagists aimed to strip away as Robert FROST, benefited indirectly from the imagist poetry’s tendency toward dense wordiness and senti- school’s formal experimentation and widespread criti- mentality and to crystallize poetic meaning in clear, cal success. neatly juxtaposed images. This crystallization is nicely The history of imagism has two relatively distinct exemplified by Hulme’s poem “Autumn” (1909, pub- phases. The first is associated with Pound, who led the lished 1915) in which the Moon, the stars, and the movement from 1912 until 1914, when he essentially images of different faces attached to them become vehi- abandoned it to devote himself to championing vorti- cles for questioning the value of modern, urban life: cism, an English version of Italian futurism, centering A touch of cold in the Autumn night— on the work of the artist and poet Wyndham Lewis and I walked abroad, the sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. Imagism’s second And saw the ruddy moon lean over a hedge phase, which Pound labeled “Amygism” in resentment Like a red-faced farmer. over his loss of control of the movement, is associated I did not stop to speak, but nodded, with Amy Lowell and spans roughly the years 1915 to And round about were the wistful stars 1917. After 1917 most imagist principles were so With white faces like town children. widely dispersed and accepted (and badly imitated) within the Anglo-American literary community that Given its subject matter, the poem remains, in typical the movement, never very cohesive to begin with, imagist fashion, notably free from the kind of tone and made way for more radical avant-garde practices. rhythmic constraints characteristic of related works by, Imagism emerged from Pound’s involvement in Lon- say, A. E. Housman, an English poet whom Pound don with a Poets’ Club that began meeting formally would later satirize in his poem “Song in the Manner under T. E. Hulme in 1908. By 1909 the club had been of Housman” (1911). reconstituted as the “second” Poets’ Club by Hulme The connections in Hulme’s poem and elsewhere to and F. S. Flint, and it included Pound as well as Ford William Wordsworth and especially to William Blake Madox Ford. Although the first reference in print to are obvious and remain somewhat ironic, given the “Les Imagistes” occurred in 1912 in Ripostes, a collec- depth of Hulme’s hostility toward romanticism more tion of Pound’s poems, the term actually refers to what generally. However, as John Gage has noted in his Pound calls “a forgotten school of 1909,” or the second study of imagist poetics, the imagists maintained links Poets’ Club, which he explicitly identifies as “a school “not only with romantics such as [Percy Bysshe] Shel- of Images” (59). ley or even Blake, but also with the more conservative This imagist school owed much philosophically to aestheticists of the Victorian generation, against whom Hulme, who is today best remembered as a neoclassical they were in ostensible revolt” (17). Other early and aesthetician, disciple, and translator of the French more radical influences on the imagists included the philosopher and Nobel Laureate Henri Bergson. Hulme symbolist poets, classical Greek and Roman poetry, railed against what he understood to be a prevailing and Chinese and Japanese verse forms, in particular cultural romanticism, which in social philosophy the haiku, or hokku. 234 IMAGIST SCHOOL

The “image,” of course, remained central to imagist versification attempted by symbolist poets, such as theory and practice throughout the existence of the Arthur Rimbaud and Jules Laforgue. movement and developed principally, though partially, Pound used his role as foreign correspondent for from Hulme’s reading of Bergson’s metaphysics. In Harriet Monroe’s literary magazine Poetry to advance Hulme’s translation of Bergson’s Introduction to Meta- the imagist cause. Monroe herself initially supported physics, Bergson proposes that the convergence of images Pound’s ambitions and proved willing to make avail- allows one to peer behind the veil of language and thus able to her readers the very best work of this new to experience things as they really are. Bergson’s and school, along with relevant explanatory criticism, with Hulme’s ideas helped Pound refine his understanding of a view to expanding the tastes of America’s literary the image in poetry. In his celebrated essay “A Few Don’ts establishment and introducing them to European by an Imagist” (1913), Pound somewhat abstractly developments in the poetic and other arts. Monroe defines the image in almost photographic terms as published work by many of the imagists Pound brought to her attention, perhaps most notably H. D., that which presents an intellectual and emotional whose “Three Poems” can be found in Poetry’s January complex in an instant of time. . . . It is the presen- 1913 issue and are attributed somewhat grandly to tation of such a “complex” instantaneously which “H. D., Imagiste,” an appellation created by Pound. gives that sense of sudden liberation; that sense of It was in the pages of Poetry that Lowell first became freedom from time limits and space limits; that acquainted with imagism, and the experience of read- sense of sudden growth, which we experience in ing H. D.’s poems profoundly altered the way in which the presence of the greatest works of art. she understood herself. In Jean Gould’s words, “the revelation of Amy’s own identity came over her in a Perhaps nowhere is this sense of freedom more per- great surge: She was an Imagiste, too! This was the sort fectly realized than in Pound’s own work “In a Station of poetry she had been unknowingly striving to write. of the Metro,” a poem which the critic J. T. Barbarese It was startlingly clear to her that she was born Imag- has termed imagism’s “enabling text” (307). iste” (113). The realization of this affinity with imagism The compactness and immediacy of Pound’s poem drove Lowell to make contact first with Monroe, whom recall the three imagist principles agreed to by Pound, she persuaded to publish some of her work, then later H. D., and Richard Aldington in 1912: with Pound in London. 1. Direct treatment of the ‘thing,’ whether sub- Both strong personalities, Pound and Lowell initially jective or objective. found much in common in their approach to poetry, 2. To use absolutely no word that does not con- although differences between them soon became clear. tribute to the presentation. Lowell particularly objected to Pound’s relatively weak 3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence commitment to imagism per se, to his tendency to of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a champion serially one avant-garde movement after metronome. (Pound “A Retrospect” 4) another, rather than consolidating and then evolving as an artist within a single movement over time. During This last principle draws attention to the fact that “In a her visit to England in 1914, Lowell found Pound sur- Station of the Metro,” and indeed nearly all of the prisingly detached from imagism and so immersed in works produced by poets who thought of themselves vorticism that her questions about the former were met as imagists, were written in “vers libre,” or free verse: variously with rudeness and indifference. poetry in which rhyme may or may not be present but Taking the initiative, Lowell decided to publish an in which cadence is valued more highly than meter anthology of imagist verse, one that would extend the (see PROSODY AND FREE VERSE). The commitment of the movement beyond what she perceived as the rather imagists to free verse followed from their desire to introductory point it had reached with Pound’s edited escape from more metrically formal modes of French volume Des Imagistes (1914). The result of Lowell’s INEZ, COLETTE 235 efforts was the first of a series of three collections of much of what we now take for granted as poetry would verse, each entitled Some Imagist Poets, which brought be, quite literally, unimaginable. together a heterogenous group of writers and which BIBLIOGRAPHY appeared, respectively, in 1915, 1916, and 1917. In Barbarese, J. T. “Ezra Pound’s Imagist Aesthetics.” In The the 1915 collection, Lowell was careful to distance her- Columbia History of American Poetry, edited by Hay Parini self from Pound, who, she implied, had distorted ima- and Brett C. Miller. New York: Columbia University Press, gism by making it too much in his own image. 1993, pp. 284–318. What is striking in Lowell’s presentation of imagism Bergson, Henri. An Introduction to Metaphysics, translated by is her determined anglicization of the movement. Gone T. E. Hulme. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1912. from the imagist lexicon are such francophone terms as Flint, F. Cudworth. Amy Lowell. Minneapolis: University of imagisme and vers libre, and in their place rest their Eng- Minnesota Press, 1969. lish-language equivalents: Imagism, free verse, and Gage, John. In the Arresting Eye: The Rhetoric of Imagism. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981. unrhymed cadence. Gone too is Pound’s emphasis on Gould, Jean. Amy: The World of Amy Lowell and the Imagist concision, for, as several critics, have noted of Lowell, Movement. New York: Dodd Mead, 1975. “although Imagism was congenial to her penchant for Grieve, Tom. “Imagism Revisited.” West-Coast-Line 27:3 noticing her surroundings, the Imagist stress on con- (winter 1993–94): 110–130. ciseness was quite antipathetic to her temperament. Hulme, T. E. “Autumn.” Ripostes, edited by Ezra Pound. Whatever Miss Lowell’s virtues, succinctness, except London: Elkin Mathews, 1915, p. 60. sometimes in repartee, was not among them” (Flint 25). Kenner, Hugh. The Poetry of Ezra Pound. Norfolk, Conn.: Indeed Lowell’s regular failure to adhere to the second New Directions, 1951. of Pound’s 1912 strictures noticeably marks (some ———. The Pound Era. Berkeley: University of California would say mars) her contributions to 1915’s Some Imag- Press, 1973. Pound, Ezra. “A Few Don’ts By An Imagist.” Poetry 1.6 ist Poets and is most striking in her contributions “The (March 1913): 198–206. Reprint, “A Retrospect.” Literary Travelling Bear” and “The Letter.” Pound read these Essays of Ezra Pound, edited by T. S. Eliot. New York: New works as indicative of Lowell’s lack of discipline as a Directions, 1968, pp. 3–14. poet and, consequently, of her failure as an imagist. ———. Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, edited by T. S. Eliot. Pound ultimately had very little at stake in his bick- New York: New Directions, 1968. ering with Lowell, although he launched a series of ———. “A Retrospect.” Pavannes and Divisions. New York: attacks on her and her publisher just prior to the pub- Knopf, 1918. Reprint, Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, edited lication of her first imagist anthology. He, and indeed by T. S. Eliot. New York: New Directions, 1968, pp. 3–14. poetry more generally, had moved on. Imagism would Pratt, William, and Robert Richardson, eds. Homage to Imag- remain a viable “project” throughout the war years, and ism. New York: AMS, 1992. a touchstone for poets for some time after that, but by Adam Muller 1930 the movement was unequivocally dead. In 1930 the house Chatto and Windus published the retrospec- INEZ, COLETTE (1931– ) Colette Inez can tive Imagist Anthology 1930, edited by Glenn Hughes be viewed as belonging to the CONFESSIONAL school of and Ford Madox Ford, which again brought together poetry, as much of her work draws on her life experi- the work of Aldington, H. D., Fletcher, Flint, James ences; however, she also examines more universal Joyce, Lawrence, and Williams. The anthology was an themes, such as the formation of identity and the anachronism, and Pound attacked it violently, referring understanding of womanhood. Inez’s poetry has been to it in a letter as “Aldington’s Imagist mortology 1930” praised for what Thomas Lask calls her “adventure- and dismissing it as “20 ans apres.” But Pound’s attack someness” in selecting subject material (29). She was cannot mask imagism’s profound importance. It proved influenced as a child by the rhythm of religious songs to be one of the most deeply transformative literary and her reading of Emily Dickinson, and words them- movements of the early 20th century, and without it so selves became of great importance to her. Her use of 236 “IN JUST-SPRING” free verse allows her to experiment with their sounds BIBLIOGRAPHY (see PROSODY AND FREE VERSE) . Gorman, Jim. “An Interview with Colette Inez.” Parnassus Inez was born in Brussels, Belgium, and raised in a 7.1 (1978): 210–223. children’s home; her father, an American priest, and her Lask, Thomas. “Voices from the Distaff Side.” New York mother, a French archivist, could not marry, and neither Times, 18 August 1972, 29. parent wanted to acknowledge Inez’s birth. At the age of Schultz, Robert. “Family Life” Hudson Review 42.1 (spring 1989): 154–155. eight, Inez was brought to America to be raised by a cou- ple in New York. However, they were indifferent parents, Kelli Murphy and their alcoholism and marital problems created addi- tional problems for Inez. Inez’s struggle to overcome her “IN JUST-SPRING” E. E. CUMMINGS childhood profoundly influences her poetry. She has (1923) E. E. CUMMINGS’s “in Just-spring,” one of his received numerous awards for her work, including a most popular poems, is derived mainly from imagism Pushcart Prize in 1986–87 and the Reedy Memorial in that its main purpose is to re-create, in as few words Award from the Poetry Society in America in 1972. as possible, the sensual particulars of a lyrical moment Many of Inez’s poems explore her parents’ illicit (see IMAGIST SCHOOL)—but it also introduced much of liaison and their abandonment of her as well as the the technical innovativeness, particularly with regard difficulties she experienced in her American foster to the placement of words on the page, that Cummings home. Inez tries to understand the choices her parents pioneered and accomplished more than any other made and how their decisions have influenced her American modernist poet (see MODERNISM). First identity and choices. However, in her search for under- sketched as an exercise for a class at Harvard at a time standing and ultimately acceptance of her childhood, (about 1914) when free verse excited undergraduates Inez does not present herself as victim. Rather she but was discouraged by professors, the poem captured “speaks with poise and measure,” according to Robert the poet’s childhood memories of a street that flooded Schultz (154), from the perspective of an adult. In the in spring each year—at the same time that a balloon- title poem from her second book, Alive and Taking seller began showing up, blowing his whistle. Names (1977), she proclaims: “I am well, sound, hale, Cummings made many changes in the poem before cross referenced with fit, / snuffling the morning air, its publication that greatly illuminate the how and why alive and taking names,” suggesting that she has over- of his technical innovations. First he changed all the come her early disadvantages. Inez examines other, 1916 version’s capital letters, such as those beginning more universal ideas in her work as well. For instance, the names of children, to lowercase, then capitalized she believes, as Jim Gorman writes, that “the ‘female’ two other letters—the beginning of his practice of using experience is culturally, socially, and even organically capitalization for emphasis only. He also removed all unique” (222). Not surprisingly, birth, abortion, and commas and periods. To better “punctuate” his “score,” female sexuality therefore figure prominently in her he broke his stanzas into smaller ones, some but a line poetry. In “The Rape of Arethusa” (1972), for example, in length. Those lines he also frequently shortened, she describes the sexual abuse of a woman: “Her some of them to a single word apiece. More than once, thighs /...buckle and spread; / he prods.” Inez shows too, he spread his lines out, as when he appropriately that women may not only be exploited for their sexual- prolonged line 4 to “whistles far and wee.” ity but may also draw strength from it (see FEMALE Cummings cut his very first line from “In just-Spring” VOICE, FEMALE LANGUAGE). to “in Just-” to make his reader quickly aware of being Inez’s verse is polished and compelling. Though she in a poem that requires careful, slow reading—and to draws heavily from her own life, her poetry explores accentuate how abruptly arrived the scene is in spring. issues that are widely accessible. Her enthusiasm for By chopping “mud-luscious” in the same manner, he life and the world around her are conveyed in her gave “mud-” time to convey ugliness before its transfor- poetry with a clear and powerful voice. mation to what mud is delightfully to most children. “IN THE WAITING ROOM” 237

Perhaps Cummings’s best changes were his condensa- coexisting with O’Hara’s clearly articulated experiences tions of “Bill and Eddy” to “eddieandbill” and “Betty and that surface just often enough. It mentions real events, Isabel” to “bettyandisbel” to show onomatopoetically, such as staying at the Y in Chicago with Jane Freilicher, through spelling rather than sound, the inseparability and real things, such as the Hartigan paintings for and energy of Eddie and Bill and Betty and Isabel (with which O’Hara modeled. These events and things, how- “isbel” also, of course, suggesting the child-world the ever, are complicated by an awareness of the numerous poem is from, where names are sometimes only partly “naked selves” making up the various aspects of per- pronounced and often misspelled). Also important was sonality; thus the poem tries to mediate between the Cummings’s improvement of “ooze-suave” to “puddle- real self, the one created by experience, and the desired wonderful,” a near-perfect poetic compound word, along self, the one created by imagination, bridging the dis- the lines of “Just-spring,” with its multiple meanings of tance between who we are and who we wish to be. just. Through such techniques and well-chosen imagery, O’Hara uses recurring images of people and things especially that which gradually reveals the true identity from his own life in order to anchor the poem: “the of the balloon-seller (as the god Pan), Cummings hunt . . . nautical references . . . circus animals, exotic achieved a marvelous celebration of childhood—and of locales . . . and romantic characters” (Perloff 142); these spring, and the immortal, rather than old, goat-footed, images help to make sense of the historical continuum rather than lame, archetypal figure at its core. evident in the poem’s universality. All of human experi- ence is here, from time and geography, in O’Hara’s BIBLIOGRAPHY claim to be everything from “a baboon eating a banana” Kennedy, Richard S. Dreams in the Mirror. New York: Live- to “a Chinaman climbing a mountain.” In keeping with right, 1980, 24–25, 97. Lindroth, James R., and Colette Lindroth. The Poetry of E. E. its name, the poem is about feeling, and “what matters Cummings. New York: Monarch Press, 1966, pp. 26–28. is not what happened but how one felt or feels about it” (Perloff 142). “The serpent in their midst,” who must be Bob Grumman saved at the poem’s conclusion, is O’Hara himself—the snake being his frequently used totem figure. In this “IN MEMORY OF MY FEELINGS” way, self preservation surfaces to reconcile the splin- FRANK O’HARA (1958) Frank O’HARA started “In tered self by resolving the jumble of impressions. Memory of My Feelings” on what he believed to be his BIBLIOGRAPHY 30th birthday, June 27, 1956—he was born in March, Gooch, Brad. City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O’Hara. less than nine months after his parents’ wedding, and New York: Knopf, 1993. never knew his real birth date—and finished it four Perloff, Marjorie. Frank O’Hara: Poet among Painters. New days later, having left paper in his typewriter so that he York: George Braziller, 1977. could return to it immediately without having to inter- rupt his inspiration. The speed and spontaneity of this A. Mary Murphy procedure is not only typical of O’Hara’s practice but is also reminiscent of Jack KEROUAC’s somewhat concur- “IN THE WAITING ROOM” ELIZABETH rent experiment (unpublished until 1957) with the BISHOP (1971) This autobiographical poem pub- scroll on which he typed On the Road in 20 days during lished in Elizabeth BISHOP’s last book, is about a girl on April 1951. The poem is dedicated to Grace Hartigan, a the verge of maturity, “three days” short of “seven years painter and one of O’Hara’s muses, but is neither about old.” Robert LOWELL wrote comparable poems about her nor for her. It is an address to her, in five parts of his childhood, but “In the Waiting Room” has too 33 to 44 lines each, through which O’Hara deals with much respect for art’s power over circumstance to fit identity in general and his own in particular. into Lowell’s usual genre of CONFESSIONAL POETRY. The poem obviously is influenced by SURREALISM in Bishop’s poem is best understood as a relative of its mass of disparate references, but it is a surrealism Wallace STEVENS’s meditations on art or as a skeptical 238 IRBY, KENNETH re-creation of two traditional schemes of human devel- Pinsky, Robert. “The Idiom of a Self: Elizabeth Bishop and opment: the growth of the poet’s mind in William Wordsworth.” American Poetry Review 91.1 (January–Feb- Wordsworth’s work and the progress of the Christian ruary 1980): 6–8. soul in the poem Bishop herself paired with “In the Shaileen Beyer Waiting Room,” George Herbert’s “Love Unknown” (1633). “In the Waiting Room” turns disorientation IRBY, KENNETH (1936– ) Kenneth Irby into insight, though the insight is laced with despair. has been broadly influenced by such postmodern mas- The instrument of young Elizabeth’s epiphany is the ters as Charles OLSON, Robert DUNCAN, and Louis National Geographic magazine that she reads as she ZUKOFSKY, as shown in a broad range of poems that are waits for her aunt at the dentist’s office. Pictures and formally complex and grammatically idiosyncratic words that blur conventional distinctions between the while not swerving from a tone that is deeply personal. familiar and the alien play upon her mind until, with a But a much deeper influence has been his affinity for, start, she recognizes that her aunt’s “oh! of pain” coming and immersion in, the Midwestern plains where he has “from inside” is “me.” All insides, all appearances of spent most of his life. In an interview Irby said that his familiarity, she realizes, are, in truth, not insides but an poetry partakes of a “Great Plains Mysticism” con- anguishing outside—alienation: Domestic spaces are cerned with evoking the poet’s spiritual, intellectual, fictions that conceal the fact of the unknown. The real- and emotional relationship to the region (Bartlett 108). ization dizzies and terrifies her, but it also inspires her His poem “The Grasslands of North America” (1977), first self-conscious artistry. Clinging to what David Kal- for example, rhapsodizes on the sensation that the poet stone calls the “life-jacket” of “observation” (34)—a shy gets each time he enters this homeland region. It seems look at grown-up bodies and a precise phrase, “how to him that he is entering it again for the first time, ‘unlikely’”—she defends herself against the inscrutable every time. with her own primitive fictions. When her vertigo Irby was born in Bowie, Texas, and was educated at passes, she has been born as a creative being, someone the University of Kansas, Harvard, and the University of knowingly involved in the “War”—not only World War California, Berkeley. After serving in the army from 1960 I, a political struggle to forge community, but also a pri- to 1962, he began to publish small editions of his poetry vate version of that conflict: in Robert PINSKY’s words, and eventually produced 24 books, chapbooks, and “the war of the poet to work on the world of things and broadsides. Best received among these include Catalpa people as much as that world works on her” (7). (1977) and Call Steps: Plains, Camps, Stations, Consistories The “War” finds expression in the form of “In the (1992). Fellow poets have often remarked on Irby’s ret- Waiting Room.” Flat, lulling language muffles the shock icent nature and how he rarely acts forcefully to advance of revelation. The poet’s savvy viewpoint passes into his career, although they all agree that he deserves to be and out of the child’s baffled one. The poem exempli- better known, especially among working poets. Irby has fies Bishop’s ideal, described by David LEHMAN as “an art taught at the University of Kansas, Lawrence, and has that feeds on what might otherwise consume it, that received several awards and fellowships. thrives on loss, that welcomes limits in order to tran- Irby’s lines are typically varied in length and made scend them” (68). Such an art offers make-believe secu- musical by the skillful use of consonance, assonance, rity, not security itself: a waiting room, not a home. and internal rhyme. Though the length of the lines often follows the principles of Olson’s “breathed” meter BIBLIOGRAPHY (see ARS POETICAS and the BLACK MOUNTAIN SCHOOL), Kalstone, David. Five Temperaments. New York: Oxford Uni- versity Press, 1977. Irby’s poems do not have a signature appearance on the Lehman, David. “‘In Prison’: A Paradox Regained.” In Eliza- page. Instead the subject matter usually determines the beth Bishop and Her Art, edited by Lloyd Schwartz and overall form of the poem. Another highly significant Sybil P. Estess. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, characteristic of Irby’s poetry is his use of grammatical 1983, pp. 61–74 unorthodoxy, like Gertrude STEIN, in order to highlight IRBY, KENNETH 239 particular words in unfamiliar contexts. One method Bartlett. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, he uses is the inverted phrase, such as in an untitled 1987, pp. 107–124. poem from Catalpa (1977), which reads, in part: “the Bromige, David. “Ken Irby’s Catalpa.” Credences: A Journal of longer I live the more people I know / are dead, the Twentieth Century Poetry and Poetics 3.1 (February 1979): more the crossing of that line.” 101–103. Kelly, Robert. “On Irby.” Credences: A Journal of Twentieth BIBLIOGRAPHY Century Poetry and Poetics 3.1 (February 1979): 121–127. Bartlett, Lee. “Kenneth Irby.” In Talking Poetry: Conversations in the Workshop with Contemporary Poets, edited by Michael Van Dyke C J D

JACOBSEN, JOSEPHINE (1909–2003) Jose- Marilyn HACKER has observed that Jacobsen is “a com- phine Jacobsen’s quiet, formal poetry deals with the passionate and unsparing participant in the human problems and anxieties of humanity, but beneath that predicament she observes. Her poems are extraordi- is a profound sense of optimism, based on her deeply nary instances which reverberate with imagination held Roman Catholic beliefs, which include a fervent while eliciting new awareness in the conscience” (213). certainty in an afterlife. In her subjects and language, In “Pondicherry Blues” (1979), Jacobsen re-creates her poems claim what she described as “high ground.” the death of an old woman, in a slightly formal and She wrote, as she remarked, “in a formal idiom and ele- chillingly effective way, using a form that moves vated tone” (338). Influenced by Robert FROST and T. S. between the tone of Philip Larkin and W. H. AUDEN and ELIOT, many of her nature poems have a steady focus a spoken blues: “She troubled herself about her soul, / and observation comparable with Elizabeth BISHOP; yes, she was concerned about her soul,” but the priest they could also be reflexive and reflectively literate, as she calls for, whom she has earlier exasperated with typical of Marie PONSOT. tiresome academic questions of the nature of sin, has Jacobsen was born in Coburg, Ontario, Canada, and no time for Mrs. Pondicherry. Instead he chooses to was raised in Baltimore. Her first poem was published spend his time tending to the lonely and the poor of when she was 10, but she did not achieve widespread his parish. The poem concludes with the priest not recognition until her sixties. Her first book, Let Each making her last rites, and “she stopped her breath in a Man Remember, was published in 1940. She was lonesome slum of death / that dark trashy street of appointed in 1971 consultant in poetry to the Library death.” Jacobsen’s work demonstrates that enduring of Congress. She was inducted into the American poetry is not spun of mere craft but a kind of auditory Academy of Arts and Letters in 1994. She received the earnestness, a preference for depth and precision over Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of sheer charm and beauty. America in 1994 and in 1997 its highest award, the Robert Frost Medal for lifetime achievement in poetry. BIBLIOGRAPHY Jacobsen’s poetry has a muscular beauty and a Jacobsen, Josephine. “Lion under Maples.” In The Instant of deeply appealing seriousness. Her use of vernacular Knowing, edited by Elizabeth Spires. Ann Arbor: Univer- sity of Michigan Press, 1997, pp. 336–339. speech is exceptional, and her dramatic sense is keen. Hacker, Marilyn. “Editor’s Shelf.” Ploughshares 21.68 (winter Her poems revere the world with its birds, bees, flow- 1995–96): 213. ers, marriage, family bonds—often heightened by a wise sense of reckoning with death as a supreme fact. Gerald Schwartz

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THE JACOB’S LADDER DENISE LEVER- One tug presumably allows her to commune with the TOV (1961) Within a year of seeing herself Russian poet in “In Memory of Boris Pasternak,” where grouped by Donald Allen among the BLACK MOUNTAIN the natural and contrived world conspires to communi- poets of The New American Poetry 1945–1960 (see cate intimations of immortality. A butterfly becomes a POETRY ANTHOLOGIES), Denise LEVERTOV began, with the word emanating from the recently deceased poet. publication of her fourth volume of poetry, to dislodge The book provides many mutations of thing into herself from such affiliations. The poems of The Jacob’s word and word into thing. Their proximity is another Ladder are not projective (kinetic and defined by ancestral legacy. “The Necessity” suggests that in words breath), ideogrammatic (registering an idea through an force inheres: every element of “speech a spark / await- accumulation of its isolated attributes), or austere. They ing redemption.” The world is legible. The prefatory constitute not an “open field” of verse, as Charles OLSON poem, addressed “To the Reader,” assures us that “as advocated in his essay “Projective Verse” (see ARS POETI- you read / the sea is turning its dark pages.” Nature CAS), but, as in the title of one of the poems, “a common “poises itself to speak.” ground.” Upon this ground friends meet, beneath it kin With its personal meditations on childhood in Eng- are buried, from it words sprout into sustenance, “to be land, on the Judaism of her paternal forefathers (one, eaten / in common, by laborer / and hungry wanderer.” Schneour Zaimon, was a Russian rabbi), and on mys- Though the influence of William Carlos WILLIAMS’s ver- tic premonition (the Welsh mystic Angel Jones of Mold nacular idiom and Robert CREELEY’s scrupulously was a maternal forefather), The Jacob’s Ladder situates inward attention persist, Levertov is here more con- Levertov well outside the range of the Black Mountain cerned with sketching an eastern European Jewish poets with whom she had been linked. Like Paul genealogy. The poem ascends the Jacob’s Ladder in the Celan, whose poetry her own work would increasingly volume’s title poem. Boris Pasternak, Osip Mandelstam, resemble, Levertov would invoke, and be guided by, the rabbi Judah Loew, and Martin Buber’s Tales of the the precedent of Mandelstam (the subject of the first Hasidim are reverently evoked and quoted. The invisi- part of “Deaths”) over the voices of her adopted home- ble yet tangible presence of a fostering heritage, part land. Jerusalem, part Crimea, sustains the poet in “Song for a BIBLIOGRAPHY Dark Voice”: “Your arms / hold me from falling.” In Colclough Little, Anne, and Susie Paul, eds. Denise Levertov: “Come into the Animal Presence” and “The Presence,” New Perspectives. West Cornwall, Conn.: Locust Hill the presence switches from animal to spiritual. In “A Press, 2000. Solitude,” the transition is from human to angelic, Gelpi, Albert, ed. Denise Levertov: Selected Criticism. Ann enacted while leading a blind man out of the subway; Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993. the tunnel too can serve as a Jacob’s Ladder. Andre Furlani An anxiety courses through the book: Will the poet overlook what, in “From the Roof,” she calls “the Hid- JARMAN, MARK (1952– ) An important den Ones”? In “The Presence” she worries, “Will you figure in the New Narrative branch of the group identi- know who it is?” In “From the Roof” the Logos orders fied as the NEW FORMALISTS, Mark Jarman consistently both the urban landscape and the poet’s move to a new produces both LYRIC and NARRATIVE POETRY in traditional apartment within it. “Design” is a word used without a and open forms. In the 1980s, Jarman (along with hint of Robert FROST’s quandary (see “DESIGN”). “The Robert MCDOWELL) provided narrative poets with a Thread” turns out not to be bridle or noose but spring place to publish via the controversial literary magazine, of spiritual action. Beyond the poet’s powers of reason, the Reaper (see POETRY JOURNALS). Jarman and McDow- but tangibly within her being, this fine elastic “net of ell not only published poets as varied as Dana GIOIA and threads” is ancestral legacy at its most durable and like Jorie GRAHAM but also spearheaded a revival in narrative the mythical Ariadne’s clue, a reliable means of deliver- poetry; the magazine was “devoted specifically to reviv- ance. Its tugs inspire not fear “but a stirring / of wonder.” ing narrative” (Walzer 5). Jarman also has published a 242 JARRELL, RANDALL landmark anthology of New Formalist poets, Rebel “Jarman, Mark,” Academy of American Poets. Available on- Angels: 25 Poets of the New Formalism (1996). line. URL: //www.poets.org/poets/poets.cfm?prmID=94. Jarman was born in Mount Serling, Kentucky. His Downloaded April 2002. father, an Episcopalian minister, relocated the family to Walzer, Kevin. The Ghost of Tradition. Ashland, Oreg.: Story Line, 1998. Kircaldy, Fife, Scotland, and finally settled in California. Jarman received a B.A. from the University of California, Jeff Newberry Santa Cruz, where he studied with Raymond Carver, then received an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers’ Work- JARRELL, RANDALL (1914–1965) Ran- shop. Jarman’s The Black Riviera (1990) won the 1991 dall Jarrell—a poet of war, childhood, dream, and fan- Poet’s Prize, and his Questions for Ecclesiastes won the tasy—evokes a fluidity of experience and a sense of the 1998 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and was a finalist for self as changeable reminiscent of Marcel Proust. the National Book Critics Circle Award. Since 1983 he Although Jarrell was influenced by poets W. H. AUDEN, has been a professor of English at Vanderbilt University. Robert FROST, and especially Rainer Maria Rilke, Jar- Jarman’s early work in the collection North Sea (1978) rell’s own distinct voice becomes increasingly apparent is clearly lyric; however, by the time he published Far with each succeeding volume he published. Besides and Away (1985), Jarman’s poems had begun to take on being a significant poetic voice of the mid-20th cen- a more lengthy, open narrative form (Walzer 87). The tury, he was a beloved teacher (primarily at the major theme in Jarman’s work is Christian faith despite Woman’s College at the University of North Carolina), the silence of God. His poems, Richard Flynn writes, a feared but admired poetry critic, a social critic, and speak of a “rejection of rote faith in order to find poetic an author of children’s stories and an academic novel, faith, more sacred because it is more hard won” (158). Pictures from an Institution (1954). His poems reject traditional faith and challenge ortho- Born in Nashville, Tennessee, he lived through the depression and spent his early adulthood during dox Christianity’s idea of an unchanged, fixed deity. World War II, briefly as a pilot, but mainly as a trainer In “Unholy Sonnet 9” (2000), Jarman twists the con- of pilots. Despite his education at Vanderbilt Univer- ventional as he describes the first moments of an air- sity and his respect for the southern Agrarians (see line crash: “Someone is always praying as the plane / FUGITIVE/AGRARIAN SCHOOL), Jarrell expressed his urban Breaks up.” As the people aboard fall from the craft, egalitarian sensibility. Among the many awards and “Out of their names,” Jarman makes God’s absent pres- honors he received were the Guggenheim Fellowship ence known in his description of “the living sky.” The in poetry (1946) and the National Book Award for The God in this poem may exist, but his silence is keenly Woman at the Washington Zoo (1961). felt, as it is in “Questions for Ecclesiastes” (1997), “With the self-consciousness of the artist, Jarrell when an aging preacher must comfort parents whose approaches [the] problem of identity, subjects it to daughter has committed suicide: God might “have poetic examination” (152), writes critic Sister M. Ber- shared what he knew with people who needed / netta Quinn. The progression of Jarrell’s books of urgently to hear it” but instead “kept a secret.” poetry reflects not only his growing artistic maturity, Jarman’s other poetry titles include The Rote Walker but also his deepening concern with this problem. (1981), Iris (1992), and Unholy Sonnets (2000). In 2001 Despite echoes of other poets evident in Blood for a he published a book of essays, The Secret of Poetry. As a Stranger (1942), this first volume reveals feelings of poet and critic, Jarman continues to be an important fig- alienation from the self and others so evocative of the ure in the revival of narrative poetry in American verse. years preceding World War II. Little Friend, Little Friend BIBLIOGRAPHY (1945) deals with the depersonalization of war and an Flynn, Richard. “Mark Jarman.” Dictionary of Literary Biogra- indomitable human spirit that sometimes survives phy. Vol. 120, American Poets since World War II, edited by despite seemingly insurmountable odds. In Losses R.S. Gwynn. Detroit: Gale Research, 1992, pp. 156–161. (1948), Jarrell considers how the metamorphosis in JARRELL, RANDALL 243

fantasy offers escape from a merciless external world RET GUNNER” (1945), reveals the conflict between the and an irrational internal self. dehumanization of technologically sophisticated war- Jarrell’s immersion in fantasy, psychology, and phi- fare and the precarious human center embodied in the losophy becomes evident in The Seven League Crutches gunner of the aircraft. The final delivery of this figure— (1951), as the poet explores the self-transformation after two symbolic births in which he remains a fetus, a that is at the heart of fairytale, folktale, and psycho- mere potentiality—grotesquely merges with the sexual analysis. In The Woman at the Washington Zoo (1960), consummation that resulted in his conception: “They Jarrell looks further inward through personae washed me out of the turret with a hose.” (invented voices serving as masks for the author). Jar- Filled with sudden shifts from the comically prosaic rell continues this inward turning in The Lost World to the romantic, “A Girl in a Library” (1951) pits the (1965), as the child inside the man—often Jarrell’s own literary, reflective, Prufrockian speaker against the girl troubled past—is resurrected to retrieve lost vitality he is tenderly observing (see “THE LOVE SONG OF J. and faith, to reform his life by repossessing his early ALFRED PRUFROCK”). Although she is distracted by her years. The terza rima structure and tripartite form of mundane school assignments and her own mediocrity, “The Lost World” (1965) echoes Dante’s Divine Comedy, she retains, unbeknownst to herself, an enchanted and for Jarrell’s protagonist, like Dante’s, is undergoing a archetypal identity. Reminiscent of Jarrell’s transforma- spiritual journey that takes him to a kind of nether tions of artworks into poetry—such as Durer’s engrav- world, where the significant former beings he encoun- ing in “The Knight, Death and the Devil” (1951) and ters are his earlier selves reflecting his youthful experi- Breughel’s painting in “The Old and the New Masters” ences and fantasies. (1965)—in “The Bronze David of Donatello” (1960) Throughout his work, Jarrell explores dualisms. His Jarrell uses the statue as a metaphor for death, not as a concerns include the urge for mother as protector negation of individual identity, but as a resolution of (“Bats” [1965]), the maternal home (“Windows” struggle, an achievement of tranquility, an ennobling [1960]), and the womb (“A Little Poem” [1942]), as deference to the great universal design. well as his antipathy for the sinister female principle (as While Jarrell’s technical virtuosity is unmistakable, in “Cinderella” [1960], “The House in the Wood” his syntax is most frequently straightforward and his [1965], and “In Nature There Is Neither Right nor Left diction simple, suggesting the rhythms and idioms of nor Wrong” [1965]). As Jarrell turns to examine that speech. Jarrell avoided catering to fads of the day, “small, helpless, human center” (“The Old and the New emphasizing instead continuing standards of excellence. Masters” [1965]), the child remains the uniting, vul- Despite what critic M. L. Rosenthal calls the poet’s nerable “center” of value in opposition to a mechanical “depressive transcendence” (25), Jarrell’s work, balanced and rationalistic vision. In the overtly lighthearted with wit and humor, provides an unflinching evocation “Deutsch Durch Freud” (1960), Jarrell compares intu- of the reality of human suffering and the concomitant ition, reverence for language, and the restorative power urge—often thwarted—to redeem that suffering. of art (“Trust, and Love, and reading Rilke”) to “hard- BIBLIOGRAPHY eyed Industry / and all the schools dark Learning.” The Burt, Stephen. Randall Jarrell and his Age. New York: Colum- protagonist in “The Woman at the Washington Zoo” bia University Press, 2003. (1960), trapped within a self-perpetuated “cage” that Pritchard, William H. Randall Jarrell: A Literary Life. New she has created out of her dull official life, seeks to lib- York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1990. erate herself by affirming her connection with the ani- Rosenthal, M. L. Randall Jarrell. Minneapolis: University of mal world. “Change me, change me!” is her plea for a Minnesota Press, 1972. fairytale-like metamorphosis achieved by a magical inti- Quinn, Sister M. Bernetta. “Metamorphosis in Randall Jarrell.” macy between the male principle, given concrete form In Randall Jarrell 1914–1965, edited by Robert Lowell et al. in the vulture, and the woman repressed inside her. Jar- New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1967, pp. 139–154. rell’s five-line tour de force, “THE DEATH OF THE BALL TUR- Doris Zames Fleischer 244 JEFFERS, ROBINSON

JEFFERS, ROBINSON (1887–1962) Robin- tically solitary, meditating outdoors on the contrast son Jeffers was of the same generation as Ezra POUND and between the calmness, indifference, beauty, power, and T. S. ELIOT, but he abjured the modernist poetics of sym- longevity of natural phenomenon and human vulgarity, bolism and imagism (see IMAGIST SCHOOL and MOD- turmoil, ugliness, self-indulgence, triviality, and pain. ERNISM). He would not operate “in fear of abstraction,” as These poems illustrate a philosophical and ethical atti- Pound had dictated; accordingly his poetry does not shy tude Jeffers dubbed “Inhumanism, a shifting of empha- away from general statement and political opinion, in sis and significance from man to not-man” (Preface concert with intense, often violent descriptions of the xxi). The poems’ titles are likely to name animals (most natural world. In his introduction to Roan Stallion, particularly birds of prey) or places: “Pelicans,” “Hurt Tamar, and Other Poems (1935), Jeffers labeled his con- Hawks,” “Love the Wild Swan,” “The Cruel Falcon,” temporaries “followers of [Stéphane] Mallarmé,” bent on “The Beaks of Eagles,” “Vulture,” “Skunks,” “Birds and “renouncing intelligibility to concentrate on the music Fishes,” “Roan Stallion,” “Point Joe,” Continent’s End,” of poetry....[I]deas had gone, now meter had gone, “Tor House,” “Cawdor,” “New Mexico Mountain,” imagery would have to go; then recognizable emotions “Carmel Point,” “Red Mountain.” The former concen- would have to go; perhaps at last even words might have trate on the fate of animals, appreciative of their physi- to go” (ix). Removed from east-coast poetic milieux, Jef- cal particularity, their elegance, ferocity, and dignity. fers lived as a rugged outdoorsman in California, where The latter spread out a wilderness landscape panoram- he built himself and his family a stone tower, featured ically, linking land and ocean to the entire cosmos, try- often in his work. ing to portray human presence as a minor folly. The Jeffers was born in Pittsburgh. His father, a professor ocean fills the poetry as an emblem of the incontrovert- of theology, gave him a rigorous and varied education. ibly real, ultimately (and, to Jeffers, fortuitously) He learned Latin, Greek, and Hebrew while still a child impregnable to the most subtle and persistent imagina- and went to boarding schools in Germany and Switzer- tion. Similarly, everywhere in Jeffers’s work, the hard land. He attended the University of Western Pennsylva- and lovely fact of rock serves as a trusted reminder of nia, Occidental College, the University of Zurich, and the endurance of physical reality. the University of Southern California, studying, in addi- Indeed he held an unapologetic notion of the real as tion to classical and literary subjects, philosophy, medi- a vital element of poetry. In “Birds” (1925), for cine, and eventually forestry. He became a popular poet instance, he calls all raucous birds to surround his during the 1920s, and his translation of Medea was a composing self because a poem “needs . . . multitudes success on Broadway in 1948, but his isolationist posi- of thoughts, all fierce, all flesh-eaters, musically clam- tion during World War II earned him disparagement, orous.” This verse is built of hard alliteration and harsh and New Critical reading practices served his work assonance, propelled by deliberately awkward phras- poorly, lacking as it does verbal ambiguity and irony. ing and lineation. Well schooled in the merciless beau- Nevertheless he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1954 for ties of nature, Jeffers turns his unflinching gaze and Hungerfield and Other Poems. Some readers see his vivid, abrasive language toward the realities of world poetry as a valuable alternative to high modernism, war: “Not a few thousand but uncounted millions, not some read him as an important religious poet, and oth- a day but years, pain, horror, sick hatred; / Famine that ers find in his work a prescient unease about environ- dries the children to little bones and huge eyes; high mental degradation. Jeffers is also valued as a California explosive that fountains dirt, flesh and bone-splinters” poet, whose perspective from the Pacific allowed him, in (“Calm and Full the Ocean” [1948]). Such atrocities the words of Robert HASS, to “tell his culture bitter earn his sorrowful anger, but not his surprise—he truths” it often did not wish to hear (xxxi). bluntly and frequently asserts disbelief in human Jeffers wrote long poems (based on Greek tragedies) integrity or wisdom. His consolation is almost invari- and short lyrics; the LYRIC POETRY is generally considered ably that humanity will amount to no more than a brief his better contribution. His lyric speaker is characteris- virulent cancer that will consume itself, giving way to JOHNSON, JAMES WELDON 245 more dignified biological and geological phenomena. the 50th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclama- The earth will ultimately be cleansed of the ugly men- tion: It looks back to slavery and pronounces the right- ace that human beings are to themselves and to nature. ful claim of African Americans to American citizenship. Indeed, in “Vulture” (1962), Jeffers anticipates his own Johnson served, as Arna Bontemps wrote, as the “philo- death as a delivery to animality and to “enskyment” sophical onlooker” of the HARLEM RENAISSANCE and from troublesome humanity. rooted the younger generation of poets in a collective To Kenneth REXROTH in 1957, this attitude tradition by including their work in The Book of Ameri- amounted mostly to “childish laboring of the pathetic can Negro Poetry (1922), the first anthology of its kind fallacy . . . high-flown statements indulged in for their (vii). As both an editor and a poet, Johnson’s work melodrama alone” (205). In 1982 the Polish poet Czes- marks a transition away from dialect as the primary law Milosz, exiled to California, confessed, “I fumed at characteristic of African-American poetry. In the intro- [Jeffers’s] naïveté and his errors, I saw him as an exam- duction to the anthology that spans work from Paul ple of all the faults peculiar to prisoners, exiles, and Laurence Dunbar to Helene Johnson, he calls for a form hermits.” But Milosz continues, “his spirit, perhaps “that will express the racial spirit” but is “freer and reincarnated in the gulls ...flying over the beach in larger than dialect” (41). Johnson’s poetry, which draws majestic formation, challenged me to wrestle, and from dialect and the more typical features of the 19th- through its courage, gave me courage” (273). century lyric, insists upon both the continuance and BIBLIOGRAPHY transformation of the African-American oral tradition. Hass, Robert. Introduction to Rock and Hawk: A Selection of Johnson was born in Jacksonville, Florida. In 1894 Shorter Poems, by Robinson Jeffers. New York: Random he graduated from Atlanta University and gave the House, 1987, pp. xv–xliii. valedictory speech, “The Destiny of the Human Race.” Jarman, Mark. “Robinson, Frost, and Jeffers and the New He would go on to become a poet, journalist, transla- Narrative Poetry.” In Expansive Poetry: Essay on the New tor, musician, diplomat, educator, novelist, and lawyer. Narrative and the New Formalism, edited by Frederick His commitment to civil rights links the wide range of Feirstein. Santa Cruz, Calif. Story Line, 1989. his professional callings. In 1901 he was almost Jeffers, Robinson. Introduction to Roan Stallion, Tamar, and lynched in Jacksonville Park and decided to move to Other Poems, by Jeffers. New York: Modern Library, 1935, New York. He served as the director of the National pp. vii–x. Association for the Advancement of Colored People ———. Preface to The Double Axe and Other Poems, by Jef- (NAACP) (1920–30) and enacted many firsts; among fers. New York: Liverright, 1977, pp. i–xxii. Milosz, Czeslaw. “Robinson Jeffers.” In Centennial Essays for them, he was the first African American to be admitted Robinson Jeffers, edited by Robert Zaller. Newark: Univer- to the Florida bar, and he was New York University’s sity of Delaware Press, 1991, pp. 268–273. first African-American professor. His dedication and Rexroth, Kenneth. “In Defense of Jeffers.” In Critical Essays literary vision were recognized with many honors. In on Robinson Jeffers, edited by James Karman. Boston: G.K. 1925 he received the NAACP’s Spingarn Medal for Hall, 1990, pp. 205–206. God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse, a book Sara Lundquist of poetry that translates folk sermons of black preach- ers into written form; Johnson also received a 1928 JOHNSON, JAMES WELDON (1871–1938) Harmon Award, and in 1929 Johnson was awarded a James Weldon Johnson personifies the definition of a Julius Rosenwald Fellowship to write Black Manhattan, poet who is a spiritual and political leader. Prophetic, a history of African Americans in New York City. inspirational, and rhetorically elegant, Johnson’s poetry “O Black and Unknown Bards” (1935) is an ode to the resonated in American public life. His poem “Lift Every artists who created spirituals and songs during, and Voice and Sing” (1900), written to celebrate Abraham despite, slavery. W. E. B. DuBois described this body Lincoln’s birth, became popularly known as the “Negro of work as “The Sorrow Songs,” in which “the soul of National Hymn.” “Fifty Years” (1913) commemorates the black slave spoke to men” (204). Emblematic of 246 JOHNSON, RONALD

Johnson’s poetic work, the speaker is an incredulous and Books for 1967. In 1971 Johnson was writer-in-resi- admiring envoy, transcribing these oral pieces into writ- dence at the University of Kentucky and in 1973 held ten form, carrying the work into the present, and insist- the Theodore ROETHKE Chair for Poetry at the Univer- ing that they are not forgotten. By describing the poets as sity of Washington. In 1983 he received the National “bards” and drawing on a repertoire of images and tropes Poetry Series Award and in 1994 was the Roberta Hol- from the romantic tradition, Johnson places these songs loway Poet at the University of California, Berkeley. in the canons of Western poetry without sacrificing their ARK is Johnson’s most fully realized work; he bril- experiential and historical specificity. “O Black and liantly combines his early interest in concrete poetry Unknown Bards” attests to the work’s power to transcend and collage with his quest to understand the shape of time and transform a people. These slave songs “still live” being, the “compass beyond confines / music of the because the poets “sang a race from wood and stone to spheres solved, / mosaic of Cosmos.” Using the myth of Christ.” Johnson’s poetry envisions an emancipated Orpheus as a guiding structure and collaging texts as future inspired by the songs that bear witness to and diverse as Tory Peterson’s A Field Guide to Western Birds transcend America’s enslaved past. (1961) and Milton’s Paradise Lost (1674)—much like “found materials” are embedded in the Watts Towers BIBLIOGRAPHY sculptures in Los Angeles, an inspiration for ARK—he Bontemps, Arna. Introduction to The Autobiography of an Ex- Coloured Man, by James Weldon Johnson. 1912. Reprint, sought to create an ahistorical poem: “a structure rather New York: Hill and Wang, 1960, pp. v–ix. than diatribe, artifact rather than argument, a veritable DuBois, W. E. B. “The Sorrow Songs.” In The Souls of Black shell of the chambered nautilus, sliced and polished, Folk, by DuBois. 1903. Reprint, New York: Penquin bound for Ararat unknown” (“A Note” 274–275). After Books, 1989, pp. 204–216. ARK, Johnson wrote “Blocks to Be Arranged in a Pyra- Johnson, James Weldon. The Book of American Negro Poetry. mid” (1996), a memorial to AIDS victims in San Fran- Orlando, Fla.: Harcourt Brace, 1922. cisco, and The Shrubberies (2001), which were written Wilson, Sondra Kathryn. “James Weldon Johnson.” Crisis during the last five years of his life in Topeka, Kansas. (January 1989): 48–71, 117, 118. The Shrubberies, while ostensibly concerned with the Kimberly Lamm idea of gardening and its attendant themes of growth, death, and exile, particularly humanity’s exile from the JOHNSON, RONALD (1935–1998) While Garden of Eden, addresses not only the minutiae of the Ronald Johnson was influenced by Louis ZUKOFSKY and natural world, but the nature of language, vision, and the BLACK MOUNTAIN SCHOOL, especially Charles OLSON, even existence itself; in that book Johnson questions if he is unique in the visionary character of his poetry, he will live beyond the 20th century and wonders if he most fully manifested in his long poem, ARK, which took will then be able “to part the night of orbs in galaxy / him 20 years to write. The technical innovation of his the congeries of word and light” (“Form”). work, combined with the insistent strength of his BIBLIOGRAPHY insight into nature, language, and science, has estab- Johnson, Ronald. “A Note.” ARK. Albuquerque, N. Mex.: lished Johnson’s position as one of the most original and Living Batch Press, 1996, pp. 274–275. compelling poets of the late the 20th century. O’Leary, Peter. “Quod Vides Scribe In Libro.” In To Do As Johnson was born in Ashland, Kansas. On the G. I. Adam Did: Selected Poems of Ronald Johnson. Jersey City, bill, he went to Columbia University in New York City, N.J.: Talisman House, 2000. where he met Jonathan WILLIAMS, the founder of the Jar- Stratton, Dirk. Ronald Johnson. Boise, Idaho: Boise State Uni- gon Society, which published Johnson’s first book, A versity Western Writers Series, 1996. Line of Poetry, A Row of Trees (1964). After graduating in Selinger, Eric Murphy. “Ronald Johnson.” In Dictionary of Lit- 1960, Johnson moved with Williams to Great Britain, erary Biography. Vol. 169, American Poets since World War where a walking tour inspired The Book of the Green II, edited by Joseph Conte. Detroit: Gale Research, 1996. Man, one of the American Library Association’s Notable Marcella Durand JORDAN, JUNE 247

JORDAN, JUNE (1936–2002) “The creation From the beginning of her career, Jordan’s writing of poems,” June Jordan said, is “a foundation for true was dedicated to exploring the possibilities of commu- community; a fearless, democratic society” (qtd. in nity building through art. Her “most fundamental com- Muller 3). One of the most prolific African-American mitment,” according to Peter Erickson, was to “a writers, with more than 25 published books, Jordan rigorous scrutiny of democracy that focuses not only on regarded poetry as her primary calling, although her its history of exclusions, but also on its potential for works also include plays, essays, memoirs, and chil- expansion” (132). As a poet—and as a novelist, essay- dren’s books. A contemporary of Amiri BARAKA, Nikki ist, activist, and teacher—Jordan addressed a wide GIOVANNI, and Audre LORDE, Jordan’s early poetry spectrum of personal and political concerns. Her early reflects many of the concerns of the BLACK ARTS MOVE- work shows a strong commitment specifically to black MENT. Since the 1970s her writing has come to explore issues and explicitly addresses an African-American more broadly the conditions necessary both to attain audience. Her first book, Who Look at Me?—a poem and to maintain “freedom” for everybody, regardless of illustrated with representations of African Americans in race, gender, class, nationality, or sexual orientation, visual art—was published in 1968; it was followed in while at the same time staying committed to the 1971 by the first novel to be written entirely in Black expression of her individual vision. In a 1977 essay, English dialect, His Own Where. Since the 1970s Jor- Jordan wrote: “I should trust myself in this way: that dan’s explorations into what “freedom” and “democ- if I could truthfully attend to my own perpetual racy” can and should mean to the individual and her or birth . . . then I could hope to count upon myself to his communities have come to include, more broadly be serving a positive and collective function, without defined, the perspectives of “minoritized” groups in the pretending to be more than the one Black woman poet United States, as well as international concerns: the sit- I am” (126). uations in South Africa and in Lebanon in the 1980s, Jordan was born in Harlem, New York City, to the war in Yugoslavia in the 1990s, and the plight of the Jamaican parents and grew up in Brooklyn. Educated Palestinian people. Important collections that include at Barnard College and the University of Chicago poems with a wide thematic variety are Things That I Do (1953–57), she started to teach English and creative in the Dark (1977) and Naming Our Destiny (1989). Jor- writing in 1966—first at City College, the City Univer- dan was also a regular columnist for the Progressive sity of New York, where Adrienne RICH, Lorde, Toni from 1989 to 1997; Soldier, the autobiography of her Cade Bambara, Barbara Christian, and Addison Gayle, childhood years, appeared in 2000. Despite her long Jr., were colleagues and friends, then at Sarah career as a poet and her public visibility, however, Jor- Lawrence College and the State University of New dan’s work has not yet received the sustained critical York, Stony Brook. She taught African-American stud- attention it deserves. ies and women’s studies at the University of California, Regardless of some clear thematic and stylistic Berkeley, where she founded Poetry for the People in developments, Jordan’s poetry is characterized by, as 1991. She described this as “a marvelous adventure in Jacqueline Brogan observes, “recurring themes and democracy and education” (Muller 3): It encourages motifs of love and desire, of family, of social injustice, students to become poets and to carry their commit- of suffering, and of joy” (200). In “Who Look at Me” ment to “the power of the word” into the surrounding (1968), a poem dedicated to the poet’s son, the speaker communities (Muller 4). Jordan’s honors include a Prix sees herself “stranded in a hungerland / of great pros- de Rome in environmental design (1970–71), a perity.” This notion of the inherent contradictions and National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1982), tensions between democratic ideals and social and and a Lila Wallace Writers Award (1995). In 1998 Jor- political realities is one of the constants in Jordan’s dan received the Student’s Choice Louise Patterson work. The position of the poet, however, is anything African-American Award for most outstanding African- but static or passive. “Poem about My Rights” (1977), American faculty at Berkeley. which Jordan described as both a “conceptual [and] 248 THE JOURNALS emotional breakthrough” for herself and which is pos- insisted that poetry follow rhetorical principles of sibly her most anthologized poem, moves the speaker argument first established in classical times and later from being “stranded” to an active role characterized reaffirmed in the Renaissance. He replaced syllogism by defiance and self-confidence in the face of continu- with juxtaposition or contingency, logical deduction ing violence (Quiroz n. p.): “I am the history of the and inference with the “logic” of experience, such as rejection of who I am [but] / I am not wrong: Wrong is what a person sees or hears, and he relied on nouns not my name / My name is my own my own my own.” and verbs, not adjectives and adverbs, and on While vigilance might be necessary, she argues, para- metonyms, not metaphors or symbols. Likewise Black- lyzing fear should not be: “I / invent the mother of the burn avoided standard meters and employed irregular courage I require not to quit,” the speaker says in “War spacing of words, characteristic of Ezra POUND, Charles and Memory” (1989). Throughout her work, Jordan’s OLSON, and others. His demonstration that words goal is to achieve connection, community, and love: “I could be used for their visual effects, often in conjunc- will make myself a passionate and eager lover in tion with graphics, influenced later VISUAL POETRY, such response to passionate and eager love / I will be as Armand SCHWERNER’s THE TABLETS. Robert Buckeye nobody’s fool” (“Resolution # 1003” [1994]). notes how Blackburn’s “use of juxtaposition . . . equal- izes the elements of the poem: one thing, no matter BIBLIOGRAPHY how different, is just next to another” (157). Black- Brogan, Jacqueline Vaught. “From Warrior to Womanist: burn’s visuality might also have been influenced by The Development of June Jordan’s Poetry.” In Speaking the Other Self: American Women Writers, edited by Jeanne downtown Manhattan painting during a period in the Campbell Reesman. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1950s and 1960s when poets later to be grouped in 1997, pp. 198–209. various schools—BEAT, Black Mountain, and NEW Erickson, Peter. “After Identity: A Conversation with June Jor- YORK—were intermingling with each other, as well as dan and Peter Erickson.” Transition 63 (1994): 132–149. with painters and musicians. Jordan, June. “Thinking about My Poetry.” In Civil Wars. Two other poets to be associated with The Journals Boston: Beacon Press, 1981, 122–129. are William Carlos WILLIAMS and Robert CREELEY. In its Muller, Lauren, et al. June Jordan’s Poetry for the People: A attention to the details of daily life, Blackburn’s poetry Revolutionary Blueprint. New York: Routledge, 1995. embraces and extends Williams’s dictum, “no ideas but Quiroz, Julie. “‘Poetry Is a Political Act’: An Interview with in things,” a plea to ground poetry in concrete images, June Jordan.” ColorLines 1.3 (winter 1999). Available on- and provides another version of the precision cele- line. URL: www.arc.org/C_Lines/CLArchive/story1_3_05. html. Downloaded May 2003. brated in Creeley’s lines, “and and becomes // just so” in his homage to Williams (“For W.C.W” [1963]). Yet Stefanie Sievers Blackburn aims for a new kind of poetry, as if the poem were a painting that refuses its frame; his is not simply THE JOURNALS PAUL BLACKBURN (1975) the collage technique Pound made famous in THE CAN- The Journals, comprising most of Paul BLACKBURN’s final TOS. Blackburn’s work can also be thought of within the poems, is a milestone in the history of literary innova- context of CONFESSIONAL POETRY—wherein the poet’s tion, beyond the open-field poetry of the BLACK MOUN- life is available for viewing, the doors of his home flung TAIN SCHOOL and, earlier, the free verse of the IMAGIST open. In this regard, these poems are similar to the SCHOOL (see PROSODY AND FREE VERSE). Blackburn work of the New York school, especially Frank wanted to create open-ended occasions out of ordi- O’HARA’s. As Peter Baker has commented, “So little nary, everyday experiences, thereby shaping a form [may] apparently [be] going on in [a Blackburn] poem that appeared to be, paradoxically, formless. He that it may seem beneath our notice” (44); still, the rejected traditional poetry’s point of view, which saw experience of reading it is palpable as momentary certain historical events as grand or monumental and occurrences become events and then rituals, just as in others as inconsequential and which, accordingly, O’Hara’s “I do this, I do that” poems, which note oth- THE JOURNALS 249 erwise unimportant details in a person’s day. Creating three times going down the page. Blackburn notes how the impression of relaxed candor, Blackburn is able, his simplest acts—fastening his belt, washing, writing ultimately, “to resist the pull toward transcendence that in his diary—are made difficult by pain. Yet this pain, the romantic and American post-romantic traditions in an apparent contradiction, makes the present have forced on several generations of poets, readers vibrant. He notices “the promise of death” in the day- and interpreters” (52). light spilling across the objects in his room; with the On the other hand, this apparent spontaneity is hard “window open, the day comes in, o fade the carci- won. Blackburn’s poems, Gilbert Sorrentino observes, noma.” This blending of diction is remarkable—the “are journals only in that they purport to follow the contemporaneity of “carcinoma” juxtaposed with the events of the last four years of the poet’s life, but the romantic apostrophe “o fade.” Finally, there is a bitter selection of the important elements out of the sea of turn as he struggles to slip out of death’s trap, when he experience . . . is rigorously formal” (103). Each poem parodies the song “The Girl on the Flying Trapeze”: has actually been worked by Blackburn to great effect. The cancer “floats thru the blood / with the greatest of “AUG/22. Berkeley Marina,” for instance, begins with a ease . the pain goes and comes again.” simply contrasting observation: The day is cold and In The Journals, no other but the present moment the sun is bright, the strong exists, fleeting yet permanent. The typical Blackburn wind holding the flags out poem, Baker has noted, “stands outside of time while foregrounding time itself” (45), an effect resulting in The flap/flap Journals’s formless formality, which was a breakthrough as the poet’s eye alights on the legs of his wife while she in new verse possibilities. Blackburn’s contribution is is exercising on the deck of their swaying boat. The utterly original, as well as a stage in the evolution of couple is perfectly composed, recalling “the 3 graces & experimental poetry. “We hear the echo in Blackburn,” the 4 dignities” of ancient Chinese philosophy, which Joseph Conte writes, “of Olson’s statement in ‘Projective Blackburn sets out on the page as two lists placed Verse’: ‘One perception must immediately and directly beside one another, each encased within a simply lead to a further perception’ [see ARS POETICAS]. The drawn rectangle: “grace of word, / of deed, / grace of poetry of process is opposed to the notion of progress, thought,” and, “standing // sitting / walking // & lying and in Blackburn . . . we hear a denial of telos, closure, down.” How are these to be read? There is to be no or climax—‘any sense of an ending’. Each arrival signals prescribed method. What is important, however, are a new departure” (48–49). Gloriously unrestricted, the two people “at peace” with the world. In this poem, seemingly at loose ends, The Journals created, for later language, in and of itself, and phenomena, the world poetry, a new aesthetic sense of what a poetic statement taken in by the poet, seamlessly merge as one through could be. This posthumous work culminated the poetic the graphics on the page. project that had consumed Blackburn throughout his Another key aspect of The Journals is its examination adult life, representing the ultimate refinement of his of dying. Blackburn learns that he has terminal cancer. technique and the distillation of his vision. His characteristic frankness becomes especially memo- rable when chronicling physical deterioration as the BIBLIOGRAPHY Baker, Peter. “Blackburn’s Gift.” Sagetrieb: A Journal Devoted world begins to slip away. He is direct and graphic. to Poets in the Imagist/Objectivist Tradition 12.1 (spring “27. VI. 71,” for example, records a morning’s 1993): 43–54. thoughts, beginning with the exclamation “sundaysun- Buckeye, Robert. “‘Rock, Scissors, Paper.’” North Dakota daysundaysundaysunday” and then the observation of Quarterly 55.4 (1987): 153–161. the essential elements of the day: “empty walks,” a Conte, Joseph M. “Against the Calendar: Paul Blackburn’s “single bird,” a “blue sky.” The enumeration leads to a Journals.” Sagetrieb: A Journal Devoted to Poets in the Imag- crisis; the phrase “EMPTY AND ALIVE” is repeated ist/Objectivist Tradition 7.2 (1988): 35–52. 250 JUSTICE, DONALD

Sorrentino, Gilbert. “Paul Blackburn (‘Singing, Virtuoso: The common speech rhythms. A typical Justice poem is Journals, edited by Robert Kelly’).” In Something Said: verbally sparse yet imaginatively rich, its language ele- Essays by Gilbert Sorrentino. San Francisco: North Point gant and decorous yet straightforward, if not, at times, Press, 1984, pp. 103–113. brutal in its implications. Justice often displays his Burt Kimmelman extraordinary mastery of traditional poetic forms—the canzone, the pantoum, the sonnet, the sestina, or the JUSTICE, DONALD (1925–2004) Donald villanelle. His poems are as crafted as they are candid, Justice’s poems are recognized for their supreme tech- often featuring thematic lucidity and tonal austerity in nical skill, impersonality of diction, accuracy of obser- an attempt to offset their sophisticated structure. Jus- vation, and complexity of thought and sentiment. tice’s exactitude is not only formal, but also verbal. A They offer a remarkable combination of exacting neo- sentence, a phrase, or even a single word sometimes classicism, which he learned during his one-year study introduces a startling nuance to a poem; in one of his with the iconoclastic critic Yvor WINTERS at Stanford, most famous poems, “Men at Forty” (1967), the men and discreet postromantic lyricism, gained through in question listen to the crickets in the woods behind years of study and teaching at the Iowa Writers’ Work- their “mortgaged” houses. “Elsewheres” (1967) begins shop. Above all, Justice’s poems reveal an intense pre- with the lines: “Already it is midsummer / In the Swe- occupation with American landscape and people, den of our lives.” which makes his work similar to that of Edwin Arling- In an Ohio Review interview, Justice admits he has ton ROBINSON and Edgar Lee MASTERS. At his best, Jus- always followed T. S. ELIOT’s dictum from “Tradition tice can be as discerning and profound as Robert FROST. and the Individual Talent” that poetry is not an expres- Justice was born and raised in Miami, Florida, sion of personality but an escape from personality (see although he spent a large part of his childhood visiting ARS POETICAS). He regularly leaves himself out of his his grandparents in Georgia. He holds university degrees poems, speaking in imagined or borrowed voice, and, from Miami, North Carolina, and Iowa, where he at times, humbly borrowing ideas from other poets, received a Ph.D. in writing (at that time, the teaching fac- such as Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Eugène Guillevic, ulty at Iowa included Robert LOWELL, John BERRYMAN, and and César Vallejo. Yet there is something uncommonly Karl SHAPIRO, among others). For the next 25 years, Jus- personal in these simultaneously restrained and confi- tice himself taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, with dent compositions; Justice’s speaking voice is charac- occasional appointments at other universities. In 1982 he terized by wryness and wit, propensity for meditation, moved back to Florida to teach as the poet-in-residence at though not abstract philosophizing, and reliance on the University of Florida, Gainsville. He retired in 1992 well-aimed observation reminiscent of William Carlos and moved back to Iowa City. Justice has been the recip- WILLIAMS. Justice’s poems reflect modern loneliness, ient of numerous grants, awards, and fellowships. His nostalgia, isolation, loss, and despair. (Some critics Selected Poems won the Pulitzer Prize in 1980. He also have compared his work to the paintings of Edward won the Bollingen Prize (1991) and the Lannan Founda- Hopper.) As a poet, Justice chooses to portray reality tion Award (1996). Some of his earlier individual vol- and reality only, no matter how troubling or uncom- umes include The Summer Anniversaries (1960), Night fortable it may be. Like the subject of his villanelle “In Light (1967), Departures (1973), and The Sunset Maker Memory of the Unknown Poet, Robert Boardman (1987), which also contains stories and a memoir. Sub- Vaughn” (1987), Justice perceives “the boredom, the sequent editions of selected and new poems were pub- horror, and the glory of the world” with an unchang- lished in 1991 and 1995. Justice has also published two ing and undiscriminating stare, fulfilling the role that books of essays: Platonic Scripts (1984) and Oblivion: On Eliot prescribed to all modern poets. Writers & Writing (1999). It is not completely surprising, then, that Justice Justice’s poems are most often recognized for their should explore the extremities of human experience, formal precision, fidelity to experience, and reliance on especially with the concept of insanity, in some of his JUSTICE, DONALD 251 most famous poems, such as “On a Painting by Patient most ordinary of places—instantly acquire a most B of the Independence State Hospital for the Insane” mysterious aura. Many of these poems are set in the (1952) and “Counting the Mad” (1960). Justice is also past, going back to the poet’s childhood during the one of the most realistic poets in the language, demon- Great Depression and adolescence during World War strating a deep interest in specific landscapes and peo- II. Many of them show distinctly southern accents, but ple that are part of these landscapes. In “Variations on they do not idealize the South as much as they offer an a Text by Vallejo” (1973), Justice imagines his Miami intriguing mixture of nostalgia and irony, consistent gravediggers speaking amongst themselves in Spanish. with the poet’s belief that one can feel a certain nostal- In “Children Walking Home from School through a gia for what one never knew or had. Good Neighborhood” (1987), he describes the chil- BIBLIOGRAPHY dren as figures held in a glass ball, “One of those in Gioia, Dana, and William Logan, eds. Certain Solitudes. which, when shaken, snowstorms occur; / But this one Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1997. is not yet shaken.” Thus only a circumspect social ———., eds. “Donald Justice Special Feature.” Verse 8 & 9 commentary blends with a genuine portrayal of indi- (winter/spring 1992): 3–72. vidual places and people. Justice, Donald. “Interview,” by Wayne Dodd and Stanley Thanks to the poet’s imaginative perspective, too, Plumly. Ohio Review 16.3 (1975): 41–63. American cities, suburbs, and small towns—these Piotr Gwiazda CKD

KADDISH ALLEN GINSBERG (1957) If elegies written in English in the 20th century by the HOWL was the poem that made BEAT poet Allen GINS- very literary establishment that first rejected Ginsberg’s BERG internationally famous and infamous all at once, poetry as anti-intellectual and amateurish. As he had in Kaddish, his long, brutal, and painfully beautiful elegy previous works, beginning with his breakthrough for his mother, Naomi, made him respected by critics composing sessions for Howl and Other Poems, Gins- and fellow poets alike. Kaddish revealed that Ginsberg berg drew from his own personal experiences, particu- was a poet destined to alter significantly the face of larly those most painful to confront and admit. During midcentury American poetry. Indeed, so influential was the conformist 1950s, when alternative behavior was the poem for its groundbreaking experiments in style, seen as a threat by American society, Ginsberg wrote in as well as its graphic portrayal of Ginsberg’s troubled Kaddish about his mother’s struggle with mental illness. childhood with a mentally ill mother, that its composi- Ginsberg explored in the poem the ways American tion in late 1957 marks the beginning of the CONFES- society itself fueled his mother’s paranoia, destroyed SIONAL movement in American poetry, later made her personality and health with its “medical treat- famous by such writers as Anne SEXTON, John BERRYMAN, ments,” and created a society where difference was and Sylvia PLATH. Many critics cite KADDISH as the inspi- punished. Ginsberg criticized his comfortable 1950s ration for Robert LOWELL’s Life Studies (1959), a cele- nation for the pain it had caused him and his family. In brated work in which Lowell dramatically moved away style, too, Kaddish broke many hard-and-fast poetic from carefully crafted poems to mine his own personal “truths.” The poem leaps breathlessly between prose traumas in highly experimental forms. and Whitmanesque long-lined verse and between By the time Ginsberg’s second collection, Kaddish reportage, politics, and metaphysics. It was an attempt and Other Poems, was published by City Lights Books to encompass the chaos of midcentury American expe- in 1961, the author was one of the major voices of a rience that Ginsberg saw embodied in his mother’s national social movement derided by literary critics, tragic life. For him, such experience required new government officials, and the media. Even so, such forms, new language, and new metaphors. attention on the Beat movement—as vitriolic as that Perhaps the most urgent reason for Kaddish, however, attention often was—made Ginsberg perhaps the most was that Ginsberg himself feared for his own sanity as he famous living American poet, a position he would con- confronted personal demons. What did it mean that he tinue to hold until his death in 1997. Thus Kaddish was was homosexual? Society in the 1950s argued that such welcomed with considerable interest. Its title poem sexual “deviance” was to be treated psychologically. would eventually be recognized as one of the greatest What was one to make of his poetic sensibility? As he

252 KAUFMAN, BOB 253 notes in the closing sections of the poem, Naomi saw life Foster, Edward. Understanding the Beats. Columbia: Univer- metaphorically, as an artist might. In other words, Gins- sity of South Carolina Press, 1992. berg explores the very real possibility that he too is los- Stephenson, Gregory. The Daybreak Boys: Essays on the Liter- ing his mind. The opening line of Howl had famously ature of the Beat Generation. New York: Morrow, 1979. told us that “the best minds of [Ginsberg’s] generation Steve Wilson [had been] destroyed by madness.” Kaddish would be Ginsberg’s test of his own sanity in a world where those KAUFMAN, BOB (1925–1986) Bob Kauf- he loved and admired were broken by social pressure or man was a street poet—a people’s poet. He was one of sedated by electric shock treatments. the founding architects and living examples of the BEAT In Kaddish we find a broad-ranging elegy on both generation as a literary, historical and existential phe- Ginsberg’s mother, who immigrated to New York’s nomenon, although he has come to be overshadowed Lower East Side from Russia as a child, and a fallen by his white, formally educated contemporaries Allen America. As the poem develops, it is clear that the GINSBERG, Jack KEROUAC, and Gary SNYDER. Kaufman author blames much of his mother’s mental illness on cofounded the significant Beat journal Beatitudes. the repressions she and others like her (politically left, Partly out of choice, partly out of disillusioned resig- Jewish, and female) faced during the years following nation and the ravages of street life, he turned his back World War II. Throughout the poem, tracing the on the seductions of fame and respectability, implicitly author’s youth with an increasingly ill mother, her declaring solidarity with the world’s anonymous poor. eventual commitment in a mental institution, and the A much-admired extemporizer, he blended his own months immediately following her death, Ginsberg rapid-fire aphorisms and wisecracks with the consider- describes his growth from fearing his mother to seeing able store of modernist poetry he had memorized (see her as the inspiration for his own poetic sensibilities. MODERNISM). His poetry reworks and defamiliarizes Structurally the poem alternates between Ginsberg’s that of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Federico García familiar long lines and sections of prose. It seems at Lorca, Tennessee Williams, Hart CRANE, Langston times, appropriately, a work in progress. Rather than HUGHES, and others. In its adventurous imagery, presenting a formal, coherent portrait of his mother, sonorous qualities, and biting wit, Kaufman’s poetry the poem presents a world, a history, in fragments. It shares much with other New World black surrealists also reveals a narrative voice desperate to find sense Aimé Cesaire, Ted Joans, and Will Alexander, as well as through memory and language. One perhaps sees in with the jazz-inspired poetry and fiction of Amiri the speaker, and in Naomi herself, the displaced sensi- BARAKA and Nathaniel MACKEY. bility of the modern artist earlier given shape by T. S. One of 13 children, Robert Garnell Kaufman was ELIOT in “THE LOVE SONG OF J. ALFRED PRUFROCK.” With born in New Orleans on April 18, 1925, into a middle- Kaddish, though, we encounter a “Prufrock” damaged class, African-American Catholic family, to a school- so deeply that there may be no hope of return to any teacher mother and a Pullman Porter father. At 18, form of normal life. Paradoxically, the speaker of Kad- Kaufman joined the merchant marines, becoming a dish eventually embraces the very qualities and voice prominent organizer in the National Maritime Union that make a social outcast. primarily based in New York City. When the American Perhaps the author’s greatest poetic achievement, Federation of Labor (AFL) and the Congress of Indus- Ginsberg’s Kaddish embodies the shattered American trial Organizations (CIO) merged in the 1950s, he was psyche at midcentury. It is graphic and tender, angry purged from the union, a casualty of the McCarthy era. and inquisitive: It is a hymn to a country at war with Kaufman left New York City, emerging in San Fran- its own conscience. cisco as a familiar figure on the bohemian literary and BIBLIOGRAPHY street scenes, and reinventing himself as a Beat street Bartlett, Lee, ed. The Beats: Essays in Criticism. Jefferson, poet with a colorful if fictitious legacy—a hybrid N.C.: McFarland, 1981. Orthodox Jewish and “voodoo” upbringing. He 254 KEES, WELDON embodied playful but purposeful dissent in his lifestyle Lindberg, Kathryne. “Bob Kaufman, Sir Real, and His Rather and poetry. His poem “Bagel Shop Jazz” (1965) was Surreal Self-Presentation.” Talisman: A Journal of Contem- nominated for the Guiness Prize for Poetry in 1963, porary Poetry and Poetics 11 (Fall 1993): 167–182. the same year as T. S. ELIOT, and in 1979 he received a Maria Damon National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. Kaufman’s first book, Solitudes Crowded with Loneli- KEES, WELDON (1914–1955?) Since his dis- ness (1965), was compiled, edited, and sent off to appearance in 1955, Weldon Kees, through the efforts of New Directions publishers by his wife, Eileen Kauf- Donald JUSTICE, among others, has gathered a small but man. Many poems from this period describe the Beat extremely devoted readership; Dana GIOIA calls it a “cult” community in all its pathos, humor, posturing, and (xv). He could easily be named the supreme poet of noir genuine utopian yearnings. “Bagel Shop Jazz,” for (as his poem “The City as Hero” [1943] might seem to instance, describes the wary alliance between “mul- suggest), a poet whose subject matter tends toward the berry eyed girls in black stockings,” “turtleneck angel somber, although that label would understate the depth guys / Caesar-jawed, with synagogue eyes,” and “Coffee- and breadth of an electrifying body of poetry. His signa- faced Ivy Leaguers”—that is, women, Jewish or Ital- ture poems center on a mysterious figure, someone ian Americans, and African Americans—who named Robinson. The poem “Robinson” (1947), for comprise the fragile community of “shadow peo- instance, shows the hallmarks of Kees’s work: an effort- ple . . . nightfall creatures.” Other poems chronicle less formalism, a close attention to details of character the ongoing social hassles of being African American; and object, a nihilism that seems unmatched among the still others are modeled on jazz compositional princi- poet’s contemporaries. Robinson’s existence is wholly ples or invoke jazz themes, and many are lyrics that contingent upon his will to exist (“Robinson alone pro- express an intense desire to live beyond one’s self or vides the image Robinsonian”). Robinson’s house does an acute dissociation, epitomized by the title “Would not exist when he leaves it, yet the phone rings contin- You Wear My Eyes?” Golden Sardine (1967) continues ually: “it could be Robinson / Calling. It never rings many of these themes and experiments with new ver- when he is here.” sions of the long poem, notably the satiric “Caryl Born in Beatrice, Nebraska, Kees attended several Chessman Interviews the PTA from His Swank Gas universities, finally graduating from the University of Chamber.” After a difficult three years back in New Nebraska. He married a melancholic alcoholic. Kees York City (1960–63), Kaufman returned to San Fran- became an almost maniacally multifaceted artist. He cisco and abruptly withdrew from public life. The late wrote poems, short stories, and essays in art criticism 1970s witnessed a brief second period of productiv- (a novel, Fall Quarter [1990], was published posthu- ity, culminating in the publication of the fragmented mously), and he composed and performed jazz piano. and visionary The Ancient Rain: Poems 1956–1978 He was a painter and a photographer, as well as a col- (1981). Posthumously Cranial Guitar: Selected Poems laborator in film and book projects in the social sci- by Bob Kaufman (1996) was also published. ences. He accomplished all this while crossing the country, every few years, from coast to coast, in search BIBLIOGRAPHY of his place within his generation. Christian, Barbara. “Whatever Happened to Bob Kaufman?” Many have noted Kees’s gifts as a social satirist, but Black World 21:12 (September1972): 20–29. few critics have discussed Kees’s poetry of protest. At a Damon, Maria. “‘Unmeaning Jargon’/ Uncanonized Beati- time when support for World War II seems, at least in tude: Bob Kaufman, Poet.” The Dark End of the Street: Margins in American Vanguard Poetry. Minneapolis: Min- cultural memory, virtually unchallenged, Kees’s poetry nesota University Press, 1993, pp. 32–76. stands as a grim reminder that even the “good” war Edwards, Brent, Farah J. Griffin, and Maria Damon, eds. involved torture, slaughter, and madness. His eerie Callaloo 25:1 (winter 2002). [Special issue, Recent Takes sonnet “For My Daughter” (1943), for instance, seems on Jazz Poetics, special section on Bob Kaufman.] at first to praise a newborn but quickly prophesies her KELLY, ROBERT 255

“death in certain war” or a related fate as “the cruel / He has been awarded a National Endowment for the Bride of a syphilitic or a fool.” This unrelenting sonnet Arts Fellowship (1977), the Los Angeles Times Prize for is so disturbing that the reader feels a horrified relief at poetry (1980), and membership in the American Acad- the last line: “I have no daughter. I desire none.” As emy and Institute of Arts and Letters (1986), among Justice puts it, Kees inscribes “the calm in the face of other honors. Long interested in the potential of small certain doom” (ix). Thus, while clearly influenced by literary magazines to advance poetic practice, Kelly was W. H. AUDEN, Kees’s poems achieve a pitch of despair founding editor in the late 1950s and early 1960s of and fatality that even Auden’s grimmest poems of war Chelsea Review, Trobar, and Matter, and has since been cannot approach. intimately associated with such groundbreaking POETRY In the months before his car was found abandoned JOURNALS as Caterpillar, Los, Sulfur, and Conjunctions. near the Golden Gate Bridge in 1955, Kees had spoken The deeply personal character of Kelly’s poetry, to his friends about both suicide and escape (to Europe combined with its continual allusion to literary, or Mexico under an alias). But he seems, after all, to mythological, and musical sources, makes it a daunt- have left this world, left it the way his poems leave his ing challenge. At the same time, many poems can be readers—unanswered, unconsoled. disturbing in their intimacy. This apparent contradic- BIBLIOGRAPHY tion is reconciled after one absorbs the overriding sen- Elledge, Jim, ed. Weldon Kees: A Critical Introduction. sibility in his poems—that of a subjectivity estranged Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1985. from a world that can only be partially grasped Gioia, Dana. “The Cult of Weldon Kees.” In The Bibliography through language. The reader must enter into the of Weldon Kees, edited by Daniel Gillane and Robert N. author’s subjectivity to understand the poems, yet lan- Niemi. Jackson, Miss.: Parrish House, 1997, pp. xv–xxxiii. guage is both the entrance and the obstacle. Justice, Donald. Preface to The Collected Poems of Weldon In directly referring to this theme, Kelly’s poem Kees, edited by Donald Justice. Lincoln: University of “Windows” (1995) is framed as a warning, beginning, Nebraska Press, 1975, pp. vii–xi. “Beware the simplicity of windows,” and then elabo- Rose Shapiro rating on the elusiveness of reality as apprehended through language. Language does not bring us any KELLY, ROBERT (1935– ) First associated closer to realities outside of us, though it may seem to. with the DEEP IMAGE and American surrealist poets (see Instead it reinforces our separation while helping us SURREALISM), including Jerome ROTHENBERG and Gilbert accept it. A few lines later Kelly writes, “Language Sorrentino, in the early 1960s, Kelly gradually devel- keeps you in your place.” Kelly approaches the world oped his own “poetics of personal mythology” (to bor- through mythological personae, or through an unsta- row Diane WAKOSKI’s phrase)—creating his own set of ble “I,” in order to satisfy his insatiable need (even sex- symbolic meanings—in more than 50 books of poetry ual greed) for what can be found, luscious and real, in and fiction between 1960 and 2000. In a 1985 inter- the world. He writes of “taking refuge” (“Windows” view, Kelly talked about his early development in these [1995]) in the world as it presents itself to him, in terms: “Some focused through the BLACK MOUNTAIN or order to open himself up, in a Buddhist sense, to the the [John] ASHBERY [see NEW YORK SCHOOL] and so on. I world as it really is. wanted to stay clear of that. I was continually revivify- BIBLIOGRAPHY ing myself, I thought with the primitive, with the bar- Kelly, Robert. “Nothing but Doors: An Interview with Robert baric, with that which comes from outside the culture Kelly,” by Denis Barone Credences: A Journal of Twentieth and every now and then brings life to it again” (“Noth- Century Poetry and Poetics 3.3 (fall 1985): 100–122. ing” 100). His extensive body of work speaks to how ———. “Robert Kelly: An Interview on Trobar,” by David he has revivified himself over and over again. Ossman. Triquarterly 43 (1978): 398–404. Kelly graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the City College ———. “A Rose to Look At: An Interview with Robert Kelly,” of New York and began to teach at Bard College in 1961. by Larry McCaffery. In Some Other Fluency: Interviews with 256 KENNEDY, X. J.

Innovative American Authors, edited by McCaffery. Philadel- of time, through the humorous self-portrait of a phia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996, pp. 170–195. woman who attempts, with bravado, to assuage the Michael Van Dyke pain of a rough life by bragging about her experi- ences, dispensing wisdom all the while. The form KENNEDY, X. J. (1929– ) Though he is here acts to solidify the poem’s final adage, the rhyme sometimes reviled by critics for being superficial, a actually making it memorable as adage, as Kennedy writer of “light” verse whose form and treatment of describes the consequence of one’s attempt to subju- subjects are not complex, the majority of X. J. gate time: “And [you’ll] be left by the roadside for all Kennedy’s poems are not superficial but are, instead, your good deeds / Two toadstools for tits and a face “serious” with regard to social commentary. The uncer- full of weeds.” tainty of categorizing Kennedy’s poetry may be a result As an editor of many textbooks and anthologies of his use of humor in his social criticism—for some, used in schools across the country, Kennedy has been humor has no place in serious poetry. Perhaps the idea a great influence on readers of American poetry. As a of Kennedy’s superficiality is extended further by his poet, his work perpetuates debate on the difference adherence to verse forms; his poems are often end- between “serious” and “light” verse. rhymed and follow strict meter. Kennedy may be con- BIBLIOGRAPHY sidered an informal member of the NEW FORMALISM Collins, Michael J. “The Poetry of X. J. Kennedy.” World Lit- movement. Indeed what he said in 1961 acts as the erature Today 61 (winter 1987): 55–58. movement’s unofficial motto: “Why should a man learn Goldstein, Thomas. “X. J. Kennedy.” In Dictionary of Literary how to write a decent villanelle . . . when . . . he can Biography. Vol. 5, American Poets since World War II, edited strew lines on a page any cockeyed way . . . and be by Donald J. Greiner. Detroit: Gale, 1980, pp. 394–397. hailed with the new American poetry? Poems ought to Gwynn, R. S. “Swans in Ice.” Sewanee Review 95 (fall 1985): be harder to write than this” (243). lxxviii–xxix. Kennedy was born Joseph Charles Kennedy in Kennedy, X. J. “Comment: The New American Poetry.” Poetry Dover, New Jersey. His first collection of poetry, Nude 98.4 (July 1961): 242–244. Descending a Staircase, was published in 1961 and won John R. Woznicki the Lamont Award. Since then he has garnered many other prizes and fellowships. Formerly a university KENYON, JANE (1947–1995) The pastoral professor, he has also edited anthologies and written emphasis and New England setting of Jane Kenyon’s more than a dozen children’s books. poetry has invited comparisons to Robert FROST and Kennedy may be best described as a chronicler and Emily Dickinson. The uncluttered spareness of her critic of everyday American culture. His wide-ranging work and her interrelated themes of faith, guilt, empa- observations display an aptitude for recognizing the thy, and pessimism also place her among that collec- significant in the ordinary and, often, the destructive as tion of people known as New England poets. Kenyon’s well. He uses meter and verse in an attempt to formal- own love of John Keats—and his haunted experiences ize themes, such as suicide and loneliness, perplexing of pain and beauty—also informs her work. subjects not easily contained by structure. In his Kenyon was raised in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where poems one not only gets a sense of seeing something she attended the University of Michigan, earning her once hidden, as the form illuminates the content, but B.A. in 1970 and her M.A. in 1972. There she met her also one witnesses the control of the uncontrollable future husband, the poet and editor Donald HALL. In and begins to comprehend the incomprehensible. 1975 Hall and Kenyon left Michigan to settle in Hall’s The frequently anthologized “In a Prominent Bar in ancestral home in New Hampshire. Their quiet life Secaucus One Day” (1961) conveys the themes of dis- together in this rural setting figures prominently in her appointment and disillusionment, the recognition of work. She died of leukemia, at the height of her pow- both the American dream gone awry and the ravages ers, at age of 47. Her awards include fellowships from KEROUAC, JACK 257 the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggen- Mattison, Alice. “‘Let It Grow in the Dark Like a Mush- heim Foundation, and a PEN Voelcker Award. room’: Writing with Jane Kenyon.” Michigan Quarterly Kenyon’s aesthetic creed is most easily summed up Review 39.1 (2000): 120–137. in her favorite quote of Ezra POUND’s: “The natural Jayme Stayer object is always the adequate symbol.” Her fastidious adherence to this principle usually results in poems of KEROUAC, JACK (1922–1969) Jack Kerouac understated elegance, such as her conclusion to “Camp is one of the most mythical figures in American litera- Evergreen” (1986): “Now it is high summer: the sol- ture, his name and the name of his novel On the Road stice: / longed-for, possessed, luxurious, and sad.” But (1957) having the power of invocation even for people her effort to pare away can sometimes hobble the who have never read a word he wrote; the names con- poetry, resulting in a failure of invention and the sub- jure freedom. By comparison, his poetry is obscure, stitution of mere reportage for cohesively linked but it is both powerful as poetry and significant as a images. Kenyon herself acknowledged this fault of at direct influence on his fellow poets. Kerouac, with least one of her poems, “Three Songs at the End of Allen GINSBERG, Gregory CORSO, and William S. Bur- Summer” (1993), though it appears elsewhere, partic- roughs, was at the hub of the mid-20th-century shift in ularly in her earlier work. As her poetic voice matures, American literary consciousness known as the BEAT what was occasionally ponderous becomes stately. generation. When his first poems later published in Understatement, or even silence, in Kenyon’s work MEXICO CITY BLUES (1959), arrived from Mexico in 1955, can, paradoxically, achieve complex and rewarding his friends who were involved in what became known moments of empathy. Like many of her pastoral poems, as the SAN FRANCISCO RENAISSANCE, Gary SNYDER, Philip “Frost Flowers” (1987) begins with a speaker who, after WHALEN, Philip Lamantia, and Michael MCCLURE, in par- having taught a class earlier, is now outside in the dusk ticular, were moved and inspired. Kerouac, “author- observing squirrels and flowers. Without preparation, catalyst” of the writerly cataclysm that shook America the following devastating lines arrive: “My sarcasm (Ginsberg vi), had a traceable impact on the writing of wounded a student today. / Afterward I heard him run- many others, such as Robert CREELEY, Amiri BARAKA, ning down the stairs.” A similar moment occurs in her Lawrence FERLINGHETTI, Lew Welch, and Anne WALD- long poem “Having it Out with Melancholy” (1993), MAN. Bob Dylan pointed to Kerouac’s verse as “the first where she movingly records her struggles with recur- poetry that spoke his [Dylan’s] own language” (Gins- ring depression. The third section of the poem reports berg ii). Ginsberg proclaimed Kerouac “a major, per- a friend’s advice: The speaker could escape from haps seminal, poet . . . and mayhap thru his imprint depression if she “really believed in God.” The speaker’s on Dylan and myself among others, a poetic influence refusal to explain away, contextualize, or otherwise over the entire planet” (vi). redeem these moments makes them intensely poignant. Jean-Louis de Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massa- There is a narrow consistency to Kenyon’s work: chusetts, the youngest of three children in a French- walks with the dog, narratives of chastened spirituality, Canadian family. His cultural origins are important, descriptions of nature, and the myriad faces of grief because of the role religion and language played in his constitute the bulk of her thematic concerns. But while life and his work; his first language was French, and there are more varied and virtuosic poets, few have won his first and last religion was Roman Catholicism, the kind of devoted readership that Kenyon enjoys. interrupted by an earnest exploration of Buddhism. BIBLIOGRAPHY The collective force of mother tongue, mother church, Garrison, Deborah. “Simply Lasting.” New Yorker (Septem- and his own mother, Gabrielle, made him maternally ber 9, 1998): 91. fixated. He moved away from his language, his church, Hall, Donald. “With Jane and Without: An Interview with and his mother, physically and philosophically, but he Donald Hall,” by Jeffrey S. Cramer. Massachusetts Review always returned closer. Kerouac married three times, 39.4 (1999): 493–510. arguably had sex with as many men as he did women, 258 KINNELL, GALWAY and shamefully rejected his only child. Burdened all not looking back, not revising, but exhausting the his life by the weight of his trinity of mother figures mind by an outpouring of all the relevant associa- and by the early childhood loss of his brother Gerard, tions” (qtd. in Miles 193). Kerouac’s stated desire at Kerouac died an ultraconservative, debilitated alco- the very start of his journey as a writer was to make holic, living once again with his mother. “at least one deathless line” (qtd. in Miles 37). He col- “Ti Jean,” or “Petit Jean,” as he was called within his laborated with Burroughs on a never-published novel, family, knew early that he wanted to be a writer, but he produced more than 20 other prose works, of which was also an athlete of promise and went to Columbia more than a dozen were published during his lifetime, in 1940 on a football scholarship; he dropped out after and wrote five books of poetry, of which only one a dispute with his coach. It was not until early 1944 appeared in print before his death. Kerouac’s icono- that he met Ginsberg and Burroughs; two years after graphic power in the American consciousness is that, he met Neal Cassady, who became Keroauc’s unsurpassed and secure. His life, as a stream-of-con- muse and the model for On the Road’s Dean Moriarty. sciousness spontaneous composition alive in his art, is Already shaped by writers such as Walt Whitman, Hart his “one deathless line.” CRANE, and Thomas Wolfe, Kerouac was further BIBLIOGRAPHY affected as a writer by his New York friends, by their Burroughs, William S. “Kerouac.” High Times (March ideas, their actions, and their speech, as they were by 1979): 53. his. Burroughs explained that “Kerouac was a writer. Clark, Tom. Jack Kerouac: A Biography. New York: Marlowe That is, he wrote” (53); rather than just talk about writ- & Company, 1984. ing or call himself a writer, he did it, even at the risk of Creeley, Robert. Introduction to Book of Blues, by Jack Ker- being gored by the life about which he wrote. The fact ouac. New York: Penguin, 1995. that he was in a frequent state of sorrow surfaces Ginsberg, Allen. Introduction to Pomes All Sizes, by Jack repeatedly in his poems. He would “suffer / even for Kerouac. San Francisco: City Lights, 1992. bugs” (“Running Through—Chinese Poem Song” Miles, Barry. Jack Kerouac, King of the Beats: A Portrait. Lon- [1992]), lament “Oh sad Bodhidharma you were right don: Virgin, 1998. / Everything we loved disappeared” (“Long Island Chi- A. Mary Murphy nese Poem Rain” [1992]), admit “I’m just a human being with a lot of / shit on my heart” (“Goofball Blues” KINNELL, GALWAY (1927– ) Galway Kin- [1992]), and wonder why “The story of man . . . nell is best known for poems that deal with death and Should hurt me so” (“Bowery Blues” [1992]). He the physical dissolution of creatures living in this recorded what went on around him, wrote experimen- world. He began as a relatively formal poet (see tally, incorporated jazz improvisation into his prose PROSODY AND FREE VERSE), but he quickly changed his and poetry; Creeley warns that there can be no real style to one influenced by William Carlos WILLIAMS, understanding of Kerouac’s work “if there is not the which uses a more simple, direct diction as well as a recognition that this remarkable person is living here, looser line and freer structure. His major theme, death, is actual in all that is written” (xiii). suggests his romantic tendencies; he views death from Kerouac is in the work, in all his beauty and in all a personal perspective and as a return to a primitive, his despair. He appears in his poems as religious prehuman state of consciousness. His influences seeker, as sexual debauchee, as little boy, as happy include American poets Walt Whitman and Emily friend, as musical composer, as penitent sinner, as Dickinson, as well as Irishman William Butler Yeats unrepentant sinner. He wrote about everything and and Czech Rainer Maria Rilke. Along with Ted Hughes believed he had “better be a poet / Or lay down dead” and James DICKEY, Kinnell is a great writer of animal (“San Francisco Blues—42nd Chorus” [1995]). He poems and is often considered one of the DEEP IMAGE created a concept of spontaneous composition, which, poets along with Robert BLY, W. S. MERWIN, Louis SIMP- as Ginsberg explains it, was “the notion of writing and SON, Mark STRAND, and James WRIGHT. KINNELL, GALWAY 259

Kinnell was born in Providence, Rhode Island. He newborn cubs. The hunter will, he tells the reader, graduated summa cum laude from Princeton in 1948 spend his days “wondering” about “that sick infusion, and received an M.A. in English from the University of that rank flavor of blood, that poetry by which I lived.” Rochester in 1949. An automobile accident claimed The speaker/hunter here has undergone an initiation the life of his brother, Derry, in 1957. Later he would into death. Awaking from that sleep, he finds that, as attempt to come to terms with this loss in such poems Lee Zimmerman maintains, “poetry is redemption, as “Freedom, New Hampshire” (1960). A career as an although it is a terrible one” (126). itinerant poet-in-residence marks Kinnell’s teaching Kinnell continued his poetic search for a transfor- résumé, which includes positions at a number of mative power of experience in The Book of Nightmares schools, including New York University. His first vol- (1971), a series of 10 poems, each in seven parts, ume of collected poems, The Avenue Bearing the Initial which was influenced by Rilke’s visionary Duino Ele- of Christ into the New World (1974) was awarded the gies (1923). David Perkins writes that these poems Shelley Prize by the Poetry Society of America. Later suggest “a possibility in experience ...that somewhat his Selected Poetry (1983) received the American Book relieves suffering or gives it a meaning” (577). The Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Kinnell also penned a poems continue to use nature—for instance, the novel Black Light (1965) and has garnered acclaim for Moon, a hen, and a black bear—and they are more his translations of French verse. personal, as we see Kinnell speaking in the role of What a Kingdom It Was (1960), Kinnell’s first book of dutiful father. His reflection on his children and their poems, introduces his concern with death and his sense youth lead him to see “poetic creation as a means of of death as dissolution of one kind of identity into resolving the nightmares of dreams for children and another, most notably in “Freedom, New Hampshire.” the nightmare of death for adults” (Calhoun 80). In While narrating memories from a summer spent with “Little Sleep’s-Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight” his brother on a farm, Kinnell employs the discovery of (1971), he places his daughter in her crib after a a cow’s skull as an image of his discovery of death. The nightmare, and as she finds sleep again, he anticipates poem’s conclusion, which includes a dedication to her waking as a kind of rebirth and new awareness, Derry, turns toward the grass that grows over a man’s when they will walk out into the world among “the grave. “It is true,” Kinnell allows, “That only the flesh ten thousand things, / each scratched with such dies.” The grave and its grass, he argues, can heal what knowledge, the wages / of dying is love.” a man suffered, “but he remains dead, / And the few Later Kinnell writes of the loneliness of memories in who loved him know this until they die.” Though When One Has Lived A Long Time Alone (1990). In everyone’s flesh dies, the poem suggests, there is some- “Memories of My Father,” he thinks of returning to his thing that lives on, transformed. The idea of transfor- father’s house and hearing someone—his father or mation through an experience of death recurs in one of some stranger—singing. The act of singing, Kinnell Kinnell’s best-known poems, “The Bear” (1968). believes, can give form to one’s feelings. Articulating in Richard J. Calhoun argues that this poem exemplifies this way imparts structure to feelings and experience, one of the poet’s strengths, a “facility in his descriptions as his songs in The Book of Nightmares may bring some to be both literal and at the same time symbolic and peace to him, the father thinking of the inevitable mythic” (66). Kinnell narrates an archetypal bear hunt death himself and his children. Experience and mem- in which the hunter leaves a sharpened bone in the ory gain permanence. In The Book of Nightmares, the bear’s food; after the bear eats, it slowly kills him from grown daughter should treasure the mouth that within. The hunter follows until the bear is dead; then reminds her “here, / here is the world.” the hunter hacks open the carcass, crawls inside, and BIBLIOGRAPHY sleeps. He dreams about the death of the bear, gaining Calhoun, Richard J. Galway Kinnell. New York: Twayne, 1992. insight into the ways of nature as he considers elements Perkins, David. A History of Modern Poetry: Modernism and of a bear’s life, such as the mother bear licking clean her After. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press 1987. 260 KIZER, CAROLYN

Zimmerman, Lee. Intricate and Simple Things: The Poetry of three children in three years and divorced Bullitt three Galway Kinnell. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987. years later. She married John Woodbridge in 1975. She Gary Leising has held teaching positions at the University of North Carolina, Washington University, Barnard, Columbia, KIZER, CAROLYN (1925– ) A gifted trans- Ohio University, Iowa, and Princeton University. She lator, critic, and poet, Carolyn Kizer has “earned a won a Pulitzer Prize for Yin in 1985. secure niche in American letters,” according to Eliza- Kizer’s dual role as both a poet and an ambassador beth B. House, through her “celebrat[ion of] the joys of for poetry is evident in her earliest serious work. Dur- art, friendship, family, and good works” (164). Kizer is ing her studies at Columbia in 1945–46, she held a considered a member of the Northwest school of Chinese Cultural Fellowship in comparative literature poets, along with David WAGONER and Richard HUGO, and she later founded and edited Poetry Northwest, because of their tutelage by Theodore ROETHKE at the 1959–65. She served as a U.S. State Department spe- University of Washington. Kizer stands among other cialist in Pakistan during 1964 and 1965 and directed powerful American women poets, including Adrienne literary programs for the National Endowment for the RICH, Anne SEXTON, Sylvia PLATH, and Denise LEVERTOV, Arts from 1966 to 1970. While holding these offices, who were trained by men but ultimately transcended Kizer also published several works of poetry, including their early training to write powerfully about their a book of translations. Her first two volumes, The experience as women. Known equally for the tightly Ungrateful Garden (1961) and Knock upon Silence crafted, formal voice of her work and for her role as an (1965), are viewed, especially through the lens of her international ambassador for poetry and poets, Kizer later work, as intent on avoiding overt sentimentality, established her reputation for meticulous craft in her particularly through the use of formal structures, intri- first work, The Ungrateful Garden, in 1961, subse- cate rhyme schemes and verse patterns, distancing lan- quently publishing a relatively small body of highly guage, and grotesque imagery. Often cited as evidence polished and critically acclaimed work. of this tendency is the poem, “The Intruder” (1961), in Kizer was born in Spokane, Washington, the only which a woman rescues a bat from a cat but drops it child of two highly intellectual, politically active par- after finding lice on the bat’s wings: “Turning on the ents. Her father was a lawyer, and her mother had tap, / She washed and washed the pity from her earned a Ph.D. in biology from Stanford and studied art hands.” “The Great Blue Heron” (1961) is a reflection and philosophy at Harvard. Kizer bloomed under the on nature’s indifference, one of her favorite early procession of distinguished philosophers, literary fig- themes. Kizer was also concerned with the role of gov- ures, architects, and planners visiting her parents’ home ernment in people’s lives, expressing in such poems as and under the doting attention of her mother, who gave “The Suburbans” (1961) and “The Death of the Public up her career to care for her. Though Kizer had a deep Servant” (1961) a preoccupation with institutions’ ten- intellectual bond with her father, it is her mother’s dencies to inhibit individuality. unceasing encouragement of her creative efforts that Knock upon Silence (1965) contains what is possibly she credits with nurturing her writing career; her 1984 Kizer’s best-known work, “Pro Femina,” a long piece volume, Yin, contains a prose work, “A Muse,” that written in hexameters that examines women’s roles, examines their relationship. As a student at Sarah focusing particularly on the struggles of women artists Lawrence College in the early 1940s, she published a who, unlike men, have “politely debated” freedom of poem in the New Yorker. The poem, she later said, was will, have “howled” for it, and “Howl still, pacing the not very good, but it nourished her emerging sense of centuries.” The poem, which is continued in several herself as a writer. Kizer did graduate work at Colum- later volumes, examines the expectations of women in bia University and the University of Washington, Seat- the past, including “old maids,” “self-pitiers,” and “sad tle, studying under Theodore Roethke there in sonneteers,” and is a testament to women’s emerging 1946–47. Married to Charles Bullitt in 1948, Kizer had freedom and to the quality of women’s art. Kizer’s third KNIGHT, ETHERIDGE 261 work, Midnight Was My Cry (1971), contains reprints have so adeptly handled moralist poetic portraiture. from her first two books and new poems that focus less As with Robinson, he was a poet of the people, a peo- on nature and more on the political-social circum- ple’s poet. And as both a prodigious formalist and a stances of the late 1960s. Favorably received, the powerful performer, his work has directly affected book’s new poems dealt with sit-ins, the assassination subsequent generations—particularly members of the of Robert Kennedy, and the war in Vietnam. NEW FORMALISM and spoken word artists (see POETRY IN Kizer did not publish poetry again until 1984, when PERFORMANCE). two volumes, both dealing with women’s experience, Knight was born in Corinth, Mississippi, one of appeared. Yin contains “Fanny,” a fictional diary of seven children. After growing up in Paducah, Ken- Fanny Osbourne Stevenson, the wife of the writer tucky, he entered the United States Army in 1947, Robert Louis Stevenson, which was later added as a served in Korea, where he saw active duty, and was continuation of “Pro Femina,” because of its focus on discharged in 1957, at which time he began to travel women’s creativity. Fanny’s role as nursemaid to the United States. Having developed a heroin addic- Robert’s talent is offset only by her one creative outlet, tion in the army and being led occasionally to support her beautiful gardens. The second volume, Mermaids in this addiction by crime, Knight was convicted of rob- the Basement: Poems for Women (1984), focuses specifi- bery and placed in the Indiana State Prison in Indi- cally on many of the roles women are forced, and anapolis in 1960. Brooks, having seen Knight’s work in choose, to assume. The volume contains reprints of journals, visited the prison and encouraged Knight’s many of Kizer’s older poems dealing with women, poetry writing. His first book, Poems from Prison, bore including “Pro Femina.” A book for men followed a foreword by Brooks and was published in 1968 by shortly after, in 1986. In this work, entitled The Near- Dudley Randall’s Broadside Press. Knight served as ness of You, Kizer reprinted previously published mate- poet-in-residence at several universities and, in addi- rial and works dedicated to writers and men in her life. tion to being nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and the All three of these later works are viewed as less formal National Book Award, received, among many other than her earlier volumes, more personal, and more honors, the American Book Award for his 1987 collec- demonstrative of a mature writer. tion The Essential Etheridge Knight. Just as adept writing a ballad as he was writing haiku, BIBLIOGRAPHY Knight’s poems hold unusually vibrant combinations of Kizer, Carolyn. Proses: On Poems and Poets. Port Townsend, Wash.: Copper Canyon, Press, 1993. ideas, stories, fables, honesty, anger, praise, destitution, House, Elizabeth B. “Carolyn Kizer.” In Dictionary of Liter- and hope. Influenced by the African-American genre of ary Biography. Vol. 169, American Poets since World War the “toast,” his poems often sketch humorous carica- II, Fifth Series, edited by Joseph Conte. Detroit: Gale, tures of people he had known. A preternaturally strong 1996, pp. 157–164. performer, Knight often left audiences thunderstruck. Rigsbee, David, ed. An Answering Music: On the Poetry of Robert BLY once wrote, “I believe that Wallace STEVENS Carolyn Kizer. Boston: Ford-Brown, 1990. and Etheridge Knight stand as two poles of North Amer- Sharon Barnes ican poetry” (108). But because Knight’s poems are so intricate and varied, Bly went on to warn of the mistake KNIGHT, ETHERIDGE (1931–1991) A of making Stevens out to be the complicated, elegant, central figure in the BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT, Etheridge indirect, and highly artificed pole and Knight the Knight’s poems at once mix the vernacular with formal straightforward, natural, and piercing pole. Knight is rhymes and rhythmical features that, in turn, bear simply less of an idealist, more of realist, but equally as strong political, social, and spiritual content. The crafted and inventive as Stevens. influences of Walt Whitman, Sterling BROWN, and Knight’s elegy for Malcolm X, “For Malcolm, a Year Gwendolyn BROOKS exist in his work. Few poets since After,” is a complex attack upon Euro-American poli- Edwin Arlington ROBINSON and Edgar Lee MASTERS tics and aesthetics. In addition to paying tribute to 262 KOCH, KENNETH

Malcolm X, the poem stands as both an example and (1987), the Fund for Poetry’s “Contribution to Poetry an indictment of the white, prim formalist poem, at Award” (1992), the Ingram-Merrill Foundation’s Distin- once embracing and rebuffing the oppressive political guished Work Award (1992), the Bollingen Prize for and aesthetic artifice in which and against which poetry (1995), induction into the American Academy of Knight himself struggled: “And make it rime and make Arts and Letters (1996), and the French government’s it prim.” Poetry may die, as do people, “But not the Chevalier de l’Ordres des Arts et des Lettres (2000). memory of him.” In Koch’s work, Ward writes, “the colour and the facetiousness ...are characteristic of his activities” (8). BIBLIOGRAPHY For example, in “Variations on a Theme by William Bly, Robert. “Hearing Etheridge Knight.” In American Poetry: Carlos WILLIAMS” (1962), Koch playfully parodies Wildness and Domesticity. New York: Harper & Row, 1990, pp. 101–108. Williams’s disarming confession and justification for eating some plums (found in Williams’s poem “This Is Gabriel Gudding Just To Say” [1934]) by variously admitting that he demolished a woman’s house, fractured her leg, squan- KOCH, KENNETH (1925–2002) Along with dered her money, and “sprayed [the hollyhocks] with Frank O’HARA, John ASHBERY, James SCHUYLER, and Bar- lye. / Forgive me.” He does the same thing in parodying bara GUEST, Kenneth Koch was a central figure of the Robert FROST’s “Mending Wall” (1914) in his own poem NEW YORK SCHOOL of poets. The New York poets “Mending Sump” (1960). His parodies may be ridicu- engaged artistically with so-called action painters (espe- lous, but they never ridicule; instead they tease in an cially the pioneers of ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM Jackson affectionate way. Likewise Koch writes about human Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Larry Rivers), the experience and broken relationships, but the poems are European avant-garde in general, and French SURREAL- never despondent. Instead he ends “Talking to Patrizia” ISM in particular. They wrote subjectively and autobio- (1994), his poem about a woman who repeatedly aban- graphically but rejected CONFESSIONAL POETRY’s dons the poem’s speaker, with the hopeful cry that if the extremes. Their philosophy of poetry is as much one of woman returns, “Late isn’t anything!” In 1968 critic rejection of things others did as it is an embrace of their Stephen Koch found Kenneth Koch’s poems “a kind of own traits. They wanted a poetry that was not arrogant, word-playground, the component parts . . . always not prophetic, not boring. While all of the New York pleasant and tasty; filled with . . . circuses, red shim- school are, in the words of Geoff Ward, “expertly mering fish, . . . chugging rusty ships”; he considered addicted to witticisms and poetic comedy” (3), Koch is the poet himself to be “sometimes insufferably silly . . . “the most frantically and farcically humorous of all [but nevertheless] perhaps the most polished wit writ- these poets” (7). His poetry is “characterized by spon- ing in English.” taneity, erotic high jinx and pathos . . . balanc[ing] out- In “The Art of Poetry” (1975), Kenneth Koch rageous improvisation, allusive intelligence and a explained that he wanted readers to be somewhat per- sweetly impersonal lyric” (“Columbian”). plexed at the end of a poem, both “Distressed and illu- Koch was born in Cincinatti, Ohio, and served in the minated, ready to believe / It is curious to be alive.” He United States Army in the Philippines during World accomplishes this in “One Train May Hide Another” War II. Koch, Ashbery, and O’Hara all studied together (1994) by revealing that what we see always conceals at Harvard in the late 1940s before migrating to New something else. The poem is a list of examples of York; after earning a bachelor’s degree in 1948, Koch things that block other things: siblings obscuring completed a master’s degree (1953) and a Ph.D. (1959) lovers, noise masking music, and so on: “always stand- at Columbia, where he joined the faculty in 1959. ing in front of something the other / As words stand in Koch’s long list of recognitions includes the Inez Boul- front of objects, feelings, and ideas.” The truly dis- ton Prize (1959), the Frank O’Hara Prize (1973), the tressing revelation is that the reader cannot get behind American Academy of Arts and Letters Award of Merit all the unconcealed people and things in order to find KOMUNYAKAA, YUSEF 263 all the concealed ones. There is always another con- African-American poet, wartime veteran poet. Influ- cealment behind the enlightenment. ences on his work include Countee CULLEN, Melvin Starting with his first book, Poems (1953), Koch TOLSON, Amiri BARAKA, William Carlos WILLIAMS, and published 20 books of poetry. He also published six T. S. ELIOT. Komunyakaa’s poetry shifts in tone from collections of plays, beginning with Bertha and Other lyrical and grand to streetwise and tough. Plays (1966), described by Stephen Koch as “delicious Komunyakaa was born in Bogalusa, Louisiana. After little dadaistic farces.” Koch’s other enterprises include graduating high school in 1965 he enlisted in the army eight prose works, among them a novel (The Red and was sent to Vietnam. Between 1969 and 1970 he Robins, [1975]), a collection of short stories (Hotel started writing for the Southern Cross, a military news- Lambosa and Other Stories [1993]), and manuals for paper. He left the military in the early 1970s and was teaching poetry and poetry writing both to children awarded the Bronze Star for his journalism. Upon his (Wishes, Lies and Dreams [1970] and Rose, Where Did return to the states Komunyakaa received a B.A. and an You Get That Red? [1973]) and to the elderly and infirm M.A. from the University of Colorado (1975, 1978), (I Never Told Anybody [1977]), an opera libretto for and an M.F.A. from the University of California, Irvine Marcello Panni’s The Banquet (produced in Bremen, (1980). Although he self-published two volumes of 1998), and art gallery exhibitions, in Ipswich and New poetry in the late 1970s, it was not until the 1980s that York, of collaborations with painters. Koch’s late he reached a broader audience and critical success. He poems are perhaps more reflective and contemplative has received many awards for his poetry, notably the than his early work, but they nevertheless are exam- Pulitzer Prize and William Faulkner Prize, both in ples, as Ken Tucker has observed, of “that mixture of 1994 for Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems earnestness, ebullience and dreamy romanticism that (1993). He has taught at Princeton University. long ago rendered Koch the ageless grad student of the Coming from a tight-knit southern family, Komun- New York School of Poets.” yakaa draws on his family experiences and regional roots. His combat experiences in Vietnam as well as his BIBLIOGRAPHY interest in jazz and African-American history also feed “Columbian Wins Bollingen Prize,” Columbia University his unique poetic voice. Komunyakaa’s journalistic Available on-line. URL: www.columbia.edu/cu/record/ record2017.13.html. Downloaded February 2002. brevity gives a stoic and clean structure to his subject Diggory, Terence, and Stephen Paul Miller, eds. The Scene of matter, which is usually emotionally complex. “Seeing My Selves: New Work on New York School Poets. Orono, in the Dark” (1988) paints a troubled picture of sol- Maine: National Poetry Foundation, 2000. diers trapped by their skin color, lower-class status, Koch, Stephen. “The New York School of Poets: The Serious chauvinism, and a war that they must fight but know at Play,” New York Times (February 11, 1968). Available so little about. Komunyakaa shows the complex rela- on-line. URL: www.nytimes.com/books. Downloaded tionship between love, sex, powerlessness, and war: February 2002. “We’re men ready to be fused / with ghost pictures.” Lehman, David. The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New There is a primal energy intermingled with romanti- York School of Poets. New York: Doubleday, 2002. cism as soldiers struggle to reconcile their mortality Tucker, Ken. “You Talking to Me?” New York Times (June 4, with their disconnection from their homes and loves. 2000). Available on-line. URL: www.nytimes.com. Down- loaded February 2002. Komunyakaa employs sharp line breaks and brevity of Ward, Geoff. Statutes of Liberty: The New York School of Poets. language to illustrate the starkness and confusion of New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993. the men. Komunyakaa focuses on the power of humanity and A. Mary Murphy the excavation of complex emotions and truths. Through his individual quest he ends up revealing the KOMUNYAKAA, YUSEF (1947– ) Yusef stark and often lonely circumstances of everyday people, Komunyakaa wears a number of hats: southern poet, while also finding the beauty and passion residing there. 264 KOSTELANETZ, RICHARD

BIBLIOGRAPHY fectly express the fully unified, overflowing, bright Komunyakaa, Yusef. “Still Negotiating with the Images: An hugeness of a universe just begun. The rest of Koste- Interview with Yusef Komunyakaa,” by William Baer. lanetz’s sequence unfolds with equal finesse. Kenyon Review 20.3–4 (summer/fall 1998): 5–29. Kostelanetz is also well known for such “fusional” Stein, Kevin. “Vietnam and the ‘Voice Within’: Public and infraverbal poems as those he calls “strings,” which Private History in Yusef Komunyakaa’s Dien Cai Dau.” consist of chains of words, each of them (except the Massachusetts Review 36.4 (winter 1995–1996): 541–561. first) incorporating the preceding word’s last, last two, Suarez, Ernest. “Yusef Komunyakaa.” Five Points: A Journal of Literature & Art 4.1 (fall 1998): 15–28. last three, last four letters. The result is an often strangely resonant blends. The string-fragment, “ideaf- Arto Payaslian encerebrumblendivestablishmentertain,” from “String- Five” (1979), bubbles with ideas about things people KOSTELANETZ, RICHARD (1940– ) fence with, have differences over, use to “divest” the Richard Kostelanetz, though best known as a critic of establishment, and so forth. Another example of his literature and culture in general, is a pioneer in the variety of fusional infraverbal poems is “dmionneeryo” fields of VISUAL POETRY and infraverbal poetry (poetry in (“Spanglish Interweavings” [1992]), which interweaves which what happens inside words is crucial); the most the word money and its Spanish equivalent, dinero, to impressive examples of his efforts were collected in his make a text surprisingly high in appropriate connota- 1993 volume, Wordworks. His influences range from tions, one, for example having to do with the domi- William Blake to Gertrude STEIN, Robert Indiana, and neering quality of money. He has been equally adept at John CAGE. Among the many poets who have learned making suggestive “fissional” infraverbal poems along from his example are John Byrum, Jonathan Brannen, the lines of “REVERBERATE” (1992), which takes its Crag Hill, G. Huth, and Bob Grumman. title-word through “RE,” “EVE,” “VERB,” “BE,” “ERA,” Kostelanetz was born in New York City, where he and “ATE” back to “REVERBERATE.” still lives. He has spent his life almost entirely as an Beyond these poems and many others based on unaffiliated scholar /artist, receiving fellowships from other infraverbal tactics, Kostelanetz has been in the the Guggenheim Foundation (1967), the National vanguard in the making of video poems, sound poems, Endowment for the Arts (1976, 1978, 1979, and 1985), poetic holograms, and almost every other unconven- and numerous other sources domestic and foreign. tional poetic form known. Kostelanetz is unusual as a poet in that he did not BIBLIOGRAPHY branch out from mainstream into “otherstream” poetry Grumman, Bob. “Segreceptuality.” American Book Review but began as a purely visual poet: His first poem, “Trib- 17.1 (September–October 1995): 20. ute to Henry Ford,” which he produced at the age of Kostelanetz, Richard. “Person of Letters in the Contempo- 27, uses uppercase Ts and As to stand for the Ford rary World.” In Contemporary Authors Autobiography company’s early 20th-century Model As and Model Ts Series. Vol. 8. Detroit: Gale Research, 1988, pp. 179–199. to create a three-frame snapshot of part of the history Parker, Peter, ed. “Richard Kostelanetz.” In The Reader’s of American automobiles. Guide to Twentieth-Century Writing. New York: Oxford Among his best visual poems is “Genesis” (1972), a University Press, 1996, p. 410. sequence of eight words, each filling a page. It begins Bob Grumman with its title, “GENESIS,” in large black print. “LIGHT” follows, in larger letters. They are pedestrianly sten- KUMIN, MAXINE (1925– ) Atypically for ciled but white on a black page. This reversal, coming her generation, Maxine Kumin eschewed the free verse directly after the title page’s black on white, gives them revolution in favor of a reinterpretation of traditional a dazzling effect. Moreover they touch each other, so, forms (see PROSODY AND FREE VERSE). Kumin has said at first, they seem a fusion of light, rather than a word. that she loves the challenge of meter and rhyme and Once recognized as a word, however, they near-per- that the rigidity of a set form is what gives her the per- KUMIN, MAXINE 265 mission to tackle emotionally charged or difficult top- sparse representation of women and people of color on ics (74). According to her, W. H. AUDEN “exerted an the board of chancellors. In addition to the volumes intellectual and visceral influence” both “in terms of already mentioned, Kumin has published 11 other col- rhyme and scansion, and his ability to compress those lections of poetry, beginning in 1961 with Halfway, gifts into images, to make a metaphor of a thought” continuing with The Privilege (1965), The Nightmare (197–198). Over time Kumin developed a looser Factory (1970), House, Bridge, Fountain, Gate (1975), music distinctively her own, employing slant rhyme, The Retrieval System (1978), Our Ground Time Here Will nonce forms, and a colloquial diction. Her work incor- Be Brief (1982), The Long Approach (1985), Connecting porates autobiography; even so, in her poems, the self the Dots (1996), Selected Poems: 1960–1990 (1997), The is not the focus, but a lens through which to view the Long Marriage (2001), and Bringing Together: Uncol- world. Accordingly she has never been associated with lected Early Poems, 1958–1988 (2003). Kumin has also CONFESSIONAL POETRY, despite her close association with published five novels, a collection of short stories, Anne SEXTON, a poet inextricably linked to that move- more than 20 children’s books (four coauthored with ment. While Kumin insists upon the androgynous Anne Sexton), four books of essays, and a memoir, and nature of writing, issues of gender have unavoidably she has taught at a number of universities, including marked her career. Her 1972 collection begins with a Tufts, Brandeis, Columbia, and Princeton. series of poems written in a male persona because, at Mortality and the counterbalancing thrust for life the time, Kumin feared they would not be taken seri- are the recurrent themes of Kumin’s poetry; Kumin’s ously if written in a female voice, while the opening reexamination of these themes is distinguished by the poem of her 1989 collection reports, “I suffer, the critic unsentimental steadiness of her gaze. Sometimes proclaims, / from an overabundance of maternal genes” dubbed “Roberta Frost,” Kumin does share in common (“Nurture”), a complaint she co-opts by celebrating it. with Robert FROST the dedication to form, the New Maxine Winokur was born in Germantown, Penn- England sensibility, and the use of nature as a subject, sylvania. She graduated from Radcliffe College with a but Kumin is no feminine derivative of Frost. Perhaps B.A. in history and literature and an M.A. in compara- her most striking difference from Frost is her forthright tive literature. In 1946 she married Victor Kumin and rejection of transcendence. Nature in a Frost poem is settled in suburban Boston. In 1957 she signed up for emblematic; the woods he stops in, or in which his an adult education poetry workshop conducted by roads diverge stand in for something beyond them- John Holmes; other members of that now legendary selves, and they are more a landscape of the mind than class included Anne SEXTON, George Starbuck, and an actual landscape (see “THE ROAD NOT TAKEN” and Sam Albert. Kumin’s collection of poems, Up Country “STOPPING BY WOODS ON A SNOWY EVENING”). In Kumin’s (1972), won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973, while Looking poems, by contrast, nature is always materially there, for Luck (1991) received both the Poets’ Prize (1994) even when it additionally performs metaphoric work: and the Aiken Taylor Award (1995). Some of Kumin’s “The cats clean themselves after the kill. / A hapless many honors include the Ruth Lilly Award (1999), an swallow lays another clutch” (“The Green Well” American Academy of Arts and Letters Award (1980), [1992]). In Alicia OSTRIKER’s words, “she employs a National Council on the Arts Fellowship (1967–68), metaphor not to elevate but to articulate phenomena— the Eunice Tietjens Memorial Prize (1972), the Levin- in the double sense of expressing them clearly and son Prize (1986) from Poetry magazine, and a fellow- showing their connections and conjunctions” (qtd. in ship from the Academy of American Poets (1986). In Grosholz 81). Connections are vital to Kumin’s poems, 1981–82, she served as consultant in poetry to the most especially in her “tribal” poems (Kumin’s term for Library of Congress, and she served as poet laureate of her many poems on family) and in her expression of New Hampshire from 1989–94. She is a former chan- the interconnectedness and interdependence of all cellor of the Academy of American Poets, a post she aspects of the natural world. Kumin is known for her and Carolyn KIZER resigned in 1998 to protest the empathetic and unflinching poetry about animals and 266 KUNITZ, STANLEY for her presentation of the human not in contrast to English in 1926 and an A.M. in English in 1927. From (and therefore somehow free of) nature but as embed- 1928 to the 1970s, he worked for the H.W. Wilson ded in and inextricable from nature. As she reminds us Company in New York City, a publishing house. At the in “Territory” (1970), “We are not of it, but in it.” age of 38 he went off to war in the United States Army. More than one critic has highlighted the connection Kunitz has won numerous prizes for his work, includ- between Kumin’s use of set form and her pervading ing the Pulitzer Prize in 1959 for Selected Poems theme of mortality: As mortality pressures and makes 1928–1958 (1958), a National Book Award for his col- precious the life we do have, so the confines of form lection Passing Through (1995), the Bollingen Prize compel and energize the poetry. Though most often (1987), and the National Medal for the Arts (1993). rooted in the local of her New Hampshire landscape, Kunitz’s metaphysical visions of physical nature are the topics and concerns of Kumin’s poetry are global often coupled with concrete images and rendered in a in scope. declarative, indicative style. For example, “The Science of the Night” (1953) compresses the scientific history BIBLIOGRAPHY of human origins and its mystery to a few short lines Davison, Peter. The Fading Smile: Poets in Boston 1955–1960. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994. addressed to the speaker’s sleeping female companion: Grosholz, Emily, ed. Telling the Barn Swallow: Poets on the “We are not souls but systems, and we move / In Poetry of Maxine Kumin. Hanover, N.H.: University Press clouds of our unknowing.” The speaker marvels, of New England, 1997. watching her, at the “long seduction of the bone” that Kumin, Maxine. Always Beginning. Port Townshend, Wash.: has led her down through her genetic history to this Copper Canyon Press, 2000. point. His lover and he had their beginnings, physical Ostriker, Alicia. Stealing the Language: The Emergence of and spiritual, in the “big bang” represented by Adam’s Women’s Poetry in America. Boston: Beacon Press, 1986. rib bone, literally the stuff of “planetary dust . . . blow- Christine Gelineau ing.” The tight layering of thought and allusion is typ- ical of Kunitz, a craftsman who melds scientific ideas KUNITZ, STANLEY (1905– ) Stanley Kunitz and myth in crisp images and syntax. Understanding, is an important modernist poet whose acute phrasing, faith, and science combine to tell readers a little about keen observation, and emotional and intellectual who they are and where they came from, but just as power have delighted readers for move than 70 years physicists calculate humanity’s position from the (see MODERNISM). At age 95 he published his 12th book “beginning of things” by measuring the shift of per- of poetry, The Collected Poems (2000), representing in ceived light toward the red end of the spectrum, so too its 154 poems work originally published from 1930 to the poet calculates the distances that lie between our 1995. In recognition for his work and a remarkable observation of and participation in the act of love and longevity, he was twice appointed the nation’s poet lau- our grasp of the wonder of it all. He alludes to the red reate (1974–76 and 2000–01). In continuing to write shift in the spectrum by which we see how the uni- strongly into his eighth and ninth decades, Kunitz verse expands. Life is short, and the time for enjoying joins poets such as William Butler Yeats, Randall JAR- the human touch rapidly diminishes. The final three RELL, Robert LOWELL, Thomas Hardy, and Czeslaw lines of the poem summarize his argument with a deft Milosz. Like Yeats especially, Kunitz as seer writes out allusion to John Donne’s “A Valediction: Forbidding of a personal, created mythology, as exemplified in Mourning” (1633). The lovers are physically together “The Wellfleet Whale” (1984). some of the time but emotionally together always, just Kunitz was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, to as the hands of the clock are always united at its cen- Jewish Lithuanian immigrants. His father, Solomon Z. ter, and as the stiff twin legs of the compass are united Kunitz, killed himself before Stanley was born, and his in Donne’s poem. This use of another poet’s conceit mother, Yetta Helen Jasspon Kunitz, worked as a dress- illustrates an important aspect of Kunitz’ method. Even maker. At Harvard University, he earned an A.B. in more to the point, it illuminates a fundamental atti- KYGER, JOANNE 267 tude, a respect for and mastery of the techniques and to the Bay Area and published her first book, The concerns of a certain type of poetic ancestor, the meta- Tapestry and the Web (1965). She then briefly lived in physical poet. New York, returned to the San Francisco area, and The simple rhythms and syntax of the final poem in moved to Bolinas. Through her involvement with local the Collected Poems (2000), “Touch Me,” convey environmental issues, editing a local newspaper, and poignance as the speaker acknowledges the passage of being a sitting member of the Ocean Wind Zendo, the years since he was a child, remembering, like Kyger has maintained an active presence in the Bolinas Wordsworth, what it was to be a child again kneeling community. Since its beginnings in the mid-1970s, she to hear the crickets underfoot and the “music pour / has also taught at the Jack Kerouac School of Disem- from such a small machine.” Desire makes that small bodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Col- machine go. Kunitz combines acute observation with orado, and at the New College of San Francisco. the language of his poetic ancestors and makes it new. Overall Kyger’s poetry resonates with a Buddhist attentiveness. Direct and immediate, her poems are BIBLIOGRAPHY often likened to snapshots in time exploring the expe- Duncan, Erika. Unless Soul Clap Its Hands: Portraits and Pas- sages. New York: Schocken, 1984. rience of sunyata, or “no-self”: “I am bereft / I dissolve Moss, Stanley, ed. A Celebration for Stanley Kunitz on His quickly / I am everybody” (“what i wanted to say” Eightieth Birthday. Riverdale-on-Hudson, N.Y.: Sheep [1978]). Yet the self demands to be understood. Meadow, 1986. “Breakfast” (1978), for instance, details a series of Orr, Gregory. Stanley Kunitz: An Introduction to the Poetry. moments through the point of view of a poetic voice New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. that gives way to sliding variables between the pro- Theodore C. Humphrey nouns “I,” “she,” and “them” and ends, “I wouldn’t go there, into their / minds. . . . thru the mirror one can KYGER, JOANNE (1934– ) Often catego- she see / pine branches.” Kyger is one of American rized as a BEAT poet, but more closely associated with poetry’s key innovators. Her poetry is of place and the SAN FRANCISCO RENAISSANCE, Joanne Kyger emerged community, and it examines a range of themes from as the Beat movement itself was beginning to wane in identity and radical ethics to spirituality, personal rela- the 1960s. Like many of the Beats, Kyger draws on an tionships, and national politics. Above all else Kyger’s assortment of influences, including Buddhist traditions challenge has been attending to the processes of realiz- and practices, American Indian and First Nations ing and directly engaging with conditions of existence, teachings, and certain strains of New Age philosophies. “the broad / sweeping / form of being there” (“what i Kyger was born in Vallejo, California. In 1957 she wanted to say” [1978]), through poetry. left Santa Barbara for the San Francisco Bay area where BIBLIOGRAPHY the HOWL obscenity trials were in full swing. There Russo, Linda, ed. “Joanne Kyger Feature,” Jacket magazine she met John WIENERS, and, through the weekly writing 11 (2000). Available online. URL: www.jacketmagazine. groups that they hosted, Robert DUNCAN and Jack com/11/index.html. Downloaded December 2003. SPICER. In 1959 Kyger moved into the legendary East- ———., ed. “Joanne Kyger author page,” Electronic Poetry West House, a communal living project where Philip Centre at the State University of New York, Buffalo. Avail- WHALEN, Lew Welch, and Jack KEROUAC were sporadic able online. URL: http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/kyger. residents. It was during this time that Kyger also began Downloaded December 2003. sitting with Zen master Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, who Tonkinson, Carole, ed. Big Sky Mind: Buddhism and the Beat had come to teach at the Soto Zen Church. In 1960 Generation. New York: Riverhead Books, 1995. Kyger joined Gary SNYDER in Japan, where they were Jason Morelyle married. Following their divorce in 1964, she returned C L D

“LADY LAZARUS” SYLVIA PLATH (1965) can, not European, makes her flippant references inde- Written in the explosive productivity of the last cent. For others, those facts of ethnicity and nationality months of Sylvia PLATH’s life and published posthu- are irrelevant: A poet has the right to employ whatever mously in Ariel (1965), this poem is both a promise will express what needs to be expressed. Regardless of and a curse. The poem articulates the furious despair her debatable right to do so, Plath draws, less than two necessary to commit suicide, combining the need to decades after World War II, on extremely fresh memo- get out of life with the energy to act on that need. In ries of behaviors and events more horrible than mere October 1962 Plath’s long-term mental illness, which imagination can conjure. She makes raw use of raw had led to previous suicide attempts, was compounded wounds in a poem that needs to be spoken for the harsh by her new status as a woman scorned by her diction and clipped lines to do their angry work. estranged husband, British poet Ted Hughes. Her Plath employs a freak-show motif, a step-right-up upcoming death is already in process in “Lady bluster addressed to “The peanut-crunching crowd.” Lazarus,” and according to the poem “it feels like hell” She thus makes a revealing comment about her per- for Plath and Hughes both. The poem defiantly speaks sonal acquaintances, suggesting that they stand around of suicide as an accomplishment, something the and watch without intervention, that a woman could speaker can “manage” once per decade. The physical strip her body off in public (this is extreme striptease) person is objectified down to its component parts— and the mob simply “shoves” closer for a better view. the teeth, the feet, the skin. This poem speaks of death They may think they are seeing a “walking miracle,” as performance by inviting an audience and rejects the but the burden of resurrection—and the cost of the idea of suicide as defeat. “Lady Lazarus” uses suicide as poem—is that the Lazarus, the resurrected one, has to an aggressive act or threat of violence not directed at face death again. The jaded voice of Plath’s speaker is the self, but at whomever she deems responsible for bitingly resentful about being revived and having to do abandoning her to it, including the listener/reader. it again, and when she speaks of the cost of intimacy, One of the most controversial elements of the poem “the very large charge” for touching her, she knows the is Plath’s use of the language of the Holocaust experience price is for the one touched as much as for the one in order to find a context miserable enough to explicate who touches. The speaker’s great desire is to be absent her own misery. The issue for critics is not whether she from the body, that organism through which all sensa- makes effective use of the metaphor, but whether she tion is experienced. Being alive hurts too much, so the has the right to use it at all. For some, the fact that Plath Lady Lazarus keeps her promise that “soon, soon” her was of German ethnicity, not Jewish, and North Ameri- flesh will be as dead as she is.

268 THE LANGUAGE SCHOOL 269

BIBLIOGRAPHY the 1960s cultural landscape that Allen could not have Britzolakis, Christina. Sylvia Plath and the Theatre of Mourn- anticipated. The work of Robert CREELEY and Charles ing. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999. OLSON became syntactically freer. Ted BERRIGAN led a Gubar, Susan. “Prosopopoeia and Holocaust Poetry in Eng- second generation of New York school poets by using lish: Sylvia Plath and Her Contemporaries.” Yale Journal of a variety of collage techniques in his SONNETS that Criticism 14.1 (spring 2001): 191–216. picked up where John ASHBERY’s “Europe” and Frank A. Mary Murphy O’HARA’s “Biotherm” left off. OBJECTIVIST poets from the 1930s either returned to writing poetry (George OPPEN) THE LANGUAGE SCHOOL The writers who or garnered attention after years of neglect (Zukofsky). emerged in the 1970s and have been identified vari- Jerome ROTHENBERG’s anthologies reasserted the impor- ously as “Language poets,” “L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E tance of neglected modernists and poetries from cul- poets” and “so-called Language poets” generally con- tures previously dismissed as “primitive” (see ceive of themselves less as a movement or school than ETHNOPOETICS). Something Else Press, founded by Dick as a loosely knit community of writers who, with a par- Higgins in the wake of the antiart movement Fluxus, ticular intensity from the mid-1970s to mid-1980s, included reprints of important works by Stein (The cultivated their own means of literary production and Making of Americans [1966], Geography and Plays engaged critically in each others’ work. Although a [1968]), and Lucy Church Amiably [1969]) in its cata- diversity of formal and thematic concerns characterize logue. John CAGE and Jackson MAC LOW introduced the writings of Bruce ANDREWS, Charles BERNSTEIN, Tina chance-based compositional procedures into music Darragh, Ray Di Palma, Robert GRENIER, Carla HARRY- and writing, while performance art (see POETRY IN PER- MAN, Lyn HEJINIAN, P. Inman, Bob PERELMAN, Ron SILLI- FORMANCE), free jazz, and the feminist and BLACK ARTS MAN, Barrett WATTEN, and Hannah Weiner (just a few of MOVEMENTs also began to flourish. Such interests the many Language writers who could be listed), in worked their way into POETRY JOURNALS and little mag- general, these writers may be said to view lived experi- azines, such as Caterpillar (edited by Clayton ESHLE- ence more as a construction of language than as a MAN), Joglars (edited by Clark COOLIDGE and Michael transparent reflection of it. Language writing extends PALMER, immediate precursors of Language writing who the tradition of avant-garde poetry exemplified by have generally distanced themselves from group align- Donald Allen’s groundbreaking 1960 anthology New ments), and 0 to 9 (edited by Vito Acconci and American Poetry: 1945–1960 (see POETRY ANTHOLOGIES), Bernadette MAYER, whose workshops at the St. Mark’s which cast a number of poetic groupings (BLACK MOUN- Poetry Project in the early 1970s were attended by sev- TAIN, NEW YORK SCHOOL, BEATS, SAN FRANCISCO RENAIS- eral Language writers). One issue of Toothpick, Lisbon SANCE) decidedly against the mainstream, or and the Orcas Islands, edited by Andrews and Michael “academic,” verse of the time. Language writing also Wiater (fall 1973), contained work by a number of revisits the work of neglected modernists (Gertrude writers who would by the end of the decade be known STEIN, Louis ZUKOFSKY, and Velimir Xlebniko, among as “Language poets.” others) and is often informed by Russian formalist and In 1971, Grenier and Watten launched This maga- French poststructuralist theories of language and ide- zine out of Iowa City, home of the country’s first cre- ology. Additionally the civil rights and free speech ative writing M.F.A. program (the Iowa Writers’ movements, along with the protests against the U.S. Workshop) and thus a mainstream poetry establish- engagement in the Vietnam War, provided a stimulus ment through which a number of avant-garde dissi- for many of these writers. dents had passed. This 1 (winter 1971) featured a While the Allen anthology delineated the major ten- cluster of review-essays by Grenier, whose declaration dencies in avant-garde poetry for several generations of “I HATE SPEECH” signaled an all-caps challenge to a poets nurtured on modernists, such as Ezra POUND and projective verse rooted in speech and the breath (see William Carlos WILLIAMS, other tendencies emerged on ARS POETICAS), while the issue also contained an homage 270 THE LANGUAGE SCHOOL to the recently deceased Olson. Claiming “I want writ- particular word refers to a particular object or concept) ing what is thought / where feeling is / words are born” is linked to Karl Marx’s critique of the commodity (qtd. in Silliman “American” 497), Grenier proposed a fetish: The meaning of words becomes a product that poetry of attention to language less as a way to refer to language users consume naively or in bad faith. Writ- the world and more as a fact of experience in its own ing that thwarts conventional meaning-making right. He also applied such attention to critical writing: processes thus critiques such consumption, turning His own review of Stein’s Lectures in America consisted the reader from a passive consumer of meaning into an of 14 quotations from her book, one quotation from active producer of meaning. Another of Silliman’s Creeley, and only five lines of his own commentary— essays from 1977, “Disappearance of the Word, essentially letting her work speak for itself. Appearance of the World,” extends this critique of ref- If Grenier’s review-essays in This 1 assumed a more erence to the broader historical development of lan- critical stance than most of that issue’s poetry, lan- guage use under capitalism. guage-centered poetries were nonetheless united with Many Language writers had also by this time con- the first critical assessment of the writing in “The verged geographically around key poetry journals and Dwelling Place: 9 Poets,” a special section Silliman POETRY PRESSES. Perelman and Watten moved to the San edited in 1973 for Alcheringa. Rothenberg, who Francisco Bay area by 1974 (bringing with them the coedited this ethnopoetics journal with Dennis Ted- magazines Hills and This, respectively), where Watten’s lock, first put Silliman in touch with Andrews and college friend Silliman (who had been editing Tottel’s Bernstein in the early 1970s. This mini-anthology pre- since 1970) had joined forces with Yale friends Steve sented writing by Andrews, Barbara Baracks, Coolidge, Benson and Kit ROBINSON. The latter’s one-shot maga- Lee DeJasu, DiPalma, Grenier, David Melnick, Silliman zine Streets and Roads, 1974, contained work by many himself, and Watten. “What connects these writers,” of these writers. Shortly thereafter Watten began a Silliman states, is “a community of concern for lan- reading series at the Grand Piano, a café on Haight guage as the center of whatever activity poems might Street in San Francisco, and Perelman began a series of be” (Silliman “Dwelling,” 118). The exemplary work of poet’s talks in his Folsom Street loft. Geoffrey Young Coolidge and Grenier, Silliman argues, “goes after a and Laura Chester began their press, the Figures, in direct confrontation with language, words,” such that 1975, and Hejinian began her Tuumba letterpress “neither the words nor the processes of the poem . . . chapbook series the following year. Each press had point out or away from the poem itself” (118). Citing nearly 20 titles in its catalogue by the end of 1978, Creeley’s claim (as Grenier had earlier) that “poems are while Watten added nearly a dozen titles under his not referential, or at least not importantly so,” Silliman This Press imprint. Meanwhile a number of writers had emphasizes that “words are not, finally, nonreferential”; arrived in New York City since 1975: Andrews and rather, these writers are interested in “diminish[ing] Lally from a fledgling Baltimore–Washington, D.C., the reference,” “the creation of non-referring struc- poetry scene, Bernstein (returning) from the West tures,” the “disruption of context,” or “forcing the Coast, DiPalma from Iowa City via Ohio. Bernstein meanings in upon themselves until they cancel out or began a reading series with Ted Greenwald at Green- melt” (118). wich Village’s Ear Inn in 1978, the same year he and By 1977 a Marxist political orientation (certainly Andrews began the journal that would soon name this manifested in private discussions and correspondence burgeoning activity. before this time) was added to the focus on language L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E ran for only four years itself. Steve McCaffery gathered essays by Andrews, (1978–81) but served in that time as a clearinghouse Bernstein, Silliman, and himself in a forum on “The of information on writing from both coasts. Politics of the Referent” for Frank Davey’s Toronto L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E published no poetry per se. journal Open Letter (summer 1977). For McCaffery the Instead a typical issue might have contained a forum referential aspect of the linguistic sign (that is, that the on one or two poets or topics, review pieces on new THE LANGUAGE SCHOOL 271 works that typically eschewed evaluation and became tions, giving the group its first book-length presenta- new works in their own right, and bibliographies or tion via a trade publisher with ties to the historic excerpts from a wide disciplinary range of recent jour- avant-garde of Pound and Williams. These two nals. Although many of the publications reviewed in anthologies sparked a new round of debates, which, by L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E were hard to obtain even then, this point, included important academic critics, the editors offered readers photocopies at cost. With including Jerome McGann and Marjorie Perloff. The more than 100 contributors, little aesthetic or political mid-1980s also witnessed the appearance of essay col- consensus resulted. At times lively debates emerged lections by Bernstein (Content’s Dream [1986]), Perel- over the value of nonevaluative reviews, the merits of man (Writing/Talks [1985]), Silliman (The New Sentence Cage and the artist Marcel Duchamp, and the efficacy [1987]), and Watten (Total Syntax [1984]). of anarchism and Marxism. Nevertheless the magazine Many Language writers continue working today, gave an appearance of coherence to the group and thus although the intense group activity has subsided. a point of entry for its critics. Perelman’s The Marginalization of Poetry has begun the The May 1979 issue of the Bay Area newsletter process of writing the history of Language writing; a Poetry Flash ran a feature on “L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E similar activity has taken place in another form, an on- Poetry” that, in part, charged the group with being line collaborative work called “the Grand Piano” (after overly theoretical, willfully obscure, dogmatic, and Watten’s reading venue) by nine members of the Bay elitist. Silliman often became chief defender of the Area group. Ann Vickery has demonstrated how many group—and not just in Poetry Flash. In the preface to of the issues confronted by Language writing were “Realism: An Anthology of ‘Language’ Poets” in Iron- framed quite differently for women associated with the wood 20 (1982), Silliman recalled the history of lan- movement. Bernstein, Perelman, and Watten have guage-centered writing, enumerated the various obtained tenure-track positions in university English publications and other activities of the group, outlined departments, spurring some (including Silliman) to the changed circumstances of avant-garde poetry since suggest that the original antiacademic stance of the the 1960s and the shortcomings of the New American group has thus been compromised. At the same time a poetry, and emphasized the importance of readership, younger generation of writers has emerged, in some audience, and community. Soon other widely circu- cases out of the very M.F.A. system Language writing lated journals began publishing collections of Lan- rejected. While their work furthers some avenues of guage writing. Bernstein edited a 50-page “Language investigation opened up by Language writing, these Sampler” for the Paris Review (issue 86 [1982]) and a younger writers are less inclined toward polemic. 100-page feature of “43 Poets” for boundary 2 (volume BIBLIOGRAPHY 14 [1985/6]), while Joan RETALLACK contributed an Andrews, Bruce, and Charles Bernstein, eds. The omnibus review of recent Language publications to L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book. Carbondale: Southern Illinois Parnassus (volume 12 [1984]). These journals University Press, 1984. appealed to broadly literary and academic readerships Kim, Eleana. “Language Poetry,” Readme. Available online. and helped Language writing reach new audiences. URL: http://hone.jps.net/~nada/issuefour.htm. Down- Silliman expanded upon his Ironwood defense in the loaded December 2003. preface to In the American Tree (1986). At more than Messerli, Douglas, ed. “Language” Poetries. New York: New 600 pages, this recently reprinted (2001) anthology Directions, 1987. remains the most comprehensive primary source for Perelman, Bob. The Marginalization of Poetry: Language Writ- ing and Literary History. Princeton: Princeton University Language writing, even while Silliman lists, beyond the Press, 1996. 40 writers it includes, more than 70 additional writers Silliman, Ron, ed. “The Dwelling Place: 9 Poets.” Alcheringa from whom “an anthology of comparable worth” could 1.2 (1975): 104–120. be drawn (xx). A year later Douglas Messerli edited the ———. In the American Tree. 1986. Reprint, Orono, Maine: shorter “Language” Poetries anthology for New Direc- National Poetry Foundation, 2001. 272 LANSING, GERRIT

Vickery, Ann. Leaving Lines of Gender: A Feminist Genealogy ing also collaborated with artists Nora Ligorano and of Language Writing. Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Marshall Reese on On the Book (2002). Press, 2000. Much of Lansing’s work is overtly sexual: “When then Tom Orange love takes you in hand,” he writes in “An Inlet of Reality, or Soul” (1977), “you don’t languish in the clover / but LANSING, GERRIT (1928–2003) Gerrit make song.” His ideal is Walt Whitman’s world of “com- Lansing’s poetics are grounded in notions of gnosis, rades,” a world of solitary individuals drawn together in magic, and transcendence. For Lansing poetry is a vortex of joy: “Sex on earth,” he claims in “Stanzas of potentially alchemical, magically transformative, Hyparxis” (1977), “is rhymed angelic motion.” releasing the self from convention into rapture. He is Lansing’s poetic project—the gradual unfolding of a a difficult poet; critics and peers place his work magical poetic vision of transformation and transcen- among the most ambitious and engaging of our time. dence—brought him considerable respect among fel- “The writing/riting of poetry is for Lansing a testing of low poets. He is, said Robert KELLY, in a blurb on the human imagination against the creative and Heavenly Tree / Soluble Forest, “the most learned among destructive powers of nature and the universe,” writes us, and the most fun.” critic Robert Baker. “It is the most serious of games BIBLIOGRAPHY and should only be played by those who would risk Baker, Robert. “The Metaphysics of Gerrit Lansing.” Rain everything, but for those, there are worlds to gain.” Taxi Online 23 (fall 2001). Available online. URL: Lansing has been associated with poets of the Boston www.raintaxi.com/online/2001fall/lansing.shtml. Down- Renaissance—Robin BLASER, John WIENERS, Stephen loaded 15 March 2003. Jonas, and others who lived in or near that city in the Foster, Edward, ed. Talisman: A Journal of Contemporary 1950s and 1960s. Robert LOWELL, Sylvia PLATH, and Poetry and Poetics 15 (winter 1995/96). [The Gerrit Lans- other CONFESSIONAL writers dominated Boston’s ing Issue] poetry landscape at this time, and Lansing and his Edward Foster associates, some of whom were, like him, much influ- enced by Charles OLSON, explored forms of LYRIC LAST POETS, THE This innovative group of POETRY less impregnated with Freudian notions than African-American poets exemplifies an African oral tra- the work of writers like Lowell. dition in the United States that is particularly a part of Descended from old Dutch and English colonial African-American poetry (see BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT stock, Lansing was reared in a small town near Cleve- and HARLEM RENAISSANCE). The group formed on May land, Ohio. He graduated from Harvard in 1949 and 19, 1968, at a celebration honoring Malcolm X’s birth- received an M.A. from Columbia in 1955. He worked day in Marcus Garvey Park in Harlem. Original mem- in publishing and bookselling. bers included Gylan Kain, Abiodun Oyewole, David Lansing edited two issues of a POETRY JOURNAL, SET, Nelson, and conga player Nilija. During the 1970s the in 1961 and 1963. His poetry was collected in The number of members swelled to include Felipe Luciano, Heavenly Tree Grows Downward (1977) and in Heavenly Umar Bin Hassan, Jalal Nurridin, and Suliaman El Tree / Soluble Forest (1995). Poems in the first book Hadi. Although the Last Poets were not officially con- appear in a different order in the second, reflecting his nected to the Black Arts movement, Amiri BARAKA belief that his book (both collections are versions of a describes the impetus behind their verse as the same: single work) evolves into a new form as new poems “Our art describes our past, the middle passage, Slav- emerge. He contributed Analytic Psychology (1983) to ery, the struggle of the Afro-American Nation! For The Curriculum of the Soul, a series of short books by Democracy, Self-Determination, and the destruction of poets following a series of subjects outlined by Olson. national oppression and capitalism” (xiii). As “The Soluble Forest,” that book now forms the con- Using the rhythm of the conga drum in a “call and cluding section of Heavenly Tree / Soluble Forest. Lans- response” to emphatic vocal expression, the Last Poets LAUTERBACH, ANN 273 brought poetry to the streets, capturing the attention of Nuriddin, Jalal, and Suliaman El Hadi. The Last Poets. Vibes large numbers of people uninterested in more tradi- from the Scribes: Selected Poems. New Jersey: Africa World tional forms of poetry. The group focused on black Press, 1992. experiences and aimed candid, metaphoric political Judy Massey Dozier messages and historical accounts of African-American experiences at a black audience. LAUTERBACH, ANN (1942– ) Since the Through their art these poets attempted to create a mid-1970s Ann Lauterbach has been writing philo- collective consciousness among blacks by directly sophical poetry that explores language’s relationship to interpreting the social injustices in their lives and lay- the tensions between presence and absence, continuity ing the blame at the door of the white power struc- and discontinuity, as well as voice and silence. Her ture. One of the most caustic examples is Jalal meditative style and intellectual content affiliate her Nuriddin’s “The White Man’s Got a God Complex” with other discursive poets, such as Wallace STEVENS (1971), a poem focused on American imperialism, and NEW YORK SCHOOL poet John ASHBERY, and her for- oppression, and white supremacy, in which the killing mal and linguistic experimentation suggest the influ- of various groups (“Indians,” “Japanese,” “black peo- ence of the LANGUAGE poets. Lauterbach also cites ple”) is summed up with this pronouncement: Emily Dickinson, Gertrude STEIN, and Sylvia PLATH as “Enslaving the earth I’m God! / Done went to the relevant feminist precursors to her own poetry (see moon I’m God!” FEMALE VOICE, FEMALE LANGUAGE). The hope for social change was the force behind Born and raised in New York City, Lauterbach com- much of the poetry. Nonetheless the Last Poets did pleted graduate work at Columbia University in 1967. not limit their criticism to the white power structure. She spent the next seven years working as an editor at They struck blows with their poetic accounts of the the publisher Thames and Hudson in London before effects of drug use with poems such as “Jones Com- returning to New York, where she directed art galleries ing Down” (1970), which describes in horrid detail in the mid-1970s. Lauterbach has published six books the force of addiction. Using the word jones as a of poetry, the first, Many Times, But Then (1979), and euphemism for drug habit, the poem indicts the the most recent, If in Time: Selected Poems, 1975–2000 motivation that propels so many poor, disadvantaged (2001), which also contains new poems. She has youth into this temporary escape from the blighted taught at Bard College and, among her other honors conditions of their experiences. and awards, she received a MacArthur grant in 1993. Their early repertoire also included tributes to leg- For Lauterbach language’s ability (or lack thereof) to endary jazz musicians, such as Charlie Parker, and mediate the contradictions of human experience is poetry dedicated to ancestors, black women, black responsible for constituting the individual’s relationship people in general, and the African heritage of African to notions of truth and reality. She has written, in “On Americans. According to the biographer Kim Green, Memory,” (1990), that words “release things from the the Last Poets’ mission “is to enlighten you with poems temporal and spatial settings in the real” (520). At the that give Black people roots, purpose, and a beginning same time, however, “Words are how we own our other than slavery and shame” (xxix). knowledge of the now” (521). Thus Lauterbach’s poetry The Last Poets, hailed as the forerunners of present- goes beyond the mere ungrounding of reality to iden- day rap artists, continue to perform. tify a new kind of knowledge that is actually grounded BIBLIOGRAPHY in the transient and uprooting character of language. Baraka, Amiri. Foreword to On a Mission, by Oyewole, Lauterbach employs three interrelated techniques to Abiodun, and Umar Bin Hassan. New York: Henry Holt, walk this delicate line between grounding and uproot- 1996. ing: She foregrounds the importance of prepositions Green, Kim. Introduction to On a Mission. Oyewole, Abio- and conjunctions, she uses abstraction to generalize dum, and Umar Bin Hasson. New York: Henry Holt, 1996. her text so as to require completion by the reader, and 274 LEE, LI-YOUNG she treats form as its own meaning-making device, not father—a physician to Mao Tse-tung, as well as a merely as an extension of content. All three devices preacher, a university professor, and a political pris- present old relations in new ways and imagine new oner of Sukarno in Indonesia—fled Indonesia in 1959 forms of relation. with his family to Hong Kong, Macao, Japan, and, These lines from “The Prior” in And For Example finally, to the United States, settling in the Midwest, (1994) demonstrate Lauterbach forging new relations where he continued to preach as a Presbyterian minis- through slippages and abstractions of meaning: “What ter. His mother is a granddaughter of Yuan Shih-kai, a is it based on what pleasure / what lost in what of your warlord and president of the Republic of China. This own making —.” Not only do the “what’s” in these remarkable personal and familial history finds itself lines lack a clear reference within the poem, they also embedded in Lee’s two works of poetry, Rose (1986) function simultaneously as both questions and nouns. and The City in which I Love You (1990) and his mem- Furthermore the prepositions multiply the syntactic oir, The Winged Seed (1995). Lee’s several honors possibilities of the sentence, forcing the reader to hear include New York University’s Delmore SCHWARTZ both “What is it based on?” and “On what pleasure?” Memorial Poetry Award (1989) for Rose, the Lamont Such referential and syntactic ambiguities make Poetry Selection (1990) for The City in which I Love You, Lauterbach’s work a poetry of possibility that demands and a fellowship from the Academy of American Poets keen attention and full participation. for distinguished poetic achievement (2003). The search for intention and awareness is common BIBLIOGRAPHY to all of Lee’s work, as he draws attention to the uni- Lauterbach, Ann. “Ann Lauterbach: An Interview,” by Molly versal through the particular, focusing on the figure Bendall. American Poetry Review 21.3 (1992): 19–25. of his father to mediate these connections. A rose, for ———. “On Memory.” In Conversant Essays: Contemporary Poets on Poetry, edited by James McCorkle. Detroit: Wayne example, acts as the central metaphor—a delicate State University Press, 1990, pp. 519–524. symbol of endurance—that personifies a chorus of Schultz, Susan. “Visions of Silence in Poems of Ann Lauter- family voices in the eponymous poem in Rose. In The bach and Charles Bernstein.” Talisman 13 (1994–5): City in which I Love You Lee invokes the Bible’s “Song 163–177. of Songs” (Song of Solomon) to connect the secular with the sacred, the mythical/archetypal with the Mitchum Huehls practical, the ordinary with the rare: “All are beauti- LEE, LI-YOUNG (1957– ) Li-Young Lee ful by variety” (“The Cleaving”). In The Winged Seed, asserts that “poetry comes out of a need to somehow— Lee shapes his family’s plight as exiles into a surreal in language—connect with universe mind ...a mind narrative that highlights an endless, immediate pres- [he] would describe as a 360-degree seeing” (qtd. in ent that contrasts memory and history. Lee’s alle- Marshall 130). Lee, a “sound-conscious poet,” in Chitra giance to the familial and the spiritual manifests itself Divakaruni’s words, uses a variety of poetic forms in in all of his writings. order to hear the frequency under language and seeks Lee’s poetic and prose styles demonstrate aesthetic “a kind of musical inevitability . . . the way the poems thinking combined with ethical, moral gestures that open, the way they disclose themselves” (qtd. in Miller rise above the cultural and the ideological. For Lee the 36). Lee’s writing, greatly influenced by teacher and mission of poets is to witness the invisible, as Tod Marshall writes, “making it revealed in the visible so poet Gerald STERN, captures a fragmentary 20th-century aesthetic that derives from memories of displacement, that everybody can line up and know what they’re lin- while it also sustains an undertone of spirituality that ing up with . . . lining up with the cosmos that they hearkens back to John Donne, Walt Whitman, and T. S. are” (146). ELIOT, among others. BIBLIOGRAPHY Born in Djakarta, Indonesia, of Chinese parents, Marshall, Tod. “To Witness the Invisible: A Talk with Li- Lee’s childhood was a series of flights and losses. His Young Lee.” Kenyon Review 22.1 (winter 2001): 129–147. LEITHAUSER, BRAD 275

Miller, Matt. “Darkness Visible: Li-Young Lee Lights up His Inspired by the LUNCH POEMS of Frank O’HARA, Lehman Family’s Murky Past with Poetry.” Far Eastern Economic began keeping a daily journal in verse to capture Review 159.22 (May 30, 1996): 34–36. authentically life’s quotidian flux, a project that resulted Marie-Therese C. Sulit in The Daily Mirror (2000) and continued through The Evening Sun, in which he writes “I’m taking jazz as / a LEHMAN, DAVID (1948– ) A New Yorker second language” (“March 23”), and indeed the work by birth, residence, and sensibility, David Lehman is exudes jazz’s improvisational spirit. The gravity in any most often associated with the NEW YORK SCHOOL of given poem can shift from light to heavy in the space of poets, whose lives and work he has chronicled in a pun, as when a satirically depicted married couple books and essays. His poetry evokes the irony and wit must ruminate on their estranged condition for hours of that earlier generation, but it more directly engages “before the remorse code / is deciphered, repealed” the immediacies of everyday life in a media-saturated, (“January 12”). technological society where values and relationships Less formally constrained and more overtly per- grow ever more complex and difficult to articulate. sonal than their predecessors, these poems casually Praised by critic Robert Schultz for his “associative allude to friends, family, popular music, films, and exuberance” and “ear for the jargons which exhibit sports, creating a singular tapestry that vibrantly contemporary truth and folly” (508), Lehman attempts depicts the idiosyncrasies and contradictions of Amer- to balance formal stylistic concerns against an impulse ican life. toward spontaneity. BIBLIOGRAPHY The son of Jewish refugees from Nazi-controlled Holley, Margaret. “Myth in Our Midst: The Multiple Worlds Europe, Lehman was raised in upper Manhattan. He of the Lyric.” Michigan Quarterly Review 32.1 (winter holds advanced degrees from Cambridge and from 1993): 150–164. Columbia University, where he studied with Kenneth McNair, Wesley. “Craft and Technique: Four Poets.” Michi- KOCH. He has held teaching positions at Cornell, gan Quarterly Review 36.4 (fall 1997): 668–682. Hamilton, Wells, and the New School University. Schultz, Robert. “One Retrospective, Four Sequels, and Among his awards are fellowships from the National Three Debuts.” Hudson Review 49.3 (autumn 1996): Endowment for the Arts (1987) and the Guggenheim 503–520. Foundation (1989). Series editor of the Best American Fred Muratori Poetry annual, Lehman has published seven volumes of poetry, including An Alternative to Speech (1986), Oper- LEITHAUSER, BRAD (1953– ) The pri- ation Memory (1990), Valentine Place (1996), and The mary feature of Brad Leithauser’s poems is a passion for Evening Sun (2002). prosodic experimentation (see PROSODY AND FREE For all their cleverness and wordplay, Lehman’s ear- VERSE), and he has lamented what he sees as a decline lier poems address serious matters, such as the Holo- in “metrical literacy” in American poetry of the last sev- caust, the Vietnam War, and the dynamics of love and eral decades (41). His writing, in which the influences marriage, often at length, and frequently contained of such poets as Donald HALL, Robert LOWELL, and Eliz- within elaborate variations on received forms, includ- abeth BISHOP, as well as Gerard Manly Hopkins and ing villanelles, pantoums, and sestinas (see PROSODY A. E. Housman, may be discerned, displays formal AND FREE VERSE). Margaret Holley discerns a distance mastery and a meticulous attention to form’s possibili- between the poet and his subjects and states that “this ties, particularly how form relates to intonation and poetry of ultimate seriousness is heavily laced with the sounds and cadences of spoken language. insouciance” (152), while Wesley McNair observes that Leithauser was born in Detroit, Michigan. He gradu- the poet’s polished craft is nonetheless tuned to “the ated from Harvard College and Harvard Law School, continual transition and perplexities of postmodern and he has written six novels as well as four volumes of experience” (677). poetry and a book of essays. He is editor of the Norton 276 LEVERTOV, DENISE

Anthology of Ghost Stories. Among the many awards and LEVERTOV, DENISE (1923–1997) Denise honors he has received is a MacArthur Fellowship Levertov is considered a member of the BLACK MOUN- (1983). He has taught at Mount Holyoke College. TAIN SCHOOL of poets, even though she never attended An expansive poet who often finds metaphors in the college. Her friends Charles OLSON, Robert CREELEY, mathematics and natural science and rhythms in and Robert DUNCAN influenced her work, but it is everything from common speech to songs by George William Carlos WILLIAMS whom she most closely fol- Gershwin, Leithauser writes with a wonderful combi- lowed formally. Her poetry combines public and pri- nation of scholarship, a microscopic eye for detail, vate experience, dealing with private issues, such as and a gentle but incisive sense of humor. A sensuous, love, solitude, divorce, marriage, and motherhood, as naturalistic, frequently pastoral imagery is typical of well as with some of the major public events of her his poems. In his poem “Small Waterfall” (1998), for times, including the Vietnam and Gulf Wars, nuclear instance, he neatly conveys the sense of a little water- proliferation, environmental degradation, and AIDS. fall with short phrases that tumble one into the next, Often praised as a master of free verse (see PROSODY AND breaking off in midstream and regathering, with FREE VERSE), she stressed the role of craft in poetry, and rhymes splashed throughout to bring continuity and many of her essays, such as “Some Notes on Organic likeness to the lines, as in: “stumbling on this small, Form,” first published in 1965, have become classics of all-but-forest-swallowed waterfall.” The poem also contemporary poetic theory. Although her poetic voice exemplifies his interest in correlating natural images is simple, it relies on concrete images and clear lan- and phenomena with the psychic “landscapes” of guage to provide insight into everyday experience. people, as it goes on to liken the waterfall to his wife, Levertov, originally spelled Levertoff, was born in the poet Mary Jo SALTER, to whom the poem is Ilford, Essex, England. She was the daughter of a Russ- addressed, calling both cataract and woman “a thing ian Jew who converted to become an Anglican priest. that flows and goes / and stays, self-propelled and - Raised in a bookish home, she was educated privately. replacing.” Her mother read 19th-century novels and poetry to In “Plus the Fact of You” (1995), a seamless inter- her, and her father provided her with a religious edu- change of personal and environmental details again cation. Levertov’s desire to become a poet came early. creates a sense of the sensuous and the cerebral as At age 12 she sent T. S. ELIOT several of her poems, and interchangeable, as the poem’s speaker muses sleepily she received from a him a two-page letter of encour- on a day of hiking and wonders, “Why at night do agement. During World War II she was a nurse in Lon- numbers clamor so,” as he finds himself counting his don, and soon afterward she married the American partner’s breaths. This interplay, as much as his tireless writer Mitchell Goodman and had a son. Goodman attention to meter and intonation, is at the heart of introduced her to Creeley, and she soon came to know what makes Leithauser’s work inventive and captivat- Olson, Duncan, and Williams. In 1948 she immigrated ing. Leithauser proves that careful attention to form to the United States, and by 1955, when she became a can liberate and give substance to an image or idea; his U.S. citizen, her poetic style had become American- poems reveal a genuine delight in images and the tire- ized. She served as the poetry editor for the Nation less connections the mind makes among them. (1961,1963–65) and Mother Jones (1975–78), and she BIBLIOGRAPHY also taught creative writing at, among other schools, Gwynn, R. S. “A Field Guide to Poetics of the ’90s,” Expan- Drew University, Vassar College, University of Califor- sive Poetry and Music Online. Available online. URL: nia, Berkeley, and Stanford University. Among her http://home.earthlink.net/~arthur505/cult1096.html. awards are the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize (1976) Downloaded April 19, 2003. and the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Soci- Leithauser, Brad. “Metrical Illiteracy.” New Criterion 1.5 (Jan- ety of America (1984). Along with being a poet, an uary 1983): 41–46. essayist, and editor, she translated works from French Amy Glynn Greacen and Spanish and was active in political protest. LEVERTOV, DENISE 277

Her first book, Double Image (1946), was published becomes more comprehensible” (145). Even in her war in London and provides an example of the neoroman- poetry, Levertov addresses public experiences through tic tendencies of English poetry of its period. Levertov personal perceptions. For example, in “Life at War” is remembered primarily for her American works, (1967), she speaks about her experience of Vietnam: starting with Here and Now (1957) and Overland to the “We have breathed the grits of it in, all our lives, / our Islands (1958). These works contain tightly crafted lungs are pocked with it.” She stresses the personal lyrics that display most of her major themes: love, effect of the war on her and on her imagination. mysticism, marriage, imagination, inspiration, the Although her volume Footprints (1972) marked a turn poet’s craft, and solitude. In many of the poems, she away from political poetry as a primary concern, she presents domestic situations through fresh viewpoints. continued to provide a poetry of witness for the rest of For example, in “The Gypsy’s Window” (1957), she her life, writing about such subjects as El Salvador, the presents plates, paper roses, and a vase as places where Gulf War, and the nuclear arms race. there is “the chance of poetry.” Also in these early vol- With her collections after the Vietnam War, such as umes she presents her concerns with religion. In the Life in the Forest (1975), Candles in Babylon (1978), tradition of Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oblique Prayers (1981), and Breathing the Water (1984), she presents religious ideas through her personal expe- Levertov returned to many of her earlier themes but rience. In her early works she displays an agnostic with looser forms. Through close perception of daily worldview, portraying her mystic visions often through experiences, her later work provides insight into the nature or her ancestors. For example, in “Illustrious importance of such acts, but it also presents the mys- Ancestors” (1958), she mentions “Angel Jones of Mold, tery inherent within objects. The poet finds God in whose meditations / were sewn into coats and everyday experience and objects, as in “The Task” britches.” Angel Jones, a tailor, connects to the divine (1981): “God’s in the wilderness next door / —that through daily events and through physical touch, just huge tundra room, no walls and a sky roof.” In these as Levertov wishes to do through her poetry. Through- collections Levertov also discusses the importance of out her work Levertov tied her personal experience inspiration. In “A Poet’s View” (1984), she states that to closely to the poem’s formal qualities, since she believe in inspiration “is to live with a door of one’s life believed that form is an expression of perception. In open to the transcendent. . . . The concept of ‘inspira- “Some Notes on Organic Form,” she states that the tion’ presupposes a power which enters the individual poet is “brought to speech” by an experience (68), which and is not a personal attribute” (241). These collec- brings the words of the poem as a perception: “the tions contain various explorations of religious belief metric movement, the measure, is the direct expression and doubt, and they point to the major concerns of her of the movement of perception” (71). later poetry. By the late 1960s Levertov became concerned with Evening Train (1990) signals her last period, in which the Vietnam War. She wrote poetry, was active in her work is permeated by Christianity and nature. After protests, and even traveled to Vietnam along with becoming a Christian in the 1980s, Levertov explored Muriel RUKEYSER to present the voice of a writer against her preoccupation with religion through prominent the war. Many contemporary critics condemned her Christian figures, such as Caedmon, Saint Peter, Saint work during this period as overly polemical. Even Julian, and Saint Thomas Didymus. In “Candlemas” she some of her most supportive critical allies, such as presents Simeon’s experiences: “Simeon opened / Majorie Perloff, questioned her work. In “Poetry, ancient arms / to infant light.” In this poem Levertov Prophecy, and Survival,” Levertov argues that poetry portrays, as she often does in her later poems, the must deal with the horrors of the period, because the importance of faith and revelation, which she ties to imagination makes the events understandable: “The poetic inspiration. Frequently, in her later poems, she intellect by itself may point out the source of suffering; explores the mystery of everyday experience, and she but the imagination illuminates it; by that light it also discusses the relation between humans and nature. 278 LEVINE, PHILIP

Much like the British romantic poets William erence. A characteristic intensity of emotion as well as a Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, she presents subsequent break with traditional forms place Levine nature as something almost imperceptible that changes among those poets of the late 1950s and early 1960s, us slightly for the better: she attempts to describe this including several poets of post–CONFESSIONAL and DEEP process of betterment. IMAGE POETRY, responsible for a second flowering of Ultimately Levertov’s poetry is one of communion romanticism in American verse. and witness—to contemporary atrocities and to the Born in Detroit, Levine worked many blue-collar divine. Through witness she reminds us what it means jobs and was educated at Wayne State University. In his to be human; moreover, her close examination of the twenties, Levine left Michigan to attend the University details of life’s pains, successes, beauties, and mysteries of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was influenced point toward an understanding of and provide means by Robert LOWELL and John BERRYMAN. Since then of coping with the complexity of life. Levine has received various grants while also teaching at California State University, Fresno. He has published BIBLIOGRAPHY 17 collections of poetry. Throughout his career, Colclough Little, Anne, and Susie Paul, eds. Denise Levertov: Levine’s work has consistently gained critical recogni- New Perspectives. West Cornwall, Conn.: Locust Hill Press, 2000. tion in American arts and letters. Ashes: Poems Old and Gelpi, Albert, ed. Denise Levertov: Selected Criticism. Ann New (1979), an exploration of Jewish heritage, earned Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993. the first American Book Award for poetry. Levine’s Levertov, Denise. “A Poet’s View.” New & Selected Essays. newer work continues to gain acclaim: What Work Is New York: New Directions, 1992, pp. 239–246. (1991) received the National Book Award, and The ———. “Poetry, Prophecy, Survival.” New & Selected Essays. Simple Truth (1994) won the Pulitzer Prize. New York: New Directions, 1992, pp. 143–153. Similar to the work of many poets who began their ———. “Some Notes on Organic Form.” New & Selected careers in the 1950s and early 1960s, the formal char- Essays. New York: New Directions, 1992, pp. 67–73. acter of Levine’s early poetry eventually gave way to a Marten, Harry. Understanding Denise Levertov. Columbia: looser, more conversational technique. His first vol- University of South Carolina Press, 1988. ume, On the Edge (1963), deals with working-class Wagner-Martin, Linda. Denise Levertov. New York: Twayne, 1967. themes in a tightly controlled iambic pentameter, lead- ing many critics to remark on the incongruence William Allegrezza between content and form. Not until the publication of Not This Pig (1968), written in free verse, does Levine LEVINE, PHILIP (1928– ) Philip Levine’s arrive at what is generally cited as his mature style. In best-known poetry deals with working-class themes in “Animals Are Passing through Our Lives,” the speaker an industrial setting, frequently the Detroit of his is an actual pig that maintains a fierce dignity when upbringing. Yet, because Levine’s verse honors the facing the blades of the slaughterhouse. The pig’s last endurance of the human spirit in the midst of harsh utterance, “No. Not this Pig,” encourages a succinct, exterior conditions, he could best be described as a yet profound connection to Levine’s primary sacrificial poet of humanity in general, endowing the silenced animal, the American laborer. with voices that transcend material circumstance. Influ- They Feed They Lion (1972) is generally considered enced by the expansive verse of Walt Whitman and, to most representative of Levine’s working-class poetry. Its a lesser extent, William Carlos WILLIAMS, Levine’s early frequently anthologized title poem grew out of the poems contain a carefully controlled, rhythmic energy Detroit riots of 1967. In the poem the colloquial title expressive of personal and collective freedom. Levine’s phrase transforms into a forceful litany as Levine’s dis- recent poems take on a quiet, conversational tone; they placement of the word lion signifies the rising anger of are somewhat less controlled than the climatic chants of those thrust into the industrial North in search of work. his first volumes, and in them fury is replaced with rev- Finally, the anger of those who have come “out of the LINDSAY, (NICHOLAS) VACHEL 279 gray hills / Of industrial barns, out of rain, out of bus Hirsch, Edward. “The Visionary Poetics of Philip Levine and ride,” culminates in release. Here Levine subversively Charles Wright.” In The Columbia History of American celebrates the communal release of the laborers’ rage, Poetry, edited by Jay Parini. New York: Columbia Univer- “They Lion,” otherwise kept in check by the system. sity Press, 1993. Levine’s next few volumes can be loosely character- Megan Swihart Jewell ized as belated elegies dedicated to his father and other close family members. The poems written during this LINDSAY, (NICHOLAS) VACHEL period make a general transition out of anger and rage (1879–1931) Vachel Lindsay was a midwestern toward a more compassionate outlook on humanity. poet who achieved great fame from 1914 through the One of Levine’s most expressive poems from this period 1920s for his rhythmic verse, which he performed is “You Can Have It” (1979). Here Levine’s 20-year-old with great skill and vigor. In the latter part of the 20th twin brother, made prematurely old by his job at an ice century his work fell out of favor, largely because of plant, “dies when he sleeps / and sleeps when he rises racist overtones, particularly in the poem “The Congo” to face this life.” In other words, the brother is physi- (1914). In the 1990s critics took a more balanced cally and spiritually exhausted from his job. Levine approach to Lindsay’s work. He was identified with employs repetition to sum up the whole of his brother’s two other Illinois populist poets whose work also experience; “You can have it” is the poem’s refrain. appeared in the Chicago-based magazine Poetry: Carl While continuing to focus on the importance of SANDBURG and Edgar Lee MASTERS. memory, Levine’s recent verse more explicitly tests the Lindsay was born in Springfield, Illinois. In 1913 ability of language—particularly poetic language—to his poem, “General William Booth Enters into capture middle- and working-class experience. As a Heaven,” was awarded a prize as the best poem Poetry result, his poems have become increasingly more acces- magazine had published that year, and it became the sible. A Walk with Thomas Jefferson (1988) and What Work title poem of his first commercially published book. In Is (1991) continue to address personal memories and 1915 Poetry chose “The Chinese Nightingale” as the American work with free verse narrative. In these vol- best poem published that year. In 1929 Poetry gave umes, one can also sense Levine’s continued investment him a special award for lifetime achievement. in the knowledge to be gained from personal experience. During most of his career, Lindsay toured tirelessly In “What Work Is,” Levine recalls waiting in line for work across the United States and eventually visited Europe outside of the Ford Highland Plant. Frequently address- and China. He recited his rhymed and emphatically ing his readers throughout, Levine encourages their par- rhythmic poetry in an expressive way that charmed ticipation in the shaping of the poem. In his aim to make audiences. In the summers of 1906, 1908, and 1912, poetry useful in our daily lives, Levine reminds his read- Lindsay took walking tours all over the South, Midwest, ers of the poetic subject matter residing inside of them. and West, bartering self-published pamphlets of poetry As Levine writes about personal memories in “The Sim- or reciting his poems in return for room and board. The ple Truth” (1994), sometimes “they must be said without tours also resulted in two prose books about his experi- elegance, meter and rhyme.” Though he often displays a ences. After his poetry brought him fame, his income certain self-effacement—a skepticism that resembles came largely from his recitations. On December 5, 1931, how one of his characters might regard poetry—Levine’s Lindsay committed suicide by drinking disinfectant. continued devotion to the craft exhibits his faith in the Lindsay’s poetry, typically in short, rhymed lines, is transformative potential of poetry. often characterized by sentimentality about children, BIBLIOGRAPHY as for example, “In Memory of a Child” (1914), which Buckley, Christopher, A. “A Conversation with Philip ends, “The angels guide him now, / And watch his Levine.” Quarterly West 43 1996–97: 267–276. curly head.” Lindsay’s populist political views also ———., ed. On the Poetry of Philip Levine: Stranger to Noth- anchor much of his poetry, such as his poems cele- ing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991. brating Abraham Lincoln and William Jennings Bryan. 280 LOBA

“When Bryan Speaks” (1915) describes the voice of LOBA DIANE DI PRIMA (1973, 1976, 1977, three-time presidential candidate Bryan as a “strange 1978, 1998) When book I (which includes previ- composite” of the millions of “singing souls / Who ously published and new sections) of Loba appeared in made world-brotherhood their choice.” 1978, this serial work was “hailed by many as the great The controversy over “The Congo” centers on the female counterpart to Allen GINSBERG’s HOWL (Clark) racial stereotyping of Africans in the poem, as in the (see LONG AND SERIAL POETRY); according to the Jungian opening line, “Fat black bucks in a wine-barrel room.” analyst Naomi Ruth Lowinsky, the 1998 volume of W. E. B. DuBois, African-American sociologist and one books I and II belongs “beside Whitman’s Leaves of of the founders of the National Association for the Grass and H. D.’s Trilogy—poems that transform con- Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), said Lind- sciousness” (147), and Jack Foley likewise declares say knew only two things about African Americans, that it “takes its place with other life-challenging, life “The beautiful rhythm of their music and the ugly side changing works of the twentieth century: [Ezra] of their drunkards and outcasts” (182). Ironically the POUND’s CANTOS, [Charles] OLSON’s MAXIMUS [POEMS], emphasis on the African Americans’ enthusiasm for [Gertrude] STEIN’s ‘Cubist’ prose.” rhythm in the poem is echoed by Lindsay’s own ten- There is an explicit and expansive gathering of ideas dency to emphasize rhythm in his poems, as in the and myths in the work; after all, the mythical Loba is a repetition of the line “Mumbo-Jumbo will hoo-doo gatherer, whose “purpose is to collect and preserve” you.” Nonetheless Lindsay was, in some senses, a lib- (Clark). The scope of Diane DI PRIMA’s book is vast; the eral-minded man widely regarded in his own time as object of Loba is to disrupt norms and assumptions in antiracist. In War Bulletins (1909), he had attacked order to create new ways of seeing the female and her racial prejudice, along with greed and urbanization, roles through an alchemy of myth, to make “a new / and DuBois himself had praised the treatment of creation myth” (part 1), not to revise an old one. African Americans in Lindsay’s story, “The Golden- To this end di Prima overturns traditional modes of Faced People” (1909). progression in the poem. Times, places, and figures are Lindsay “discovered” Langston HUGHES when Hughes, thrown into the mix; for the development of an who was serving as a waiter at a banquet Lindsay achronic, ageographic strategy; thus “chinook / breezes attended, gave Lindsay some of his poems. Although from Eden” (part 6) locates the paradise garden near Lindsay did not know it, Hughes’s first book, The Weary the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains. Loba is any- Blues (1926), had already been accepted for publication thing but linear narrative, anything but predictable. by Alfred A. Knopf. Lindsay’s enthusiasm for Hughes’s Divided into two books, each consisting of 8 parts writing, however, suggests that Hughes rightly judged (averaging 15 pages each), the structure itself is unpre- Lindsay to be a sympathetic reader. Lindsay’s work, dictable: Some pieces are titled, and some are not: while it sometimes chooses style over substance, Some of the epigraphs are historical, and some are remains entertaining to read or listen to and is often imaginary (such as that by a Jungian scholar): Some of charming in its spaciousness. His engagement with the the text is italic, and some plain: Sometimes the voice race question makes his life and work an interesting speaks to the Loba, sometimes speaks of the Loba, and study in the complications of the attitudes of his time. sometimes is the Loba speaking: Sometimes the Loba BIBLIOGRAPHY doesn’t seem to be anywhere around, as di Prima dips DuBois, W. E. B., “The Looking Glass: Literature.” Crisis into her net and brings up Persephone or Kali or Guin- 12.4 (August 1916): 182. evere or any of the approximately 130 figures she lists Lindsay, Vachel. “The Golden-Faced People.” War Bulletin in one piece of part 3. No. 1 (Springfield, Illinois, 1909): 1–4. In part 1 the Loba has tidy animal feet; in part 2 she Massa, Ann. Vachel Lindsay, Fieldworker for the American is wearing traditional aboriginal clothing but changes Dream. Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1970. into 1950s teen garb on the next page. In part 1 she has Thomas Lisk the flaccid breasts of an elderly woman, but in part 2 LOEWINSOHN, RON 281 these breasts have the newness and firmness of youth. In BIBLIOGRAPHY these and other ways, di Prima denies her readers any Brainard, Dulcy. Review of Loba, by Diane di Prima. Pub- chance of identifying the female archetype of this poem lisher’s Weekly 245.26 (June 29, 1998): 53. with any single mythical figure of choice. Although Clark, Audrey M. Review of Loba, by Diane di Prima. Ram- Mary of Nazareth is the focus of part 6, it is clear that bles: A Cultural Arts Magazine. Available online. URL: Mary is not the archetype, but only a fragment of her; http://rambles.net. Downloaded November 2001. Foley, Jack. Review of Loba, by Diane di Prima. Alsop Review. part 15 turns to Kali and delivers a sequence of hymns Available online. URL: www.alsopreview.com. Down- and prayers. The female in this poem takes as many loaded November 2001. guises as possible and is as capable of violence and Lowinsky, Naomi Ruth. Review of Loba, by Diane di Prima. destruction as she is capable of childbirth and nurtur- Psychological Perspectives 39 (summer 1999): 146–147. ing. While the maternal function is not erased, it is placed in a perspective with the other aspects of the A. Mary Murphy female. Through the Loba, the female is shown to be a creature of appetites and possibilities. She is no longer LOEWINSOHN, RON (1937– ) Ron Loewin- confined to feminine stereotypes or constrained by gen- sohn’s poetry consistently acknowledges its debt to der-based strictures. Instead “no one / is depicted here” major modernist figures, including Ezra POUND, (part 12), nor can she be labelled by the usual terms William Butler Yeats, and William Carlos WILLIAMS (see designated for social and familial relationship roles (part MODERNISM). Loewinsohn grew up in and around San 14)—she is not derivative or dependent or definable. Francisco; as an aspiring Beatnik in the late fifties, he “She is formless / or that She is all forms” (part 15). knew Allen GINSBERG, who wrote an introduction to his Not surprisingly, red, the signature color of women first published volume, Watermelons (1959), and in mythology, has a subtle symbolic value as the female encouraged Loewinsohn to send the manuscript to is repeatedly clothed or accessorized in red (part 14), Williams, who added his own prefatory letter praising the uterus likened to a precious red stone (part 13), the author’s “poetic gift.” Loewinsohn credits these two and, “ropes of blood cover her breasts and her wide figures with encouraging him to observe daily experi- hips / like red flowers” (part 15). To be female is to ence directly in his work and not to strain to produce bleed, and because blood is the sign of woman, di poetry according to a formula (“Interview”). Nonethe- Prima stresses it as the unbreakable connector every less his modernist-inspired work, while always accessi- woman has with the overarching Woman (part 16). ble, is deeply allusive and intertextual, invoking figures The collective sign of the female is transitory, however. from classical antiquity (Ovid, Aristotle), the English In the lines “Forty years it took / for the napkin to fall (Chaucer, Shakespeare) and the Continental (Stéphane from my eyes” (part 3), di Prima refers to menopause, Mallarmé, Paul Valéry) literary canon, anthropology the great hormonal shift that allows for new ways of and other physical sciences, and, most often, mod- being for women. In the poem, however, the postmen- ernism. His forms and themes range from shorter lyrics strual female discovers that “There is no myth / for this (see LYRIC POETRY), employing repetition, run-on lines, older ample woman” (part 16), and she needs one. and economically selected internal rhymes and treating The Loba appears in order to redress the imbalance love, family and American sports and landscapes, to and to validate the worth of those whose cultural, pro- essays that inquire into the nature of poetic form by creative, and erotic value have been lost. The three- engaging with the theories of Pound and Yeats. page “Apparuit” in part 14 speaks of the female self as Loewinsohn was born in Iolio, Philippines, and equally able to handle “the spear / the harp the book came to the United States in 1945. Initially rejecting the butterfly,” as a peaceful but not passive self. Loba is university education, in keeping with BEAT notions of complicated, perplexing, and demanding; it must be to authenticity, he spent his twenties in various printing achieve its goal of rupturing the established order and jobs and hitchhiking across the country until an oppor- providing a female-oriented vision. tunity to teach at the San Francisco State University 282 LOGAN, JOHN

Poetry Center launched his academic career. He earned LOGAN, JOHN (1923–1987) John Logan a B.A. in 1967 from the University of California, Berke- extended the boundaries of CONFESSIONAL POETRY as ley (where he began teaching in 1970), and an M.A. practiced by such figures as Robert LOWELL. His earlier and Ph.D. (in 1971) from Harvard. He received the work was formal but it evolved into a distinctive free Poets Foundation Award in 1963 for The World of the Lie verse (see PROSODY AND FREE VERSE). In his early years and the Irving Stone Award from the Academy of Amer- Logan wrote in a lyrical language that coalesced into ican Poets in 1966. religious themes. During his marriage he joined the Meat Air: Poems 1957–1969 (1970) collects four previ- Catholic Church; after the couple divorced, he left the ous volumes and other poems and develops Loewin- church, although it continued to inspire imagery that sohn’s sense of the imagination’s power to transform would remain a prominent aspect of his poetry. physical reality, treating poetry as a form of communion, Logan was born and raised in Red Oak, Iowa. His of the word (air) made flesh (meat). In his final published first book of poetry, Cycle for Mother Cabrini, was pub- volume, Goat Dances: Poems and Prose (1976), his treat- lished in 1955. He was the recipient of several honors, ment of language’s curative powers grows more sophisti- including the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the cated, and more subtly qualified: He writes of “the dark National Institute of Arts and Letters (1974). During whole made external / in a muddle of words” (“Goat his career Logan was founder and editor of Choice until Dance ‘Is it when things are most clear’” [1976]). The 1980, as well as poetry editor of Critic and the Nation. volume’s opening essay, “May I Have This Dance,” play- Logan’s use of religious imagery and confessional fully examines Pound’s definition of logopoeia as “the voice found a significant readership. Regarding his first dance of the intellect among words,” a definition which collection, John Fandel writes, “This thin volume has Lowinsohn says “leaves that dance mostly a metaphor.” weight. Ten poems, most of them long, create the Accordingly dancing stands for various creative and cog- adjectives: vigorous, keen, refreshing, neat. They also nitive processes throughout the volume, which combines define the term lyrical” (124). Logan relied on his domestic scenes tenderly portrayed (“All the possible is Catholic faith for most of his early poetry, although, in in your brown / hair” [“Goat Dance: Is it when things are later collections, his poetry centers around the most clear”]), acute attention to physical detail (“the ephemeral nature of youth or, more specifically, lost coronae of the furniture in the early / morning streetlight youth from the perspective of an adult. Patrick Calla- filtering thru the blinds” (from the same poem), and han notes that a “favorite theme of The Zigzag Walk eruptions of racy, antipoetic language (“O bright tits of (1973), for example, is youth’s initiation into adult- the world!” [“Goat Dance: ‘You inspire me,’ you said”]). hood. The rite-of-passage is sometimes presented At its best Loewinsohn’s work appeals in diverse ways: Its humorously” (642). The poem “Three Moves” from exploration of the fluid boundaries between poetry and this book demonstrates Logan’s ultimate use of religion essays and its erudite engagement with the modernist and concerns about the fleeting moment: For a time canon afford intellectual pleasures, while his range of the speaker does not remember “The only one who interests and clear style offer lyrical rewards. ever dares to call / and ask me, ‘How’s your soul?’” Here BIBLIOGRAPHY the author is considering his religious background Barrax, Gerald William. “Four Poets.” Poetry (August against his life as an older and more experienced adult. 1968): 343–344. The lines concluding this poem are a confession that Harrison, Jim. “California Hybrid.” Poetry (June 1966): the speaker does not currently have a priest. A posthu- 198–201. mous volume titled John Logan: The Collected Poems Loewinsohn, Ron. Interview by Jesse Wolfe. Berkeley, Calif., (1989) includes some of his best known works. His 14 June 2002. late poetry continues to center around religion and Pritchard, William H. “Shags and Poets.” Hudson Review observations of life from the perspective of an adult; (autumn 1970): 563–577. notably, in “Chicago Scene,” he alludes to the problems Jesse Wolfe of sexual ambiguity that plagued him throughout life: LONG AND SERIAL POETRY 283

“A boyish drummer [who] ticks his brush” illustrates and breaking stanzas irregularly. A common theme to Logan’s confusion and self-imposed guilt for latent be found in his poems is that of cultural failures of the homosexual urges he discovered as an adult. past standing as figures for a corrupt modern world. Logan’s poetry depicts a divergence from the confes- Referring to the title of one Logan’s books, Henry Tay- sional mode Logan used as a younger poet into a poet- lor remarks, “Many of the poems are meditations on ics that involved his perspective as an adult looking historical examples of “vain empires,” whether earthly, back on his life, his family and his religious experi- spiritual or intellectual” (28). A fierce witness of cul- ences and his current view that life passes quickly. tural decay, Logan balances irony with opulent diction and attention to the difficulties of human life. BIBLIOGRAPHY In “Stereopticon” (1984), Logan contrasts modern Callahan, Patrick. “Tonal Power, Incoherent Rage: Rhetoric in photography with the stereopticon, a 19th-century Three Poets.” Sewanee Review 78.4 (spring 1972): 639–644. Fandel, John. “Song and Sanctity.” Commonweal 63.5 (4 device that created the illusion of solidity by projecting November 1955): 124–126. double images, in order to critique a shallow present. He praises a stereoptic image of an Artic expedition for Christopher Bloss showing how “the world is not flat, / but round, whole, dangerous.” Logan writes not only about history but LOGAN, WILLIAM (1950– ) Formally ele- also from within it. In “Keats in India” (1998), he gant and tonally acerbic, William Logan is associated imagines the romantic poet John Keats surviving with NEW FORMALISM, though he claims that form alone tuberculosis to travel to India, where he sees “a fakir cannot render a poem; he once said, “I can read only so strangle a man” and observes the tipping of ceremonial much unvaried pentameter, tedious as a minor god, pots in the Ganges, which “sink into eternities of rest.” without wanting to be strangled with piano wire” As an antidote to the modern obsession with the self, (140). (See PROSODY AND FREE VERSE.) An active reviewer Logan offers formal rigor and historical perspective. of poetry with a commitment to rigorous art, he recalls BIBLIOGRAPHY the poet-critic Randall JARRELL. Logan’s poetry is of a Logan, William. “Interview.” In All the Rage. Ann Arbor: piece with his criticism; he examines events and figures University of Michigan Press, 1998. from history, science, and art, often judging against the Taylor, Henry. “Hints from Hell.” New York Times Book human capacity to better its conditions. Yet he offers Review (12 July 1998): 28. compensations for the decaying world: the pleasure of a virtuoso’s command of language, an eye for unex- Robert Temple Cone pected natural landscapes, and a refusal to sentimental- ize human relations. LONG AND SERIAL POETRY The long Logan was born and raised in Boston. In 1980 he poem has been the measure and the lifework of many spent time in England on an Amy LOWELL Poetry Travel- significant 20th-century American poets. Yet the term ing Fellowship. His first book was published in 1982. In long poem is a notoriously vague descriptor applied (by 1988 the National Book Critics Circle awarded Logan a poets and critics alike) to poems of vastly different citation for excellence in reviewing and in 2000 made lengths and forms. One can discriminate, however, him a finalist for their award in criticism. He has received between those long poems in the 20th century that the John Masefield and Celia B. Wagner Awards from the maintain the organizational structure of the epic and Poetry Society of America (1991) as well as the Lavan those that adopt the random and incomplete process of Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American seriality. Epic poems by 20th-century poets adapt or Poets (2000). He has taught at the University of Florida. renovate forms whose theoretical and structural under- Technical complexity and sharp analysis character- pinnings were set in earlier periods. The series, or ize all of Logan’s work. His poems are metered and serial poem, is remarkable for being the long form that rhymed, though they push against form by rhyming is entirely new in 20th-century poetics. 284 LONG AND SERIAL POETRY

The epic poem remains the classic type and model for or separation is more characteristic of serial poetry. The the long form in poetry. The modern epic, however, can modern epic feels compelled to assert complete control be distinguished from its predecessors and other types over its materials; the series enjoys its own abandon- of the 20th-century long poem. The “open” nonnarra- ment to the materials of its presentation. In this sense, tive models for the modern epic differentiate it from the series is more appropriate to an increasingly hetero- such earlier works as John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1674), dox culture. Totality in the modern epic represents an William Wordsworth’s The Prelude (1850), and Robert attempt to realize a grand design upon the world; the Browning’s The Ring and the Book (1868–69), which postmodern series accedes to the condition of flux, rev- maintain the developmental structure of a narrative (see els in the provisional state of things. The epic, assertive NARRATIVE POETRY). Yet the modern epic shares with its in principle, gives way to the serial articulation of par- predecessors the demand for comprehensiveness—not ticulars. The series forsakes mythic permanence in the in a narrow sense of a “comprehensive” treatment of a recognition of cultural transience. particular subject, because no epic limits itself to a sin- An important transitional work between the mod- gle thematic concern nor claims to have “exhausted” a ern and the contemporary long poem, THE MAXIMUS given subject, but rather in the sense of a complete POEMS of Charles OLSON (1970) elicits praise for, and worldview, a breadth of intellectual range. Classical raises objections to, the method of Pound’s Cantos as works, such as Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura (50 B.C.), on an “ego-system” and of William Carlos WILLIAMS’s PATER- everything from atomism to Zeno, or Ovid’s Metamor- SON (1963) as an “emotional system.” Olson establishes phoses (A.D. 1), with its definitive re-creation of the these two modern works as “halves” of a job The Max- Greek mythology, offer themselves as models, though imus Poems would encompass and complete. The poem neither of these presents an extended narrative with an relies upon the superhuman persona (character) of heroic figure. In fact, Arthur Golding’s translation of “Maximus,” through whom the poet assumes a didac- Ovid (1567) is a primary source for Ezra POUND’s rein- tic authority. In its use of the city of Gloucester, Mass- spiring of classical mythology in THE CANTOS (1972). The achusetts, (like Paterson, New Jersey) as focal point, theory of the universe presented in book I of the Meta- the local situation provides the major organizational morphoses and Lucretius’s treatment of science and phi- device of The Maximus Poems. Olson’s use of persona losophy can also be said to anticipate James MERRILL’s THE and locale attempts to provide the comprehensiveness CHANGING LIGHT AT SANDOVER (1982) or Frederick Turner’s and the coherence to which both The Cantos and Pater- The New World (1985). Central to the epic, then, son originally aspired. whether narrative or otherwise, is its capaciousness; its Like Pound and Williams, Olson adopts a composi- length is only justified by its breadth. Thus the form tional method of nonnarrative collage of historical and demands a complete portrait of the culture (not an cultural documents in The Maximus Poems. Merrill, in excerpt) or a whole system of belief (not a single idea). The Changing Light at Sandover, prefers dramatic struc- The epic in 20th-century American poetry can also ture as the more illustrious conveyance of the epic into be distinguished from other long forms in its desire for the late 20th century with its expansive worldview. “totality.” Pound’s Cantos demand—even if they do not The stylistic and structural contrasts between Olson’s achieve—a coherent synthesis. They posit an authori- and Merrill’s poems make for a fascinating study. One tarian hierarchy so that Pound’s claim for the sponsor- pictures the disheveled Olson with a day’s growth of ship of Benito Mussolini should not be surprising given beard, drinking Johnnie Walker Black straight from the Virgil’s endorsement of the Augustan reign at the con- bottle and jabbing at an enormous topographical map clusion of book VI of the Aeneid or given Ovid’s rever- of Gloucester tacked to his study wall. His rambling ential treatment of the “Deification of Caesar” in the monologue on the arcane details of the early settlement final book of the Metamorphoses. The modern epic is of Massachusetts perplexes his visitors. In contrast, the characteristically concerned with “centering,” bringing urbane and wealthy Merrill hosts a séance for the diverse materials into a synthesis. In contrast, dispersal amusement of a small party of friends in the sumptu- LONG AND SERIAL POETRY 285 ous dining room of his mansion at Stonington, Con- poetics also invoke the essential elements of “sight, necticut. His guests are amazed by what reveals itself sound, and intellection” in Louis ZUKOFSKY’s 24 part “A” on the Ouija board, under the guise of entertainment. (1978). The transept of ARK is capped by Johnson’s Despite these fundamental differences of style and sub- RAD I OS, his rewriting of portions of Milton’s Paradise stance, both poets are obsessed with cosmology, the Lost by excision, beginning with Milton’s text and then creation and evolution of the world. Olson summons deleting lines and even parts of words to form a new this theme of the origin of the world by incorporating text. In an entirely different vein, the completion of substantial portions of Hesiod’s Theogony (eighth cen- Merrill’s elegant Sandover inspired New Narrative tury B.C.) and relating its mythology directly to the works that deploy a wide cast of characters and devel- New World locale that provides the principal land- oped plots (see NEW FORMALISM). Vikram SETH’s chroni- scape and sensibility of the epic. In “Maximus, From cles of the foibles of Bay Area yuppies, The Golden Gate Dogtown-I,” Olson models his account of the local lore (1986), takes the form of a 307-page novel-in-verse. of Dogtown, the “WATERED ROCK,” on Hesiod’s tale The serial form in contemporary poetry, however, of Gaia and encircling Okeanos. Merrill, for his part, represents a radical alternative to the epic model. The proposes to tell an “old, exalted” story, the “incarnation series describes the complicated manner in which one and withdrawal of / A god.” In his masquelike poem, thing follows another. Its modular form—in which Merrill introduces his own pantheon; in place of Greek individual elements are both discontinuous and capa- deities, we meet the God Biology and his twin Nature, ble of recombination—distinguishes it from the the- who doubles as Chaos. Both Olson and Merrill aspire matic development or narrative progression that to create a world inside their poems; with map or characterizes other types of the long poem. The series Ouija board, they chart the dimensions of the epic as resists a systematic or determinate ordering of its mate- universal statement. rials, preferring constant change and even accident, a The epic demands—even if it does not always protean shape and a chance-determined method. The achieve—a coherent synthesis of its socioeconomic, epic systematically creates a world through the gravita- anthropological, or cosmological materials. In keeping tional attraction that melds diverse materials into a with what used to be called the “argument” of the unified whole. But the series describes an expanding poem, the modern epic retains a hierarchical super- and heterodox universe whose centrifugal force structure, even if only the pro forma one of the tradi- encourages dispersal. The epic goal has always been tional 24 books. Making his own distinctions between encompassment and summation, but the series is an a long poem and a serial poem, Sherman Paul employs ongoing process of accumulation. In contrast to the the word “long to cover poems of length that have a epic demand for completion, the series remains radi- structure that encloses them, frames them, guides cally and deliberately incomplete. them” (37–38). An external framework of accepted The fizzling of several modernist epic poems to ideas “both encloses and closes the poem: the long cohere or achieve their goals, including The Cantos and poem, as I define it, is a closed poem” (Paul 37–38). Paterson, and the distaste for the hierarchical structures The epic poem strives always to be complete. Olson, and belief systems that frame them has led many post- literally on his deathbed, felt compelled to designate to modern poets to serial composition. Poems written in his literary executor the final poem of Maximus so that many loosely associated parts also signify the impatience if the manuscript finally lacked the kind of cohesion to of poets with the short personal lyric demanded by which he aspired, it would most certainly have closure. some POETRY JOURNALS. The series, a modular form in Ronald JOHNSON constructs his epic, ARK (1996), on an which individual sections are both discontinuous and architectural model of Beams, Spires, and Ramparts, capable of multiple orderings, contrasts the linear “based on trinities, its cornerstones the eye, the ear, the causality of most narrative forms; the serial poem is ran- mind.” Acknowledging a debt to the spiritual triad of dom and polyvalent, accommodating an expanding and Dante’s Divine Comedy (early 14th century), Johnson’s heterodox universe. As discussed in Joseph Conte’s 286 LORDE, AUDRE

Unending Design: The Forms of Postmodern Poetry, exam- into who they most want and need to be and then to ples in the first half of the century include Williams’s act, to do what needs being done,” Audre Lorde once Spring and All (1923), George OPPEN’s Discrete Series said (“Above” 94). Poetry as a transformative force in (1934), and Zukofsky’s Anew (1946). The postwar poet- the light of continuing oppression was central to ics of the BLACK MOUNTAIN SCHOOL and SAN FRANCISCO Lorde’s artistic, moral, and political vision. As a self- RENAISSANCE produced several book-length serial poems: defined “Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet,” Lorde the “unbound and uneven” poems of Robert DUNCAN’s spent her writing career negotiating the implications of infinite series, PASSAGES; Robert CREELEY’s granular Pieces this complex identity, trying to find ways to “make nec- (1969); THE JOURNALS (1975) of Paul BLACKBURN; Jack essary power out of negative surroundings” (Lorde SPICER’s books, such as Homage to Creeley (1959) and The “Above” 91). Loosely associated with the BLACK ARTS Heads of the Town up to the Aether (1962); Diane DI PRIMA’s MOVEMENT in the 1960s, Lorde continued to be a friend multifaceted experimental LOBA (1973, 1976, 1977, and mentor to poet-activists committed to breaking 1978, 1998); and Robin BLASER’s open-ended image- cultural silences, including Adrienne RICH, June JOR- nation series so far compiled in The Holy Forest (1993). DAN, Pat Parker, Essex Hemphill, and Barbara Smith. Among more recent poets, there is Seth and his Lorde was born in Harlem to West Indian parents. Golden Gate. Nathaniel MACKEY combines jazz tonalities Educated at Hunter College and Columbia University, and Dogon mythology in his “Song of the Andoum- she worked as a librarian from 1961 to 1968; from boulou” and “mu” series, both open-ended works 1968 to 1988 she taught English and creative writing, appearing in multiple volumes after the style of Dun- mainly at the City University of New York. In 1989 she can and Blaser. Leslie SCALAPINO prolifically explores received the American Book Award for her collection the shifting, repetitive, and combinatorial form of seri- of essays, A Burst of Light. As writer, educator, and ality in that they were at the beach (1985) and Way activist, she was always concerned with improving (1988). As Lynn Keller observes in Forms of Expansion: public visibility for women of color, both within the Recent Long Poems by Women, such poets as Rachel Blau United States and internationally: In the 1980s she DUPLESSIS (in DRAFTS) and Beverly DAHLEN (in A Reading) cofounded Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press and have turned to serial poems as an alternative to the Sisterhood in Support of Sisters in South Africa. She patriarchal assumptions of culture prevalent in male- also a received the Walt Whitman Citation of Merit and dominated epic poetry. The serial poem represents was named poet laureate of New York in 1991. postmodern poetry’s most innovative contribution to Lorde’s 1968 debut poetry collection, The First the long form. Cities, has been linked to the Black Arts movement; her complete body of work, however, shows an independ- BIBLIOGRAPHY ent, singular voice. In The Black Unicorn (1978), writ- Bernstein, Michael André. The Tale of the Tribe: Ezra Pound and the Modern Verse Epic. Princeton: Princeton University ten after a journey to Dahomey in 1974, Lorde Press, 1980. broadened the mythic scope of her writing to include Conte, Joseph M. Unending Design: The Forms of Postmodern West African influences. In the 1980s and early 1990s, Poetry. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991. she continued to hone a lyrical idiom characterized by Keller, Lynn. Forms of Expansion: Recent Long Poems by both its complex and evocative imagery and its excep- Women. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. tional emotional and intellectual courage. Paul, Sherman. Hewing to Experience. Iowa City: University Lorde’s poetry encompasses a wide spectrum of of Iowa Press, 1989. themes, from the necessity for self-definition in “Coal” Joseph Conte (1968)—”I / Is the total black, being spoken / From the earth’s inside”—to the political responsibilities of the LORDE, AUDRE (1934–1992) “I want my writer who promised of her pen, “never to leave it / poems—I want all of my work—to engage, and to lying / in somebody else’s blood” (“To the Poet Who empower people to speak, to strengthen themselves Happens to Be Black and the Black Poet Who Happens “LOVE CALLS US TO THE THINGS OF THIS WORLD” 287 to Be a Woman” [1986]). Whether she expresses her high up in a city apartment-building; outside the bed- anger at the violence directed at black children who room window, the first laundry of the day is being “play with skulls / at school” (“School Note” [1976]) or yanked across the sky, and one has been awakened by examines how love between women of different races the squeaking pulley of the laundry-line” (124). The “means a gradual sacrifice of all that is simple” (“Out- speaker gets up to a world where everything is inhab- lines” [1986]), however, Lorde’s overarching vision is, ited with the spirits of angels. The soul, once loath to as she expressed it in the essay “Age, Race, Class, and accept the new day and what it must remember, now Sex” (1984), to understand “human difference as a accepts the body, with all its imperfections. One of springboard for creative change.” Wilbur’s few unrhymed poems, it is divided into two parts, structured as thesis and antithesis. Part 1, as Paul BIBLIOGRAPHY F. Cummins says, “develops the soul’s desire by estab- Dhairyam, Sagri. “‘Artifacts for Survival’: Remapping the lishing the relationship between the soul and the laun- Contours of Poetry with Audre Lorde.” Feminist Studies dry.” The literal wash hung on the line is transformed 18.2 (summer 1992): 229–256. by angels who fill everything with “the deep joy of ———. “An Interview with Audre Lorde,” by Karla Ham- mond American Poetry Review (March/April 1980): 18–21. their impersonal breathing” (11). Lorde, Audre. “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefin- In the countertheme the waking body now has “a ing Difference,” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by changed voice.” The desired-for “nothing on earth but Audre Lorde. Freedom, Calif.: The Crossing Press, 1984, laundry” gives way to the soul’s acceptance of the body, pp. 114–123. but now with a sense of loss and regret. That imper- ———. “Above the Wind: An Interview with Audre Lorde,” fection of earthly existence, Cummins further notes, by Charles H. Rowell. Callaloo 14.1 (1991): 83–95. underlies Wilbur’s theory of the difficulty of reconcil- ing sensibility and objects, summed up by Wilbur: “A Stefanie Sievers lot of my poems ...are an argument against a thing- “LOVE CALLS US TO THE THINGS OF less, an earthless kind of imagination, or spirituality” (50). In the poem the “bitter love” of the soul still RICHARD WILBUR (1955) THIS WORLD” wishes for “clean linens on the backs of thieves.” Since it appeared in his third volume of poetry Things The things of this world, as St. Augustine acknowl- of This World (1956), “Love Calls Us to the Things of edged, take on beauty when they are changed through This World” has been Richard WILBUR’s most discussed the senses or the imagination. The poem’s structure lyric poem (see LYRIC POETRY), including lengthy analy- and diction, through the common experience of laun- sis in a 1964 symposium with Richard EBERHART, May dry, have created, in Frank Littler’s words, the “paradox SWENSON, Robert Horan, and Wilbur himself. As the of man’s finding the spiritual through the actual—the signature poem of the volume, it is, in Wilbur’s words, theme of the poem” (53). The playfulness and ease of “a poem against dissociated and abstracted spirituality” Wilbur’s language in Things of This World underlie a (25). A debate between body and soul, the poem serious commentary on the nature of the poetic argues for the importance of things of the world, rather process. There must be angels in the modern world, than abstractions. This poem signals a new phase in Wilbur argues, and the role of poetry is to define “the Wilbur’s career, in which he stresses the need for the proper relation between the tangible world and the imagination to accept, even celebrate, the given world. intuitions of the spirit” (125). The poem’s title, taken from St. Augustine’s Confessions BIBLIOGRAPHY (A.D. 400), represents a struggle between dream and Cummins, Paul F. Richard Wilbur: A Critical Essay. Grand reality. Richard Eberhart sees the poem as a conflict Rapids, Mich.: David B. Eerdmans, 1971. between “a soul-state and an earth-state” that the soul Eberhart, Richard. “On Richard Wilbur’s ‘Love Calls Us to must, by necessity, win (4). the Things of This World.’” In The Contemporary Poet as Wilbur describes the occasion of the poem as need- Artist and Critic: Eight Symposia, edited by Anthony ing to conjure an early morning “scene” in a “bedroom Ostroff. New York: Little, Brown, 1964, pp. 4–5. 288 “THE LOVE SONG OF J. ALFRED PRUFROCK”

Littler, Frank. [No Title] Explicator 40.3 (1982): 53–55. self-doubt, his self-awareness, and his failures are Wilbur, Richard. “On My Own Work.” In Responses: Prose played out against an ugly urban backdrop, which Pieces, 1953–1976. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, mocks his romanticism and a social milieu that deval- 1976, pp. 115–126. ues his sensitivity and erudition. Despite all this, he Gary Kerley experiences and expresses the idiosyncratic and poignant beauty of the yellow fog, the sea, and the “THE LOVE SONG OF J. ALFRED singing mermaids he imagines. PRUFROCK” T. S. ELIOT (1915) T. S. ELIOT’s BIBLIOGRAPHY “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is often identified Ackroyd, Peter. T. S. Eliot: A Life. New York: Simon and by critics as the first truly modernist poem emerging Schuster, 1984. from Anglo-American MODERNISM. Ezra POUND, who was Hayman, Bruce. “How Old is Prufrock? Does He Want to instrumental in persuading Harriet Monroe to publish Get Married?” CLA Journal 38.1 (1994): 59–68. it in Poetry magazine, commented that it was the best Smith, Grover. “‘Prufrock’ as Key to Eliot’s Poetry.” In poem he had “seen from an American” and that it was Approaches to Teaching Eliot’s Poetry and Plays, edited by evidence that Eliot “had trained himself and modern- Jewel Spears Brooker. New York : MLA, 1988, pp. 88–93. ized himself on his own” (qtd. in Ackroyd 56). Melissa Johnson The poem, written predominantly in irregularly occurring rhymed couplets of various lengths, is a dra- LOWELL, AMY (1874–1925) Amy Lowell is matic monologue in the tradition of 19th-century Eng- widely credited with introducing the IMAGIST SCHOOL to lish poet Robert Browning, in which the speaker—in a America’s reading public. Lowell’s identification with state of distress or crisis—reveals more about himself the movement began with her discovery of the poetry than he appears to intend. Eliot’s speaker, J. Alfred of H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), which inspired a pilgrimage Prufrock, addresses an unidentified “you” concerning to England and resulted in a number of lifelong friends attendance at an evening party and asks a woman there (and enemies). Lowell embraced the imagists’ empha- “an overwhelming question.” The ironic characteriza- sis on clear, unadorned poetry and soon brought her tion of the protagonist Prufrock—who is not a great considerable resources to bear upon its wider dissemi- lover but a timid, self-conscious, and alienated man, a nation. Lowell’s poetry often explored personal themes nonentity—is typically modernist. Although Prufrock of thwarted passion, interpersonal conflicts, the stark exhibits the indecision of Hamlet, he knows that he is life of rural New Englanders, and the losses of war not a tragic hero—but rather “Almost, at times, the (Men Women and Ghosts [1916]), as well as more Fool.” He is an antihero confronting the sterility and impersonal forces of myths and legends (Legends threat of the modern world, unable to act and frus- [1921]), and her work took a particular interest in trated by pseudointellectuality and impotence—both Asian literature and Art (Pictures of a Floating World his own and that of the women who “come and go / [1919] and Fir-Flower Tablets [1921]). In a career that Talking of Michelangelo.” spanned 650 poems, enriched by her sensitivity to Like Eliot’s mature modernist masterpiece THE WASTE sound and sensual imagery, numerous critical works, LAND, “Prufrock” utilizes different tonal registers and and a massive biography on John Keats (1925), Lowell modes of language as well as a lack of traditional nar- undeniably altered the literary landscape of her time. rative transitions to create the effect of chaos and frag- Lowell was born in Brookline, Massachusetts, into mentation. An epigraph from Dante in the original one of the most respected and influential families in Italian and allusions to the Bible, Shakespeare, and New England. She received a private education at 17th-century English poet Andrew Marvell are juxta- home under the guidance of governesses before posed with jarringly modern descriptive language and attending private schools in Boston. Lowell began writ- images: “When the evening is spread out against the ing seriously after an inspiring encounter with the sky / like a patient etherised upon a table.” Prufrock’s famous actress, Eleonora Duse, in 1902, though it was LOWELL, ROBERT 289 another actress, Ada Russell, who became her life’s time: the nuclear standoff between the United States love. While Houghton Mifflin published her first col- and the Soviet Union, the war in Vietnam, and the civil lection of poems, A Dome of Many-Colored Glass in rights struggle. He began as a successor to T. S. ELIOT 1912, it was not until she traveled to London in the and Robert FROST and matured into a poet of consider- summer of 1913 to meet Ezra POUND and H. D. that able originality and force. Sylvia PLATH and Anne SEX- Lowell’s poetry began to receive critical attention. Over TON, both briefly his students, were profoundly the next 12 years, Lowell’s influence continued to influenced by his work. Other poets closely associated grow, and by 1919 she became the first woman to with Lowell include Allen Williamson, Frederick Sei- deliver a lecture at Harvard. In 1924 she won the del, Charles SIMIC, and Michael Hoffman. Helen Haire Levinson Prize from Poetry, and in 1926, Lowell was born in Boston, Massachusetts. His one year after her death, her book of poems, What’s father was a retired navy officer; his mother, Charlotte O’Clock, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Winslow Lowell, was descended from Mayflower Lowell’s desire for poetry to be a spoken art eventu- stock. The IMAGIST poet AMY LOWELL was his cousin, ally led her to develop a form of free verse she called the poet James Russell Lowell his great-great uncle. “polyphonic prose,” which she argued wove poetry Lowell oscillated throughout his adult life between and prose into one another so that rhythm and escape from his familial and social ties and return to cadence, not appearance or strict meter, identified a the familiar, protective confines of Harvard and Beacon work as poetic. In the poem “East, West, North, and Hill, an affluent neighborhood in Boston. He endured South of a Man” (1925), Lowell writes, “Pipkins, pans, two years as an undergraduate at Harvard before trans- and pannikins, / China teapots, tin and pewter,” inun- ferring to Kenyon College, where he became the pro- dating the verse with phonic effects. By employing the tégé of the poet John Crowe RANSOM. Through Ransom, alliterative effects of the multiple ps and ns of the first Lowell came in contact with the FUGITIVE/AGRARIAN line and ts of the second line to the assonance of the SCHOOL—principally, Robert Penn WARREN and Allen multiple short i sounds and the lines’ overall rhythm TATE—writers who hoped to reclaim southern agrarian and cadence, Lowell argued that her polyphonic prose experience from what they believed to be northern served as a balance between the strict meter of Victo- misunderstanding and reverse bigotry. Also while he rian verse and what she saw as the less musical free was at Kenyon, Lowell befriended the poet and critic verse forms of her day. While today Lowell’s poems and Randall JARRELL. In 1940 he married the writer Jean critical prose are overshadowed by those of other mod- Stafford. In effect, by his early twenties, he was taken ernists, her work’s relevance to present-day literary up by the most influential literary figures of the time, theories has given her a new life beyond her years. largely on the basis of his charisma and promise. As early as his first year at Harvard, however, Low- BIBLIOGRAPHY ell showed signs of emotional instability. During a Benvenuto, Richard. Amy Lowell. Boston: Twayne, 1985. manic episode in 1943, he declared himself a consci- Damon, Foster. Amy Lowell: A Chronicle. Hamdon, Conn.: Archon Books, 1966. entious war objector and was briefly imprisoned, an experience he would recall in his much-anthologized Jonathan Stalling “Memories of West Street and Lepke” (1959). His powers of recovery were nearly as prodigious as his LOWELL, ROBERT (1917–1977) Robert literary ambition; that same year saw the publication Lowell was a major voice in American poetry in the of his first book, Land of Unlikeliness. Three years later cold war years, from the end of the Second World War Lord Weary’s Castle established Lowell as the most until his death. The endurance of his reputation can be important young poet in America. His reputation was attributed, in large part, to his success in associating consolidated when Life Studies (1959) was published, personal torment, his so-called CONFESSIONAL subject with its candid studies of personal crisis and its mas- matter, with the social and geopolitical struggles of the terful use of free verse (see PROSODY AND FREE VERSE). 290 LOWELL, ROBERT

The enthusiastic critical reaction to Life Studies, and tal illness brought to Lowell’s personal life made the two volumes in a similar mode in the early sixties, For prospect of writing grand meditations on the order of the Union Dead (1964) and Near the Ocean (1967), the late Eliot or Wallace STEVENS untenable. The BEAT ensured professional security even when his personal poets, led by Allen GINSBERG, and the NEW YORK SCHOOL life was deteriorating in a succession of affairs, drink- poets, under the sway of Frank O’HARA, brought pres- ing bouts, divorces, and manic-depressive break- sure to adopt a more conversational and colloquial downs. The late 1960s saw his immersion in politics, approach. Lowell’s guide, in this respect, was William inspired by his opposition to the Vietnam War and his Carlos WILLIAMS, whose minute, nuanced poems of friendship with senator (and fellow poet) Eugene observation retained a high measure of craft. The McCarthy. His later years were taken up with a suc- result in Life Studies was a poetry that embraced the cession of uneven notebook volumes of 14-line poems brutal realism of Ginsberg’s incantations while avoid- (Notebook 1967–68, History [1973], For Lizzie and Har- ing bardic or visionary claims. Lowell’s poems achieve riet [1973], and The Dolphin [1973]). Lowell died a disarming simplicity and candor, but retain the soon after the publication of a volume of meditations resources of formalist verse, as in these lines from “To on memory and death, Day by Day. He received the Speak of the Woe That Is Marriage” (1959): “My Pulitzer Prize for Lord Weary’s Castle and the National hopped up husband drops his home disputes / and Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry for Life Studies. hits the streets to cruise for prostitutes.” Lowell’s writing falls into several periods. His early Over the years nearly every American poet of any work shifts the ground of the high modernist mythic importance has had to contend with Life Studies and method of Eliot and Ezra POUND from classical Greece For the Union Dead, either in embracing what Lowell and Rome to Puritan New England (see MODERNISM). A had made or by deliberately turning away from it. wrathful Jehovah, Herman Melville’s white whale, and “Waking in the Blue” (1959) and “FOR THE UNION DEAD” larger than life Puritan and American Indian warriors (1964) remain two of the most important political take the place of Zeus and the Achians and Trojans, poems of the 20th century; “Commander Lowell” though the sense of heroic striving in the face of dark (1959) and “My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux fate is more classical than strictly Calvinist. In style the Winslow” (1959) are among the more important poems derive from early Eliot by way of Ransom; the poems of childhood and reminiscence. Lowell’s studies metrical elegance, the scholarly ambition, and the of marital troubles, divorce, and mental illness have world-weary tone come from Eliot, while the affinity long been known for their candor in pushing the lim- for American themes shows Ransom’s guiding hand. its of acceptable subject matter in poetry, but they “Mr. Edwards and Spider” (1947) is an early master- would not have received such notice without their piece in this style: “I saw the spiders marching through technical strengths: an epigrammatic concision line by the air, / Swimming from tree to tree that mildewed line, exact and psychologically penetrating imagery, day.” The iambic rhythm of these lines is so assured and a technical mastery balanced by a measure of that it carries the mixing of sea and military metaphors ironic and gentle humor. Lowell appears to have shied and knocks the dust off what heretofore had been a lit- from the temptation of the “great” that lured Dylan tle known chapter in local history: the hellfire sermo- Thomas so often, as well as from the overly modest nizing of Jonathan Edwards. The New England, sense of the particular characteristic of Jarrell’s melan- Puritan, haunted terrain of this and other poems from choly late poems. Unfortunately Lowell could not sus- his first two books would remain Lowell’s home tain work at this level. Among the sonnets he produced ground throughout his career. in such volume for 10 years there are a few moving The early works mark a transition point in Ameri- portraits—”Robert FROST” (1969) and “Ezra Pound” can poetry; Lowell and many poets following him (1969) most notably—but for the most part they show could do nothing but aspire to a repetition of what he a falling-off of vision and control. His last book, Day by had perfected. The disruptions and torment that men- Day (1977), somewhat redeems this late fondness for LOY, MINA 291 discursive, autumnal rumination. The poems break association with the Communist Party led to charges in free of the previous 14-line restraint, and although the 1953 of conspiring to overthrow the government (in lines tend to meander rather than accumulate or build, 1957 the charges were overturned due to lack of evi- the presence of death lends them an expressive coher- dence). Lowenfels, who had resumed writing poetry ence of mood. during his trial and subsequent incarceration, marked Lowell can perhaps be compared with English his return to the world of poetry with the publication Romantic Samuel Taylor Coleridge in personality and of The Prisoners (1957). It was during this period that the arc of his life. Both were damaged and sad, their he began editing anthologies of avant-garde poetry. talents only partially realized, yet each was magnificent Lowenfels’s early poems owe a great debt to mod- within his limitations. Like Coleridge, Lowell was a ernist poets, such as T. S. ELIOT. Images and themes loyal and helpful friend, an unstinting conversational- that appear in work from throughout his career are ist, and a great encourager of young talent. In his “Epi- those of industry, commerce, and the struggle of labor logue” (1977), he characterized his work as against oppression. His middle and later poems are “heightened from life, / yet paralyzed by fact.” The often characterized by wordplay, social commentary, truth of this has been weighed and struggled with by and allusions to contemporary and historical events. succeeding generations of poets. An exemplary poem from Lowenfels’s middle period is BIBLIOGRAPHY “Steel 1937” (1938), whose title refers to efforts to Bell, Vereen. Robert Lowell: Nihilist As Hero. Cambridge: Har- unionize small steel producers. He writes that beneath vard University Press, 1983. the surface of the earth “coal and iron lie and the men. Williamson, Allen. Pity the Monsters: The Political Vision of Scratch it and you’ll find / a geography of lies.” Robert Lowell. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, Lowenfels is notable for playing a role in many his- 1974. torically significant artistic groups in the 20th century. Yenser, Stephen. Circle to Circle: The Poetry of Robert Lowell. Beginning his career as an American exile in Paris and Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975. later becoming a McCarthy-era target, Lowenfels went Christopher Moylan on to shape the landscape for the next generation of avant-garde poets. LOWENFELS, WALTER (1897–1976) Wal- BIBLIOGRAPHY ter Lowenfels is perhaps most recognized as the editor Bonosky, Phillip. “The Life of Walter Lowenfels.” Political of POETRY ANTHOLOGIES, such as Poets of Today (1964) Affairs 75.6 (1996): 16–20. and Where Is Vietnam? (1967). These collections intro- Lewis, Joel. Introduction to Reality Prime: Selected Poems, duced many new voices into the poetry landscape and edited by Lewis. Jersey City, N.J.: Talisman House, 1998. cemented poetry’s value as political speech in the 1960s and 1970s. Equally important are his own 12 Jason Stumpf collections of poetry, the best known of which is Some Deaths (1965). His work as an editor and author share LOY, MINA (1882–1966) Mina Loy was among themes of opposition to oppression and a commitment the first poets writing in English to register the impact to poetic experimentation. Lowenfels’s work emerges of the early European avant-garde (see EUROPEAN out of MODERNISM. POETIC INFLUENCES), particularly the work of Gertrude Lowenfels was born in New York City. He published STEIN and the Italian futurists. During the 1910s and his first collection of poetry, Episodes and Epistles in 1920s, Loy used a combination of linguistic experi- 1925 and fled to Paris the following year to pursue a mentalism and a razor-sharp satiric wit to challenge writing career. Following the publication of Steel 1937 conventional aesthetics and social mores, attacking (1938), Lowenfels did not write poetry for the next 15 especially the sentimental attitudes toward women. years. During this period he edited the Daily Worker, a Although very different in tone, Loy and Marianne Communist newspaper based in Philadelphia. His MOORE represented for fellow poets the cutting edge of 292 LUNCH POEMS antiemotional and intellectual modernist poetry (see both the personal and cultural levels in relation to sex- MODERNISM). Ezra POUND initially coined the term uality, imperialism, aesthetics, and religion. logopoeia, “poetry that is akin to nothing but language, BIBLIOGRAPHY which is a dance of the intelligence among words and Burke, Carolyn. Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy. ideas” (424), to describe the new poetry being pro- Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. duced by Loy and Moore. Pound, Ezra. Selected Prose 1909–1965, edited by William Born in London, Loy originally pursued a career as Cookson. New York: New Directions, 1973. an artist, which in the years prior to World War I Shreiber, Maeera, and Keith Tuma, eds. Mina Loy: Woman and brought her into contact with various avant-garde cir- Poet. Orono, Maine: National Poetry Foundation, 1998. cles on the Continent, particularly the futurists, whom Jeffrey Twitchell-Waas she credited with instigating her mature poetry. She spent much of the war in New York, where she was LUNCH POEMS FRANK O’HARA (1964) active in the most experimental artistic and literary cir- Frank O’HARA’s practice of dashing off poems anywhere, cles and published her stunning early sequence of any place, any time, is the premise for Lunch Poems, his poems “Songs to Joannes” (1917). Throughout most of fifth book. The project was proposed by Lawrence FER- the 1920s and 1930s, Loy was a striking figure in the LINGHETTI, whose City Lights Books published the col- heyday of the expatriate bohemian community in lection once O’Hara finally prepared and submitted the Paris, where she published her collection, Lunar manuscript (see POETRY PRESSES). The process took a Baedeker [sic] (1923). Returning to New York, Loy number of years, since O’Hara was not particularly lived increasingly in isolation, writing but rarely pub- ambitious about publication; thus the 37 poems lishing poems and constructing artworks, using found included in Lunch Poems sample more than a decade of materials, depicting street people. work. Among these poems ostensibly composed dur- Loy’s deliberately artificial syntax, irregularly ing O’Hara’s lunch hours are “THE DAY LADY DIED” and an rhyming free verse, and unusual, highly unsentimental untitled poem which, in typical O’Hara fashion, begins vocabulary create an intellectual and antiexpressive in response to some immediate event, in this case poetry drained of conventional lyric emotion. quoting a newspaper headline declaring, “Lana Turner Although Loy’s futurist-inspired manifestos express an has collapsed!” expansive sense of liberation, her poetry is typically Francis Hope dismisses Lunch Poems in a single para- satiric: A corrosive questioning of respectability com- graph by concluding, “there’s not much reality in these bines with a strong empathy for society’s victims and sandwiches—only the puppyish charm of occasional rejects. However, underlying a hard verbal surface is an good impromptus” (688). Hope condemns O’Hara’s intense spiritual longing, which became increasingly poems for not being scholarly and crafted by revision, pronounced in her later art and poetry. the very things O’Hara and other NEW YORK SCHOOL “Songs to Joannes” (also published as “Love Songs”) artists eschewed. In fact, O’Hara’s technique was to use sardonically examines a failed affair in a highly com- the impromptu, the spontaneous, and the common to pressed and elusive manner. The notorious image— create a charming intimacy. Raymond Roseliep employs ”Pig Cupid his rosy snout / Rooting erotic stronger language in his assessment of these poems, garbage”—exemplifies the poem’s mocking of conven- complaining of the “wearisome cataloging of persona- tional love poetry and romantic fantasy, which are lia” and “naughty-little-boy-sayings” (326) that revealed as grounded in instinct and sexuality. The offended him, things characteristic of American poetry ambitious long poem, Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose, after World War II and not just O’Hara’s idiosyncratic written in the mid-1920s, mythologizes Loy’s own province. The fundamentals of O’Hara’s work elicit a upbringing and family in order to analyze the cultural more generous response from Gilbert Sorrentino, who effects of psychological repression. The poem dissects notes the “grace and skill” with which O’Hara navigates the consequences of the mind’s denial of the body at a world that is “all fun and games, laughter, la dolce vita; LUX, THOMAS 293 even the wretched and miserable segments of it are Sighted, was published in 1970. Lux has taught at etched in a fine chiaroscuro of wit” (19). The “brisk and Sarah Lawrence College and the Georgia Institute of brilliant world” Sorrentino identifies is abundantly evi- Technology. He received the Kingsley Tufts Award for dent in Lunch Poems (19). Split Horizon in 1994; his New and Selected Poems, A prime example of this speed and clarity is the com- 1975–1995 was a finalist for the 1998 Lenore Mar- pressed progression through time and space in the 11-, shall/Nation Poetry Prize, and it was a finalist for the five-, and six-line stanzas of “Mary Desti’s Ass” (1961). Los Angeles Times Book Award in poetry (1995). He has The poem’s diverse occasions take place all over North also been awarded a number of fellowships. America, Asia, and Europe, involving specific dancers, Before he became successful in his writing and teach- composers, and poets, but most of all “you” and “I” are ing careers, Lux worked as a dishwasher and a night the players in these events. The speaker encounters a watchman, among other positions. Some of his poems friend’s mother who is recently returned from Turkey, reflect the realities of manual work—such as “Cows” passes judgment on assorted American cities, and (1994), set on the dairy farm where Lux grew up. “What includes unknowns among the noteworthy who partic- I should be doing is working in a box factory in my ipate in the whimsical serial. There are pleasant and hometown or the Elastic Web factory, where my whole unpleasant episodes in this poem, which help it main- family worked,” he has said. “Given where I come from, tain contact with the concrete reality of the average per- I probably shouldn’t be a poet. So I think I’m lucky.” son’s world, and the finest images in the piece articulate (Moore 65–66). He has also said that “good poetry can these opposites. While one experience is “like being be accessible and clear and lucid and still be highly orig- pushed down hard / on a chair,” elsewhere life is bal- inal and fresh and powerful.” (Interview by Spalding). anced by “love sneaking up . . . through the snow.” It is Although his first two books were heavily influenced by this careful touch that saves Lunch Poems from being SURREALISM, he finds the style now “too arbitrary, and . . . pedestrian and prosaic. kind of lazy. It doesn’t pay enough attention to the musi- BIBLIOGRAPHY cal elements of poetry” (Interview by Spalding). Hope, Francis. “Suffer and Observe.” New Statesman (30 Lux’s work flows from his respect for the craft of April 1965): 687–688. working with words. His poem “An Horation Notion” Roseliep, Raymond. “From Woodcarver to Wordcarver.” (1994) tells readers that writing is a craft, neither a Poetry 107 (February 1966): 326–330. God-given talent nor a thunderbolt of inspiration: “You Sorrentino, Gilbert. “The New Note.” Book Week (May 1, make the thing because you love the thing / and you 1966): 19. love the thing because someone else loved it / enough A. Mary Murphy to make you love it.” Lux’s poems are expressions of his love of words and his fascination with the varied char- LUX, THOMAS (1946– ) Thomas Lux com- acters and things that populate our world. bines the wit typical of the NEW YORK SCHOOL with a BIBLIOGRAPHY rigorous eye for line and phrase. In his later work, Lux, Thomas. “Interview with Thomas Lux,” by J. M. Spald- especially, he captures ordinary things—rabbit tracks ing. Cortland Review 8 (August 1999). Available online. in fresh snow, an abandoned jar of maraschino cherries URL: www.cortlandreview.com/issue/8/lux8i.htm. Down- on a refrigerator shelf—and brings them to life in a loaded March 2003. vivid and unusual way. Like his contemporaries Bob ———. Untitled Interview with Thomas Lux, by B. C. Hicok and Billy COLLINS, Lux captures the complexities Cohen. Violet Crown 1.1 (September 2002). Available on- of postmodern life in poems that sparkle even as they line. URL: www.violetcrown.net/text/newinterview.html. pack a serious punch. Downloaded March 2003. Lux was born in Northampton, Massachusetts, and Moore, Judith. “Thomas Lux.” San Diego Reader 26.22 holds degrees from Emerson College and the Univer- (May 29, 1997): 65–66. sity of Iowa. His first collection of poems, The Land Rachel Barenblat 294 LYRIC POETRY

LYRIC POETRY The lyric is one of the primary Three traditional forms of lyric have been particu- poetic forms, which also include NARRATIVE and dra- larly popular in 20th-century American poetry. The matic. The 20th-century American lyric poem itself first, the elegy, stems from Greek and Roman poetry takes on various forms, including the traditional elegy, covering a variety of subject matter. Ancient elegies fol- sonnet, ode, song, as well as original types and styles. lowed a particular form: couplets consisting of a hexa- American lyric poetry, has roots in the medieval song meter and pentameter line, respectively. The and ancient Greek poetry. Sappho, the sixth-century contemporary elegy, a somber poem usually written in B.C. poet who shaped the lyric poem, influenced 20th- remembrance of someone, with no particular meter or century writers, such as AMY LOWELL and H. D. Ancient form, evolved from the 16th-century English elegy. lyric poetry was often set to music; the word lyric is The elegy may mourn a single person, a group of peo- derived from the Greek word for “lyre.” Lyric poetry ple, or humanity in general. Robert LOWELL’s “The has never dwindled much in popularity. In the 20th Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket (For Warren century, it has often addressed feminist, racial, and Winslow, Dead at Sea)” (1946) is a seven-stanza elegy other social concerns. for his cousin, which was inspired by Herman Melville Much of the lyric poetry of the 20th century did not (the poem was originally titled “To Herman Melville”). change a great deal in definition or form from the Theodore ROETHKE, a friend of Lowell, also wrote ele- ancient poetry. Like the ancient lyric poems, 20th- gies, such as “Dying Man” (1955), in memory of century American lyric poetry emphasizes thoughts William Butler Yeats, and “Elegy for Jane” (1953). Mil- and emotions, often the poets’ own suffering. The lyric lay’s “Memorial to D.C.” (1918) is a short poem poem still most frequently takes the form of a brief, mourning the death of a child. Conrad AIKEN’s “Crepe highly personal monologue, often written in the first- Myrtle” (1949), an elegy for Franklin D. Roosevelt, person, dealing with a single person or situation, W. H . AUDEN’s “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” (1940) and rather than a story involving multiple characters or “In Memory of Sigmund Freud” (1940), and Irving events. The speaker of a lyric poem might address her- FELDMAN’s “ THE PRIPET MARSHES,” (1965), an elegy for the self or himself, another person, a group of people, an Holocaust victims, are also examples. object, a reader, or nobody. A large portion of Ameri- The second traditional form of lyric, the 14-line can 20th-century poetry can be considered lyrical. sonnet, originates from medieval songs. Many 20th- American lyric poetry dates back to Anne Bradstreet century sonnets have retained the respective forms and and Edward Taylor, 17th-century American poets, typical subject matter produced by Petrarch and although lyricism was not characteristic of the poetry Shakespeare in the 14th and 16th centuries. Gwen- written at that time. The 19th century produced dolyn BROOKS’s “The Sonnet-Ballad” (1949) and Coun- numerous lyric poems in American literature by poets tee CULLEN’s “Yet Do I Marvel” (1925) are examples of including Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Edgar the Shakespearean sonnet form. In 1944 Brooks won Allan Poe, William Cullen Bryant, and Ralph Waldo the Midwestern Writers Conference prize for her son- Emerson. These poets had great influence on the lyric net, “Gay Chaps at the Bar,” part of a sonnet sequence poetry of the following century. about World War II. In style, “Gay Chaps at the Bar” Most 20th-century American poets wrote some conforms to Shakespearean (three four-line stanzas lyric poetry, including Allen GINSBERG, James MERRILL, and a closing couplet) and Petrarchan (an eight-line Dave SMITH, and Jorie GRAHAM. Major lyric poets of the section and a six-line section) forms, albeit loosely. 20th century included most of the IMAGISTS, T. S. Other poets have deviated from the common structure ELIOT, as well as other poets, such as Langston and created their own forms. Robert Lowell published HUGHES, Rita DOVE, Edna St. Vincent MILLAY, and three collections of unrhymed sonnets in 1973: For Robert FROST. The blues, jazz, folk lyrics, and black Lizzie and Harriet, The Dolphin, and History. Other spirituals of American music are also an important 20th-century poets who have written sonnets include part of the lyric tradition. Edwin Arlington ROBINSON, Mark JARMAN, Adrienne LYRIC POETRY 295

RICH, Marilyn HACKER, and Elinor Wylie, whose sonnets ered a lyric, because of the emotional first-person are often considered her best work. voice, yet the poem contains overtones of racial issues The ode, also with roots in the ancient Greek choral not usually found in lyric poetry, as does his “Let songs by such poets as Pindar and Horace, has, like America Be America Again” (1936). The first-person the elegy, undergone a transformation in form and voice, common in his poetry, often speaks for the col- subject matter. The ode is a long, usually formal poem lective whole of African Americans. and was popular with 19th-century English poets, Lowell, who was sentenced to prison as a conscien- such as John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Usually tious objector to military service during the World War a poem celebrating something, the contemporary odes II, emphasized history and politics in his poetry in an is well represented by James William Applewhite, Jr.’s attempt to come to terms with the events of the wars of “Ode to the Chinaberry Tree” (1986), Wallace the late 20th century. While most of his poetry is lyri- STEVENS’s “ THE IDEA OF ORDER AT KEY WEST” (1934), Don- cal, much of it also contains political overtones, such as ald JUSTICE’s “Ode to a Dressmaker’s Dummy” (1991), “July in Washington” (1964), which describes the and “ODE TO THE CONFEDERATE DEAD” (1928), one of “elect, the elected” arriving as “bright as dimes,” but Allen TATE’s best-known poems. Tate’s poem, a medita- dying “dishevelled and soft.” Lowell was influenced in tion in a Confederate graveyard, recalls the ancient his writing by a number of other lyric poets, including Pindaric odes, though Tate’s poem speaks at a much Robert Browning, Frost, and William Carlos WILLIAMS. more personal level. The lyric poem has been written in a variety of styles The forms described above constitute popular forms by a cross section of 20th-century American poets. The of 20th-century American lyric poetry, yet modern 20th century produced traditional forms and styles of lyric poetry is not limited to them. Similarly while lyric poetry in addition to taking new directions with many of the lyric poets of the 20th century conformed subjects and styles. Many of the foremost poets of the to traditional lyric forms and subjects, some poets cre- century earned recognition through their lyric poetry. ated new styles and forms and departed from tradi- Lyric poetry will always continue to be a major form of tional subject matter as well. For instance, poets, such poetry that speaks personally to the reader. as Frost, while practicing well-known forms, such as BIBLIOGRAPHY the sonnet, also developed their own lyric styles and Jefferys, Mark., ed. New Definitions of Lyric: Theory, Technol- forms. Frost, one of the foremost American lyric poets ogy, and Culture. New York: Garland, 1998. of his time, is known for his craftsmanship and ability Johnson, W. R. The Idea of Lyric: Lyric Modes in Ancient and to write both blank verse and rhymed verse. Many of Modern Poetry. Berkeley: University of California Press, his poems imitate vernacular speech while following a 1982. rigid structure concerning rhyme and rhythm. Pinsky, Robert. The Situation of Poetry: Contemporary Poetry Traditionally lyric poetry is nonpolitical and nonhis- and its Traditions. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University torical. Yet many poets wrote about both political and Press, 1976. historical subjects in their lyric poetry. Hughes, for Rosenthal, M. L. The Modern Poetic Sequence: The Genius of example, incorporates political meaning into his Modern Poetry. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983. poetry. “THE NEGRO SPEAKS OF RIVERS” (1921) is consid- Sigrid Kelsey CMD

MACKEY, NATHANIEL (1947– ) Nathaniel beings of the Dogon. These poems are emblematic of Mackey is among the most prodigious and versatile Mackey’s work, an excursion that the author will not African-American writers, practicing a unique open form bring to a conclusion, opting for hopeful (if fretful) pur- that draws from the OBJECTIVIST and BLACK MOUNTAIN suit of originality. This postmodern choice of serial SCHOOLS, CARIBBEAN POETIC INFLUENCES, and the BLACK ARTS incompletion offers the possibility that in seeking and MOVEMENT. His poetry is closely connected with improv- representing difference or newness, a change in worldly isational and spontaneous music. It explores and cele- circumstance will follow (see LONG AND SERIAL POETRY). brates traditions and mythologies of the African diaspora These poems, spiritual-psychic locations, move along a that are largely marginalized in American culture. A liter- highly developed web, “wrestling with / sound” that is ary nomad who invokes and channels descendents of inclusive and unreduced. Words, for Mackey, are blocks spirits that inhabit the world, Mackey frequently makes to be carved and reshaped while advancing content: “Sat references to Dogon cosmology (from West Africa), con- on a / train crossing adverse / heaven. Raz they called / tinental jazz, and Caribbean ritual in his work. His it, fractured masses .../ Arz it/ could’ve easily been, poetry will often unite, even within the course of a more / likely Zra, Zar the / asymptotic arrival we / stanza, completely unconventional references with fluid- glimpsed, / ‘Not yet’ yelled at every / stop.” The poem ity and lyricism. His collections are transcontinental continues, “Raz / with an e on the / end. A way of / maps that hold and cross-reference many narratives out- spelling, a spell if / by e we meant / exit.” This passage is side dominant cultural forms. indicative of Mackey’s unusual, chordal treatment of Mackey was born in Miami, Florida, and raised in words, which reflect the malleability of language. The- California before attending Princeton and Stanford matically it shows Mackey’s attention to an endless pur- Universities. His first collection, Eroding Witness, was suit of something beyond what is present. published in 1985; besides poetry, he has published Mackey’s poetry illustrates that there is progress to three volumes of fiction and a book of criticism. be made and boundaries to be crossed by people inter- Mackey has been editor of the journal Hambone; he ested in cultural inclusion. The complexity of his work also coedited the anthology Moments Notice: Jazz in indicates that exploring the truth of history and den- Poetry and Prose (1993). In 2001 he became a chancel- sity of humanity is a challenging, rough, and poten- lor of the Academy of American Poets. tially endless ride. Along with individual works, Mackey has authored BIBLIOGRAPHY an ongoing series of poems entitled Song of the Andoum- Foster, Ed, ed. Talisman 8 (1992). [Special issue on boulou (1977–present), named after the unfinished Nathaniel Mackey].

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Rowell, Charles, ed. Callaloo 23.2 (2000). [Special issue on nothing—nothing at all,” MacLeish depicts our sense of Nathaniel Mackey]. dispossession, in which there are no answers to the Christopher Funkhouser ceaseless unfolding mysteries, and exhorts us to rely on the power of the spiritual within our own minds. MACLEISH, ARCHIBALD (1892–1982) With its images able to be experienced directly, Archibald MacLeish wrote poems reflecting on the MacLeish’s poetry pins down instances of the emotion timeless paradoxes of being human: He also acted as a rather than analogues of it, making us believe more Socratic voice, pricking the consciences of his fellow than we can prove of the future of the human race, citizens, and he was perhaps the only poet of the early namely that we can make a future, shape a destiny. In 20th century who grasped and wrote about the mod- the midst of often incredulous and cynical times, his ern revolution in physics, the space-time continuum, achievement lies in the new ways he found to state and the four-dimensional universe. Considered a what we have always known. major modernist poet of the generation following Ezra BIBLIOGRAPHY POUND and T. S. ELIOT (see MODERNISM), MacLeish, with Donaldson, Scott. Archibald MacLeish: An American Life. his sensitivity to technique and his lyrical gift, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992. expressed common existential anxieties of the time. No Hall, Donald. Their Ancient Glittering Eyes: Remembering poem has expressed the modernist sense of art so well Poets. New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1992, p. 122. as “Ars Poetica” (1926), with its signature statement: Gerald Schwartz “A poem should not mean / But be.” MacLeish was born and raised in Glencoe, Illinois. MAC LOW, JACKSON (1922–2004) Jack- He won three Pulitzer Prizes: in 1932 for the narrative son Mac Low is among the most innovative and pro- poem Conquistador (see NARRATIVE POETRY), in 1953 for lific poets of the 20th century. He is best known as a Collected Poems: 1917–1952 (which won a National poet who employs chance operations and other deter- Book Award and the Bollingen Prize in that year), and ministic compositional procedures (see CYBERPOETRY). in 1959 for his verse-drama J.B., based on the Book of That is, he frequently writes by letting objective and Job. In 1965 he received an Academy Award for his impersonal guides or systems determine what he will work on the screenplay of The Eleanor Roosevelt Story. write. However, Mac Low also has written traditional He was appointed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt sonnets, political, occasional, and CONFESSIONAL verse to serve first as librarian of at the Library of Congress in a diverse body of work that continues to baffle and and later as director of the War Department’s Office of inspire his contemporaries, Robert CREELEY, Jerome Information. ROTHENBERG, and Armand SCHWERNER among them. MacLeish’s poetry presents a rare wholeness of vision Influenced by Buddhism, pacifist anarchism, and the throughout his long career, reiterating the value of the modern LYRIC POETRY tradition extending from Walt real, the tangible experience of one’s impressions and Whitman and Carl SANDBURG to Ezra POUND and sensations. He distrusted abstractions, in the political Gertrude STEIN, Mac Low has also composed music arena no less than in the aesthetic. Unlike Pound and and theatrical works, worked as a painter, film, and Eliot, he did not write for posterity nor for an elite, writ- video artist, and performed individual and collabora- ing instead as one person to another, specifically as an tive works, often with his wife, the artist and poet American. “The poet’s best work is elegiac,” as Donald Anne Tardos. Taken as a whole, Mac Low’s work reori- HALL has remarked, “with a special rage for emptiness, ents readers’ assumptions about free will, conscious for blank faces at the edge of the void. While we fear or authority, and the individual ego. dread annihilation, [MacLeish’s] lines make their music” Mac Low was born in Chicago, Illinois. He studied (122). In the one-sentence sonnet “The End of the philosophy with Paul Goodman and other “Chicago World” (1926), which ends with the lines “There in the Aristotelians,” a group of philosophers and critics whose sudden blackness the black pall / Of nothing, nothing, views contrasted to the coterminous New Criticism (see 298 MAC LOW, JACKSON

FUGITIVE/AGRARIAN SCHOOL), at the University of Chicago. words or strings of words) culled from “source texts”— In 1943 Mac Low moved to New York City, eventually whatever he happened to be reading at the time. The earning a bachelor’s degree in classical languages at motives for composing in this unusual manner, within a Brooklyn College (1958). In the meantime he had poetic tradition and deeply invested in the personal worked as poetry editor for the pacifist-anarchist maga- expression of the author, were based in part on inter- zines Why?/Resistance, Retort, and, later, WIN (Workshop pretations of Zen Buddhism, which advocate circum- in Nonviolence [1966–75]). In the mid-1950s, Mac venting the individual ego so that one’s work might lead Low studied Zen and Kegon Buddhism with Dr. D. T. to the enlightenment of others. Mac Low developed Suzuki at Columbia University and attended John CAGE’s three approaches based on such motives: intentional, course in experimental music. Mac Low has performed quasi-intentional, and nonintentional. his poems—often devised as musical/theatrical scores— Each approach is defined by the degree to which the since 1960, when the Living Theater produced his The author is able to foresee the results of the process of Marrying Maiden: a play of changes. The title refers to the composition, on the one hand, and the performance oracle used to compose the piece, the I Ching, or Book of (including silent reading) on the other. One of the Changes, the same oracle Cage used to compose certain results of using strict compositional methods is that of his musical pieces, including his soundtrack for Mac Mac Low is meticulously responsible for his prosody Low’s “play.” Mac Low’s first major poetry collection, and other formal measures, while performances fre- Stanzas for Iris Lezak, was published by Dick Higgins’s quently allow a great deal of initiative to the perform- Something Else Press in 1972. The works in the collec- ers. Nonintentional and quasi-intentional works have tion are among the first composed by means of Mac contributed toward making Mac Low a primary influ- Low’s innovations in procedural, chance-deterministic ence on the linguistic experiments of the LANGUAGE methods. Other collections of poetry particularly suit- SCHOOL in the 1970s and 1980s. able for staged performances followed, among them His later, “intuitive” works, often created, as he has Words nd Ends from Ez, a methodical lyric revision of said, “from the liminal area of the mind,” point to a Pound’s epic THE CANTOS, taking the iconoclastic “spirit of fourth method that does not prioritize “intention” in Pound” to a logical extreme. Between 1966 to 1994, general (Mac Low). These later works produce rich Mac Low taught at New York University, Temple Uni- cadences demanding a full and equal attention to versity, and the Naropa Institute, among other institu- language. This attention is signaled by scoring the tions, and performed and exhibited works in various poetic line with spaces to indicate pauses, hyphen- media from New Zealand to Germany, Japan, France, ation, and accents, as in this line of verse: “Finding your Sweden, and across the United States. In 1994 his 42 own level of héll with cultural signifiers-glow- Merzgedichte in Memoriam Kurt Schwitters shared the ing-in-the-lámplight” (“Finding Your Own Name {For- America Award for literature for a book of poetry pub- ties 154}” [2001]). There is no ultimate religious lished in that year. Other significant awards, fellowships, message in Mac Low’s work, implicit or explicit. and grants have included those from the National Instead, he discloses how language permeates the indi- Endowment for the Arts (1979), the Guggenheim vidual ego with the social exigencies of the world that Foundation (1985), and the Tanning Prize from the makes the idea of the ego possible in the first place. Academy of American Poets (1999). BIBLIOGRAPHY Mac Low’s work takes MODERNISM’s formal innovations Hartley, George. “‘Listen’ and ‘Relate’: Jackson Mac Low’s in verse to the level of meaning-making in language Chance-Operational Poetry.” Sulfur 23 (fall 1998): 189–203. itself. From 1954, having already produced a significant Mac Low, Jackson. “Response to Piombino.” Available body of work in traditional, free verse and cubist forms online. URL: http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/maclow/ (see PROSODY AND FREE VERSE), Mac Low began compos- piombino.html. Downloaded June 2003. ing via chance-deterministic methods, often devising Quasha, George. “A Concrete Dialog with Myself on, and poems from randomized linguistic units (permuting for, Jackson Mac Low.” Paper Air 2.1 (1980): 55–63. MAJOR, CLARENCE 299

Retallack, Joan. “______:______” In Festschrift for Jackson garbage cans, leaving well lit allies,” and pulling his Mac Low’s 75th Birthday, Crayon (Fall 1997): 87–97. carts, “eyes glued southward long steppin homeward.” Taylor, Henry. “Jackson Mac Low: Gristlier Translations, The speaker tracks washington’s journey from his com- Arcane Pronouns.” In Compulsory Figures. Baton Rouge: mitment to American patriotism to his disillusionment Louisiana State University Press, 1992, pp. 245–266. with the government’s indifference to the plight of his Patrick F. Durgin family. Madhubuti highlights this inattention to certain classes of the population, while warning of the response MADHUBUTI, HAKI (DON L. LEE) of people who feel they have nowhere to turn. (1942– ) Formerly Don L. Lee, Haki Madhubuti is Madhubuti’s well-crafted poetry continues to mes- a poet, educator, essayist, and literary critic whose work merize and transform with a blend of humor, realism, emerged out of the 1960s’ BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT. Mad- and rhythm. hubuti read poetry in bars and out on street corners, BIBLIOGRAPHY punctuating his words with sound and rhythm. He was Madhubuti, Haki. Earthquakes and Sunrise Missions. Chicago: determined to bring poetry to the people, insisting, Third World Press, 1984. “Language in the context of the working poem can raise Weil, Eric A. “Personal and Public.” In The Furious Flowering the mindset of entire civilizations, speak to two year of African-American Poetry, edited by Joanne V. Gabbin. olds and render some of us wise” (14). His lines were Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999. simple and direct, forging a black aesthetic that might be embraced by blacks who held little interest in the Judy Massey Dozier dense allusions of traditional poetic lines. Born in Little Rock, Arkansas, and raised in Detroit, MAJOR, CLARENCE (1936– ) As poet, he settled in Chicago, where he founded Third World novelist, lexicographer, anthologist, essayist, editor, Press and established the Institute of Positive Educa- teacher, and painter, Clarence Major resists categoriza- tion New Concept School and its publication, Blacks tion. For instance, as editor of The New Black Poetry Books Bulletin. He also became one of the first members (1969), a volume often associated with the BLACK ARTS of the Organization of Black American Culture MOVEMENT, Major stayed “firmly away from any notion (OBAC). Widely anthologized and the author of 15 that art needed to be a conscious instrument of social books, Madhubuti has been a professor of English and or political change” (Rowell 672). Fiercely individual- director emeritus of the Gwendolyn BROOKS Center at istic, but not solipsistic, Major’s writing “weld[s] a Chicago State University. complex modern diction to a constant historical con- During the 1960s Madhubuti, like many of his con- sciousness” (Howe 69). temporaries, began to employ the vernacular in his Born in Atlanta, Major grew up in Chicago. At 17 he poetry, “experimenting with vocabulary, spelling, studied painting at Chicago’s Art Institute and later punctuation, and line breaks” and using “a variety of entered the United States Air Force, serving for a few first-person narrative stances” as Eric Weil has years (1955–57). Major’s 1954 pamphlet of poetry observed (234). A revolutionary writer who insists titled The Fires That Burn in Heaven was followed by that social change must stand at the forefront of the publication in magazines and reviews throughout the writer’s mission, Madhubuti’s themes have ranged next decade. After editing Coercion Review from from tributes to Steve Biko, Malcolm X, and others to 1958–66, Major moved to New York and worked as criticism of the Vietnam War and the importance of associate editor of the Journal of Black Poetry until loving relationships. 1970. Major’s Configurations: New and Selected Poems, In “White on Black Crime” (1984), Madhubuti high- 1958–1998 was a finalist for the National Book Award lights the effect of widespread unemployment. The in 1999. His poem “The Funeral” won the 1976 Push- speaker follows an unemployed master welder, “milton cart Prize. He received the National Council on the washington,” who wanders the streets, looking “in Arts Award in 1970 for the poetry collection Swallow 300 MANDELBAUM, ALLEN

the Lake. The short story “My Mother and Mitch” also MODERNISM. Though not lavishly experimental, his won a Pushcart Prize in 1989. The novel My Amputa- verse possesses the allusive density of T. S. ELIOT, the tions won the Western States Book Award in 1986. bardic voice of Ezra POUND, the verbal playfulness of Bebop and blues music are notable influences in his Wallace STEVENS and James Joyce, and the terse, short- poetry, but Major is a self-described “visual thinker” lined utterance of William Carlos WILLIAMS. Like some (670). He sees painterly perspective and narrative of his modernist precursors, his distaste for his times point-of-view as interconnected, and his poems are drives him to seek order and renewal in tradition, and often concerned with revealing their speakers’ per- his career as a translator and his deeply rooted Judaism spectives, as in the collection Swallow the Lake (1970). supply him with ceaseless inspiration. “Time,” writes Surfaces and Masks (1988) is richly allusive, referring to Mandelbaum in the introduction to his translation of famous pictorial art, as well as to literary and social The Aeneid (1971), “with all its density, does not disap- history. This collection demonstrates both Major’s sar- pear; but it seems to heighten and not to muffle the donic wit and sharpening sense of the dependence of words of the past addressing us” (xiv). Western cultural traditions upon the presence of the Heightening “the words of the past” has been Man- ironically invoked “cultivated Negro”: as Major sug- delbaum’s life’s work. The son and grandson of ortho- gests, “Behind every closed window / on the Grand dox rabbis, Mandelbaum was born in Albany, New Canal, Othello and Desdemona” (“I” [1988]). York. He graduated from Yeshiva University at 18 and Major’s concerns with music, visual culture, and received his M.A and Ph.D. from Columbia University. erudition, and their relationship to racist practices, are He has taught at several universities, including the most pointedly addressed in his stunning long poem City University of New York, Wake Forest University, The Slave Trade: View from the Middle Passage (1994). and the University of Torino in Italy. Along with pub- Here a contemporary speaker possessed by the spirit of lishing five books of his own poetry, Mandelbaum Mfu, an African man who drowned himself during the established his reputation as an important contempo- Middle Passage rather than submit to slavery, relates rary translator through several translations of classical, Mfu’s story by reference to a series of famous paintings medieval, and modern poets. Among his many awards and cartoons. As Othello’s spirit shapes the Venice of and fellowships, Mandelbaum received the National Surfaces and Masks, Mfu’s channeled testimony forces a Book Award for his translation of The Aeneid (1972) to consideration of the ways in which the world con- and was a finalist for the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for his tinues to be shaped by the events, the logic, and the translation of The Metamorphosis. culture of the slave trade. Indeed one can trace the theme of “translation” Major’s individualistic and experimental poetry throughout Mandelbaum’s own poetry. In his shorter forces a new, often uncomfortable examination of cul- lyrics and his longer poem sequences, Chelmaxioms ture and history. (1978) and The Savantasse of Montparnasse (1988), BIBLIOGRAPHY Mandelbaum reworks classical motifs, such as the epic Bell, Bernard. Clarence Major and His Art: Portraits of an narrator, the hero, and the journey and quest, for the African-American Postmodern Artist. Chape Hill: University modern reader. As it bridges the centuries, Mandel- of North Carolina Press, 2000. baum’s poetry also blends classicism, Christian Howe, Fanny. “Clarence Major: Poet and Language Man.” humanism, Jewish thought, and modern philosophy. Black American Literature Forum 13.2 (1979): 68–69. Not only time and tradition, but the vastness of the Major, Clarence. “An Interview with Clarence Major,” by world is translated into an eternally present “here” in Charles H. Rowell. Callaloo 20.3 (1998): 667–678. Mandelbaum’s global vision. Several forms of transla- Danielle Glassmeyer tion can be seen in this line from “The Civil Sea” (1967): “Arm in (iron) arm (s), Aeneas / and Augus- MANDELBAUM, ALLEN (1926– ) Allen tine / sink within / the wake of twenty centuries.” Here Mandelbaum’s poetry places him in the mainstream of literary allusions and the motif of the sea journey MATHEWS, HARRY 301 translate the present into the universal, assonance and that literary aspirations would damage his successful alliteration translate words into music, and wordplay law career. Shortly after his success with the Spoon and punning translate the highly serious into the par- River Anthology, he gave up law to devote himself to adoxical and humorous. writing. Masters received several literary awards, Mandelbaum’s poetry challenges the casual reader: including the Helen Haire Levinson Prize from Poetry Its conceptual density and its scholarly weight can magazine (1916), the National Institute and American drive even the most erudite to the “Notes” appended to Academy of Arts and Letters award in literature each of his books. Nevertheless Mandelbaum’s poetry, (1942), a Poetry Society of America Medal (1942), and especially such sequences as Chelmaxioms and The an Academy of American Poets Fellowship (1946). Savantasse of Montparnasse, never fails to broaden our Masters’s early poetry follows conventional forms vision by immersing us in classical and Judaic tradi- and deals with traditional topics (see PROSODY AND FREE tions while delighting us with wit and wordplay. VERSE). The Spoon River Anthology poems depart from this, presenting brief, free verse portraits of inhabitants BIBLIOGRAPHY of the Spoon River cemetery. The monologues provide Mandelbaum, Allen. “Introduction.” The Aeneid, translated by Allen Mandelbaum. Berkeley: University of California honest, sometimes bitter or pathetic glimpses of life in Press, 1971, i–xviii. a small midwestern town. For example, Knowt Moore, Richard. Review of The Savantasse of Montparnasse, Hoheimer laments: “When I felt the bullet enter my by Allen Mandelbaum. American Book Review. 10 (Janu- heart / I wished I had staid home and gone to jail.” The ary/February 1988): 14. book, almost an instant success, received mixed Weinfield, Henry. “Allen Mandelbaum.” In Contemporary reviews. Contemporary poets Ezra POUND and Sand- Jewish-American Dramatists and Poets: A Bio-Critical Source- burg praised the volume, while Amy LOWELL criticized book, edited by Joel Shatzky and Michael Taub. Westport, it. Some held that it was too realistic, and that it con- Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999, pp. 382–389. tained inappropriate poetic matter. Dennis D. McDaniel Subsequent to Spoon River, Masters published poetry, plays, and essays, none meeting with his initial MASTERS, EDGAR LEE (1869–1950) success. His second volume of poetry, The Blood of the Edgar Lee Masters, among the founders of the Chicago Prophets (1905), received little recognition, as did most Renaissance (which included Theodore Dreiser, Carl of his later publications. The New Spoon River (1924), a SANDBURG, and Vachel LINDSAY, with whom he associ- sequel to the first, is usually considered his second ated), was a leading poet of naturalism and regionalism most important work. Masters’s later work was criti- during the early 20th century. Also a novelist, play- cized as being hastily published, serving as a vehicle to wright, essayist, and biographer, Masters is best known express his own political thoughts and opinions. Mas- for his poetry. His most celebrated work, the Spoon ters published 53 books during his lifetime, but will River Anthology (1915), comprises more than 200 always be known as the “Spoon River poet.” poems. Already a published poet, Masters was to BIBLIOGRAPHY become a prolific writer, but this collection remained Russell, Herbert K. Edgar Lee Masters: A Biography. Urbana: his masterpiece. University of Illinois Press, 2001. Born in Garnett, Kansas, Masters spent most of his formative years in the Illinois towns of Petersburg and Sigrid Kelsey Lewistown, nearby the Spoon River, which provided many of the surroundings reflected in his work. Mas- MATHEWS, HARRY (1930– ) Harry Math- ters became a lawyer in 1891 and worked in his father’s ews is better known as a novelist than as a poet, but in law practice. After a year Masters moved to Chicago, both guises he has exerted a decisive influence on the where he remained until 1923. There he wrote essays, experimental tradition in American letters. In the late plays, and poetry, often under pseudonyms, fearing 1950s and early 1960s, Mathews became close with 302 MATTHEWS, WILLIAM

many of the key figures in the NEW YORK SCHOOL of has called the sequence “an experiment in discovering poetry, especially John ASHBERY, who led him, Mathews how formal pretexts lead into intimate experiences” writes, “to discover the possibility of ‘MODERNISM’—a (“Autobiography” 160). The phrase neatly sums up his world where I was allowed and in some sense obliged continuing poetic project. The elaborate surface con- to invent what I wrote” (“Autobiography” 137). Since structions of Mathews’s poems repeatedly reveal them- the early 1970s, Mathews has been associated with selves as attempts to articulate the deep truths of desire OuLiPo, or Ouvroir de littérature potentielle (Work- and loss by oblique means. shop of potential literature), a French group of writers BIBLIOGRAPHY and mathematicians dedicated to exploring the use of Mathews, Harry. “Autobiography.” In The Way Home: Col- formal constraints in the writing of novels and poems. lected Longer Prose. London: Atlas Press, 1989. As the only American member of the group, Mathews ———. “An Interview with Harry Mathews,” by Lytle Shaw. has functioned as a cultural emissary between the Chicago Review 43.2 (spring 1997): 36–52. French and American avant-gardes. ———. Preface to A Mid-Season Sky: Poems 1954–1991. Mathews was born and raised in New York City and Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1992. attended Princeton and Harvard, where he earned a O’Brien, John, ed. Review of Contemporary Fiction 7.3 (Fall degree in music in 1952. Between 1953 and 1978 he 1987). [Harry Mathews Issue] lived in various European locales, spending most of his Damian Judge Rollison time in Paris. From 1961 to 1963 he edited the leg- endary magazine Locus Solus, along with Ashbery, Ken- MATTHEWS, WILLIAM (1942–1997) Asso- neth KOCH, and James SCHUYLER. In 1973, after ciated with DEEP IMAGE POETRY, William Matthews befriending the French novelist Georges Perec, Math- received much praise for his ability to apply intelli- ews was asked to join OuLiPo. Mathews received a gence, wit, irony, and, often, a conversational tone to National Endowment for the Arts grant in fiction writ- such recurrent themes as loss, the workings of the ing in 1981 and an award for fiction from the Ameri- mind, and the passing of time. He once remarked, can Academy of Arts and Letters in 1991. His novel “[W]riting poems was the first time I ever learned to The Journalist won the America Award for fiction in play. When I discovered I could play and be serious at 1994. the same time, it was terrific” (33). In his early poetry, represented in the volumes The Matthews was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, and pub- Ring (1970) and The Planisphere (1974), Mathews lished his first full-length collection, Ruining the New exhibits a comic SURREALISM and a mercurial range of Road, in 1970. His honors included National Endow- tones, from breathless exuberance to solitary despair. ment for the Arts Fellowships (1975 and 1984), a The poems tend to cohere thematically rather than as Guggenheim Fellowship (1980), and a National Book narrative situations. For example, “Deathless, Lifeless” Critics Circle Award in 1995 for his collection Time & (1971) meditates on a loosely related set of images of Money. He served as president of Poetry Society of human death and separation and on their analogues in America, served on the literature panel of the the natural world: “Someone who is complete became National Endowment of the Arts, and taught at sev- the fragment,” “Oaks erect themselves as casually.” eral universities. After joining the OuLiPo, Mathews became increas- Comfortable with free verse and, particularly in later ingly preoccupied with formal experimentation. The poems, structured form (see PROSODY AND FREE VERSE), poems that make up Trial Impressions (1977) consist Matthews applies intelligence, irony, and a sense of entirely of contemporary variations on a love lyric by sentence rhythm to subjects ranging from lust to the Elizabethan poet John Dowland: “Deare, if you famous last words, Verdi to vasectomies. Critics note change, Ile never chuse againe” becomes “Deep, if you that Matthews’s work gains a complexity by simultane- charge, I’ll never chug again” and “If you break our ously addressing two opposed ideas: “gain and loss are breakfast date, I’ll go begging in Bangkok.” Mathews natural partners, as are birth and death,” Allen Hoey MATTHIAS, JOHN 303 suggests, noting the twin themes of the titles of such Jones, Matthias is deeply concerned with giving lan- collections as Rising and Falling and Time & Money guage the weight of its lost historical and philosophi- (118). In addition, Donald REVELL has observed that cal connotations. In fact, one of Matthias’s most Matthews “skillfully avoids reductiveness just as he important contributions to poetry is the way he takes avoids the maudlin self-awareness to which CONFES- language and imbues it with a richness of association, SIONAL poets often succumbed” (123). often by writing about found texts in the context of the Matthews frequently writes about such passions as history and landscape from which they came. The basketball and jazz, connecting them to a broader critic Vincent Sherry notes the power this kind of sense of the melancholy that accompanies change. In activity can have for readers at a time when so many of “The Blues” (1989), he links his boyhood music les- the stories once considered central to Western civiliza- sons to emotional ones: “I knew the way music can fill tion have lost their immediate familiarity. “Matthias,” a room, / even with loneliness.” Known for his love of writes Sherry, “offers from his word-hoard and refer- puns and quips—he titled one poem “The Penalty for ence-trove the splendid otherness of unfamiliar Bigamy Is Two Wives” (1982)—his sharp wit serves an speech; on the other hand, this is our familiar tongue, emotional depth and resonance. In “Dead Languages” our own language in its deeper memory and reso- (1995), a poem characteristic of his interest in lan- nance” (145). guage itself, Matthews moves from a list of amusing Born in Columbus, Ohio, Matthias attended Ohio etymologies that show how language changes without State University, then went on to study English litera- our knowing it (“Yes, senile / and Senate ‘grew’ from the ture at Stanford in 1963. While there he was a member same ‘root’”) to an understanding that we too experi- of a group of young poets studying under Yvor WINTERS, ence subtle, unexplainable changes: “we led our lives / a group that included two future U.S. poets laureates, or they led us, and how would we know which?” Robert PINSKY and Robert HASS. Deeply involved in the At his best, Matthews used his carefully crafted anti–Vietnam war movement and drawn toward the verse, his attention to the slippages of language, and countercultural world of San Francisco, Matthias nev- his cultivated wit and erudition to provide perspective ertheless left the Bay Area in 1966 to write poetry and on loss and change, offering pleasures to the mind pursue his studies in England. A professor as well as a while plumbing the human heart. poet, Matthias began teaching at the University of Notre Dame in 1967. He has published eight books of poetry, BIBLIOGRAPHY as well as translations from Swedish and Serbian, and Hoey, Allen. “Love & Work.” Shenandoah 48:3 (1998): 110–121. has edited two books on Jones. Matthews, William. “Talking about Poetry: An Interview Matthias’s poetry is driven by three sets of contrary with William Matthews.” [Interview by Wayne Dodd and impulses. In the poems of his first three books (Bucyrus Stanley Plumly (on April 12–13, 1972 in Athens, Ohio)]. [1970], Turns [1975], and Crossings [1979]), for exam- Ohio Review 13:3 (1972): 33–51. ple, we find Matthias pulled toward political activism, on Revell, Donald. “‘The Deep En-leaving Has Now Come’: the one hand, and a playful aestheticism, on the other. In Ammons, Matthews, Simic, and Cole.” Ohio Review 41 “The Stefan Batory Poems” (1979), he even says of him- (1988): 116–132. self that “Prospero whispers in one ear / And Lenin in the Bryan Walpert other.” Another tension in his work comes from the con- flict between the desire to write lucid, personal lyrics and MATTHIAS, JOHN (1941– ) John Matthias’s the attraction of arcane reference and formal experimen- poetry is as grounded in British traditions as it is in tation. A further set of contrary impulses in Matthias’s American culture. While his work has been influenced work is the pull toward the geographic particularities of by major American poets, including Robert DUNCAN places where he has lived (especially England) and the and Ezra POUND, it is also very much influenced by the lure of the imaginative work of artists from long ago work of the Welsh poet David Jones. Like Pound and and far away: He is simultaneously a poet of place and 304 MAXIMUM SECURITY WARD a profoundly intertextual poet, writing about landscapes leaves us to create and affirm meaning, in spite of our and making use of the texts associated with those land- ultimate destruction. scapes. “Northern Summer” (1984) and “A Compostella Characteristics of the poem include the elements of Diptych” (1991) are exemplary poems of this kind. modernism that Guthrie took from Pound and Eliot (in These contradictions do not make for incoherence, how- addition to the love of the medieval Provençal trouba- ever: It is through orchestrating them into a music of his dors), allusions to contemporary science played own that Matthias defines his singular place in American against mythic references, and a reliance on fragments poetry. and quick cuts similar to cinema clips or voices on a BIBLIOGRAPHY radio. All these help to give a sense of the upheaval Archambeau, Robert, ed. Word Play Place: Essays on the that followed World War I through World War II, the Poetry of John Matthias. Athens: Ohio University Korean War, and Vietnam. A key theme is embodied in Press/Swallow Press, 1998. the line “Human I never would have chosen to be,” Hooker, Jeremy. The Presence of the Past: Essays on Modern which appears several times, including in “This British and American Poetry. Bridgend, United Kingdom: Stealth,” where he says that even though he would not Poetry Wales Pres, 1987, pp. 97–105. choose to be human, he respects that humans, in spite Sherry, Vincent. “The Poetry of John Matthias: Between the of “all frustration,” try to “push . . . beyond” their lim- Castle and the Mine.” Salmagundi 65 (fall 1984): 132–145. itations. Angry at Christianity’s self-righteousness and Robert Archambeau America’s paternalism, Guthrie nonetheless believes in righteousness, as embodied in “lovers of liberty, beauty, MAXIMUM SECURITY WARD RAMON justice” (“And the Evening and the Morning”). Those GUTHRIE (1970) Maximum Security Ward, pub- three touchstones—liberty, beauty, and justice—make lished when Ramon GUTHRIE was 74 years old, is one of Guthrie’s work less evasive than Eliot’s or Stevens’s and the last masterpieces of MODERNISM. In this work more sharply focused than Pound’s. Guthrie echoes the allusiveness and renaissance A poem about a man dying of cancer may sound humanism of Ezra POUND’s THE CANTOS, the voices of depressing, but Maximum Security Ward is an exhilarat- T. S. ELIOT’s THE WASTE LAND, and Wallace STEVENS’s (and ing and uplifting book, full of honest emotion and Eliot’s) obsession with the loss of religious certainty. wonderful fun, with a tight network of cross-references Like The Cantos and Charles OLSON’s MAXIMUS POEMS, and allusions. Maximum Security Ward is a long poem made up of BIBLIOGRAPHY smaller individual poems (see LONG AND SERIAL POETRY). Gall, Sally. An American Classic: Ramon Guthrie’s Maximum Although Maximum Security Ward is a poem of many Security Ward. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, voices, the dominant one is that of Guthrie’s own per- 1984. sona, identified with Merlin, Marsyas, Ishmael, and ———., and M. L. Rosenthal. The Modern Poetic Sequence: others who dared to defy the gods. It is a witty, self- The Genius of Modern Poetry. New York: Oxford University conscious, mocking, and tender voice, trying to find a Press, 1983. moral center without God and believing in love even in Hadas, Rachel. “Eloquence, Inhabited and Uninhabited.” the face of painful death. The voice is given authority Parnassus 12:1 (fall–winter 1984): 133–153. not only by the immediate suffering of cancer treat- Thomas Lisk ment in an intensive care ward he mockingly calls the Maximum Security Ward, but also by the human suf- THE MAXIMUS POEMS CHARLES OLSON fering caused by the series of wars that mutilated the (1960–1983) Charles OLSON’s The Maximus Poems 20th century. The poem suggests that life teases us articulates an image of “man” through a form of map- with the possibility of beauty, justice, and liberty, only ping that navigates human uncertainties. Constructing to defeat us in the end by taking away all three. But life an alternative to political and social life during the does not, just tease us the poem goes on to say, but 1950s and 1960s, Olson’s postmodern ethos projects a THE MAXIMUS POEMS 305 familiarity with the human body from which, Olson of purpose and method. The page now reflects Olson’s feels, modern man has become estranged. His aim is to visual sense of how words come over into speech when merge the mental and the physical landscapes through the individual is freed from self-consciousness. For passionate acts of attention. Avoiding both sentence and instance, William Stevens, an early shipbuilder, paragraph, he employs fragmentary allusions to an embodies the poetic fact that measurements consonant eclectic range of texts that resonate with his purpose. with the sense of touch are crucial to achieving poetic Two volumes of this multivolume poem were published purpose. Stevens is the first Maximus, or alter ego of during Olson’s life: The Maximus Poems (1960) and The the narrator. In the entry “Tyrian Business,” Olson him- Maximus Poems, IV, V, VI (1968). The Maximus Poems: self becomes Maximus and learns “how to dance / sit- Volume Three (1975) was published posthumously. The ting down,” the breath projecting the kinetic motion of standard text, including previously unpublished frag- thought. Speaking now with a less rhetorical voice, the ments, is The Maximus Poems (1983), edited by George poet inhabits the poem. Additionally historical facts Butterick. As the poem evolves, an exceptional political have established an objective basis for investigating vision becomes the tragedy of an isolated visionary. The heroic archetypes and projecting authentic engage- Maximus Poems is arguably the most significant Ameri- ment with the environment, as exemplified both by the can poem of epic proportions other than THE CANTOS of accomplishments of those colonial-era settlers that Ezra POUND, the poem to which it is most often com- Olson considers to have been heroic and by the lore pared (see LONG AND SERIAL POETRY). and life styles of American Indians. For Olson the Puri- Set largely in Gloucester, Massachusetts, the forward tan settlement of New England signifies a perversion of motion of The Maximus Poems maps a time-space com- newly discovered material wealth, while seafaring fig- plex, modeled on the quantum-mechanical view of the ures, like Juan de la Cosa, represent a realistic and universe, and folds inner experience with the poet’s pragmatic relation of person to space conceived as sense of place in the world. Olson is insistent about the inescapable fact to which the ego must adjust its need for the whole organism to experience direct and motions. To Olson’s sensibility, projecting a landscape immediate perceptions. Maximus, the heroic antago- on a map of human possibilities requires firsthand nist, envisions a polis, or ideal city, heeding a necessity experience. Similarly evidence from the history of the “to write a Republic.” Here, in a gesture typical of fishing trade and American Indian folklore testify to Olson’s method, ethical and nautical senses of “write” methods of living in physical and spiritual accord with and “right” pun thematically. Hopes for practical, social the earth. success of his project diminish during the years of its In The Maximus Poems, IV, V, VI (1968), the cosmo- composition; nonetheless the poems maintain a vision- logical sweep of the undertaking emerges. Engage- ary quality until reaching the cryptic flatness of the final ment with the archetype of the hero engenders a words, “my wife my car my color and myself.” spiritual order of discoveries. Both American Indian In the first entry in the larger scheme of poems that and the earliest Indo-European materials enter the make up The Maximus Poems, composed in 1950 as fabric of the poem as Maximus/Olson becomes a one of several “letters” addressed to his contempo- reflection of the heroic archetype developed by psy- raries, Maximus urges the citizens of Gloucester, espe- chologist Carl Jung, homo maximus. Olson’s use of cially the young, to embrace change. Olson introduces Jung fuses with his reading of the philosopher Alfred the dominant thematic chord: “love is form, and can- North Whitehead and his association of ego-transfor- not be without / important substance.” This intensity mation with spiritual and physical self-knowledge. reflects his long-term private correspondence with the Figures that join birth with death and the sea with the writer Frances Boldereff, whose ideas inspired him at land record Olson’s sense of becoming one with his crucial turning points. In 1953, after having revised his mortality. Intoned to refrains from Hesiod’s Theogony landmark 1950 essay “Projective Verse” (see ARS POETI- (eighth century B.C.), “Maximus from Dogtown—I” CAS), Olson returned to the poem with a renewed sense enacts a ritual death of the hero, embraced by the 306 MAYER, BERNADETTE mother. The figure is a transformation of Our Lady of Clark, Tom. Charles Olson: The Allegory of a Poet’s Life. New Good Voyages, who in the first letter cradles, not the York: Norton, 1985. Christ Child, but a ship “of uncertain sex.” The explo- Olson, Charles. Collected Prose. Berkeley: University of Cali- ration of the landscape associated with the mother’s fornia Press, 1997. body reveals a questionable masculinity, reflecting Stein, Charles. The Secret of the Black Chrysanthemum. New York: Station Hill, 1987. Olson’s private uncertainties. In the Gravel Hill sec- tion of Maximus, outside and inside surfaces, indeed, Don Wellman the very body and method of the poem, merge. Enyalion, a wounded, perhaps castrated type of the MAYER, BERNADETTE (1945– ) Berna- god Mars appears first in this context. He will become dette Mayer is a foremost experimental poet in the NEW the poet’s alter-ego in the concluding volume. YORK SCHOOL tradition. Her work strives for an inclu- The mapping of landscape, figure, and enduring siveness of quotidian experience, dream materials, pattern is crucial to “Maximus’s success in finding a memories, and records of consciousness. She writes in coherent order,” Don Byrd has observed, “despite his a wide range of forms, from more recognizably poetic initial failure to make Gloucester itself cohere” (86). structures, such as sonnets, to long prose texts, such as Relations among major themes enact Olson’s dream- journals and extended epistolary sequences. Through inspired response to a sentence from The Secret of the her teaching at the St. Mark’s Poetry Project in New Golden Flower, a ninth-century Chinese work of York in the early 1970s (see POETRY INSTITUTIONS), she alchemy: “that which exists through itself is called helped bring together many of the poets who would meaning” (qtd. in Clark 280–281). Similar themes and later form the LANGUAGE SCHOOL. images map an intensity of transformative moments, Mayer was born in Brooklyn, New York. Her early for instance, the image of a “Black Chrysanthemum” life was marked by the deaths of both her parents by and “the flower” that “grows down the air of heaven,” the time she was 14. She attended the New School for near the opening of The Maximus Poems: Volume Three, Social Research (B.A., 1968) and has taught widely in a volume that also contains graphically compelling New York and various places in New England. She pages, as words arranged in roseate patterns. In The had children with poet Lewis WARSH, with whom she Maximus Poems, the honesty with which the poet por- edited the United Artists book series. She received trays both illumination and, finally, a faltering sense of a National Endowment for the Arts grant in poetry self-worth touches with acute relevance on contempo- in 1979. rary struggles with subjectivity, even though some One of Mayer’s experimental projects, widely seen as readers have raised questions about Olson’s gender- an early example of POETRY IN PERFORMANCE, called bias and personal arrogance. Olson’s commitment to “Memory” (1972), combined photography and taped meaning and method has influenced a wide range of narration. Originally a gallery installation in New York, poets, including Robert CREELEY, Robert DUNCAN, and the text was published as Memory (1975). In this work others associated with BLACK MOUNTAIN College; Allen Mayer shot one roll of color film every day during the GINSBERG, Robin BLASER, John WIENERS, and others asso- month of July 1971, accompanied by a taped narration. ciated with SAN FRANCISCO RENAISSANCE or BEAT poetry; In Studying Hunger (1975), Mayer states: “I had an idea and contemporary writing like that of Susan HOWE, before this that if a human, a writer, could come up with Barrett WATTEN, Ron SILLIMAN, and others associated a workable code, or shorthand, for the transcription of with LANGUAGE-centered writing. every event, every motion, every transition of his or her BIBLIOGRAPHY own mind, & could perform this process of translation Butterick, George. A Guide to The Maximus Poems of Charles on himself, using the code, for a 24-hour period, he or Olson. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978. we or someone could come up with a great piece of lan- Byrd, Don. Charles Olson’s Maximus. Chicago: University of guage/information” (7). Mayer’s experimental aesthetic Illinois Press, 1980. is on display here, breaking down formal distinctions MCCLATCHY, J. D. 307 between poetry and prose, with the aim of inclusiveness sonal expression) and largely free verse. They are in recording states of consciousness. remarkable for their elevated language and subject mat- The book-length poetic text Midwinter Day (1982) ter, the latter often containing elements of CONFESSIONAL was written on a single day, December 22, 1978, in and metaphysical poetry. The contemplative tone of his Lenox, Massachusetts. Mayer’s lyric voice here ranges work shows the influence of Yvor WINTERS and the early from “Wisdom’s gray sky remembers” to “Staying in / work of James MERRILL and Robert PINSKY. And sex is memory’s intensity.” Peter Baker has written McClatchy was born in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. of this work: “Suspending final or totalizing judg- He is the author of four books of poetry: Scenes from ments, the text would remain open past the point of Another Life (1981), Stars Principal (1986), The Rest of critical evaluation, inviting endless readings and active the Way (1990), and Ten Commandments (1998). Aside writings, where ‘writing’ includes much more than from his poems and essays (White Paper [1989] and composing poetry” (161). Twenty Questions [1998]), he has also written four opera A collection of Mayer’s shorter poems and selections libretti, including Emmeline (1996), commissioned by from the longer works was made available in A the Santa Fe Opera. He is the recipient of many honors, Bernadette Mayer Reader (1992). Her highly colloquial including the Witter Bynner Award for poetry from the voice can be seen in the “Sonnet” that begins, “You jerk American Academy of Arts and Letters (1985). you didn’t call me up,” and proclaims, “I’m through McClatchy’s work often displays a compacted lan- with you bourgeois boys.” The collection also includes guage and verbal virtuosity that he describes as the some of her translations from Catullus and the Greek “knotty lyric” (qtd. in Bloom 330). The poem “Sniper” Anthology, a group of 6,000 poems written between the (2002), for example, begins with a sentence that com- seventh century B.C. and A.D. 10th century, indicating bines rich sound qualities with a vernacular verisimili- something of the range of this American original. tude: “The geedee cannon cockers with their illumes / BIBLIOGRAPHY And boom-boom arty always miss the point.” Here Baker, Peter. “Language, Poetry and Marginality.” In Obdurate “boom-boom arty” refers to exploding artillery; the Brilliance: Exteriority and the Modern Long Poem. Gainesville: authentic sound of this phrasing lends a sense of University of Florida Press, 1991, pp. 150–161. immediacy to the poem. Although his poems are typi- Mayer, Bernadette. Studying Hunger. Berkeley, Calif.: Big Sky, cally free verse, he does occasionally experiment with 1975. a more formal structure. He uses varying rhyme Shapiro, David. “A Salon of 1990: Maximalist Manifesto.” schemes and forms, including the pantoum, a Malayan American Poetry Review (January/February 1991): 37–47. poem similar to the French villanelle. Peter Baker McClatchy’s latest book of poems, The Ten Com- mandments, is organized according to God’s moral MCCLATCHY, J. D. (1945– ) J. D. McClatchy instructional manual, delivered via Moses. Within this has successfully been a writer, editor, critic, teacher, and frame, McClatchy waxes upon all manner of rule and political representative. Not only has McClatchy been custom in the personal, social, and philosophical viewed as an important writer since his first book of realms and “encompass[es] the range of human pleas- poems in 1981, but he has also been influential as the ures and failings” (Christian). The poem “My Mammo- editor of the Yale Review. He has edited poetry antholo- gram,” for example, is composed of five sections, each gies and published two collections of critical essays. He sporting four stanzas: two rhyming quatrains and two has taught at Yale, Princeton, the University of Califor- rhyming tercets. The theme of the poem is very per- nia, Los Angeles, and Columbia, and has been chancel- sonal and does not cringe from intimate details, such lor of the Academy of American Poets. McClatchy’s as “useless, overlooked / mass of fat” (17). But, perhaps poems, like those of many of his postmodern colleagues, more important, in the final section, the speaker seems are lyrical versions of NARRATIVE POETRY (poems that tell to bow his head in resignation and accept that life is a a story or capture a moment through some form of per- sometimes “farcical” slippery slope and that a person’s 308 MCCLURE, MICHAEL various body shapes and stages are only “disguises” for received many honors, including a Guggenheim Fel- the soul’s last laugh. lowship (1973) and distinguished lifetime achieve- Like his metaphysical predecessors and contempo- ment in poetry award from the National Poetry raries, McClatchy often seeks the kernel of truth or wis- Association (1999). dom embedded in an emotionally imbued situation. A primary motive of McClure’s art is the discovery of McClatchy’s work, both his concentrated free verse and the materiality of consciousness. This theme manifests formal poems, seems to suggest that not only life’s spec- itself in the way he typographically centers his poems so trum of glories and disappointments, but also the quiet that they are “allowed . . . to have a body language on the moments between them, are worthy of examination. page” (McClure Huge Dreams 168), and in his develop- ment during the 1960s of his poetic “beast language,” a BIBLIOGRAPHY mode of writing that attempts to convey the very gestures Bloom, Harold, and Lehman, David, eds. The Best of the Best American Poetry. New York: Scribner, 1998. of vocal expression by transcribing vocal sounds without Christian, Graham. “Laws of Gravity.” Boston Phoenix (March using recognizable words. For example, these two lines 30, 1998). Available online. URL: www.desert.net/ww/03– from Ghost Tantras (1964), his first extended exploration 30–98/boston_books_1.html. Downloaded December of beast language, convey desire: “NOH. NAH-OHH / 2003. hroor. VOOR-NAH! GAHROOOOO ME” (58). Ellmann, Richard, and Robert O’Clair, eds. The Norton With the license provided by Charles OLSON’s recon- Anthology of Modern Poetry. 2d ed. New York: Norton, ception of the poetic line in terms of the poet’s breath 1988. (see ARS POETTCAS), McClure developed an approach to Michael Kuperman poetry that conceives of his media (written text, per- formed word) as an enactment and extension of the MCCLURE, MICHAEL (1932– ) Michael poet’s own physical presence. McClure’s Meat Science McClure was only 23 when he read his poetry at the Six Essays (1963) marked a turning point in his environ- Gallery in San Francisco and, along with Allen GINS- mental politics and ultimately in his poetics; the pre- BERG, among others, helped initiate the BEAT movement. dominant aim of his work from this point on became Since that time he has written more than 40 volumes of to “revolt against habitual ways of feeling and action” poetry, fiction, essays, and plays and continues to for the sake of “ more direct gestures” (McClure 43). experiment with POETRY IN PERFORMANCE, including his BIBLIOGRAPHY collaborative work with the keyboardist Ray Manzarek Kahn, Douglas. Noise Water Meat. Cambridge, Mass.: Massa- (previously of the rock band the Doors). McClure’s chusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1999. work has been consistently experimental, with an aim McClure, Michael. Meat Science Essays. San Francisco: City toward communicating thought and emotion in as vis- Lights Books, 1963. ceral and physical a manner as language will allow. Phillips, Rod. “Forest Beatniks” and “Urban Thoreaus.” New McClure was born October 20, 1932—”the same York: Peter Lang, 2000. day as Rimbaud” (McClure Ghost Tantras 109)—in Jason Camlot Marysville, Kansas, and grew up in Seattle, where he developed an interest in wildlife and the environment. MCDOWELL, ROBERT (1953– ) Robert He moved to San Francisco in 1954, enrolled in Robert McDowell is considered a pioneer in the New Narra- DUNCAN’s poetry workshop at San Francisco State Uni- tive movement in contemporary poetry (see NEW FOR- versity, and published his first book of poems, Passage, MALISM). His keen sense of poetic formalism led him to in 1956. Like Gary SNYDER, McClure shows a deep reevaluate American poetry in the wake of modernist concern with nature in his poetry, but McClure’s main and postmodernist free verse lyrical experimentation interests lie less in a descriptive poetry of natural (see MODERNISM). As a cofounder with Mark JARMAN of scenery than in the mammalian consciousness he the magazine the Reaper, established in 1980, McDow- believes is dormant in all human beings. His work has ell revived NARRATIVE POETRY and thereby created signif- MCGRATH, THOMAS 309 icant awareness of this medium of expression. Arguing BIBLIOGRAPHY that “poetry, more than ever, is harnessed by and sub- Gwynn, R. S. New Expansive Poetry. Ashland, Ore.: Story ordinated to its criticism” (Jarman and McDowell 4), Line Press, 1999. he challenged the status quo of American literary crit- Jarman, Mark, and Robert McDowell. The Reaper Essays. icism by stressing the importance of narrative verse. Brownsville, Ore.: Story Line Press, 1996. McDowell is best known for his narrative poetry in Walzer, Kevin. The Ghost of Tradition—Expansive Poetry and Postmodernism. Ashland, Ore.: Story Line Press, 1998. loose iambic lines. The critic Kevin Walzer has observed that his “poems draw on, without simply imi- Nicolas Fernandez tating, the example of the three twentieth-century mas- ters of narrative verse: Robert FROST, Robinson JEFFERS, MCGRATH, THOMAS (1916–1990) Thomas and Edwin Arlington ROBINSON” (63). The dominant McGrath represents the powerful convergence of the themes appearing in his poems include American soci- personal and the political in verse. An eccentric mix of ety, culture, and history; the family; and the complex- pastoral and BEAT radical sensibility, his poetic voice is ity of familial and conjugal relationships. Using deftly rooted in the American soil and spirit and speaks out constructed plots presenting everyday characters lead- against economic and political injustice. Donald HALL ing ordinary lives, McDowell’s engaging narrative has called McGrath the best American poet of public shows how small yet significant moments can alter denunciation and invective (qtd. in Whitehead one’s life. 90–91). Far from being merely denunciatory, however, Born in Alhambra, California, McDowell’s formal his verse projects the optimism of cultural healing. education at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Attempting to refashion the American perspective on (1971–74) and Columbia University (1974–76) culmi- community, work, and nation, McGrath summons us nated in six years of teaching at Indiana State University, back to a cultural wholeness out of what he sees as the Evansville, where in 1980 he colaunched the Reaper. In devastation of capitalist corruption. Propelled by an 1985 he founded Story Line Press and in 1987 pub- active imagination assuming myriad shapes, his poetry lished his first collection of poems, titled Quiet Money, is marked by formal, linguistic, and stylistic unpre- followed by The Diviners (1995), then On Foot, In Flames dictability, from haikulike poems in Passages toward the (2002). He is actively involved in criticism, editing such Dark (1982) to his freewheeling, six-beat-lined epic works as Poetry after Modernism (1991). Letter to an Imaginary Friend (1970). The sense of narrative in all of McDowell’s work is McGrath was born near Sheldon, North Dakota, to palpable. In the single narrative poem “The Diviners” Irish-Catholic homesteaders. As a child he labored on (1995), McDowell presents the struggles of a Califor- steam rigs with migrant Wobbly labor crews, exposed nia family over the span of two generations. We wit- to an often violent labor unrest that became the source ness Tom, the only son, growing up in a family plagued of his visionary poetry’s working-class consciousness. by alcoholism. Trying to find some meaning in his life, In spite of his family’s financial hardship, he studied at since “Tom’s sense of loss and pain won’t dissipate,” he the University of North Dakota, Louisiana State Uni- finally escapes to Ireland after his father’s death. In versity, and, with a Rhodes scholarship, New College, “The Pact” (1994), McDowell explores the theme of Oxford. McGrath held many jobs throughout his life- forgiveness and redemption, showing how the main time: union organizer, documentary-film writer, sol- character, John-Allen, betrayed by his wife, Sarah, dier in the Aleutians during World War II, editor and comes to terms with her deceit. founding-editor, respectively, of California Quarterly McDowell’s narrative poems engage at many levels. and Crazy Horse, and college teacher in Maine, New His imaginative story lines craft intricate plots and sub- York, North Dakota, Los Angeles, and Minnesota. In plots that expose his characters’ strengths and weak- the 1950s he was called before the House Un-American nesses. Ultimately, though, his poems present a larger Activities Committee and blacklisted as a communist, and more significant vision of humanity as a whole. an event that sharpened his socialist resolve. Despite 310 MCKAY, CLAUDE his leftist leaning, he was awarded a number of presti- movement. In McGrath’s masterpiece, Letter to an gious prizes during his lifetime. In 1990 he was pre- Imaginary Friend, this new order is inspired by Hopi sented the distinguished achievement award by the prophecy. A personal and political journey to an Amer- Society for Western Literature. ican utopia, Letter is characteristically chaotic and dis- Beginning with Longshot O’Leary’s Garland of Practi- orderly, moving geographically between North Dakota, cal Poesie (1940), the book with which he first Louisiana, New York, California, Alaska, and Greece achieved recognition, McGrath tried to create a poetry and stylistically between hard, biting parody, bawdy in which private reminiscence mirrors the often humor, and dreamy self-expression, as well as between tumultuous unfolding of social and political history. the lilt of local Irish idiom and the invective of com- Autobiographical moments are never merely CONFES- munist agitation. Written over 30 years and adopting SIONAL in his work; they also reflect the universal: The the forms of autobiography, Catholic sacrament, and memory of a foreman’s swing at a seasonal farm American political history, the epic ends in the fiery laborer, for example, effects the collapse of American blaze of the Kachina, the Hopi blue star that signals the community and shared labor in the wake of industrial Saquadohuh, or Fifth World, which is to emerge from corporatism. But if McGrath’s poetry seethes with the dark womb of the earth. Part 4’s apocalyptic dream anger at what is lost to the profit and exploitation of vision, in which the speaker roars through myriad hal- modern America—tradition, family, compassion—he lucinatory realms to arrive at this new order of solidar- counters this rage with redemptive, visionary alterna- ity, shared labor, and love, exemplifies McGrath’s tives. Work, love, poetry, and, above all, the human embracing of violence and chaos as tools to reshape a imagination represent, for McGrath, the ultimate world gone mad. His poetry surges with fury for the remedies for an ailing America; vivid, shamanistic America that once was and, it this fury is turned to dream-visions serve as liberating forces for social and productive use, can be again. political revolution. BIBLIOGRAPHY McGrath’s expansive range of tone shifts from didac- Gibbons, Reginald, and Terence Des Pres, eds. Thomas ticism to eloquent lyricism to satiric wit. His vocabu- McGrath: Life and the Poem. Urbana: University of Illinois lary, including neologisms that Reginald Gibbons calls Press, 1992. “glossological wonders” (Gibbons and Des Pres 10), Stern, Frederick C., ed. The Revolutionary Poet in the United mingles patois, slang, and the tall tale with a more tra- States: The Poetry of Thomas McGrath. Columbia: Univer- ditional “poetic” voice: Packy O’Sullivan of New York sity of Missouri Press, 1988. shipyard fame interrupts a reflective passage in Letter Whitehead, Fred, ed. “The Dream Champ” North Dakota to sputter, “Doublebarreled shitepoke sheepcroakes, Quarterly 50 (fall 1982). ([Special issue devoted to swillbelly like a poison pup!” Compounding these Thomas McGrath]). vocal pyrotechnics are images of hyperbolic exaggera- Reid Cottingham tion and distortion. Into a worker’s rainy-day breakfast strides the beautiful Jenny, apotheosized by Letter’s MCKAY, CLAUDE (1889–1948) No single exhausted workers: “Jenny! / Entering, the light poet, with the possible exception of Langston HUGHES, swarms around her!” Wild, extravagant, and excessive, did more to bring attention to the literature of the McGrath’s world is stunningly fantastical, brimming HARLEM RENAISSANCE than poet and novelist Claude with possibility. Infused with a carnivalesque energy, McKay. Despite his strong association with the move- his verse showcases new and dizzying perspectives that ment, McKay insisted that his poems should speak to upend “official” culture and lend credibility to his own all people, not just to African Americans. This attitude insurrectionary politics. and his attention to poetic craftsmanship evoke the McGrath’s poetry is, above all, a call to action, to tension between the demands of racial pride and intel- social apocalypse. Its linguistic puns, inversions, and lectual autonomy that fueled the creative energies of echoes contribute to the imperative for newness and his African-American contemporaries. While he later MEINKE, PETER 311 distanced himself from the Harlem literary scene, the BIBLIOGRAPHY independence, breadth, and scope of McKay’s writings Barksdale, Richard, and Kenneth Kinnamon. “Renaissance made him a crucial reference and influential figure for and Radicalism: 1915–1945.” In Black Writers of America: writers in the later Civil Rights movements. A Comprehensive Anthology, edited by Barksdale and Kin- McKay was born to relatively wealthy parents of namon. New York: Macmillan, 1972. 467–79. Jamaica’s peasant class. This almost middle-class status Hart, Robert C. “Black-White Literary Relations in the Harlem Renaissance.” American Literature 44.4 (January provided him with early intellectual mentors, includ- 1973): 612–628. ing a schoolteacher older brother and an influential Keller, James R. “A Chafing Savage, Down the Decent Street.” British folklorist, both of whom directed the budding African American Review 28.3 (autumn 1994): 447–456. poet’s studies of classical and romantic literature and philosophy. After the 1912 publication of two volumes William F. Hecker of juvenile poetry in Jamaica, McKay migrated to the United States, where he studied at both the Tuskegee MEINKE, PETER (1932– ) Peter Meinke is Institute and Kansas State University until 1914. He sometimes associated with the NEW FORMALISM move- followed his studies with a series of menial railway jobs ment of the 1980s but is a practitioner of both formal that led him to New York and the publication of his and free verse poetry (see PROSODY AND FREE VERSE): “I 1922 volume of poetry, Harlem Shadows, which critics have a general theory that every poem has its ideal now hail as the first great literary achievement of the shape, whether free verse or formal,” he says (58). Harlem Renaissance (Barksdale 490). McKay used the Meinke’s formal verse often feels, at first reading or earnings from this work to fund extensive travels hearing, like free verse, and his free verse often feels throughout Europe, North Africa, and the Soviet formal, if misleadingly conversational. His later poems Union, where he became a world symbol of the continue an early use of space and line breaks in place African-American literary left. As the vibrancy of the of standard punctuation. early Harlem Renaissance faded, so did McKay’s poetic Meinke was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, output. He ultimately resolved the internal struggles and has lived in Florida since 1966. Among his many seen throughout his poetry through a 1944 conversion awards are the Olivet National Sonnet Prize (1966), to Roman Catholicism. two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships Many of McKay’s poems reflect nostalgically on the (1974 and 1989), Poetry Society of America awards island life and folklore of Jamaica; however, he made (1976, 1984, and 1992), and the Southeast Booksellers his reputation with verse that unsparingly confronts Association Best Book of Poetry of the Year Award in the injustice and rage generated by race relations in the 2001, for Zinc Fingers. His first book of poetry, The United States. Eschewing the free verse style favored Night Train and the Golden Bird, was published in 1977. by Hughes and other jazz-age poets, McKay reserved He was professor of literature and director of the writ- the elegant structure of the sonnet for his most militant ing workshop at Eckerd College from 1966 to 1993. ideas and images (see PROSODY AND FREE VERSE). As Andy Solomon observes, Meinke forms “a con- In his most widely anthologized poem, the sonnet stant web of interconnections between the most com- “If We Must Die” (1919), McKay elevates the African mon events and objects and the lining of the human American’s plight with a plea for nobility. The poem’s heart” (6D). Like Emily Dickinson, Meinke uses small central metaphor compares the African-American and unassuming objects and moments to illuminate experience to fighting off a pack of dogs and calls for larger truths about our lives. In “Azaleas” (1978), he determined and noble resistance so that “even the uses the flowers as “humorous examples / of human monsters we defy / Shall be constrained to honor us hubris” and as connections to the “deep wilderness of though dead!” This rhetoric of resistance and human the soul.” dignity makes McKay’s message resonate as succeeding Like the romantic poets, Meinke’s work is easily generations discover the power of his verse. accessible, but it also shares the intertextuality of 312 MELTZER, DAVID

modernist and postmodernist poets (see MODERNISM). From an early age, the young Meltzer was on stage, Titles and themes, such as “Advice to My Son” singing with various children’s groups, both on the (1965), “In Gentler Times” (1966), and “Uncle Jim” East Coast and in California. This early musical train- (1986) invite even the most intimidated reader to ing served him well when he began reading his poetry read further. One does not need to understand the at the Jazz Cellar, a North Beach hangout favored by allusions in poems, such as “A Meditation on You and Beat poets, including Ferlinghetti and Kenneth Wittgenstein” (2000), “Mendel’s Laws” (1981), and REXROTH. Rather than a strict reading, Meltzer would “Scars” (1996), to appreciate the poems themselves, improvise, much like the musicians who backed him but those who recognize the references to art, science, up: “I’d scribble out an outline of a poem. . . . There and history find further depth in Meinke’s poems. would also be written verses as anchors for areas when The first stanza of “Scars” introduces a boy who wor- I improvised, created lyric (or poem) on the spot—in ships his father in a fairly ordinary way: “When I was context with the music & the idea of the poem” (qtd. young I longed for scars / like my father’s”; these scars in Hawley and Charters). are “the best . . . on the block.” The last stanza com- His early verse mirrors this environment. Short, syn- pares the father to Laius, a character from the myth of copated rhythms, one- and two-word sentences, brief Oedipus, a move that gives a classical twist to a sim- splashes of words on a page like trumpet blasts char- ple story. acterize his work: “units of 4. / In thought. Instrumen- tal” (“Free Jazz [Atlantic 1364]/for CC” [1975]). Much BIBLIOGRAPHY of Meltzer’s poetry is inseparable from this era. It Byrd, Gregory. “Aesthetics at the Southernmost Point.” Mississippi Quarterly 52.2 (spring 1999): 287–294. bounces back and forth from bebop brevities to free Meinke, Peter. “Essay on ‘Zinc Fingers.’” Literary Review. verse that dwells on family, music, the Kabala—what- 44.1 (fall 2000): 57–59. ever topic occupies his mind while the pen occupies Solomon, Andy. “Meinke Sheds Light through Small Win- his hand: “Rainbow lozenge light prismatic / wobble dows.” St. Petersburg Times, August 27, 2000, 6D. across cheap scroll Buddha” (“More on the Art” Trakas, Deno. “Peter Meinke.” In American Poets since [1975]); each word an image that depicts the dreams World War II. Part 2: L–Z. Vol. 5 of Dictionary of Literary in his sometimes nightmarish reality. Biography, edited by Donald J. Greiner. Detroit: Gale, It is not until No Eyes: Lester Young (2000) that 1980, pp. 41–45. Meltzer pursues any one topic relentlessly. This book Gregory Byrd was inspired by a photograph of the great saxophon- ist with his horn, sitting on the bed of the rundown MELTZER, DAVID (1937– ) David Meltzer hotel room in which he later died. Meltzer turns one classifies himself as a “second generation BEAT” poet snapshot of “Prez” into a staccato series of loving por- (Hawley and Charters). When he slid into the scene in traits of a musician who “rejects bruise / accepts blue” 1957, Lawrence FERLINGHETTI had already published in a world not ready for him. Each untitled poem is Allen GINSBERG’s HOWL, and Jack KEROUAC’s On the Road closed with a fermata, the musical symbol that had reached classic status. But the accomplishments of denotes an elongation of a piece’s final note—a his predecessors have not prevented him from finding reminder that the poem, as well as its subject, has his niche. In nearly 50 years on the West Coast poetry come to an end. scene, Meltzer has written copious volumes of poetry BIBLIOGRAPHY and novels and edited seminal collections of interviews Hawley, Robert, and Ann Charters. “David Meltzer.” In Dic- with his first-generation Beat compatriots. He has also tionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 16, The Beats: Literary become very well known for his historical treatments Bohemians in Postwar America, edited by Charters. Detroit: of jazz, the medium that gave him his start. Gale Group, 1983, pp. 405–410. Meltzer was born in Rochester, New York, to parents Kerdian, David. Six Poets of the San Francisco Renaissance: who both made their livings as classical musicians. Portraits and Checklists. Fresno, Calif.: Giliga Press, 1967. “MENDING WALL” 313

Kirsch, Jonathan. “West Words; Edgy Conversations Get to Barry Ahearn has commented that Menashe “finds Heart of Beat Generation.” Los Angeles Times, June 13, in everyday scenes the materials for extended vision” 2001, 5:1. (297), and he often accomplishes this through the use Aimee Fifarek of rhyme, emphasizing not only the sounds but the physical relationships between words, as would a ver- MENASHE, SAMUEL (1925– ) Samuel bal ideogram. In “The Niche Narrows” (2000), possi- Menashe was largely unknown in America for most of bly Menashe’s ARS POETICA, he describes a scene of the 20th century. His short, meditative poems draw paring away toward the essential, where one becomes heavily on the roots of words, and he has likened them gradually thinner “Until his bones / Disclose him.” As to mathematical problems best solved with economy with most of his work, the tone here is a synthesis of and precision. While he has been compared to the celebration and elegy. IMAGISTs and to Emily Dickinson, he once wrote, “I Menashe’s poems ask for revelation in the physical never thought of anything I read—either on my own or world. His prayerful deployment of concrete language in school—as a literary model” (234). He has not writ- always calls into question the primal meanings of words, ten criticism, taught poetry, or edited, and his influence challenging the reader to suspend ordinary association. has been limited, though he has drawn praise from sev- BIBLIOGRAPHY eral prominent critics, including Donald Davie, Hugh Ahearn, Barry. “Poetry and Synthesis: The Art of Samuel Kenner, and Stephen Spender. For most of his career, Menashe.” Twentieth Century Literature 2 (summer his reputation has remained greatest in England. 1996): 294–308. Menashe was born in New York City and learned Davie, Donald. “The Poetry of Samuel Menashe.” Iowa Yiddish and English by the age of three. In 1943 he Review 3 (1970): 107–115. trained at Fort Benning, Georgia, and fought in Menashe, Samuel. “Samuel Menashe 1925–.” Contemporary France, Belgium, and Germany during World War II. Authors: Autobiography Series, edited by Mark Zadrozny. Under the G.I. Bill, he attended the Sorbonne and Vol. 11. Detroit: Gale Research, 1990. 223–239 received his doctorate at age 24, completing his thesis, Christopher McDermott in French, on the religious and mystical origins of poetry. His first book, The Many Named Beloved, was “MENDING WALL” ROBERT FROST published in London in 1961. His poems were (1914) A regionalist in the tradition of Edgar Lee included in Penguin Modern Poets, Volume 7 (1966), MASTERS and Edwin Arlington ROBINSON, Robert FROST and his other books are No Jerusalem But This (1971), stands with William Carlos WILLIAMS as one of MOD- To Open (1974), Collected Poems (1986), and The Niche ERNISM’s few rural sages. He pits ritual against reason Narrows: New and Selected Poems (2000). In 1999 he in “Mending Wall,” a blank verse meditation on the was one of 21 poets featured in the PBS broadcast darker side of humanity’s ostensibly civil traditions Fooling with Words. (see PROSODY AND FREE VERSE). Each year the poem’s His spare style has been influenced by the Bible, and speaker joins his neighbor to repair a stone wall that his poems are religious but not dogmatic. His main separates their property. It seems an innocent tradi- themes are the relationship between the spiritual and tion, but Frost hints at underlying problems from the the material and between the eternal and the fleeting. As outset: “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” Donald Davie has written, Menashe speaks “at a linguis- he writes, “[T]hat sends the frozen-ground-swell tic and cultural crossroads” (108), where his intersecting under it,” thereby dislodging its rocks. As the imagery concerns are English, French, American, and Jewish. In implies, that “something” is ice or frost; by punning “My Mother’s Grave” (1971), he describes Jerusalem as on his own name, Frost expresses a distinctly modern having a wall made of skeletons (“Bones / Are mortar”) ambivalence toward such barriers and what they rep- and a street held together by dust. Both the speaker and resent. His language is calculated to emphasize that the city thus share bereavement and exile. while he does not hate a wall, destroying a fence is a 314 MERRILL, JAMES more social act—a couple, he notes, can walk through MERRILL, JAMES (1926–1995) James Mer- the gaps in a broken wall—than rebuilding one. In rill was a remarkably accomplished and always surpris- light of these opening lines, the neighbors’ annual get- ing poet. Beginning with a rare mastery of form and together seems to stem, ironically, from a rather anti- language, displayed in highly wrought creations, he social impulse. gradually relaxed his manner, enabling it to mimic the In addition to being unsociable, the poem’s title task vagaries and vicissitudes of habitual experience. But a (“mending”) also seems irrational. Although Frost’s mere imitation of life was never his poetic object. speaker is the one to initiate the yearly march, he Instead he was engaged throughout his long and suc- reflects aloud on its unreasonableness. When his neigh- cessful career in the crucial task of translating life into bor answers simply, “Good fences make good neigh- art, or perhaps of salvaging through art what is mean- bors,” the speaker finds that explanation not only ill ingful and precious in the waste of experience. His chief founded but also slightly barbaric, a remnant of darker precursor in this task was the modern novelist Marcel ages. The tradition that Frost initially describes as a sort Proust, but Merrill was also influenced by the later of game becomes, by the end of the poem, emblematic occultist poetry of William Butler Yeats and by the med- of an ignorant and outdated mysticism. The boulders itational sequences of Wallace STEVENS. In the preceding balance as if by magic, and the elderly farmer appears a generation of American poets, the work of both Eliza- sort of ancient barbarian, a brute who “moves in dark- beth BISHOP and Robert LOWELL instructed Merrill in the ness .../ Not of woods only and the shade of trees.” use of autobiographical material (especially from child- Enveloped in the dimness of ritual, he simply repeats hood) approached from psychological viewpoints; he the old adage without question. In contrast, Frost’s pointed to Bishop in particular as a key influence on the more enlightened speaker questions the ritual wall- final maturation of his urbane yet intimate poetic voice. mending—its origins, its purposes, its effects. Like the As a formalist poet, he was influenced most immedi- preeminent theorists of literary modernism, Frost asso- ately by the daunting example of W. H. AUDEN and, fur- ciates tradition with incivility and even danger. ther back in the tradition, by the perfected The poem would not, however, be truly modern if 18th-century heroic couplets of Alexander Pope and these simple binaries—social/antisocial, rational/irra- the 17th-century suave pastorals of Andrew Marvell. tional, traditional/new, and so on—were not signifi- Merrill was born in New York City, the son of the cantly complicated by Frost’s craftsmanship. For famous financier and cofounder of the Merrill-Lynch example, the speaker acknowledges his own mischie- brokerage firm, Charles Merrill, and his second wife, vously teasing mood, and his one-sided banter with Helen Ingram, both of whom were originally from the stolid old farmer eases the poem’s heavy social and Florida. His parents divorced when Merrill was 13, a literary implications. Frost’s speaker is an extraordinar- traumatic experience that he renders and ponders ily imaginative person who, as his references to elves repeatedly in his poetry. Merrill attended Amherst Col- and stalking apple trees suggest, finds at least some lege, where he studied with Ruben Brower, met Robert pleasure in the irrational. The wall-mending ritual FROST, and wrote a senior thesis on metaphor in engages the speaker’s sense of fun despite his modern Proust’s great novel Remembrance of Things Past. His wariness, and, in the final analysis, ambivalence reigns first commercially published book (two earlier books in Frost’s New England. had been privately printed), First Poems, appeared in 1951 and received generally favorable and even envi- BIBLIOGRAPHY ous reviews. In 1955 Merrill moved from New York Lentricchia, Frank. Robert Frost: Modern Poetics and the Land- City to the small coastal town of Stonington, Con- scapes of Self. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1975. necticut, where he lived, off and on, with his compan- Richardson, Mark. The Ordeal of Robert Frost: The Poet and ion David Jackson for the rest of his life. From 1959 to His Poetics. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997. 1979 he and Jackson spent a part of each year in a Betsy Winakur Tontiplaphol house in Athens, and thereafter they wintered mainly MERWIN, W(ILLIAM) S(TANLEY) 315

in Key West, Florida, where Jackson bought a home. In ing, CONFESSIONAL depiction of the primal family drama 1956 Merrill used a portion of his inherited wealth to (see NARRATIVE POETRY). fund the Ingram Merrill Foundation, which provides Merrill’s most elaborate version of the existential money in support of the arts and artists. In addition to drama is his elaborate mock-epic trilogy, THE CHANGING poetry, Merrill also wrote two novels, the first of which, LIGHT AT SANDOVER, in which he merges the confessional the semiautobiographical The Seraglio, was published and mythic modes through the metaphorical device of by Knopf in 1957. His second novel, The (Diblos) Note- the Ouija board, at which he and Jackson sat (in real book (1965) was a finalist for the National Book Award life) for nights and years on end, conjoining the living in fiction. In 1966 his fourth book of poems, Nights and the dead, life and art, experience and myth. Criti- and Days, won the National Book Award in poetry. He cal sentiment concerning the trilogy’s success as a went on to receive many poetry awards, including the modern epic and regarding its relation to Merrill’s Bollingen Prize (1973), the Pulitzer Prize (1976), a sec- work as a whole is sharply divided. But the vast sweep ond National Book Award (1978), the National Book and detailed complexity of the poem’s imaginative Critics Circle Award (1982), and the first Bobbitt landscape—not to mention the astounding technical National Prize for poetry awarded by the Library of virtuosity displayed throughout its nearly 600 pages— Congress in 1988. He died of a heart attack, having confirm Merrill’s status as one of the dominant poetic been weakened by a struggle with AIDS. figures of the last half of the 20th century, one of those Taken as a whole, Merrill’s creations form an elabo- most likely to be remembered in centuries to come. rately detailed and multilayered autobiography. In his longer narrative sequences, he merges the autobio- BIBLIOGRAPHY Adams, Don. James Merrill’s Poetic Quest. Westport, Conn.: graphical instinct of contemporary poetry and of his Greenwood Press, 1997. self-proclaimed precursor, Proust, with a complex Kalstone, David. Five Temperaments. New York: Oxford Uni- symbolic system worthy of Dante, William Blake, or versity Press, 1977. William Butler Yeats. In the poem “Scenes of Child- Materer, Timothy. James Merrill’s Apocalypse. Ithaca, N.Y.: hood,” the poet describes watching an old home movie Cornell University Press, 2000. with his mother, in which the much younger mother Yenser, Stephen. The Consuming Myth. Cambridge, Mass.: and her toddler son are joined on the screen by the Harvard University Press, 1987. ominous shadow of the inept father-cameraman—at Don Adams which point the film jams and catches fire. Following this symbolic apocalypse, the poet’s resigned, bemused MERWIN, W(ILLIAM) S(TANLEY) mother goes up to bed, bidding her son “pleasant (1927– ) A prodigious poet and acclaimed trans- dreams.” Later, as he sits pondering his father’s life and lator, W. S. Merwin’s distinguished career follows the death and his own inheritance, he hears his mother’s ambitious literary projects of his modernist predeces- labored breathing upstairs, which he describes as the sors T. S. ELIOT, Ezra POUND, and William Carlos sound of life “escaping into space.” This last word then WILLIAMS (see MODERNISM). In more than 15 books of turns his attention heavenward, to the night sky and its poetry and four books of prose, Merwin’s theme, espe- Milky Way of stars, which he imagines as the shed skin cially as it develops in the later phase of his work, is of the primal serpent, whose symbolic presence in the the postmodern problem of finding language that can world he interprets as proof of the continued existen- offer an adequate and just account of the world. The tial quandary shared by all who have unwittingly insistent and—as some critics have described it—dis- arrived on life’s stage as “heroes without name or ori- tant voice in Merwin’s poems is essential to an under- gin.” With its deft, allusive, condensed argument and standing of the generation of American poets that its surprising, weighty conclusion, the poem is a typi- includes such authors as John ASHBERY, Robert CREELEY, cally strong Merrill narrative performance, weaving Allen GINSBERG, Galway KINNELL, James MERRILL, Adri- coy allusions to tradition and myth into a witty, touch- enne RICH, Gary SNYDER, and James WRIGHT. 316 MERWIN, W(ILLIAM) S(TANLEY)

Born in New York City in 1927 and raised in Union the impulses of didactic poetry, Merwin hews to the City, New Jersey, and Scranton, Pennsylvania, Merwin responsibility of the poet who has “no choice but to was educated at Princeton University, where he studied name the wrong as truthfully as he can, and to try to with the influential poet-critics John BERRYMAN and R. P. indicate the claims of justice in terms of the victims he BLACKMUR. Merwin spent an additional year at the uni- lives among” (Regions 291). As early as The Lice versity studying Romance languages before living and (1967), Merwin holds human culture accountable to working in France, Spain, Majorca, and England. He has the delicate and sustaining web of life, as in the lived and worked in Mexico, New York City, the south- speaker’s haunting address to a grey whale in the west of France, and the Hawaiian island of Maui. His poem “For a Coming Extinction.” His devotion to awards include the 1971 Pulitzer Prize, the 1979 Bollin- nature is shaped by a profound engagement with the gen Prize, the 1998 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the 1994 contradictions of human culture—a concern with the Tanning Prize from the Academy of the American Poets contours of human desire and its, at times, unaccept- for outstanding and proven mastery in poetry, and the able costs. 2003 Harold Morton London Translation Award. Through the 1990s Merwin assembled a testimonial Merwin’s first book, A Mask for Janus, received the to personal and cultural loss: in the elegiac prose of The 1952 Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. In his fore- Lost Upland (1992), in the intricate sequences of poems ward to the collection, W. H. AUDEN calls attention to in Travels (1993) and The Vixen (1996), and in the Merwin’s intimate knowledge of poetic tradition and 300-page narrative-in-verse of 19th-century Hawaii myth. Critics praised Merwin’s formal range in the The Folding Cliffs (1998). In The River Sound (1999), poems written between 1947 and 1958 and now col- nature’s persistence appears as an antidote to human lected in The First Four Books of Poems (1975). The and ecological loss. In the lyric “The Gardens of Ver- 1960s and 1970s mark a period of transition. In the sailles,” the human impulse to shape nature points to work collected in the Second Four Books of Poems the diminishment of the natural world under the (1993), Merwin develops and expands his thematic imposition of “form’s vast claim.” However, the final and formal range. Carefully chosen line breaks, vari- lines of the poem intimate that despite this rage for able use of caesura, evocative rendering of the spoken order, the presence of the river remains, tenaciously, in word, and movement away from punctuation—these “the sound of water falling.” formal characteristics are simply the most visible qual- The origin of a poem, Merwin has said, is “a passion ities of Merwin’s poems from this middle period. Mer- for the momentary countenance of the unrepeatable win, in describing the difference in these poems, says world” (5). The destiny of a poem, it might follow, is to that “it might be more to the point to say that whatever awaken a fuller recognition of the self within the all- may provide their form is less apparent” (1). too-fragile and quickly passing frame of our lives. Mer- Merwin’s poems require careful listening for what win’s poems urge us to affirm a wider sympathy with might best be called the “shape” of a speaking voice. the nonhuman world of nature. And yet, in the open- Although the seductive rhythms and allegorical ing of “Testimony” (1999), Merwin admits his uncer- impulses of the poems have baffled many of his read- tainty over how the pain of “learning what is lost / is ers, the inscrutable presence of Merwin’s speakers nev- transformed into light at last.” Merwin’s poems, bril- ertheless registers the struggle to reconcile the public liant flashes of illumination, remind us of the existence and the private dimensions of experience. “My own life of something more substantial—hope. in the sixties,” Merwin explains, “seemed to be made of BIBLIOGRAPHY contradictions: City life and rural life; Europe and Brunner, Edward. Poetry as Labor and Privilege: The Writings America; Love of the old and a craving for change; of W. S. Merwin. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991. Public issues and a disposition to live quietly” (2). Frazier, Jane. From Origin to Ecology: Nature and the Poetry of One of Merwin’s abiding concerns is the relation- W. S. Merwin. Teaneck, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson Univer- ship between aesthetic and moral issues. Eschewing sity Press, 1999. MEXICO CITY BLUES 317

Hix, H. L. Understanding W. S. Merwin. Columbia: University philosophy of “spontaneous composition”—writing of South Carolina Press, 1997. down experience and impression unmediated by Hoeppner, Edward Haworth. Echoes and Moving Fields: Struc- reflection—the only structural rule Kerouac set for ture and Subjectivity in the Poetry of W. S. Merwin and John himself was that each chorus had to fit on a single page Ashbery. Lewisburg, Penn.: Bucknell University Press, 1994. in his notebook (Jones 141), but he occasionally side- Merwin, W. S. “Preface.” The Second Four Books of Poems. Port stepped this restriction merely by picking up where Townsend, Wash.: Copper Canyon Press, 1993, pp. 1–5 ———. “to name the wrong.” Regions of Memory: Uncollected the page length had stopped him in the next chorus, Prose, 1949–1982, edited by Cary Nelson and Ed Folsom. virtually midsentence or mididea. Some portions of the Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987, pp. 291–292. poem are simple transcriptions of the musings of Ker- Nelson, Cary, and Ed Folsom, eds. Regions of Memory: ouac’s neighbor, Bill Garver, a morphine addict he had Uncollected Prose, 1949—1982, by W. S. Merwin. Urbana: known in New York. But the book is primarily an exer- University of Illinois Press, 1987. cise in creative self-analysis done by a profoundly tal- ———. W. S. Merwin: Essays on the Poetry. Urbana: Univer- ented man with profoundly powerful demons. sity of Illinois Press, 1987. The poem’s rhythms are jazz rhythms, and a non- Mark C. Long stop reading of the poem emphasizes the beat of Ker- ouac’s verse as it affects the delivery of the words and MEXICO CITY BLUES JACK KEROUAC lines. The occasional digression into “scat,” nonsensi- (1959) Jack KEROUAC’s personal note on the title page cal and wordless jazz sound play, provides Kerouac of Mexico City Blues declares his wish “to be considered a with a respite from the intensity of the issues with jazz poet,” and the poem’s 242 choruses are invested which he deals throughout. By providing this natural with a musicality and improvisational quality that bridge, designed for the particular musicality of the answer his wish. As with musical compositions, each poem, Kerouac conceals his momentary retreats from movement of this book-length poem is independent, but the subject matter (essential to the poet’s ability to con- the piece is more fully comprehensible and purposeful tinue) as a change of pace rather than an explicit break. when taken in its entirety. The 242 choruses contain In the poem Kerouac records his attempt to resolve the allusions to a vast range of experiences, from Kerouac’s major issue of his life: the death of his older brother in life: “I was the first crazy person / I’d known” (“88th childhood. This event complicates the Roman Catholic Chorus”), from literature: “F. Scott Fitzgerald ...Who Kerouac’s religious seeking, his alcoholism, and his burned his Wife Down” (“30th Chorus”), and from reli- problematic relationship with his mother and, to a gion: “Nirvana? Heaven?” (“199th Chorus”). The poem’s lesser extent, with everyone else he knew. private set of references is typical of the BEAT poets, writ- These psychological by-products of early childhood ers associated with this radical shift in American poetry loss are wound together in Mexico City Blues, as the lan- in the mid-twentieth century who often looked outward guage of Buddhism provides Kerouac with both hope for experience, then immediately recorded personal for spiritual and mental relief and pleasure for the ear. responses to everything (unconcerned with social The critic James T. Jones explains that “the religious respectability). The more a reader knows about the poet, motif also connects autobiography to the most impor- in this instance, the fuller the understanding of the poem tant theme of the poem, Kerouac’s exploration of the because the background explains the importance of oth- concept of anatta, the possibility of annihilating self” erwise obscure or confusing places, names, and events. It (33). The “211th Chorus” ends with perhaps the deep- certainly helps to explain what Charlie Parker and Bud- est desire of Kerouac’s heart: liberation from “that slav- dha are doing in the same poem, indeed in the same cho- ing meat wheel / and safe in heaven dead.” rus (“239th Chorus”). The seeming discontinuity of the choruses, leaping as Mexico City Blues was written in three weeks, largely they do from subject to subject in a stream-of-conscious- influenced by marijuana and morphine, in Mexico City ness fashion, is resolved when they are placed within the during August 1955. Along with his personal writing framework of Kerouac’s life. He found in these poems a 318 MILES, JOSEPHINE way to articulate “personal conflicts into poetic tension sharing in a language, participating in a culture” (3). [through] his combination of lyric and narrative, cumu- Miles’s body of work reflects a mind engaged in the lation and repetition, language spinning and ideas, in a 20th century, from her poetry’s distinct MODERNISM to metaphorically musical structure” (Jones 165). Mexico her later involvement in the social movements of the City Blues is a kind of Beat generation variation on the tra- 1960s. The colloquial language in which her poetry dition of King David’s psalms, full of confidence, doubt, delights demonstrates her immersion in the everyday longing, and joy, dealing with spiritual and corporeal life of her era, but the precision of her diction and the things, by a 20th-century romantic psalmist. dispassion of her voice reveal the painstaking mind of Allen GINSBERG, who embraced what he called Ker- the scholar. Like Emily Dickinson, Miles displays an ouac’s “spontaneous bop prosody” (Miles 317) and often comic self-examination; like Wallace STEVENS or whose poem HOWL was written the same year as Mexico E. E. CUMMINGS, she plays with words and syntax to City Blues, approached Lawrence FERLINGHETTI, at City disorient and delight. Lights Books, to publish Kerouac’s book (see POETRY Miles was born in Chicago but spent most of her life PRESSES). Although Ginsberg even offered to pay the costs in California. She received an M.A. and Ph.D. from the out of his own royalties from Howl and Other Poems, Fer- University of California, Berkeley, where she subse- linghetti rejected the manuscript. Ginsberg finally quently taught. Her students included A. R. AMMONS, approached Grove Press, which published the book in William STAFFORD, Robin BLASER, Jack SPICER, and Diane 1959. The book received such a blistering response by WAKOSKI. A mentor and teacher to BEAT poets, Miles has Kenneth REXROTH that more congenial reviews by Robert been called a “precursor” (Knight 7). A prolific scholar, CREELEY and Anthony HECHT were unable to redress the Miles published more than 10 scholarly books and more harm. Rexroth’s opinion was scathing: When Kerouac than 15 collections of poetry. Her Collected Poems: had written previously about “jazz and Negroes, [he had 1930–1983 won the Lenore Marshall/Nation Prize (1983) concentrated on] two subjects about which he knew less and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize (1983). She than nothing,” Rexroth claimed, and he did the same received many other awards and fellowships, including thing with Buddhism and drugs in Mexico City Blues one from the Academy of American Poets (1978). (14). Even so, in spite of his unconcealed derision, Miles’s lyrics are often short, terse observations of a Rexroth admitted that the book exhibits a “terrifyingly detached, acerbic, scholar: “The gang wanted to give skillful use of verse, the broad knowledge of life, the pro- Oedipus Rex a going away present / He had been a found judgements, the almost unbearable sense of real- good hard-working father and king” (“Oedipus” ity” one expects from Kerouac (14). Certainly this poem [1960]). She might also report and reflect on over- skillfully and beautifully communicates Kerouac in all of heard conversation: “Said, Pull her up a bit will you, his simultaneous vulnerability and confidence. Mac, I want to unload there. / Said, Pull her up my rear BIBLIOGRAPHY end, first come first serve” (“Reason” [1955]). In her Jones, James T. A Map of Mexico City Blues: Jack Kerouac as later work, she comments on current events, yet she Poet. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992. connects them to her life: “This was a dark year for Kerouac, Jack. Book of Blues. New York: Penguin, 1995. Spiro Agnew; / It was a dark year for me too” (“Sleeve” Miles, Barry. Jack Kerouac, King of the Beats: A Portrait. Lon- [1979]). In all her work, there speaks the voice of one don: Virgin, 1998. who loves the poetry of the common American idiom Rexroth, Kenneth. “Discordant and Cool.” New York Times and who can perceive the complexity in the most com- Book Review (November 29, 1959): 14. mon American experience. A. Mary Murphy BIBLIOGRAPHY Knight, Brenda. “Josephine Miles: Mentor to a Revolution.” MILES, JOSEPHINE (1911–1985) In her In Women of the Beat Generation: The Writers, Artists, and scholarly work, Poetry and Change (1974), Josephine Muses at the Heart of a Revolution. Berkeley: Conari Press, Miles writes, “The poet is a person in place and time, 1998, pp. 39–45. MILLAY, EDNA ST. VINCENT 319

Miles, Josephine. Poetry and Change: Donne, Milton, called St. Nicholas and began writing seriously, submit- Wordsworth, and the Equilibrium of the Present. Berkeley: ting pieces for its editor’s consideration. By the time she University of California Press, 1974. was 18 and too old to enter any more writing contests, Dennis McDaniel she had won every award the magazine offered. In high school she acted in school plays, played the piano in MILLAY, EDNA ST. VINCENT (1892–1950) recital, edited the school paper, and wrote. In 1912 she Edna St. Vincent Millay was a singular phenomenon in submitted the poem “Renascence” to a competition, The American literature of the early 20th century. She was Lyric Year’s selection of the year’s 100 best poems. Her a star whose books sold in numbers more often associ- poem placed fourth and therefore was awarded no ated with fiction than poetry and whose speaking voice prize money. Ironically this fact garnered the poem and magnetic personality gave her an irresistible more attention than it might have had the poem won. appeal in both her public and private lives. She was Critics extolled the virtues of “Renascence” and its encouraged early by Sara TEASDALE and the critic Louis writer. Millay was rewarded with the attention and Untermeyer, but Millay’s literary acquaintanceship pri- patronage of Caroline Dow, who organized sufficient marily included publishers and minor poets rather financial support to send her to college. Millay chose than the other major writers of her time; hers was an Vassar (1913–17). She also chose to have no children, art more influential than one influenced by her con- and although she married, hers was not a conventional temporaries. While her career coincides with the IMA- marriage. Eugen Boissevain took care of her from the GIST SCHOOL, she is not an imagist poet in any strict time they married in 1923 until his death in 1949, sense of community or practice. During the 1920s she managing their lives so that she was free to immerse wrote plays produced by the Provincetown Players in herself in living and writing. Millay won the Pulitzer New York, as did Sherwood Anderson, Djuna Barnes, Prize for poetry in 1923, the Levinson Prize in 1931, E. E. CUMMINGS, Susan Glaspell, Eugene O’Neill, Wal- and the Gold Medal of the Poetry Society of America in lace STEVENS, and William Carlos WILLIAMS. She was sig- 1943. She was elected to the National Institute of Arts nificant enough to share a stage with Robert FROST and and Letters (1929) and the American Academy of Arts Carl SANDBURG, and her prominent position allowed and Letters (1940). her to exercise advocacy on behalf of other poets. Mil- From her earliest poems, Millay’s work displays a lay once declared Robinson JEFFERS “the best poet in freshness of image, a depth of emotional loss, and a America” (Milford 330), and in the 1930s she annually cynicism about love. In “Thursday” (1923), she advised the Guggenheim Foundation on how best to expresses surprise at a rejected lover’s dismay, wonder- grant its fellowships. She recommended E. E. Cum- ing at the assumption that what was love on Wednes- mings (whom she believed had “a pretty big talent in day will still be love the following day—unusual to pretty bad hands” [qtd. in Milford 370]) and Louise hear in a woman’s voice because of the traditional myth BOGAN in 1933; Conrad AIKEN, Kay BOYLE, and Walter of woman’s constancy. Millay showed no interest in a LOWENFELS in 1934; and in 1938 she rejected Muriel pedestrian life of decorum; in an untitled quatrain she RUKEYSER, whose writing on social issues Millay felt declared, “My candle burns at both ends; / It will not made for poor poetry. last the night” (1923). Millay’s originality is clearly Millay was born in Rockland, Maine, the eldest of expressed in “Spring” (1923), in which she argues three daughters; her irresponsible father was asked to against poems exuberantly praising the season simply leave by the time she was eight. The girls were raised by for its existence. All of the beauties of spring taken their practical mother, a nurse, whose work absences together are not enough to justify life, which the poem were so frequent and prolonged that the children often compares to “an empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted were left to their own devices. The all-female family stairs”; she is unimpressed and unrelieved that every existed in relentless poverty. For her 12th birthday, Mil- year spring “Comes like an idiot, babbling and strew- lay received a subscription to a children’s publication ing flowers.” The jaded voice and bravado of many of 320 “MINIVER CHEEVY”

her poems are counterbalanced by the extraordinary eras. In this sense the poem anticipates T. S. ELIOT’s THE longing articulated in others. Her sonnets (see PROSODY WASTE LAND (1922) and Ezra POUND’s “Hugh Selwyn AND FREE VERSE), a form she consistently employed Mauberley” (1920). Although Robinson’s poem from the time she was 15, variously express sexual engages the perception of difference between the pres- desire uncomplicated by emotional involvement but ent and the past mostly for comic purposes, it provides complicated by gender norms (“I, being born a woman an example of 20th-century poets’ sense of attenuated and distressed” [1923]), make a case for love as one of, cultural and artistic life in the modern age. but not the only or most necessary, the necessities of The speaker of the poem subtly delineates Miniver’s life (“Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink” [1931]), situation, which, as Wallace Anderson points out, is condemn a world inactive in the face of fascist expan- suggested by the word vagrant and the phrase “on the sion (“Czecho-Slovakia” [1939]), and chart her history town,” meaning “to be supported by the town, a char- as a woman. In these poems she is stricken with love, ity case. Miniver . . . is the town ne’er-do-well, the town by turns abandoned and abandoning, and she wrestles loafer” (107). But Miniver perceives his condition as a with mortality, her own and that of those she loved. cruel accident of fate. He believes that had he been born Millay published 25 books between 1917 and 1949, to an earlier age, he would have known romance and primarily writing poetry, but also fiction, drama, and created art. Instead his untimely and prosaic existence an opera libretto. Her later poems are not held in the is a burden that he must bear tragically but philosoph- high regard her early work enjoyed, and Millay herself ically. While presenting Miniver’s appraisal of his situa- occasionally feared she had lost her gift. Critics some- tion, the poem provides no support for his opinion; times wondered if perhaps she had been too eagerly rather, it undermines Miniver’s false sense of martyr- lauded as a major poet at the start of her career. Her dom with exaggerated diction, and excessive repetition. late poems are often politically motivated propaganda The first stanza of the poem initiates the ironic tone. rather than passionate love lyrics, and this change of Hyperbolic verbs, such as “assailed,” expose Miniver’s focus may have caused a reassessment of her body of notion that he is a kind of romantic sufferer. Moreover work in more recent times. Whatever one might think the final line is deliberately truncated so that the solem- of her political statements, there is no denying the nity of the rhythm is undercut: “He wept that he was emotional power of her LYRIC POETRY. ever born, / And he had reasons.” In the third stanza, feminine rhymes (ending in unstressed syllables,) give BIBLIOGRAPHY a humorous, mock-heroic tone to Miniver’s fantasies Brittin, Norman A. Edna St. Vincent Millay. Rev. ed, Boston: Twayne, 1982. about living in the legendary ages of King Arthur or the Freedman, Diane P. Millay at 100: A Critical Reappraisal. Car- Trojans (“Priam’s neighbors”), of whom he dreams bondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1995. while “resting” from his decidedly less than Herculean Milford, Nancy. Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent “labors.” When rhymed with “labors,” “neighbors” not Millay. New York: Random House, 2002. only sounds comically forced and stilted but also Thesing, William B., ed. Critical Essays on Edna St. Vincent echoes the melodramatic falling rhythm. Millay. New York: G.K. Hall, 1993. The concluding stanzas more directly mock Miniver’s A. Mary Murphy self-pity. In the penultimate stanza, the repetition of the verb “thought” sarcastically undermines Miniver’s self- “MINIVER CHEEVY” EDWIN ARLINGTON commiseration. As Anderson notes, “the addition of the ROBINSON (1910) Although in many ways a fourth ‘thought’ changes the tone of the stanza entirely, poet of the 19th century, Edwin Arlington ROBINSON is making it absurd” (107). The last stanza provides an important transitional figure whose poems inspired Miniver’s convenient excuse for drowning his sorrows in many 20th-century poets. “Miniver Cheevy” is the first alcohol: He was born to the wrong time. The rhyming of American poem to express dissatisfaction with the “thinking” and “drinking” suggests not only that his modern age by satirically contrasting it with earlier drinking comes from thinking about his fate but also MODERNISM 321 that his drinking influences his thinking, his bathetic this already complicated picture, modernism con- delusion of being destined to languish in a fallen era. tained contradictory elements: It proclaimed democ- racy while holding to certain elitist ideals, such as the BIBLIOGRAPHY level of education the reader needed in order to under- Anderson, Wallace. Edwin Arlington Robinson: A Critical stand the works, and it was both traditional and anti- Introduction. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967. Barnard, Ellsworth. Edwin Arlington Robinson: A Critical traditional, searching for order through the use of Study. New York: Macmillan, 1952. cherished myths (which can be seen in Eliot’s refer- ences to the classical world, for example) while at the Edwin J. Barton same time using fragmentary, nontraditional forms. Numerous cultural forces worked to create the mod- MODERNISM To most critics, modernism ernist movement in poetry, although modernist artists encompasses a relatively short time in the early 20th responded to these forces in various ways. At the century, from approximately 1910, just before World beginning of the 20th century, many artists perceived War I, to the beginning of World War II, although problems with the ideals of the movements that pre- some critics believe that the movement began in the ceded modernism: Romanticism, Victorianism, and late 19th century and continued until 1965. The Edwardianism. Romanticism’s philosophies of panthe- movement began in Europe, but Americans, especially ism and transcendence no longer seemed to cohere for expatriates, played major roles in it. The modernist those who had to cope with the technologies of indus- period was particularly innovative. Modernism is often trial modernization. In addition, romanticism’s more considered to include all the “isms” of this era—ima- moderate expression and valuation of nature—the gism (see IMAGIST SCHOOL), cubism, dadaism, abstrac- rural, agricultural, and traditional—as opposed to cul- tionism (see ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM), and so on—and ture and art seemed inadequate to express a sense of to mark a sense of cultural crisis and radical rupture loss and new beginnings. Victorianism and Edwar- with the past that became the hallmark of certain dianism also proved inadequate: The first seemed too artists, literary and otherwise, who created work in the morally earnest, complacent, and, at times, overly wake of World War I and the early 20th century squeamish about sexual matters; the second, a reaction advancement of industrialization. Regarding modernist to its predecessor’s conservatism, began to doubt ideals of poetic language, Ezra POUND, one of the most authority, but not always very deeply. After the Edwar- important figures of this movement, would issue the dian period, the movement to the ideas of modernism famous exhortation to “make it new.” The modernist seemed almost inevitable. writers do just that: They “make it new,” because, for As the philosopher Jurgen Habermas states, moder- them, this new world could only be adequately nity “revolts against normalizing functions of tradition; reflected in the most innovative paradigms and modes Modernity lives on the experience of rebelling against of expression. all that is normative” (“Modernity,” 162). In the wake Key characteristics of modernist writing include a of the apocalyptic sense of a new century and the cul- movement away from realism into abstractions; a tural crisis brought on by World War I, Western deliberate complexity, even to the point of elitism, forc- notions of superiority came into question. In addition, ing readers to be very well-educated in order to read long-held precepts of the Renaissance and Enlighten- these works; a high degree of aesthetic self-conscious- ment models of reality, all encompassing beliefs that ness; questions of what constitutes the nature of being; humans were essentially good and could perfect both a breaking with tradition and conventional modes of themselves and their societies, were beginning to col- form, resulting in fragmentation and experimentation; lapse, and the value systems underlying American and, finally, the privileging of irony. As a result, poetry society—those of God, country, and capitalism—also written in the modernist mode was often impersonal, faced challenges on almost all fronts. Large-scale cosmopolitan, highly learned, and skeptical. To add to migrations from rural areas to urban centers, along 322 MODERNISM with technological change, also caused feelings of cul- religion or the scientific presuppositions that realism tural dislocation. and naturalism rested upon. In turn, these poets cre- The American poets associated with the modernist ated a solipsistic, self-conscious imagination that movement include T. S. ELIOT, Pound, Gertrude STEIN, insisted on having a general frame of reference in itself. and H. D., all expatriates, as well as Wallace STEVENS, The modernists were highly conscious that they Marianne MOORE, Hart CRANE, and William Carlos were being modern—that they were “making it WILLIAMS. In the British Isles, the primary modernist new”—and this consciousness is manifest in the mod- poets are William Butler Yeats, W. H. AUDEN, Stephen ernists’ radical use of a kind of formlessness; their Spender, Edith Sitwell, Cecil Day-Lewis, Louis MacNe- work thus utilized collapsed plots, fragmentary tech- ice, and Dylan Thomas. Even Gerard Manley Hopkins, niques, and stream-of-consciousness point of view. the English Jesuit whose poetry was published posthu- The modernists also sometimes used associative tech- mously in 1918, was seen as a modernist; his procla- niques, a collection of seemingly random impressions mations of doubt and despair, and his wrenching of and allusions with which readers are expected to make the sonnet form and theory of inscape (in brief, the the connections on their own; this technique was aesthetic principle that the individually distinctive meant to convey the creative potential of the uncon- form of an object reveals its rich singularity) pointed to scious and the pressure of the unspoken on the spo- a key modernist contradiction: a simultaneous break ken. Eliot’s THE WASTE LAND is arguably the greatest with and embracing of the past. example of this allusive manner of writing; it includes Modernism also reflects an awareness of new psy- a variety of Buddhist, Christian, Greek, Judaic, Ger- chological theories propounded by Sigmund Freud man, and occult references, among others. and Carl Jung, the historical-cultural theories of Karl Some of the most exciting and innovative modernist Marx, the philosophical theories of Frederich work was done in poetry, and the key poets, Eliot and Neitzsche, and the iconoclastic, evolutionary theories Pound, were also leading critics and promulgators of of Charles Darwin. These new and radical concepts modernist theories. Pound is perhaps best known for offered so-called master narratives, such as Marx’s his editing of Eliot’s work and for functioning as a cat- ideas on the dynamics of capitalism, which sought to alyst for the modernist movement. At Pound’s urging, explain history and produce a new sense of historical Harriet Monroe of the Chicago magazine Poetry pub- consciousness. All of these new ideas worked to under- lished “THE LOVE SONG OF J. ALFRED PRUFROCK.” This mine long-held assumptions about language, culture, poem, published in 1915, when the poet was still a religion, and reality, which aided in the creation of the young man, conveyed a sense of futility and sterility “modernist self” prevalent among literary artists of this through a stream-of-consciousness, a fragmented movement: self-conscious, nihilistic, fragmented, cyn- form. It became the model modernist poem. Pound, in ical, alienated, detached, the creator as opposed to the encouraging its publication (Monroe was at first reluc- preserver of culture, innovative. This new sense of self tant to publish it, since she wanted it to end on a tri- gave the modernist writers a heightened sense of pur- umphant note), noted that Eliot had “actually trained pose, even as their responses to the cultural crises were himself and modernized himself on his own” (qtd. in highly individual. Litz 956). The Waste Land was published in 1922, con- In particular, the psychologies of Freud and Jung sidered to be the apex year of the modernist move- deeply affected modernist writers, who focused on the ment. Brilliantly aided by Pound’s careful editing, The unconscious mind, concerning themselves with the Waste Land reflects a number of modernist characteris- inner being more than the social being and looking for tics: despair, a desire for assurance and certainty, frag- ways to incorporate these new views into poetry. The mentary form and stream-of-consciousness style, in new theories of the unconscious led the modernist addition to its multiple allusions and perspectives. writers to look inside themselves for their answers Although modernism was a highly innovative move- instead of seeking truth, for example, through formal ment, it can be accused of not being quite so egalitar- MONTAGE OF A DREAM DEFERRED 323 ian as its proponents might claim. Critic Andreas Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Huyssen hints at high modernism’s elitist project: Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington: Indiana University “Modernism constituted itself through a conscious Press, 1986. strategy of exclusion, an anxiety of contamination by Kenner, Hugh. A Homemade World: The American Modernist Writers. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1975. its other: an increasingly . . . engulfing mass culture” Litz, A. Walton. “Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot.” In Columbia Lit- (vii). This concern for contamination led modernist erary History of the United States, edited by Emory Elliot. writers to disregard shared conventions of meaning, New York: Columbia University Press, 1988, pp. 947–971. making many of their supreme achievements, such as Longenbach, James. “Modern Poetry.” In The Cambridge most of Eliot’s poetry, especially The Waste Land, and Companion to Modernism. New York: Cambridge Univer- Pound’s THE CANTOS, inaccessible to the common sity Press, 1999, pp. 100–130. reader. For Eliot, who, along with Pound, was the most Stephanie Gordon important critic of the movement, this abstruseness was necessary to prevent a literature from heading MONTAGE OF A DREAM DEFERRED down the slippery slope of populism. In addition, LANGSTON HUGHES (1951) Montage of a those in the forefront of modernism were often edu- Dream Deferred, a book-length poem set in Harlem, cated at elitist institutions and came from wealthy uses multiple voices and a jazz bebop structure to backgrounds: Eliot, the pampered youngest son of an explore the joys and sorrows of postwar city life, while upper-middle-class family, was educated at Harvard echoing Langston HUGHES’s ubiquitous phrase “dream and Oxford; Pound, H. D., and Williams, a medical deferred” throughout its pages. In this poem, which doctor, at the University of Pennsylvania; Stein at Rad- consists of a series of 87 short pieces designed to cliffe; and Stevens at Harvard. Furthermore the some- resemble a complex musical composition, Hughes times radical political inclinations of some of these demonstrates his continued interest in using African- poets have provoked much critical commentary; critics American popular music as a source of rhythm and tend to link these tendencies to the poets’ elitist back- structure; indeed, the influence of the blues tradition grounds. From the fascism of Pound to the conser- in his poetry dates from his first published volume, The vatism of Eliot and Yeats, modernist writers seem, at Weary Blues (1926). In his determination to make a times, to have enclosed themselves in a glass cage, far new kind of poetry for the masses, using fresh and from the teeming masses. original language and contemporary poetic forms, In short, modernists sought to break with the past. Hughes can be linked philosophically with poets of the While their movement was resistive, a reply to a world IMAGIST SCHOOL, such as Ezra POUND, and with the Walt considered to be a spiritual and moral wasteland, the Whitman-influenced writers of the Chicago Renais- modernist rebellion did not extend to an outright sance, such as Carl SANDBURG and Vachel LINDSAY. rejection of all belief systems. Modernists still believed However, as Robert O’Brien Hokanson reports, it possible to “shore up these fragments against ruin,” critics have noted that Hughes’s particular contribu- as Eliot famously notes at the conclusion of The Waste tion to MODERNISM lies in “his ability to combine a Land. Meaning may or may not exist in the natural modern consciousness with an abiding racial con- world, but the modernist writers saw themselves as sciousness” (79). In doing so Hughes seeks to incor- making meaning out of their art, even as they created porate African and African-American traditions of their own ordering principle. myth, music, and culture into his poetry rather than BIBLIOGRAPHY the European models used by his modernist contem- Berman, Art. Preface to Modernism. Urbana: University of poraries. In common with other writers associated Illinois Press, 1995. with the HARLEM RENAISSANCE, such as Sterling BROWN Habermas, Jurgen. “Excerpt from ‘Modernity—An Incom- and Zora Neale Hurston, Hughes’s poetic practice plete Project.’” In Postmodernism: A Reader. London: reflects his commitment to adapting black dialect and Edward Arnold, 1992, pp. 160–170. the black folk experience for artistic use. For Hughes 324 MONTAGE OF A DREAM DEFERRED this project has intellectual, political, social, cultural, “grand time,” even though the poem ends with the and literary implications, and indeed Montage reflects “Echo: Did / Somebody / Die?” The hope of postwar the extent to which, as Steven C. Tracy contends, prosperity has been dashed and little progress made, as “Hughes merged the African-American oral and writ- apparent from the speaker who complains that ten traditions, exploiting conventions, techniques, although the war allowed him to get off relief, now he and the goals of both to achieve a poetry that is intel- is “almost back in the barrel again.” In these poetic nar- lectually stimulating, sociopolitically responsible, and ratives landladies overcharge and renters land in jail aesthetically pleasing both as folk poetry and litera- when they protest unlivable housing conditions, girl- ture” (2). friends ask, Can you “love me, daddy / and feed me too?,” Montage with its “boogie-woogie rumble,” demon- and the speaker in “Blues at Dawn” is so close to strates Hughes’s interest in the performative nature of despair that he says, “If I recall the day before, / I poetry (see POETRY IN PERFORMANCE), and the piece wouldn’t get up no more.” Despite expressions of dis- lends itself to his practice during this period of staging may and difficulty, however, Montage shines with brief public readings accompanied by a jazz band. By adapt- moments that extol the excitement of city life: A ing the structural characteristics of bebop to the poetic “Parade” becomes a “chance to let / the whole world form, Hughes created a poem rich with the nuances of see / old black me!,” and a Harlem night inspires an this challenging new musical genre. While Walter C. impulse to take the “neon lights and make a crown.” Farrell, Jr., and Patricia A. Johnson argue that the influ- Finally, with the chilling recognition that “there ain’t no ence of bebop composition allowed Hughes to create Ku Klux / on a 133rd,” Hughes reminds his readers in Montage a new form of poetry, “a series of short that despite its drawbacks, Harlem offers African poems or phrases that contribute to the making of one Americans a safer alternative to the lives of violence long poem” (61), Hokanson goes further to suggest and oppression they lived in the South. that just as bebop represents a rebellion against the Although versions of the poem published after the mainstream jazz tradition, Montage reflects the unrest original 1951 edition have altered the original format Hughes observed in the postwar African-American and typography and thus diminished its presentation urban community (64). As Hughes describes it in his as a single long poem, its title serves to emphasize the introductory note, the poem’s rhythm is “punctuated work’s montage composition of juxtaposed images and by the riffs, runs, breaks, and disc-tortions of the shifting perspectives. While this structure may be music of a community in transition” (387). Bebop linked to other modernist literary projects that used words and rhythm are also present in the use of collage techniques, Hughes’s strategy signals also his exclamatory jive slang phrases that end several poems, alignment with significant developments in African- including the opening piece, “Dream Boogie”: “Hey, American music and culture. John Lowney acknowl- pop! / Re-bop! / Mop! / Y-e-a-h!” edges that even as Montage “invoked a polymorphous The poem’s language is enriched by the variety of African American musical tradition familiar to readers voices that touch on a variety of subjects, many com- of Hughes’s earlier blues and jazz poetry, it summons mon to blues music that also specifically reflect this tradition through bebop’s more defiant postwar Hughes’s views on urban social and economic issues mood” (358). Montage of a Dream Deferred throbs with and on the “dream deferred,” which symbolizes the the beat of its time and place. promise without fulfillment repeated throughout the BIBLIOGRAPHY work. The ironies of postwar economics are expressed Farrell, Walter C., Jr., and Patricia A. Johnson. “Poetic Inter- in several poems that recall wartime prosperity with pretations of Urban Black Folk Culture: Langston Hughes nostalgia even as they acknowledge war’s sorrow; in and the ‘Bebop’ Era.” MELUS 8.3 (1981): 57–72. “Green Memory,” the speaker calls the war a time Hokanson, Robert O’Brien. “Jazzing It Up: The Be-bop “when money rolled in / and blood rolled out,” while Modernism of Langston Hughes.” Mosaic: A Journal for the in the piece called “World War II,” the war is called a Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 31.4 (1998): 61–82. MOORE, MARIANNE 325

Hughes, Langston. Introductory Note to The Collected Poems the latest developments in art and culture through vora- of Langston Hughes, edited by Arnold Rampersad and cious reading of magazines and research trips to David Roessel. New York: Vintage, 1994. libraries. On a trip to Britain in 1911, she bought Ezra Lowney, John. “Langston Hughes and the ‘Nonsense’ of POUND’s Personae and Exaltations (an entry in a college BeBop.” American Literature 72.2 (2000): 357–386. notebook reads “Ezra Pound—at all costs!!”), and the Tracy, Steven C. Langston Hughes and the Blues. Champaign: next year she visited the Library of Congress, where she University of Illinois Press, 1988. read Wyndham Lewis’s and Pound’s magazine Blast. Her Jacqueline O’Connor first major publications happened in 1915—in the Ego- ist in London and in Harriet Monroe’s Poetry and Alfred MOORE, MARIANNE (1887–1972) Mari- Kreymborg’s journal Others in the United States. anne Moore’s poetry combines precise visual observa- Moore’s first book, Poems, was published in London tion, moral questioning, eclectic erudition, and verbal in 1921 by H. D., her partner Winifred Ellerman play together with fastidious attention to metrical and (known as “Bryher”), and Richard Aldington. It con- graphic shape in a way that makes her one of the most sists largely of the poems that had been submitted to singular poets of the 20th century. Her work, while dis- the aforementioned journals and was apparently pre- tinctly modernist in its method and presentation (see pared without Moore’s knowledge. In 1924 Moore’s MODERNISM), is not easily classified into any single first American book, Observations, was published. It school or trend in American poetry. Although con- was on the strength of this book and her many maga- nected early in her career with the IMAGIST SCHOOL, and zine publications that Moore was awarded the Dial later adopted by Louis ZUKOFSKY as an OBJECTIVIST, much magazine’s award in 1924. In 1925 she would become of her work takes on questions of ethics and abstract the Dial’s editor, a position she would hold until it intellectual thought not normally associated with those ceased publication in 1929. When the magazine movements. Contemporary poets of the NEW FORMALISM folded, Moore and her mother left Manhattan for claim Moore as an influence, though her emphasis on Brooklyn, where she would live for the next 36 years. the materiality of language and on the function of In 1934 Moore met Elizabeth BISHOP, then a student words outside of the symbolic order also anticipate the at Vassar who first approached her as a mentor, but LANGUAGE SCHOOL of the late 20th century. who would become a very close friend. Moore’s Moore was born in Kirkwood, Missouri. She spent her Selected Poems was published in 1935 (with an intro- first years in the house of her grandfather, a Presbyterian duction by T. S. ELIOT). After the publication of What minister, together with her mother and older brother. Are Years? in 1941 and Nevertheless in 1944, Moore After her grandfather’s death in 1894, the family moved turned her energies toward a novel she had begun in first to Pittsburgh, then to Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where the 1930s entitled The Way We Live Now, which was they lived for 20 years. Her relationships with her never published. In 1945, encouraged by W. H. AUDEN, brother and her mother were the most important ones in Moore began a translation of the Fables of Lafontaine. her life, both personally and artistically. Moore received Her translation is distinguished by the painstaking many awards and prizes over the course of her career, attempt to render in English the metrical patterns and including the Dial Award in 1924, a Guggenheim Fel- rhymes of the original French. The project took eight lowship in 1945, and the Bollingen Prize for poetry, a years to finish, and it was published in 1954. National Book Award, and the Pulitzer Prize for poetry The appearance of Moore’s Collected Poems in 1951 for the publication of her Collected Poems in 1951. She began a period of great celebrity. Through the 1950s was a member of the National Institute of Arts and Let- and early 1960s, Moore appeared in many magazines ters and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. and newspapers wearing her trademark tricorn hat and After graduating Bryn Mawr College in 1909, Moore cape. In 1956 she wrote a poem celebrating the Brook- returned to Carlisle and taught at the Indian School lyn Dodgers’ appearance in the World Series called “A there for several years. During this time she followed Hometown Piece for Messr’s Alton and Reese” that was 326 MOORE, MARIANNE printed on the front page of the New York Herald Tri- describes the stanza these lines come from as bune. This moment signaled a definite shift into occa- “exhibit[ing] an archaic disregard of the mere things sional verse (poetry that results from the observance of human desire does with sentences” (99). Instead the various events) that accelerated in her later years. In lines show Moore’s attention to visual arrangement, as 1955 she published her first collection of prose writ- exaggerated or enhanced by her preference for com- ing, Predilections. These were followed by more poetry: posing poetry on a typewriter. Like a Bulwark (1956), O to be a Dragon (1959), and For Kenner, Moore’s aesthetic connects the visual to Tell Me, Tell Me (1966). Her Complete Poems were pub- the verbal through puns that are more associative than lished in 1967, though a subsequent edition of the explicit: “Moore’s poems deal in many separate acts of book published in 1981 incorporates revisions made attention, all close-up; optical puns, seen by snapshot, by Moore up to the time of her death in 1972. in a poetic normally governed by the eye, sometimes Much of Moore’s poetry resists the CONFESSIONAL or by the ears and fingers, ultimately by the moral sense” revelatory moment, choosing instead to question the (92). In “The Pangolin” (1941), for example, she authority inherent in the position of the author by describes an exotic, scaled animal as having “scale / evocatively arranging fragments of text that she found lapping scale with spruce-cone regularity” and as being in her reading or in conversation in a manner analo- a “near artichoke with head and legs,” “Leonardo da gous to a visual collage. Her principles of arrangement Vinci’s replica.” include exacting attention to the metrical and visual Marriage, a long poem published as a chapbook by layout of lines and stanzas, as well as to their rhyme Moore’s friend Monroe Wheeler in 1923, is a high patterns. This method results in rapid shifts in perspec- point of her collage style, juxtaposing text from such tive and tone that can be disorienting, but, at their best, wide-ranging sources as the 17th-century essays of they can create a carefully arranged atmosphere for Francis Bacon, a Scientific American article, and an off- contemplation. In her poem “When I Buy Pictures” hand comment from Pound. Much of the poem uses (1921), the speaker singles out those objects (“an arti- these diverse fragments to present Adam and Eve as choke in six varieties of blue; the snipe legged / hiero- avatars of male and female views of marriage, yet the glyphic in three parts”) that are “‘lit with piercing poem ends with the image of a statue of Daniel Web- glances into the life of things’” (a quotation spliced into ster in Central Park, the motto carved into its base: the poem from a 1919 treatise on the Old Testament) “‘Liberty and union / now and forever.’” Webster’s and “acknowledge the spiritual forces which have made words, which come from a famous 1830 speech it.” This attention to the beauty of natural objects or defending the rights of the federal government against well-made things and the spiritual force behind them is the claims of secessionists, are pulled from their origi- characteristic of Moore’s work throughout her career. nal context to become a perfect expression of the bal- Moore’s sometimes abrupt juxtaposition of images is ance of individual liberty and shared union that is at accentuated by the typographical arrangement of her the heart of marriage. poems—line breaks and indents whose importance Moore’s impulse to represent the world is always was as much visual as metrical, as in “THE FISH” (1921), connected to a religious responsibility to praise truth- in which fish swimming among objects in the sea dis- fully through description, without self-aggrandize- cover interesting finds, including a “mussel” that is ment, yet always striving toward a spiritual truth. Even “Marriage,” which actively questions the traditional opening and shutting itself like gender roles assigned to husbands and wives, also struggles to find a new law on which that relationship an can be based. This struggle takes the form of a wide- injured fan. ranging search across many disciplines and fields of In Hugh Kenner’s 1975 collection of essays on Ameri- inquiry and ends with the surprising but perfect image can modernist writers, A Homemade World, he of an American icon. For Moore, the pursuit of the MORLEY, HILDA 327 genuine produces an aesthetic at once profoundly my children need my help”), or like Carmen, the feisty modest and lapidary, erudite and immediate. octogenarian sacristan of Aunt Carmen’s Book of Practical Saints (1997), whose prayer to the Good Shepherdess BIBLIOGRAPHY implores, “Madre Mia, teach your cranky Carmen the Costello, Bonnie. Marianne Moore: Imaginary Possessions. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981. practicality / of beauty, its joyful mystery necessary as Engel, Bernard F. Marianne Moore. Rev. ed., Boston: bread.” Voice—be it raised or silenced, of landscape or Twayne, 1989. of people, in Spanish or in English or both—is a dom- Heuving, Jeanne. Omissions Are Not Accidents: Gender in inant motif for Mora, leading to close attention to the Art of Marianne Moore. Detroit: Wayne State Univer- sound imagery and suggesting how important listening sity Press, 1992. is to knowledge. Imagining the stories inherent in the Kenner, Hugh. “Disliking It.” In A Homemade World: The poetry of nature and the nature of poetry, Mora is like American Modernist Writers. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hop- the storyteller in “Cuentista” (1995): “She carries a kins University Press, 1975. green river / in her arms, a rolling play of light.” Molesworth, Charles. Marianne Moore: A Literary Life. New York: Macmillan, 1990. BIBLIOGRAPHY Fox, Linda C. “From Chants to Borders to Communion: Pat Michael Barsanti Mora’s Poetic Journey to Nepantla.” Bilingual Review La Revista Bilingue 21.4 (September–December 1996): MORA, PAT (1942– ) Pat Mora has been a 219–230. significant southwestern voice in American literature Murphy, Patrick D. “Conserving Natural and Cultural Diver- since the 1980s. Also an essayist, memoirist, and sity: The Prose and Poetry of Pat Mora.” MELUS 21.1 author of children’s books, Mora as a poet is interested (spring 1996): 59–69. in the organic poetic line and formal/linguistic play, G. Douglas Meyers and she has been influenced by Pablo Neruda, Fed- erico García Lorca, Lucille CLIFTON, and Mary OLIVER. MORLEY, HILDA (1919–1998) Hilda Morley Mora’s poetry conveys transcendental themes through is associated with the BLACK MOUNTAIN SCHOOL of poets, tightly crafted imagery often rooted in the southwest- in part because of her affiliation with Black Mountain ern desert landscape and its inhabitants. A bilingual, College, where she lived and taught, along with her bicultural feminist from a city where the Rio Grande husband, composer Stefan Wolpe, from 1952 to 1956. marks the U.S.–Mexico border, Mora ponders rivers Yet like Joanne KYGER, another midcentury poet who and borders, both literal and metaphorical, and her chose to write poetry outside the establishment and to free verse is infused with Spanish words and phrases follow the compelling contours of the spacious page, (see PROSODY AND FREE VERSE). she is seen as part of a contemporary poetic movement Mora was born and raised in El Paso, Texas. In 1985 whose practices were more suggestive than definitive. and 1987 she was honored with the Southwest Book Morley was born and raised in New York City. She Award for two collections of poems, Chants and Bor- attended various colleges, including University College ders, respectively. In 1986 she received a Kellogg (London) and New York University, and thereafter she National Leadership Fellowship to study ways of pre- spent many years lecturing and teaching. In the early serving culture (a recurrent theme of her poetry), and 1940s Morley was a Hebrew translator for the Office of in 1994 she received a National Endowment for the War Information in New York City; she also translated Arts Creative Writing Fellowship in poetry. Two of her poems from the Hebrew, winning the L. Lamed Transla- books of poetry for children have also received awards. tion Award for Letters from the Desert in 1983. Her first Women are central to Mora’s work, and they are por- book, A Blessing Outside Us, prefaced by Robert CREELEY, trayed in complex detail, whether they are like “Elena” was published in 1976. In 1983 she received a Guggen- (1984), an immigrant who tenaciously struggles to heim Fellowship and was the first-time winner of the learn English (“for if I stop trying, I will be deaf / when Capricorn Prize (given in recognition of excellence to a 328 MOSS, HOWARD poet over 40), awarded for her third book of poetry, To Moss set an example for his generation among poets Hold in My Hand: Selected Poems 1955–1983. who believed in explicit order, as well as for later poets Morley’s work always reflects her experiences; her who have identified themselves with NEW FORMALISM. language is precise and spare, intense and serene. Sen- He was also the poetry editor at the New Yorker maga- sations—visible, tangible, audible—make her lyrics zine from 1950 until shortly before his death, a posi- intensely personal. In her poems love and loss are tion that allowed him influence over much of intense forces that shape perceptions of nature, art, mainstream American writing. and experience. As Carolyn KIZER has written, “in read- Moss was born and raised in New York City. In 1942 ing Morley ...we are wrapped up in seeing, and sens- he won Poetry magazine’s Janet Sewall David Award for ing what we see” (160). his own poetry. His first book was published in 1946. “Curve of the Water” (1988) is a painterly medita- He was inducted into the American Academy and tion on the shapes and colors in a landscape; it con- Institute of Arts and Letters in 1968 and won the siders the slippery relationship between reality and our National Book Award for poetry for his Selected Poems ability to perceive and know it. As in other Morley in 1971. His New Selected Poems (1984) was awarded poems, the music and repetition of her language lulls; the Lenore Marshall/Nation Poetry Prize in 1986, a year “water” is a substance that occurs in many ways in the in which he also received a fellowship from the Acad- world, as a color (green), a destination, and source emy of American Poets. (well and harbor). The use of repetition and difference All of Moss’s work possesses a subtle finish. His evokes not only the way a landscape compels one to early and middle poems are end-rhymed and metered, gaze, but also the way the natural world is “at variance his later work is freer—but all of it has a striking reg- to / what we know.” The lines “we see them but / they ularity of meter and tone. The prevalent themes in are not held as seen, not kept there / behind the eyes” Moss’s work involve fundamental issues, such as suggest that to know is not to fix in one place, but to change in life, human relationships, loss, and death. experience again and again. Meditative and evocative, He writes ably of “the difficulty of love, the decay of Morley’s poems explore the material and sensual the body, the passing of time, and the inevitability of world. Her visual poetics creates an apt sense of airi- death,” all set against “the inexhaustible beauty of the ness and movement—freedom of thought. natural world,” as Dana GIOIA has observed (102). He is, in fact, a great elegist who can portray attachment BIBLIOGRAPHY and loss with stunning acuity through graphic simplic- Conniff, Brian. “Reconsidering Black Mountain: The Poetry of ity and bitter irony (see LYRIC POETRY). Hilda Morley.” American Literature 65:1 (1993): 117–130. Kizer, Carolyn. Proses. Port Townsend, Wash: Copper In “Elegy for My Sister” (1980), he painstakingly Canyon, 1993. details his sister’s fatal disease and her struggle to cope with it. Trying to rise from her bed, her leg breaks “sim- Linda V. Russo ply by standing up”; her bones have been “[m]elted into a kind of eggshell sawdust” by chemotherapy. His MOSS, HOWARD (1922–1987) Howard Moss metaphors go beyond physical distress to show the was an important practitioner of formal verse in the plight of the soul. And in “Elegy for My Father” (1954), mid-20th century. He also had an uncanny ability to intense pain, dying, and separation are made vivid envision nature—and by envisioning it, to transform it through paradox. His father, for example, is freed from into an environment created by humanity—thus life by his pain, a “double-dealing enemy.” bringing it into the realm of civilization; he strove to Moss’s finely crafted verse is matched by his willing- formalize nature, in keeping with his view of what ness to account for the peripatetic and otherwise poetry should be. He once remarked, “What my poems insignificant details of living, making them, at times, are really about . . . is the experience of hovering monumental. In his work the truth peeks out through between the forms of nature and the forms of art” (29). artifice. MULLEN, HARRYETTE 329

BIBLIOGRAPHY Caribbean, and the Americans. The hurricane speaks, Bawer, Bruce. “The Passing of an Elegist.” New Criterion 6.3 at one point saying, “You know Charles ain’t no kind of (November 1987): 35–37. proper African name, but it’s the one my patrons give Gioia, Dana. “The Difficult Case of Howard Moss.” Antioch me, the one meteorological overseers picked out.” Review 45.1 (winter 1987): 98–109. Moss’s relationship with the tradition of modern Moss, Howard. “Howard Moss: An Interview,” by Robert American poetry is complex and somewhat tense. She Leiter. American Poetry Review 13.5 (September/October has written a response to Robert FROST’s “ STOPPING BY 1984): 27–31. WOODS ON A SNOWY EVENING,” “Interpretation of a Poem Burt Kimmelman by Frost” (1991), and another to Wallace STEVENS’s “Thir- teen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” “A Reconsideration MOSS, THYLIAS (1954– ) Thylias Moss is of the Blackbird” (1990). Both of her poems insist on the an important figure in contemporary African-American importance of race and gender, elements that are absent poetry, a literary descendant of African-American poets from the original poems by the two white male poets. Langston HUGHES, Robert HAYDEN, and Gwendolyn Moss’s public praise of Galway KINNELL proves that her BROOKS. Moss is ambivalent about being identified as a questioning of the literary canon has not led her to a representative African-American poet, however, largely simplistic dislike of such white, male, acclaimed poets because she worries that this could reduce or oversim- (one such poet, Charles SIMIC, was Moss’s teacher in the plify her own work and the works of others identified University of New Hampshire’s graduate program). with this category. Her poetry’s breadth spans religion, Her free-form poetry reflects her wide-ranging inter- family, and racism together with references to far more ests in literature, folk life, and American social issues. eclectic subject matter. Critic Jabari Asim claims, Moss’s use of seemingly unedited language creates a “[Her] interests are so extensive and varied that readers sense of immediacy and unfiltered experience through- may exhaust themselves just scrambling to track down out her work. the sources of her many allusions” (8). BIBLIOGRAPHY Moss was born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio, but vis- Asim, Jabari. “Poet of This World and the Next.” Washington its to family members in southern states gave her a keen Post, April 5, 1998, sec. X, p. 8. awareness of the virulent racism most often identified Ivry, Sara. “A Fine Line.” New York Times Magazine, January 7, with the South. She has received numerous grants and 2001, p. 8. awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship (1995) and Moss, Thylias. “The Generosity of Arpeggios and Ravens.” a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (1996). Michigan Quarterly Review. 39.2 (spring 2000): 301–306. Much of Moss’s work presents stream-of-conscious- Sean Heuston ness reflections on life events, characters, and specific objects. Moss is decidedly a free verse poet, and she is MULLEN, HARRYETTE (1953– ) Harryette primarily concerned with the possibilities of imagina- Mullen is a scholar and a poet whose poetry examines tive association apart from regular rhyme or meter: the intersection of gender, race, erotics, and the avant- “Only in a few things did I want permanence, consis- garde. The linguistic and syntactic experimentation of tency, predictability; mine was seldom a yearning for her poetry places Mullen firmly in the avant-garde tra- universals” Moss says (305). Moss’s poems frequently dition that stretches from Gertrude STEIN to the poets turn surreal or visionary, but they almost always remain of the LANGUAGE SCHOOL. The racial concerns of her strongly connected to real-world issues or objects. In poetry also locate her in the rich tradition of African- “Dear Charles” (1993), for example, a rambling prose American experimental poets, such as Norman H. poem in the form of a letter addressed to a hurricane Pritchard and Nathaniel MACKEY. elicits a response from the masculine hurricane that ties Born in Alabama and raised in Texas, Mullen the destructive fury of the tropical storm to the real his- received a B.A. in English from the University of Texas, tory of slavery and exploitation in West Africa, the Austin. Mullen has taught at Cornell University and the 330 MUSKE-DUKES, CAROL

University of California, Los Angeles. She completed Mullen, Harryette. “Solo Mysterioso Blues: Interview with graduate work at the University of California, Santa Harryette Mullen,” by Calvin Bedient. Callaloo 19 Cruz, in the history of consciousness program, where (1996): 651–69. Mackey directed her dissertation. Mullen has published Mitchum Huehls four books of poetry, the most recent being Muse & Drudge (1995), and a critical work, Gender, Subjectivity, MUSKE-DUKES, CAROL (1945– ) While and Slave Narratives (1998). Carol Muske-Dukes (formerly Carol Muske) certainly Instead of using figurative techniques such as simile engages the world from a feminist perspective, she is not and metaphor, Mullen uses metonymy, anagrams, and simply a feminist poet. A respected literary critic, she puns (which are associative not symbolic) to invite the argues that contemporary poetry should move readers reader to collaborate in making the text’s meaning. For “away from chaos, from isolation, divisiveness, away example, the interpretive possibilities in just one line from self-conscious fragmentation” (“Woman”). Such from her Stein-inspired work Trimmings (1991) are movement, Muske-Dukes claims, is “crucial” for a many: “Girl, pinked, beribboned. Alternate virgin at first young poet to develop “an open mind” (“War”). In her blush”. This section, about an African-American girl poems this open-mindedness results in a compelling uncomfortably dressed, demonstrates the connections combination of progressive politics and aesthetic excel- between clothing and gender (the pressure of being lence that inspires the critic Vijay Seshadri to name her “beribboned” can manifest itself in eating disorders that “an exemplary citizen both of the world and of the might make her “be rib boned”), clothing and race republic of letters” (20). (being “pinked” not only implies that she is dressed in Muske-Dukes was born in St. Paul, Minnesota. She pink but also that the unwanted clothing is an attempt published her first book of poems, Camouflage, in to make her pass for white), and clothing and sexuality 1975. Her poems are now widely anthologized. (her “first blush” could be a blush of her cheeks but also Among her awards and honors are the 1979 Alice Fay her first menstruation or sexual experience). Di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of Amer- Although many African-American anthologists do ica and a 1981 Guggenheim Fellowship. She has not consider her experimental work to be sufficiently taught at the University of Southern California. representational of a black voice, Mullen believes that Even in her earliest poems, Muske-Dukes establishes her poetry can usefully address racial concerns while herself as a poet unafraid to confront the most desolate also challenging the categories that make “racial” writ- spaces of the 20th century’s social history. Whether ing something other than avant-garde or feminist writ- writing about a student’s reaction to being raped ing. Indeed Mullen’s first work Tree Tall Woman (1981) (“China White” [1985]) or her response to a Czech stu- employs a stable ethnic voice throughout the collection, dent’s self-immolation in protest of the 1968 Soviet but since that volume Mullen’s poetry has engaged mul- invasion of Prague (“Prague: Two Journals 1970, tiple and fragmented voices. These voices are often not 1990”), her careful craftsmanship offers sympathetic overtly racialized because Mullen’s work focuses more interpretations of even the most dismal facets of the on the material words themselves (the fact that they are human experience. It is in this very human sympathy often puns or anagrams, for instance) than the content that Muske-Dukes presents her poetic vision—a coura- to which those words refer. Mullen’s poetry represents geous call for poetry to make a difference in the world. the convergence of the political and the poetic in inno- In “At the School for the Gifted” (1997), Muske- vative forms that enact fruitful alternatives (not just Duke’s speaker struggles to inspire students to embrace oppositions) to the dominance of identity-based LYRIC poetry by having them discover verse in the “Cut out POETRY in the contemporary poetic world. camels [that] plodded across the blackboard’s high / sill.” BIBLIOGRAPHY The students strive to produce poetry befitting their Frost, Elisabeth. “An Interview with Harryette Mullen.” Con- intellectual talents, but fall short, as they are “suspicious / temporary Literature 41 (2000): 397–421. in individual spotlights.” Instead of finding satisfaction “MY LIFE BY WATER” 331 in inspired flashes of poetic insight, Muske-Duke’s erary anthologies. In 1992 she engineered a political speaker and her students find sweetness in the inspired campaign and was a write-in candidate for president of chaos of poetic word and sound association. This com- the United States in 28 states. She has received many mitment to a very American sharing of ideas, inherent in honors, including National Endowment for the Arts the reading and writing of poetry, marks Muske-Duke as grants (1989 and 1995) and two Lambda Book Awards, the preeminent spokesperson for both the aesthetic for The New Fuck You (1995) and School of Fish (1997). power and the social relevance of contemporary verse. In “How I Wrote Certain of My Poems” (1991), Myles explains that, for her, “life is a rehearsal for the poem” BIBLIOGRAPHY and that she has an obsession with culture (201). Rock- Emanuel, Lynn. “The Audience’s Audience.” Michigan Quar- terly Review 35.4 (fall 1996): 720–733. ’n’roll and the spirit of freedom prevalent in the 1960s Muske-Dukes, Carol. “War of the Edens,” Boston Review provided Myles with permission to forge ahead accord- Available online. URL html://bostonreview.mit.edu/BR23. ing to her own inclinations as an artist. In her book 1969, 3/muske.html. Downloaded December 2002. Myles writes about being at the Woodstock Festival and ———. “Woman on the Ledge,” Crossroads: The Journal of hearing Jimi Hendrix: “His ‘Star Spangled Banner’ was the Poetry Society of America Available online. URL: the end of America for me. We were through with it” http://poetrysociety.org/journal/articles/muske.html. (55–56). Her writing is reality based, playful, and Downloaded December 2002. provocative, and she always addresses important human Seshadri, Vijay. “The Neuroses of History.” New York Times concerns. In the poems Myles personifies herself as a Book Review, February 8, 1998, 20. gamut of selves. She is both an immigrant, who explains William F. Hecker she was part of “a generation of people who went to / the bars on 7th street and drank” (“Holes” [1991]), and a MYLES, EILEEN (1949– ) Eileen Myles’s member of the Kennedy clan, who suggests, “I am not / writing is firmly established within the lineage of the alone tonight because / we are all Kennedy’s” (“An Amer- NEW YORK SCHOOL. Equally vital is her prominence as a ican Poem” [1991]). Myles is confidently attendant to high-profile lesbian poet of the late 20th century. She her immediate surroundings; writing and daily life in also claims a range of other major influences, includ- New York City, including its inequities and banalities, are ing Christopher Isherwood and Hart CRANE. Yet Myles’s deeply connected for her. Her writing is genuine, clear, work is independent and original. Her poetry is writ- and purposeful. She is assured in her mission as an active ten in open form (see PROSODY AND FREE VERSE), using a and socially activist poet who characteristically exposes conversational style with brief, columnar lines. Public significant human vulnerabilities. intent underscores her work. She communicates BIBLIOGRAPHY openly about intimate and personal subject matter, Durgin, Patrick. “Eileen Myles.” In Dictionary of Literary Biog- and she manages to revitalize her subjects. Myles raphy. American Poets Since World War II, edited by Joseph upholds her statement, “I’ve always thought a poet Conte. Detroit: Gale Research, 1998, pp. 203–212. should think big, not small” (qtd. in Richard 26), Myles, Eileen. “How I Wrote Certain of My Poems.” Not Me. through constant writing and her efforts to reach audi- New York: Semiotexte, 1991. ences and unite multiple communities. ———. “Never Real, Always True: An Interview with Born, raised, and educated in and near Boston, Mass- Eileen Myles,” by Frances Richard. Provincetown Arts 15 achusetts, Myles moved to New York City in 1974. Her (2000): 24–29. first collection of poems, The Irony of the Leash, was pub- ———. 1969. New York: Hanuman Books, 1989. lished in 1978. She was personal assistant to James Christopher Funkhouser SCHUYLER and artistic director of the St. Mark’s Poetry Pro- ject during the 1980s (see POETRY INSTITUTIONS). Myles has “MY LIFE BY WATER” LORINE NIE- written poetry, fiction, drama, and book and art reviews; DECKER (1968) “My Life by Water” headlines she is widely anthologized and has also edited several lit- Lorine NIEDECKER’s 1970 book of collected poetry, My 332 “MY LIFE BY WATER”

Life by Water: Collected Poems 1936–1968. Although the as to pacing, double entendres, and subtle wordplay. poem had been published previously (in North Central One example of this rotates around the center of the [1968], by Fulcrum Press), it gained significance in its poem: “arts and letters.” Niedecker creates a rural scene 1970 publication as the title poem of the last book of with active sights and sounds: “Muskrats / gnawing / Niedecker’s poetry published within her lifetime. “My doors / to wild green / arts.” The final word, arts, how- Life by Water” can be seen as autobiographical, not only ever, is broken off from the phrase and given special of poet and place but also of poetics; it demonstrates the emphasis by its placement at the beginning of the next culmination of Niedecker’s poetic ideals from her earliest line, where it is coupled with its idiomatic partner “let- OBJECTIVIST short verse to her later experiments in build- ters.” Thus the previous line, “to wild green / arts,” ing movements of meaning through poetic sequence. shifts to “arts and letters.” This connective line acts as Some of the characteristics commonly associated with the poetic nexus, at which the early concrete images of Niedecker’s work include simple and basic word choice, place converge with the abstract language of scholar- clarity and purity in aural and visual images, a strong ship. Niedecker brings the reader to experience the fact emphasis on the natural world, and irregular stanzaic that that her life by water, although rural and out- form. Overarching this is her emphasis on poetic move- doorsy, is inexorably linked to the literary. Similarly her ment; Niedecker was very interested in the ways mean- scholarship and intellectual pursuits spawn from her ings could turn and shift within a poem through word surroundings—one cannot exist without the other. This choice and juxtaposition. “My Life by Water” is an engag- plays into Niedecker’s idea that poetry is a liquid form, ing crescendo of these fundamentals. one that changes and evolves from one reading to the The poem’s first stanza begins with a reassertion of next on the page and in the reader’s mind. Niedecker the title and ends with the directive to the reader, says about this process: “The visual form is there in the “Hear.” By choosing to end the stanza with the homo- background and the words convey what the visual form nym “Hear,” Niedecker introduces “My Life by Water” gives off after it’s felt in the mind” (86). immediately as a poem of place; through the aural Growing as a poet, Niedecker expanded her ideas connective of “Hear” and “Here,” Niedecker invites the regarding language and context when she began to write reader to experience both forms of the word at once. in the longer, more associative medium of this work: the She directs the reader’s senses to “Hear” the sounds poem sequence (see LONG AND SERIAL POETRY). Through localized in the “Here,” which she continues to build poetry sequences, Niedecker studied the interconnected throughout the poem. Such wordplays and puns are movements of a poem. Niedecker’s technique of modi- common in Niedecker’s work and are seen throughout fying or shifting sentence, as elements are added or sub- this poem. Its title itself evokes a playful ambiguity: tracted, illustrates this interdependency by focusing on “My Life” may be read as an autobiography of “Water” the ever-changing and amorphous nature of language. as well as an autobiography of a person “by” or near These movements include the action and agency a poem water. Throughout this work Niedecker finds ways to has on a page (double meanings through strategic punc- mix meanings, to invoke more than one sense at a tuation and spacing) and the effect a poem has within time, and to create a multidimensional experience, one the reader psychologically (increasingly layered insights rife with what she once called “the knowledge of every- through multiple readings). “My Life by Water” is a tour thing influencing everything” (86). de force study of constructing and deconstructing mean- As the poem progresses, Niedecker continues to cre- ing; with the advent of each new line and each new ate a sense of “place” through crisp, clear imagery. With word, the experiences of meaning within a poem only a few words cleverly juxtaposed, Niedecker creates sequence gets progressively more nuanced. a scene, both visually and aurally, of spring frogs, bend- Showing her poetic roots as well as her ability to ing mud boards, and gnawing muskrats. Her word move beyond them, My Life By Water reflects choice is basic and minimally unadorned. The spacing Niedecker’s unique contributions to objectivism and surrounding each word creates a shorthand, giving cues imagism (see IMAGIST SCHOOL). The imagery and spac- “MY PAPA’S WALTZ” 333 ing of the poem have the well-contained, concrete The great conflict in “My Papa’s Waltz” involves the effects of her earlier work. The double readings and ambivalent feelings the grown son has about memories shifting meanings within the poem herald a form of of his father. The speaker recalls a night when the poetics Niedecker called “reflectivism,” which focuses drunken father “waltzed” about the kitchen with the on the interconnectedness of words and experience. In young boy, knocking the kitchen implements off the a letter to a fellow Fort Atkinson resident and poet, shelves. Though the father’s whiskied breath nearly Gail Roub, Niedecker writes, “modern poetry, and old sickens the child, he clings to his father “like death.” poetry, if its [sic] good, proceeds not from one point to The word choice and imagery reflect violence: The the next linearly but in a circle. [It has a] light, a father holds the boy’s wrist, not his hand, and taps out motion, inherent in the whole . . . and awareness of the dance beat on the son’s head; the action of the everything influencing everything” (86). Niedecker dance repeatedly scrapes the son’s ear against the then goes on to cite the first and last lines of “My Life father’s belt buckle. Yet the violence is counterbalanced by Water” as exemplars of these ideals (86). in other choices of diction and image: the poet chooses BIBLIOGRAPHY to say “we romped,” indicating a more playful intent, DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. “Lorine Niedecker, the Anonymous: and the boy clings to his father as they dance their way Gender, Class, Genre and Resistances.” In Lorine Niedecker: to the boy’s bed, where he will eventually, perhaps, go Woman and Poet, edited by Jenny Penberthy. Orono, to sleep. Maine: National Poetry Foundation, 1996, pp. 113–138. The presence of a third person in the scene—the Niedecker, Lorine. “Getting to Know Lorine Niedecker,” by boy’s mother—reveals another conflict. As the mother Gail Roub. In Lorine Niedecker: Woman and Poet, edited by watches the two dance, her frown indicates the anxiety Jenny Penberthy. Orono, Maine: National Poetry Founda- and sadness that affects the entire family. While the tion, 1996, pp. 79–86. grown speaker struggles to reconcile his father’s abuse Judith S. Girardi with the awe and respect he has for his father, this image of his mother’s unhappiness adds more confu- “MY PAPA’S WALTZ” THEODORE sion to the understanding he seeks. ROETHKE (1948) “My Papa’s Waltz,” one of the Roethke’s use of rhythm is an effective tactic for most anthologized and recognizable of Theodore expressing the ambivalent mood of the poem. The ROETHKE’s poems, embodies the poet’s emphases on dance is fittingly described using a playful iambic introspection and the anxieties of childhood, which trimeter, or waltz time, rhythm. However, the playful- were later to influence CONFESSIONAL POETRY. Origi- ness of the rhythm serves also to further support the nally published in 1948, the poem is somewhat of a ambivalence—should the speaker remember this vio- departure for Roethke. Many of his works deal with a lence-tinged scene with such a frivolous dance beat? return to the origins of life and explorations of the The poem ends with the seemingly benign image of the subconscious, while “My Papa’s Waltz” is a rather tra- boy hanging onto his father as he is put to bed, but, as ditional and simple poem. Still it takes as its inspira- with his own life, the conflict is left unresolved. tion and subject matter the overriding concern of Roethke’s early poetry: the attempt to connect, BIBLIOGRAPHY through the power of memory, the figures of child and Balakian, Peter. Theodore Roethke’s Far Fields: The Evolution of father. For most, if not all, of his life, Roethke viewed His Poetry. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, his father, Otto—who died while Theodore was a 1989. Kalaidjian, Walter B. Understanding Theodore Roethke. teenager—with mixture of fear and love. The father Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1987. figure in his poetry, then, is often one of awesome, godlike power. Joseph Schaub C N D

NARRATIVE POETRY Despite the predomi- a way—sometimes the only way—of knowing one’s nance of LYRIC POETRY, narrative poetry has prospered world” (417). To conceive of fragmented events as con- in 20th-century American literature, and its conven- tinuous, with a beginning and an end, is a way for the tions have undergone innovative reconsideration unri- imagination to endow them with meaning, “to impose valled since the English romantic era. In contrast to the its own order on what is,” as Sylvia PLATH observes in intense utterance of the lyric, which typically speaks her poem “On the Difficulty of Conjuring up a Dryad” from a single moment in time, conventionally the nar- (1957). In the face of Whitman’s conception of Amer- rative is a poetic genre that tells a story, binding ica’s expansive, irreducible diversity, American poets sequences of events via plot and character. Historically, have felt the need to refashion the narrative to accom- the narrative subdivides into epics, such as John Mil- modate their visions of a fragmented and discontinuous ton’s Paradise Lost (1674), romances, such as Chaucer’s modernity. Although some poets continued to use con- Troilus and Criseyde (ca. 1385), and shorter ballad ventional narrative forms, the most interesting innova- forms. But the changes in modes of storytelling, par- tions have occurred by combining the narrative with ticularly those affected by modernist experimentation the brief, intense character of the lyric. with the prose novel, have made it necessary for narra- Modern American narrative poetry falls into two tive conventions to change as well. categories. The first is the conventional narrative In the years before MODERNISM, American writers in mode, either in the short form of Robert FROST’s ironic particular envisioned poetry as fundamentally distinct stories or the epic scope of James MERRILL’s THE CHANG- from story. Walt Whitman transformed epic poetry ING LIGHT AT SANDOVER (1982) (see also LONG AND SERIAL from the narrative mode to the lyric sequence. Earlier POETRY). The second and predominant form is the nar- Edgar Allen Poe had contended, in his famous essay rative-lyric, which combines the psychological drama “The Philosophy of Composition” (1846), that all of the lyric with the narrative’s descriptive sequence of poems should be readable in one sitting. These factors, events. Poems by Elizabeth BISHOP and Rita DOVE, for alongside the rising popularity of the prose novel, instance, typically begin with narrative description and divided narrative from poetry so that by 1915 modern move into meditation, in which the lyric voice realizes poets, such as Ezra POUND and H. D., considered the a connection between itself and the unfolding story. lyric the defining genre of poetry and rarely allowed their early work to include traditional narrative ele- CONVENTIONAL NARRATIVE ments. However, as Marjorie Perloff suggests, many The reassuring patterns that the conventional narrative poets continued to discover that “to tell a story is to find offers—a beginning and an end, an authoritative third-

334 NARRATIVE POETRY 335 person speaker—often invite a wider readership than telling found in legends,” and in defense of his unusual the difficult diction of the lyric. Though not a predomi- choice of verse over prose, he asks: “Since it never truly nant mode, the conventional narrative provided a vehi- fit, / why wear the shoe of prose? In verse, the feet went cle for modern poets who avoided the experiments of bare.” Far from detached, Merrill’s speaker is T. S. ELIOT and Pound and turned instead to Thomas enmeshed in the writing of his own poem, consistently Hardy or Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, two precursors reflecting on earlier passages and on the craft of narra- to the modern narrative. Frost’s narratives in North of tive poetry itself. Though composed primarily of long Boston (1914, 1915) were great popular successes that stretches of conventional narration, Merrill’s poem also offered readers scenes of rural life and hardship in clear, uses the innovations in poetic storytelling form (the everyday speech. “The Death of a Hired Man,” which narrative-lyric, symbolic logic, reflexive comment on David Perkins has called one of “the finest short narra- narrative as a genre) that have defined and resuscitated tive poems written . . . in the twentieth century” (241), the narrative mode in 20th-century American poetry. is composed mostly of dialogue, through which Frost Other conventional narratives include Robinson JEF- unfolds the tragedy of an old man preparing to die. FERS’s “Roan Stallion” (1924) and The Double Axe Forecasting modern innovations in the prose novel, (1948), Randall JARRELL’s Orestes at Tauris (1948); Frost’s virtual exclusion of an omniscient narrative voice many of John Crowe RANSOM’s poems; Robert LOWELL’s produces more complex, interesting characters, and the The Mills of the Kavanaughs (1946), Robinson’s Glory of resultant irony and ambiguity haunts his other tales as the Nightingales (1930), Robert Penn WARREN’s “The Bal- well, including “A Hundred Collars” (1914, 1915) and lad of Billie Pots” (1943), Wallace STEVENS’s “The the ghostly “Witch of Coos” (1923). Stephen Vincent Comedian as the Letter C” (1923), and the verse seg- BENÉT’s popular success, John Brown’s Body (1928), is a ment of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Pale Fire (1962). long narrative poem that utilizes the conventions of epic, and Edwin Arlington ROBINSON’s Arthurian narra- NARRATIVE-LYRIC tives, Merlin (1917), Lancelot (1920), and Tristram Like the medieval romance, the modern narrative-lyric (1927), also found great favor with American readers, often employs a single “heroic” central figure, a per- with their traditional meters and detached, objective sonage who describes a sequence of events and rumi- narration (see PROSODY AND FREE VERSE). nates on its larger, philosophical significance. In Undoubtedly the most successful and sustained nar- contrast to the traditional third-person grammatical rative poem of the 20th century is The Changing Light form, the first-person “I” of the narrative-lyric shifts at Sandover, a poem of some 17,000 lines based on the focus from the events themselves to their meaning Merrill’s experiences with a Ouija board. In three for the speaker, who connects them through images books Merrill invokes poets of the narrative tradition, that often reveal something about his or her psycho- including Homer, Dante, and W. H. AUDEN to guide logical or emotional state. The events need not employ him through his sometimes tragic, sometimes comic plot nor designate a clear beginning and end. In fact, encounters with the spirits of the dead. The poem the speaker assumes the function conventionally ful- observes mainly conventional rhyme schemes and filled by plot—a meditating consciousness that con- switches between Dantean terza rima and Augustan nects disparate events, ordering them around its own couplets. The Changing Light at Sandover has been her- insights. For instance, Bishop’s “IN THE WAITING ROOM” alded as the postmodern generation’s epic, encompass- (1976) follows a young speaker to a dentist’s office, ing everything from chemical biology to world wars. where she waits for her aunt while looking at maga- Merrill’s speaker deftly uses repetition and allusion to zines filled with photographs of volcanoes and aborig- build his fantastic image of the supernatural universe, inal woman, when there is a sudden sound; from the as he says: “ bit by bit, the puzzle’s put together / Or inner office “came an oh! of pain / — Aunt Consuelo’s else it’s disassembled, bit by bit. Hot pebbles.” The voice.” The speaker’s mind combines the exclamation speaker reveals that he “yearned for some unseasoned of pain, the striking photographs, and the elderly 336 NARRATIVE POETRY women around her in the waiting room into a realiza- most obscure moments, the presumption of story . . . tion of her own unique identity and of the feminine held fast, no matter how murky the story nor how and human attributes that “held us all together or rapid the utterance” (145). Lowell’s more CONFESSIONAL made us all just one.” Before the poem ends the narra- poems in Life Studies (1959), such as “My Last After- tive resumes, but the “slush and cold” of the story have noon with Uncle Devereux Winslow” and “Dunbar- now become symbolic elements of the speaker’s chang- ton,” employ similar narrative techniques—lack of ing consciousness. Bishop’s fictional narrative isolates a plot, quick shifting of scenes, first-person speaker— single psychological moment in time in which the but emphasize the significance of the story’s details by speaker discerns an essential connection between the refusing to offer a final unifying moment of realization. self and community, or storyteller and story. Plath’s earlier poems, such as “Sow” (1957), “Fable of Other poems, such as James WRIGHT’s “Snowstorm in the Rhododendron Stealers” (1957), and “Blackberry- the Midwest” (1971), employ a similar technique, but ing” (1960), also relate trivial events that move subtly the narrative element is even further submerged in a toward a universal insight. In “Sow,” the speaker is led symbolic landscape: The poem’s speaker steps “into the on “a tour / Through his lantern-lit / maze of barns” water / of two flakes. / The crowns of white birds rise.” where the speaker’s neighbor keeps his prize sow hid- Instead of distinguishing narrative from meditation, den. As the poem closes, the narrative of this Wright’s poem combines the two in a series of moving labyrinthine quest leads to a “vision of ancient hog- images and symbols, suggesting that the narrative itself hood” and a beast that swills “the seven troughed seas is an allegory for the mind’s realizations. In her discus- and every earthquaking continent.” Plath’s brief, sion of Wright’s poem as exemplary of the return of hyperbolic story funnels into the ecstatic insight of the narrative in postmodern poetry, Perloff writes that the lyric, finding common events capable of yielding a speaker “relives a particular situation or set of events in visionary wonder. the past so as to come to terms with . . . the present” Frank O’HARA is another poet who successfully com- (413). bines narrative and lyric with innovative results. Con- Though he also utilized more conventional narrative trary to Plath’s technique, his “I do this, I do that” form in The Mills of the Kavanaughs, Lowell often incor- poems, as he called them (qtd. in Gooch 288), revel in porated narrative elements into his shorter lyrics. His narrating the intimate details of his daily life without acclaimed “Skunk Hour” (1959) describes a sequence universalizing. Rather than move toward meditation, of tangential, unrelated events—a wealthy heiress’s O’Hara’s speakers remain concerned with detail and downfall, a millionaire’s bankruptcy, the speaker’s visit frank honesty, suggesting poetry’s inability to impose a to “the hill’s skull”—culminating in a morbid insight, single meaning on the apparent formlessness of expe- which is also the speaker’s first and only reference to rience. For instance, “THE DAY LADY DIED” (1960), an himself: “My mind’s not right .../ I myself am hell.” elegy for jazz vocalist Billie Holiday, narrates a string of The meandering narratives of decay and isolation crys- seemingly inconsequential “pseudo-events”—a shoe tallize in the speaker’s brief realization, and when the shine, buying a hamburger and milkshake, perusing a narrative concludes with a description of a mother poetry magazine “to see what the poets in Ghana are skunk skulking in the garbage pail, we discern a doing these days”—until the speaker glimpses a news- melancholic continuity of thought despite the seeming paper headline announcing Holiday’s death; he disconnections. In his comments on Bishop, which observes that he has begun to sweat and recalls “lean- also apply to himself, Lowell sees in the narrative-lyric ing on the john door in the 5 SPOT [jazz club] / while mode hints of Frost’s storytelling technique and she whispered a song along the keyboard.” Rather than William Carlos WILLIAMS’s lyric epiphanies, whose resolve into a single psychological insight, the present- “purpose is to heighten or dramatize the description tense narrative remains fluid and descriptive. O’Hara’s and, at the same time, to unify and universalize it” poem elicits an elegiac pathos (a feeling of sympathy or (77). And Helen Vendler remarks that “even in Lowell’s pity) by accumulating subjective and personal details “THE NEGRO SPEAKS OF RIVERS” 337 around a missing central event: the death for which the Nash was born in Rye, New York. After a single year poem is composed. at Harvard and a few odd jobs, he began working at the Other narrative-lyrics include Dove’s sequence in Doubleday publishing company. During his time at Thomas and Beulah (1986), John BERRYMAN’s loosely there, Nash became acquainted with the New York autobiographical DREAM SONGS (1969), Williams’s frag- literati, which resulted in a brief stint as managing edi- mented “Spring and All” (1923) and sections of PATER- tor for the New Yorker. His first book of poetry, Hard SON (1963), Eliot’s “Burbank with a Baedeker: Lines, was published in 1931 and became a best-seller. Bleinstein with a Cigar” and “Sweeney Erect” (1920), Sixteen new books followed, as well as many collections Warren’s “Pondy Woods” (1935) and “Kentucky of previously published poems. He married Frances Mountain Farm” (1935), many of Denise LEVERTOV’s Leonard in 1931, and the couple’s two daughters, Linell volumes, including The Freeing of the Dust (1972), and Isabel, appear frequently in Nash’s verse. His other Robert HAYDEN’s “The Dream” (1970), and H. D.’s TRIL- writings include plays, lyrics, and children’s books. To OGY (1944) and HELEN IN EGYPT (1961). his irritation, however, he won no awards. Nash’s wit may be sharp and to the point, as it is in BIBLIOGRAPHY his oft-quoted “Reflection on Ice-Breaking” (1931): Gooch, Brad. City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O’Hara. New York: Knopf, 1993. “Candy / Is dandy / But liquor / Is quicker.” His longer Lowell, Robert. Collected Prose. New York: Farrar, Straus & poems contain ruminations on everything from matri- Giroux, 1987. mony to airplane engineering. In “Portrait of the Artist Perkins, David. A History of Modern Poetry. Vol. II. Cam- as a Prematurely Old Man” (1934), he distinguishes bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987. between sins of commission and sins of omission, Perloff, Marjorie. “From Image to Action: The Return of deciding that the latter kind is worse, because “about Story in Post-Modern Poetry.” Contemporary Literature sins of omission there is one particularly painful lack of 23.4 (1982): 411–427. beauty, / Namely, it isn’t as though it had been a riotous Vendler, Helen. Part of Nature, Part of Us: Modern American red-letter day or night every time you neglected to do Poets. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980. your duty.” Sins of commission are “what you are doing Anthony Cuda when you are doing something you ortant” (to rhyme with “important”). In Nash’s world of lovingly bickering NASH, OGDEN (1902–1971) Ogden Nash couples and overactive children, these sins are compar- was a humorous poet whose distinctive, playful poetry atively rare. His interest is in the sins of ordinary life, was very popular during his lifetime and is still fre- such as failing to answer a letter or to renew an insur- quently quoted. Nash’s poems are known for their pre- ance policy. Nash’s humor is based in a detailed and posterous rhymes and for their cheerful, affectionate loving observation of everyday truths and foibles, trans- skewering of middle-class American life. His lines formed by his eccentric and charming words into deliberately break every metrical rule, exaggerating poems that simultaneously satirize and praise. patterns of speech. His rhymes often depend on new BIBLIOGRAPHY coinages so that “dictionary” rhymes with “fictionary” Stuart, David. The Life and Rhymes of Ogden Nash. New York: (“The Eight O’clock Peril” [1935]) and “Calcutta” Madison Books, 2000. echoes “butta” and “mutta” (“Arthur” [1940]). While much of the humor of Nash’s poetry comes from this Rachel Trousdale sort of linguistic tomfoolery, his subject matter is also funny, consisting of philosophical musings on families, “THE NEGRO SPEAKS OF RIVERS” flirtation, animals, money, language, and work. Nash LANGSTON HUGHES (1921) The poet’s first loved Lord Byron and John Keats, and his early poems mature and most recognizable published poem, “The were imitations of the romantic style, but in his mature Negro Speaks of Rivers” became an anthem for work he created a new poetic form. Langston HUGHES’s life and poetry and the Civil Rights 338 NEMEROV, HOWARD movement in the United States. Hughes is most highly speaker’s soul evoke thoughts of death, but also death- regarded for his poems that utilize blues rhythm, but in lessness and transcendence; as Arnold Rampersad this earlier poem he employs a rhythmic structure more says, Hughes becomes “the poet who sings of life akin to the cadences of a gospel sermon. Hughes was because he has known death” (1,40). interested in capturing the oral traditions of African BIBLIOGRAPHY Americans, and here he fittingly uses a rhythm that rep- Barksdale, Richard K. Langston Hughes: The Poet and His Crit- resents an important part of black culture and life. ics. Chicago: American Library Association, 1977. Written while crossing the Mississippi River by Rampersad, Arnold. The Life of Langston Hughes, Volume I: train, the poem was published in the African-American 1902–1941. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. journal Crisis in June 1921. Although not infused with ———. The Life of Langston Hughes, Volume II: 1941–1967. blues rhythm and written outside of the HARLEM REN- New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. AISSANCE, Hughes later included it in his collection The Joseph Schaub Weary Blues (1926), which is now noted as an impor- tant part of that literary movement. The poem eventu- NEMEROV, HOWARD (1920–1991) Howard ally became so closely identified with Hughes that it Nemerov has often been described as “deeply divided,” was chosen to be read at his funeral service. which is reflected in his dual devotion to poetry and Hughes establishes the rhythm of a gospel preacher fiction as well as his incorporation of romantic visions through his use of repetition of particular words and with deep skepticism. Louis Rubin writes that phrases within a free verse structure. Anaphora (repe- Nemerov’s poetry “is unique in its magnificent fusion tition of words or phrases at the start of lines) in the of idea and emotion in language. He wrote two kinds middle stanzas also contributes to the sermonlike qual- of poems. One kind was witty, acerbic, satirical [while ity; “I bathed,” “I built,” “I looked,” and “I heard” begin the other was] lyric, philosophical, meditative” (677). these lines. The longer lines also recall Walt Whitman’s Nemerov was born in New York City. His sister was extended lines in Song of Myself (1855), establishing the photographer Diane Arbus, who committed sui- the African-American tradition as not only part of the cide in 1971. Nemerov taught at Bennington College African but also the American traditions. and Brandeis University (1966–68), moving to Wash- Thematically the poem speaks of connection and ington University at St. Louis in 1969. He was a con- tradition. The speaker links himself to the rivers of the sultant in poetry to the Library of Congress (1963–64) ancient and New Worlds. In taking the reader on a tour and chancellor of the American Academy of Poets from of these rivers that have been part of his and his ances- 1976. Nemerov’s many prizes and honors include the tors’ lives for centuries, he connects his experience— first Theodore ROETHKE Memorial Award (1968), Frank and by extension, that of all African Americans—to the O’HARA Memorial Prize (1971), the National Book beginnings of the world: first the Euphrates, which Award (1978), the Pulitzer Prize for poetry (1978) for flowed through the Garden of Eden, then to Central his Collected Poems, and the Bollingen Prize for poetry Africa, at whose heart is the Congo River. Next he (1981). He served as poet laureate of the United States makes the connection to one of the great early civiliza- from 1988 to 1990. tions: ancient Egypt. Finally, he brings this connection His Reflexions on Poetry and Poetics (1982) uses and tradition to America as his thoughts travel down Menelaus’s encounter with Proteus in Homer’s The the Mississippi. This American tradition, however, is Odyssey as the analogy for the role of the artist: “The not one yoked by slavery and death, though it hints at grasping and hanging on to the powerful and refractory their inextricable tie to African-American experience. spirit in its slippery transformations of a single force The Mississippi is connected to Abraham Lincoln, a flowing through clock, day, violet, greying hair, trees reminder of the past injustices of slavery while carry- dropping their leaves, the harvest in which by a pecu- ing the promise of freedom. The images of the setting liarly ceremonial transmutation the grain by which we sun, dusk, and the deepness of the rivers and the live is seen without contradiction as the corpse we NEW FORMALISM 339 come to” (220). Nemerov was influenced by the expand and popularize poetry’s reading audience in philosopher Owen Barfield, who contended that matter contemporary American culture. The term expansive is imbued with consciousness, which in conventional poetry also includes the New Narrative poets, a closely religious terms is expressed in such notions as the earth aligned (and overlapping) group who, as the name is the revelation of God. Nemerov strives to depict the suggests, wrote poems (often book-length sequences) inseparability of two kinds of consciousness; The indi- that tell stories, fictional or otherwise. vidual poet’s mind can never be separated from the con- Early essays by New Formalist poets pointed out sciousness or “mindfulness”—a term used by Barfield that current creative-writing education in America, by to mean “consciousness” or “design”—of things, nor ignoring or forgetting prosody (the study and tech- can the inherent mindfulness of things be recognized nique of writing in meter), severely limited the range of but for the poet whose mind mirrors them. The mutu- poems or styles in which a young poet could perform. ally exclusive nature of these elements is illustrated in Free verse seemed to be the only model genuinely the final lines of “The Blue Swallows” (1967), which available to an up-and-coming poet (see PROSODY AND explain that the poem itself is not the point; the point FREE VERSE). Worse, writing-workshop training that is its role in rediscovering the world, “where loveliness emphasized the personal voice over the listening ear adorns intelligible things, / because the mind’s eye lit left few standards (aside from apt personal expression) the sun.” While it is commonly accepted that the light for evaluating the tens of thousands of new poems from the Sun made human life possible, Nemerov those workshops produced every year—a literary situ- reverses the terms to suggest that human origins are ation that Brad LEITHAUSER, in his essay “Metrical Illit- mental to the same extent that they are physical. eracy” (1983), compares both to the search for needles Throughout his poetry Nemerov emphasizes that the in a haystack and to the well-known image of innu- role of the poet or artist should be “finding and faith- merable “monkeys pecking at typewriters” (149–151). fully reflecting the mindfulness / That is in things, and Dana GIOIA, one of the New Formalists’ most outspo- not the things themselves.” ken writers, was more severe: “this lack of training BIBLIOGRAPHY makes [many young poets] deaf to their own inepti- Bartholomay, Julia. The Shield of Perseus: The Vision and Imag- tude,” he wrote in a 1987 Hudson Review essay (Gwynn ination of Howard Nemerov. Gainsville, Fla.: University of 26). The New Formalists’ return to meter and rhyme Gainesville Press, 1972. was thus originally a call for new poetry with a greater Potts, Donna. Howard Nemerov and Objective Idealism: The awareness of its own technique and with a stronger Influence of Owen Barfield. Columbia: University of Mis- link to the practices of poets before T. S. ELIOT, William souri Press, 1994. Carlos WILLIAMS, and Ezra POUND. New Formalism’s Rubin, Louis. “In Memory of Howard Nemerov 1920–1991. first task was to differentiate itself from the dominant Sewanee Review 99 (fall 1991): 673–679. style of the time, and the most obvious difference here Donna Potts was the New Formalists’ use of meter and traditional forms, such as the sonnet. NEW FORMALISM New Formalism is the However, as any of the New Formalists would name applied to a movement of poets who emerged in acknowledge, formal poetry was still being practiced the 1980s and 1990s, writing in meter and sometimes by several well-known and well-respected figures from in rhyme, reacting against the perceived orthodoxy of a previous generation: Such poets as Anthony HECHT, the CONFESSIONAL or autobiographical free verse LYRIC Richard WILBUR, and John HOLLANDER, had risen to POETRY current in POETRY JOURNALS and creative writing prominence in the 1950s, before the domination of programs generally since the 1960s. The movement is autobiographical free verse that Gioia and Leithauser also frequently called “Expansive Poetry,” for its argued against. From the beginning, some of the New attempt to broaden the modes, voices, and techniques Formalists (Leithauser, J. D. MCCLATCHY, Mary Jo available to contemporary poetry and for its hope to SALTER, or Gjertrud SCHNACKENBERG, for example) 340 NEW FORMALISM seemed to draw directly on the classicist strategies of both the politics of the New Formalism (if such a dif- this previous generation, preserving a certain cautious fuse movement can be said to have a single politics) tone, academic distance from their subjects, and an and what it is to practice writing in form. When Ira admiration for high culture (Breslin 144–145). Others Sadoff writes, for example, that New Formalism is too among the New Formalists adopted a stance toward “univocal,” because in a multicultural society “our received culture that would be identified as typical for poetries are enriched by otherness, by many differ- the movement. In his essay “What’s New about the ent . . . varieties of meters” (8), he seems to be accus- New Formalism?” (1988), Robert McPhillips argues ing iambic meter of a kind of tyranny, when the New that the chief innovations of the New Formalists are an Formalists as a group do their best to use as many acceptance of popular culture, vernacular diction, and meters as English will bear. (If iambs or iambic meter direct (not distanced) depiction of emotion: “If the are dominant in their work, it is because that measure [New Formalist] poem concerns cultural objects, they is well suited to the language, not because it somehow are likely to be from popular culture and to be indige- exerts a conservative domination over the language. nously American,” for instance, Charles Martin’s trip to Language precedes meter in any sensible account of a Brooklyn aquarium or Dana Gioia’s “Cruising with prosody.) However, Sadoff seems to be more reason- the Beach Boys” (160–163). By avoiding the high able when he suggests that “poems that privilege Eurocentric culture and the sometimes arch conceits or sound and meter are conservative . . . because they diction of the 1950s formalists, this wing of the New decontextualize poetry”: That is, by making formal Formalism hoped to create a more accessible poetry, to exactness or beauty an end in itself, formalists run the “revers[e] poetry’s declining importance to the cul- risk of writing in a kind of social isolation that, Sadoff ture,” as Gioia puts it, by reaching out to the general argues, may keep them from being politically respon- American reader (Gwynn 23)—not the “mass audience sible (7). This is a reasonable argument, but only to the of television or radio,” exactly, but the segment of the extent that a poem becomes rarefied on its way to general public that still enjoys “serious novels, film, being a finished work of art—and this is clearly a crit- drama, jazz, . . . and the other modern arts” (Can icism that could be turned against many free verse Poetry Matter 249). The New Formalists, to regain an poets as well as against Leithauser or James MERRILL audience alienated not only by the high culture of a (whom Sadoff inappropriately lists among his “neo- Hecht or Hollander but also by the abstruseness of a formalists”). Still, the social “decontextualization” of John ASHBERY or Jorie GRAHAM (to say nothing of the the work of art may be the shadow side of the value of deliberate alienations struck by the LANGUAGE poets), civility implicit in writing in meter, the “premium not kept their language direct and their allusions recogniz- only on technique, but on a larger cultural vision that able. “Rather than be bards for the poetry subculture,” restores harmony and balance to the arts” (Jarman and as Gioia puts it, “they aspired to become the poets for Mason xviii–xix): Critics, such as Sadoff, might see this an age of prose” (249). restored harmony as a loss of necessary discord. Certainly the New Formalists drew criticism from Paul Breslin, in a more convincing critique, writes many sides, as their essays (though not their poems) that the poets of the New Formalism, as they invoke were often polemic and dismissive of the virtues of the Beach Boys rock group or personal ads (as in much contemporary poetry. Frequently these attacks Vikram SETH’s novel-in-verse The Golden Gate [1986]) portrayed meter itself as a sort of ancient fascism, “arti- “are inclined to take white middle-class life too readily ficial, elitist, retrogressive, right-wing, and ...un- as the universal” (145). This is a difficult criticism for American” (Can Poetry Matter 32), as if the regular the New Formalists to answer, for if they write from alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables or the popular culture or a popular idiom, the populace on decision to break every line after five beats somehow which they draw is most generally their own, and a encoded a political message. These blanket arguments number of the more prominent New Formalists hold against form or formalism generally misunderstand Ivy League degrees. To invoke the working-class south- THE NEW YORK SCHOOL 341 ern childhood of Andrew Hudgins (The Glass Hammer two anthologies, however, a very strong case is made [1994]) or the lesbian love sonnets of Marilyn HACKER for the resurgence of writing in form in the final is not really an answer to Breslin’s criticism, except to decades of the 20th century. show that writing in traditional forms neither pre- It is still too early to say with certainty what place cludes nor excludes the writing of other voices or other the New Formalism will have in the history of Ameri- lives. It may be true, however, that the New Formalists’ can poetry. One measure of the movement’s success, as search for a popular audience has led many of them to Maillard suggests, “can be seen in the ...increasing accept popular culture too readily “as ‘the’ established number of young poets writing formal verse” (68). culture” (Breslin 145). Recent books of truly startling quality by poets, such as Still, as the scope of the New Formalist movement Philip Stephens (The Determined Days [2000]) and becomes clearer, it becomes much less possible to iden- Greg Williamson (Errors in the Script [2001]), suggest tify a single taste or technique for the group, which that some of the best poetry of the early 21st century includes both high and low culture, both strict and will be written in traditional meters or forms. How- loose metrists, and poets from many different back- ever, American poetry is still so various, so catholic of grounds. “A mistake made by nearly everyone who has taste and democratic of spirit, that it would be impos- written about the New Formalists,” Keith Maillard sible to ascribe ascendancy to any one movement or to writes in a 1995 essay, “is to claim a common ground draw conclusions about the direction of poetry in the for them. . . . it is impossible to find any such shared coming century. aesthetic; they are a wonderfully diverse lot” (53). BIBLIOGRAPHY This diversity is clear in the anthology Rebel Angels: Breslin, Paul. “Two Cheers for the New Formalism.” Kenyon 25 Poets of the New Formalism (1996), which Mark JAR- Review 13.2 (spring 1991): 143–148. MAN and David Mason edited for Story Line Press (a Finch, Annie, ed. After New Formalism: Poets on Form, Narra- publisher that has consistently supported and pub- tive, and Tradition. Ashland, Ore.: Story Line Press, 1999. lished the New Formalists). Jarman and Mason include ———., ed. A Formal Feeling Comes: Poems in Form by Con- “poets who are chatty and elegiac, satirical and gently temporary Women. Ashland, Ore.: Story Line Press, 1994. moving, [whose] range of subjects and forms has Gioia, Dana. Can Poetry Matter?: Essays on Poetry and Ameri- already done much to restore vitality to the art” (Jar- can Culture. St. Paul, Minn.: Graywolf Press, 1992. man and Mason xix), and although this last claim may Gwynn, R. S., ed. New Expansive Poetry: Theory, Criticism, seem overstated, the strength of the anthology largely History. Ashland, Ore.: Story Line Press, 1999. bears it out. Rebel Angels is an impressive collection, Jarman, Mark, and David Mason, eds. Rebel Angels: 25 Poets of the New Formalism. Ashland, Ore.: Story Line Press, 1996. but it also gives shape to a group of poets whose num- Sadoff, Ira. “Neo-Formalism: a Dangerous Nostalgia.” Ameri- bers had been heretofore variously determined by the can Poetry Review 19.1 (January/February 1990) 7–13. attention of individual essayists. It includes such prominent voices as Gioia, Leithauser, Martin, Salter, Isaac Cates Hacker, Rachel HADAS, and Molly PEACOCK, although it does not include Schnackenberg or McClatchy. The THE NEW YORK SCHOOL The New York anthology also gives a place to such underacknowl- school of poetry was an innovative group of poets made edged poets as Rafael CAMPO, Wyatt Prunty, and up principally by Frank O’HARA, John ASHBERY, Barbara Andrew Hudgins, as well as to young poets who at that GUEST, James SCHUYLER, and Kenneth KOCH. Their poetry time had published only a single book, such as Rachel was experimental, philosophical, staunchly antiestab- Wetzsteon, Elizabeth Alexander, and Greg Williamson. lishment, and antiacademic. The group began writing Jarman’s and Mason’s work is excluded, as are a num- in the 1950s and is closely associated with a similarly ber of the women in Annie FINCH’s more extensive A named movement in painting alternatively called Formal Feeling Comes: Poems in Form by Contemporary ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM or action painting. The name Women (1994), also from Story Line Press. Between the New York school is a result of an aesthetic sensibility 342 THE NEW YORK SCHOOL and writing style, more than simply a location, culturally dominant conceptions of masculinity. More- although all five poets did live in New York City at over, like the abstract expressionists, the poets became some point during their formative years as writers. increasingly interested in the surface and medium of Their poetry is steeped in the facts, events, and objects the work of art. In other words, they began to think of everyday life, and it is characterized by an impulse to that the language of the poem—its sounds, structures, blur the boundary between art and life; in writing forms, interactions of words, and textures—should be poetry that includes the discourse and details of normal just as important as any attempt to create meaning. human interaction, the poets conflated the differences This was a radical departure from the mainstream between what is normally considered material for art poetry being practiced at the time (by academic poets, and what people experience in day-to-day existence. such as Robert LOWELL, Allen TATE, and John Crowe They are also noteworthy for appropriating various RANSOM), and it was also a significant departure from aspects of French SURREALISM and French symbolism; their peers, such as the BEATS and the BLACK MOUNTAIN they especially employed typically surrealistic juxtapo- SCHOOL, who were engaged in other experimental sitions, which tended to be combined with whimsical poetic movements. The New York school was different, observations of daily human behavior and speech. because it created an emphatic shift away from the Their use of ironic gestures coupled with an often supposed meaning of the poem and toward an interest casual, informal tone and style created a unique tension in the materiality of language. that characterizes their distinct poetic sensibility. The New York school had a tremendous influence The term New York school was supposedly coined on poets of future generations who have come to share by John Bernard Myers, the director of the Tibor de a similar sensibility and style. Some of the poets who Nagy Gallery in New York City, in an effort to connect are considered to be part of the second generation of the increasingly popular abstract expressionist painters the New York school include Ron PADGETT, Bill BERK- with the then-emerging poets who were also working SON, Ted BERRIGAN, and Joe Brainard. Other poets who in New York at the time. Both groups frequently col- are sometimes associated with the New York school laborated on projects or shared and argued about ideas include Anne WALDMAN, Harry MATHEWS, Edwin Denby, regarding art, politics, and philosophy. The character- Kenward Elmslie, Alice NOTLEY, Bernadette MAYER, istics associated with the label—the New York Eileen MYLES, and Tony Towle. Locus Solus, alternately school—emerge first and foremost from the poets’ edited by Schuyler, Ashbery, and Koch, was the pri- antitraditionalist aesthetic and highly experimental mary literary magazine that came to represent the aes- style. Taking the lead from such painters as Jackson thetic flavor of the first generation. Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Robert Motherwell The impact of the New York school has been wide and, later, a second generation of painters—Fairfield and varied. This group has been considered the pre- Porter, Jane Freilicher, Nell Blaine, Grace Hartigan, cursor to various postmodern movements in poetry, Larry Rivers, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jasper Johns— especially LANGUAGE poetry. In particular, the notion these poets strove for artistic change by proclaiming that anything in life is material for a poem, ranging poetry to be a process, not simply a product. from pop culture images and events to daily thoughts The poets never collaborated together on a mani- and routines, emerged with the poetry of the New York festo, nor did they construct any kind of formal school school. What are often called Frank O’Hara’s “I do this, or program, but they did create a very close-knit com- I do that poems” (qtd. in Gooch 288), which note the munity of writers and painters who shared a variety of everyday details of the poet’s life, exemplify this blend- strong convictions. They also lived an alternative ing of the mundane with the structure and language of lifestyle, which differed greatly from the dominant a poem. In one of O’Hara’s poems entitled simply conservative culture of the time. Three of the five poets “Poem” (1950), the speaker proposes to an interlocu- in the core group were homosexual (Ashbery, Schuyler, tor that they go for a stroll in inclement conditions: “if O’Hara), and all of them, in different degrees, explored it rains hard on our toes / we’ll stroll like poodles.” The THE NEW YORK SCHOOL 343 playful language here is typical. Like O’Hara, many of crete and material connection to the everyday—direct the poets in the New York school seem comfortable human experience and language—that is the source of using a collage of thoughts, actions, and details from a poem’s unfolding. O’Hara describes this impulse in their daily experience in ways that may be surreal and “Personism: A Manifesto” (1961): “I’m not saying that complex or direct and straightforward. I don’t have practically the most lofty ideas of anyone Ultimately the poetry of the New York school is dif- writing today, but what difference does that make? ficult to characterize, because it contains a tremendous they’re [sic] just ideas. The only good thing about it is variety of styles, themes, and methods. Ashbery’s that when I get lofty enough I’ve stopped thinking and poetry, for example, is often characterized as oblique, that’s when refreshment arrives” (498). This “refresh- indeterminate, and periphrastic; it may have no sense ment” can be characterized by a poetry that resists tra- of an ending, and it perpetually circumnavigates ditional forms and poetic devices, such as end-rhyme, thoughts and images. His poetry is akin to the move- meter, alliteration, and even metaphor (see PROSODY ment of consciousness itself, whereby the mental AND FREE VERSE). Even when most oblique, as in Ash- process and language serve to complicate perception bery and Guest, the poetry of the New York school and understanding, rather than creating any kind of stays grounded in the materiality of language. determinate conclusions. O’Hara’s poetry can be an New York school poetry is, most of all, sympathetic intriguing mixture of surrealist juxtapositions, but, at to the visual arts from which it draws its inspiration; other times, it contains a very casual discourse with a indeed, the materiality important in abstract expres- conversational style that seems like a letter written to a sionism—its foregrounding of paint itself—is an obvi- friend. Like O’Hara, Schuyler is known for his conver- ous shared aesthetic. The five core poets, except for sational style and charm, and he is perhaps the most Koch, wrote extensively about art, especially painting. lyrical and musical of the group. Guest’s language is O’Hara and Schuyler wrote for ARTnews and both full of tonal complexity that is often rendered through became curators at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. shifts in sound and syntax rather than content. Koch’s Guest and Schuyler were both associate editors at ART- poetry is replete with wit and humor, and it tends to be news, and Ashbery established a career as an art critic, more narrative and direct than that of the other writers writing for ARTnews, Art in America, Newsweek, and the of the group. Paris Herald Tribune. The influence of painting is evi- All the same, there are some common characteris- dent in their poetry through a shift in attention from tics. The most significant of these is the poetry’s sense symbolism, metaphor, and signification to the actual of a process, in which a work tends to emphasize its operations and materials required to write a poem. own methods, procedures, and strategies, rather than Like a painter’s interest in the canvas, paint, and indi- simply the end result. In other words, the poem vidual brushstrokes, these poets became interested in becomes a revelation of its own process as a specific calling attention to their own basic materials—words, kind of discourse, and not simply a finished product. phrases, images, sentences, and the white space of the This strategy fits effectively with the content of the page itself. poem, which is often tied to the events of everyday life. Schuyler wrote, in 1959, that “New York poets, The poetry is written while seemingly moving and except I suppose the color blind, are affected most by observing, whether through reality or through the flux the floods of paint in whose crashing surf we all scram- of consciousness. In the poetry there exists a strong ble” (qtd. in Lehman Beyond 2). A painterly poetics in interest in intellectual and philosophical ideas, ranging this sense can be, on the one hand, involved in creating from philosophical movements, such as existentialism, a vivid picture with intense sensory detail, concrete phenomenology, transcendentalism, and radical imagery, tonal complexity, and multivalent coloration, empiricism, to poetic trends, such as romanticism, and, on the other hand, a poetics that is interested in imagism (see IMAGIST SCHOOL), and objectivism (see detaching language from its meaning. Like the abstract OBJECTIVIST SCHOOL). However, ultimately it is the con- expressionists who stopped using lines and color to 344 NIEDECKER, LORINE represent things or objects, and who began visualizing O’Hara, Frank. “Personism: A Manifesto.” In The Collected the canvas as an arena in which to act out a process Poems of Frank O’Hara, edited by Donald Allen. Berkeley: detached from verbal or linguistic logic, these poets University of California Press, 1995, pp. 498–499. began to regard writing as an activity that always refers Ward, Geoff. Statues of Liberty: The New York School of Poets. to itself in some way and poetry as a type of collabora- New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993. Watkin, William. In the Process of Poetry: The New York tion with life and language. The poets, however, faced School and the Avant-Garde. Lewisburg, N.Y.: Bucknell an additional paradox that the painters did not: They University Press, 2001. were working with language, the terms of which are abstract and inherently denotative. The New York Mark Tursi school poet must turn the signifying quality of language against itself and must do so in a concrete and visual NIEDECKER, LORINE (1903–1970) A poet way. The images and details the New York school poets of the OBJECTIVIST movement of the 1930s, Lorine created often subordinated or even abandoned referent Niedecker is known for her use of pristine images, and meaning in favor of texture, sound, or linguistic minimalist technique, and subtle wordplay. A rural gesture. Ashbery is perhaps most notable in this regard, poet, Niedecker was nevertheless cosmopolitan in her as can be seen in the following excerpt from “Our literary connections. Her best-known and most artisti- Youth” (1962): “Of bricks . . . Who built it? Like some cally intimate correspondence was with the objectivist crazy balloon / Of bricks . . . Who built it? Like some poet Louis ZUKOFSKY. Through Zukofsky, she met such crazy balloon .../ When love leans on us.” The words poets as William Carlos WILLIAMS, George OPPEN, Cid create a tension that invigorates the possibilities of lan- CORMAN, and Carl RAKOSI. guage by challenging causality and referentiality. Guest Lorine Faith Niedecker was born in Fort Atkinson, writes similarly in her poem “An Emphasis Falls on Wisconsin. She spent most of her life in a cabin by the Reality” (1989): “Cloud fields change into furniture / Rock River along the shores of Lake Koshkonong on furniture metamorphizes into fields.” Black Hawk Island. Niedecker is frequently referred to The poetry of the New York school was pivotal to as a poet of “place,” because of her strong connection the American literary landscape of the 20th century, and frequent poetic use of the people and environs of because of its liberating effects on poets who could her home. She was not widely known during her life- now consider a greater range and kind of material time, but those who knew and appreciated her work appropriate for poetry, as well as the way in which this were loyal in their support. In 1946 she published her material could be expressed. These poets demon- first book-length publication of poems, New Goose. strated that colloquial discourse was a viable and effec- Her next book, My Friend Tree, appeared in 1961. Only tive means for expressing daily emotions and thoughts, five books of Niedecker’s poetry were published in her as well as for expressing deeper imaginative and meta- lifetime, the last one, My Life by Water, just months physical challenges, such as identity formation and before her death. consciousness. This movement demonstrated that Niedecker’s poetic themes are diverse and far-reach- almost anything, including the mundane and ordinary, ing. Her work ranges from poems of geology and nat- could be made exciting and intriguing within the mar- ural history to poems of historical figures and current gins of a poem. events. The subject that seemed to inspire her most was the lake country she lived in and the small town BIBLIOGRAPHY “folks” around her. From 1944–50 she worked as a Gooch, Brad. City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O’Hara. New York: Knopf, 1993. copy editor for Hoard’s Dairyman, and she calls upon Lehman, David. The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New this experience in her 1950 poem “In the great snow- York School of Poets. New York: Doubleday, 1998. fall before the bomb” (1961). Here she gives a detailed ———., ed. Beyond Amazement: New Essays on John Ashbery. description of her experience in the working world, in Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1980. a voice that balances the line between dismissal and “NOTES TOWARD A SUPREME FICTION” 345 admiration. “I worked the print shop / right down her seemingly simple but often enigmatic works is among . . . the folk from whom all poetry flows.” increasing. Niedecker was involved in some of the Keeping with the objectivist tradition, Niedecker most philosophically and technically innovative shifts worked to capture and report accurately the folk in modern poetry (see MODERNISM). She used poetry speech and natural rhythms of the Fort Atkinson peo- and language as a meeting and meshing place for psy- ple and landscape. She wanted to present life as it was, chology, history, science, and art. stripping away all modifiers that could bias or senti- BIBLIOGRAPHY mentalize the people or places around her. In the final Hayes, Paul G. “‘At the Close—Someone’: Lorine’s Marriage stanza to this poem, she discusses not only the process to Al Millen.” In Lorine Niedecker: Woman and Poet, edited of writing poetry, but also its effect in her life as a by Jenny Penberthy. Orono, Maine: National Poetry Foun- medium of appreciation and isolation. She wonders, dation, 1996, pp. 65–77. what would people “say” if they were aware that “I sit Penberthy, Jenny, ed. Lorine Niedecker: Woman and Poet. for two months on six lines / of poetry?” Orono, Maine: National Poetry Foundation, 1997. Niedecker, like other objectivist poets, believed that Judith S. Girardi excessive verbiage could obfuscate or worse yet com- promise meaning within a poetic work. Because of “NOTES TOWARD A SUPREME FIC- this, Niedecker’s poems are often short and focused as TION” WALLACE STEVENS (1942) Despite they capture a person, place, moment, or emotion and the provisional nature of its title, “Notes toward a hold it suspended in time with a gemlike integrity. Supreme Fiction” contains Wallace STEVENS’s most sus- Toward the end of her life, Niedecker began to string tained and significant comment on his poetics, and it her short poems together to form larger poem marks an important expression of modern humanist sequences. This poetic form encompasses some of her thought. In it, Stevens relates some of his neo-roman- best work, setting her clear images and concentrated tic ideas about the sublime—yet fully human—heights ideas within a larger context, while still keeping ver- of experience and understanding that are available to biage sparse. us through poetry. The poem certifies that while our The beginning poem in Niedecker’s sequence everyday understanding of life is imperfect, poetry can Thomas Jefferson (1970) displays these characteristics. point to a truth about the human condition that goes This short segment focuses on the difficulties of politi- beyond the ordinary. This is a truth that is “Venerable cal life by relating a fleeting but impassioned thought and articulate and complete,” even if it is accessible as Jefferson is caught between his role as husband and only in our temporary experience of the poem. patriot. “My wife is ill!” he says, and yet he must await To be sure, “Notes” has many concerns beyond “a quorum.” The forceful clause that begins the poetry, and it would be inaccurate to characterize it as sequence clearly sets the stage not only in content (Jef- nothing more than a statement of literary philosophy. ferson’s wife is sick), but also of pace and tone (Jeffer- Nevertheless it is illuminating to focus on the poem’s son is concerned and alarmed by his wife’s condition). self-reflexive qualities. “Notes” begins with an eight- The image of Jefferson sitting dutifully in a room while line prologue in which, according to Harold Bloom, feeling internally trapped by circumstance is made the poet declares his love for his poem, indicating that very clear in this short verse of four lines. Yet the situ- this is an emotional as well as an intellectual project for ation is not overdrawn or sentimentalized. As critic Stevens (168). The poet also affirms his belief that we Paul G. Hayes says: “Such is all Niedecker’s poetry: can comprehend and find satisfaction in the poem’s never rhapsodic, always spare, clear, honest, distilled “vivid transparence,” a vital and vibrant truth that to an irreducible base” (67). comes to us without mediation. However, the certainty Despite the lack of recognition in her lifetime, inter- of the prologue is short-lived, and the poet’s confi- est in Niedecker’s poetry continues to grow. Her poems dence in completely revealing this truth dissolves as are consistently anthologized, and scholarship around the work progresses. We might have expected as 346 NOTLEY, ALICE much, since the title promises nothing more than some male-owned” (531). Although her poetics are loosely unified “notes” that are aimed “toward” some- uniquely her own, William Carlos WILLIAMS, Philip thing which Stevens is reasonably sure exists but that WHALEN, and Ted BERRIGAN, in their respective ways ultimately remains elusive. showed the route to the independence that is Notley’s Stevens names this goal the “supreme fiction.” This trademark. destination marks not only our encounter with it—or Notley grew up in Needles, California, in the with “the first idea”—but also the means by which we Sonoma Desert. She graduated from Barnard College experience it. When Stevens speaks of a “fiction,” he in 1967 and two years later received an M.F.A. from does not mean to suggest that this ideal is unreal or the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop, where she untrue. Instead, taking advantage of the word’s Latin met Berrigan, her future husband. They had two sons, root, Stevens uses “fiction” to emphasize that this is Anselm and Edmund, both now established poets in something constructed, arranged, or, to use one of his their own right. Notley and Berrigan settled in New terms, “confected.” Still although the supreme fiction is York’s Lower East Side in 1976, where she was soon something that is made, it is not made up: The supreme recognized as a major figure in the second generation fiction constitutes “the real,” and its “poem refreshes life of the NEW YORK SCHOOL. Berrigan died seven years so that we share, / For a moment, the first idea.” As a later, but Notley remained in New York until 1992, guide to a truth which we intuit with a faculty beyond when she moved to Paris with her second husband, rationality, the supreme fiction is, in part, a humanist the British poet Douglas Oliver. Her long poem Mys- substitute for religious faith. However, the poet looks to teries of Small Houses received the Los Angeles Times produce this supremity, or what he calls “The final ele- Book of the Year Award in 1998, and in 2002 she gance, not to console, / Nor sanctify, but plainly to pro- received an American Academy of Arts and Letters pound.” In other words, whereas for Stevens Award, the Griffin Poetry Prize for her long poem Dis- conventional religion aims to provide solace or to trans- obedience, and the Shelley Memorial Award of the form the mundane into something divine, the poem of Poetry Society of America. the supreme fiction intends only to reveal that the In The Descent of Alette (1992), Notley uses quota- human sphere is profound and sufficient unto itself. tion marks to isolate and emphasize words as spoken BIBLIOGRAPHY units: “it smelled of mice,” “smelled of warm fir” “& Bloom, Harold. Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate. meek blood.” Drawing on Notley’s dreams, the poem Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1976. concerns a “descent” into mythic depths where a dom- Kermode, Frank. Wallace Stevens. New York: Grove Press, ineering man, the tyrant, must be deposed. A woman’s 1961. epic (a genre traditionally reserved for men), the poem Vendler, Helen. On Extended Wings: Wallace Stevens’ Longer was originally published in Notley’s and Oliver’s The Poems. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969. Scarlet Cabinet (1992). Reissued in 1996, it has become Jeannine Johnson an important work in the feminist poetic canon. Notley’s Selected Poems (1993) brought together a NOTLEY, ALICE (1945– ) Alice Notley’s massive range of innovative writing, from 165 Meeting poetry attempts, in her words, to “re-center” the “I,” to House Lane (1971) to At Night the States (1988). The find how, in the wake of postmodernist criticism, one Descent of Alette was followed by Mysteries of Small can situate the first person at the center of a poem Houses (1998) and Disobedience (2001). “It’s necessary (“Small”). She has also insisted on full freedom to to maintain a state of disobedience against . . . every- speak with a woman’s voice, including during an thing,” Notley said in a lecture at King’s College, Lon- interview published in Talisman (2002): “[I] never don, in 1998 (“Poetics”). Her poetry is always identified with a poetics outside myself really. Partly I evolving, always finding new forms and material. Dis- had such trouble with the concept of the [poetic] obedient to all traditions, it is among those most line. . . . As I’ve said so many times, it seemed so closely watched by avant-garde poets and critics today. NYE, NAOMI SHIHAB 347

BIBLIOGRAPHY tion, he takes himself to task for having associated McCabe, Susan. “Alice Notley’s Epic Entry: ‘An Ecstacy of there with white women and gay men. Finding Another Way of Being.’” Antioch Review (summer Struggling with these menacing feelings of guilt, 1998): 273–280. Baraka attempts to find a form of expression, a system Notley, Alice. “An Interview with Alice Notley,” by Edward of “Numbers” and “Letters,” appropriate to his nascent Foster. Talisman 23–26 (2002–2003): 506–515. black identity. In “Square Business” (1961–63), ———. “Small Houses Rebuilt with Musical Glue: A Word- another poem from Black Magic, the speaker complains by-Word with Alice Notley,” by Maureen Holm. Available online. URL: http://www.geocities.com/LyricRecovery/ that white people “own” both “language” and “num- alice_notley.htm. Downloaded April 2003. bers,” but he adds (mysteriously) that black people ———. “The Poetics of Disobedience,” Electronic Poetry own the “strong” numbers. By contrast, in “Numbers, Center. Available online. URL: http://wings.buffalo.edu/ Letters,” Baraka stakes a claim upon language. He epc/authors/notley/disob.html. Downloaded March 2003. resolves to say what he means and to “be strong / about Edward Foster it.” However, Baraka does not clearly identify the source of this “strong” black language. Is this language “NUMBERS, LETTERS” AMIRI BARAKA grounded in any personal or cultural history? On the (LEROI JONES) (1969) First published in Black one hand, Baraka suggests that the past forms the Magic (1969), “Numbers, Letters” appeared during foundation for his new idiom. His art is an expression Amiri BARAKA’s black nationalist period of the late of “all the things that make me, have formed me, col- 1960s and early 1970s, when he was one of the lead- ored me.” On the other hand, he intimates that the ing figures in the BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT. However, present is the true basis of this idiom. The history that Baraka included “Numbers, Letters” in the section of matters is “today.” Epitomizing a recurrent paradox in Black Magic entitled “Target Study: 1963–1965” and Black Arts writing, Baraka conceives of authentic black so identified the poem with the crucial phase of his identity and language as both historically conditioned personal, artistic, and ideological development that and strictly of the moment. preceded his nationalist period. Between 1963 and BIBLIOGRAPHY 1965, Baraka gradually severed his personal and pro- Baraka, Amiri. The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones. Chicago: fessional ties with the white bohemian subculture of Lawrence Hill, 1997. Greenwich Village and began to view the black com- ———. Tales. Grove: New York, 1967. munity of Harlem as his proper home. Self-con- Sollors, Werner. Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones: The Quest for a sciously autobiographical, “Numbers, Letters” is a “Populist Modernism.” New York: Columbia University meditation on the black writer’s relationships to white Press, 1978. America and black America. Matthew Calihman Baraka recalls in his 1984 autobiography that after leaving Greenwich Village for Harlem in March 1965, NYE, NAOMI SHIHAB (1952– ) Naomi he felt as if he were “Back in the homeland to help raise Shihab Nye, poet and children’s author, writes about the race” (Autobiography 295). Yet, as he readily admits, conciliation. Nye writes as Swiss/German-American- his nationalist ardor was tinged with guilt. The speaker Palestinian, Texan, wife, mother, and teacher (of both of the autobiographical fragment “Words” (1967) con- children and graduate students). William STAFFORD has fesses, “I live in Harlem . . . and suffer for my deca- been a major influence on her work. Nye’s writing dence which kept me away so long” (Tales 89). focuses on ordinary experiences and the importance of Similarly in “Numbers, Letters,” Baraka emerges as a surpassing the ordinary. Her poetry draws from Mexi- black intellectual who has recently returned, guiltily, can-American neighbors in Texas, Arab-American per- from the decadent world of white bohemia. Baraka spectives, and other cultural traditions. clearly regards his sojourn in bohemia as an act of race- The daughter of an American mother and a Palestin- treason, and, in a grotesque gesture of self-condemna- ian father, Nye grew up in St. Louis and Jerusalem and 348 NYE, NAOMI SHIHAB has spent her adult life in San Antonio. Nye has worked words instead of violence, how would our world be as a journalist and has taught at the University of Texas, different?” (159). Much of Nye’s poetry deals with how Austin. Her poetry has been featured on National Pub- to reconcile belonging to more than one ethnic or lic Radio’s The Writer’s Almanac and A Prairie Home Com- national group. In “Half and Half” (1998), soup is panion, and on PBS The Language of Life and The United made by a worman with “what she had left / in the States of Poetry. Nye’s many honors include fellowships bowl, the shriveled garlic and bent bean. / She is leav- from the Library of Congress (2000) and the Lannan ing nothing out.” To leave nothing out is Nye’s pre- Foundation (2002). She won the National Poetry Series scription for living. Her overriding principle, in life prize for Hugging the Jukebox (1982) and was a National and in her writing, is acceptance. Book Award finalist (2002) for 19 Varieties of Gazelle. BIBLIOGRAPHY The scope of Nye’s work is global. Common human Moyers, Bill, et al. The Language of Life. Garden City, N.Y.: characteristics and universal acceptance are her major Doubleday, 1995. themes. Nye often illustrates these through her own Nye, Naomi Shihab. “Talking with Poet Naomi Shihab Nye,” life. In her autobiographical novel Habibi (1997), Nye by Lisa Suhair Majaj. Al Jadid 2.13 (1996). presents the meeting of displaced Americans, new- ———. “Words to Sit in, Like Chairs.” In 911: The Book of comers to Palestine, and Palestinian villagers. Tensions Help: Authors Respond to the Tragedy, edited by Michael in the meetings are removed through the nurturing of Cart. Chicago: Cricket Books, 2002. mutual acceptance and mutual experience. ———., and Neil Conan. “Do We Need Poetry?” Talk of the Nye promotes self-questioning. In “Words to Sit In, Nation. National Public Radio. December 10, 2001. Like Chairs” (2002) she asks, “If people . . . could use Freda J. Fuller-Coursey C O D

OBJECTIVIST POETRY The term objectivist cerns can be incorporated into a poetry of formal was coined by Louis ZUKOFSKY in 1930 for “‘Objec- experimentation. tivists’ 1931,” a special issue of Poetry for which he The most important statement of objectivist poetics served as guest editor. Of the many poets included in is Zukofsky’s essay “Sincerity and Objectification: With that issue and in its follow-up anthology, An “Objec- Special Reference to the Work of Charles Reznikoff,” first tivists” Anthology (1932), the poets now most often published in “‘Objectivists’ 1931.” In this essay he lays associated with the label are Zukofsky, George OPPEN, out the fundamental principles of his own poetic prac- Carl RAKOSI, Charles REZNIKOFF, and (sometimes) the tice: The poet ought to compose always with “sincer- Englishman Basil Bunting. Lorine NIEDECKER, a Wis- ity,” the most scrupulous attention both to the objects consin poet, is also often included among the objec- and events about which he writes and to the particu- tivists. The four core members of the lars of his own language, and the finished poem ought objectivists—Oppen, Rakosi, Reznikoff, and Zukof- to exhibit “objectification,” an object-like, tangible sky—were all Jewish, urban, intensely intellectual, and form as if language were material. In these principles (except Reznikoff) politically left-wing, and their objectivist poetics goes beyond the imagism of Ezra poetry reflects these backgrounds and inclinations. Pound, which prescribed rules for dealing with These poets, who all began seriously writing and pub- images and using language but largely failed to discuss lishing in the 1920s and 1930s, remained largely the finished form that the poem ought to assume (see unknown until the 1960s; since then they have IMAGIST SCHOOL). received increasing critical attention and have been Zukofsky’s theory deeply influenced some of the recognized as an important set of influences on more poets among the objectivists, particularly Oppen, recent poetic movements, including many of the poets Rakosi, and William Carlos WILLIAMS; others of them, anthologized in Donald Allen’s The New American less closely associated with objectivism, including Poetry 1945–1960 (1960) and, later, the LANGUAGE Reznikoff and Kenneth REXROTH, seemed largely oblivi- SCHOOL (see POETRY ANTHOLOGIES). The objectivists, it ous both to the theory and to the overall label. Indeed can be argued, are a crucial bridge between the high while Zukofsky seemed to view the objectivist “move- MODERNISM of T. S. ELIOT and Ezra POUND and the post- ment” for some years as a useful marketing device for his modernism of these more recent movements. In large and his friends’ poetry, he was well aware that the objec- part because of their steadfast adherence to poetry’s tivist poets were by no means a coherent group or truth-telling ambitions, the objectivists’ work stands as school: He had arrived at the critical terms “sincerity” an important model of how political and ethical con- and “objectification” without consulting the other poets

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included in the Poetry issue, and he would always insist NALS), and Jonathan WILLIAMS, editor of the Jargon Press that there was no such thing as “objectivism.” (see POETRY PRESSES), in the 1960s. Charles Reznikoff’s poetic style was largely formed Oppen and Zukofsky, though they renewed their before he came in contact with Zukofsky and the other friendship in the late 1950s, when Oppen returned to objectivist poets, and he interpreted Zukofsky’s term New York after a decade living in Mexico, eventually objectivist as referring not so much to the shape that the broke with one another. One reason for their estrange- poem ought to take as to the poet’s stance toward real- ment was their attitudes toward difficulty in poetry. ity: Reznikoff’s own poetry, deeply influenced by train- Both men had written dense and oblique LYRIC POETRY ing in law, often takes the form of objective testimony, in the early 1930s, but Zukofsky’s work—in particular as in his long poems Testimony (1975) and HOLOCAUST his long poem “A”—grew more and more obscure over (1975), which draw directly upon court transcripts the course of its composition and serial publication. (see LONG AND SERIAL POETRY). His short poems are While Zukofsky was capable of writing lyrics of great notable for the laconic, precise manner in which they beauty and limpidity, he was also enamored of com- present both moments of interpersonal emotion and plex forms and recondite reference. As “A” moves into the varied tableaux of the Manhattan streets that the second half of its 24 sections, the poem seeks to Reznikoff walked obsessively. wind in more and more information, doing so in more Rakosi’s work is often far more playful, sometimes and more oblique, “coded” manners. Zukofsky saw even “light,” than that of his companions. He began this merely as an extension, a following-through of his writing much under the influence of the imagists and objectivist rhetoric of the early 1930s. His goal was to Wallace STEVENS, though his association with Zukofsky make the poem a continually “musical” object, and to turned his work in more angular, compressed direc- do so he experimented with various forms derived tions. While his early work is often biting and startling, from classical music. Early parts of “A”, for instance, the poems Rakosi wrote after his return to poetry in imitate the form of the baroque fugue, often to dizzy- 1965 are more relaxed, gentle, and good-humored, ing lengths, while “A”-13 is a formal imitation of the often taking the form of a loose series, such as “Amer- rhythms of one of Bach’s partitas for solo violin. icana” (1967–86). The progression of his career is Oppen’s later work is also difficult, but his difficulty largely obscured in his Collected Poems (1986), for stems not from the complexity of formal devices or the which Rakosi rearranged and often revised his earlier variety of literary, historical, philosophical, and per- work, but is clear in Poems 1923–1941, which Andrew sonal references, as in Zukofsky, but from the gravity of Crozier edited in 1995. the philosophical and ethical issues with which his The Wisconsin poet Niedecker was inspired to get poems seek to grapple. Oppen’s later poetry is obsessed in contact with Zukofsky when she read the “‘Objec- with problems of communication and community and tivists’ 1931” issue of Poetry, and she and Zukofsky derives much of its weightiness from his reading of the shared an almost four decades-long friendship and presocratic philosophers and the 20th-century German correspondence. Her poetry, which began with experi- philosopher Martin Heidegger. For Oppen, the issue of ments in SURREALISM and modifications of the forms of difficulty in poetry was ultimately an ethical matter. nursery rhymes, has much in common with Zukofsky’s Oppen felt that the obscurity of Zukofsky’s poetry was in its striking images, juxtapositions of language, and a mere superficial complexity, a screen by which Zukof- short lines. In the last decades of her life, she wrote a sky could repel the casual reader, while his own poetry, number of major sequences revolving around various in contrast, dealt with inherently difficult problems. historical figures and around the history and geology While there is no single objectivist “style” shared by of the American Midwest. While she remained largely all the poets associated with the name, there are a isolated from the other objectivist poets, her work (like number of characteristics that their poetries share. Zukofsky’s) was championed and published by Cid They all tend to write free verse (though Zukofsky and CORMAN, editor of Origin magazine (see POETRY JOUR- Niedecker experimented with forms derived from tra- OBJECTIVIST POETRY 351 ditional meters and rhyme schemes). They are Whatever momentum the objectivist movement had intensely aware of what Zukofsky calls “historic and initially generated among its participants was largely contemporary particulars” (“A”-24, 1978) including dissipated over the 1930s, and the objectivist poets both the political and the historical implications of drifted out of touch with one another; Rakosi and whatever they might be writing about. (Indeed Oppen, Oppen, in fact, completely abandoned writing poetry Zukofsky, and Rakosi worked on behalf of Communist for some years. The name, however, was revived in the Party causes during the 1930s and remained politically early 1960s when James Laughlin’s New Directions Pub- aware throughout their lives.) And, perhaps most lishers, in collaboration with the San Francisco Review, importantly, they write in conscious opposition to began publishing books by Oppen, Rakosi, and establishment verse culture: the refined formal verse Reznikoff, and in 1968 L. S. Dembo, editor of Contem- promoted by the poets and critics of the New Criticism porary Literature, conducted a series of interviews with during the 1940s and 1950s (see FUGITIVE/AGRARIAN Oppen, Rakosi, Reznikoff, and Zukofsky that helped to SCHOOL), and later what was perceived as the limp, per- solidify the critical association of the four poets as sonal, diaristic verse promoted by American creative “objectivists.” (While Oppen, Rakosi, and Reznikoff writing programs. accepted their rediscovery under this banner with good And while the term objectivist can only with diffi- grace—and perhaps bemusement—Zukofsky would culty be used as a stylistic description of these poets’ have nothing to do with a revived objectivist movement. work, the objectivists share certain fundamental He considered himself to have moved beyond that stances toward the world and the poem. All of them moment in his career, and he repeatedly refused invita- insist upon the utmost precision in the use of language tions to appear with the other three poets on “objec- and the most careful adherence to the facts of percep- tivists” programs.) Since Dembo’s interviews there has tion. This is what Zukofsky calls “sincerity,” what been increasing critical attention paid both the poets Oppen means when he says that “the poem is con- individually and to their collective achievements. cerned with a fact which it did not create” (2), and Quite apart from their critical reception, the objec- what Reznikoff intends when he relates the poet’s tivists have proved an enduring influence on impor- words to the sworn testimony given in a court of law. tant contemporary American poets, including Robert The objectivist poets, then, share a sense that the rela- CREELEY, Charles BERNSTEIN, Rachel Blau DUPLESSIS, tionship of the poem and the world must be in some Michael HELLER, David IGNATOW, Robert KELLY, Sharon sense a relationship of truth—an ethical relationship. OLDS, Michael PALMER, Jerome ROTHENBERG, Armand They may not write in superficially realistic styles, but SCHWERNER, Hugh SEIDMAN, Harvey SHAPIRO, and John their work always bears an ethical responsibility to the TAGGART. They have also been significant to a number real as perceived and experienced. of contemporary French poets, including Anne-Marie After the publication of the “‘Objectivists’ 1931” Albiach, Claude Royet-Journoud, and Emmanuel came An “Objectivists” Anthology, which was published Hocquard. by To Publishers in 1932. To was a short-lived imprint run by Oppen and edited by Zukofsky himself, and it BIBLIOGRAPHY Dembo, L. S. “The ‘Objectivist’ Poet: Four Interviews.” Con- folded soon after, having printed books by Williams temporary Literature 10 (1969): 64–91. and Pound in addition to the anthology. In 1933 DuPlessis, Rachel Blau, and Peter Quartermain, eds. The Oppen, Reznikoff, Zukofsky, and Williams combined Objectivist Nexus: Essays in Cultural Poetics. Tuscaloosa: to start the Objectivist Press, a cooperative venture University of Alabama Press, 1999. which would publish self-funded volumes. The Objec- Heller, Michael. Conviction’s Net of Branches: Essays on the tivist Press printed books by Williams, Reznikoff, and Objectivist Poets and Poetry. Carbondale: Southern Illinois Oppen before it too folded. (The imprint was briefly University Press, 1985. revived by Zukofsky’s wife, Celia, in 1948 to publish McAllister, Andrew, ed. The Objectivists. Newcastle upon his anthology A Test of Poetry.) Tyne, England: Bloodaxe, 1996. 352 “ODE TO THE CONFEDERATE DEAD”

Oppen, George. “The Mind’s Own Place.” Kulchur 10 (sum- the poem, and the debt to Eliot is clear. The fallen, mer 1963): 2–8. decaying leaves in the first stanza and throughout the Williams, William Carlos. “Objectivism.” In Princeton Encyclo- poem recall the “grimy scraps / Of withered leaves” pedia of Poetry and Poetics, edited by Alex Preminger et al. that wrap around the feet of the addressee in Eliot’s Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1965, p. 582. “Preludes” (1917). Tate’s startling images of a blind Zukofsky, Louis. Prepositions+: The Collected Critical Essays. crab, leaping jaguar, and spiders are reminiscent, Hanover N. H.: Wesleyan University Press Press, 2000. respectively, of Eliot’s “ragged claws” in “THE LOVE SONG ———., ed. An “Objectivists” Anthology. New York: To, Pub- OF J. ALFRED PRUFROCK” (1915) and the springing tiger lishers, 1932. and spiders in “Gerontion” (1920). The strangely ———., ed. “‘Objectivists’ 1931.” Poetry 37.5 (February 1931). unpunctuated two-line refrain reappearing four times in Tate’s poem echoes Eliot’s use of refrains. The Mark Scroggins abstractions in the poem are as startling as the images: “[S]trict impunity,” “casual sacrament,” “seasonal eter- “ODE TO THE CONFEDERATE DEAD” nity of death,” “fierce scrutiny,” and “rumour of mor- ALLEN TATE (1927) “Ode to the Confederate tality” thicken the first stanza (a nine line sentence) of Dead,” Allen TATE’s most anthologized and best-known the poem with intellectual rigor. poem, brought MODERNISM more fully to bear on Amer- The poem is “agrarian” in that it resurrects the his- ican poetry, especially in the South, where a pervasive tory of the South and tries to restore a sense of stoic sentimental/romantic poetics was giving way to the pride to the heirs of its troubled past. Yet, doubting agrarian aesthetics of the Fugitives (see FUGITIVE/AGRAR- memory’s comforts, the poet shows restraint in its IAN SCHOOL). First published in 1927 and revised over conclusions about how to proceed in a death- the next 10 years, the poem describes, in second-per- drenched world. The penultimate stanza begins with a son address, a man who has stopped beside a dilapi- suggestion to speak to the mortal predicament, but dated Confederate graveyard. The reader is the stanza ends in a series of bleak questions. Tate encouraged to contemplate the scene by observing the finally suggests, “Leave now / and shut the gate.” We many signs and symbols of death and the possibilities are left with an image of a serpent who, much like the of regeneration. poet confounded by death, “Riots with his tongue Tate technically and philosophically explained his through the hush.” own poem in an essay entitled “Narcissus as Narcis- BIBLIOGRAPHY sus” (1968), indicating that the poem was “‘about’ Eliot, T. S. The Sacred Wood and Major Early Essays. Mineola, solipsism or Narcissism, or any other ism that denotes N.Y.: Dover Publications, 1998. the failure of the human personality to function prop- Tate, Allen. “Homage to T. S. Eliot.” Memoirs and Opinions, erly in nature and society” (595). The verse is satu- 1926–1974. Chicago: Swallow Press, 1975, pp. 87–91. rated with a stoic yet apocalyptic tone and deals ———. “Narcissus as Narcissus.” In Essays of Four Decades. unflinchingly with the conflicting modern themes of Chicago: Swallow Press, 1968, pp. 593–607. nature, history, death, and alienation. The poem Underwood, Thomas. Allen Tate: Orphan of the South. Prince- responds to what T. S. ELIOT promoted in his prose ton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000. work, The Sacred Wood (1920), employing “deperson- John Poch alization” and an “objective correlative,” which reveals emotion through the removed (often imperative) “OF BEING NUMEROUS” GEORGE voice, the specific event, and oddly juxtaposed OPPEN (1968) Published as the central poem in a images. collection of the same name, “Of Being Numerous” is In Tate’s essay “Homage to T. S. Eliot” (1975), Tate arguably George OPPEN’s finest poetic achievement. claims that he “never tried to imitate [Eliot] or become Oppen had wanted to write “a decisive expression of a disciple” (90). Still a modernist influence pervades the period,” a long poem that would illuminate the O’HARA, FRANK 353 existential backdrop to the turmoil of the 1960s (108). transparency. “I don’t mean that much can be But he hoped to do so without engaging in the heroic explained,” he adds: “Clarity in the sense of silence.” Of quest-romance common to epic poetry and without Being Numerous won the 1969 Pulitzer Prize. recourse to the didacticism of works produced by such BIBLIOGRAPHY poets as Ezra POUND. This unusual approach to the DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. “Objectivist Poetics and Political function of poetry arises from Oppen’s desire to be part Vision: A Study of Oppen and Pound.” In George Oppen: of a “sincere and public conversation” concerning Man and Poet, edited by Burton Hatlen. Orono, Maine: humanity (82), a desire for which he is greatly admired National Poetry Foundation, 1981. by contemporary poets across the political and aes- Golding, Alan. “George Oppen’s Serial Poems.” In The thetic spectrum. Objectivist Nexus, edited by Rachel Blau DuPlessis and “Of Being Numerous” has deep roots in OBJECTIVIST Peter Quartermain. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama poetics. It is a serial poem constructed out of 40 Press, 1999. extraordinarily condensed, quasi-independent sections Oppen, George. The Selected Letters of George Oppen, edited by Rachel Blau DuPlessis. Durham, N.C.: Duke University (see LONG AND SERIAL POETRY). There is no narrative pro- Press, 1990. gression, but rather it consists of a sequence of lyric, philosophical investigations that reveal a mind unwill- Duncan Dobbelmann ing to fabricate truth when none can be found. Oppen thought the purpose of “Of Being Numerous” was to O’HARA, FRANK (1926–1966) Francis Rus- try to understand humanity as “a single thing”—he sell O’Hara immersed himself in art of all kinds for all was grappling with “the fact of being numerous, with- of his adult life. Along with John ASHBERY, Barbara out which we are marooned, shipwrecked” (121). The GUEST, Kenneth KOCH, and James SCHUYLER, all of whom poem examines the distances between people, the rela- he knew well, he was one of the first-generation NEW tionship between people and place, and the way in YORK SCHOOL poets; he knew many contemporary which we use language to navigate between people and painters and their work equally well (including the places. Like Walt Whitman, Oppen uses New York New York school painters, for which the group of poets City as the archetype of these relations: It is a city in was named), and internalized the aesthetic of ABSTRACT which the numerous is continually haunted by the EXPRESSIONISM. O’Hara worked as an art critic and cura- “shipwreck / Of the singular” and in which both are tor, internationally promoting Jackson Pollock, Willem forcibly grounded and encompassed by “the mineral de Kooning, and Larry Rivers, among others. A prolific fact” of the city, the “impenetrable” matter that pro- poet, O’Hara’s practice was akin to the BEAT POETRY of vides both bedrock and circumference. the post–World War II period in its subjectivity and The poem is profoundly dialectical; Oppen scruti- spontaneity, but nevertheless stopped short of outright nizes opposing concepts (thesis and antithesis) in an confessionalism, the American origins of which could effort to reveal how they mean. The singular/numerous be found in Beat poetry and which the New York poets opposition, though the most critical, is but one among rejected (see CONFESSIONAL POETRY). While the New a number of oppositions that Oppen contemplates in York poets, in general, “wrote in language that was the poem, such as distance/nearness, solidity/evanes- illogical and often meaningless, O’Hara’s particular cence, youth/age, clarity/obscurity, and rootless tone was surrealist, Ashbery’s was philosophical, and speech/rooted speech. Unlike other dialectical con- Koch’s was comic” (Gooch 224). structions, however, Oppen’s oppositions do not O’Hara was born in Baltimore, Maryland, where resolve into syntheses that become terms in further his parents had moved to conceal the somewhat pre- dialectics. “Of Being Numerous” does not have a thesis mature birth of their child just six months after they to prove—it is not an argument. Instead the poem were married, a fact which O’Hara never learned; brings clarity to the problems with which we are col- they soon returned to their origins in Grafton, Mass- lectively perplexed. Oppen searches for clarity and achusetts. In 1944 O’Hara enlisted in the navy and 354 O’HARA, FRANK served as a sonarman in the South Pacific. The mili- York, and his endless experiences with his vast circle of tary rationale for his assignment was that his musical friends in his city. “Larry Rivers . . . inspired poems of training would give him a more sophisticated ear for expressionist pain and dazzling surface, [while] Jane tonal changes. O’Hara had studied piano through his Freilicher and Grace Hartigan . . . inspired poems of childhood, and when he entered Harvard on the G.I. almost weightless fondness and affection, [and] Vincent bill in 1946, he planned to pursue a career in music Warren was the first muse to inspire O’Hara to openly performance and composition. gay love poems” (Perloff 330). He was so utterly a city The influence of music can be found in his poems, poet that he admitted, “I can’t even enjoy a blade of formally in “phonetic and rhythmic devices modeled grass unless I know there’s a subway handy, or a record on the music of John CAGE and Eric Satie” (Perloff iii), store” (“Meditations in an Emergency” [1957]). and in the content of such pieces as his birthday poems The immediacy of his work, written in the moment to Rachmaninoff. O’Hara’s life and vocation soon of impulse, makes for a diaristic content in poetic form shifted permanently with the death of his father, who that O’Hara described as “simply unmade telephone had nurtured O’Hara’s love of music, in early 1947, calls” (qtd. in Gooch 150). His recording of events, during O’Hara’s second semester of university. From most pronounced from 1956 on, resulted in poems that moment he composed more poetry than music. that were, in his words, “I do this, I do that” poems Although his formal education gave him a thorough (qtd. in Gooch 288)—an echo of James Joyce’s practice grounding in the history and prosody of English poetry of recording what went on around him as it happened, (see PROSODY AND FREE VERSE), he considered himself a with which O’Hara would have been very familiar prose writer for a number of years, “coming to poetry since he read Joyce devotedly. Among his most well- by way of poetic prose” (131). Following his graduation known poems are “THE DAY LADY DIED” (1964), “IN MEM- from Harvard in 1950, O’Hara went to the University of ORY OF MY FEELINGS” (1958), and LUNCH POEMS (1964), Michigan, where he received his master’s degree in so called at Lawrence FERLINGHETTI’s suggestion, 1951. He had gone to Ann Arbor on John CIARDI’s sug- because O’Hara wrote them on his lunch hours. Death gestion; Ciardi taught poetry composition at Harvard and unhappy love consistently were events provoking and believed O’Hara should go to Michigan with the O’Hara to write with a “sentimental directness that set goal of winning the Avery Hopwood Major Award in his work apart in style” from the other New York poets, poetry, which O’Hara did win in 1951. He received a and his poems on the death of James Dean brought Rockefeller Fellowship to serve as playwright-in-resi- popular culture into poetry (Gooch 269). Likewise his dence at the Poet’s Theatre in Cambridge, Massachu- poem on the collapse of Lana Turner is a typical exam- setts during the first six months of 1956. He published ple of his journalistic style combined with current six books of poetry, three plays, and a great many essays events in a uniquely poetic way. In “Lana Turner has and reviews; since his early death several collections of Collapsed!” (1964), O’Hara opens with the newspaper poetry have appeared in print, as have collaborations in headline, then discusses the weather conditions, com- the form of poem-paintings with visual artists. plains briefly about the traffic that impedes his O’Hara’s early writing combines his exploration of progress to an appointment, and returns to the head- dada and SURREALISM, abstract expressionism, and ver- line once he situates it in his day and makes clear that nacular speech “to produce a body of exciting experi- the snow and rain in New York are nothing like the mental poetry” (Perloff ii). His mature work is likewise weather in California, where Turner’s collapse has a fusion of influences, such as Guillaume Apollinaire, occurred. He then indirectly tries to comprehend what Vladimir Mayakovsky, Rainer Maria Rilke, William Car- could cause such an incident, by remarking that he has los WILLIAMS, and Ezra POUND. Also fundamental to exhibited shocking behavior in social settings—but “I O’Hara’s poetry was his need for a muse in order to gen- never actually collapsed”—and immediately concludes erate the poems that resulted from his great capacity for the poem with the endearing plea, “oh Lana Turner we friendship, his solid situation as an urban poet of New love you get up.” OLDS, SHARON 355

O’Hara wrote not only short lyrics in reaction to Lehman, David. The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New current conditions and situations, but also longer ret- York School of Poets. New York: Doubleday, 2002. rospective pieces, such as “Lament and Chastisement,” Perloff, Marjorie. Frank O’Hara: Poet among Painters. New a 1948 prose memoir of his navy service, and “Ode to York: George Braziller, 1977. Michael Goldberg (’s Birth and Other Births)” (1960), a A. Mary Murphy poem of early life, in which O’Hara “absorbs the fam- ily snapshot into the larger movement of life so as to OLDS, SHARON (1942– ) Sharon Olds is create a dynamic composition” (Perloff 141); then a CONFESSIONAL poet who has published nine books of there is “Memorial Day 1950” (1971), which is full of poetry since 1980. Emily Dickinson, Muriel RUKEYSER, references to figures in his artistic heritage as well as to Anne SEXTON, and Robert LOWELL are among her his childhood. “Second Avenue” (1960) is O’Hara’s greatest influences. Olds uses unadorned language longest poem; written during March and April 1953, coupled with biting imagery to explore themes of sex- the poem consists of 11 movements and nearly 500 uality, family relationships, domestic violence (both lines. The piece is full of scenes and descriptions, and physical and psychological), and the body. Although it is “O’Hara’s most ambitious attempt to do with her poems often present images of horror and terror, words . . . what the Abstract Expressionists were doing she nonetheless seeks to allow poetry, time, and with paint” (Perloff 70). It has the inexplicable surreal- reflection to bring us, in Peter Harris’s words, “back ist “Grappling with images of toothpaste falling on gui- to health” (262). tar strings,” but also the gently erotic lover “lissome in Raised in San Francisco, California, Olds attended whispering, salivary in intent” and the echoing of Stanford University and received a Ph.D. from Colum- remembered advice of his father to “Leave the men bia University in 1972. Her first book of poetry, Satan alone, they’ll only tease you.” “Second Avenue” is an Says (1980), was published when Olds was 37. The important transitional moment in O’Hara’s develop- Dead and the Living (1984) won the Lamont Poetry ment, containing everything that is typical of O’Hara Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, stylistically, such as colloquialism, exclamation points, establishing Olds as one of the best new voices in enjambed lines, and unique syntax, and in terms of poetry. Olds is founding chair of the writing program subject matter, including specific people, the city, and at Goldwater Hospital for the severely physically dis- art, just at the same time that he moves away from a abled. She was named New York State poet French surrealism into an American perception. Critic (1998–2000) and has taught at New York University. Marjorie Perloff claims that “Ashbery and O’Hara, like The immersion into the dark, graphic world of Allen GINSBERG . . . have an influence that transcends domestic violence, alcoholism, and social abuses is a sta- schools and geographic boundaries” (196); these three ple of Old’s poetry. But she is always accessible and has are poets who “have taken the contemporary lyric an intense, urgent voice. “By confronting her own ‘dark- down parallel courses that never quite meet” (xiii). ness’ fairly,” says Carolyne Wright, “Olds has affirmed O’Hara’s critical reputation was building during his the humanity of those who engendered that darkness, lifetime, but his greater impact was on younger poets, and shown herself . . . to be a poet of affirmation” (151). who discovered him early and who learned a poetic Olds is successful in moving into the violence of freedom from him. Those who read most closely saw domestic and social abuses and becoming part of the the depth that can lie beneath speed and spontaneity. same emotive density as those it would appear her BIBLIOGRAPHY poems seek to criticize. In “Fate” (1992), the speaker Diggory, Terence, and Stephen Paul Miller, eds. The Scene of discusses her relationship with her abusive, alcoholic My Selves: New Work on New York School Poets. Orono, father, and we see her transformed from a state of hate Maine: National Poetry Foundation, 2000. to one of understanding, which accepts even his “bad Gooch, Brad. City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O’Hara. breath” and “slumped posture of failure, his sad / sex New York: Knopf, 1993. dangling on his thigh.” There is no inflated language or 356 OLIVER, MARY mannerisms here. In “Photograph of the Girl” (1984), Twelve Moons (1979)—draws on Oliver’s midwestern reader and speaker together become part of the same roots. The spare, conversational language of the poems emotive fabric as the poem’s subject. To produce this is concerned with landscape, longing, and family. The effect, the external image of a beautiful victim of starva- poems in American Primitive are inclined toward tran- tion is conflated with happenings invisible to a camera. scendence. “I want to lose myself,” Oliver says in As the Russian drought of 1921 takes the girl’s life, the “White Night,” enacting the ritual of reconnecting with reader finally sees that deep in the body “ovaries let out nature. In Dream Work (1986), House of Light (1990), her first eggs / golden as drops of grain.” and White Pine (1994), Oliver’s concerns are with the Olds’s poetry explores places unseen, sometimes unknown life around us. As Oliver suggests in a later immediately terrifying and sometimes peaceful and essay, “The world is not what I thought, but different, redemptive. Olds explores the violence of the world so and more! I have seen it with my own eyes” (Winter that she—and readers—may learn how to forgive. Hours 88). The themes of revelation and reverence also BIBLIOGRAPHY distinguish her graceful and meditative prose in Blue Harris, Peter. “Four Salvers Salvaging: New Work by Voigt, Pastures (1995) and Winter Hours (1999). Olds, Dove, and McHugh.” Virginia Quarterly 64.2 “Would it be better to sit in silence? / To think every- (1988): 262–276. thing, to feel everything, to say nothing?” Oliver asks Wright, Carolyne. Review of The Dead and the Living, by in her book-length poem The Leaf and the Cloud Sharon Olds. Iowa Review 15.1 (1985): 151–161. (2000). Such is the impulse of the river and the stone, Robert Leston “But the nature of man is not the nature of silence.” The nature of man, Oliver admonishes her reader, is OLIVER, MARY (1935– ) Rooted in the tra- wild and civilized—utterly alive in the flesh, obliged to dition of American romanticism, the voice of Mary the devotions of curiosity and respect. Oliver has become inseparable from the chorus of BIBLIOGRAPHY 20th-century poets concerned with the natural world, Bonds, Dianne S. “The Language of Nature in the Poetry of including Robinson JEFFERS and Theodore ROETHKE, Mary Oliver.” Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal W. S. MERWIN and Denise LEVERTOV, Gary SNYDER and 21 (1992): 1–15. Wendell BERRY. Nature is the subject of Oliver’s work, yet Fast, Robin-Riley. “The Native American Presence in Mary her mystical inclinations do not draw her away from a Oliver’s Poetry.” Kentucky Review 12.1—2 (autumn devotion to the civilized use of language and literature. 1993): 59–68. Oliver was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and was edu- McNew, Janet. “Mary Oliver and the Tradition of Romantic cated at Ohio State University and Vassar College. No Nature Poetry.” Contemporary Literature 30.1 (spring Voyage and Other Poems, her first book, appeared in 1989): 59—77. 1963. Her sixth collection, American Primitive, won the Oliver, Mary. Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems. New York: Houghton, 1999. Pulitzer Prize in 1984, and New and Selected Poems received the National Book Award in 1993. Oliver’s Mark Long work has also been recognized with a Lannan Founda- tion Award (1998), a National Endowment for the Arts OLSON, CHARLES (1910–1970) Charles Fellowship (1972–73), and a Guggenheim Fellowship Olson is a towering figure in 20th-century American (1980–81). Oliver has taught at the Fine Arts Work- poetry, figuratively and literally (he was 6′ 10′′), and he shop in Provincetown, Massachusetts, Case Western used his large stature as a basis for his Maximus per- Reserve University, Bucknell University, Sweet Briar sona, as in his monumental work THE MAXIMUS POEMS. College, and Bennington College. Olson also provides a key link between American poets The early work—No Voyage and Other Poems (1963), of an earlier generation, such as William Carlos The River Styx, Ohio, and Other Poems (1972), Night WILLIAMS and Ezra POUND, and his younger contempo- Traveler (1978), Sleeping in the Forest (1978), and raries, such as Robert CREELEY and Edward DORN, who OLSON, CHARLES 357

would come to be known as members of the BLACK research fed the historical imagination of his first MOUNTAIN SCHOOL. His “Projective Verse” essay (1950) poems in a way that has come to be recognized as post- stands as a crucial statement of the poetics of open- modern, a word which he is often credited with using field composition (see ARS POETICAS). for the first time in its currently accepted meaning. In Olson was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, “La Préface,” Olson addresses in a prescient way the though childhood experiences in nearby Gloucester, meaning of the Nazi concentration camp, calling north of Boston, excited a life-long fascination with “Buchenwald new Altamira cave,” thereby linking the this New England fishing village. He produced an horrors of the holocaust to the earliest known human account of his relationship with his postman father in art forms and calling on readers to reflect on the full The Post Office (1975). Olson attended Wesleyan Uni- range of recorded human history. Already highly versity (1928–32), earning a B.A. and M.A. He later advanced in his myth thinking, Olson takes the figure pursued graduate studies at Harvard and taught there of Odysseus as an early persona. He also faces directly from 1936–39. Among his students was a young John the problem of giving meaning to the incomprehensi- F. Kennedy. Olson’s own career in government service ble: “The closed parenthesis reads: the dead bury the (1940–45) was cut short, it would seem, due to his dead, / and it is not very interesting” (47). strong support of progressive democrat Henry A. Wal- Also in the immediate aftermath of World War II, lace’s presidential candidacy. Olson’s entry into the lit- Olson instigated an intense literary friendship with erary field came with his highly original work on Pound, who was being held at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital Herman Melville, Call Me Ishmael (1947). His associa- in Washington, D.C., after having been found incom- tion with Black Mountain College in North Carolina petent to stand trial for treason. Olson’s essay “This Is (1951–56) as its rector created the company of writers Yeats Speaking” (1946) seeks to provide a hearing of who came to be known under this name. He used a sorts for the incarcerated elder poet. By 1950 Olson 1950–51 Guggenheim Fellowship to study ancient had broken off his visits to Pound, due to Pound’s Mayan culture in Mexico. His last significant period of unregenerate support for fascist ideology. At this time teaching came at the State University of New York, Buf- Olson was contacted by Creeley, leading to an episto- falo (1963–65), where he influenced yet another gen- lary relationship that changed both of their poetic eration of American writers. careers. From Creeley, Olson took the central tenet of Olson entered his period of poetic maturity rela- his “Projective Verse” essay that “FORM IS NEVER tively late. His first surviving poems, such as “La Pré- MORE THAN AN EXTENSION OF CONTENT” (Col- face” (1946), came from the time he was revising his lected Prose 240). Olson’s letters to Creeley from his earlier scholarly work on Herman Melville into Call Me archaeological sojourn to the Yucatán Peninsula in Ishmael (1947). He provides sociohistorical context for Mexico became known as The Mayan Letters. Poet and Moby Dick through reference to the extreme experi- critic Nathaniel MACKEY has written: “The ancient Maya ences of suffering of Owen Chase and the crew of the represented an alternative to the reign of abstraction Essex, a Nantucket-based whaler rammed and sunk by [Olson] argues against, an orientation that refuses to a sperm whale in 1820. He links the nautical experi- depreciate the phenomenal world or to take it for ence of these men to the 19th-century movement west granted ...” (126). Creeley later joined Olson at Black across the North American continent, saying: “I take Mountain College. SPACE to be the central fact to man born in America, This intense period of literary activity by Olson saw from Folsom cave to now. I spell it large because it the publication of some of his most celebrated shorter comes large here. Large, and without mercy” (Collected poems, such as “The Kingfishers” (1950) and “In Cold Prose 17). Olson’s research included the physical Hell, In Thicket” (1951). The same period witnessed reconstruction of Melville’s personal library, leading to the germination of Olson’s life-long epic-length poem, his discovery of the genesis of Moby Dick in the mar- The Maximus Poems (1960–83). The publication of ginal notations to Melville’s copy of King Lear. This Olson’s correspondence with Frances Boldereff has 358 OLSON, TOBY given unprecedented insight into Boldereff’s role in BIBLIOGRAPHY helping Olson to attain the multifaceted vision of his Baker, Peter. “Poetic Subjectivity in Olson’s Maximus Poems.” ambitious epic. The poem begins with the declaration In Obdurate Brilliance. Gainesville: University of Florida of the Maximus persona’s identity: “Off-shore, by Press, 1991, pp. 94–107. islands hidden in the blood / jewels & miracles, I, Max- Byrd, Don. The Poetics of the Common Knowledge. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994. imus.” Olson uses this persona to achieve a complex Cook, Albert. “Maximizing Minimalism: The Construct of interweaving of the literary, sociohistorical, mythical, Image in Olson and Creeley.” In Figural Choice in Poetry and geological dimensions of the poem. Albert Cook and Art. Hanover, N. H.: University Press of New Eng- has proposed: “In Olson’s critical writings the histori- land, 1985, pp. 149–166. cal-microscopic, the geographical-millenial, and the ———. Myth and Language. Bloomington: Indiana Univer- archetypal, are reasoned into interdependence over and sity Press, 1980. over again. He angles those interdependences into The Mackey, Nathaniel. “That Words Can Be on the Page: The Maximus Poems in such a way that the images, though Graphic Aspect of Charles Olson’s Poetry.” In Discrepant ‘flat’ and in a seemingly linear sequence, transcend the Engagement. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993, pp. 121–138. found objects or actions with which they begin” (“Max- Maud, Ralph. Charles Olson’s Reading: A Biography. Carbon- imizing” 158). By this understanding, the physical loca- dale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1996. tion of the poem in Gloucester affords Olson a way of Olson, Charles. Collected Prose, edited by Donald Allen and linking place and history. According to Charles Stein, Benjamin Friedlander. Berkeley: University of California “Geography and historical geology are given primary Press, 1997. attention in presenting the human action of the poem” ———. Selected Writings, edited by Robert Creeley, New (121). Over time the significance of Olson’s achieve- York: New Directions, 1966. ment in The Maximus Poems has come to overshadow Stein, Charles. The Secret of the Black Chrysanthemum. Barry- the brilliance of his work in shorter forms. town, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1987. In the course of the later progression of The Maximus Peter Baker Poems, Olson’s vision becomes more directly personal, based on the self-orienting turn he refers to as tropos. OLSON, TOBY (1937– ) Toby Olson’s pac- Peter Baker has written: “the self-orienting of tropos ing, rhythms, and themes are evocative of Robert CREE- allows Olson to make what he calls the ‘LEAP’ from the LEY. His conversational approach is reminiscent of geography of actual place, actual reality, to the compre- David ANTIN’s talk poems. And, generally, he shares a hensive mythological view that serves as humankind’s poetic kinship with such innovators as John TAGGART guide back to that reality” (94). In the second volume and Jackson MAC LOW. His work shows influences from of the poem, for example, Olson writes, “my memory romanticism’s return to nature, MODERNISM’s revival of is / the history of time.” He also writes, “I am making a epic tropes, and the NEW YORK SCHOOL’s emphasis on mappemunde. It is to include my being.” Historical speech patterns. Olson engages these traditions while memory and the mapping of physical geography merge transforming them into his own particular style coura- with the personal vision of the poet. As Don Byrd has geous enough to stare down divorce, socioeconomic argued, “The maximus . . . gives evidence of the ade- politics, carcinoma, immigration policies, and racism quacy and reality of Olson’s own time, and, in our read- in his characteristically breathless cadences. ing, evidence of the adequacy and reality of our own Merle Theodore Olson was born in Berwyn, Illinois, time. Unlike disciplinary, statistical knowledge, it but there is little evidence of this midwestern beginning makes itself available to us . . . by proposing specific in his writing. Perhaps Olson’s early disposition toward concrete acts of knowing” (363). Olson’s unique contri- places and pacing are more easily traced to his days in bution to American poetry of the 20th century was to the United States Navy from 1957–61, during which propose a poetry as well as a poetics that were also and time he served as a surgical technician. Taking to the always a way of knowing the world. sea and water are repeated undercurrents through OPPEN, GEORGE 359 much of Olson’s work, but, even more, the simultane- BIBLIOGRAPHY ous skills of diligent observer and precise craftsmanship Olsen, Lance, and Dennis Barone, eds. Review of Contempo- demanded of surgeons define Olson’s relationship to rary Fiction 11.2 (summer 1991). [Donald writing. After military duty Olson pursued a B.A. at Barthelme/Toby Olson Issue] Occidental College and subsequently a master’s degree Owens, Rochelle. Review of Human Nature, by Toby Olson. from Long Island University. He has served on numer- World Literature Today 74.3 (summer 2000): 599–600. ous faculties and writer residencies, and he has dedi- Barbara Cole cated his teaching career to Temple University, starting in 1975. He has received a number of fellowships, and OPPEN, GEORGE (1908–1984) George his acclaimed novel, Seaview (1983), was recognized Oppen came to prominence in the early 1930s as part with the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction. of the OBJECTIVIST SCHOOL. The objectivists were linked Throughout his career, just as Robert DUNCAN con- to the IMAGIST SCHOOL and were heavily influenced by tinuously wrote PASSAGES or John BERRYMAN endlessly William Carlos WILLIAMS. In addition to Oppen, the wrote DREAM SONGS, Olson has composed “Standards.” group most notably included Louis ZUKOFSKY, Carl In these “Standard” poems, by employing jazz’s tech- RAKOSI, and Charles REZNIKOFF. Oppen’s distinctive, nique of creating subtle differences through repetition, spare style stayed consistent through the eight books of Olson reminds readers how words—through rhythm, poetry that appeared between 1934 and 1978. His tempo, and cadence—make music. “Standard-9, Just understated control and economy of phrase also influ- One (Some) Of Those Things” (1993) demonstrates enced writers and movements as varied as Paul Auster, how a single memory rolls into other memories, how a William BRONK, J. H. Prynne, Louise GLÜCK, Michael dream riffs on the original experience: “these strange PALMER, and the LANGUAGE SCHOOL. conglomerates? .../ how turn the body off from Oppen was born in New Rochelle, New York, and dreaming?” Since he is a renowned fiction writer as grew up in San Francisco. After an unhappy time at a well as poet, it is not surprising that his writing oper- military academy, he attended Oregon State University ates fluidly, flowing back and forth across genre divi- in Corvallis. There he read Conrad AIKEN’s anthology of sions, illustrating how memory ebbs between past and modern poetry, a pivotal moment in his life. There too present. Olson’s most acclaimed novels fall within the he met his lifelong companion, Mary Colby. They quit detective story genre, and so too his poems grapple college and set out, as she put it, to “discover the with the mystery of memory. Much as a detective col- world” (Mary Oppen 64). Oppen’s early work with the lects clues, Olson’s speakers collect memories as snap- objectivists brought him attention, but his later shots which fuse into a collage of dizzying beauty. work—after a 20-year silence—brought him awards: As the titles of his most recent collections imply, the PEN/West Rediscovery Award (1982); lifetime Olson is interested in how Human Nature (2000) recognition awards from the American Academy of remains a process of Unfinished Building (1993). Simi- Poets (1980), the National Endowment for the Arts lar to the way a building under construction, complete (1980), and the American Academy and Institute of with external scaffolding, houses the internal hopes of Arts and Letters (1980); and in 1969 the Pulitzer Prize what is to come, Olson’s poems avoid enclosures, sim- for Of Being Numerous. ple symmetries, and neat conclusions. His speakers In 1934 the Objectivist Press published Oppen’s DIS- set out in each poem to discover where the paths of CRETE SERIES, with a preface from Ezra POUND and an memory will lead. The goal is not some hidden treas- appreciative review in Poetry magazine from Williams. ure chest of lyric “truth”; rather it is the search itself This slim book demonstrates how his clear and con- which keeps us fascinated. Olson’s poems remain crete minimalism was won from the verbose style that standards to be played over and over, each one per- was still fashionable in the 1920s. The series begins by petually building stories and making poetic music that juxtaposing a pastiche of grandiose sentimentalism— will never be finished. “the world, weather-swept, with which one shares the 360 OPPEN, GEORGE century”—with his more prosaic choices that are no For Oppen the interconnectedness of individual and less profound for being simple. From here his urban global events is key, and he emphasizes this at the open- lines carry on from Williams and describe the ing of the book through the content and the eclectic machined cityscape of a New York full of bolts and epigraphs from Robert Heinlein and Martin Heidegger. ships and “Deaths everywhere —.” Even in the final poem, “World, World —,” Oppen crit- Discrete Series was followed by three phases of an icizes the “medical faddism” of the contemporary obses- extended period of silence. First, during the depres- sion with the self and suggests instead that the mystery sion, Oppen joined the Communist Party to devote of existence is an individual who is simultaneously himself to poverty relief work. He needed to do some- local—”here”—and historical—”More than oneself.” thing in the physical, political world that poetry could Oppen’s next book, Of Being Numerous (1968), not affect. In the second phase, he enlisted and fought directly confronted the historical. Returning to the Bay for the United States Army. Finally, after his return to Area after a trip to Europe, he wrote his most obviously civilian life and a brief stint in California, he spent polemical collection, including the eponymous title 1950–58 with his wife and daughter in self-imposed poem “OF BEING NUMEROUS.” He espoused multicultural exile in Mexico avoiding the House UnAmerican Activ- tolerance—the “numerous”—and opposed the Viet- ities Committee (HUAC) and others engaged in the nam War—”Ours aren’t the only madmen tho they communist “witch-hunt.” have burned thousands.” Of Being Numerous was origi- In 1962 Oppen published The Materials, which he nally called Another Language of New York, after the 40- had begun in 1958 just before leaving Mexico—it was poem series which comprises the bulk of the book—an his first new book for almost 30 years. The word mate- expanded version of the poem “A Language of New rials in the title refers both to the physical presence of York” from the volume This in Which. The ensuing things in the world and also to the “material” of Marx- Pulitzer Prize success guaranteed the book a wider cir- ist “dialectical materialism.” In as concrete a way as culation than any of his previous work, although the possible Oppen includes both the tactile world and his poetry showed no political or formal concessions. tangible experience of the abstract ideas of Marxism in In Seascape: Needle’s Eye (1972), Oppen concerns which Hegel’s philosophical model of discourse is himself with the horizon of the Pacific Ocean. This “sea played out materially through class-structures in the and a crescent strip of beach” and the Biblical aphorism political world. The Materials is similar in style to Dis- that it is as easy for a rich man to go to heaven as for a crete Series. In “Blood from the Stone,” Oppen even camel to pass through a needle’s eye give the collection observes people in the street; the decade of the 1930s its title. Seascape is inescapably about the West (215), as “Is still in their lives.” In an even more specific move- the 10 poems in “Some San Francisco Poems” remind ment of identification with his earlier work, Oppen us. It marks his return to the place where he grew up refers to the earlier poem and its era as “our times.” and also to his involvement with the younger San Fran- The book is a series of poems that brings him up to cisco (see SAN FRANCISCO RENAISSANCE) poets and Euro- date, not only from the 1934 Discrete Series but also pean poets of the late 1960s. Despite its brevity this from “‘Birthplace: New Rochelle’” to his present situa- book deals seriously with history from geographical, tion as a father himself, returning physically and sym- political, and theological perspectives, noting the marks bolically to “The house / My father’s once.” of power, history, and even potential salvation, on the This in Which (1965) confirmed Oppen’s return to Bay landscape—”a kind of redemption / Exposed still writing and provided initial versions of title poems for and jagged on the San Francisco hills” (“Some San three of his next books (“Of Being Numerous” that was Francisco Poems—4. Anniversary Poem”). This seri- originally titled “A Language of New York,” “Alpine,” ousness notwithstanding, Oppen finds grounds for and “Primitive”). It followed The Materials in talking optimism—this is, after all, the needle’s eye that, sur- about class and, especially in the series “Five Poems prisingly, gives access to heaven. In the closing poem about Poetry,” about poetry’s relation to class structure. “Exodus,” he links his poetry directly to his belief in the OPPENHEIMER, JOEL 361 future. The poem, whose subject matter is already the Review. While the early influences on his writing came divine deliverance from bondage, stops unfinished and from E. E. CUMMINGS and Don Marquis, it was the poetry invites us to read the living future of the children as the of William Carlos WILLIAMS and the instruction of Olson continuation of “ . . . Miracle / of.” that made him into a successful poet. He appeared in In Myth of the Blaze (1975), the “blaze” of the title the first section of the now famous The New American comes from William Blake’s 19th-century blazing Poetry in 1960 (see POETRY ANTHOLOGIES and POETRY JOUR- “tygers” (the stars in the night sky), and the collection NALS), along with Olson, Robert DUNCAN, Edward DORN, is explicitly involved with the history of writing poetry and Robert CREELEY. The discursive style and his com- from the Book of Job to 16th-century Sir Thomas mitment to the open form of poetry, the generation of Wyatt, Shakespeare, and Blake right up to Oppen, the form of the poem from inside the act of writing (see Reznikoff, and Zukofsky. Oppen’s final book, Primitive PROSODY AND FREE VERSE), make him a Black Mountain (1978), owes more to his wife, Mary, than any of his poet, but he was a Black Mountain poet who acknowl- previous books, and it is difficult to know how far the edged the influence of the time and temper of New York early symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease affected his City in his writing. While he experiments in using only writing. Entering his seventies and looking back on a lower case and no uppercase letters appear from time to decade since his Pulitzer Prize, Oppen reflects on his time, Oppenheimer’s use of these features remains achievements as a man, a poet, and a famous poet. unique in American poetry since 1945. Oddly it is the opening of the book that dwells more Oppenheimer was born in Yonkers, New York, and on his state of life. In both “Disasters” and “To Make grew up in New York City in a middle-class Jewish fam- Much,” respectively, he reflects obliquely on his ebbing ily. He discovered his interest in poetry while in high vitality: “the desert my life / narrows,” and “we are old / school, but he went to Cornell, then University of we are shrivelled.” Although still keenly aware of his Chicago for a technical education before finding Black failing faculties, in “Populist,” he regains some of his Mountain College, where he was a student of M. C. hope for the young. Richard, Paul Goodman, and Olson. In 1966 he became Oppen was a craftsman for whom each poem was a director of the St. Mark’s Poetry Project (see POETRY INSTI- crafted object. The concentration on the object in his TUTIONS). Between 1966 and 1968 he developed a pro- early objectivism refers to “the objectification of the gram that grew into the “Poets in the Schools” project, poem, the making of an object of the poem” (“Inter- which continues through the present. Between 1969 view” 160), and his writing adhered to this ideal of and 1984 he wrote a regular column for the Village Voice craftsmanship throughout his career. on baseball, public issues, and political themes, the BIBLIOGRAPHY news of the city. By 1980, however, he began looking Hatlen, Burton, ed. George Oppen, Man and Poet. Orono, outside of New York for a place to live. In 1982 he Maine: National Poetry Foundation, 1981. secured a position teaching at New England College (he ———. ed. Paideuma 10.1 (1981). [Special Issue on George had taught previously at the City College of New York). Oppen] Oppenheimer’s early books—The Dancer (1951) and Oppen, George. Interview conducted by L. S. Dembo. Con- The Dutiful Son (1956)—were published by Jonathan temporary Literature 10.2 (1969): 159–177. WILLIAMS, who was also a student at Black Mountain Col- Oppen, Mary. Meaning A Life: An Autobiography. Santa Bar- lege. The poems from 1959–62, published as Just bara, Calif.: Black Sparrow Press, 1978. Friends/Friends and Lovers (1980) fill out the record of the Dan Friedman early writing. With the publication of The Love Bit and Other Poems (1962), Oppenheimer had established a dis- OPPENHEIMER, JOEL (1930–1988) Joel tinctive style built on short lines, frequent enjambment, Oppenheimer was a student of Charles OLSON’s at BLACK intricate metrical measures (developments coming from MOUNTAIN College in the 1950s and published in the a close reading of William Carlos Williams’s poems), and, avant-garde journals Origin and the Black Mountain most of all, lowercase—and no uppercase—letters. He 362 ORTIZ, SIMON J. developed a discursive style that allowed all kinds of such as the artists Franz Kline and Jackson Pollock information to come into the poem even as it maintained whom he would meet there: Oppenheimer invokes “his- multiple points of view in sharp metaphors without a tory” and says that “it is where the paintings / come from symbolic structure. He called his line the “flat line.” The and the poems.” Oppenheimer’s poetics change com- pivotal poem of this early period is “The Fourth Ark plex ideas of history and personal passions into simple Royal” (1959), which talks about the men from the grammatical statements. The poems move from line to British warship Ark Royal, the news of people and events line smoothly with recurrences of vowel and consonant at the Cedar Tavern in New York City, and events in the sounds. And yet the poems turn out to be metrically poet’s life. complex and conceptually profound. Also notable from In Time: Poems 1962–1968 (1969) was Oppenheimer’s this collection is the poem “CACTI.” first book published with a trade publisher, and that was After this large collection smaller books followed, followed by the second, On Occasion: Some Births, such as The Uses of Adversity (1987), a long poem Deaths, Weddings, Birthday, Holidays, and Other Events describing the effects of chemotherapy on Oppen- (1973). He was now a master of the occasional poem, a heimer’s mind and body, naming the chemicals and poem for a wedding or birth, family things. These recording the effects, but with wit and an affirmation of poems, such as “The Polish Cavalry” (1970) written the value of living even as the illness advances. The last after Olson’s death, “A Wedding” written on the occa- poems were published as New Hampshire Journal (1994). sion of a friend’s wedding, “For Matthew Dead” written Oppenheimer will be remembered as the master of after the death of Paul Goodman’s son, and “A Poem for the occasional poem. He will also be known as a poet Children” (1970), written in response to the anti–Viet- who celebrated living and the rituals of living and who nam War movement and other political movements, all insisted that life, love, and erotic desires should be cel- have the features of honoring specific occasions with a ebrated along with marriages, the new season, and patient telling of circumstances and a poetic line sup- deaths. He made simple and graceful statements. ported by finely tuned measures and cadences. BIBLIOGRAPHY His columns for the Village Voice (1969–84) added Butterick, George F. Joel Oppenheimer: A Checklist of His Writ- another dimension to Oppenheimer’s writing. He could ings. Storrs: University of Connecticut Library, 1975. deal in prose with political movements, mainly the Viet- Gilmore, Lyman. Don’t Touch the Poet: The Life and Times of nam War protests, public issues of life in New York, and Joel Oppenheimer. Jersey City, N.J.: Talisman House, 1998. family affairs, freeing his poetry for meditations on other Thibodaux, David. Joel Oppenheimer: An Introduction. subjects. The result was a major book of American Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1986. poetry, The Women Poems (1975). He took his lead from Robert Bertholf Robert BLY’s book, Sleepers Joining Hands (1973), in find- ing information about the eternal female goddess, but ORTIZ, SIMON J. (1941– ) During the he added his own obsessions about sex and women and American Indian renaissance of the 1960s and 1970s, his intense personal relationships. The Women Poems are Simon Ortiz emerged as one of the most influential a serial poem in which each poem explores one aspect American Indian writers. Though also a fiction writer, of the central theme, but together they form a sustained, essayist, and filmmaker, he remains best known for his meditative narrative (see LONG AND SERIAL POETRY). By the poetry. Ortiz sees his work as that of reclaiming, revi- next major collection, New Spaces; Poems 1975–1983 talizing, and demystifying language to enable Native (1985), Oppenheimer was moving on to other concerns peoples to “come into being as who we are within the without forgetting the great value of ordinary events; he reality we face” (27). With a colloquial voice and acces- was exploring new spaces, as well as new ways in which sible, usually narrative form, Ortiz revitalizes the oral his poetry could create spaces for living as an imagina- traditions of his Navaho Acoma heritage, using cre- tive act. “A Village Poem,” for example, is a meditation ation stories, animal voices, and the rhythms of cere- on places and people associated with the Cedar Tavern, monial songs and chants (see NARRATIVE POETRY). OSTRIKER, ALICIA SUSKIN 363

Born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Ortiz was raised reaches back, brings forward, and celebrates the old in an Acoma-speaking family in the village of Deet- traditions with the aim of healing and renewal. ziyamah. At government and religious schools, he was BIBLIOGRAPHY “socialized” into American culture and became aware Allen, Paula Gunn. The Sacred Hoop. Boston: Beacon Press, of his inclusion in, and exclusion from, that world. His 1986. education was completed at Fort Lewis College Ortiz, Simon J. Woven Stone. Tuscon: University of Arizona (1962–63), the University of New Mexico (1966–68), Press, 1992. and the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop Siget, Andrew. Simon Ortiz. Boise, Idaho: Boise State Univer- (M.F.A., 1969). He has taught at California State Uni- sity, 1986. versity, the University of New Mexico, and Sinte Gleska Michael Sowder College in Rosebud, South Dakota. Ortiz works actively for Native interests and has assumed leader- OSTRIKER, ALICIA SUSKIN (1937– ) ship positions in tribal government. He has received a Alicia Ostriker stands in the company of feminist National Endowment for the Arts Discovery Award poet/critics, including Adrienne RICH, Audre LORDE, (1969), an NEA Fellowship (1981), and the Pushcart and Marge PIERCY, who helped create—and were influ- Prize for poetry (1981). enced by—the United States feminist movement (see Ortiz’s first collection, Going for the Rain (1976), FEMALE VOICE, FEMALE LANGUAGE). Ostriker’s critical and recounts in contemporary settings a traditional journey poetic contributions to American letters are a signifi- of awakening manifested through an identification with cant record of an observant, thinking, politically aware the land and the Acoma people. A Good Journey (1977), woman who examines her experiences in light of the his second collection, employs traditional storytelling political and social circumstances that surround her. A techniques: personification of animals, multiple voic- hallmark of Ostriker’s work is her ability to mix per- ings, dramatic monologue, quotation, embedded story, sonal reflection with political observation. A particu- and second-person address. He observes, “The only larly powerful example of this is The Mother/Child way to continue is to tell a story and that’s what Coyote Papers (1980), which juxtaposes poems about her fam- says” (153). In “Telling about Coyote,” for example, a ily, particularly the birth of her son, with political com- traditional speaker explains how coyote created the mentary on the Vietnam War. trouble in the world; coyote (who is described as “exis- Born in Brooklyn, New York, Ostriker grew up in tential Man”) says, “‘Things are just too easy ...’/ Of Manhattan housing projects in a working-class Jewish course he was mainly . . . shooting his mouth.” In his family. Graduating with a B.A. in English from Bran- third collection, Fight Back: For the Sake of the People, For deis University in 1959, Ostriker continued her edu- the Sake of the Land (1980), Ortiz commemorates the cation at the University of Wisconsin, earning an M.A. Pueblo Indian Revolt of 1680. The first part, “Too Many (1961) and a Ph.D. (1964). Ostriker has been a pro- Sacrifices,” laments the suffering caused by corporate fessor at Rutgers University since 1965. The author of domination of the land and people; the second part, nine volumes of poetry, two significant works of femi- “No More Sacrifices,” is a prose memoir and cultural nist literary criticism (Writing like a Woman [1983] and history interspersed with poems. From Sand Creek Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women’s Poetry (1981) retells the story of a 19th-century massacre at in America [1986]), two groundbreaking works of Bib- Fort Lyons, Colorado, and seeks through storytelling a lical analysis, and several other works of criticism, healing of both Native and European Americans. After Ostriker is the winner of numerous honors and and Before Lightning (1994) chronicles a winter on the awards, including, for her 1986 collection, The Imagi- Rosebud Lakota Reservation with poems of celebration nary Lover, the William Carlos WILLIAMS Award of the and prayers for continued survival. Poetry Society of America and, for her 1996 The Crack In all of his work, Ortiz confronts the exploitation in Everything, the Paterson Poetry Award and the San and loss suffered by Native peoples, yet he always Francisco State University Poetry Center Award. 364 “O TASTE AND SEE”

Reflecting on her experience as a Jewish-American development of poetry in which metrical patterns and woman of the 20th century, Ostriker’s poetry is acces- highly formal diction were discarded in favor of direct sible, conversational in tone, and quick to combine utterance and the use of what William Carlos WILLIAMS cultural or spiritual critique with observations of her called the “variable foot,” a metrical system based on the immediate surroundings. In A Woman under the Surface rhythm of everyday language rather than the meter of (1982), many of the poems, including “The Waiting traditional poetry (see PROSODY AND FREE VERSE). Room” and “The Exchange,” look at women’s experi- Levertov wants to teach us that when we embrace ences, the former examining “the fears of the betrayal / “all that lives,” we embrace the world and all the things Of our bodies” and the latter exploring anger, revenge, within it, things we not only see but also take within and freedom from women’s roles. Later works, less for- our very selves: wind, rain, fruit, color, even the words mal than her first, continue these themes, examining we speak. Our embrace of “all that lives” means we are motherhood, relationships, art, religion, and healing, totally alive to the experience of life, and, for Levertov, among other issues, from an unabashedly political and life also means poetry. Everyday experiences inspire feminist perspective. Especially significant is the final the poetry she writes, and the Bible poster the speaker section of The Crack in Everything (1996), “The Mas- of this poem sees on the subway is, in itself, a reference tectomy Poems,” which chronicle her treatment for to this poetry of human experience through its quota- breast cancer. Ostriker’s ability to artfully enhance her tion from Psalm 34 (“O taste and see that the Lord is observations of life with insightful political and social good!”), for the Psalms themselves are poems. “O Taste critique is a consistent feature of her work. and See,” then, is a poem about the small things that lend our lives grace and beauty because of their quo- BIBLIOGRAPHY tidian and poetic nature. Cook, Pamela. “Secrets and Manifestos: Alicia Ostriker’s Poetry and Politics.” Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review 2 The subway poster with its Biblical quotation is not (spring 1993): 80–86. the only example of the secularization of religious Ostriker, Alicia. “An Interview with Alicia Ostriker,” by experience and the experience of human life this rep- Katharyn Aal. Poets and Writers Magazine 17.6 (Novem- resents. Transubstantiation (as in the Christian Mass) ber/December 1989): 16–26. here becomes the way in which we are able to face the Williams, Amy. “Alicia Ostriker.” In Dictionary of Literary fact of our eventual death and weave it into our lives, Biography. Vol. 120, American Poets since World War II, and the fall of Adam and Eve becomes the means by edited by R. S. Gwynn. Detroit, Mich.: Gale Research, which we can gain the knowledge we need to lead a 1982, pp. 239–242. full and joyfully engaged life. Levertov’s use of the fall Sharon L. Barnes is also a reference to the romantic poets (who turned to secularized versions of the story of the Garden of Eden “O TASTE AND SEE” DENISE LEVERTOV as a means of examining human experience), and once (1964) The title poem in Denise LEVERTOV’s 1964 col- again we see that Levertov is signaling a change from lection of poetry, “O Taste and See” is a strong statement the work of her poetic predecessors; while the fall was of her poetics. “The world is / not with us enough,” she a morality tale for the romantics, it becomes here a les- begins, and her opening lines do more than just allude to son in how to embrace life—a lesson, in other words, William Wordsworth’s sonnet (“The World Is Too Much in how to taste and see. with Us” [1807]); they contradict it and in doing so sig- nal not only Levertov’s movement away from the formal- BIBLIOGRAPHY ism of her poetic predecessors but also her rejection of Rodgers, Audrey T. Denise Levertov: The Poetry of Engage- ment. Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University the classification “New romantic” given to her when she Press, 1993. was a young writer. The formalism and conventional Wagner, Linda W. Denise Levertov. New York: Twayne, 1967. style of earlier poets (including her younger self) were challenged by her evolving use of organic form and her Wendy Galgan OWENS, ROCHELLE 365

OWEN, MAUREEN (1943– ) Maureen GOSSIP NOTES OF COURT LIFE” (1993), spirited Owen was an important participant in the “mimeo” invocations of precious stones—”O Ambivalent Onyx! (mimeograph copy machine) revolution that funda- Reckless diamonds obsessed opal / or Unplumbed mentally shaped a second generation of NEW YORK tourmaline”—are interspersed with various textual SCHOOL poets. A long-time member of the community commentaries. In the story of Cinderella, “the slipper of poets associated with the St. Mark’s Poetry Project is / made of fur but the translator mistook the French / in the Bowery (see POETRY INSTITUTIONS), she served for & translated it as being of glass.” This poem, like many many years as program coordinator and, in 1969, others, incorporates an awareness of the sexism that began publishing an influential magazine, Telephone, permeates literary and cultural contexts: “& now the in the church basement. In 1972 Owen began a series author / has agreed to define a woman’s genitalia as an of books—through a press she called Telephone ‘absence.’” Owen’s use of cataloging in different poems Books—and published, early on in their careers, such displays the exuberance for sensual experience that notable writers as Fanny HOWE and Susan HOWE, and underlies much of her poetry, as in “Dear L” (1973), other writers such as Janine Pommy-Vega, Fielding which begins: “Thanks for the early guided hike down Dawson, and Ed Friedman. Her own collagist poetry, to / the bottom lands through juniper & hawthorn, / which is inclusive, witty, and vivacious, reflects a per- grapevine, sassafras, hackberry, honeysuckle.” sonal ethic largely defined by her devotion to a sense Owen’s vivid poems are graced by her unwillingness of community. to see any details—especially life’s small complexities— Owen was born in Graceville, Minnesota, and grew as unfit material for poetry. Her poems are significant up on a farm. Later her father and mother worked as without aspiring to be monumental. There is no horse trainers on the California racetrack circuit. She estranging distance here; the poem, equal to the life, is studied at San Francisco State University and Seattle full of experience and courageous experimentation. University, and she lived in Japan for three years, BIBLIOGRAPHY studying Zen Buddhism. She has taught at Naropa Foster, Edward, ed. Talisman 21 (winter/spring 2001). University and at Edinboro University in Pennsylva- [Maureen Owen Issue] nia. Her first book, Country Rush, was published in Owen, Maureen. “An Interview with Maureen Owen [with 1973. In 1979 she was awarded a Poetry Fellowship Edward Foster].” Talisman 21 (winter/spring 2001): 67–78. by the National Endowment for the Arts, and she won the Before Columbus American Book Award for AE Linda V. Russo (Amelia Earhart) in 1984. American Rush: Selected Poems, nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book OWENS, ROCHELLE (1936– ) An award- Prize, was published in 1998, the same year Owen winning playwright as well as a poet, Rochelle Owens received a grant from the Foundation for Contempo- was one of the few women writers to achieve recogni- rary Performance Arts. tion within the male-dominated circles surrounding Owen has consistently written an intriguing quo- BEAT POETRY. In the late 1950s, her idiosyncratic poems tidian poetry, often diarylike in its form. Many poems caught the attention of the poets George ECONOMOU and move quickly in their attentions, collaging quotes Imamu Amiri BARAKA (then LeRoi Jones), whose enthu- (both literary and conversational), witty anecdotes siasm led to the publication of her work in the influen- and exclamations, and vivid descriptions. Blank space tial underground magazines Trobar and Yugen. Soon incorporated within lines and between words or afterward she received widespread notice for iconoclas- phrases relays a sense of the connection-across-dis- tic, Off-Off Broadway plays, such as Futz (1968) and tance that the various sources suggest. As Fanny Howe Istanboul (1968). In its subversive themes and linguistic has written, her lines are “galactic . . . spaces between experimentation, her work anticipated the products of starry explosions,” such that her poetry “scatters and the LANGUAGE SCHOOL that would emerge several spreads and stops mysteriously” (79). In “FROM decades later. Acknowledging the connection, the critic 366 OWENS, ROCHELLE

Marjorie Perloff nevertheless asserts that Owens’s writ- multiple voices of historical and archetypal figures ing “is sui generis” and that “Owens is angrier, more conveyed through the speaker’s bitter tongue—creates energetic, and more assertive than most of her Lan- dramatic tension and works to expose the hypocrisy of guage counterparts” (12). male-dominated Western culture. Her book-length Owens was born in Brooklyn, New York. She poem, Luca, intersperses narration by Leonardo da attended public schools and the New School for Social Vinci, the model for his Mona Lisa, Sigmund Freud, Research. She has taught at the University of California, and Freud’s patient Flora in order to weave a shifting, San Diego, Brown University, and the University of disjunctive tapestry in which the myth of exclusively Oklahoma. Among her 16 volumes of poetry are Rubbed male creative genius (“Sigmund lip-synced”) is under- Stones (1994), New and Selected Poems, 1961–1996 mined by the inspirational dynamism of the women. (1997), and Luca: Discourse on Life and Death (2001). Owens’s poems seem improvisational but, in fact, Owens’s early poems demonstrate the tangibility are carefully orchestrated critiques that strike at the and volatility of language, employing phonetic mis- heart of society’s conventional wisdom. Nash points spellings, disjunctive syntax, typographical variations, out that Owens “constructs poetry that analyzes, dis- and unusual juxtapositions to create the sense of the sects, reorders, and recasts underlying beliefs about the poem as an object wholly separate from other forms of nature and goals of poetry” (131). expression and resistant to traditional modes of inter- BIBLIOGRAPHY pretation. The opening line of “Called Also the Instant” Muratori, Fred. “A Curious Kind of Derangement.” American (1961) illustrates the sonorous quality of these experi- Book Review 20:1 (November/December 1998): 21, 24. ments: “Become limulus sounded minuted Gradual the Nash, Susan Smith. “An Immense and Continuous Splen- silent lumps.” Fueled by feminism and radical politics dor: Thoughts on the Poetry of Rochelle Owens.” Talis- since the mid-1960s, Owens’s work explores themes of man 12 (spring 1994): 129–140. violence and corrupt authority, as well as “the agonies Perloff, Marjorie. Introduction to Luca: Discourse on Life and of living in the 20th century world, and the pain of Death, by Rochelle Owens. San Diego, Calif.: Junction awareness of apocalypse impending,” according to Press, 2001, pp. 9–12. Susan Smith Nash (131). Owens’s use of polyphony— Fred Muratori C P D

PADGETT, RON (1942– ) Ron Padgett, asso- in love with the work of the Surrealist predecessors” ciated with the so-called second generation NEW YORK (qtd. in Eshleman 9). Padgett has many won prizes, SCHOOL, is a primary figure in post–World War II exper- including fellowships from the National Endowment imental American poetry. In addition to producing a for the Arts (1976) and the Guggenheim Foundation wide range of poetry, essays, and prose poems, Padgett (1986) and the Officier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des has translated French writers, including Blaise Cendrars, Lettres from the French Ministry of Culture and Com- Guillaume Apollinaire, and Paul Reverdy. In a personal munication (2001). interview Padgett expressed literary affinity with Although characteristically Padgett’s work is highly “[Frank] O’HARA, [Kenneth] KOCH, [John] ASHBERY, comedic, it does not avoid serious concerns. His early [James] SCHUYLER, [Kenward] Elmslie, [Allen] GINSBERG, poems show the influence of Frank O’HARA’s “I do this, [Aimée] Cesaire, Kenneth PATCHEN, Hart CRANE, [William I do that” aesthetic, where the poet lists—often in a Carlos] WILLIAMS, [Ezra] POUND, Wallace STEVENS, early whimsical and disarmingly informal manner—the rou- [T. S.] ELIOT, [Federico García] Lorca, [Vladimir] tines of a walk in the city or the unfolding of a thought. Mayakovsky, [Pablo] Neruda, the surrealists, the Padgett’s later poetry shows increasing originality and dadaists, [Gerard Manley] Hopkins, Apollinaire, [Max] formal daring, as he experiments with prose poems, Jacob, [Pierre] Reverdy, [Blaise] Cendrars, [Valery] Lar- poem-pictures (often in collaboration with artists, baud, St-Pol-Roux, [Stéphane] Mallarmé, [Conte de] including Joe Brainard, George Schneeman, and Jim Lautréamont, [Arthur] Rimbaud, [Charles] Baudelaire, Dine), and other multigenre and collaborative works. [Walt] Whitman, [Emily] Dickinson, [Friedrich] His poems are populated by characters and language Hölderlin, [William] Blake, [Ludovico] Ariosto. . . . Let’s specific to popular culture. Padgett explains this influ- go back to Aristophanes!” (Padgett/Kane). ence: “[M]y upbringing was quite ‘normal’: toys, base- Padgett was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma. As a 16-year- ball, movies, cars, with their attendant vocabularies” old high-school student, he edited the White Dove (qtd. in Eshleman 8). Review, an influential little magazine that published the The effect comic books had on Padgett’s poetry must work of, among others, Paul BLACKBURN and Jack KER- not be underestimated: In Great Balls of Fire (1969), he OUAC. Padgett moved to New York City in 1960 to evokes cartoonlike characters, including “a stupen- study at Columbia University. While in New York he dously terrifying huge grotesque Flower Dog” (“A helped edit and produce Ted BERRIGAN’s C magazine, a Careless Ape”). In his book The Big Something (1990), crucial organ for New York school poets. He moved to one encounters “Dagwood outlines with Blondie Paris as a Fulbright Fellow in 1965–66, where he “fell disheveled” (“How to Be a Woodpecker”).

367 368 PALEY, GRACE

Nevertheless Padgett’s work is always tempered by between these events and larger concerns. Affirming the what David SHAPIRO refers to as “a very uncanny dark- importance of the poet’s connection to society, many of ness” that keeps it as serious as it is pleasing and hilar- Paley’s poems are testimonies to what she has witnessed ious (82). Padgett generates poetry off the sheen of a in her years as an activist. These poems, which often comic surface. focus on linguistic events—such as a story told to her as a child or the testimony of an El Salvadoran woman BIBLIOGRAPHY who has lost a son—highlight her conversational style Eshleman, Clayton. “Padgett the Collaborator.” Chicago Review 43.2 (1997): 8–14. by including various phrases—such as “they said” or Padgett, Ron. “An interview with Ron Padgett,” by Ed Fos- “she answered.” These powerful poems about social ter. In Postmodern Poetry: The Talisman Interviews/Inter- and political issues constitute Paley’s most distinctive viewed by Ed Foster. Hoboken, N.J.: Talisman House, contribution to American poetry. 1994, pp. 99–114. “Street Corner Dialogue” (1992), for example, opens ———. Interview with Ron Padgett, by Daniel Kane. New with the exclamation “Thank God for the old Jewish York City. 12 December 1997. ladies / though their sons are splendid with houses”; Shapiro, David. “A Night Painting of Ron Padgett.” Talisman these are people who can be relied upon to “take our 7 (1991): 82–87. leaflets.” She describes a dialogue in which their Daniel Kane acceptance signals the promise of a better future. In “Responsibility” (1984), Paley reaffirms her concern PALEY, GRACE (1922– ) Although best with the world’s future, stating that it is the poet’s known for her short stories, Grace Paley is an accom- responsibility to watch over this world and to “cry out plished poet who has written poetry for more than half like Cassandra, but be / listened to this time.” a century. Paley’s style is open and casual, written in BIBLIOGRAPHY simple language with little punctuation. This “com- Arcana, Judith. Grace Paley’s Life Stories: A Literary Biography. fortable” style—something she learned from W. H. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994. AUDEN—and Paley’s habit of grounding her poems in Bach, Gerhard, and Blaine H. Hall, ed. Conversations with her own experiences as a social and political activist, Grace Paley. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997. mother, teacher, and writer, create a connection Clark, LaVerne Harrell. “A Matter of Voice: Grace Paley and between poet and audience, reader and text. In her the Oral Tradition.” Women and Language 23:1 (spring poems Paley uses the combination of a sharp ear for 2000): 18–25. dialogue and a concern about larger issues to merge Kimberly Bernhardt the provincial and the global in interesting ways. Born to Russian Jewish immigrants, Paley was raised PALMER, MICHAEL (1943– ) Michael in New York City. She published her first book of short Palmer is an influential poet of the avant-garde whose stories, The Little Disturbances of Man, in 1959. She was work has been associated with the LANGUAGE SCHOOL of inducted into the American Academy and Institute of poetry. Palmer’s work builds on the American mod- Arts and Letters in 1968, and in 1987 she was awarded ernist poetic tradition of such poets as Ezra POUND, a prestigious Senior Fellowship by the National William Carlos WILLIAMS, and Gertrude STEIN (see MOD- Endowment for the Arts. Her first collection of poems, ERNISM), and his work also has been influenced by the Leaning Forward, was published in 1985; her New and poetry of Robert DUNCAN and Robert CREELEY. Since Collected Poems was published in 1992. Palmer is concerned with how sound and meaning Among the prevalent themes in Paley’s work are her function in poetry, the images in his work are often connections to family and history, women’s issues, time, abstract, and he plays with the slipperiness of the the city of New York, and, importantly, issues of social words’ meanings. However, Palmer’s poems certainly justice. In poems that seem to concentrate on simple, are not meaningless. Echoes of common experience everyday events, Paley explores the connections create multiple interpretations that are not directly “THE PANGOLIN” 369 explained in the poems. According to Palmer his BIBLIOGRAPHY poetry has “a resistance to the static image and, in fact, Clover, Joshua. “Ghosts in the Arcade.” Village Voice, May 9, an invocation of one that is more nomadic and that 2000, 78. forces the reader into a somewhat more active mode of Palmer, Michael. “An Interview with Michael Palmer,” by reading” (109). Palmer expands on the modernist ten- Paul Naylor, Lindsay Hill, and J. P. Craig. River City 14.2 dency to break away from narrative or lyrical poems (1994): 96–110. Selinger, Eric Murphy. “Important Pleasures and Others: that depend on formal devices (such as meter or Michael Palmer, Ronald Johnson.” Postmodern Culture 4.3 rhyme), storytelling (such as the dramatic monologue (1994). Available online. URL: http://muse.jhu.edu/ or CONFESSIONAL lyric), or explanations of political or journals/postmodern_culture/v004/4.3selinger.html. philosophical positions (see LYRIC POETRY and NARRATIVE Downloaded May 2002. POETRY). Instead his work opens up a field of semantic possibilities for the reader. J. Andrew Prall Palmer was born and raised in New York City. To date, he has published 10 collections of poetry, from “THE PANGOLIN” MARIANNE MOORE Blake’s Newton (1972) to his most recent collection, The (1936) While critics disagree over the intent of Promises of Glass (2000). Palmer’s influence extends Marianne MOORE’s “The Pangolin”—whether its pri- beyond poetry, as he also has collaborated with the mary attention rests on civic virtue, artistic purpose, Margaret Jenkins Dance Company on renowned works or how the world is experienced—almost all agree on of modern dance during the last 30 years. He has its central issues: namely, a concern with art, poetry, received several fellowships, and in 1999 he was and science as a unified investigation of the natural elected a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets; world, the relationship between the animal, human, in 2001 he received the Shelley Memorial Award from and spiritual kingdoms, and the importance of “grace” the Poetry Society of America. in humanity’s betterment of its condition. Such con- In “Untitled (April ’91)” (1991) Palmer engages the cerns place “The Pangolin” in the modernist tradition, idea of a narrative in a poem, stating that a narrative along with such poems as T. S. ELIOT’s THE WASTE LAND demands that one must “paint a flower with a death’s (see MODERNISM); moreover, its difficulty of interpreta- head.” The combination of “flower” and “death” seems tion, formal innovation, and interest in cultural refer- contradictory and subverts the reader’s expectations ence lend “The Pangolin” to being placed in the regarding the function of a narrative, that the flower category of modernist masterpiece. would be related to life or fertility. The poet then writes Published first in England as the title poem of The that the words in the narrative are subject to gravity; Pangolin and Other Verse, “The Pangolin” is one of therefore, they bend “as if suns would flower as sparks Moore’s most superbly executed animal poems, a topic of paint / then fall before the retinal net.” In this sur- that dominated her early poems, such as “THE FISH” real image, the bending or manipulation of words is (1935) and “The Paper Nautilus” (1941), as well her compared to suns that bloom in bursts of color before later poems, such as “To a Giraffe” (1966). The first five one’s field of vision. Palmer’s innovative use of lan- of “The Pangolin”’s nine stanzas focus mainly on the guage can have the same effect, allowing for the expe- physical characteristics of the pangolin—a long-tailed, rience of a fresh outlook on the world through the scale-covered mammal of tropical Africa and Asia, bending—and reading—of words. which has a long snout and sticky tongue for eating Palmer’s poetry explores the dichotomy between the ants and termites—and the last four compare these fea- personal and the philosophical, creating a destabilizing tures to “man.” In many respects Moore’s Puritan sensi- tension that the reader may find unsettling. However, bility—her reliance on sparse, layered symbolism and the controlled uncertainty of his work allows for a her sense that people need to work at virtue—places a response and engagement with language that is at turns great deal of spiritual weight on the lines, such as “that sensual, paradoxical, musical, and frequently beautiful. the outside / edge of his hands may bear the weight and 370 PASSAGES

save the / claws // for digging,” by pointing out features D.’s spiritualism, and Olson’s notion of composition by that suggest prudence and functional necessity. Even field (see ARS POETICAS), Passages is a significant feature when other sections of the poem focus on the “grace” of of Duncan’s mature work. “Passages 1–30” appear in the pangolin, they do so by focusing on the pangolin’s Bending the Bow (1968); “Passages 31–37” appear in attainment of grace through “adversities” and “con- / Ground Work (1984), along with three other unnum- versities” so that “grace” for the pangolin is as much a bered “Passages,” since Duncan stopped numbering spiritual state as it is an aesthetic one. them in order to deny a linear coherence. Ground Work And yet the pangolin itself is as much a subject of II (1987) contains an additional 13 “Passages.” the poem as any moral lesson. The aforementioned Intended to be a meaningful part of the individual lines clearly foreground the pangolin’s physical books in which they were published as well as “the makeup. This concern with the animal’s habits, move- unfolding revelation of a Sentence beyond the work” ments, and physical appearance runs the length of the (“Some Notes” xi), the “Passages” poems are intricately poem, which covers diet, defensive strategies, charac- connected to Duncan’s other writing. “An Illustration teristics of its skin and tail, and nocturnal wanderings. Passages 20,” for instance, is also number XXVI of This material information dominates the poem to such Duncan’s other major series THE STRUCTURE OF RIME, and a degree that the pangolin as subject itself and the pan- “Passages 36” is included in a separate set entitled A golin as teacher of virtue and grace become parallel Seventeenth Century Suite. investigations. “The Pangolin” in some ways splits the Passages is a series of poems without end, engaging difference between Ezra POUND’s high modernist desire simultaneously with aspects of history, myth, memory, for historical and aesthetic instruction and the post- aesthetics, imagination, and identity. Beginning with modern interest in objects and words as materials in an epigraph from the Emperor Julian, which reads, in themselves above and beyond their functions as signi- part, “For the even is bounded, but the uneven is fiers. With such a bridge in mind, Moore’s mixing of without bounds and there is no way through or out of poetry, science, and ethics in “The Pangolin” becomes it,” “Tribal Memories Passages 1” introduces the ques- a way of foregrounding our material environment tions of form and formlessness. Romantic in his belief while being instructed by it. that the artist is one who searches for meaningful pat- BIBLIOGRAPHY terns, Duncan considers correspondence an immanent Joyce, Elisabeth. Cultural Critique and Abstraction: Marianne characteristic of language, and subsequently he views Moore and the Avant-Garde. Cranbury, N.J.: Associated the field of the poem as something to be yielded to University Presses/Bucknell University Press, 1998. rather than overly controlled. The poems recognize McQuade, Molly, ed. By Herself: Women Reclaim Poetry. St. that “Chaos / and the divine measures and orders / so Paul, Minn.: Graywolf Press, 2000. wedded are” (“Transgressing the Real,” Passages 27 Willis, Patricia, ed. Marianne Moore: Woman and Poet. [1968]), and that: “Not one but many energies Orono, Maine: National Poetry Foundation, 1990. shape the field” (“Transmissions,” Passages 33 [1984]). Joel Bettridge Welcoming puns, etymologies, errors, silence, frag- ments, and disruptions, Duncan “works with all parts PASSAGES ROBERT DUNCAN (1968–1987) of the poem as polysemous, taking each thing of the Written in the mode of the long poem associated with composition as generative of meaning” (Introduction Louis ZUKOFSKY’s “A,” William Carlos WILLIAMS’s PATER- ix). Two notable poems in Passages include “The Torso SON, and Charles OLSON’s THE MAXIMUS POEMS (see LONG Passages 18,” a celebration of homosexual love, and AND SERIAL POETRY). Robert DUNCAN’s Passages (other- “Up Rising Passages 25,” which critiques the United wise known as “the ‘Passages’ poems”) demonstrates a States military presence in Vietnam. Later “Passages” poet’s deep commitment to various mythopoetic tradi- grow more insistent on the dissolution of imaginative tions and his view of poetry as a “grand collage” (Intro- boundaries as a way to overcome the darkness of cor- duction vii). Influenced by Ezra POUND’s THE CANTOS, H. rupt politics and spiritual stagnation: “There is truly no PATCHEN, KENNETH 371 direction no ‘center’ to the ‘center’ our More than a cast of characters, her family members rep- sounding / goes out as we go out no cir- resent natural forces that shape the poet’s world, from cumference to the ‘circumference’” (Untitled [1987]). the baby whose wails of vowels seem to be “calling / for Passages mixes poetry and prophecy in an active their lost consonants” (“Night Sounds” [1975]) to the exploration of the unknown. Focusing on different stern father who sits, “clearing / his throat of language” myths of the past and their continuing influence on the (“Silent Treatment” [1995]). These descriptions con- present, Duncan’s series favors process over closure trast sharply with the recurring images of her home, set and beginnings over endings while acknowledging that placidly among the trees of rural Maryland, under an each is an inherent part of the poet’s creative act. “alphabet / of silence” (“Blizzard” [1981]). BIBLIOGRAPHY Pastan is at her most lyrical when reveling in the Duncan, Robert. Introduction to Bending the Bow. New York: intersection of these natural forces and her own rela- New Directions, 1968, pp. i–x. tively brief time on earth. In “Topiary Gardens” (1991), ———. “Some Notes on Notation.” In Ground Work. New she laments that she will never grow leaves and berries, York: New Directions, 1984, pp. ix–xi. but she takes as consolation that someday “planted Reid, Ian W. “The Plural Text: ‘Passages.’” In Robert Duncan: deep underground / [she] too will send up green” that Scales of the Marvelous, edited by Robert J. Bertholf and will drape the gravestones sitting unchanging above Ian W. Reid. New York: New Directions, 1979. her. This intertwining of loss with life, sorrow with James L. Maynard happiness, imbues her work with a passionate love of the natural cycle. Pastan’s poetry has an intimate qual- PASTAN, LINDA (1932– ) Linda Pastan is ity that resonates, as if her words were memories, most often recognized for what many consider to be rather than poems, familiar yet “strangely new, words / “domestic poetry”—explorations of her roles as daugh- you almost wrote yourself” (“A New Poet” [1991]). ter, wife, and mother—as well as her fine eye for the BIBLIOGRAPHY nature around her. Her recurring themes of family and Adelman Ken. “Word Perfect: For Linda Pastan, Revision Is nature are lyrically interwoven with her recognition of the Purest Form of Love.” Washingtonian (May 1996): 29. the cyclical qualities of life, acknowledging this as the Nordhaus, Jean. “Linda Pastan: The Hightened Present,” source of both life’s pain and its wonder: “One exodus The Writer’s Center. Available online. URL: www.preview- prefigures the next” (“Passover” [1971]). port.com/Home/pastan-e1.html. Downloaded 2000. Pastan was born and grew up in the Bronx, New York. Pastan, Linda. “Linda Pastan [Interview with Lisa Granik].” Despite her family’s hopes that she would pursue a In Truthtellers of the Times: Interviews with Contemporary career in medicine like her father, she earned degrees in Women Poets, edited by Janet Palmer Mullaney. Ann English and library science in the 1950s from Radcliffe, Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998, pp. 82–87. Simmons, and Brandeis. In 1958 won Mademoiselle’s Aimee Fifarek Dylan Thomas Award, after which she put her writing aside for 10 years to marry and to raise three children. PATCHEN, KENNETH (1911–1972) One Her first volume of poetry, A Perfect Circle of Sun, was of the earliest figures associated with the literary BEAT published in 1971. Since then she has written nine addi- movement, Kenneth Patchen was an avant-garde tional books of poetry, spent four years as the poet lau- writer, poet, and artist whose work consistently reate of Maryland (1991–95), and earned a National demonstrated his proletarian roots, as well as his com- Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1972) and several mitments to pacifism, socialism, relentless experimen- other awards, including the Alice Fay Di Castagnola tation with literary form, and radical human Award from the Poetry Society of America (1978). consciousness. From 1936 to 1972, Patchen published When she began writing poetry as a teenager, Pastan more than 36 books of poetry, fiction, and drama, focused on religious and other familial tensions, and including experiments in the antinovel, concrete this tendency carried over into her published verse. poetry (see VISUAL POETRY), poetry and jazz (several of 372 PATERSON his recordings have been released on the Folkways BIBLIOGRAPHY record label), irrational tales and verse, and painting. Nelson, Raymond, Kenneth Patchen and American Mysticism. Strongly influenced by Walt Whitman and William Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984. Blake, Patchen’s unique aesthetic followed no particu- Smith, Larry R. Kenneth Patchen. Boston: Twayne, 1978. lar group or style, and, like Blake, he saw his art as the James Emmett Ryan visionary work of a poet-prophet. From his introduc- tion to Blake’s The Book of Job (1947) also came one of PATERSON WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS Patchen’s many assertions of personal and artistic free- (1946, 1948, 1949, 1951, 1958, 1963) The five dom, a cry for personal liberty that contributed to the books which make up Paterson were originally pub- ethos of an emerging post–World War II American lished separately in sequence by New Directions in counterculture: “Do what you want and what you want New York, and William Carlos WILLIAMS had begun will make / everybody more beautiful.” work on a sixth at the time of his death in 1963. The The third of five children in a working-class family, poem was published in a single volume in 1963, Kenneth was born in Niles, Ohio. An excellent student including the brief fragments of book 6 found among and athlete, Patchen worked two summers in the Ohio Williams’s papers. Because of its epic scope, Paterson is steel mills with his father and brother to supplement grouped among American long such poems as Hart his college scholarship at Alexander Meilejohn’s Exper- CRANE’s THE BRIDGE, T. S. ELIOT’s FOUR QUARTETS and THE imental College at the University of Wisconsin. Later WASTE LAND, Ezra POUND’s THE CANTOS, Louis ZUKOVSKY’s he studied with his mentor, Meilejohn, at the Com- “A,” and Charles OLSON’s THE MAXIMUS POEMS (see LONG monwealth College in Mena, Arkansas, but Patchen AND SERIAL POETRY). soon became disenchanted with academics and left Williams, the most celebrated practitioner of ima- after one semester. In 1967 he received an award from gism (see IMAGIST SCHOOL), explained his plan and the National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities premise for Paterson in the poem’s “Author’s Note,” for “lifelong contribution to American letters.” which appeared with book 1 in 1946; he envisioned “a Working at odd jobs and traveling in the United long poem in four parts—that a man in himself is a States and Canada from 1930 to 1933, Patchen con- city, beginning, seeking, achieving and concluding his tinued his writing. “Permanence,” a sonnet, was pub- life in ways which the various aspects of a city may lished in the New York Times in 1932. Before the Brave embody” (n.p.). Book 1 brings together Paterson the (1936), Patchen’s first book of poetry, set out his man and Paterson the city in its opening lines: “Pater- favored themes of love and pacifism in the years lead- son lies in the valley under the Passaic Falls / its spent ing to world war. In “Class of 1934,” a bitter survey of waters forming the outline of his back,” thus personi- the prewar political climate, he writes, “Hitler offers / fying the city and sexualizing the river and its falls. Death Death.” As the war churned on, Patchen wrote Williams subsequently interspersed prose excerpts prolifically and angrily about its destructiveness. His from personal letters, newspapers, and local histories refrain, “To hell with power and hate and war,” in with his lines of verse. The complete work has been “Instructions for Angels” (1945) characteristically pre- described by Gilbert Sorrentino as “a masterwork of cedes an equally fervent call to love and humanity. High MODERNISM, an open collage of sustained and Refusing the violence and death of battle, the speaker exquisite lyrics, fragmented narratives, recollected, locates instead the life-giving power of his lover, for “in revived, and revised history, and a bravura display of her eyes / Is a country where death can never go” (“All bricolage” (261). From the start, fellow poets and crit- the Roses of the World” [1946]). ics watched closely and held widely divergent opinions In 1959 a surgical accident permanently damaged of Williams’s “masterwork.” Richard EBERHART wel- his spine, and Patchen was bedridden for the remain- comed the second installment as “even more exciting der of his life. This, however, did not prevent him from than the first,” because “the sense of energy, movement continuing to write and paint. and reality is everywhere present” (“Energy” 4), and PATERSON 373

Robert LOWELL connected the book to the first great plete absence of rhythm, an arbitrariness of line- icon of American poetry when he declared it to be length, a flatness of diction, a poverty of metaphor” “Whitman’s America, grown pathetic and tragic, bru- and “appallingly bad prose” (449). talized by inequality, disorganized by industrial chaos, It is impossible to know how to reconcile dismissals and faced with annihilation” (693). such as these with the claim that the book is what As the first four parts of the sequence progress, earth, another reviewer called a “modern classic,” “disarm- air, fire, and water maintain symbolic value at the same ingly simple in its sharp clarity and intense sincerity of time as sets of binaries (including man/woman, expression” (Wills 415). The “sharp clarity” is found city/wilderness, and marriage/divorce) emerge to when “the man broke his wife’s / cancerous jaw,” the expand the symbolic framework of the poem. The irony “sincerity of expression” heard when “Love is a kitten, of Paterson is that Williams, who always insisted on a pleasant / thing, a purr.” common speech by and for ordinary people, would After taking more than a decade of critical coverage write a book so complicated that it requires interpreta- into account, spanning the publication history of the tion by specialists (Eberhart “Image” 5). Hayden CAR- book in its parts, what emerges from among these RUTH was bothered that even “at the eighth reading voices is a consensus that while the book’s structure some details of structure and aspects of symbol remain and design are so problematic as potentially to defeat unclear” (331); while a particular symbol appears con- its premise, Williams’s lyrical power is unquestionable sistently, its use and meaning are inconsistent (Spears and his control of the image remains unmatched. This 40). One critic describes book 3 as “some magnificent lyricism is evident in Paterson when Williams likens a passages, some silly passages, and a great mass of undi- man’s thoughts to boughs “from whose leaves stream- gested material” (Spears 42), and he concludes that the ing with rain / his mind drinks of desire,” and it is the third installment is “not only about the failure of lan- grace by which the poem might be redeemed. guage; it is a failure of language” (43). Books 4 and 5, BIBLIOGRAPHY published later, also received mixed reviews. Carruth, Hayden. “Dr. Williams’s ‘Paterson.’” Nation 170 Carruth’s mixed feelings about Williams’s epic con- (April 8, 1950): 331–332. tinued with the publication of Book Four, the last line ———. “The Run to the Sea.” Nation 173 (August 25, of which reads “the end” because it was intended to be 1951): 155–156. the final segment. While Carruth believed it to be a Ciardi, John. “The Epic of a Place.” Saturday Review 41 major moment in American poetry and admired the (October 11, 1958): 37–39. whole as an “often superlatively good, lyrical medita- Eberhart, Richard. “Energy, Movement and Reality.” New tion,” he nevertheless considered Book Four as “less York Times Book Review, June 20, 1948, 4. satisfactory” and “less well integrated” than its prede- ———. “The Image of Ourselves.” New York Times Book cessors (156). John CIARDI and Thom GUNN agree that Review, February 12, 1950, 5. the subject and meaning of Book Five are never clear, Gunn, Thom. “Poetry as Written.” Yale Review 48 (December but while Ciardi confesses to being occasionally “baf- 1958): 297–305. fled,” he insists there still is “richness” and “master[y]” Lowell, Robert. “Patterson II.” Nation 166 (June 19, 1948): in the book (39); Gunn also concedes Williams’s 692–694. Mariani, Paul L. William Carlos Williams: A New World “purity of language,” but in the end he believes that Naked. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981. “whole sequences of Paterson Book Five could be “One Man’s River.” Times Literary Supplement September 10, rearranged and still mean about as much and as little 1964: 842. as they do now” (298). Finally, the reception of the Ricks, Christopher. “Sprawling.” New Statesman (September posthumous 1963 edition is harshest of all, perhaps 25, 1964): 448–450. because the venerable Dr. Williams no longer could be Sorrentino, Gilbert. Review of Paterson, by William Carlos touched by the criticism; Christopher Ricks calls it Williams. Review of Contemporary Fiction 13.2 (summer “boring” and an “almost total failure” citing “a com- 1993): 261–262. 374 PEACOCK, MOLLY

Spears, Monroe K. “The Failure of Language.” Poetry 76 In Paradise: Piece by Piece, Peacock acknowledges (April 1950): 39–44. that formal poems, such as sonnets, “were poems with Williams, William Carlos. “Author’s Note.” William Carlos happy barriers” and that working out formal poetic Williams. Paterson, New York: New Directions, 1963. n.p. “puzzles” afforded her creative freedom and emotional Wills, G. Review of Paterson, by William Carlos Williams. safety (140). For example, in “Say You Love Me” National Review 16.20 (May 19, 1964): 415. (1989), she uses the terza rima form as the grounding A. Mary Murphy for a description of her father’s alcoholic rampage and his drunken insistence on love and obedience. In this PEACOCK, MOLLY (1947– ) Molly Peacock poem the family interacts through threats and lies. The is an advocate for what is often called “expansive child may be forced to profess love and may, indeed, poetry,” verse that blends formalist and narrative tech- love the father. Nevertheless isolation and loss envelop niques (see NEW FORMALISM). With the goal of extending everyone in the household: The telephone didn’t ring. poetry’s readership by incorporating “novelistic narra- “There was no world out there, / so we remained, com- tive and traditional forms” (Walzer 11), Peacock utilizes pletely alone.” This poem underscores Peacock’s com- rhyme, form, and strict syllabic count to describe and mitment to direct, honest communication, which is the explore life’s most trying, tumultuous, and intimate basis for personal relationships, family, and community. events. She is known for her personal, almost CONFES- BIBLIOGRAPHY SIONAL revelations about abusive family relationships, Allen, Annette. “Molly Peacock.” In Dictionary of Literary Biog- female sexuality, abortion, marriage, and divorce. Influ- raphy. Vol. 120, American Poets since World War II, edited by enced by Anne SEXTON’s astonishing revelations, Sylvia R. S. Gwynn. Detroit: Gale Research, 1992, pp. 243–247. PLATH’s intense imagery, and Elizabeth BISHOP’s polished Rector, Liam. “Molly Peacock.” In Contemporary Poets. 5th language, as well as by feminist activism of the 1960s ed. Chicago: St. James Press, 1991, pp. 749–750. and 1970s, Peacock clearly stands out as a poet who Walzer, Kevin. The Ghost of Tradition: Expansive Poetry and speaks dispassionately about her experiences without Postmodernism. Ashland, Ore.: Story Line Press, 1998. being deadened by shame or regret. Diane Warner Peacock was born in Buffalo, New York. She received a B.A. from the State University of New York, Bingham- PERCHIK, SIMON (1923– ) Simon Per- ton, (1969) and later was a Danforth Fellow at Johns chik’s poetry reflects the reality of contemporary Amer- Hopkins University (M.A., 1977), where she studied ican life that is a culmination of the past and a with the poets Cynthia MacDonald and Richard continuous struggle for identity. Perchik can best HOWARD. Peacock’s first book of poems among five col- described as a modernist whose influences include lections was And Live Apart (1980). She has also pub- Vincente Aleixandre, Paul Celan, and Pablo Neruda lished a creative nonfiction memoir, Paradise, Piece by (see MODERNISM). Perchik can capture a moment, a Piece (1998), and a teaching anthology, How to Read a photograph, or a memory in expressive, emblematic Poem—and Start a Poetry Circle (1999). She has garnered words, such as in his depiction of a graveyard whose numerous awards, including fellowships from the “notices ...offer the dead / page after page (“You read Ingram Merrill Foundation (1978 and 1988), New York these notices ...” [2000]). The images of Perchik’s Foundation for the Arts (1985 and 1990), National work starkly erupt from urban concerns about war, Endowment for the Arts (1990), Lila Wallace Founda- existence, and place. tion (1994), and Woodrow Wilson Foundation (1995). Perchik was born in Paterson, New Jersey. After Peacock served as president of the Poetry Society of serving as a pilot in World War II, he earned both a America from 1989–94, during which time she began B.A. in English and a law degree from New York Uni- “Poetry in Motion,” a project that mounted hundreds of versity. In 1964 he published his first book, I Counted short poems in New York City subways and became a Only April, and has since published more than 20 model for similar programs across the country. chapbooks and books of poetry. PERELMAN, BOB 375

Each word in Perchik’s poetry creates a visible and aesthetics. Language poets seek to nullify traditional veritable image. The poetry involves such themes as self methods of meaning-making by disrupting the stan- exploration and the impact of external forces on identity, dard syntax of language, introducing “self- / doubt and as seen in war’s influence on Perchik. In Hands Collected word-doubt” (“The Poet” [1986]) into both the poem (2000), airplane images parallel the images of birds and the reader, thus forcing the reader to participate in (these also pervade much of his early poetry), serving the creation of the poem. both to revive personal memories as a pilot and to link Perelman was born in Youngstown, Ohio, the second the collective human mind to a flight for poetic freedom. of two children, to solidly middle-class parents. He In Touching the Headstone (2000), Perchik focuses on the began attending the Putney School in Vermont at age interconnectedness of life and death, allowing the living 12, where he received intensive education in music, to touch the past, as emphasized by the title. poetry, and the classics. Although he originally aspired Perchik omits all titles from his work, a strategy that to be a concert pianist, his admitted lack of technical resists traditional poetic form and definition and allows ability and passion for literature led him to the Univer- for a range of reader interpretations. In a poem begin- sity of Michigan, where he earned a degree in classics ning “Wherever I turn ...” (2000), Perchik revisits his (1969) before going on to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop past and the war. Images of planes lend a cold, harsh to earn an M.F.A. in poetry (1970) and a Ph.D in En- edge to “this yard” that exists as a place of personal his- glish from University of California, Berkeley (1990). tory. The yard, representative of memory, history, and Perelman’s poetry has been described by his critics experience, is being dug through by “a shovel that won’t and peers alike as cynical, satirical, and dire. In his leave the ground.” Perchik further explores moments of poem “Anti-Oedipus” (1986), whose title repeats that human maturity in “It’s easy to grow tall ...” (2000) as of philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s he describes the natural transitions of life from a “first seminal work (1977), his speaker stops himself from born leaf” to icy peaks “taking you with them.” gouging out his eyes, which “deny” the truth they Perchik’s substantial gift for crafting poetry is evi- observe, to “see” into a seemingly simple word: “Inside dent in his lucid and concrete language. His precise the house (note the word / standing solid, timbered, choice of words solidifies every poem. painted, mortgaged, but that’s okay.” Perleman’s juxta- BIBLIOGRAPHY position of a modern-day Oedipus tearing out his eyes, Bennett, Jim. “Simon Perchik: Touching the Headstone,” New so as not to see the truth of his condition, with the lin- Hope International Review Online. Available online. URL: guistic act of seeing the house in a multiplicity of con- www.nhi.clara.net/bs0283.htm. Downloaded December texts diverts the imagination from the man who will 2003. not see to the house, which now seems to hold signif- Perchik, Simon. “Interview with Simon Perchik,” by David icantly more meaning. Baratier. Jacket Magazine 8 (1999). Available online. URL: Language is the true subject of Perelman’s poetry. http://jacketmagazine.com/08/perchik-iv.html. Down- With their endlessly shifting focus and redirections, loaded December 2003. Perelman’s poems constantly emphasize the space Maria D. Lombard between meaning and language. The reader is denied the option of ignoring the usually transparent interface PERELMAN, BOB (1947– ) Bob Perelman between the “I” who writes “and the you reading is recognized as one of the most political, and often the (breath still misting the glass) / examples of the body most humorous, of the LANGUAGE poets. From their partitioned by the word” (“Binary” [1986]). In recog- beginnings at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, Perleman nizing language for what it is, we are also acknowledg- and fellow language poets Michael Waltuch, Tomaz ing that it is our connection, albeit imperfect, to each Salamun, and Barrett WATTEN came to the forefront of other. In this way poet and reader become a single poetry’s avant-garde by deliberately rejecting the lyrical entity, entwined in language, comaking a new shared and personal poetry of the BEAT and NEW YORK SCHOOL reality at the level of the poem. 376 PETERS, ROBERT

BIBLIOGRAPHY An early work, “Christmas Poem 1966: Lines on an Evans, Steve. “Bob Perelman.” In Dictionary of Literary Biog- English Butcher-Shop Window” (1968), demonstrates raphy. Vol. 193, American Poets since World War II, edited well this willingness to confront—even to celebrate— by Joseph Conte. Detroit: Gale Group, 1998, pp. violence. “O beautiful severed head of hog,” Peters 266–281. begins his catalogue of dismembered animal parts, Monroe, Jonathan. “‘Poetry, Community, Movement’: A Con- ending with the almost euphoric exclamation, “I see versation, with Bob Perelman, Charles Bernstein, and Ann you all!” To encounter this horror, then to speak of it is Lauterbach.” Diacritics 26 (fall/winter 1996): 196–210. itself a triumph. Aimee Fifarek Pain threatens to destroy even language, as in Peters’s poem “the child in the burnt house” (1974). PETERS, ROBERT (1924– ) Robert Peters is The child “finds his father / charred, dead, huddled,” equally adept in CONFESSIONAL and observational modes and after escaping from the house, the stars “tell the of writing, brief, parabolic incantations, and book- child to sing. / but he can’t do anything.” Pain has over- length dramatic monologues. Besides being a poet, he is whelmed the child, as it constantly threatens to over- also a noteworthy scholar, critic, dramatist, and fiction whelm the adult poet. But language yields its own writer. His chief influences are Theodore ROETHKE, rewards. To speak is to survive. Robert BLY, and Robert Louis Stevenson, after whom he BIBLIOGRAPHY was named. His project is to find the connections Bertolino, James. “Robert Peters: An Appreciation.” Belling- between different poetic movements and, on a larger ham Review 10 (spring 1987): 55–56. scale, different genres of writing. His work explores sim- Collins, Billy. “Literary Reputation and the Thrown Voice: ilar meetings of brutality and tenderness, the sublime The Poetry of Robert Peters.” In A Gift of Tongues: Critical and the grossly physical, memory and lived experience. Challenges in Contemporary American Poetry, edited by Peters was born and raised in northern Wisconsin. Kathleeen Aguero and Marie Harris. Athens: University of What he would later cite as the beginning of his life as Georgia Press, 1987, pp. 295–306. a poet occurred in February 1960 when his four-year- Wakowski, Diane. “Robert Peters.” American Poetry 2 (win- old son Richard died of one-day meningitis. His first ter 1985): 71–78. book of poetry, Songs for a Son, was chosen by Denise Matthew Purdy LEVERTOV in 1967 for a series of books she was editing. In 1952 he received a Ph.D. from the University of PIECES ROBERT CREELEY (1969) This Wisconsin. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship for controversially obscure sequence of minimalist the 1966–67 academic year, and in 1974 he received a poems, written in the late 1960s and published in fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. 1969, takes as its subject the question of form: cos- He taught at several universities before finally settling mic, national, human, poetic. Robert CREELEY’s tactics at the University of California, Irvine, where he went here are elusiveness and inwardness, qualities drawn on to teach for more than 30 years. largely from the influence of Charles OLSON, his BLACK Although Peters sees brutality in the world, he does MOUNTAIN College friend. In Pieces, however, Creeley’s not try to avoid it. It is instead more important for him voice veers modestly away from the prophetic majesty to be fully conscious in the face of trauma in order to of Olson’s Maximus persona, used in THE MAXIMUS render it more powerfully in language. He finds POEMS, in favor of what Creeley calls “small facts” (3). redemption in writing. This comes through in his Responding to Olson’s theory of “Projective Verse” (see erotic odes to John Dillinger and Robert Mitchum, the ARS POETICA), Pieces expresses in verse Creeley’s secret lusts of his youth. In maturity, having realized engagement with the limits and parameters of poetry his identity as a poet and a homosexual, Peters retains itself and his concern with the question of how poetry his old longing; the only difference is in his freedom to works. As he told Allen GINSBERG, “I cannot define a articulate this longing. poem. ...I cannot tell you what I think a poem is. I PIECES 377 think that has to do with the fact that all the terms of Creeley voices this commitment in a number of indi- consciousness are, at the moment, undergoing tremen- rect ways, but also directly. “I hate the metaphors,” he dous terms of change” (36). announces, insisting on the reality “of things / in The organization of Pieces requires explanation. Of words.” If the minimalist verse of Pieces lacks perfec- the 73 short poems that comprise the volume, 33 are tionism and retains much of the rough quality of a titled; the rest are listed in the table of contents by their working notebook, then just as surely it expresses a opening line—after the fashion of E. E. CUMMINGS. devotion to the possibility of charting consciousness Many of the poems are extremely brief, seeming to be incrementally through language, even if that con- constructed in the spirit of a haiku or zen koan, as with sciousness must be advanced haltingly, word by word. the enigmatic “So tired / it falls / apart.” Creeley has The extreme concision of Creeley’s word-by-word min- since explained that the writing of the poems was con- imalism here accords with Olson’s principle of projec- ducted as a daily journal so that the poems are tive verse, whereby perceptions are recorded arranged exactly in the order that they were written: sequentially and, in turn, lead to new perceptions. In “When the time came to publish it, I simply used the another sense, however, Creeley—a New Englander by chronological sequence of its writing, and let ...three birth and disposition—can be seen as following Ralph dots indicate that that was the end of a day’s accumu- Waldo Emerson’s notion, in his “Nature” essay (1849), lation, and the single dots most usually indicate divi- that “words are signs of natural facts.” But what marks sions in the writing as it’s happening” (192–193). out Creeley’s unique attitude about language is his Despite such explanations, however, considerable alignment of pleasure and the materiality of language: uncertainty remains about where each poem ends and “Words / are / pleasure.” the next begins, particularly since the chronological As these influences and associations suggest, Pieces ordering of the poems results in the theme of one stands as a contribution to both theory and practice in “piece” echoing through the lines of subsequent poetry. As theory it recalls Williams’s comment in Pater- “pieces.” Indeed many of these pages have a calculated son that there are “No ideas but in things.” Creeley’s rough-draft quality about them, suggesting that they concept of language’s materiality adds the concept of are fragments, shards of a work in progress, unpolished time and movement so that, as he indicates in the first and in disarray. “Mazatlan: Sea,” for example, opens poem, “No forms less / than activity.” The journal-like with a precisely rhymed couplet, initiating a pair of pre- structure of Pieces, implying “age as form,” reinforces cisely wrought stanzas (“The sea flat out, / the light far this chronological patterning of words; the poems out”), but the concluding fourth and fifth stanzas express shards of sequential perception, not only word appear unfinished or perhaps directionless. Sometimes, by word, but also day by day and minute by minute. too, Creeley inserts brief sections of prose between the Addressing the difficulty of mutual human understand- poems, as did William Carlos WILLIAMS in PATERSON, the ing and the radical separation of even highly conscious American poetry sequence that Pieces most closely individuals—“Here I / am. There / you are”—leads resembles (see LOVE AND SERIAL POETRY). Creeley to a conclusion that even when language, as in The apparently fragmentary selections in Pieces fig- Pieces, is purified of metaphor, its meanings can be ure importantly in Creeley’s insistence not only on the accepted and yet not entirely understood. “small facts” of daily life, but also in his understanding The poems enlist minimalism in the service of of poetic authenticity, which calls for a transcript of immediacy; each brief line examines an instant: “Pre- perceptions and modes of consciousness that can be sent again / present present / again present / present documented, although not completely and not always again,” with “present” indicating both material pres- coherently. Following language to the deepest levels of ence and the “now,” or present tense. Creeley’s preoc- its authenticity through Pieces requires a strong resist- cupation with the poems’ ability to remain present in ance, on Creeley’s part, to simile and metaphor and a discrete moments resonates with T. S. ELIOT’s attempt commitment to words as things, as facts themselves. to work through the problem of time in FOUR QUARTETS, 378 PIERCY, MARGE particularly his paradoxical notion that “If all time is ing a Discussion Group” (1992). Many poems reflect eternally present / All time is unredeemable.” In this her frustrations with industrialized, patriarchal society sense, like Eliot, Creeley’s Pieces haltingly works and her visions of the better world she aims to help toward a combined theory of poetry and time. create. Her poems about, for, and to her mother are BIBLIOGRAPHY especially powerful. In “My Mother’s Body” (1985), she Creeley, Robert. Contexts of Poetry: Interviews 1961–1971, writes: “This body is your body now, ashes now / and edited by Donald Allen. Bolinas, Calif.: Four Seasons, roses, but alive in my eyes.” This extended musing on 1973. Piercy’s complicated connection with her mother is, by Faas, Ekbert. Robert Creeley: A Biography. Hanover, N.H.: turns, angry and compassionate, loving and fierce. University Press of New England, 2001. Piercy’s early work is marked by short lines and her Wilson, John, ed. Robert Creeley’s Life and Work: A Sense of discovery of feminist theory; her later work shows Increment. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. longer lines, a larger range of imagery, and the influ- James Emmett Ryan ences of country living and her reconnection with Judaism. Piercy’s increasing involvement with Judaism PIERCY, MARGE (1936– ) Marge Piercy is is mirrored in its increasing role in her work, especially one of the 20th century’s most prolific and respected her collection The Art of Blessing the Day (1999). Her feminist writers. Her work shows a commitment to the work as a whole combines earthy humor, a gift for dream of social change, rooted in personal narratives, sacralizing ordinary moments, a strong sense of narra- the wheel of the Jewish year, and landscapes both tive, and a passion for what in Hebrew is called tikkun urban (Detroit) and pastoral (Cape Cod). The title of olam, the imperative to heal the world. one of her favorite poems is “To Be of Use” (1973), and BIBLIOGRAPHY she believes poems should be useful. By this she means Mitchell, Felicia. “Marge Piercy’s The Moon Is Always Female: not necessarily that poems should be didactic, though Feminist Text, Great Books Context.” Virginia English Bul- many of hers are, but rather “that readers will find letin 40.2 (1990): 34–45. poems that speak to and for them” (Piercy xii). Nowik, Nan. “Mixing Art and Politics: The Writings of Adri- Piercy was born in Detroit, Michigan, to a family enne Rich, Marge Piercy, and Alice Walker.” Centennial deeply affected by the depression. She was the first in Review 30.2 (spring 1986): 208–218. her family to attend college, at the University of Michi- Piercy, Marge. Introduction to Circles on the Water. New gan; she earned a B.A. in 1957. Winning a Hopwood York: Knopf, 1982, pp. xi–xv. Award for poetry and fiction (1957) enabled her to fin- Walker, Sue, and Hamner, Eugenie, eds. Ways of Knowing: ish college and spend time in France, and her formal Essays on Marge Piercy. Mobile, Ala.: Negative Capability Press, 1991. schooling ended with an M.A. from Northwestern Uni- versity. Her first book of poems, Breaking Camp, was Rachel Barenblat published in 1968. She has won a number of awards, including the Massachusetts’ Governor’s Commission PINSKY, ROBERT (1940– ) Robert Pinsky’s on the Status of Women Literary Award (1974) and the poetry reveals the influence of Yvor WINTERS, the poet Sheaffer Eaton–PEN New England Award for literary and critic under whom Pinsky studied during his grad- excellence (1989). uate school years at Stanford University. Winters’s anti- Piercy’s activism began with the Civil Rights move- modernist poetics and Augustan sensibility were ment and progressed to the feminist movement. Her important to Pinsky’s development, as was Winters’s lifetime of spiritually motivated social action is a reso- ideal of an articulate poet-professor. In accordance with nant theme throughout her body of work. “This is this ideal, Pinsky has published three volumes of liter- how . . . coalitions are knit from strands of hair, / of ary criticism. Pinsky has, nevertheless, always main- barbed wire, twine, knitting wool and gut,” begins tained a populist approach in his poetry (which “Report of the Fourteenth Subcommittee on Conven- concerns itself with such topics as television, tennis, and PINSKY, ROBERT 379 his hometown of Long Branch, New Jersey), especially “Essay on Psychiatrists” divides its topic into parts, in its insistence on accessible, discursive language, lan- examining each in turn in the manner of an expository guage that embodies what Pinsky has called the “prose essay. This may seem like a modest goal, but it was a virtue” of clarity. This populism has given Pinsky a great radical gesture at a time when such slogans as “No ideas deal of visibility in American literary culture. but in things” (see William Carlos WILLIAMS) and “A Born and raised in Long Branch, New Jersey, Pinsky poem should not mean but be” (see Archibald received a B.A. from Rutgers University in 1962. He MACLEISH) had become canons of poetic taste. attended graduate school at Stanford, along with a The Situation of Poetry: Contemporary Poetry and Its number of other important American poets, including Traditions (1976), Pinsky’s next book, can be seen as a John MATTHIAS and Robert HASS. He received a Ph.D. in kind of manifesto for the poetry Pinsky was writing in 1966 and has taught English literature at several uni- Sadness and Happiness. While the book is written as a versities. He served as the poetry editor of the New study of several contemporary poets rather than as a Republic from 1978 to 1986 and held a similar position polemical essay, it nevertheless makes forceful argu- with the online magazine Slate starting in 1996. He ments for discursive, essayistic poetry. Arguing against was the first poet ever to serve three consecutive terms the antiessayistic qualities of modernist poetry, Pinsky as United States Poet Laureate (1997–2000), following says that “the techniques of imagism, which convey the his Stanford classmate Hass in that office. Pinsky has powerful illusion that a poet presents, rather than tells won the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award about, a sensory experience” are “tormented premises” (1999) and the Howard Morton Landon Prize for for poetry (see IMAGIST SCHOOL), but that they have translation (1995), among many other honors. become the norm for American poetry in the 1970s Pinsky’s first book, Landor’s Poetry (1968), celebrates (Poetry 3). He finds that many of the most popular the work of the 19th-century English poet Walter Sav- poets of the time “avoid abstract statement, or at least age Landor. It is fitting that Pinsky should begin his avoid unqualified commitment to such statement” career with a study of a poet like Landor, since Pinsky’s (155). In The Situation of Poetry, he argues that this own poetry embodies many of the same qualities of avoidance of abstract statement truncates poetry’s pos- Landor’s writing: classical restraint, clarity, and a sibilities, while in “Essay on Psychiatrists” he demon- respect for poetic tradition. When Pinsky writes that strates the richness of those possibilities. Landor is “not an innovator who breaks or abandons In An Explanation of America (1979), Pinsky makes traditional forms, but one who exploits, combines, and his most ambitious effort in writing discursive poetry. furthers them” (Landor’s 2), he describes not only Lan- With the exception of “Lair” and “Memorial,” the short dor but also the poet that he himself will become over poems that open and close the book, the entire volume the next three decades. consists of a single long poem in 12 parts, composed Landor also makes an appearance in the long poem in Pinsky’s discursive or essayistic style. Addressing the “Essay on Psychiatrists,” in Pinsky’s first book of poems, poem to his daughter, Pinsky sets himself the task of Sadness and Happiness (1975) (see LONG AND SERIAL “tell[ing] [her] something about our country, / Or [his] POETRY). It is a mark of Pinsky’s populism that Landor idea of it.” While this father-to-daughter address and Euripedes rub shoulders in that poem with figures appears intimate and domestic, the poem itself is very out of popular culture, such as Rex Morgan, M.D., from much a public act, taking up American history on a the comic strip of the same name. “Essay on Psychia- grand scale in the manner of Robert LOWELL and exam- trists” is also important because it is one of Pinsky’s first ining the national character at a time when many major experiments with what he calls “discursive Americans shared their president’s assessment of the poetry”: a poetry that allows itself to discuss a topic, to country as suffering through a “national malaise,” as express opinions, to pose and answer questions, and to Jimmy Carter termed it in a speech earlier that year. present ideas abstractly and at length. Like the long If An Explanation of America took up the public side poem “Tennis” (also from Sadness and Happiness), of Lowell’s poetics, then Pinsky’s next two books of 380 PIOMBINO, NICK poetry, A History of My Heart (1984) and The Want Bone critical acclaim, and it allowed him to continue the (1990) can be seen as taking up the more personal, investigations of world religious traditions that he had CONFESSIONAL side of Lowell’s work. In the long title begun in such poems as “The Figured Wheel” (1997) poem, as well as in such shorter lyrics as “The Ques- and “Shiva and Parvati Hiding in the Rain” (1990). tions” and “The Garden,” Pinsky addresses the matter Religion is a major topic of Pinsky’s two most recent of his own past more directly than ever before. The volumes of poetry, The Figured Wheel: New and Col- book appeared in the same year as the translation of lected Poems (1996) and Jersey Rain (2000), which also Czeslaw Milosz’s The Separate Notebooks that Pinsky revisit other familiar themes, including American pub- completed with Hass, and Pinsky’s renewed interest in lic life (“In Memory of Congresswoman Barbara Jor- memory and the private life shows the influence of his dan”) and that most perennial of Pinsky’s subjects, his work as a translator of Milosz’s meditative writings. early years in New Jersey (“An Alphabet of My Dead”). While Pinsky’s poetic concerns become more private in Pinsky’s career path may have led him to the American A History of My Heart, his poetic form and diction laureateship, but it has also led him home. remain resolutely public, shying away from obscurity BIBLIOGRAPHY and arcane reference. Archambeau, Robert. “Roads Less Traveled: Two Paths Out In the 1980s Pinsky showed interest in the public life of Modernism in Postwar American Poetry.” In The of poetry outside of the small world of professional Mechanics of the Mirage: Postwar American Poetry, edited by poets and critics. Poetry and the World, Pinsky’s 1988 Michel Delville and Christine Pagnoulle. Liège, Belgium: collection of critical essays, returns again and again to University of Liège Press, 2000, pp. 35–48. the question of the place of poetry in the public sphere. Longenbach, James. “Robert Pinsky and the Language of “What is, or what would be, a democratic poetry?” he Our Time.” Salmagundi 103 (summer 1994): 155–177. asks at the beginning of “Freneau, Whitman, Williams” Parini, Jay. “Explaining America: The Poetry of Robert Pin- (101), and versions of this question animate “American sky.” Chicago Review 33.1 (summer 1981): 16–26. Poetry and American Life,” “Poetry and Pleasure,” and Pinsky, Robert. Landor’s Poetry. Chicago: University of the volume’s title essay. One of Pinsky’s projects in the Chicago Press, 1968. ———. Poetry and the World. Hopewell, N.J.: Ecco, 1988. 1980s shows how serious he was about bringing poetry ———. The Situation of Poetry. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton into new, popular contexts: In 1984 Brøderbund Soft- University Press, 1976. ware released the text-based computer game Mind- wheel, for which Pinsky did much of the writing and Robert Archambeau into which he introduced a number of poems from the classics of English literature. PIOMBINO, NICK (1942– ) Nick Piom- Pinsky’s interest in the popular, nonprofessional bino is one of the founding members of the LANGUAGE context of poetry continued into the 1990s, when he SCHOOL of poets and a particularly important contribu- used his prominence as poet laureate to launch the tor to the theory associated with experimental poetry Favorite Poem Project, a program in which Americans and aesthetics in the post–Vietnam War era. Piombino from all walks of life were asked to record their favorite demonstrates an important trend in poetics, a blend of poems. The project involved many public readings and writing practices adopted from poetry and more pro- an extensive Web site, and it eventually led to the pub- saic and speculative forms of writing: an extraordinary lication of the anthology America’s Favorite Poems emphasis on the philosophical question of what con- (1999), which Pinsky edited along with Maggie Dietz. stitutes the literary object. A social worker and psy- It should come as no surprise that a poet concerned choanalyst as well as a poet, Piombino has considered with the public life of poetry should be drawn to the status of a poem as an object for decades, most Dante, who boldly chose to write in the “vulgar prominently in his essays. tongue” of Italy, as Dante put it. Pinsky’s translation of Piombino was born and has continued to live in The Inferno of Dante (1994) was received with much New York City. His writing began appearing in the late PLATH, SYLVIA 381

1970s. Piombino’s major awards include the New York PLATH, SYLVIA (1932–1963) Sylvia Plath is Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in poetry better known for her troubled life than for her poetry. (1990–91) and a Postgraduate Center for Mental She suffered an early mental breakdown that she fic- Health Author’s Recognition Award (1992). tionalized in The Bell Jar (1963), which became a best- By using techniques associated with the prose seller after her suicide. But her poetry deserves more poem, Piombino’s poetry often looks like prose, and attention than it receives. She is considered a CONFES- vice versa. The ensuing difficulty the reader may expe- SIONAL poet, because of the intimate nature of her rience is a difficulty to categorize, but such a difficulty poetry and because of her relationships with confes- can be enjoyed. And in his explorations of the object- sional poets Anne SEXTON and Robert LOWELL. Like status of poetry, Piombino encourages us to read all them, Plath rejects the MODERNISM of Ezra POUND, T. S. such writing uncategorically. Poems and essays can be ELIOT, and William Carlos WILLIAMS, which emphasizes considered, according to Piombino, as equally “theo- the abstract and the universal. Instead Plath embraces retical objects,” hence the title of his 1999 volume the deeply personal. But she is not purely autobio- Theoretical Objects. From an early essay written with graphical either. In a 1960 BBC interview she said, “I poet Alan Davies, Piombino asserts that the “object think my poems immediately come out of the sensu- state is the blur between the thing and a word. . . . ous and emotional experiences I have, but ...I believe The word itself is at first a thing, then becoming an that one should be able to control and manipulate object representing an object” (38). The implications experiences, even the most terrifying” (qtd. in Alexan- of language as a blurry “object” carry over into his der 305–306). Plath’s poetry transcends the term con- more recent work, often written as sentence groups fessional through her attention to the craft of poetry broken into discrete verse lines: “Poetry is never satis- and by her filtering of experience through the lens of fied, so it never satisfies. Poetry provokes and will not her own stylized mythology. The “I” in her poems is a relent. But it won’t intrude either. / Poetry is a persona, or fictional mask, rather than the true voice of chameleon. Poetry changes form faster than percep- the poet. It is a shell to protect an intense, highly sen- tion can follow, so poetry can enlarge perception” sitive individual who needed to be heard, but not seen (“With Open Arms” [2001]). too deeply. This dramatic tension between disclosure Piombino’s declarative statements ask readers to and omission is a large part of what makes Plath’s work question if what they are reading is a poem or an essay. so difficult yet so rewarding. But if it is true that “it never satisfies,” the result of such Plath was born in Boston, Massachusetts, to a Ger- questions is a kind of “blur,” a writing that is “faster man immigrant father and a mother of Austrian descent. than perception,” and an object that resides more in Her father, Otto Plath, was a professor of German and the reader’s mind than in the world outside. By focus- biology who authored a landmark study on bumble- ing on perception and other psychic phenomena, bees. Her mother, Aurelia Schober Plath, had been a stu- Piombino’s training as a psychoanalyst shines through dent of Otto’s at Boston University and was the to augment the literary project of Language poetry valedictorian of her class. According to biographer Paul with highly original insights into what poetry has been Alexander, Aurelia Plath’s strongest desire was to be a and can be in the future. writer, but she chose instead to raise a family and to BIBLIOGRAPHY advance the career of her husband. Born of such ambi- Bernstein, Charles. “The Second War and Postmodern tious and exacting parents, it is not surprising that Plath Memory.” In A Poetics. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Uni- was a volatile mix of drive and self-doubt. Her father’s versity Press, 1992, pp. 193–217. death when she was eight, of complications from long- Piombino, Nick, and Alan Davies. “The Indeterminate Inter- undiagnosed diabetes, affected Sylvia profoundly for her val: From History to Blur.” In The Boundary of Blur, by entire life. Even then she was driven to write, and she Nick Piombino. New York: Roof Books, 1993, pp. 34–42. published her first poem in a Boston newspaper at age Patrick F. Durgin eight. She won literary prizes throughout high school 382 PLATH, SYLVIA and pursued a degree in English at Smith College, where her father and Hughes, both of whom she felt had she published both prose and poetry in national period- abandoned her. Here Plath uses the conceit of a Jew to icals. She also won a contest for an internship with express her feelings of powerlessness in the face of Mademoiselle magazine in New York. Her experience “Nazis,” but instead of being killed by them, she bests there precipitated a mental breakdown that resulted in a them: “If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two.” Other nearly successful suicide attempt. poems—”The Rabbit Catcher” (1962), “The Jailer” Following graduation from Smith in 1955, Plath (1962), and “Purdah” (1962)—express more of the went to Cambridge University in England on a Ful- helplessness Plath felt at this time when her own death bright Fellowship. She met the then-unknown British seemed to her the only way to become powerful. In poet Ted Hughes, and after a short courtship, they “The Jailer,” the speaker has been “drugged and raped” married and had two children. The union lasted six and ends wondering “what would he / Do do do with- years; she was estranged from him when she died. The out me,” implying that the captor needs her as much separation provided the catalyst for Plath’s best-known as she depends on him for her survival. “The Rabbit poems. In the seven months between the initial break- Catcher” marks the beginning of the end of Plath’s up and her death, Plath wrote more than 50 poems, marriage; the speaker identifies with a rabbit caught in most of which she ordered in a manuscript entitled a snare and implies that the constriction is killing both Ariel and Other Poems and left on her desk. Published people in the relationship. posthumously in 1965, Ariel became one of the best- Toward the end of her life, Plath had difficulty pub- selling volumes of poetry ever sold in America. Long lishing the intense poems she was churning out on after her death, Plath’s Collected Poems (1981) won the either side of the Atlantic. Several of these last poems Pulitzer Prize in 1982. Other awards and honors forecast or perhaps confessed her will to suicide. The include recognition by the Academy of American Poets erotic energy of “ARIEL” (1962) is focused on a self- (1955), the Ethel Olin Corbin Prize (1955), and the destructive “drive / Into the red / Eye, the cauldron of Marjorie Hope Nicholson Award (1955). morning.” In “LADY LAZARUS” (1962), the speaker implies Arguably Plath’s earlier poems are just as accom- that her suicides are sideshow curiosities in which she plished as her later ones, yet not as dire. She published annihilates herself once in every decade for the enjoy- regularly and had a contract with the New Yorker. ment of onlookers, miraculously surviving but suffering. American critics largely ignored Plath’s first book, Plath’s anger and feelings of victimization merge into a Colossus and Other Poems (first published in England in private mythology of retributory suicide in which, 1961), although the few reviews it received were through death, the female persona becomes purified mildly positive. The title poem visits a lifelong theme and perfected. Her death is revenge on those left behind, of Plath’s—her relationship to her father. The speaker though the object is not necessarily to cause them pain. is trying to uncover and reassemble a giant stone statue In “Fever 103°” (October 1962), the speaker says, “I am of her father with “Lysol” and “gluepots” (“The Colos- too pure for you or anyone.” Death becomes a rejection sus” [1959]). At peace with this project, she shelters in of the pain the “you” has caused. The last poem she ever his ear at night. The overall tone is of regret over his wrote, “Edge” (1963), depicts the scene of a suicide in absence. Plath wrote many poems trying to exorcise which a mother lies sprawled in “perfection,” her two her father’s influence. Hughes came to be a father fig- children “coiled as serpents” nearby. ure, though she resisted her growing dependence on Plath wrote especially poignantly about her children, him and she fought against her discomfort with his lit- and her love for them is evident. The speaker in “For a erary success, which was complicated by his appeal to Fatherless Son” (1962) warns her son that he will soon other women. A late poem, “Gulliver” (1962), seems to feel an absence in his life, but that for now she loves him be directed toward Hughes, and the overlarge stature for his “stupidity” which represents his innocence and of Gulliver is similar to the size of the father in “The ability to love her, and she calls his smiles “found Colossus.” “DADDY” (1962) is used as a vehicle to vilify money.” The poems about pregnancy, childbirth, and “A POEM FOR SPECULATIVE HIPSTERS” 383

mothering are among the most unshielded works Plath (1970), the Delmore SCHWARTZ Memorial Award in wrote. Here she lowers her masks and expresses emo- 1973, and for his third, Out-of-the-Body Travel (1977), tion without excessive drama. In “Magi” (1960), “Child” which was also nominated for a National Book Critics (1963), and “Balloons” (1963), she shows the strength Circle Award, the William Carlos WILLIAMS Award. of her love as well as the depth of her dilemma: How can Influenced by his relationships with his parents, par- she go on living without contaminating her children ticularly his alcoholic father, Plumly’s poems are often with “the troublous wringing of hands” (“Child” set against the background of his Ohio childhood. His [1963])? These mothering poems show ambivalence as poems deal with common situations and are accessible well, but they are much more positive and less mediated in both content and language. Remarking on In the than her poems of victimization and revenge. Outer Dark, Anthony Piccione asserts, “Plumly is at his Plath’s three major lifelong themes are death, victim- best in the image poem. His is a precise blend of ordi- ization, and motherhood. At the end of her life, these nary language and bright new perceptions, couched in preoccupations merge into a vision of her own death, a low-keyed voice that speaks to us all” (409). In “The despite or because of her love for her children, as a way Iron Lung” (1977), Plumly explores the father-son to resolve conflict. Her poems of brutal self-examination identity through image (the son’s face “moons in the helped open the way for poets, particularly female mirror,” and he dreams he “is wearing [his] father’s poets, to use their intimate experiences in their work. body”), as well as through affirmation and impossibili- BIBLIOGRAPHY ties (“So this is the dust that passes through porcelain,” Alexander, Paul. Rough Magic: A Biography of Sylvia Plath. and “If we could fold our arms, but we can’t”). Plumly New York: Viking Penguin, 1991. explores reality with such verbs as “dreaming,” “real- Hall, Caroline. Sylvia Plath. Boston: Twayne, 1978. ize,” and “remember.” And through phrasal repetition, Meyering, Sheryl L. Sylvia Plath: A Reference Guide. Boston: Plumly creates heredity and regeneration, showing how G.K. Hall, 1990. people cannot escape their or their family’s past. Even Wilma Weant Dague as Plumley’s father plays a major role in his first four books, Summer Celestial (1983) exhibits a desire to stop PLUMLY, STANLEY (1939– ) Stanley treating memory as past and, through his mother, move Plumly writes NARRATIVE POETRY in a sensitive, unsenti- toward a present state of ancestry and spirituality. mental voice that recreates moments through images Plumly’s poetry unabashedly strives to marry both his and exploration of memory. His poetry is formalized own experience with his family’s, the outer world of without being formal; spiritual without being religious. indifference with the interior world of self-definition, Although his poetry is personally reflective, he is not a hoping to find the shadow of truth residing where the CONFESSIONAL poet. Rather by examining polarities— past and present intersect. father/son, light/dark, dream/reality—Plumly attains BIBLIOGRAPHY the present moment’s personal truth. “It seems to me,” Piccione, Anthony. Review of In the Outer Dark, by Stanley Plumly has said, “what a poem does is it . . . trans- Plumly. Southern Humanities Review 6.4 (fall 1972): forms, returns, so that we can better see experience for 406–410. what it is and what it means” (404). Plumly, Stanley. “Plumly, Stanley (Ross) 1939–.” Contempo- Born and raised in Barnesville, Ohio, Plumly com- rary Authors, Vol. 110, edited by Christine Nasso. Detroit: pleted a B.A. at Wilmington College in 1961 and an Gale, 1984, pp. 404–407. M.A at Ohio University in 1968. He was the editor of Michelle Bonczek the Ohio Review from 1970–75, a recipient of a Guggenheim grant in 1973, and since 1968 has taught “A POEM FOR SPECULATIVE HIP- at major universities, among them Columbia and STERS” LEROI JONES (AMIRI BARAKA) Maryland. He has won many awards, including, for his (1964) First published in his second collection of first collection of poems, In the Outer Dark: Poems poems, The Dead Lecturer, “A Poem for Speculative 384 “POETRY”

Hipsters” is the work of Amiri BARAKA’s (then LeRoi nationalist and Marxist writing, in which art is not a Jones’s) bohemian period of the late 1950s and early matter of speculation but a practical form of cultural 1960s. Baraka was one of the contributors to The New and social engagement. American Poetry: 1945–1960 (1960), an influential BIBLIOGRAPHY anthology of postwar experimental poetry (see POETRY Jones, LeRoi. “How You Sound??” The New American Poetry: ANTHOLOGIES). Like many of the poets included in this 1945–1960, edited by Donald M. Allen. New York: Grove, volume, he rejected the formalist, or “academic,” poet- 1960, pp. 424–425. ics still dominant in the United States at midcentury. ———. “Hunting Is Not Those Heads on the Wall.” In Home: Baraka often insisted that the process of making poetry Social Essays. New York: Morrow, 1966, pp. 173–178. is far more important than poems themselves and that Sollors, Werner. Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones: The Quest for a to confine oneself to regular verse forms is to conclude “Populist Modernism.” New York: Columbia University the poetic process before it begins. Poems thus com- Press, 1978. posed, he thought, are dead artifacts instead of vital Matthew Calihman expressions of actual life. In the essay “How You Sound??” (1960), Baraka proclaims, “There cannot be “POETRY” MARIANNE MOORE (1921) anything I must fit the poem into.” The poetic process, “Poetry” is remarkable in that it demonstrates the he says, consists of making everything “fit into the ambiguity of textual authority—Marianne Moore poem” (424). “A Poem for Speculative Hipsters,” pub- revised the poem throughout her lifetime and sup- lished a few years after this essay appeared, envisions ported concurrent publications of different versions. an ideal world in which a poet can create literature in Without one authoritative text to ground any reading accordance with this principle. The poem recalls an of the poem, “Poetry” becomes fluid, mutating over artist’s journey to a “forest / of motives,” a distant and time to reflect Moore’s poetic development. Critics mysterious sanctuary where art, safe from the imposi- count as many as 11 different texts of “Poetry” pub- tions of form, can exist as pure process. lished between 1919 and 1981, but Bonnie Honigs- Like the journey Baraka imagines, his poem is itself blum notes four basic versions: a five-stanza version a “speculative” philosophical and aesthetic exercise: an with near consistency of syllabic meter and rhyme; a attempt to push thought and art beyond the limits of 13-line version in free verse; a 15-line version with immediate perception and everyday experience. In a three stanzas, internal rhyme, and a roughly consistent contemporaneous essay, “Hunting Is Not Those Heads syllabic meter; and a compressed three-line version on the Wall” (1964), Baraka argues that just as “hunt- with a revised five-stanza version attached as a foot- ing” cannot be defined in terms of its stuffed and note. This 32-line, five-stanza footnote, published in mounted artifacts, “Art-ing” cannot be defined in terms Moore’s Collected Poems (1967), is the most frequently of formally determined, completed works of art (175). anthologized version of “Poetry.” Thus the “forest / of motives,” devoid of such gross Stylistically “Poetry” reads almost like prose, with material forms as “owls” and “hunters,” appears to be a Moore’s typically long sentences, jagged line breaks, place where the artist’s “motives” or “ideas” exist unto and plain diction. Moore characteristically integrates themselves. Baraka contrasts his artist with Connie outside quotations into her poems—in “Poetry” she Chatterley, the heroine of D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chat- cites Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy and William But- terley’s Lover (1928), who emerges in this poem as a ler Yeats. Her inventive juxtapositioning of quotations figure of mere sensuality and half-hearted political strengthens her own voice by calling attention to it commitment. Yet if the “forest / of motives” is an within a context of external voices. escape from the entrapments of the material world, it “Poetry” begins ironically as a poem that takes a is also a place of absence: Baraka’s artist is “really / derogatory stance towards poetry (“I, too, dislike it”). nowhere.” In the end, then, “A Poem for Speculative But poetry here remains ambiguous and undefined. Hipsters” perhaps anticipates Baraka’s later black Instead of offering the reader an objective explanation POETRY AND TRANSLATION 385 of what poetry is, Moore shifts her focus to the detailed ican poets than in previous periods. Poets responded to physical effects brought about by reading poetry. She the globalization of the metropolitan West with an zooms in on particulars, noticing the sensations in her unparalleled production of English-language transla- hands, eyes, and hair that indicate a reaction to good tions, resulting in a wide variety of forms and theories poetry. Natural imagery of inverted bats, hefty ele- of translation. Important poets who also translated phants, and wild horses followed closely by more poetry include Elizabeth BISHOP, Paul BLACKBURN, Cid mundane references to the practical world of business CORMAN, Lyn HEJINIAN, Richard HOWARD, Langston suggests that poetry may exist in the intersection HUGHES, Allen MANDELBAUM, Gary SNYDER, Rosmarie between the practical and the imaginative. Poets are WALDROP, Eliot WEINBERGER, and Richard WILBUR, among “literalists of the imagination,” Moore writes. And if others. The present essay will limit its focus to the poetry can be found in the stuff of everyday life, works of six of the most influential poet/translators, Moore’s opening indictment of poetry suddenly seems Ezra POUND, AMY LOWELL, Kenneth REXROTH, Robert less ironic. The objection, it would seem, is to aca- BLY, Jerome ROTHENBERG, and Louis ZUKOFSKY. demic definitions that seek to generalize or intellectu- Ezra Pound initiated a century of American poetry alize the particular experience of a strong poem. greatly indebted to the bounty of material gathered Moore’s development of her topic alters with alter- from around the globe. Pound translated, among oth- nate versions of “Poetry.” The 1924 13-line poem con- ers, Guido Cavalcanti from the Italian, Sappho from cludes with “enigmas are not poetry,” which suggests a the Greek, Arnaut Daniel from the Provençal, and Sex- plea for lucidity and exactness of language that Moore’s tus Propertius from the Latin. In his essay “Guido’s own vague opening lines would seem to resist. How- Relations” (1954), he explains his propensity for alter- ever, the 1967 shorter three-line text concludes by ing the target language (the English) in ways that can tersely asserting that poetry is “a place for the gen- produce sonorous textures, which evoke the source uine,” yet offers no concrete definition of the “gen- text’s linguistic particularities. He sought to escape the uine,” leaving the work of identifying it up to the rigidity of Victorian English tradition by enriching his reader. Moore’s predilection for multiple variant texts translations with archaic elements of Greek, Latin, and virtually explodes the common notion of the unified Anglo Saxon. For instance, in his translation of the authoritative text, and her process serves as a model Anglo-Saxon poem “The Seafarer” (1912), Pound imi- for such 20th-century poets as Donald HALL and Lyn tates the source text’s meter and archaic diction HEJINIAN, who likewise resist the limitations of textual (“mews” for “seagulls,” “Nathless” for “nevertheless”) closure. A text can be returned to again and again with and often translates literally (“corna caldast” becomes each version in conversation with the others. “corn of the coldest”) as well. Yet Pound did not BIBLIOGRAPHY reserve these compositional strategies for translations Honigsblum, Bonnie. “Marianne Moore’s Revisions of alone; instead, they inflected his own work with ‘Poetry.’” In Marianne Moore: Woman and Poet, edited by archaic diction and foreign syntax that often evokes Patricia C. Willis. Orono, Maine: National Poetry Founda- strong, nearly sanctified resonances. By making trans- tion, 1990, pp. 185–222. lation into a trope, a metonym for a distant authentic- Martin, Taffy. Marianne Moore: Subversive Modernist. Austin: ity, the “luminous details” (Pound, “I Gather the Limbs University of Texas Press, 1986. of Osiris,” 24) that Pound gathered during his inter- Terry Lynn Pettinger textual travels operated as symbols for larger cultural networks of authority. Therefore Pound’s poetics can POETRY AND TRANSLATION Perhaps it be seen as a product of an expeditionary model of should not come as a surprise that a century marked by translation, where the poet searches old foreign litera- world wars, ease of travel, economic globalization, and ture for images and textures that can then enrich and further racial and ethnic diversification of its populace renew the Anglo-American idioms with new clarity, might also see a greater interest in translation by Amer- rhythms, sounds, and forms. 386 POETRY AND TRANSLATION

While his translations from Western sources were Perhaps the most well-known American poet after important to Pound’s original works, his encounter with the imagists to find inspiration from contact with non- Chinese poetry via a manuscript of Ernest Fenollosa left Western cultures is Rexroth. He translated from many the greatest mark on both his work and, by extension, languages—Latin, Greek, Italian, Spanish, French, Chi- early Anglo-American MODERNISM. In 1913 Pound nese, and Japanese—but he is best remembered for his received papers of the late Fenollosa, who, up until his East Asian translations. His translations resisted Pound’s death, had been working on a series of translations of undeniable influences by adopting a more idiosyncratic ancient Chinese verse and Japanese Noh drama. Once in and willfully colloquial tone: “Every day on the way possession of these decipherings and Fenollosa’s roman- home from my office, I pawn another of my Spring tic translation theories, Pound went on to publish his Clothes” (One Hundred Poems from the Chinese [1971]). most popular translation: Cathay (1915). But perhaps The substitution of “office” for the more common just as importantly, Pound was able to locate both the choice “court” along with the everyday syntax reveals IMAGIST and vorticist literary movements within the clas- Rexroth’s willingness to reframe ancient verse in his sical Chinese tradition. Fenollosa’s notes argue that a modernized personal idiom. Nevertheless his transla- Chinese character is “a vivid shorthand picture of the tions often lean toward the direct, clear, and concrete operations of nature. . . . The thought-picture is not qualities that not only characterize Pound’s East Asian only called up by these signs as well as by words, but far translations but had, by midcentury, become quintes- more vividly and concretely....[T]hey are alive” (8–9). sentially modernist: “The bright, thin, new moon He goes on to claim, “Poetic thought works by sugges- appears” (One Hundred Poems from the Chinese [1971]). tion, crowding maximum meaning into the single Ever since the publication of One Hundred Poems phrase pregnant, charged, and luminous from within” from the Japanese (1955), Rexroth’s translations have (28). For Pound, Fenollosa’s work uncovered a vast and been widely read, enjoyed, and criticized. Over his ancient cultural system that could validate the avant- long career Rexroth translated several volumes of garde in its efforts to revitalize Western civilization. poetry from both Japanese and Chinese (with a partic- Yet Pound was not the only poet associated with the ular concentration on the Tang poet Du Fu), as well as imagists to publish translations of East Asian verse. hundreds of tanka (a form of short Japanese verse of Amy Lowell also made translation an important com- generally five lines), and he also composed tanka in ponent of her poetry. While East Asian themes appear English. In fact, one can see numerous references, even in her earliest work, A Dome of Many-Coloured images, and syntactic translative hauntings throughout Glass (1912), in such poems as “A Japanese Wood his original work, but the most dramatic instance of Carving” (1912), her later work begins to show a translation’s transposition occurs in his last major greater interest in the Far East, typified by her book of work, The Love Poems of Marichiko (1978). Rexroth verse, Pictures of a Floating World (1919). The title is a used the guise of translation to write from the voice of translation of the Japanese term ukiyo-e, which is asso- a fictive Japanese woman. The poems depict a detailed ciated with a form of 18th-century Japanese lacquer and exoticized (and often highly eroticized) Japanese prints that Lowell’s 174 short, free verse lyrics take as world: “The moon sinks into the far off hills. / Dew their collective subject. Her later collaboration with the drenches the bamboo grass. .../ At midnight the tem- expert on China and translator Florence Ayscough on ple bells ring.” Unlike Rexroth’s own tanka written in Fir-Flower Tablets (1921) solidified Lowell’s promi- English, however, these poems were first falsely pub- nence as a populist of Asian verse. Even though neither lished as translations. The Marichiko series uses a sug- Lowell nor Pound read Chinese and were poorly gestive haiku-like form and Orientalized details to received by the community of experts on Chinese, perform an act of ventriloquism suggesting an ultimate their translations helped usher in and popularize the fusion of the poet and translator. century’s interest in poetic translations, Asian verse, In addition, both Robert Bly and Jerome Rothenberg and the exoticized East. continue to produce a huge volume of foreign poetry POETRY AND TRANSLATION 387

in translation and, in turn, reproduce the theory of tions and the field of ETHNOPOETICS that he and the translation as both a humanistic bridge and poetic anthropologist/translator Dennis Tedlock initiated with necessity. Rothenberg and Bly were associated with a the 1971 publication of Alcheringa explored the impor- movement of poetry called DEEP IMAGE, a term coined tance of aurality, or sound, in translating primarily in an essay published in 1961 by Robert KELLY. While indigenous oral poetry. Robert von Hallberg sees this Bly and Rothenberg may not have agreed on the par- focus on aurality as a shift to a poetics in which “the ticulars, they both translated with an intense belief in objective is a radical contemporaneity....What was the ability to bring across complex images through emerging was the premise that the body is the basis of translation. In 1958 Bly, along with William Duffy, language, that sounds made by a speaking body in one began a journal entitled the Fifties, which Bly later solo locale may be likened to similar sounds made by a edited as the Sixties and the Seventies and which speaking body in a distant locale or time” (261). focused on presenting translations from both Europe This development leads us back to what was perhaps and Latin America. Bly argued that translations were the most controversial translation in the 20th century, vitally important to American poetry, since American Zukofsky’s Catullus (1969), a “homophonic translation” poetry needed the importation of foreign images to (translating the sounds of the source text into words in keep it alive. To this day Bly remains one of the most the target language that mimic those sounds) of the voluminous poet/translators working, and his example Latin. While translating from Latin and Greek has been continues to fuel a near-ubiquitous interest in gather- an important genre in its own right for centuries, Zukof- ing foreign images through translation. But like the sky’s translation stands in a category all its own. In his aforementioned poets, Bly is not only interested in translator’s preface Zukofsky states, “This translation of translating content; he also employs non-English tem- Catallus follows / the sound, rhythm, and syntax of his / plates in his own creative work. In his book The Night Latin—tries, as is said, to breathe / the ‘literal’ meaning Abraham Called to the Stars (2001), he uses the ghazal, with him” (1). Therefore the source work’s textures an Arabic form of poetry in which the individual stro- become a compositional template that selects English phes, or stanzas, are poems themselves: “My heart is a words based primarily upon their similarity to the spo- calm potato by day....// Friend, tell me what to do.” ken Latin and not their semantic properties. For exam- Not only does he employ a foreign compositional tem- ple, the Latin “Tondet os. miser a miser / concubine, nuces plate (here dialogic, autonomous stanzas), but his da” appears in English as “toned down his me, sir ah me, imagery reflects a lifetime of reading foreign literature. sir / quaint cute boy, now it’s the nuts” (61). Similar to Bly, Rothenberg is still producing both Later we see Zukofsky, like so many poets before and translations and his own creative work, yet Rothenberg after him, apply the textures discovered during his work is perhaps most recognized for his industrious publi- on translation to his original poetry as well, as in this cations of intercultural anthologies. His latest anthol- line from “A”-22 (1975), a section of his long poem “A”: ogy, Poems for the Millennium (1995), coedited with “Ye no we see hay / io we hay we see / hay io we see no” Pierre Joris, is perhaps his most exhaustive contribu- (36). For Zukofsky, translation was about discovering tion yet. While his anthologies are very important to new sounds and rhythms more than deep images or the history of translation and poetry in the 20th cen- exotic details; therefore his work after his homophonic tury, he is also recognized for his innovative translation translations plays more liberally with sound and syntax, strategies. He coined the term total translation to just as his translations had. The resultant disjointed syn- describe his translations of Navajo songs entitled The tax resembles verse produced through the chance oper- 17 Horse Songs of Frank Mitchell (1970), in which he ations (a compositional method based on random includes nonsense syllables and bends the English sampling) of, say, Jackson MAC LOW and in turn provides phonemes toward the Navaho: “Because I was thn a strong antecedent to the material (visual and aural) boyngnng raised ing the dawn NwnnN go to her my poetics of those writing in the tradition that has come to son N wnn N wnn N nnnn N gahn.” His total transla- be called LANGUAGE poetry. 388 POETRY ANTHOLOGIES

In all of the poets discussed here, translation reveals declares, “aspire to canonical service” in one way or itself to be an interculutral as well as interlinguistic another (477), and their attempt to construct, main- poetic practice. And while translations informed by tain, or challenge the literary canon (the list of writers many of the poets discussed thus far continue to be or texts that are considered exemplary) is one of their published, many American poets, especially multilin- crucial functions. gual ones such as Cecilia Vicuqa and Anne Tardos, are Anthologies have existed in the West since at least the breaking down the formal distinction between transla- Alexandrian period, when Greek scholars began to col- tion and writing proper, as well as publishing American lect texts of Sappho, Archilochus, Pericles, and other poetry in languages other than English. It is safe to say, poets of Greek as exemplary instances of either a partic- therefore, that the poetics of translation will continue to ular metrical form or poetic content. The anthologist’s play a central role in the poetry of the 21st century. and anthology’s instructional purpose remained, more BIBLIOGRAPHY or less, intact through the years. In the 20th century, Apter, Ronnie. Digging far the Treasure: Translation after however, both the editorship and purpose of antholo- Pound. New York: Paragon House, 1987. gies transformed, at least in part, the classroom and Fenollosa, Ernest. The Chinese Written Character as a Medium became, to a large extent, a primary venue for establish- for Poetry, edited by Ezra Pound. San Francisco: City ing a way in which poets themselves might develop a Lights Books, 1936. map of both contemporary and historical poetry. Huang, Yunte. Transpacific Displacement: Ethnography, Trans- Arguably the modern anthology begins in 1914 with lation, and Intertextual Travel in Twentieth-Century American Ezra POUND’s Des Imagistes, which included poems Literature. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. by American- and British-born poets: Pound himself, Pound, Ezra. “Guido’s Relations.” In Literary Essays of Ezra H. D., Richard Aldington, and F. S. Flint. In large part Pound, edited by T. S. Eliot. London: Faber and Faber, working against the formal and thematic conservatism 1954, pp. 191–200. of late 19th-century Victorianism, Pound used his col- ———. “I Gather the Limbs of Osiris” (1911). Selected Prose, 1909–1965, New York: New Directions, 1973, pp. 21–43. lection to advance a very specific sense of the poem, von Halberg, Robert. “From Translation.” TriQuarterly (win- which disavowed established meters and metaphors ter 1995): 249–276. for a responsive and open poetic form that came to be Zukofsky, Luis. Translator’s Preface to Catullus, translated by called “free verse” (see PROSODY AND FREE VERSE). While Celia Zukofsky and Louis Zukofsky. London: Cape Pound’s anthology initiated an influential, interna- Goliard, 1969. n.p. tional American presence, he constructed his poetics Jonathan Stalling from Greek, Roman, French, Italian, and Irish tradi- tions and disregarded possible American examples of POETRY ANTHOLOGIES In its broadest innovative verse, including the work of Edgar Allen sense, a poetry anthology is a collection of poems writ- Poe, Emily Dickinson, and Walt Whitman. ten by a variety of poets. Typically an anthology also In addition to the sense of the poem it explicitly contains or is organized by a determining thematic or advocated, Des Imagistes importantly marked the time-period focus. Thus, on the one hand, we might assumption of the anthologist’s role by a poet and the read the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, which refusal of the anthology’s historic impulse, though the demonstrates a period but not a thematic unity, or, on instructional and canonical purpose of the anthology the other hand, we might pick up an edition of 100 remained intact (as much as Pound’s editorial practice Love Poems, which showcases love poems throughout was essentially polemical and corrective), Pound’s effort history. Regardless, however, of their determining marked a change in the stake of the anthology through focus or organization, anthologies are, almost without its assumption of the editorial role by a poet and its exception, involved in the work of establishing “repre- interest in redirecting public recognition of poetry’s his- sentativeness” or the institution of what is called tory and contemporaneity. Shortly after Pound’s gather- “canonicity.” That is, all anthologies, as Jed Rasula ing, James Weldon JOHNSON published The Book of POETRY ANTHOLOGIES 389

American Negro Poetry in 1922. While clearly not a to focusing attention on both a past and present work direct consequence of Pound’s project, Johnson’s of poetry by largely unknown writers, these antholo- anthology nonetheless showed the change in the gies articulated a developing sense of a specifically anthology’s editorial project and agency. Following American poetry. Johnson’s efforts, Alain Locke (The New Negro), Countee Despite the explosion in the publication of poetry CULLEN (Caroling Dusk), Sterling BROWN, Arthur Davis anthologies in the first part of the 20th century, no con- and Ulysses Lee (The Negro Caravan) and Langston sensus on what typified modern verse was established. HUGHES and Arna Bontemps (The Poetry of the Negro, In fact, the very proliferation of publication may have 1746–1949), all put together collections of African- made it impossible for any accord to be reached. Ironi- American literature before 1949. These anthologies cally this difficulty of characterizing and canonizing the were central to the formalization of the HARLEM RENAIS- poetic production of the modernist period defines the SANCE and testify to the power of the anthology to affect post–World War II approach to anthologization. the sense of both historical and contemporary scene of In 1957 Meridian published The New Poets of En- American poetry. Also these collections established the gland and America, edited by Donald HALL, Robert Pack, crucial possibility of the anthology to recognize and and Louis SIMPSON and featuring an introduction by gather writing that might otherwise be unavailable to a Robert FROST. The anthology was seen by many as the general readership and significantly affected the map of securing claim on the postwar American literary land- Modern American literature. scape by a younger generation of English and Ameri- A more direct consequence of Pound’s Des Imagistes can poets, such as Donald JUSTICE, Robert LOWELL, was the circuitously influential An “Objectivists” Anthol- Adrienne RICH, and W. D. SNODGRASS. The editors ogy edited by Louis ZUKOFSKY and printed by Harriet selected largely academic poets working within a tradi- Monroe’s Poetry in 1931 (see OBJECTIVIST SCHOOL). tion of modernist verse and valuing the forms, struc- Pound, seeking to facilitate a specifically American tures, and craft of such British and American participation in and response to the active European modernist poets as Frost, W. H. AUDEN, Wallace production of poetic manifesto and anthology, urged STEVENS, and T. S. ELIOT. Three years later, in 1960, and Monroe to grant editorial reign to Zukofsky (see EURO- partly in opposition to The New Poets of England and PEAN POETIC INFLUENCES). Publishing himself, Charles America, Grove Press published Donald Allen’s The REZNIKOFF, William Carlos WILLIAMS, George OPPEN, New American Poetry, 1945–1961. Featuring a diverse Kenneth REXROTH, and others, Zukofsky’s gathering range of poets—LeRoi Jones (Amiri BARAKA) to Helen represented a group of poets who, working within ADAM, Charles OLSON to John ASHBERY, Robert DUNCAN explicitly modernist modes, almost entirely resisted to Allen GINSBERG—the anthology offered a very differ- the draw to Europe. While more or less overlooked at ent picture of the poetic landscape and represented the time, Zukofsky’s anthology has become progres- exclusively American writers who, unaffiliated with sively more important to a sense of an American MOD- any academic institution and largely unpublished, ERNISM, documenting the work of poets who assumed were considered “outsiders,” although Allen grouped and practiced a recognizably modernist writing while individual poets into categories and thus established remaining in the United States. new “insiders,” albeit antiacademic ones. The two texts Together with such collections as Alfred Kreym- engaged in a “battle of the anthologies,” competing for borg’s Others (1916), Harriet Monroe and Alice Corbin representativeness and readership. Henderson’s The New Poetry (1917), Louis Unter- The stake in this war between the anthologies was meyer’s Modern American Poetry: An Introduction twofold. On the one hand, the landscape of contem- (1919), and Conrad AIKEN’s American Poetry 1671–1928 porary poetry was being disputed; on the other, the (1928), Zukofsky’s and the assorted African-American character, canon, and continuity of modernist verse anthologies offer a rich and varied picture of early was under scrutiny. In his introduction to Modern Verse 20th-century American poetic production. In addition in English, 1900–1950 (1950)—an anthology closely 390 POETRY ANTHOLOGIES

linked to The New Poets of England and America—Allen significantly in 1986 with Ron SILLIMAN’s In the Ameri- TATE writes, “The early reception in England of Robert can Tree. Like Allen’s some three decades earlier, Silli- Frost and the enormous international influence of man’s editorship served a polemical function. As both Pound and Eliot and, later, of W. H. Auden, have at last the publishing and educational industries proliferated produced an Anglo-American poetry that only by con- in the 1950s and 1960s, textbook anthologies mush- vention can be separated” (qtd. in Rasula 223). Tate’s roomed. By 1970 Norton had published its first sense of an inseparable synthesis of U.S. and British anthology of poetry and formalized what would traditions is echoed in the Hall, Pack, and Simpson become the increasingly dominant purpose of the anthology, particularly in its amalgamation of British anthology: to provide the classroom with a fairly stabi- and American poets. Implicit to these anthologies’ lized group of Anglo-American poets. Silliman’s claim of a poetry of Britain and the United States is a anthology, however, attempted to deflect an uncritical sense that the two countries not only share a literary assumption of a traditional canon and offered a vibrant tradition but also produce an ultimately indistinguish- and oppositional gathering of poets who explicitly put able poetry. into question the poetic forms and modes prominent Allen’s The New American Poetry, in contrast, is exclu- in commercial and university publications. Impor- sively and explicitly American. Aside arguably insepa- tantly In the American Tree made possible a more pub- rable from, the formal distinctions of the two lic appearance of independently published American collections, this attempt to define “American poets and poets working in an experimental tradition. More poetry” crucially differentiates the terms and claims of recently, Douglas Messerli’s From the Other Side of the each anthology. While the Hall, Pack, and Simpson Century (1994) and the Pierre Joris– and Jerome anthology, like its Tate-edited predecessor, insists on an Rothenberg–edited Poems for the Millennium (1995) “English language” tradition, the Allen anthology claims take up Silliman’s and others’ project of anthologizing a uniquely American writing that depends upon the innovative and international poets. singular conditions of U.S. history, politics, and general These recent attempts to complicate the canon have culture. While Pound is a shared poetic exemplar, the centered on formally experimental poems and poets Allen anthology, one might say, substitutes Williams for and thus, as some critics have pointed out, showcase a Auden and Zukofsky for Eliot, adding (in no particular very limited range of race and gender. In this way these order) Laura RIDING, H. D., Walt Whitman, Emily Dick- more adventurous contemporary anthologies showed inson, Herman Melville, Gertrude STEIN, Hughes, and the same exclusivity as that of more mainstream col- others. In the midst of the Hall-Allen poetry war, lections of American verse, such as Helen Vendler’s The Robert Kelley and Paris Leary published A Controversy Harvard Book of Contemporary American Poetry (1985) of Poets (1965), in which the editors offered a potpourri and J. D. MCCLATHY’s The Vintage Book of Contemporary of writers that crossed camp lines, as Snodgrass was fol- American Poetry (1990), both of which offer readers lowed by Jack SPICER and James DICKEY by Ed DORN. valuable collections of formally conventional poetry Boldly disregarding partisan tendencies, the anthology directly heir to an Anglo-American High Modernism. attempted to represent the conflicted and complex state Partly in response to the limitedness of these late cen- of early postmodern American verse. The editorial tury collections, anthologies African Americans, strategy of Kelley and Leary was not widely adopted, women, gays, and other marginalized groups appeared and anthologies—particularly those assembled by more frequently. Catch the Fire!!!: A Cross-Generational poets—largely remained explicitly partisan through the Anthology of African-American Poetry (1998), for second half of the 20th century. instance, included Baraka, June JORDAN, Sonia SANCHEZ, Allen’s anthology published a solely American and Quincy Trupe, and Florence Howe’s No More poetry which, heir to a primarily Anglo Modernism, Masks!: An Anthology of Twentieth Century American attempted to establish a characteristically and innova- Women Poets appeared in 1993. Resurgent: New Writing tive U.S. postwar verse. This project was taken up most by Women (1992), edited by Lou Robinson and Camille POETRY IN PERFORMANCE 391

Norton, is an important collection of innovative prose- native to the printed poem read silently in solitude. By poetry work, and Timothy Liu’s Word of Mouth: An taking the poem off the page, a poem in performance Anthology of Gay American Poetry (2000), collects the can call attention to the affinities of poetry with other work of vital postmodern gay poets. There is also the modes of expression; these affinities suggest different annual Best American Poetry, edited by David LEHMAN. ways poetry can (and should) communicate, alternative In the end any anthology, if only implicitly, makes a venues in which poetry can appear, and new ways that canonical claim regarding the poems included. These it can have an impact upon the world. Thus poetry in claims vary wildly, yet are nonetheless central to the performance is often figured in opposition to more tra- anthology’s formation. Ultimately the anthology is both ditional kinds of poetry, and its literary movements an invaluable educational aid and an ideological tool. often position themselves against poetry as “high art,” Teachers, students, and readers of poetry must be both against white, middle-class, corporate culture, and alert to the distinctive advantage of the anthology—to against poetry’s academic institutions. offer access to poems that might not otherwise be Preexisting models for the oral performance of read—and be aware and critical of the anthology’s poetry in 20th-century America range from the ancient motivated, essentializing, and canonizing functions. rhapsodists (the wandering poets in the time of Homer) and Brahmanic mnemonists (students who BIBLIOGRAPHY memorized and recited ancient Indian hymns), Golding, Alan. From Outlaw to Classic: Canons in American African, Oceanic, and American Indian oral chant and Poetry. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995. Rasula, Jed. The American Poetry Wax Museum. Urbana, Ill.: storytelling, and the Celtic and European bard and National Council of Teachers of English, 1995. minstrel tradition, as well as early 20th-century Euro- pean avant-garde performances, such as those of Thomas Fisher dadaist artists in Zurich’s once-famous Cabaret Voltaire (see EUROPEAN POETIC INFLUENCES). While these models POETRY IN PERFORMANCE Poetry in have been drawn upon in various ways by American performance is a broad category used to describe the poet-performers in order to formulate alternative work associated with a wide range of literary move- poetry practices and to make poetry a public, commu- ments and trends, including BEAT POETRY, the BLACK ARTS nal, and sometimes a countercultural and radical polit- MOVEMENT, the LANGUAGE SCHOOL of poetry, the oral ical activity, the earliest historical examples of the poetics movement, ETHNOPOETICS, rap, slam poetry, performance of poetry in the United States are found fusion poetry, and CYBERPOETRY, and it may include in the primarily educational, yet still community- activities as diverse as the private oral recitation of oriented practice of elocution and drawing-room poetry, live and recorded poetry readings, sound poetry recitation. Emerging in the 19th-century and persisting (which emphasizes the sound of words, instead of their well into the first two decades of the 20th, poetry read- meaning), and performance art, to list a few. While ing and recitation clubs aimed to acculturate and technically a “poetry performance” can refer to any entertain. In the first decades of the 20th century, poets poetic work in any form, including poems printed on as different as Vachel LINDSAY and Langston HUGHES the page, it is more commonly used to describe poetry gave poetry performances that were legendary even in that is “off the page” and, if not always “on the stage,” a period when audiences were used to similar theatrics at least made manifest in a medium or in media other in performances on vaudeville and in the delivery of than the printed word. Perhaps most commonly it church sermons. The recordings of modernist poets refers to the oral performance of poetry either as a T. S. ELIOT, Ezra POUND, and Gertrude STEIN, among poem read aloud or recited from memory, which may others, reading their own work, which were released include body gesture, movement, props, and musical or by the Library of Congress and commercial labels, sound accompaniment and which, as a “performance,” such as Caedmon, in the 1940s and 1950s, repre- represents a public and often politically inflected alter- sented a break with these earlier practices of popular 392 POETRY IN PERFORMANCE recitation and introduced the oral performance of “your mama”) are exchanged (mainly) between men, poetry as an extension of the expressive work of the the winner being the one who is able to verbally destroy avant-garde, high art poet (see MODERNISM). But it was all of his opponents (see CARIBBEAN POETIC INFLUENCES). probably not until 1955 and the Six Gallery reading in Rap, which emerged out of the South Bronx section of San Francisco, featuring poetry performances by the New York City in the 1970s, shares Black Art perfor- likes of Michael MCCLURE, Philip WHALEN, Gary SNYDER, mance’s sense of language as a weapon of power. The and Alan GINSBERG’s reading of HOWL (with Jack KEROUAC rapper often boasts of his rhyming (and sexual) cheering them all on) that the true significance of prowess and answers the stated attacks of his oppo- poetry in performance as an antiestablishment, antitra- nents and detractors. Rap is a dialogical verbal per- ditional gesture materialized in the United States. The formance within the larger art form of hip-hop, which Beats took Charles OLSON’s idea that the limitations of includes deejaying (cutting and scratching a vinyl poetry arise from “manuscript, press, the removal of recording), break dancing and other forms of move- verse from its producer and reproducer, the voice” and ment, graffiti art, and specific codes of dress. Rap is one developed a poetics rooted in oral performance, drawing aspect of a multimedia art form. upon Buddhist chant, popular folk and protest singing, Slam poetry represents another confrontational and, improvisational jazz, and the political stand-up routines in this case, explicitly competitive form of poetry per- of comics, including Lenny Bruce (“Projective Verse” 22). formance. Slam poets compete against each other by While this work of the Beats expressed a loosely winning over an audience with work that is entertain- defined leftist and environmentalist politics, the poetry ing and powerful on a first hearing and by impressing performances of the Black Arts movement, starting in the judges who rank and score their performances, the mid-1960s, identified social engagement and black winner being decided through a process of elimination. power as defining aspects of its performative aesthetic. The slam was born in the mid-1980s in Chicago and From such bases as the Black Arts Repertory Theatre and quickly spread to the Nuyorican Poets’ Café in Manhat- School, founded in Harlem in 1965 by Imamu Amiri tan, where a multiethnic field of poets performed work BARAKA (LeRoi Jones), the movement was innovative in its that was typically lively, declamatory, humorous, con- use of language (particularly Black English), music, and fessional, vulgar, political, and rantlike in nature. The performance to produce a poetry that emphasized oral- short length of the slam piece (measured not by lines ity and featured a ritual use of call and response between but by minutes, traditionally three) combined with the artist and audience coherent in purpose with the com- need to convey an arresting and persuasive message munity meetings, lectures, and study groups that were before an audience in such venues as bars and night held in the same venues as the performances. Fueled by cubs has made the slam poem an identifiable genre of a politically informed anger, Baraka’s piece, “Black Art” poetry in its own right, a genre that has persisted (1966) suggests the degree to which poetry was con- beyond the competitive context of the poetry slam and ceived by this movement as a gesture of forceful action: can still be heard at actual “open mic” and “spoken “We want ‘poems that kill.’ / Assassin poems, Poems that word” events across North America. Slam-influenced shoot guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys.” spoken word events continue be a significant site of Some of these same performance strategies, as well as organization for grassroots, ethnic-based poetry com- the sense of poetry as a vehicle for self-definition munities. These poetry communities have also been through “speaking out” against an oppressive status developed as “virtual” communities, gathering in “elec- quo, is also apparent in rap and slam poetry. Rap (also tronic bars” on the Internet, where the printed word is called “emceeing”)—speaking in rhymes to the beat of made to perform in new ways, “deploying new idioms, music—draws its roots from the Jamaican DJ “toast- rhythms, and typographical conventions,” as a means ing,” or speaking live over a music recording, and from of establishing a “poetics of virtual proximity” that the African-American verbal game of one-upmanship mimics spoken word gatherings in the domain of called “dozens,” in which witty insults (often about cyberpoetry (Brawley 164, 173). POETRY IN PERFORMANCE 393

These grassroots and community-based activities operations governing the choice of words, proving that are only tangentially linked to other more theoretically sound has an emotional effect beyond rational mean- developed experimental and performance-oriented ing and highlighting the human speaking voice as a work in the oral poetics, ethnopoetics, sound poetry, musical instrument (Morris 129–146). Language poetry, and fusion poetry movements. Some Not unlike the sound poet, who “practices the primary characteristics of these new approaches poetry deformation of linguistic form at the level of the signi- (identified in an early essay on the subject by Jerome fier” (Andrews and Bernstein 89), the writers associ- ROTHENBERG) include a sense of “ethnological continu- ated with the Language movement (the name taken ity,” the “breakdown of boundaries and genres,” “a from its journal, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E,) approached move away from the idea of ‘masterpiece’” toward a poetry as a way of placing attention “primarily on lan- sense of the “transientness” of the artwork, “a new guage and ways of making meaning, that takes for sense of function in art,” based on “what it does” in a granted neither vocabulary, grammar, process, shape, specific (social or performance) context, “a stress on syntax, program, or subject matter” (Andrews and action and/or process,” as well as the blurring of Bernstein ix). Thus, counter to spoken word poetry, boundaries between artist and audience, between real Language poetry often defies any principle of direct time and theatrical time, and between transformations address or dialogue; rather, it performs language in a that are expressed in a performance and “actual trans- way that underscores its status as a non-transparent formations (of the self, of consciousness)” that result medium of expression. Instead of establishing a sense from it (12–15). Ethnopoetics originated among poets of community in performance, it articulates a dry skep- with an interest in anthropology and linguistics and ticism toward community, as Charles BERNSTEIN puts it among anthropologists and linguists with an interest in in his essay, “The Conspiracy of ‘Us’” (1984): “I don’t poetry, such as Rothenberg, David ANTIN, and Denis believe in group formation, I don’t like group forma- Tedlock. These poets and critics emphasize the dialog- tion” (Andrews and Bernstein 185). ical dimensions of performance and associate the art of The recent phenomenon of fusion poetry manifests poetry with the acts of talking, chanting, or singing, a conscious awareness of all of these preceding move- which give shape to proverbs, riddles, curses, laments, ments, fusing the worlds of the oral and the written prayers, public announcements, and stories. and working “with a full awareness of the variety, In sound poetry the conventional hierarchy between eclecticism, the wild multiplicities of media and mean- vocal sounds and semantic sense is modulated and ing available to any creative imagination in the often reversed, resulting in a poetry that foregrounds Infobahn age” (Cabico and Swift 26). In sum, the words as vehicles of sound and often moves beyond phrase poetry in performance can refer to numerous recognizable language to explore the nonverbal, poetic practices, all of them seeking to enliven poetry expressive capacities of the human voice. Words by infusing it with other genres and media and by per- become shrieks and squawks, moods are struck forming it in novel venues. through modulations in vocal tone and volume, and rhythmic patterns are developed by alternating gut- BIBLIOGRAPHY Andrews, Bruce, and Charles Bernstein, eds. The tural grunts and high-pitched yelps. The CANADIAN L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book. Carbondale: Southern Illinois POETIC INFLUENCE upon American poetry by sound University Press, 1984. poets, including Bill Bissett and the poetry perform- Bernstein, Charles, ed. Close Listening: Poetry and the Per- ance group the Four Horsemen, is worth noting. The formed Word. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. work of these Canadian poetry performers and of Brawley, Lisa. “The Virtual Slam: Performance Poetry on the American poets, including Jackson MAC LOW and John Net.” Chicago Review 40 (1994): 157–163. CAGE, was motivated by a desire “to create a poetry of Cabico, Regie, and Todd Swift, eds. Poetry Nation: The North spontaneous affect” (Bernstein 168–169), and the American Anthology of Fusion Poetry. Montreal, Canada: sound pieces they created were often based on chance Véhicule Press, 1998. 394 POETRY INSTITUTIONS

Gladney, Marvin J. “The Black Arts Movement and Hip- take the wide dissemination of verse as its purpose. Hop.” African American Review 29 (1995): 291–301. One of its recent endeavors has been the creation of Morris, Adelaide, ed. Sound States: Innovative Poetics and “Poetry in Motion,” a campaign that mounts poems on Acoustical Technologies. Chapel Hill: University of North posters in places of public transportation across the Carolina Press, 1997. country, begun by Molly PEACOCK in New York City. Olson, Charles. “Projective Verse.” In Selected Writings, Another populist project, launched by Robert PINSKY edited by Robert Creely. New York: New Directions, 1966, pp. 15–26. during his term as poet laureate of the United States, Rothenberg, Jerome. “New Models, New Visions: Some the Favorite Poem Project archives and promotes Notes towards a Poetics of Performance.” In Performance poetry’s role in the lives of everyday Americans, irre- in Postmodern Culture, edited by Michel Benamou and spective of age, profession, ethnicity, gender, or socioe- Charles Carmello. Madison, Wis.: Coda Press, 1977. conomic background. Van Wienen, Mark W. “Vachel Lindsay as Performer,” Mod- The largest institution in the country dedicated to ern American Poetry: An Online Journal and Multimedia poetry is the Academy of American Poets, founded in Companion to Anthology of Modern American Poetry, 1934 by Marie Bullock. While the academy shares compiled by Cary Nelson. Available online. URL: some of the breadth and scope of the PSA—having, for http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/g_1/lindsay/ example, named April “National Poetry Month”—the performer.htm. Downloaded October 2003. organization exists more to support American poets at Jason Camlot various stages of their careers. To that end the academy sponsors numerous contests, poetry readings, and POETRY INSTITUTIONS Although poetry poets’ residencies, in addition to providing resources institutions have existed since the early 20th century, for poetry teachers, offering financial support to poetry with the advent of writing programs in American uni- publishers, and archiving text and audio recordings of versities, these institutions have greatly proliferated, established and emerging poets. The academy’s perva- becoming crucial for readers to decide which poets are sive sensibility over the years has been tilted toward important. The need for such institutional guidance has LYRICAL and NARRATIVE POETRY not very experimental in grown as poetry itself has fragmented into disparate structure or disjunctive in voice. Nonetheless, as the schools and subcultures. As Dana GIOIA states in his most financially sufficient poetry institution in the seminal essay “Can Poetry Matter?” (1991), “American country, it can be considered the most influential. It poetry now belongs to a subculture. ...To maintain has a board of chancellors, composed of preeminent their activities, subcultures usually require institutions, American poets in the latter stages of their career, and since the general society does not share their interests” this board is responsible for conferring some of the (96, 103). Gioia is referring largely to academic institu- country’s largest literary awards. In 1998 two chancel- tions, though other organizations devoted to poetry lors, Carolyn KIZER and Maxine KUMIN, very publicly have also emerged, differentiated from schools of poetry resigned to protest the absence of minorities on the (such as the IMAGIST or the BLACK MOUNTAIN SCHOOL) in board. A longstanding perception exists that the acad- this crucial aspect: While the schools are largely initiated emy is an insular, elitist institution, a kind of old boys’ and sustained by poets, poetry institutions include crit- club, and Kizer and Kumin’s resignation called atten- ics, poetry-readers, and even nonspecialists, thereby cre- tion to the facts that there had never been an African- ating effects on a much broader social scale. American chancellor and that the annual academy The nation’s oldest poetry organization, the Poetry fellowship had been awarded disproportionately to Society of America (PSA), was founded in 1910 and white males of a certain generation. As a result of this once counted among its members Robert FROST, protest, the composition of the board of chancellors Langston HUGHES, Edna St. Vincent MILLAY, Marianne has since become more heterogeneous; the 2003 board MOORE, and Wallace STEVENS. Unlike other organiza- included Nathaniel MACKEY, Yusef KOMUNYAKAA, tions with a more elitist agenda, the PSA has evolved to Michael PALMER, and Susan HOWE. POETRY INSTITUTIONS 395

There have been a number of alternatives to the derived from science rather than religion. Though the mainstream poetics espoused both by the PSA and the college became defunct in 1956, its influence was felt Academy of American Poets. One such institution is deeply by a generation of American artists and writers. the National Poetry Foundation (NPF), created in Located in St. Mark’s Church in New York City’s East 1971 by Carroll Terrell, the foremost publisher of Village since 1966, the St. Mark’s Poetry Project offers scholarly work on Ezra POUND and the Pound tradition, many diverse readings and writing workshops. As including OBJECTIVIST and, recently, LANGUAGE poetry, as Jerome ROTHENBERG relates, “The Poetry Project vortex well as an occasional book of verse. The NPF also hosts circa 1967—to which I was witness—included Beat international conferences on modern poetry. Another poets, NEW YORK SCHOOL poets, San Francisco poets nontraditional organization is the Naropa Institute in [see SAN FRANCISCO RENAISSANCE], Black Mountain Colorado, which was founded by Buddhist scholar and poets, DEEP IMAGE poets, Midwest & Southwest region- artist Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche on principles that als, Fluxus poets, Umbra poets & so on . . . even—in combine contemplative Eastern studies with tradi- this unusually most generous of vortexes—academic tional Western scholastic and artistic disciplines. Inau- poets.” Demonstrating a commitment to live poetry gurated as the Jack KEROUAC School of Disembodied events, the project offers biweekly readings, marathon Poetics by Allen GINSBERG and Anne WALDMAN, Naropa readings, and audio archives, including a recording of offers academic degrees in poetics with an aesthetic the only known joint reading between Ginsberg and model inseparable from the cultivation of mindfulness Robert LOWELL. Another institution dedicated to the and awareness integral to Buddhist ideals of existence. preservation of live recordings is the San Francisco- Such principles as synchronicity of body and mind and based Poetry Center and American Poetry Archives, the need to transcend egoism to arrive at ethical con- which was founded in 1954 on the basis of a gift from sciousness are thought to be applicable to living and to W. H. AUDEN at San Francisco State University. After the writing. The writers initially associated with Naropa Library of Congress, the center has the largest literary were considered BEATs, and the kinds of poems pro- recording archives in the nation, including more than duced there today are still influenced by Ginsberg, 2,000 original audio, video, and film recordings of Waldman, Gregory CORSO, Diane DI PRIMA, and poets reading their works. The center also has an Lawrence FERLINGHETTI. Naropa also hosts readings and extensive reading series. other nonacademic functions. The tradition of slam poetry began in Chicago in During the 1930s, Black Mountain College was 1986 (see POETRY IN PERFORMANCE), when Marc Smith formed out of a dispute over pedagogy and academic began a poetry reading series at a jazz club, the Get Me freedom. It did away with such bureaucrats as deans High Lounge, which gave birth to a phenomenon in and provosts so that the locus of power resided with which performance is highlighted and judges from the the faculty themselves. The school came to be known audience assign numerical values to poets’ perform- as a sanctuary for artists, musicians, and writers, both ances. In 1999 Poetry Slam, Inc. (PSI) became a non- as teachers and students who participated in collective profit organization that oversees an international labor, maintenance work, food preparation, and so on. coalition of poetry slams. Another poetry institution The poet Charles OLSON arrived to teach during the dedicated to slam is the New York-based Nuyorican 1950s, and others, including Robert CREELEY and Poets Café, where performers are often of Puerto Rican, Robert DUNCAN, followed. They were known as the Dominican, or African-American descent. Largely BLACK MOUNTAIN SCHOOL of poets, and while they and overlooked by academia, slam has created a pantheon the other poets associated with the movement, such as of its own stars, who have appeared on such programs Denise LEVERTOV and Edward DORN, wrote dissimilar as HBO’s Def Poetry Jam and on Broadway as Russell kinds of poems, they shared a disdain for baroque, Simmons Def Poetry Jam. romanticized, end-rhymed poems, seeking instead to Poets House, cofounded in 1985 by Stanley use plain-spoken diction to present a view of reality KUNITZ, is best known for its vast poetry library, which 396 POETRY INSTITUTIONS

is free and open to the public. Poets House has more Shihab NYE, and Carolyn FORCHÉ, and was subsequently than 40,000 volumes of books, journals, chapbooks, broadcast on televison, giving poetry one of its largest audio tapes, videos, and electronic media, and any- audiences. Subsequent documentaries with Bill Moy- one can find haven in its New York office. Poets ers, such as The Power of the Word, Sounds of Poetry, and House also sponsors public programs, including Rita DOVE, Poet Laureate, have been filmed in part at the panel discussions, seminars, readings, and lectures, Dodge Poetry Festival and later broadcast. in such venues as public parks and libraries. More Finally, the Electronic Poetry Center (EPC) serves as than any other poetry institution, Poets House is ded- a hub for resources in electronic poetry and poetics at icated to new poets, as evinced in its annual showcase the State University of New York, Buffalo, as well as on where the year’s new poetry books are gathered, the Web at large. The ambitious goal of the EPC is to exhibited, and eventually documented in the Direc- provide the widest possible range of resources centered tory of American Poetry Books, the most comprehen- on “digital and contemporary formally innovative sive bibliographic resource for contemporary poetry. poetics, new media writing, and literary programming” Poets House has also forged a partnership with the (“Intro”). These include curated lists of readings, inter- American Library Association to help increase the views, audio files, and other digitally archived texts. presence of poetry in libraries nationwide. Generally The EPC also hosts periodic festivals in poetics, with Poets House offers a kinder, gentler community than an emphasis on the way the Internet is changing poetic other poetry organizations. modalities. This emphasis includes hypertext and mul- The 92nd Street Y in New York has a broad range of timedia, where the use of links, audio, image, and social and cultural programs, of which poetry is just interactivity conspire to create new species of poems one small part. The Y, started in the 1870s as the (see CYBERPOETRY). Young Men’s Hebrew Association, is largely considered One of the most vital aspects of the EPC is the Poet- the most prestigious venue for a poet to read in in ics Listserv, which is a virtually connected network of America and generally the kinds of poets who read poets, the most active and prominent of a number of here, such as Seamus Heaney and Derek WALCOTT, are such electronic poets’ communities. The poets who at the later stages of their careers. The part of the Y compose the listserv can send email of any variety, be dedicated to poetry, the Unterberg Poetry Center, offers it an announcement of publication, call for submis- workshops and seminars. Along with the Nation mag- sions, theoretical question, political statement, azine and other organizations too numerous to men- response to a prior posting, or simply their latest tion, the Y also sponsors an annual poetry contest for poem, and this email will reach every other member of poets who have not yet published a book. Past winners the listserv. As a result, collaborations and dialogue of the “Discovery”/ Nation prize include Mary Jo have been generated among poets residing on other SALTER, Mark STRAND, Gary SOTO, and Lucille CLIFTON. sides of the globe, who might otherwise had no oppor- The Dodge Poetry Foundation, created in Madison, tunity to encounter each other. On any given day, some New Jersey, in 1987, emphasizes helping educators hundred-odd poets will post messages to the listserv. incorporate poetry into the classroom. The foundation Poetry institutions, in all their different manifesta- is responsible for a biennial poetry festival that is the tions, are integral to the formation of what is known as largest in the nation. Since it has such broad popular a canon in American poetry. From practioners of NEW appeal and takes “getting poetry off the page” as its FORMALISM to Language poets, nearly every aesthetic mantra, the poets who are celebrated in the festival are school has an organization to help support and to pro- mainstream in form and sensibility. One of the most liferate its ends. The largest institution, however, noteworthy poetry film documentaries, Bill Moyers’s remains academia, where a majority of poets work The Language of Life takes place at the Dodge Poetry when they are not writing. It is not hyperbole to claim Festival. This documentary consists of interviews of 18 that without the sustenance of these institutions, poets, including Michael HARPER, Adrienne RICH, Naomi poetry, as we know it, would not exist. POETRY JOURNALS 397

BIBLIOGRAPHY Through the century the role of the little magazine has Gioia, Dana. “Can Poetry Matter?” Atlantic Monthly 276.5 varied to a degree, but it has consistently been a shap- (May 1991): 94–106. ing force in literary studies. “Intro,” Electronic Poetry Center. Available online. URL: The early part of the century is known as the era of http://epc.buffalo.edu/intro.html. Downloaded March the little magazine, because poetry journals were very 2003. important to the publicizing of MODERNISM—its ideas, Rothenberg, Jerome. “The History/Pre-History of the Poetry its major figures, and its literature. Approximately 80 Project,” Project Papers. 1996–2002. Available online. URL: www.poetryproject.com/_Archives/projectpapers/ percent of authors who achieved fame between 1912 rothenpap.html. Downloaded March 2003. and 1946 were first published in little magazines. They were specifically useful for the publication of mani- Ravi Shankar festos outlining modernist values. Ezra POUND, for example, defined the IMAGIST SCHOOL in “A Few POETRY JOURNALS Throughout the 20th Don’ts,” first published in Poetry, and little magazines century, journals have been one of the most important also carried explanations of futurism, dadaism, vorti- means of disseminating poetry, creating poetic com- cism, and other movements. The degree of engage- munities, introducing new poets, and encouraging ment with modernist ideas varied among the poetry that falls outside of the mainstream. Generally magazines, but almost all contributed to the eventual poetry journals have been established to fill a gap in acceptance of new poetry styles. literary publications. The most successful of these Such writers as T. S. ELIOT, Pound, H. D., William Car- journals have made an impact on literary history by los WILLIAMS, Mina LOY, Carl SANDBURG, Robert FROST, promoting a particular style or school of poetry so that and Marianne MOORE appeared in a number of mod- even if the journals themselves are not widely distrib- ernist magazines. Harriet Monroe’s Poetry, begun in uted, the poets and poetry they endorse become well 1912, took a somewhat conservative stance, though it known and influential. was one of the earliest of the little magazines. It printed Poetry journals are often referred to as “little maga- a wide range of material and is still one of the most pres- zines,” because of their limited readership. Such publi- tigious poetry journals in the United States. In 2003 cations are distinct from commercial ventures in that Poetry received a $100 million bequest from Kuth Lilly, they exist not for profit but instead to circulate litera- heir of a pharmaceutical foundation, making it the rich- ture that popular presses will not print. Usually one est poetry foundation in world. The Dial (1920–29) was person or a small group of people oversees the entire slightly less conservative than Poetry and was the first publication of a little magazine. While the majority of publisher of Eliot’s THE WASTE LAND. The Little Review poetry journals publish, usually, six issues or less before (1914–29) printed an eclectic group of writers, as did shutting down, many remain in print for decades. Some Poetry, but it was more radical, as it “invit[ed] and little magazines are devoted strictly to poetry, but most enact[ed] opinionated debate about the nature and include a variety of literary and nonliterary works. The value of art” (Marek 60). Williams began Contact aims, contributors, and audiences of these journals vary (1920–23) to reflect his commitment to formally exper- greatly, often based on poetic school, region, political imental poetry that also attended to the poet’s locale; party, gender, race, class, sexual orientation, or another that is, he sought poetry that seemed distinctly Ameri- defining artistic or cultural characteristic. Because can rather than rooted in European traditions. Alfred poetry journals are generally open to new voices and Kreymborg’s Others (1915–19) was yet another radical new styles, they often introduce writers who eventually journal, as it published writing with extreme styles of achieve public recognition. Thus these little magazines, formal experimentation. While most of the modernist along with POETRY PRESSES and POETRY INSTITUTIONS, poetry considered important today first appeared in one encourage diverse poetic practices by challenging dom- of these small magazines, there were many other jour- inant modes and moving poetry in new directions. nals of the time doing slightly different sorts of work. 398 POETRY JOURNALS

Most of the writers of the HARLEM RENAISSANCE were Finally, a number of universities began to sponsor excluded from the little magazines above, but they cre- poetry journals to further their own reputations, a ated their own venues for poetry, the arts, and politics. trend that continues today with such well-known jour- The National Association for the Advancement of Col- nals as the Kenyon Review, begun in 1939. This ten- ored People (NAACP) started the Crisis in 1910, which dency has spawned a debate between the independent published such writers as Langston HUGHES and Jean and the academic little magazines, highlighting the TOOMER. The Messenger (1917–28) was known for its potential merits and drawbacks of each. While inde- socialist writing, but it also printed poetry by Hughes, pendent little magazines may print the most cutting- Claude MCKAY, and others. Opportunity (1923–49) was edge work, they also often print much writing of poor the most literary of these three major Harlem journals, quality; furthermore, they frequently lack funds and and it published work by Countee CULLEN, Paul support. Academic poetry journals, on the other hand, Lawrence Dunbar, Gwendolyn Bennett, and nearly all generally have consistently high standards, but their of the other important writers of the time. Although editorial decisions may be conservative or even subject African-American poets benefited from little magazines, to censorship, because of a university affiliation. For- they still were granted less freedom than their white tunately both academic and independent journals have counterparts, because the Harlem Renaissance journals proliferated, and both forms can claim significant liter- usually favored poetry with positive portrayals of black ary contributions. culture and minimal formal experimentation. By the 1950s, most poetry journals were publishing In the 1920s and 1930s, three major developments formalist verse and were associated with universities. occurred in the realm of the little magazine. First, However, some writers developed journals specifically regional small magazines were developed in areas to counter the mainstream trends, eventually changing where writers felt underrepresented and misunder- what was accepted as “literary.” Cid CORMAN’s Origin stood by northeastern journals. The Fugitive (1922–25) (1951–57), one of the first of these, contributed to the jumpstarted the careers of several southern writers, eventual legitimization of the BLACK MOUNTAIN SCHOOL, such as Allen TATE, John Crowe RANSOM, and Robert especially the work of Charles OLSON and Robert CREE- Penn WARREN, who championed southern nationalism LEY. Then Creeley buttressed this effort by editing the (see FUGITIVE/AGRARIAN SCHOOL). The Prairie Schooner, Black Mountain Review (1954–57), originally intended begun in 1927, was developed to represent perspec- simply to publicize the then-existing Black Mountain tives from the Midwest, though it now publishes writ- College. The last issue of the Black Mountain Review was ers from any region. The longevity of the Prairie devoted to the SAN FRANCISCO RENAISSANCE and BEAT Schooner and the continued introduction of new maga- POETRY. Other editors were also bringing the schools of zines centered around local perspectives attest to the poetry together. LeRoi Jones (later known as Amiri ongoing importance of region in the little magazine. BARAKA) published Yugen (1957–63) with Hettie Jones In addition, the 1920s and 1930s saw the advent of and the Floating Bear with Diane DI PRIMA, encouraging many political magazines, because of renewed interest Beat, Black Mountain, and other experimental artists. in leftist politics. The New Masses (1926–48) published Donald ALLEN’s Evergreen Review (1957–70) also printed political poetry in direct support of class revolution. poetry from communities across the United States, with The Partisan Review (1933–2003), however, supported the notable publication of Allen GINSBERG’s HOWL (1957). literature that was for and about the working classes, At the same time, the San Francisco Renaissance was whether or not it encouraged class struggle, finally particularly encouraged by journals such as Semina breaking with the Communist Party in 1936. While (1954–64), City Lights (1963–78), Ark (1947–48), and proletariat literature is often considered separately J (1959–62), which printed writing by such poets as from that of the major modernist and Harlem Renais- Kenneth REXROTH, Robert DUNCAN, and Muriel RUKEYSER. sance writers, all three movements overlapped with Poets of the OBJECTIVIST SCHOOL, including Louis ZUKOF- one another. SKY and George OPPEN, were printed not only in alter- POETRY JOURNALS 399

native publications but also in established journals, (1971–82), were precursors to the LANGUAGE SCHOOL of such as Poetry New York (1949– ). And such writers as poetry in their attention to the early phases of postmod- John ASHBERY, Kenneth KOCH, Frank O’HARA, and James ernism. The signature journal, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E SCHUYLER, started journals (Locus Solus [1961–62] and (1978–82), edited by Charles BERNSTEIN and Bruce Art and Literature [1964–67]) to encourage a poetry ANDREWS, included poetry by well-known writers, such which came to be known as the NEW YORK SCHOOL. A as Susan HOWE. Lee Hickman’s Temblor (1985–89) also second generation of New York school poets, including published innovative poetry, but it had a wider range Ted BERRIGAN and Ron PADGETT, edited journals such as than journals of the Language school. At the same time, the World (1967– ) and C (1963–67). Of course, both academic journals, such as the Southern Review many more magazines contributed to the diverse litera- (1965– ) and boundary2 (1972– ), and independent ture of the 1950s and early 1960s, but these are some magazines, such as ManRoot (1969– ) and Sparrow, that proved especially vital in forming communities of established specializations to shape their publications. writers who might otherwise have slowed in produc- In the 1980s and 1990s, mainstream journals flour- tion or been lost in obscurity. ished as they printed work by well-known writers as By the late 1960s, new magazines were being pub- diverse as Robert PINSKY, Alicia OSTRIKER, and Nathaniel lished at an astonishing rate for at least three reasons. MACKEY. Among these were the Painted Bride Quarterly First the mimeograph machine made publication easier (1973– ), Ploughshares (1971– ), and American Poetry and less expensive than ever before. Second civil rights Review (1972– ), the last of which has boasted a circu- activism, antiwar protests, and environmental move- lation of 17,000. At the same time, other prominent jour- ments fueled the creation of many journals. Finally, nals continued to print experimental poetics and/or were foundations, such as the National Endowment for the aimed at underrepresented groups. Talisman (1982– ), Arts and the Coordinating Council of Literary Maga- for example, edited by Edward FOSTER, has published zines (later renamed the Council of Literary Magazines innovative poetry, such as that by Alice NOTLEY and and Presses), began funding magazines. The boom in William BRONK, though it tries to present a range of little magazines continues today, provoking contro- poetic styles rather than representing a single school. versy. Some argue that most magazines have small audi- Callaloo (1976– ) prints African and African-American ences and publish a large percentage of poor writing: literature that might not always find an outlet despite Would not fewer magazines with a larger circulation increased multicultural awareness. Kathleen FRASER and better material be preferable? The opposing side began HOW (ever) (1983–92) to establish a place for answers that having a greater number of magazines women writers to publish experimental poetry, and the allows more opportunities for important writers to journal was recently reinvented in an online format emerge, even if most writing does tend toward medioc- called HOW2 (1999– ). This move into cyberspace is a rity. Furthermore an abundance of magazines appealing trend that has already increased the numbers of little to small groups is preferable to a homogenized publi- magazines, and it is one that will likely continue. The cation directed toward a mass audience. During this widespread use of the Internet has allowed the develop- period of rapid growth, such journals as Clayton ESHLE- ment of CYBERPOETRY and e-zines, publications that are MAN’s Caterpillar (1967–73) printed innovative poetry, desirable not only because of the low cost and potentially while the New American Review (1967– ) published widespread circulation but also because cyberspace work by every major poet of the time. offers opportunities for experimenting with form and During the 1970s, poetry journals moved in a few format that would be quite costly—or even impossible— directions. On the one hand, poets writing in a person- in a print journal. Like HOW(ever), the Little Magazine ally expressive—though often also political—mode, (1970– ), published by the State University of New such as Adrienne RICH, were regularly published in York, Albany, moved from a print to CD to an online mainstream journals. In addition, many journals, such version, partially to take advantage of the multimedia as Tottels (1970–81), Hills (1973–83), and This available on the Web. Other online journals, such as 400 POETRY PRESSES

Xcp: Cross Cultural Poetics (1997– ) (also in print form), larger publishing houses, whether because the per- work to combine experimental poetry, such as that by ceived difficulty of their work was seen as too great a Baraka or Harryette MULLEN, with unique Internet for- marketing risk or because mainstream publishers mats and an international appeal. The Blue Moon Review themselves underestimated the worth of poets who (formerly the Blue Penny Quarterly [1994– ]) is one of posed a challenge to literary tradition. Indeed Jed the oldest e-zines and reaches more than 25,000 people. Rasula suggests that American poetry is founded on It remains to be seen how the voluminous growth of the alternative publishing, as typified by Walt Whitman’s e-zine will eventually affect American poetry. self-published Leaves of Grass (1855) and Emily Whether in print or in cyberspace, little magazines Dickinson’s carefully prepared manuscripts. “The continue to flourish in number, though most have a American poetic tradition as such,” Rasula writes, small audience and tend to publish for only a brief “begins with a repudiation of, and by, the dominant period. More than ever before, American poetry jour- media” (412). nals are sites where local and international interests In the modernist period (see MODERNISM), such writ- come together. The local is encouraged as small maga- ers as Ezra POUND and Gertrude STEIN self-published zines are developed to fill precise aims. Meanwhile many of the books on which their reputations now rest. changes in technology have encouraged an interna- And Pound tirelessly promoted the publication of other tional focus: Because all types of poetry are available at important poets and novelists, often in alternative ven- all times, networks can be developed across geograph- ues. Stein, before the sensation of The Autobiography of ical spaces, and people are increasingly reminded of Alice B. Toklas (1933) led Bennett Cerf to take her on at the relevance of global issues. Poetry journals have Random House, had such difficulty securing publica- been crucial in the reception of various poetry move- tion of her genre-defying works, such as TENDER BUTTONS ments, and they continue to influence the way in (1914) and The Making of Americans (1925), that she which readers understand poetry of the present and and her partner, Alice B. Toklas, printed several of her the past. books in their own Plain Editions, including the impor- tant collection Operas and Plays (1932). BIBLIOGRAPHY The loose collective of second-generation modernist Anderson, Elliott, and Mary Kinzie, eds. The Little Magazine poets known as the OBJECTIVISTs founded the important in America: A Modern Documentary History. New York: Pushcart, 1978. presses To Publishers and the Objectivist Press, which Golding, Alan. From Outlaw to Classic: Canons in American they used to gain exposure for their own poetry; publi- Poetry. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995. cations of the two presses include DISCRETE SERIES by Hoffmann, Frederick J., Charles Allen, and Carolyn F. George OPPEN and In Memoriam: 1933 by Charles Ulrich. The Little Magazine: A History and a Bibliography. REZNIKOFF (Objectivist Press [both 1934]), as well as the Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1946. work of first-generation poets, such as Pound (How to Marek, Jayne E. Women Editing Modernism: “Little” Magazines Read and The Spirit of Romance, To Publishers [both and Literary History. Lexington, Ky.: University Press of 1932]) and William Carlos WILLIAMS (Collected Poems Kentucky, 1995. 1921–31, Objectivist Press [1934]). Perhaps the most Morrison, Mark S. The Public Face of Modernism: Little Maga- enduring influence of Pound on the world of alternative zines, Audiences, and Reception, 1905–1920. Madison: Uni- publishing was his advice to James Laughlin, then a versity of Wisconsin Press, 2001. student at Harvard, to give up trying to become a poet Laurie McMillan and found a publishing house. In 1936 Laughlin founded New Directions, a press that became one of the POETRY PRESSES From the beginning of largest independent houses and that made available on the century, small independent presses have had an a relatively wide scale works by central modernist poets important role to play in the championing of poets and younger writers, such as Kenneth PATCHEN, Gregory whose experimentalism made them an uneasy fit at CORSO, and Denise LEVERTOV, as well as English transla- POETRY PRESSES 401 tions of Arthur Rimbaud, Charles Baudelaire, Guil- for instance, has been strongly associated with Story laume Apollinaire, and Federico García Lorca. Line Press, founded in 1984 by Robert MCDOWELL, and Perhaps the most important of the smaller presses in associated with such poets as Mark JARMAN, Alfred the 1950s and 1960s was Grove Press, which in 1960 CORN, and Annie FINCH. brought out Donald Allen’s watershed anthology The If the academy has become, as Alan Golding claims, New American Poetry 1945–1960 (see POETRY ANTHOLO- “the main audience for poetry today” (159), one result GIES). Allen’s book collected emerging poets associated has been the increasing importance in recent decades with various poetic “schools”: NEW YORK, BLACK MOUN- of the academic press. Significant examples of this TAIN, SAN FRANCISCO RENAISSANCE, and the BEATs, and aspect of the publishing scene include the University helped to define the aesthetic boundaries of experi- of Pittsburgh Press’s Pitt Poetry Series, whose catalog mental poetry in the postwar period and beyond. includes Sharon OLDS, Cathy SONG, and Carol MUSKE- Beginning in the 1950s, Lawrence FERLINGHETTI’s DUKES, and Wesleyan University Press, publisher of a City Lights Books, an extension of his bookstore of the remarkably wide array of poets, including David IGNA- same name in San Francisco’s North Beach, published TOW, James WRIGHT, Joan RETALLACK, Rae ARMANTROUT, in its Pocket Poets Series first editions of many of the and Yusef KOMUNYAKAA. Wesleyan, along with other most important poetic works of the postwar era, such university presses, such as Johns Hopkins, has done as Allen GINSBERG’s HOWL and Other Poems (1956) and much to keep in print important 20th-century poets, Frank O’HARA’s LUNCH POEMS (1964). In 1968 John Mar- such as Louis ZUKOFSKY. Also worthy of note is the tin founded what soon became one of the most National Poetry Foundation at the University of Maine, respected publishers of fine-quality small editions, Orono, whose press makes available an array of hard- Black Sparrow Press, in order to publish the work of to-find editions of 20th-century poetry, as well as the the iconoclastic Los Angeles poet Charles BUKOWSKI; first collected editions of such poets as Kenneth FEAR- Black Sparrow went on to publish important works by ING and Carl RAKOSKI. John WIENERS, David ANTIN, Edward DORN, Robert DUN- While perennially struggling with formidable finan- CAN, and many others, while its Bukowski catalog has cial obstacles, small presses continue to act as a crucial become among the most valuable properties in con- entry point, introducing new and challenging poetry to temporary poetry. the culture at large. It is a measure of the strength of In the 1970s the nascent group that would soon alternative publishing since the 1970s that it would be come to be known as the LANGUAGE SCHOOL were highly too difficult to offer a representative list of important active in small-press publishing; among the most presses. While it would be difficult to point to a single notable examples is Lyn HEJINIAN’s Tuumba Press and publishing house that has shaped the poetic canon as Barrett WATTEN and Robert GRENIER’s This Press (which profoundly as did New Directions or Grove at midcen- published Ron SILLIMAN’s Ketjak [1978] and Bruce tury, as a collective enterprise, small presses have ANDREWS’s Sonnets (Memento Mori) [1980]). Presses become a permanent feature in the world of contem- associated with Language poetry published work that porary poetry. pushes against the boundaries of what is usually called BIBLIOGRAPHY “mainstream poetry.” Even the so-called mainstream, Clay, Steve, and Rodney Phillips. A Secret Location on the however, relies heavily on small presses as a venue. Lower East Side: Adventures in Writing 1960–1980. New There is, for example, Copper Canyon Press, founded York: Granary Books, 1998. in 1972, whose catalog includes W. S. MERWIN, Hayden Golding, Alan. From Outlaw to Classic: Canons in American CARRUTH, and Lucille CLIFTON. Poetry has been, of Poetry. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995. course, brought out by major publishing houses, Rasula, Jed. The American Poetry Wax Museum: Reality Effects, including W. W. Norton and Penguin. Yet other smaller 1940–1990. Urbana, Ill.: National Council of Teachers of presses have helped give rise to new movements in English, 1996. poetry; NEW FORMALISM (which emerged in the 1980s), Damian Judge Rollison 402 POETRY PRIZES

POETRY PRIZES The 20th century has seen association, were established in the 1980s and 1990s— the advent of a great number of prizes for excellence in some with substantial cash awards. (The purse for the American poetry, especially in the later decades. Build- Lilly Prize, for instance, is $100,000.) In the 2001 edi- ing on the tradition begun by Alfred Nobel, newspaper tion of the Best American Poetry series, more than half of publisher Joseph Pulitzer established prizes for Ameri- the awards cited by the poets in their biographies were can journalism and letters in 1917, with the first established in the last quarter of the 20th century. Pulitzer Prize for poetry being awarded in 1922. Major There is little evidence to suggest what, if any, effect poetic awards were also established in the first half of winning these awards has on a literary career. Some of the century by large philanthropic organizations, arts the traditional awards seem to be little more than aca- journals, literary societies, and prestigious academic demic entitlement programs: Established poets are institutions. Some, such as the Levinson Award (1914) members of the selection board one year, then given by Poetry magazine, were established to encour- awarded winners a few years later. Other first and sec- age young writers and to recognize the excellence of ond book awards, such as the Yale Series of Younger specific volumes. Others, such as the Poetry Society of Poets (1973), generally awarded to unknowns, do not America’s Frost Medal (1930) and the Shelly Memorial seem necessarily to lead the winners to fame and for- Award (1929), are given in recognition excellence of a tune. Few of these winners have become literary stars, poet’s body of work overall. with the exception of such poets as John ASHBERY, Another group of prestigious awards emerged in the Adrienne RICH, and Stanley KUNITZ. On the whole, 1950s. The National Book Foundation began giving prizes no longer guarantee future literary success—if out its awards in 1950, and a few years later the pres- they ever did. tigious James Laughlin Award was established by the Today the taste of poets, publishers, and the reading Academy of American Poets. This is also the time when public is much more of a factor in the success of a young the American literary landscape was changing. While poet than the awards he or she might earn. While the such poets as Carl SANDBURG and Theodore ROETHKE academy may continue to recognize its stars and those were accepting the major awards of the day, poetic who follow their paths, it is the popular appeal of poetry movements, such as the BEATs, BLACK MOUNTAIN, and today that may be most influential. Individual poems the NEW YORK SCHOOL, were rejecting the traditional lit- published in literary magazines are the raw material for erary forms for which these poets were praised. In the anthologies, the delivery method of choice today. In famous collection The New American Poetry (1960) (see such series as the Best American Poetry, a first-time poet POETRY ANTHOLOGIES), the poets in their biographies do has as much chance as a veteran of appearing in print not mention receiving any awards beyond the occa- next to the likes of an Ashbery or a Kunitz. The oppor- sional fellowship. Instead they focus on the people and tunities for a poet to share his or her work—through the ideas that influence their poetry. many poetry journals, online e-zines, or poetry slams This emphasis on the personal rather than the institu- available—vastly outnumber those of previous years. tional was a sign of the changing times. Traditional ideas Having succeeded without aid of the traditional aca- of good poetry gave way to subjective assessments based demic/publishing network, late-century poets have not on ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation—the multicul- necessarily needed or craved its accolades. turalism experienced in the late century. The bursting Some major poetry awards (in order of open of the canon made space for the recognition of pre- establishment): viously unappreciated poetics. The resurgence of the popularity of American poetry in the last decades of the Pulitzer Prize (1922): Nominated by a volunteer jury 20th century was accompanied by a proliferation of of five, selected by the Pulitzer Board, and pre- prizes to honor the creators. Prizes, such as the Before sented by the president of Columbia University, the Columbus Foundation’s American Book Award and the Pulitzer remains the most prestigious American Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize offered by the Modern Poetry award in letters. Winners include Edward Arlington POETRY PRIZES 403

ROBINSON (1922), Sylvia PLATH (1982), Yusef KOMUN- the award and purse of $10,000 has been given to YAKAA (1994), and Stephen DUNN (2001). Denise LEVERTOV (1976), Josephine MILES (1984), Frost Medal (1930): The Frost Medal and $2,500 are Mark JARMAN (1998), and Wanda COLEMAN (1999). awarded annually at the discretion of the Poetry Walt Whitman Award (1975): Awarded to an American Socitey of America’s Board of Governors, for distin- who has not yet published a book of poetry, this guished lifetime service to American poetry. Past win- prize includes $5,000, a one-month residency at the ners include Edna St. Vincent MILLAY (1943), Robert Vermont Studio Center, and publication of the poet’s Penn WARREN (1985), and Sonia SANCHEZ (2001). first book. Recipients include David BOTTOMS Shelly Memorial Award (1929): The Shelley Memorial (1979), April Bernard (1988), and John Canaday Award of between $6,000 and $9,000 is given by (2001). the Poetry Society of America to a living American Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award: This memorial award for poet “selected with reference to genius and need” a manuscript-in-progress of poetry or verse-drama (“Poetry”). Winners include Conrad AIKEN (1929), is open only to Poetry Society of America members Gwendolyn BROOKS (1975), and Alice NOTLEY and carries with it a purse of $1,000. Past winners (2001). include Linda PASTAN (1978), Carolyn FORCHÉ Bollingen Prize (1949): The Bollingen Prize, established (1982), and Angie Estes (2001). by Paul Mellon, with a current purse of $50,000, is American Book Award (1980): Established by the awarded biennially by the Yale University Library to Before Columbus Foundation, this award is an American poet for the best book published dur- bestowed by a panel of writers, editors, and pub- ing the previous two years. Ezra POUND was awarded lishers. Its winners include William BRONK (1982), the first Bollingen prize, despite being incarcerated Dorothy Barresi (1997), Andres Montoya (2000), for treason at the time of the award. Winners and Sandra GILBERT (2001). include E. E. CUMMINGS (1958), James MERRILL Witter Bynner Poetry Prize (1980): Established by the (1973), and Louise GLÜCK (2000). American Academy & Institute of Arts & Letters, National Book Award (1950): Given to an American this prize supports the work of a young poet. Win- poet by the National Book Foundation for the best ners include Franz WRIGHT (1995), Mark DOTY book of poetry published during the award year. (1997), and Rachel Wetzsteon (2001). Winners include William Carlos WILLIAMS (1950), National Book Critics Circle Award (1981): Given to an Allen GINSBERG (1974), and Lucille CLIFTON (2000). American author by the National Book Critics Circle James Laughlin Award (1954): Given to a poet for his or for the best book of poetry in the preceding year, her second book already under contract with a pub- past winners include A. R. AMMONS (1981), Hayden lisher, this award includes a $5,000 purse and a CARRUTH (1992), and Judy Jordan (2000). promise from the Academy of American Poets to Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry (1986): purchase 10,000 copies of the book for distribution This award and $10,000 prize are given by the to its members. Past winners include Donald HALL Sewanee Review to honor the distinguished career of (1955), Stephen DOBYNS (1971), AI (1978), and Peter an American poet. Winners include Howard Johnson (2001). NEMEROV (1986), X. J. KENNEDY (1998), and Freder- Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize (1973): Awarded to a ick Morgan (2001). poet under age 40 by the Yale University Press for Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize (1986): The award and substan- her or his first published volume of poetry, past win- tial purse ($100,000 in 2001) is offered by the Mod- ners include Robert HASS (1973), Cathy SONG ern Poetry Association, affiliated with Poetry (1983), and Maurice Manning (2000). magazine, to recognize the lifetime achievement of Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize (1975): Awarded by the an American poet. Winners include Charles WRIGHT Nation and the Academy of American Poets for the (1993), William MATTHEWS (1997), and Yusef best book of poetry published in the previous year, Komunyakaa (2001). 404 PONSOT, MARIE

Lannan Literary Awards (1989): This award was estab- and sestina, Marie Ponsot considers herself an eccen- lished by the Lannan Foundation to honor both tric, having written as much free as formal verse (see established and emerging writers whose work is of PROSODY AND FREE VERSE); her poems are always formal, exceptional quality. Nominations are made anony- she said in a telephone interview, in the sense that mously by the foundation’s literary committee. “language generates form” (Interview). Compared Winners include Cid CORMAN (1989), William with 17th-century John Donne for her metaphysical Bronk (1992), Denise Levertov (1993), and Herbert poems, with James Joyce for her word coinages and Morris (2000). puns, and with Seamus Heaney for her connection to Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize (1990): This the earth, Ponsot can nevertheless be best described as prize of $10,000 is awarded by the Library of Con- keenly independent. gress every other year for the best published book of Ponsot was born and reared in Queens, New York. poetry. Winners include James Merrill (1990), Ken- Her first volume, True Minds (1957), was swallowed in neth KOCH (1996), and David Ferry (2001). the wake of Allen GINSBERG’s HOWL. Living for decades Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award (1992): This memorial “outside the world of poetry,” as she supported seven award, offered by Claremont Graduate University, is children by writing for television and radio, teaching awarded to a poet who has been published but has and translating, Ponsot maintained the “desire to write not yet reached the pinnacle of his or her career. The poems, not to publish them” (Interview). She won the award carries a substantial purse ($100,000 in 2001). Eunice Tietjens Memorial Award for poems in Poetry Previous winners include Susan Mitchell (1993), magazine (1960). Her second volume, Admit Impedi- John Koethe (1998), and Alan Shapiro (2001). ment (1981), did not appear until she was 60. The Robert H. Winner Memorial Award: Established to reward Green Dark (1988) won the Delmore SCHWARTZ Memo- original work being done in midcareer by a poet over rial Poetry Award. Long revered in poetry circles, she age 40 who has not yet received significant appreci- came to popular prominence when The Bird Catcher ation, this award brings with it a purse of $2,500. (1998) won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Previous winners include Helen Frost (1993), Liz Springing: New and Selected Poems (2002), featured in a Waldner (1998), and Jeffrey Franklin (2001). front-page review in the New York Times Book Review Wallace Stevens Award (1994): Given annually by the when Ponsot was 81, includes one uncollected poem Academy of American Poets to recognize proven from each year between 1946 and 1971. She was mastery in poetry, the award and stipend of awarded the Shelley Memorial Award by the Poetry $150,000 has recently been awarded to Adrienne Society of America and the Phi Beta Kappa Poetry Prize Rich (1996), Jackson MAC LOW (1999), Frank BIDART (2002). Ponsot has taught at Queens College of the (2000), and Richard WILBUR (2003). City University of New York. BIBLIOGRAPHY Dinitia Smith has written that a “Marie Ponsot poem “Poetry Awards FAQ.” Academy of American Poets. Available is a jeweled bracelet, carefully carved, with small, firm online. URL: www.poets.org. Downloaded December 2003. stones embedded in it” (E1). Her poems begin with “Poetry Society of America Awards Guidelines,” Poetry Soci- stark assertions, such as “Death is the price of life” ety of America. Available online. URL: www.poetrysociety. (“For A Divorce” [1981]), include puns, such as “I org/psa-awards_gdln.html. Downloaded December 2003. think I’ve got what I need / In the overhead compart- Rasula, Jed. The American Poetry Wax Museum: Reality Effects, ment” (“What Do You Want to Be When You Grow 1940–1990. Urbana, Ill: National Council of Teachers of Up?” [2002]), or end in witty aphorisms, such as, “Age English, 1996. is not / All dry rot” (“Pourriture Noble” [1998]). “Late” Aimee Fifarek (1981) is a crown of sonnets (a series in which the last line of each sonnet becomes the first line of the next). PONSOT, MARIE (1921– ) Termed a for- The intricate form and the recurring image of her malist because of her mastery of the sonnet, villanelle, mother’s diamond, whose “permanence defies / The POUND, EZRA 405 dark, in sparkles on this page,” demonstrate her signa- never written a word of verse, he would still command ture elegance. recognition in 20th-century poetry. His own poetry, Whether writing about motherhood or metaphysics however—its stoic boldness, dramatic concisions, and in colloquial or philosophical diction, Ponsot demon- haikulike faithfulness to image (see IMAGIST SCHOOL)— strates, in David Orr’s words, “the exhilarating still demands attention and study. Pound’s sense of his integrity” (9) of one who insists that poetry is, as Pon- own importance and place in the artistic tradition, sot herself said, “human language at its most tri- along with his later political antics and eventual trial umphant” (Interview). for treason, have catapulted him into both the infa- mous and glorious position of gatekeeper to literary BIBLIOGRAPHY modernism in the West. Deen, Rosemary. Review of Springing, by Marie Ponsot. Image: A Journal of the Arts and Religion 35 (summer Born in Hailey, Idaho, Pound moved at the age of two 2002): 114–116. with his family to Philadelphia. He attended the Univer- Orr, David. “What’s Not a Poem Has Been Discarded.” sity of Pennsylvania before earning a B.A. at Hamilton Review of Springing, by Marie Ponsot. New York Times College (1905). He then continued his work in Romance Book Review, April 21, 2002, 9. languages, especially the Provençal of the 12th-century Ponsot, Marie. Telephone Interview with Maureen Connolly Troubadour poets, and earned an M.A. from the Univer- McFeely. New York City. December 9, 2002. sity of Pennsylvania in 1906. Following a Harrison Fel- Smith, Dinitia. “Recognition at Last for a Poet of Elegant lowship from the University of Pennsylvania (1906), Complexity.” New York Times, April 13, 1999, E1, 3. which he used to finance a trip to Spain, Pound took a Maureen Connolly McFeely teaching post at Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indi- ana. After offering a young burlesque actress shelter for POUND, EZRA (1885–1972) Ezra Pound’s a night, however, he was removed from the college for battle cry, “Make it new!,” became the implied motto what was deemed immoral behavior. This inauspicious for one of the most significant literary movements of ending to his American teaching career began Pound’s the 20th century. MODERNISM found its most fervent ascendancy in the London literary scene. In 1908 after a advocate in Pound and his numerous poems, essays, stay in Gibraltar and then Venice—where he published tracts, and manifestos, all of which sought to redefine his first book, A Lume Spento (1908)—Pound went to poetry in light of a declining, late Victorian culture. London. A steady stream of publications followed, both Inspired early in his life by such varied sources as the in Europe and America, as well as editorships at premier Troubadours, Homer and the classical Greek canon, poetry magazines, such as Poetry (1912), the Little Robert Browning, and Confucius, Pound condensed Review (1917), and the Dial (1920). Although he never his learning and skills into highly concise and allusive received the accolades he thought he deserved (and verse. This move toward a rougher, more volatile poet- which his contemporaries Eliot, whom he helped edit ics was, in part, a revolutionary’s response to staid and revise THE WASTE LAND, and Frost did), he eventually societal norms. Pound saw early 20th-century poetry won the Dial award for poetry (1928), an honorary and the culture to which it pandered as rotten and degree from Hamilton College (1939), the prestigious sorely in need of classical revival under the pressure of Bollingen Prize for poetry (1949), and the Academy of a modern consciousness. His sense of timing, his American Poets Award (1963). shrewd business sense, and his knack for garnering the His estrangement from the United States creates a praise of other artists and important patrons guided violent tension in his poetry. In “Hugh Selwyn Mauber- him to the foreground of literary modernism in Lon- ley” (1920), he ridicules America for its cultural poverty, don. Pound helped William Butler Yeats mature, aided referring to his homeland as “a half-savage country.” in William Carlos WILLIAMS’s move toward modernism, American pragmatism, though, fostered in Pound a promoted Robert FROST, and discovered T. S. ELIOT, predilection for vernacular and crass directness. Indica- H. D., James Joyce, and countless others. Had Pound tive of Pound’s linguistic range are his diction choices, 406 POUND, EZRA such as “Guffaw,” “Kulchur” instead of “Culture,” and ness in Blast! is his ending denouncement in “Saluta- “sd” instead of “said.” Pound’s early poetry, however— tion the Third”: “Here is the taste of my boot. . . . Lick from A Lume Spento, Personae (1909), and much of the off the blacking.” loose translations in Cathay (1915)—owes much to Pound’s poetic idiom—one that emerged during Browning’s dramatic monologues by historical figures. the war years and took firm hold on him by the time “Sestina: Altaforte” (1908), the first sestina published in of his departure for Paris in 1920—displays conci- English, for example, is written in the voice of Bertran sion, objectivity, and harsh juxtapositions. He forces de Born, a troubadour who is one of the damned in readers to juggle myriad allusions and cryptic com- Dante’s Inferno. The poem exhibits a high degree of tech- parisons. In “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” (1920), the nical bravado and talent, and it alludes to many of the line “Capaneus; trout for facticious bait” places the themes and formal moves that Pound obsessed over: an burden of reconciling the two images on the reader. artist’s being punished for boldness, classical allusion, At his best Pound epitomizes verbal economy and dramatic personae, and a typically Anglo-Saxon vocab- imagistic precision. His rhyming of classical lan- ulary. “I have no life save when the swords clash” guages with English and his vast knowledge and appears to be a line that fits not just Pound’s persona, study of medieval forms and meter still loom large in but Pound himself. Pound’s early work attests to his the English poetic tradition. At his worst, however, awareness of poetic heritage and his intense study of Pound can be pedantic and overly allusive, relying on both Anglo-Saxon and Provençal traditions. His early intimidation to force his readership into acknowledg- work only hints, though, at the dramatic shift he would ing his prowess. His lifelong work, THE CANTOS undergo just years later. (1930–70)—a daunting sequence of 117 poems in The first blatant move toward a modern style—what which Pound attempted an agnostic version of Pound referred to as “nearer the bone” and “free of Dante’s Divine Comedy—still leaves audiences baffled. emotional slither”—came in 1913 with the publication The poem’s Odyssean journey to the underworld, as of “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste” in Poetry. In this short well as its Dantesque mixture of mythic with contem- essay, Pound outlined the tenets that would, in various porary figures, place it strongly in the Greek and Ital- forms, dominate not only his own aesthetic practice ian traditions Pound admired. Collages of Chinese but most of the literary tradition of the West for the characters and foreign languages, highly cryptic allu- next half century. Among the initiatives Pound called sions, and veiled personal and political attacks, how- for were “direct treatment of the ‘thing’” and composi- ever, make The Cantos one of the most challenging tion “in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in reads of the 20th century. Though the work still sequence of a metronome.” Verse, to Pound at this stands as a monument to modernism, the extent to stage, became more like sculpture, something carved which Pound’s Cantos succeeds aesthetically is still from alabaster, something done with craftsman quality debated by scholars and poets alike. and made to endure. Pound even offered a name for While in voluntary exile in Italy in the 1920s and this new aesthetic: imagism. Throughout World War I 1930s, Pound’s obsession with constructing an artistic and immediately following, he continually refined his utopia led him to fascist politics, harsh anti-Semitic imagist dicta, escaping any potential stagnation or mis- rants, and, ultimately, to anti-American broadcasts use by lesser artists. Under the banner of vorticism— during World War II. He vilified Jews and capitalism as ”a combination of literary high jinks and aesthetic the causes of cultural ruin in the West, and he suffered mumbo jumbo” (Tytell 159)—Pound and cohort Wyn- delusions regarding the role both Jews and capitalism dham Lewis published Blast! (1914). In this vitriolic played; and he supported overly optimistic economic rant, Pound espoused such themes as an artistic recon- systems. Ultimately Pound was detained by the Amer- quest of culture, political and economic revolution, ican authorities after the liberation of Italy, and he was antiusury, and an ominous anti-Semitism that later led returned to the United States in 1945 under arrest for to political turmoil and his arrest. Typical of the bitter- treason. Though he was later acquitted on the grounds “THE PRESIDENTS OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA” 407 of mental instability, he spent many years in St. Eliza- To compose the poem, Mac Low structured images beth’s mental hospital in Washington, D.C., where he and sometimes irregular stanzas, or strophes, by trans- received visits from young poets, such as Allen GINS- lating the letters of each U.S. president’s name (from BERG and Paul BLACKBURN. Pound’s Bollingen Prize for Washington to Fillmore) into a word based on each let- the Pisan Cantos in 1949 finally afforded his friends the ter’s Phoenician meaning. Modern Roman script opportunity to persuade authorities to release him. descends from the Phoenician, and Mac Low’s system They succeeded; Pound was finally freed in 1957 and implies a relation between ancient writing systems and returned to Italy the following year. Ezra Pound was contemporary American social systems. For example, both admired and despised, idolized and vilified, as here is the end of the first section, entitled “1789,” after the dominant figure of modernism. Washington’s inaugural year. This passage contains images corresponding to the last four letters of “Wash- BIBLIOGRAPHY ington,” G (camel), T (mark), O (eye), and N (fish): Kenner, Hugh. The Pound Era. Berkeley: University of Cali- fornia Press, 1971. for tho he had no camels he had slaves enough Nadel, Ira B. The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound. New and probably made them toe the mark by keeping York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. an eye on them Tifany, Daniel. Radio Corpse: Imagism and the Cryptaesthetic for he wd never have stood for anything fishy. of Ezra Pound. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995. The words and images are thus connected by com- Tytell, John. Ezra Pound: The Solitary Volcano. New York: mentary that implicates Washington in evil slavehold- Doubleday, 1987. ing system. But the arbitrariness of the image structure Chad Davidson also suggests that the public persona of a president, or perhaps any such authority figure, is just as arbitrarily “THE PRESIDENTS OF THE UNITED imposed as benevolent and worth following or believ- STATES OF AMERICA” JACKSON MAC ing. On the other hand, an awareness of which ele- LOW (1963) “The Presidents of the United States ments of the poem are imposed by the system and of America” demonstrates a trend in mid-20th-century which are not allowing Mac Low’s own authority to MODERNISM—in line with William Carlos WILLIAMS’s dic- manifest itself transparently. tum, “no ideas but in things”—in a synthesis of com- The cumulative effect of the poem, commensurate positional methods peculiar to Jackson MAC LOW. By with the gradually wilder form it takes on the page, is taking an objective view of poetry’s basic building as incendiary as the repetition of images. This repetition block, language, through a systematic approach to lends ominous semantic weight to ordinary words and writing, “The Presidents” stands with Charles OLSON’s images, even as Mac Low’s deft treatment of them lends THE MAXIMUS POEMS, Paul BLACKBURN’s THE JOURNALS, and humor to the poem. Though relatively short, “The Pres- Armand SCHWERNER’s THE TABLETS as an epic experiment idents of the United States of America” evokes both the in the turn from metaphor to metonymy, from fluid epic tradition from Homer through Pound and the bur- grammatical structures to radical parataxis (setting geoning alignment in the 1960s of avant-garde literary incongruent elements side-by-side), and from standard practice with American social dissent. free verse layout to visually provocative and disruptive BIBLIOGRAPHY lineation (see LONG AND SERIAL POETRY). Like Ezra Hartley, George, “‘Listen’ and ‘Relate’: Jackson Mac Low’s POUND’s THE CANTOS, Mac Low’s poem builds a “struc- Chance-Operational Poetry.” Sulfur 23 (fall 1998): ture of images” out of everyday language, which, in 189–203. turn, allows the poet to make social and political com- Taylor, Henry, “Jackson Mac Low: Gristlier Translations, mentary that transcends the everyday. Frequently per- Arcane Pronouns.” In Compulsory Figures. Baton Rouge: formed in the latter half of the 1960s, the poem was Louisiana State University Press, 1992, pp. 245–266. not published in full until 1986. Patrick F. Durgin 408 “THE PRIPET MARSHES”

“THE PRIPET MARSHES” IRVING FELD- god.” But the protective mist with which he seeks to MAN (1979) “The Pripet Marshes” belongs to that cover his people “clouds” his own mind instead. He is genre of poetry that deals with, or bears witness to, the overtaken by primordial and voiceless forces. It is the Holocaust. Its final version appears in the center of Irv- end of civilization. But such is the force of the witness ing FELDMAN’s work. Feldman imagines his own family poem, or Feldman’s dramatic reinvention of it, that the and loved ones on the site of the tragedy. Thinking of testimony itself provides transcendence. his Jewish friends, he seizes “them as they are and BIBLIOGRAPHY transport[s] them in [his] mind to the shtetlach and Stiller, Nikki. “On Jewish Poetry in English.” In The State of ghettoes,” the poem begins. The words seizes and trans- the Language. Vol. 2. Berkeley: University of California port—relating to the Nazis gathering their victims—are Press, 1990, pp. 51–60. used ironically. This imaginative act at first gives the speaker a sense of control. At times he takes a Biblical Nikki Stiller tone. The poet’s defeat at the end signifies the utter fail- ure of the artist or, indeed, of the individual to stem the PROSODY AND FREE VERSE Traditional tide of hatred that will soon, like the Pripet Marshes, an English prosody depends on identifying syllables and area in Eastern Europe overrun by the Germans, engulf stresses (or accented and unaccented syllables). To his loved ones. Desperately trying to seize his people, indicate which syllables receive emphasis, the conven- the speaker collapses “as though drugged or beaten,” tion is to use an acute accent (´) and for syllables stupefied by the prospect of such brutality. receiving less emphasis to use a breve (˘). The first line The poem is full of color. Feldman celebrates peo- of Robert FROST’s “Birches” would thus be scanned as ple, friends, and relatives, whom he imagines in a follows: “When Í see bírches bénd to léft and ríght.” Russian village moments before the Germans arrive. Against this underlying rhythm, which operates Frank has the “hair and yellow skin of a Tartar”; there throughout the poem, a reader might add less repeti- is also “Abbie whose coloring wants lavender,” his tive rhythmic emphasis appropriate to the sense of the mother “whose gray eyes are touched with yellow,” as passage. Scansion is the process of identifying the well as his “brown-eyed son” and “red-haired sisters.” stressed and unstressed syllables of a particular poem Against the grim and anonymous Holocaust, which and noting how they are arranged in patterns. annihilated the individual, Feldman evokes character, Rhythm and meter are not synonymous. Meter is a personality, individuality: One friend is “Sullen,” while specific form (or variety of forms) of rhythm; more another is a “moping, melancholy clown.” He also specifically, meter is an arrangement of syllables that includes the names—Marian, Adele, Munji—of those underlies a rhythm. Perhaps the most common form of who engage in social activities, “walking the streets, meter is iambic pentameter, in which each line of poetry visiting, praying in shul,” and “arguing.” There is ban- contains 10 syllables, with every other syllable ter and impatience and merriment. accented (sometimes a group of syllables will not fol- The poem is also full of sound. The speaker’s ears low the iambic pattern, yet the majority of groups of “tingle” when he hears voices: Maury’s voice “is rapid syllables do). The line from Frost cited above is an and slurred,” Lottie’s voice “flattens every delicacy,” example. Iambic pentameter that does not rhyme is Abbie “who, when [he] listen[s] closely is speaking to called blank verse. Some theorists have argued that [him],” and the family is “bantering [its] tenderness rhythm is a subtler term than meter, since it includes away.” The emphasis on daily human activity substi- sound effects that cannot easily be described by the tutes here for any rumination on nature. The primordial language used to understand meter. marshes, the nature, is irrelevant to the poet’s vision. Of Free verse is most simply defined as nonmetrical course, the individual is helpless. As the Germans poetry. A subtler definition would note that free verse approach on their motor cycles, the speaker cries, “I may have meter and rhyme, though not in a strict, snatch them all back, / For, when I want to, I can be a repeated pattern, such as iambic pentameter. The critic PROSODY AND FREE VERSE 409

Charles Hartman says, “Free verse, like all verse, is practice. The lack of such a standard means that a read- prosodically ordered and not aimless” (24). Prosody ing of a given line or poem based on the duration of the also includes efforts to explain the irregular rhythms of sounds in the line depends on the highly subjective and free verse, as well as the effects of meter and rhyme. variable interpretation of the individual reader. Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1855) is the first Pound’s idea, “to break the pentameter, that was the major work of American poetry to be written in free first heave,” current long before he articulated it in verse. But, as Chris Beyers explains in A History of Free canto LXXXI (of THE CANTOS), set forth a cause that Verse, unmetered verse existed in English and Ameri- Pound’s friend Williams elaborated on under the term, can poetry before Whitman, notably in parts of the variable foot (Williams 289). Williams claimed that tra- King James version of the Bible, in the prophetic books ditional meter was “wholly unrelated to our language” of romantic William Blake, and in the 18th-century (quoted in Beyers 187). Williams used variable foot to work of Christopher Smart. The effect of Whitman’s describe means other than metrical scansion to deter- long free verse lines in Leaves of Grass was not to be felt mine the length of the poetic line. strongly until the 20th century, long after Whitman’s Although there is still no agreed-upon way of “meas- death in 1892. In the first half of the 20th century, uring” its form, free verse was, through most of the most free verse poets were trying to define their own 20th century, the dominant mode or style of poetry. styles as distinct from Whitman’s. Few notable 20th-century American poets wrote no After Whitman’s practice came the work and theo- free verse, and several notable ones wrote only free ries of Ezra POUND, William Carlos WILLIAMS, and verse, including Allen GINSBERG and Marianne MOORE. Charles OLSON. Pound wanted to break with the metri- Many poets, in fact, have written in both metered and cal tradition by identifying a more flexible organizing free verse forms, including Theodore ROETHKE and principle—cadence. Making an analogy with musical Adrienne RICH. It is possible to write in rhyme and not structure, Pound claimed that cadence had been the in meter or to use alliteration (similar consonant basis for the rhythms of good poetry since the classical sounds at the beginnings of words), consonance (gener- Greeks (Beyers 19). ally, similar consonant sounds), or assonance (similar The word cadence comes from the Latin cadere, vowel sounds) to provide form in a poem. Pound’s meaning “to fall.” It refers to the rise and fall of the famous two-line poem, “In a Station of the Metro,” voice in speaking, though the term may refer to mod- though nonmetrical, used assonance in the words ulations of tone as well. Most loosely, cadence refers crowd and bough. Advocates of free verse have argued to the rhythmic flow of the whole poem and serves to that such subtleties of sound are more likely in free remind us that traditional prosody is more a matter of verse than in metered verse, and considerable artistry how the lines sound when read aloud than of how they is required to achieve them. appear on the white space of the page. But some 20th- Free verse has been studied extensively with the century poets, such as Williams, were concerned with goal of finding a way to indicate the rhythm of free both the sound of verse and the appearance of the verse lines. Most analysts have been forced to fall back poem on the page. on the examination of stressed and unstressed syllables Pound’s musical analogy raises the question of dura- or to borrow terminology, such as the phoneme (an tion, a concept borrowed from Greek and Latin poetry abstract, written entity that corresponds to a sound to interpret the auditory dimension of both metrical made in speech) from linguistics. More comprehensive and free verse lines. Duration refers to how long it takes and successful attempts to understand the workings of to say a particular syllable out loud. In English, how- free verse have taken into account the visual and gram- ever, unlike Greek and Latin, there are no agreed-upon matical as well as the auditory reasons for establishing measures of syllabic duration in the practice of poetry. line breaks. Although linguists analyze duration, there is no fixed Enjambment designates the carrying over of sen- vocabulary for discussing specific durations in poetic tence syntax from one line to the next. Williams relies 410 PROSODY AND FREE VERSE heavily on enjambment for his poetic effects. In Olson’s “Projective Verse”—his theory of “open “Poem” (1934), for instance, which begins “As the field” poetics—has often been cited as a seminal docu- cat / climbed over,” a single sentence is sustained ment laying out the principles of “composition by without punctuation through the 12 lines of the field.” Olson proposes “projective” verse as a desirable poem. The movement of the sentence thus imitates alternative to “closed” verse, “which print bred and the cat’s smooth climbing over various obstacles, an which is pretty much what we have had in English & effect Williams might say would be impossible with American, and have still got, despite the work of rhyme and meter dictating consistency. Pound & Williams” (386). Olson argues that “compo- The study of the forms of free verse encourages sition by field” makes the poem a transfer of energy readers to look beyond the regular rise and fall of “from where the poet got it . . . by way of the poem meter to find more complex and individual elements itself to, all the way over to, the reader” (387). of order, including grammar and syntax. “In a Station The basis of Olson’s organic conception of form is of the Metro,” for example, ends each line with a break human breathing. Where a practitioner of traditional in the syntax. Each of the two lines of the poem is a prosody, such as Frost, hears in meter the regular grammatical unit, though, interestingly, the poem as a orderly rhythm of breath and heartbeat, Olson hears whole is not a sentence but simply the two parallel constraint. Olson therefore shifts emphasis from the noun-based phrases, each of which has embedded in it causal rhythm of meter—against which syntax, tone of a prepositional phrase. voice, duration, and so on are played—to an open For most free verse poets, the form of the poem form in which syntax, breath pauses in speech, and evolves from the inner necessity of the poem’s meaning modulations of meaning and tone become the domi- rather than the form being a rigid external pattern that nant rhythm of the poem. the poem’s “meaning” must be made to fit. For exam- For Olson, as for more traditional prosodists, the ple, Olson’s formulation in his 1950 essay “Projective syllable (or its audible counterpart, the phoneme) “is Verse” (which he attributes to Robert CREELEY), “FORM the king and pin of versification, what rules and holds IS NEVER MORE THAN AN EXTENSION OF CON- together the lines, the larger forms, of a poem” (388). TENT” (387), echoes Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “meter- Although Olson is not particularly coherent about making argument” in “The Poet” (1844), which exactly how the syllable is supposed to work in pro- influenced Whitman. In other words, for Olson, as for jective verse, he does explain that “the two halves” (of Emerson, content should create form, not be made to poetic practice, presumably) are the syllable, which he fit a preexisting form (see ARS POETICAS.) identifies with “the HEAD, by way of the EAR,” and the Although Williams’s application of the term variable line, which he identifies with “the HEART, by way of foot can be confusing, it is at least clear that he was the BREATH” (390). concerned with establishing a standard by which the The line, for Olson, follows Williams’s practice of integrity of the free verse line might be judged. In a making form, in Olson’s words, “an extension of con- given poem, Williams’s lines tend to look the same. tent.” Although theories about free verse have often They are relatively short, often characterized by stair- attempted to identify or establish rules by which to step indentation, and grouped in threes. Although judge the form, free verse remains flexible and various Williams used enjambment a great deal for various in practice. But then, much of free verse has been an effects of meaning and sound, he started with the syn- effort to inject new energy and complexity into the lit- tactical unit (the phrase or clause) as the basis of the erary form called “poetry.” line. According to Beyers, “What Williams was after, BIBLIOGRAPHY and what he spent his entire career pursuing, was the Beyers, Chris. A History of Free Verse. Fayetteville: University sound not of words but of meaning” (216). The sense, or of Arkansas Press, 2001. meaning, of the sentences therefore tends to take Hartman, Charles O. Free Verse: An Essay on Prosody. Prince- precedence over the line breaks. ton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980. PURDY, AL 411

Holder, Alan. Rethinking Meter: A New Approach to the Verse arises. The issue of truth as a predicament of language, Line. Lewisburg, Penn.: Bucknell University Press, 1995. not existence, has also been later taken up by post- Olson, Charles. “Projective Verse.” In The New American modern writers, such as the LANGUAGE SCHOOL of poets. Poetry 1945–1960, edited by Donald M. Allen. New York: For Oppen, “Psalm,” along with the several other Grove Press, 1960. poems that open This in Which, makes “a prelude, a Williams, William Carlos. “Free Verse.” In Princeton Encyclo- statement of the metaphysical vision and the anthro- pedia of Poetry and Poetics, edited by Alex Preminger, Frank J. Warnke, and O. B. Hardison. Princeton, N.J.: pocentric—the social as they would say” (Oppen 108). Princeton University Press, 1974. This song, in praise of deer in a forest—“that they are there”—is also an attempt to ground and bring into Thomas Lisk focus a relation with the world and “anthropocentri- cally” (Oppen 84) with humanity by way of language. “PSALM” GEORGE OPPEN (1965) The poem In the space of the poem, the “small nouns” Oppen pro- “Psalm” is from George OPPEN’s third book, This in Which. claims in his purview become a cord that can bind us (1965) The influence of Walt Whitman and an Ameri- to the world and to each other. The weight Oppen gives can free verse tradition is evident (see PROSODY AND FREE to this poem is quite striking. He says in a letter, VERSE), but the strict sense of image and line in the poem “P[salm] makes a rather desperate declaration of faith. comes out of Oppen’s IMAGIST and OBJECTIVIST roots. It is true I can’t convince myself that human society will Using vivid images, Oppen describes a pastoral scene survive long without some such stubborn faith—but following deer as they bed down and graze in their for- that is almost an open declaration of desperation” (84). est home. The scene is interrupted in the last stanza, “Psalm” is arguably the most visually striking of the where the poem’s speaker jolts and shocks by suggesting poems in This in Which. Five four-line stanzas, each that the leaves in the woods and the deer are “nouns.” with a deeply indented first line, demands unusual However, the poem is not cynical—it does not reduce attention to the visual appearance of this poem on the the deer to mere illusions of language—in fact, for page. Oppen’s foregrounding of the visual aspect of the Oppen the word deer becomes, through the poem, a material poem causes a switch in focus back and forth statement of “faith” in existence. from the look of the poem to what the poem “looks at” Louis ZUKOFSKY’s 1931 essay “Sincerity and Objectifi- through words. cation,” defining objectivist poetics, begins by focusing BIBLIOGRAPHY on sight and perception: “optics—the lens bringing the DuPlessis, Rachel, Blau and Peter Quartermain. The Objec- rays from an object to a focus” (12). Objectivist poets tivist Nexus: Essays in Cultural Poetics. Tuscaloosa: Univer- are concerned not with a scientific or moral objectivity sity of Alabama Press, 1999. but with a focused artistic vision that makes the poem Hatlen, Burton, ed. George Oppen: Man and Poet. Orono, an object itself. Zukofsky does, however, link formal Maine: National Poetry Foundation, 1981. achievement in poetry with the poet’s emotional, artis- Oppen, George. Selected Letters of George Oppen, edited by tic, and ethical “sincerity,” and this concern also appears Rachel Blau DuPlessis. Durham, N.C.: Duke University in “Psalm,” in which the issue of truth itself is primary. Press, 1990. “Psalm” opens with an epigraph taken from Thomas Zukofsky, Louis. Prepositions. Berkeley: University of Califor- Aquinas: “veritas sequitur esse rerum,” or “truth follows nia Press, 1981. the existence of things.” The relation of truth to “the Alicia Cohen existence of things” is identified by Oppen—and by the objectivists generally—not so much as an ontological or PURDY, AL (1918–2000) Through his non- epistemological one, but rather as a problem of lan- conformity and alignment with the working class, Al guage generally and poetry specifically. The issue for Purdy went from being an outsider to someone who, Oppen is how to make a poem that is as real (object- through his poetry, has had a great effect on both read- like) and startling as the world “in which” the poem ers and other writers. His use of everyday language and 412 “THE PURSE SEINE” a lyrical sense of place and history reflect his diverse connections between Purdy’s vast body of well- influences, such as D.H. Lawrence, Bliss Carman, and crafted, open poems seem to share much in common Walt Whitman. Purdy went from high school dropout, with these American counterparts. a stint in the Royal Canadian Air Force, and riding the BIBLIOGRAPHY rails to being honored as the grand mentor to a new MacKendrick, Louis. Al Purdy and His Works. Toronto: ECW generation of Canadian poets. Although he was vocal Press, 1991. in his opposition to much of U.S. governmental poli- Rogers, Linda, ed. Al Purdy: Essays on His Works. Toronto: cies, Purdy nonetheless integrated the American poetic Guernica, 2002. vision of Whitman and Robinson JEFFERS in his work, Solecki, Sam. The Last Canadian Poet: An Essay on Al Purdy. even as he often dismissed Whitman. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999. Purdy was born in Wooler, Ontario. Having left Arto Payaslian school prematurely, Purdy traveled throughout Canada during the depression, working factory jobs. “THE PURSE SEINE” ROBINSON JEFFERS After six years in the Royal Canadian Air Force, he and (1937) The poetry of Robinson JEFFERS is best his wife settled in Ameliasburg, Ontario. It would be described not as part of a movement but as a search for Purdy’s home until his death. Although he published solitude and a rejection of human-created movements. his first chapbook in 1944, Purdy did not receive crit- “The Purse Seine” represents the poet’s antimodernist ical and popular acclaim until The Cariboo Horses disavowal of civilization. While the modernists saw the (1965) was awarded the Governor General’s Award. height of humanity in civilization, but felt that the Purdy continued to write until 2000, publishing his golden age was long past and unrecoverable (see MOD- first novel, A Splinter in the Heart (1990). The Collected ERNISM), Jeffers felt that civilization had sustained itself, Poems of Al Purdy (1986) won Purdy his second Gov- but at the expense of humanity. He believed that the ernor General’s Award. modern world was declining in its relentless pursuit of Purdy abandoned conventional poetic forms early progress. He also rejected the modernists’ break with on and turned to a more conversational and accessible traditional forms, using instead blank verse in long, tone. His interests in history, literature, and the envi- narrative poems, and a Whitmanesque free verse in his ronment created a kind of livable poetry in which the shorter lyric poems (see PROSODY AND FREE VERSE). reader is placed within a cultural and geographic con- “The Purse Seine” was published in the collection text. In “For Robert Kennedy” (1973), Purdy’s melan- Such Counsels You Gave Me at a time when Jeffers was choly, straightforward tone turns lyrically from the beginning to lose his audience, which had grown towering figure of Kennedy to Purdy’s grandfather as a weary of his pessimism and seeming misanthropy. Still man “newspapers never heard of / but loved for no it captures the main thrust of Jeffers’s world view: We reason or every reason.” Purdy’s tenor is that of an are doomed, because we seek comfort and answers in equalizer, finding the quiet humanity in the world, big civilization. William H. Nolte describes the poem as and small. “one of his most striking commentaries on the He struggled to validate a Canadian history that inevitability of the disasters that must follow the sepa- seemed always to exist on the margins of world his- ration of man from the earth” (121–122). tory. He consciously took on the role of being Canada’s The poem is simple and direct, reflecting the poet’s poet long before his success reaffirmed it. Many critics typical style. Aside from a single extended metaphor have noted that Purdy took much from his American of a fish, it is devoid of symbols. The speaker presents influences, such as James WRIGHT and Charles first a scene of sardine fishing boats (the poem is BUKOWSKI, to formulate his own vision of Canadian named for a type of fishing net). Because of the natu- poetics. Purdy had complex and contradictory rela- ral phosporescence of the schools of fish, the fisher- tionships with the poetry of Charles OLSON, William men must work at night during the dark phase of the Carlos WILLIAMS, and Ezra POUND. Yet, over time, the Moon. Guided by the glowing of the fish, they place “THE PURSE SEINE” 413 their nets, then haul in their catch. As he watches the exception to what they perceive as mere pessimism in trapped fish being drawn closer and tighter together his verse. His is no prophecy of doom; it is simply an within the net, the speaker describes the scene as both observation of the inevitable. The poem states that any “beautiful” and “a little terrible.” The silver glints of enterprise conducted by the mass of flawed humanity the masses of sardines contrast their terror and immi- will eventually bring about destruction, though the nent deaths. earth will live on. Later, as the speaker looks from a promontory over the lights of the city, he is reminded of the trapped sar- BIBLIOGRAPHY dines flickering within the net. Humanity has created Karman, James, ed. Critical Essays on Robinson Jeffers. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1990. its own net, called progress, and has become trapped Nolte, William H. Rock and Hawk: Robinson Jeffers and the in cities. The net has not closed yet, but it is being Romantic Agony. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1978. drawn tighter. Finally, in a direct address to the reader, the speaker confronts his contemporaries who take Joseph Schaub C RD

RAKOSI, CARL (1903–2004) Carl Rakosi is While using Rawley as his professional name, he best known as one of the original OBJECTIVIST poets, kept Rakosi as his pen name. Through the late 1920s along with Louis ZUKOFSKY, Charles REZNIKOFF, George and 1930s, he dedicated himself to his poetry while OPPEN, Lorine NIEDECKER, and Basil Bunting, although attempting to find a career that would both sustain he is perhaps the least studied. These second-genera- him personally and concretely contribute to others. He tion modernists sought variously to bring poetic spent brief periods in graduate, law, and medical innovation together with social engagement in the schools before entering a long career as a social worker. depression years of the 1930s (see MODERNISM). From Eventually unable to synthesize the need for direct 1940 through 1965, Rakosi gave up writing poetry social action with his artistic demands, Rakosi entirely and devoted himself entirely to a career as a social gave up writing poetry. His poetry of the late 1930s worker and psychologist. After this long hiatus, contends with this widening personal divide, apparent Rakosi, with remarkable longevity and wry wit, has in “Declaration,” (1941) when he affirms, “I shall put been writing in a direct style marked by a tone of sin- my purity away now / and find my art in other men,” cerity that runs through his diverse reflections on and in “To the Non-Political Citizen,” (1941) which popular culture, metaphysics, and aging. More than ends “When will you become indignant / and declare any other objectivist poet, Rakosi has explored the yourself / against the wrongs of the people?” psychology and ramifications of the poet as a speak- For 25 years Rakosi lived entirely as Callman Raw- ing individual. ley, removing himself so fully from poetry that the pub- Born in Baja, Hungary, Rakosi immigrated to the lisher of his first book, Selected Poems (1941), thought United States at the age of six to live with his father and that Rakosi had died in Eastern Europe behind the iron stepmother, first in Indiana, then in Wisconsin. At the curtain. Rakosi published several professional articles age of 21, after completing a degree in English at the as Rawley, but it was only as he neared retirement that University of Wisconsin, Rakosi legally changed his Andrew Crozier, a young graduate student who had name to Callman Rawley to counter some of the anti- rediscovered Rakosi’s early poetry, contacted him, immigrant sentiment of the time. As he writes, “For rekindling his creative output. one thing, Rakosi was always being mispronounced One of the influences on his earliest poetry was Wal- and misspelled, but the main reason was that I didn’t lace STEVENS; Rakosi remembers being “seduced by the think that anyone with a foreign name would be hired, elegance of language, the imaginative associations of the atmosphere was such in English departments in words. . . . [He] was involved in a language world” those days” (Contemporary Authors 205). (“Interview” 182). While Rakosi adopted these lush

414 RANSOM, JOHN CROWE 415 surfaces of language, he could also parody them to Sign,” (1975) which begins “In this country / the sign some degree with such lines as “All motion blurs the outlives America.” Rakosi rounds out his extensive scented yaw of her skirts / (linen like the subsiding of later writing with series of poems reflecting on the per- labials, / like the undertow in the veins)” in his series sonal process of aging, the artistic practice of poetry, “Domination of Wallace Stevens” (1925). and eclectic spiritual meditations. As Rakosi matured toward a poetry of clear, direct BIBLIOGRAPHY communication that valued subject matter as much as Crozier, Andrew. Introduction to Poems, 1923–1941, by Carl language, he was drawn to the precise images and Rakosi. Los Angeles: Sun & Moon, 1995. clipped lines of William Carlos WILLIAMS. In this, Heller, Michael, ed. Carl Rakosi: Man and Poet. Orono, Rakosi’s most objectivist work, he maintains a sharp Maine: National Poetry Foundation, 1993. edge to his verse and quick attention to detail in Perloff, Marjorie. “Looking for the Real Carl Rakosi: Collect- description. Like Williams, Rakosi turns this keen per- eds and Selecteds.” Journal of American Studies 30 (Aug. ception upon the particulars of urban life. In “Good 1996): 271–283. Prose,” (1933) for example, he describes a caged Rakosi, Carl. “Carl Rakosi.” Contemporary Authors Autobiog- canary as “the sun lights up / the lettuce leaf / between raphy Series. Vol. 5, edited by Adele Sarkissian. Detroit: the bars” in brief lines that can read like the pieces of a Gale Research, 1987, pp. 193–210. prose sentence in which each piece is a measured ———. Collected Prose. Orono, Maine: National Poetry Foundation, 1983. observation or association. ———. “Interview with Carl Rakosi.” Contemporary Litera- Rakosi also takes Williams’s style and turns it to social ture 10 (spring 1969): 155–159. critique, most notably in his parody of Williams’s 16- word poem “so much depends” (also known as “The Michael Rozendal Red Wheelbarrow” [1923]). Whereas Williams sketched a quiet farm scene centered on a red wheelbarrow, RANSOM, JOHN CROWE (1888–1974) Rakosi in “YES” (1971) recasts the poem in an urban set- As an essayist, teacher, and poet, John Crowe Ransom ting, placing the speed of the verse in the context of was a major influence on American poetry, southern business executives and excrement. Rakosi’s short one- writing, and criticism. He was a founding member of and two-word lines tick by with the insistent pace of an the FUGITIVE/AGRARIAN SCHOOL, which included, among “instant // wrist / watch”; by the end, the precise beauty others, Allen TATE, Robert Penn WARREN, and Donald of image becomes little more than “a clean / bowel.” DAVIDSON. The Fugitives and the IMAGISTS SCHOOL were The quarter-century break in writing divides the two most influential forces in American poetry in Rakosi’s poetry into two distinct phases (Crozier 13), the early part of the 20th century. The imagists tended with the latter characterized by a direct, conversational toward experimentation and individualism, while the tone and a broken, two-part line. Still there are some Fugitives tended toward classicism and traditionalism. connections between the two halves; as Marjorie Often Ransom is called a minor poet, since his poetic Perloff has pointed out, Rakosi continues reworking output was small; however, he is an important figure in his earlier poetry throughout his later volumes. the Southern Renaissance, which included such writ- In his second phase, Rakosi blends his modernist ers as Warren, William Faulkner, and Eudora Welty. As form with a more romantic concern for the speaking a literary critic, Ransom coined the term New Criti- subject, bringing together his early focus on precise cism, which came to describe the dominant critical description of objects with an appreciation that “indi- practice in American universities in the 20th century, viduality remains avant-garde” (Collected Prose 46). A and he was otherwise an influential critic and teacher, number of separate, often ironic voices work their way counting among his students poets Randall JARRELL and through the considerations of history and popular cul- ROBERT LOWELL. ture in his “Americana” (1967) series, mixing observa- Ransom was born in Tennessee in 1888, and he grew tion with critique in the poems, such as “Coca Cola up in the household of an open-minded Methodist 416 RAP POETRY minister. At 15 he entered Vanderbilt University; his pri- and acclaim during the 1970s. Influenced by the various mary interest was philosophy. After graduation he stud- experimental poetry movements that developed in the ied classics as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford from 1910 to United States after World War II, Reed came of age as a 1913. Upon returning from England, he was appointed writer in New York City during the 1960s. He was to the English department faculty at Vanderbilt. Outside loosely associated with the nationalist BLACK ARTS MOVE- of military service in World War I, he remained at Van- MENT, but he criticized its attempt to codify a single black derbilt until departing in 1937 for Kenyon College, aesthetic. Fascinated by hoodoo, the African-American where he founded the literary journal the Kenyon Review. form of voodoo, Reed developed an idiosyncratic “Neo- He was awarded the Bollingen Prize for poetry in 1951 Hoodoo Aesthetic” that honored hoodoo’s spirit of indi- and the National Book Award in 1964. vidual improvisation. The poem “Catechism of d His first book, Poems about God (1919), was written Neoamerican Hoodoo Church” (1970) calls upon the during World War I, but he quickly became disillu- African-American writer to “conjure” the black traditions sioned with the work. During his years with the Fugi- hidden in American culture but also to “DO YR ART D tives, he published Chills and Fever (1924) and Two WAY U WANT.” However, even as Reed conceived of this Gentlemen in Bonds (1927), and it is these two collec- more inclusive black aesthetic, he began to see the inter- tions upon which his reputation rests. By 1927 Ran- relatedness of the many distinct cultures comprising the som ceased writing poetry in favor of criticism. American “multiculture.” Since the early 1970s, he has Ransom’s recurring themes are the conflict of the been a prominent advocate of multiculturalism. body and the soul, the transience of life, the passing of Born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Reed grew up in beauty and love, myth, and tradition. His poems are tra- Buffalo, New York, where he attended the University of ditional in form, but his use of language is playful, filled Buffalo (now the State University of New York, Buf- with wit and irony. Often he portrays the particular in falo). He lived in New York City from 1962 to 1967 delicate situations to attention to the universal. For and there helped to build two proto–Black Arts move- example, in “Janet Waking” (1927), a young girl learns ment institutions, the Umbra poetry workshop about death through the death of her pet hen: “It was a (1962–64) and the group’s magazine Umbra transmogrifying bee / Came droning down on Chucky’s (1963–64). Reed began teaching intermittently once old bald head.” Janet’s response is “Wake her from her he left New York for the San Francisco area in 1967, at sleep!” In this poem traditional elements, such as rhyme, the University of California, Berkeley. As a founding are connected with humor to display an experience that member of the multiculturalist Before Columbus everyone knows—the first awareness of death. Foundation, which sponsors the American Book Awards, and as a coeditor of Yardbird (1972–76) and BIBLIOGRAPHY several other literary magazines, Reed has promoted Quinlan, Kieran. John Crowe Ransom’s Secular Faith. Baton the work of many underappreciated writers of various Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989. Young, Thomas Daniel, ed. John Crowe Ransom: Critical cultural backgrounds. His own body of work includes Essays and a Bibliography. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State five volumes of poetry: catechism of d neoamerican University Press, 1968. hoodoo church (1970), Conjure (1972), Chattanooga (1973), A Secretary to the Spirits (1978), and New and William Allegrezza Collected Poems (1988). In 1973 Conjure was nomi- nated for both the National Book Award in poetry and RAP POETRY See CARIBBEAN INFLUENCES; POETRY the Pulitzer Prize, and in 1998 Reed was awarded a IN PERFORMANCE. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. Like the Black Arts poets, Reed views the making of REED, ISHMAEL (1938– ) Although Ishmael poetry as a revolutionary activity. Challenging the elit- Reed is now better known for his novels than for his ism and racism he perceives in both the Anglo-American poetry, his early verse received considerable attention literary tradition and traditional accounts of American REVELL, DONALD 417 history, he experiments with such neglected poetic cal writings involve what she has termed “poethics,” an materials as Egyptian mythology, characters and motifs idea key to understanding Retallack’s work. Central to from popular films, 19th-century hoodoo lore, and con- poethics is the concept of the poethical “swerve,” which versations with everyday people, such as flight atten- comes about as one relinquishes control of the lan- dants and cab drivers. “The Jackal-Headed Cowboy” guage. This “swerve” allows the poet to attend to the (1972) imagines the ancient Egyptian god of the dead, multiplicity of patterns (typographical and material as Anubis, as an outlaw-hero in contemporary America. well as syntactical and associational) that constitute lan- Reed’s multiculturalist focus is more explicit in “Chat- guage and our relationship to it. The interplay between tanooga” (1973), in which he pictures his birthplace as the poet and the language is made available to the the site of many different cultural histories. The poem reader in what Retallack has termed a “geometry of suggests that this American city, like writing itself, is attention.” The poet is no longer dictating terms nor “something you / Can have anyway you want it.” allowing previously constructed terms to dictate mean- ing. The attentive reader, then, creates her or his own BIBLIOGRAPHY meaning in a complex relationship with the text. Dick, Bruce, and Amritjit Singh, eds. Conversations with Ish- An example of the importance of the reader’s role in mael Reed. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995. Mackey, Nathaniel. “Ishmael Reed and the Black Aesthetic.” a Retallack poem can be seen in Errata Suite. On page C.L.A. Journal 21.3 (March 1978): 355–366. 59, there is a blank space in the text (literally, “——”). Page 60 is a nearly exact repeat of the same text. If the Matthew Calihman page is held up to a light, the word time from page 60 shows through exactly where the “——” is on page 59. RETALLACK, JOAN (1941– ) Joan Retal- Furthermore, the word time backwards (“emit,” but lack’s work is most clearly associated with that of John with a backwards e) looks like “omit” (the reversed e CAGE in its use of chance-operation and audience- looks like an o). One cannot know if this is intentional, centered techniques and with the LANGUAGE SCHOOL of and it does not matter—the word is there, and it is poets in its concern with the materiality of texts—the real. The reader makes of it what she or he will. forms of letters and words on the page. In much of her Retallack’s “poethical wager” is a bet with the future: work, the reader must pay attention to details of typog- the possibility that one’s work will be influential in raphy and seemingly accidental textual inclusions, ways that one cannot foresee. Retallack’s work invites such as apparent typographical errors. such uncertainty, recognizing it as the opportunity it is. Retallack was born in New York City. She received an BIBLIOGRAPHY M.A. in philosophy from Georgetown University in Hatlen, Burton. “Joan Retallack: A Philosopher among the 1976, by which time her performance works were Poets, a Poet among the Philosophers.” Contemporary Lit- appearing at the Corcoran Gallery, the New Playwright’s erature 42.2 (summer 2001): 347–375. Theater, and other gallery spaces throughout the Wash- Lazer, Hank. “Partial to Error: Joan Retallack’s ERRATA SUITE.” ington, D.C., area. Circumstantial Evidence, Retallack’s In Opposing Poetries. Vol. 2, edited by Hank Lazer. Evanston first full-length collection, appeared in 1985. It was fol- Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1996, pp. 70–76. lowed in 1993 by Errata Suite, which was selected for Vickery, Ann. “Taking a Poethical Perspective: Joan Retal- the 1994 Columbia Book Award by Robert CREELEY. lack’s Afterrimages.” In Leaving Lines of Gender: A Feminist Retallack’s other awards include two Gertrude STEIN Genealogy of Language Writing. Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan Awards for innovative North American poetry (1993 University Press, 2000, pp. 167–178. and 1997) and a grant from the Lannan Foundation Dean Taciuch (1998–99). Retallack has taught at Bard College. Retallack has also published numerous critical essays REVELL, DONALD (1954– ) Donald Rev- and interviews. MUSICAGE is a book-length inter- ell’s poem should expose reality through art in the way view/conversation with Cage. Many of Retallack’s criti- a prism reveals the colors of light. However, Revell 418 REXROTH, KENNETH describes his poetics as an attempt to “unname things” mented, elliptical quality: “myself the other / winter and opposes “anything that seeks to define” (“Better even more.” Unsaid” 29). What powers his poems is not formal vir- BIBLIOGRAPHY tuosity, but “delight”—his sincerity and attention to the Baker, David. “Plainness and Sufficiency.” In Heresy and the world and ability to convey experience (29). Concerned Ideal: On Contemporary Poetry. Fayetteville: University of with ethical and political problems, Revell is willing to Arkansas Press, 2000. let them shape his aesthetics. Though influenced by Revell, Donald. “Betraying the Silence.” American Poetry John ASHBERY, Revell cannot be grouped with the NEW Review. 21.5 (1992): 17–18. YORK SCHOOL of poetry. His books show his desire to ———. “Better Unsaid: On Poetic Fragments.” American experiment with new forms, and to revive old ones. Poetry Review. 25:4 (1996): 29–30. Revell grew up in New York City. He received a ———. Interview/Conversation with Marie C. Jones, Uni- Ph.D. in English from the State University of New versity of North Texas, Denton. March 23, 2000. York, Buffalo in 1980. In 1991 he married the poet Schultz, Susan M. “Houses of Poetry after Ashbery: The Poetry of Ann Lauterbach and Donald Revell.” Virginia Claudia Keelan. Revell was the editor-in-chief of the Quarterly Review. 67 (1991): 295–309. Denver Quarterly from 1988 to 1994. His first book, From the Abandoned Cities, winner of the 1983 National Marie C. Jones Poetry Series, is characterized by short lyrics and for- mal poems; however, he soon started to experiment REXROTH, KENNETH (1905–1982) Ken- with less conventional structures and abandoned per- neth Rexroth’s work intersects with a broad range of sonal issues for larger themes in his next three books, twentieth-century American poetry, poetics, and The Gaza of Winter (1988), New Dark Ages (1990), and movements: MODERNISM, the OBJECTIVIST SCHOOL, the Erasures (1992). Appalled at the bombastic rhetoric of SAN FRANCISCO RENAISSANCE, and the BEATs. Yet despite early century futurism and vorticism (two literary the significant areas of overlap with these poetic move- modernist movements advocating an aesthetic of ments and personal involvement with various poets speed, technical innovation, and political violence [see associated with them, Rexroth remains somewhat of an MODERNISM]), which helped spread fascism and com- anomaly in the poetic landscape—in part, because he munism, Revell undertook to discredit utopian ideolo- positioned himself as the perennial aesthetic, social, gies by helping his generation rebuild poetry after the and political outsider. mass exterminations of the mid-20th century. Born in South Bend, Indiana, and raised by a Although Paul Celan, Samuel Beckett, and other post- mother with strong feminist and socialist leanings, Holocaust writers had devised a sparse, pointed rheto- Rexroth was deeply affected by the progressive politics ric, Revell chose to “betray the silence” of his of his upbringing, and his work bears the imprint of predecessors, claiming that poetry needed to return to the leftist ideologies that dominated his childhood “the grand gesture, the didactic example,” if it were to home. When his mother died in 1916 and his father teach about reality again (“Betraying” 18). died three years later, Rexroth initiated a plan of self- In his most recent work, Revell refuses the formal education whereby he dropped out of high school in poetic closure of fixed forms and genres to avoid over- order to pursue a real education of street politics, simplifying the real. Poets should ask questions, he books, and writing. Eventually, though, he began to says, but not worry about the answers, because study music and art at the Art Institute of Chicago and “understanding is not necessarily important” (“Conver- the University of Chicago, and his early life was that of sation”). For Revell, any answer comes short of the the poet, painter, and political activist. His lengthy truth, and any form comes short of closure. For exam- career has not been without renown; his honors ple, in “Elegy” (1998), Revell discovers that the elegiac include the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry genre fails to assuage a mourner’s grief. Grief eludes Society of America (1958) and the Academy of Ameri- language, and the elegy can only mirror grief’s frag- can Poets’ Copernicus Award (1975). REXROTH, KENNETH 419

In 1927, after marrying the painter Andree Schafer, terpiece” by some critics, Rexroth strikes a balance the first of Rexroth’s four wives, he moved to Califor- between social commentary and LYRIC POETRY. nia. Largely supported during this period by the Fed- The 1940s not only marked a breakthrough in eral Writers Project, Rexroth melded his politics with Rexroth’s writing career, it was also a period of the California landscape into a poetry that was immense intellectual development that included poignant and played upon a deep emotional register— extensive study of Japanese and Chinese culture and a point perhaps best exemplified by “Climbing Mile- art and translations of Greek, Chinese, and Japanese stone Mountain, August 22, 1927” (1940), which poetry—all of which are evident in The Act of Worldly juxtaposes the 1927 execution of the anarchists Nicola Wisdom (1949), as well as the masterful The Signature Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti with images of stars of All Things (1950), which blends pacificism, the over the Sierra and reminiscences of Boston and the spiritual interconnectedness of the natural and the political events leading up to Sacco’s and Vanzetti’s human worlds, and the influence of the late 16th- infamous arrest, imprisonment, and execution: “We sat and early 17th-century German mystic Jacob Bohme up late while Deneb moved over the zenith / And I told (see POETRY IN TRANSLATION). At this time, Rexroth also Marie all about Boston, how it looked / That last terri- defines the poet’s role in The Signature of All Things as ble week.” “Climbing Milestone Mountain” typifies “one who creates / Sacramental relationships / That Rexroth’s poetic style of fairly regular free verse lines as last always.” well as his tendency to ruminate upon a particular In the 1950s Rexroth’s daughters Mary Delia Andree landscape that leads to sociopolitical, philosophical, and Katherine Ann Helen were born. Both became and spiritual points of view. subjects for his poetry—most notably A Bestiary for My After 1927 Rexroth’s poetry took a more experimen- Daughters Mary and Katherine (1955). Rexroth contin- tal slant, and in 1931 his work was included in a spe- ued writing throughout tumultuous personal crises, cial issue of Poetry, edited by Louis ZUKOFSKY, which and his critical acclaim grew with his antiestablishment served as the poetic manifesto of objectivism. “Funda- poem “Thou Shalt Not Kill” (1955): “They are murder- mental Disagreement with Two Contemporaries” ing all the young me. / For a half a century now, every (1966), for example, exemplifies Rexroth’s early exper- day.” While the poem responds to the death of Dylan imentation, and it is remarkable how this poem, in its Thomas, it clearly embodies the humanist-pacifist ide- use of lettering for the sake of visual shaping at the sac- ology that informs all of Rexroth’s poetry. The poem rifice of language, is closer to the poetry of the later demonstrates the degree to which the later poetry, half of the 20th century than to Rexroth’s own later under a more mature and skilled hand, can present a works. Zukofsky also included Rexroth’s early experi- scathing sociopolitical critique that has poetic merit mental work in An “Objectivists” Anthology (1932). Yet and avoids didacticism. not long afterward and in a maneuver that was fre- Publication of The Collected Shorter Poems (1966) quently repeated throughout his career, Rexroth dis- and The Collected Longer Poems (1968) further testified tanced himself from the objectivists and abandoned his to Rexroth’s acknowledged presence within the pan- experimental, cubist-influenced poetry in favor of a theon of significant American poets. This period more direct and less oblique style. This period was included the publications of well-received and popular marked by a series of affiliations with various poetic translations of poets of China and Japan, as well as the movements, including poets who would figure large in masterful and erotic The Love Poems of Marichiko the San Francisco Renaissance and the Beats. (1978), written in a woman’s voice. The tenderness In 1940 In What Hour, his first book of poetry, was and eroticism of the later works of poetry are a natural published. With its sociopolitical critiques of war and extension of Rexroth’s long poetic career and his pre- environmental themes, the poetry favors a rhetorical occupation with love as the force that binds human stance that borders upon the didactic. In The Phoenix beings to one another. Rexroth’s legacy is his loving and the Tortoise (1944), which was regarded as a “mas- documentation of all facets of human life—even its 420 REZNIKOFF, CHARLES shortcomings—and his desire to eliminate hatred and [1963]). He soon decided to attend law school; after war through the force of poetry. passing the bar in 1916, he returned to selling hats, a BIBLIOGRAPHY job he enjoyed, because it left his mind free to think Bartlett, Lee. Kenneth Rexroth. Boise, Idaho: Boise State Uni- about poetry. Heeding the fate of his grandfather, versity Press, 1988. whose legacy of 30 years worth of verse (in Hebrew) Gibson, Morgan. Revolutionary Rexroth: Poet of East-West had been lost, Reznikoff decided to publish his own Wisdom. Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1986. work. His first book, Rhythms, came out in 1918; many Hamalian, Linda. A Life of Kenneth Rexroth. New York: Nor- of the books that followed, including the playlets col- ton, 1991. lected in Nine Plays (1927), were also self-published. David Clippinger In 1928 Reznikoff began work at a law encyclopedia company; he was fired some years later, because he REZNIKOFF, CHARLES (1894–1976) There could not adapt his writing style to the prescribed is likely no better example of OBJECTIVIST poetics than legalese. He went to Hollywood in 1938 to read scripts the work of Charles Reznikoff. Louis ZUKOFSKY and conducted research for a friend in the industry; acknowledged this in “Sincerity and Objectification,” the improbable combination, however, did not last the essay that launched the objectivist venture in 1931: much longer than a year. His experiences there pro- Reznikoff’s poetry was “sincere,” because it was con- vided the grist for the posthumously published novel cerned with “the detail, not mirage, of seeing” (Zukof- The Manner Music (1977). Like most of the objectivist sky 273). And Reznikoff’s poetry embodied poets, Reznikoff published no poetry at all from 1941 “objectification,” because it was at “perfect rest,” like an to 1959; during these years he devoted his meticulous object “to which the mind does not wish to add” attention to editing the Jewish Frontier and translating (Zukofsky 276). Reznikoff was an observer who pre- and researching for organizations, such as the Jewish ferred “thinking with things as they exist” to thinking Publication Society. By the Waters of Manhattan, a selec- things into existence (273). His stated preference was tion of poems published by New Directions in 1962 at for “the pithy, the necessary, the clear, and the plain” the urging of Oppen, finally brought Reznikoff to the (“Early History of a Writer” [1969]), but an uncom- attention of a broader public. Though recognition was mon clarity of vision is not benign simplicity. In a long time in coming, he was awarded the Morton Reznikoff’s poems the subjects speak for themselves; Dauwen Zabel Prize by the National Institute of Arts sentimentality is all but excised, and the persona of the and Letters in 1971. poet is nowhere to be found. This extraordinary Reznikoff’s legal work, particularly the condensed restraint, coupled with a heightened sense of the poem narratives and minutiae of the case studies themselves, as a linguistic construct, has made Reznikoff popular exerted a significant influence upon his writing. While among many contemporary poets, such as Charles reading the law, he found it “delightful” to “bathe in the BERNSTEIN and Michael HELLER. Reznikoff was consis- clear waters of reason” and to “use words for their day- tently championed by fellow objectivists Zukofsky and light meaning / And not as prisms” (“Early History of a George OPPEN and later praised by such poets as Writer” [1969]). In contrast, traditional verse seemed William Carlos WILLIAMS and Robert CREELEY. “affected” to him, “fake flowers / In the streets which I Reznikoff was born in Brooklyn, the son of Russian walked.” The reference to walking here is not acciden- Jews who fled persecution. At the age of 16, he set off tal. Reznikoff’s primary method of research was to roam to study journalism at the University of Missouri. Dis- the streets of New York: In his prime, he walked 20 covering, however, that journalism concerns itself miles a day. This ambulatory routine provided him with much more with news than it does with language, he the data for what Bernstein, in his essay “Reznikoff’s left after only a year. Upon his return to Brooklyn, Nearness,” has usefully identified as a poetry of witness. Reznikoff went to work as a salesman in his parents’ Here an old man “pulls off a bit of baked apple, shiny millinery business (as documented in Family Chronicle with sugar, / eating with reverence food, the great com- RICH, ADRIENNE 421 forter” (Poems [1920]), and there “Among the heaps of 196), and the same could be said for her entire career. brick and plaster lies / a girder, still itself among the Over the years those “divisions” have come in many rubbish” (section 69 Jerusalem the Golden [1934]). forms, and while poetry has resolved some of them for Observations such as these, which have a haikulike Rich, it has also reinforced others. One of the enduring burst of incisive clarity, are generally embedded in a divisions—and one which has served as a renewable long series of similar ones that together constitute a sin- source for her work—involves her ambivalent attitude gle poem. This serial structure adds to the perceptual toward poetic language. Early in her career, for detail a wide scope that has the overall effect of subtle instance, Rich felt both empowered and divided from social commentary (see LONG AND SERIAL POETRY). herself as a woman, as she attempted to write in the Testimony (1978) perhaps best illustrates Reznikoff’s ostensibly genderless, supposedly universal voice of poetry of witness. Using law reports, he distills— the male poets she had studied in high school and col- sometimes verbatim—events that took place in Amer- lege (see FEMALE VOICE, FEMALE LANGUAGE). The title of ica during the late 19th century. Characters, such as her 1978 collection The Dream of a Common Language Gunnysack Joe, “Uz” Waffle, and Dutch Maggie, indicates Rich’s desire to find or create a women’s lexi- engage in robbery, land disputes, quarrels, rape, adul- con; though in time she found a language that seemed tery, and prolific amounts of racism and abuse. The more faithful to her experience, she has never discov- reader is immersed in a cascade of trauma mitigated ered a common language that could reflect and unite only by nuances in tone that add humor, insight, and the experiences of all women. Rich has also remained mystery. After the painful specificity of previous sec- divided between feeling that poetry is a powerful tool tions, for example, one six-line section, consisting of a for creating community and promoting justice, on the letter exhorting its recipient to “keep things still as a one hand, and knowing, on the other, that language mouse” until he or she arrives to “do up the town” alone cannot create social change. Somewhat paradox- (“Social Life”), leaves one wondering what manner of ically, her poetic production has been, in part, moti- folly landed the perpetrators in court. Here, as else- vated by her doubt about her art. And yet, over a where in his work, Reznikoff does not privilege the 50-year span, she has published 20 volumes of poetry, beautiful over the ordinary or even the ugly; instead he in addition to five collections of nonfiction prose. attempts to illuminate shared experience. Reznikoff Moreover she has found lasting inspiration in the work wrote “not for victory” but “for the common sunshine”; of poets as disparate as Emily Dickinson, William Car- he did not seek “a seat upon the dais / but at the com- los WILLIAMS, Wallace STEVENS, H. D., W. H. AUDEN, mon table” (“Te Deum” [1959]). Pablo Neruda, Muriel RUKEYSER, Anna Akhmatova, and Audre LORDE. BIBLIOGRAPHY Rich was born in Baltimore, Maryland. She gradu- Bernstein, Charles. “Reznikoff’s Nearness.” In The Objectivist Nexus: Essays in Cultural Poetics, edited by Rachel Blau ated from Radcliffe College in 1951, and that same year DuPlessis and Peter Quartermain. Tuscaloosa: University she won the prestigious Yale Series of Younger Poets of Alabama, 1999, pp. 210–239. Award for her book A Change of World. She married Hindus, Milton, ed. Charles Reznikoff: Man and Poet. Orono, Alfred Conrad in 1953, and by 1959 they had three Maine: National Poetry Foundation, 1984. sons. In the 1960s she became increasingly involved in Zukofsky, Louis. “Sincerity and Objectification: With Special political causes, including the Civil Rights movement, Reference to the Work of Charles Reznikoff.” Poetry 37.5 anti–Vietnam War protests, women’s rights actions, and (February 1931): 272–284. the push for gay rights. In 1970, as she was just begin- Duncan Dobbelmann ning to identify herself privately as a lesbian, she ended her marriage. For Diving into the Wreck (1973), one of RICH, ADRIENNE (1929– ) Adrienne Rich her most celebrated collections, Rich won the 1974 has said that, as a young poet, she used poetry “to National Book Award, which she accepted in the name write [her]self out of [her] own divisions” (What Is of all women and on behalf of herself and two other 422 RICH, ADRIENNE nominees, Lorde and Alice Walker. After living almost Common Language, Rich displays a more steadily her entire life in the Northeastern United States, Rich sophisticated and varied hand: These poems, such as moved to California in 1984. “Power,” “To a Poet,” “Transcendental Etude,” and She has received many awards and honors, includ- “Cartographies of Silence,” demonstrate the accom- ing the National Medal for the Arts (1997)—which she plishment and range of a poet who can continually refused to accept, citing the U.S. government’s insuffi- renew the “old theme” that “Language cannot do cient support for the arts—and a MacArthur Fellow- everything,” as she puts it in the latter poem. The vol- ship (1994). Over the years she has taught at several ume also contains “Twenty-One Love Poems,” a colleges and universities, including Swarthmore, City remarkable sonnet sequence of unconventional College of New York, San José State, and Stanford. prosody that celebrates lesbian love and reinvents a Rich’s poetry has evolved through several stages, traditional poetic form to suit a decidedly nontradi- and the style of her best-known writing is quite unlike tional theme. that of her earliest verse. In her work of the 1950s, the The subject of lesbian love in itself is an important influences of 17th-century John Donne, William Butler one for Rich, but it is also significant as one example of Yeats, Stevens, and Auden are apparent, and the poetry the kinds of connection that are possible on what she largely uses iambic pentameter, rhyme, and regular calls the “lesbian continuum” (“Compulsory” 51). As stanzaic breaks (see PROSODY AND FREE VERSE). Rich’s she explains in her essay “Compulsory Heterosexuality subjects in these poems tend toward the abstract, and and Lesbian Existence,” the lesbian continuum marks her voice is rather detached, emanating from a third- a spiritual link between and among all women, regard- person perspective that is rarely identified as specifi- less of their sexual or affective orientation. This essay cally female. She would later chide herself for valuing marks a refinement of her earlier ideas about a “com- verse that aims to be “‘universal,’ which meant, of mon language” and presages a change in her concerns: course, nonfemale” (“When We” 44). However, even In the 1980s Rich shows less interest in the differences then—as in “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers” (1951)—there between male and female and in the problems that lan- were signs of the strong feminist voice that would guage poses for women in particular, and she becomes emerge later and define her poetics: As Rich explains it, more interested in the differences in “verbal privilege” “poems are like dreams: in them you put what you among women of varying classes and ethnicities don’t know you know” (“When We” 40). (“North American Time” [1986]). In the 1960s, for the first time, Rich became famil- In “Frame” (1981), for instance, the speaker watches iar with the work of women poets—both predecessors from a point of safety as a young black woman is and contemporaries—and her poems, such as “SNAP- harassed and arrested without cause by police on the SHOTS OF A DAUGHTER-IN-LAW” (1963), reflect her bur- campus of a Boston university. Rich recognizes the geoning feminist concerns. They also exhibit her ways in which race, class, and nationality affect one’s growing belief in the value of using themes drawn from voice and one’s power, ideas which she considers in ordinary life and are consistently written in the first her essay, “Blood, Bread, and Poetry: The Location of person. As the decade progressed, Rich became more the Poet” (1986). There Rich acknowledges her advan- attentive to the ways in which language is gendered taged position, as someone who “can write at all” and and politicized, and she laments in “The Burning of whose “words are read and taken seriously” (187). She Paper instead of Children” (1971) that “this is the also recognizes that with those privileges comes a oppressor’s language // yet I need it to talk to you.” responsibility not to presume to speak for others and With the poem “DIVING INTO THE WRECK” and the col- to “examine the ego that speaks in [her] poems—not lection of the same name, Rich established herself as a for political ‘correctness,’ but for ignorance, solipsism, poet of the first rank and continued to explore forces laziness, dishonesty, automatic writing” (187). that influence the woman artist. A few years later, in After Rich’s move to California, her sense of the her poems of the skillful collection The Dream of a importance of location was heightened. In such poems RIDING (JACKSON), LAURA 423 as “North American Time” (1986), “Dreamwood” ———. “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision.” In (1989), and “An Atlas of the Difficult World” (1991), On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966–1978. she engages the metaphor of the map to examine her New York: Norton, 1979, pp. 33–50. position, especially as it exists relative to that of her Templeton, Alice. The Dream and the Dialogue: Adrienne readers. In the final section of “Atlas,” she is quite con- Rich’s Feminist Poetics. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1994. scious of the ways in which one’s place—social, geo- Werner, Craig. Adrienne Rich: The Poet and Her Critics. graphical, emotional—affects one’s relationships to Chicago: American Library Association, 1988. others. There Rich presents a catalogue of imagined readers who encounter her poetry “late, before leaving Jeannine Johnson the office,” “standing up in a bookstore,” “in a room where too much has happened for you to bear,” or RIDING (JACKSON), LAURA (1901–1991) with “a crying child on your shoulder.” She repeats the Laura Riding was one of the central women writers of the phrase, “I know you are reading this poem,” perhaps period of MODERNISM, because of her contributions as a wishing as much as declaring that it is possible for peo- poet, her collaborations with Robert Graves on literary- ple in many different situations to find a connection critical works, and their editorial work on the journal through poetry. Epilogue (1935–37), as well as for her writings on poetry’s For Rich, it is essential to believe that poetry can form and function. During Riding’s early poetic career, create such connections and that it can have some tan- she was a member of the FUGITIVE/AGRARIAN SCHOOL of gible effect on the world. In a recent poem, “Letters to poets, who praised her poetry’s ability to avoid the sen- a Young Poet” (1999), Rich names several examples of timentality of contemporary female poets, such as Edna violence, both large scale (the World War II concentra- St. Vincent MILLAY. Riding’s own poetic quest was to find tion camp Terezin) and small (the recent suicide of a language that illuminated what she called “truth,” woman artist). Then, echoing Auden’s “In Memory of which, in her own poems, included shunning a reliance W. B. Yeats” (1940), she asks the novice whom she on analogy, metaphor, and sensuous language. After the addresses, “would it relieve you to decide Poetry / publication of her Collected Poems (1938), her medita- doesn’t make this happen?” Rich refuses to “decide” that tions on poetry’s inability to contain truth ultimately led poetry’s effect on the world is negligible, even if that her to stop writing poems altogether. Although Riding belief would ensure that her art cannot be responsible herself was uncomfortable with poets naming her as a for such atrocities. Whatever limitations poetry has, literary precursor, such poets as Graves, W. H. AUDEN, Rich still believes it has some power to improve our and John ASHBERY claim her as a poetic influence. lives, and she turns to it to help her as both a witness Laura Reichenthal was born in New York City and to history and a participant in it. attended Cornell University from 1918–21, leaving before completing a degree. In 1927 she changed her BIBLIOGRAPHY name to Laura Riding. Riding’s first book, The Close Cooper, Jane, ed. Reading Adrienne Rich: Reviews and Chaplet, was influenced by her friendship with Graves, Re-visions. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984. who invited Riding to come to England with him and Rich, Adrienne. Adrienne Rich’s Poetry and Prose: Poems, Prose, his wife in 1926, the same year Riding’s first book Reviews, and Criticism, edited by Barbara Charlesworth appeared. Riding and Graves coauthored A Survey of Gelpi and Albert Gelpi. New York: Norton, 1993. ———. “Blood, Bread, and Poetry: The Location of the Modernist Poetry (1927) and founded the Seizin Press Poet.” In Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose, in 1928. Later they moved the press to Deyá, Spain. 1979–1985. New York: Norton, 1986, pp. 167–187. When the Spanish civil war broke out, Graves and Rid- ———. “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Exis- ing returned to Pennsylvania, where Riding met tence.” In Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose, Schuyler Jackson, whom she married in 1941. Riding 1979–1985. New York: Norton, 1986, pp. 23–75. received the Bollingen Prize for her contributions to ———. What Is Found There. New York: Norton, 1993. poetry in 1991, the same year she died. 424 RÍOS, ALBERTO

Riding’s recurrent subjects in her poetry were the Ríos was born in Nogales, Arizona. He studied at the observation of the rift between mind and body, as well University of Arizona and began teaching creative writ- as a preoccupation with death as a way to unite to this ing in 1982 at Arizona State University. Whispering to rift. The evanescence of the sensory world led Riding Fool the Wind won the Walt Whitman Award from the to believe it did not contain unity, or truth. As she Academy of American Poets in 1981. His short story writes in “Truth and Time” (1926), “The succession of collection, The Iguana Killer: Twelve Stories from the fair things / Delights, does not enlighten.” In the pref- Heart, won the 1984 Western States Book Award. ace to the reprint of her Selected Poems in Five Sets Ríos emerged in the 1980s as a leading figure among (1970), Riding rejected poetry as her cause, explain- a new group of university-trained Hispanic writers who ing her quest for truth to be a “something” beyond made bicultural experiences central to their work. In his poetry: “My cause is something poetry fails to be— poetry he is drawn toward multiple understandings of belying its promissory advertisement of itself” (17). events, a hallmark of borderland writers who know Nevertheless one of the lasting values of her poems there are at least two languages for describing any situa- lies in the inherent tension they display, “excit[ing] tion. In much of his work, Ríos explores truths of expe- some sense of wherein the failure of poetry lies, and rience that do not conform to rational explanation. As some fore-sense of what that something might be” William Barillas notes, “Ríos is a poet of the body’s intel- (Preface 17). ligence, of inherent perception and expression in physi- cal gesture and embrace” (116). In Ríos’s poem “Advice BIBLIOGRAPHY to a First Cousin” (1985), a grandmother’s folk cure for Ashbery, John, “The Unthronged Oracle: Laura Riding,” Other Traditions. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University a scorpion bite—placing a live scorpion on the bite— Press, 2000, 95–121. turns into a lesson for surviving in an unsafe world. The Riding Jackson, Laura. Preface to Selected Poems in Five Sets, poem’s speaker is told to watch out for other scorpions by Laura Riding Jackson. New York: Persea Books, 1970. who will be smarter and meaner, “the way you must Simon, John, “Laura Riding and Her Traveling Circus.” In look out for men / who have not yet bruised you.” Dreamers of Dreams: Essays on Poets and Poetry. Chicago: The magical realism of the Colombian novelist Ivan R. Doe, 2001, pp. 12–21. Gabriel García Márquez has had a profound impact on Wexler, Joyce Piell. Laura Riding’s Pursuit of Truth. Athens: Ríos. From Márquez, Ríos takes an appreciation of how Ohio University Press, 1979. surrealistic juxtaposition can ultimately be instructive Jennifer Grotz rather than mystifying. In “On January 5, 1984, El Santo the Wrestler Died, Possibly” (1985), Ríos takes RÍOS, ALBERTO (1952– ) Since the publi- an actual event—the funeral of a costumed Mexican cation in 1982 of Whispering to Fool the Wind, Alberto professional wrestler—and uses it as a meditation Ríos has emerged as a leading figure in contemporary upon the mythic power of icons, venturing far afield Chicano literature. A short story writer and memoirist from the funeral itself. Such a poem is an example of as well as a poet, Ríos takes a narrative approach in what Deneen Jenks sees as “ideas of patience, of mov- much of his poetry (see NARRATIVE POETRY). His poetic ing sideways, of crossing quietly over borders” that is voice is often that of a storyteller, and frequently the characteristic of Ríos’s work (121). Ríos painstakingly stories he tells draw upon his childhood in the border explores the significance to be drawn from moments town of Nogales, Arizona. While his early poetry was that might be otherwise overlooked. most notable for his efforts to capture childhood per- BIBLIOGRAPHY spectives, much of Ríos’s recent work exhibits quali- Britton, Sheilah. “Discovering the Alphabet of Life,” ASU ties of SURREALISM in the tradition of magical realism. Research. Available online. URL: http://researchmag.asu. Ríos’s extravagant use of language places him along- edu/articles/alphabet.html. Downloaded May 2, 2003. side such writers as Mary OLIVER, C. K. WILLIAMS, and Jenks, Deneen. “The Breathless Patience of Alberto Ríos” Joy HARJO. Hayden’s Ferry Review 11 (fall/winnter 1992): 115–123. “THE ROAD NOT TAKEN” 425

Ríos, Alberto. “Words like the Wind: An Interview with standing of the ever-changing realm of the phenome- Alberto Ríos, by William Berillas.” Americas Review nal world. 24:3–4 (fall/winter 1996): 116–129. “Riprap” is the product of a mind sharpened by the Jim O’Loughlin hard-edged, sun-splashed natural forms of the high Sierras; its economical structure, moreover, reflects the “RIPRAP” GARY SNYDER (1958) The 25 line rhythms of working with stone. Literally the pattern of poem “Riprap” registers the Zen-inspired aesthetics of well-placed stones offers a foothold in otherwise slip- Chinese poetry that Gary SNYDER inherited from his pery terrain. By analogy, Snyder suggests, the poem modernist predecessor Ezra POUND and his contempo- provides a similar solidity in the changing order of rary Philip WHALEN, as well as the Western landscapes in thoughts as well as things. the poems of Robinson JEFFERS and Kenneth REXROTH. BIBLIOGRAPHY “Riprap” is part of a cycle of poems Snyder composed Allen, Donald M., ed. The New American Poetry, 1945–1960. during his stint as a trail crew laborer in California’s New York: Grove Press, 1960, pp. 420–421. Sierra Nevada. By the summer of 1955, Snyder had ded- Dean, Tim. Gary Snyder and the American Unconscious: Inhab- icated himself to the study of Chinese language and iting the Ground. New York: St. Martin’s, 1991. Buddhism and had abandoned writing poetry. But, as he Murphy, Patrick D. A Place for Wayfaring: The Poetry and would write later, “under the influence of the geology of Prose of Gary Snyder. Corvallis: Oregon State University the Sierra Nevada and the daily trail-crew work of pick- Press, 2000, pp. 43–62. ing up and placing granite stones in tight cobbled pat- Mark Long tern on hard slab,” Snyder found himself writing poems that did not resemble anything he had done before (qtd. “THE ROAD NOT TAKEN” ROBERT in Allen 420–421). FROST (1915) “The Road Not Taken” is among The opening lines, “Lay down these words / Before the best-known poems of the 20th century. Readers your mind like rocks,” compare the mental activity of who encounter the poem in high school, perhaps even arranging words on the page with the physical activity in college, are likely to hear that it is an expression of of laying stones on a mountain trail. A celebration of the importance of American individualism. Most the body and mind at work, the poem begins with the Americans have probably heard the final lines of “The speaker instructing himself on the intentional activity Road Not Taken” used in such a way: “Two roads of poetic composition. The activity is not determined diverged in a wood, and I — / I took the one less trav- by the existing structures of the mind, but rather by eled by.” That choice is what is distinctive. It would be the exigencies of constructing a functional pattern, a a mistake to say that this sort of interpretation—the means of access to new terrain. one generations of American readers have been The body of the poem opens into a sequence of encouraged to accept—is simply wrong, but Robert associations, moving from substantial objects in the FROST’s letters show that this meaning is not at all what world—”Solidity of bark, leaf or wall”—to the cos- he originally had in mind. mological arrangement of the “straying” planets in the George Monteiro explains that Frost did not person- universe. The lines, wrestling free from the con- ally identify with the poem’s speaker; rather he thought straints of syntax, follow the requirements of the of the poem as a private joke about the general indeci- poem’s associative method. The second controlling siveness of his friend, the British poet Edward Thomas. analogy in the poem is between the world and “an Thomas’s letters to Frost make it clear that, at first, endless / four-dimensional / Game of Go.” An ancient Thomas did not get the joke; he took the poem com- Chinese game of strategy, Go involves placing stones pletely seriously, just as many readers have been on a board to control space and in response to the encouraged to do (Monteiro 1–3). It is important to emergent patterns of the game as it unfolds. The com- note that the poem quickly took on a life of its own, parison is perfectly appropriate to Snyder’s under- and that Frost certainly did not mention the “private 426 ROBINSON, EDWIN ARLINGTON joke” publically. Instead he apparently recognized the cal of any particular literary movement. With 23 publi- advantage of letting readers interpret the poem in a cations ranging in genre from collections to book-length variety of complex ways. narrative poems (see NARRATIVE POETRY), and in style Richard Poirier claims that “[Frost’s] ultimate subject from villanelles and sonnets to blank verse (see PROSODY is the interpretive process itself” (xxiii), and the com- AND FREE VERSE), Robinson is perhaps one of the most plexities of “The Road Not Taken” support this state- overlooked and undervalued poets of 20th-century ment. The poem’s speaker describes the two diverging American literature. Influenced by the 19th-century roads in a way that should make readers wonder how likes of Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William different these roads really appeared to be. Although Wordsworth, and Rudyard Kipling, Robinson’s work he initially says that one road appeared to be less trav- reflects a transition from the themes and styles of the eled, he soon mentions that actually the two roads romantics to those of the modernists (see MODERNISM). looked very similar and that they were equally covered Robinson was born in Head-of-the-Tide, Maine. He in fallen leaves on the morning the speaker made his lived most of his life in Maine and New York. He stud- choice. If the roads looked the same, readers may won- ied at Harvard University from 1891 to 1893, although der, how can the speaker possibly know that he took he was a poor student. His first collection of poems, the less-traveled road, and how can he know what dif- The Torrent and the Night Before, was published on his ference, if any, this choice made? The title further own in 1896. Other publications, including The Chil- undermines the sense of certainty by mentioning the dren of the Night (1897) and Captain Craig (1902), soon road the narrator did not take, rather than the one that followed, the former catching the attention of Presi- supposedly was so significant for the rest of his life. As dent Theodore Roosevelt, who appointed Robinson to Jay Parini points out, “There may well be no road less a position in the office of the collector of customs, New traveled by” (154). York, in 1905. In 1919 the Outlook magazine pub- Frost never publicly disagreed with the conven- lished a celebration issue for Robinson’s 50th birthday. tional interpretation of the poem. He seemed to accept It was not until 1921, however, with the publication of that the poem had taken on a life quite different from his Collected Poems and his first Pulitzer Prize, that his original intent. An example from China emphasizes Robinson finally broke through as a major poet. He the poem’s potential for very different interpretations. won two more Pulitzers, in 1924 for The Man Who Died Chinese schoolteachers commonly use the poem to Twice and in 1927 for Tristram. His last book, King symbolize the exact opposite of American individual- Jasper, was published in 1935, just before his death ism. Instead, in their interpretation, the road less trav- from cancer. eled suggests the political road of communist Robinson’s poetry often deals with conflict, such as principles and cultural revolution. the opposition between light and dark, particularly BIBLIOGRAPHY within individual characters. With this theme Robin- Monteiro, George. “Commentary: ‘The Road Not Taken.’” son “took the middle romantic style and put it to uses In Robert Frost: Poems, Life, Legacy. New York: Henry it had not known. He made it American and he made Holt, 1998. it Realistic; and incidentally, he made it in an important Parini, Jay. Robert Frost: A Life. New York: Henry Holt, 1999. sense, urban,” as Louis Coxe has noted (27–28). Espe- Poirier, Richard. Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing. Stanford, cially at the beginning of the 20th century, Robinson’s Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990. work portrays a fresh reality that would continue Sean Heuston throughout his career. In his early shorter poems, Robinson explores con- ROBINSON, EDWIN ARLINGTON flict, through specific forms, such as the villanelle and (1869–1935) Edwin Arlington Robinson is best the sonnet. In the villanelle “The House on the Hill” known for his formal rhyming poems, surprise endings, (1894), he emphasizes that the past is gone and cannot and characterizations of the human condition not typi- be changed: “The House is shut and still, / There is ROBINSON, KIT 427 nothing more to say.” In other words, the ghosts of the Robinson emphasizes the love of this story by depict- past may linger, but we should not dwell on the dark- ing Tristram, who, though alone, contemplates “the ness of the past. In the sonnets “Cliff Klingenhagen” white sunlight flashing on the sea.” This final image of (1897), “Thomas Hood” (1897), and “Reuben Bright” light in the Arthurian trilogy is the one that Robinson (1897), the focus turns to the struggle between light returns to again and again in his long, narrative poems, and dark within individual characters. Klingenhagen is especially his final two publications, Amaranth (1934) a man who will swallow the darkness, represented by and King Jasper (1935). The lesson is clear for the wormwood, to save the light, or wine, for his dinner reader and the characters, such as Fargo, who finds companion. Hood hides his sorrow from the commu- “The world around him flamed amazingly / With light nity, yet the community still senses “a weird unrest.” that comforted and startled him,” and the lady Zoë, And Bright, the friendly butcher, cannot calmly survive who “Fled upward through the darkness,” out of the death of his wife, and the darkness appears when Jasper’s kingdom to live on in the light. he “tore down the slaughterhouse.” In these poems the movement to light is Robinson’s In Robinson’s poetry, “The twilight warning of expe- lesson for all. It is a model “for people to come to terms rience, / The singular idea of loneliness” (“Isaac and with life on their own account, to find some degree of Archibald” [1902]) are often the darkness against peace and satisfaction within themselves” (Barnard which humans must fight. Such is the case for many of 233–234). Such a lesson and the amazing expression the characters in Robinson’s medium-length poems, of it are what make Robinson a great American poet. such as “Isaac and Archibald” (1902), “Aunt Imogen” BIBLIOGRAPHY (1902), and “Rembrandt to Rembrandt” (1921). Gen- Anderson, Wallace L. Edwin Arlington Robinson: A Critical erally the characters are older and feel alone in life, yet Introduction. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967. each one comes to realize that he or she is loved and Barnard, Ellsworth. Edwin Arlington Robinson: A Critical cherished by friends and family—perhaps not as he or Study. New York: Macmillan, 1952. she had imagined, but loved nonetheless. Each person Coxe, Louis O. Edwin Arlington Robinson: The Life of Poetry. must “Forget [her or his] darkness in the dark” and New York: Pegasus, 1969. come to the light of living life in the present. Winters, Yvor. Edwin Arlington Robinson. Norfolk, Conn.: This theme is best expressed in Robinson’s long, New Directions, 1946. narrative poems. The movement from darkness to light Keri Overall appears throughout the Arthurian trilogy of Merlin (1917), Lancelot (1920), and Tristram (1927). Ending ROBINSON, KIT (1949– ) Known for his with the line, “And there was darkness over Camelot,” participation in the Bay Area LANGUAGE SCHOOL scene of Merlin represents the movement into darkness that the 1970s and 1980s, Kit Robinson shares with his comes with age. Lancelot ends with an alteration and peers a focus on the ways in which language frames our addition to Merlin’s lesson: “Where the Light falls, thoughts and perceptions. Building on the traditions of death falls; / And in darkness comes the Light.” Once his modernist and postmodernist predecessors one accepts the darkness and embraces it, he or she (Gertrude STEIN, William Carlos WILLIAMS, and other can move on toward the light, and the light is a glori- poets of MODERNISM, as well as the poets of the NEW YORK ous place. The final chapter, Tristram, illustrates the SCHOOL), Robinson employs strategies, including the non glory of the light with Isolt. In the medieval story of the sequitur, which deliberately confuse the unsuspecting ill-fated love between the knight, Sir Tristram, and the reader. “In the Orpheum Building” (1982), for example, lady, Isolt the Fair, Tristram is sent to bring Isolt to opens with the following sentence: “Single story two marry his uncle, but on the journey they swallow a bedroom dwelling across from / Parts unknown and potion that binds them forever in eternal love. Many won’t be back and hesitates / To hand over that strong- hurdles face the lovers, so they never can be together, box.” Composed of a series of seemingly unrelated tex- and each eventually dies in despair over this lost love. tual fragments, the poem imitates yet subverts the 428 RODEFER, STEPHEN syllogistic logic of conventional discourse. While we ———. “Time & Materials: The Workplace, Dreams, and come to recognize in its various fragments the language Writing.” Poetics Journal 9 (June 1991): 21–35. of classified advertisements, scraps of passing conversa- Strang, Brian. “Presence and Permeability.” Review of tion, and technical jargon, the text’s overall meaning is Democracy Boulevard, by Kit Robinson. Aufgabe 1 (sum- left open and unresolved. The poem, in refusing to use mer 2001). Available online. URL: http://www. durationpress.com/litmuspress/aufgabe/issue1.htm. language as a transparent window through which the Downloaded April 2003. world is made both visible and knowable, highlights the ways in which our perception is ordered by the linear Tim Shaner structure of the sentence. Born in Evanston, Illinois, Robinson received a B.A. RODEFER, STEPHEN (1940– ) “My pro- from Yale University in 1971. He taught in the Califor- gram is simple,” Stephen Rodefer writes, in the preface nia Poets in the Schools program from 1977–83, and to his best-known work, Four Lectures (1982): “[It is] then he worked as an executive in the information tech- to surrender to the city and survive its inundation. To nology industry in and around San Francisco. Robin- read it and in reading, order it to read itself” (7). In son’s first book, Chinatown of Cheyenne, was published declaring the city his muse, Rodefer places himself in a in 1974. He has received a number of grants, including long line of “urban” poets—from first-century B.C. Cat- one from the National Endowment for the Arts (1979). ullus (84–54 B.C.) to 15th-century François Villon to Like the double careers of Williams and Wallace Frank O’HARA—who find their text and their audience STEVENS before him, Robinson’s career as an executive in the cultural flood of Western capitals. Rodefer’s in California’s high-tech industry has had an important work moves as comfortably in the domain of the spo- impact on his poetry. In his poem “The Wig” (1991), ken and the heard, carrying forward the New Ameri- he reveals his practice of writing on the job, “of doing can poetry (see POETRY ANTHOLOGIES) emphasis on a bit of one’s private work on company time, of thereby everyday speech, as in that of the written and the ‘personalizing’ one’s corporate labor.” Robinson argues decoded, though sometimes shifting to the broadly elsewhere that writing on the job grounds poetry in ranging investigations of LANGUAGE writing. common experience. His sampling of corporate lan- Born in Bellaire, Ohio, Rodefer earned a B.A. in art guage seeks to “drain specialized language of its isolat- history at Amherst College (1963) and an M.A. in lan- ing productive assurance and exploit it in the guage and literature at the State University of New York, expression of human desires” (“Time and Materials” Buffalo (1965), where he studied with Charles OLSON; 27). Employing a variety of invented forms, Robinson’s Rodefer earned an M.F.A. at San Francisco State Univer- poetry is grounded in the poetics of the everyday, from sity (1976). Rodefer’s first book, The Knife, was pub- the language of the corporate workplace to domestic lished in 1965. His translation of Villon (1968) under meditations to the visual and aural traffic of the com- the pen name Jean Calais received wide acclaim. He has mute in between. As he puts it in his afterword to The taught at several universities, including the University of Crave (2002), his poems “skirt the fringes of love and California, San Diego, where from 1985–87 he curated business, form and emptiness, the spaces between the Archive for New Poetry. Rodefer has settled in Paris; things, home and a restless movement from place to there he has worked on moving his poems from the place” (119). page to the canvas, where he literally paints them. The canvas of Four Lectures is large: “When I say me BIBLIOGRAPHY it’s a figure of speech. Just another poet AGOG for Perelman, Bob. “Language Writing and Literary History.” In The Marginalization of Poetry: Language Writing and Liter- foam. / Look at all those f-stops up there. Eventually ary History. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, everything becomes all stars.” In stanzas of 15 lines, 1996. 11–37. the poet-persona ventriloquizes a range of tones and Robinson, Kit. Afterword to The Crave. Berkeley, Calif.: Ate- discourses—from satiric to amorous, lyrical to didac- los, 2002, p. 119. tic—and orchestrates abrupt switches between high art ROETHKE, THEODORE 429 and advertising, street obscenity and literary allusion, grant family became the source of his cardinal work. with an unerring sense of music. Much of the play The family greenhouses encompassed for Roethke all occurs by ear—where “foam” slides into “fame,” and stages of life, phases of evolution, and range of emo- “poet AGOG” into “demagogue.” tions, they were his personal Eden and the source of all Unlike Walt Whitman and his BEAT descendants, his nightmares. Although kept close to home and sent Rodefer brings an ironic scrutiny to his materials, dis- to the University of Michigan (B.A., 1929), Roethke tancing the poetry from the very excess that drives it. resisted pressure for a practical legal career, and he Moral ambivalence is reinforced through the disjunc- escaped to English studies and poetry at Harvard. tions of the “I,” direct in its address but hard to locate, Despite the depression, he pursued an academic career an overheard narrator more in the manner of John ASH- and from 1931 to 1935 taught at Lafayette College. BERY than Frank O’Hara’s expressivist meditations. Louise BOGAN (a poetry editor of the New Yorker), Stan- Rodefer writes, “Though the species is in me, I am neu- ley KUNITZ, Rolfe Humphries, and others helped him tral” (“Enclosure of Elk” [1991]). publish in Poetry, the New Republic, and the Saturday The result is often satirical—“Oh academy, oh Review. In 1935, after moving to Michigan State Uni- gainsville, oh tenured night” (“Daydreams of Frascatti” versity, he suffered the first of numerous breakdowns [1992]), often frankly erotic—”Julie my duck ...ex and was institutionalized for three months. He finished sexy gerun / diva, my rue de la main d’or” (“Mon his M.A. at Michigan in 1936 and began teaching at Canard” [1995]), but it is always rooted in the central Penn State College, during which time his first book, impulse of a LYRIC POETRY: “love does not / die, that is / Open House (1941), was published. This was the begin- the fathomless question” (“Beating Erasers” [1994]). ning of a great career, earning him two Guggenheim BIBLIOGRAPHY Fellowships (1945 and 1950), the Eunice Tietjens Rasula, Jed. “Rodefer’s ‘Lectures.’” Poetics Journal 3 (1983): Memorial Prize (Poetry magazine, 1951), two Ford 87–90. Foundation grants in (1952 and 1959), the Pulitzer Rodefer, Stephen. Preface to Four Lectures. Berkeley, Calif.: Prize for The Waking (1954), a Fulbright grant (1955), The Figures, 1982. the Bollingen Prize (1959), two National Book Ward, Geoff. Language Poetry and the Avant-garde. England: Awards—for Words for the Wind (1959) and The Far British Association for American Studies, 1993. Field (1965)—and the Shelley Memorial Award Jonathan Skinner (1962), among other awards and honors. A deceptively straightforward CONFESSIONAL work, ROETHKE, THEODORE (1908–1963) Theo- Open House begins Roethke’s quest into the possibilities dore Roethke’s experiments in seeking a language for of using consciousness and language to understand the the incommunicative experience of madness and self and the world. Exploring the techniques of his employing classical poetic structures for explorations predecessors and mentors, Roethke tries on the styles of the modern soul influenced an entire generation. of others in order to achieve his own goals and Sylvia PLATH, Robert LOWELL, James WRIGHT, David explores theories of psychoanalysis and socialization, WAGONER, Carolyn KIZER, and others found in Roethke’s as well as the possibilities of straightforward expres- poems the language, rhythms, and approach for their sion. But although he finds these styles and theories own discoveries of the self. His dialogue with great insufficient, his unique responses were only to be dis- verse as a means of developing individual voice was covered in the coming years. important to many modern writers. William Butler His reputation as a teacher growing, he was soon Yeats, T. S. ELIOT, Emily Dickinson, Leonie Adams, Eli- invited to Bennington College, where he became nor Wylie, W. H. AUDEN, and Dylan Thomas were his friendly with Kenneth Burke. At Bennington he began most acknowledged influences. intense experiments with mysticism, meditation, and Roethke was born in Saginaw, Michigan. His child- concentration. His insistence upon understanding, imi- hood amid a greenhouse empire owned by his immi- tating, and using his experiences of manic depression 430 ROGERS, PATTIANN was dangerous; although aware of this danger, he felt To read the Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke his unique experiences were a vital tool for poetic (1966) from beginning to end is to follow the deter- achievement, finding poetic brotherhood in the roman- mined, methodical quest for a viable poetic identity tics William Blake and John Clare. As he says in “In a and simultaneously to experience the possibility of Dark Time” (1965), “What’s madness, but nobility of madness at any given moment. soul / At odds with circumstance?” BIBLIOGRAPHY In The Lost Son (1948), published a year after he Blessing, Richard. Theodore Roethke’s Dynamic Vision. Bloom- moved to the University of Washington, Roethke ington: Indiana University Press, 1974. shows the results of his mental and poetic risks. He Burke, Kenneth. “The Vegetal Radicalism of Theodore describes the direction in “An American Poet Intro- Roethke.” Sewanee Review LVIII (winter 1950): 68–108. duces Himself and His Poems,” as going “back in order Malkoff, Karl. Theodore Roethke: An Introduction to the Poetry. to go forward,” and he reveals the technique of close New York: Columbia University Press, 1971. observation and identification, which leads to loss and Roethke, Theodore, and Carolyn Kizer. On Poetry and Craft. subsequent reintegration of the self and was influenced Seattle: Copper Canyon Press, 2001. by D. H. Lawrence, upon whom he wrote his M.A. the- Seager, Allan. The Glass House: The Life of Theodore Roethke. sis. In the poem “Cuttings,” Roethke describes plant New York : McGraw-Hill, 1968. Stiffler, Randall. Theodore Roethke: The Poet and His Critics. cuttings, which appear to die aboveground but grow Chicago: American Library Association, 1986. hidden roots. The poem that follows, “Cuttings (later),” is an identification with these cuttings, a first- Karen Alkalay-Gut person experience of rebirth, and an acknowledgment of the consciousness of his quest: “When sprouts break ROGERS, PATTIANN (1940– ) Pattiann out,/...I quail, lean to beginnings, sheath-wet.” This Rogers’s poetry links the intellectual rigors of the sci- “preliterary” style, with its curt, breathless lines, and entific method with the possibilities and suppositions non sequiturs, are all aspects of the search of the lost inherent in a life based upon spiritual questioning. son for his true father. Often compared with Walt Whitman, Henry David If the poems of Praise to the End! (1951) are not ini- Thoreau, and Theodore ROETHKE, Rogers notes that for tially clear and communicative, it is because they begin these writers landscape and environment are much in a state of almost pure subjectivity, a complete union more than “picturesque background” (Elliot “Inter- with the self, which has no need of external communi- view” 24). In her work the natural world becomes a cation. The influences of Yeats’s cycles are clear. The “source of self-knowledge and sustenance, a force, an developing speaker follows the progress out of the self actor, often a determining presence” (Elliott “Inter- and into the world, metaphorizing evolution, the mys- view” 24). Although she takes plants, animals, and tic way, and psychoanalysis. The Waking (1953) and forces of nature as her subjects, Rogers is not merely a Words for the Wind (1958) continue this direction. “nature” poet, nor can her work be identified with any From an awakening into the world of others in the for- particular American region. Her poems are character- mer book, Roethke explores the subject of love in the ized by an awareness of, and reverent curiosity about, latter. His marriage with Beatrice O’Connell in 1953 the immensity of things unknowable. inspired these moving and intelligent inquiries into the Rogers was born in Joplin, Missouri. When she was conflicts of love. Words for the Wind received the most 13, her parents joined a fundamentalist Christian sect recognition in Roethke’s lifetime, and it won the most that followed a literal interpretation of the Bible. prizes. It is significant that this first book about rela- Though the sect opposed advanced education, tionships was followed by poems for children, I Am! Rogers’s parents allowed her to attend the University Says the Lamb (1961). The Far Field (1964), published of Missouri, where she studied philosophy, astronomy, posthumously after a fatal heart attack, anticipates and zoology, which run counter to the restrictions of death as a unity with the cosmos. religious fundamentalism. Rogers studied creative ROSENBERG, DAVID 431 writing at the University of Houston (M.A., 1981). ROSENBERG, DAVID (1943– ) David Her first book, The Expectations of Light, was published Rosenberg is a startling poet of learning, subtlety, and that same year. Many other titles have followed, ambition, and his books include heroic translations, including a collection of essays on the art of writing, commentary, and anthologies. He is in the tradition of Dream of the Marsh Wren (1999). Rogers has received Ezra POUND, who insisted that in recovering our numerous awards, most notably the Theodore archaic, cultural, and theological roots, we may get Roethke Prize (1981), five Pushcart Prizes (1984, closest to a sacred matrix. Rosenberg, however, began 1985, 1989, 1991, and 1997) and a Lannan Founda- writing in conjunction with the NEW YORK SCHOOL of tion Award (1991). poetry, in which a new SURREALISM competed with a Rogers, in a conversation with David Elliott, called parodistic mania and a whimsy of kitsch and culture. scientific terminology “an evocative, musical, beautiful But he outgrew this observational bias and has been vocabulary,” which she believes has been neglected by guided in a complex symbolist journey toward contemporary poets (19). For example, “The Verifica- Jerusalem and the origins of the Bible. tion of Vulnerability: Bog Turtle” (1986) contains a Rosenberg was born in Detroit. He studied with description of a turtle’s body that combines zoological Robert LOWELL at the New School and with Donald HALL terminology with poetic simile: The turtle’s carapace at the University of Michigan, where he received a B.A. resembles “beveled wood,” and the “hingeless / plas- in English (1964) and refined his work. He also met tron” becomes a fortified chest, which shields the tur- Delmore SCHWARTZ at Syracuse University, where he tle’s heart, or its “particle of vulnerability.” received an M.F.A. (l966). After six books of poems were Rogers’s poems express the wonder and exhilaration of published in Canada, where he worked as an editor, and scientific discovery, and she credits Jacob Bronowski’s The with his doctorate on Gertrude STEIN almost completed, Ascent of Man (1973), an exploration of scientific thought, he made a commitment to study Hebrew literature in history, and art, as having been a tremendous influence Israel and the United States, and these studies changed on her life and work. Her poetry explores the way scien- his life. One of his translations is the well-known and tific study can affect our view of ourselves, our commu- controversial Book of J (1990), a recovered biblical text. nities, and our world. In “Why Lost Divinity Remains He has taught at many universities and has lectured Lost” (1993), the speaker describes her attempts to locate both nationally and internationally. the divine—she searches for enlightenment but her “con- Rosenberg’s poems are sensual and provocative. He centration / is broken by the pattern of leaf shadows” on translates the Psalms as blues, maintaining the freshness “the wall.” The physical world for Rogers is a sensuous, of American jazz. He continued for many years to create pleasurable, and, ultimately, life-affirming distraction. She “a poet’s Bible,” not merely a mistranslation, but a wise intends for her unique and sometimes difficult material to and moderate nigun, or improvisation. He gave himself bridge the gaps between science, literature, and spirit. up to a lengthy series of testaments concerning Jewish life and art, and he created the influential anthologies on BIBLIOGRAPHY Judaism for his generation: Congregation (1987), Genesis Engelbrecht, Marsha. “Pattiann Rogers.” In Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 105. American Poets since World (1996), Testimony (1989), and others. The main theme War II, edited by R. S. Gwynn. Detroit: Gale, 1991, and stylistic finesse in Rosenberg’s poetry and other pp. 210–214. writings is the mystery of translating and mistranslating. Rogers, Pattiann. “An Interview with Pattiann Rogers,” by He always plays with the boundaries between an origi- Richard McCann. Iowa Review 17 (spring/summer nal and a copy, between a sacred poem and its restora- 1987): 25–42. tion. Eventually, a reader hardly knows whether the text ———. “‘Praise Is a Generative Act’: A Conversation with at hand is an original, homage, essay, or fiction. A poem Pattiann Rogers,” by David L. Elliott. Tampa Review in The Lost Book of Paradise (1993) radiates this mystery (1999): 19–32. in lines that might be from a lost Hebrew text or from a Diane Warner very contemporary American one: “[T]he creator” 432 ROTHENBERG, JEROME becomes both poet and divinity, bringing the reader “to modern style. Revolution has been supplanted by the crawl in a great library / of the natural world, to read / innovative Poems for the Millennium (1995), a massive the text of plants.” This new poem tries to recreate an two-volume sourcebook, coedited with Pierre JORIS, old, possibly inverted, sacred poem, to restore a tone which situates 20th-century poetry in a truly global from the biblical Song of Songs, and to make readers feel context. For Rothenberg, poetry has been, first and the archaic as something as fresh as a scientific discov- foremost, a process, and in that process the successful ery. Immersed in natural and human history, Rosenberg poet creates not only his or her poem but also himself finds in a destroyed forest material for a new Bible. His or herself. His own poetic development has involved poems raise a bridge between scientific and linguistic an amplification of the principles of the artistic dada marvels. movement in that he regularly experiments with BIBLIOGRAPHY sounds as sounds, with the perceptual and cognitive Bloom, Harold. “Translating J.” In The Book of J, translated possibilities offered by repetition, and with the rela- by David Rosenberg. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990, tionship of the primitive and the contemporary. pp. 49–55. Rothenberg was born to first-generation Polish- Carruth, Hayden. “David’s Psalms.” Bookletter Literary Sup- Jewish immigrants in New York City. He launched his plement 3.9 (December 20, l976): 2. career as editor of the small magazine Poems from the Hall, Donald. Foreword to Job Speaks, by David Rosenberg. Floating World (1959–63) and operator of Hawk’s Well New York: Harper and Row, 1977, pp. vii–viii. Press, through which he published important works by David Shapiro Robert KELLY, Armand SCHWERNER, and Diane WAKOSKI, as well as his own first volume of poems, Black Sun ROTHENBERG, JEROME (1931– ) Poet, White Sun (1960). But his first publications, signifi- translator, anthologist, and critic, Jerome Rothenberg is cantly, were relatively standard translations of contem- best known for his development of DEEP IMAGE POETRY porary German poets. As a member of the United States and his strategies of “total translation.” An emphasis on Army, he had been stationed in Mainz, Germany, from oral performance in poetics coupled with a drive to 1953 to 1955, after which time he attended Columbia expand the formalistic legacy of what came to be University for graduate work (he had previously earned known as New Criticism (see FUGITIVE/AGRARIAN a B.A. at the City College of New York and an M.A. at SCHOOL) has motivated his composite career in the University of Michigan). On the strength of these ETHNOPOETICS. Influenced by the work of both Ezra translations, Lawrence FERLINGETTI invited him to pre- POUND and Gertrude STEIN, Rothenberg has long pare a collection of postwar German poetry, New Young labored to revise what he refers to half-ironically and German Poets, for the Pocket Poets Series, published in half-seriously as the “great tradition” of Anglo-Ameri- 1959 by City Lights Books (see POETRY PRESSES). The can MODERNISM (Pre-Faces 100). His early efforts in this poems Rothenberg later culled for inclusion in the regard involve the recovery of forgotten modernists, widely circulated Poems for the Game of Silence, such as Mina LOY, in an important gathering of avant- 1960–1970 (1971) demonstrate an engagement with garde poetry in English, Revolution of the Word (1974). the “deep image” that had been sparked by these trans- This anthology’s “Pre-Face” illustrates his reasons for lations—particularly those of Paul Celan, a resisting the New Critical style that increasingly domi- German-speaking East European Jew—and exhibit a nated American poetry in the 1950s, which he dis- commitment to the exploration of his own Jewish her- misses as “little toughening of Tennyson” and itage. They also lay the groundwork for the subsequent attributes to W. H. AUDEN, Robert LOWELL, Allen TATE, contributions to the fields of poetics and ethnology that and Richard WILBUR, among others (99). The Pre-Face led him to found the ethnopoetics movement. also, however, illustrates his debt to the experimental With the help of a few close collaborators—particu- modernism that preceded it—and his rationale for larly the anthropologist Dennis Tedlock and the lyri- recasting that modernism to fit his particular post- cally gifted Nathaniel TARN—Rothenberg centered RUDMAN, MARK 433 ethnopoetics with Technicians of the Sacred (1968), an ters, he insists, I will change your mind. His volume A achronological collection of indigenous North Ameri- Paradise of Poets (1999) concludes with a statement that can poems, and consolidated it with Alcheringa encapsulates the theory that underlies this goal: “I do (1970–73, 1975–80), “the first magazine of the world’s not of course believe that [a paradise of poets] exists in tribal poetries” (Rothenberg and Tedlock “Statement of any supernatural or mystical sense, but I have some- Intention” 1). Rothenberg has taught at a number of times felt it come to life among my fellow poets, and, schools, including the University of California, San even more, in writing—in the body of the poem” (117). Diego. Over the course of four decades, he has won BIBLIOGRAPHY numerous awards, including the 1982 American Book Lazer, Hank. “Thinking Made in the Mouth: The Cultural Award for Pre-Faces & Other Writings (1981), and three Poetics of David Antin and Jerome Rothenberg.” In Pic- PEN writing awards (1994, for poetry, 1994 and 2002 turing Cultural Values in Postmodern America, edited by for translation). William G. Doty. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama As his work with the deep image edged toward Press, 1994. ethnopoetics, Rothenberg began working simultane- Mottram, Eric. “Where the Real Song Begins: The Poetry of ously to preserve traditions even as he distorted or Jerome Rothenberg.” Dialectical Anthropology 2.2–4 dislodged conventions. Within a decade he was con- (1986): 171–177. sidering how the contemporary poet might fill the role Rothenberg, Jerome. A Paradise of Poets: New Poems and of shaman in the tribal sense, as a holy man and Translations. New York: New Directions, 1999. healer. The “minimal” poetry of Shaking the Pumpkin ———. Pre-Faces & Other Writings. New York: New Direc- tions, 1981. (1972) contains a strong element of play and consis- ———., and Dennis Tedlock. “Statement of Intention.” tently privileges sounds over sense. “The 12th Horse Alcheringa 1.1 (1970): 1. Song of Frank Mitchell (Blue),” a poem in which a Selerie, Gavin. The Riverside Interviews 4: Jerome Rothenberg. sacred singer describes why “Some are & are going to London: Binnacle Press, 1984. my howinouse [house],” makes clear the use of mean- ingless syllables and distorted sounds in this tribalized Matthew Hofer poetics. For this kind of total translation, the unit of composition is an extended breath, and before the RUDMAN, MARK (1948– ) Mark Rudman’s poem begins Rothenberg provides a phonetic key to poetry takes up the relationships between fathers and each breath’s chanted rhythm: “wnn N nnnn N gahn sons, history and memory, literary tradition and schol- hawuNnawu nngobaheegwing.” Yet individual lines arship. The figures of motion and architecture appear on the page, like these last, gain power only when central to his poetics. Rudman composes in a short- spoken aloud: “Some are & are gone to my house now ened version of the American long poem (see LONG AND naht bahyeee naht — / nwinnng buht nawuNNN SERIAL POETRY), something he calls the “intermediate” baheegwinning.” poem inspired by William Blake’s “The Marriage of Throughout his career Rothenberg has emphasized Heaven and Hell” (1790) and T. S. ELIOT’s THE WASTE intercultural solidarity and attacked the fashionable LAND (two important early influences). Increasingly postmodern notion that impermeable boundaries sepa- Rudman has attempted “to transpose an American rate people, contending instead that the nature of trans- context onto Horace’s Roman world” (Rudman “Notes” lation “asserts or at least implies a concept of psychic & 201) by writing a series of Horatian palimpsests biological unity” (Pre-Faces 93). He has, for more than including such poems as “Against All Odds” (1999) 25 years, been unsatisfied with a tepid multicultural- and “In Your Own Time” (1999). ism, since poetry, in his view, can strive for an intercul- Rudman was born in New York City. He has edited tural future. Indeed he has written and translated the journal Pequod since 1975 and has taught at New poems that are meant to matter in the social and cul- York University since 1984. In 1987 he published By tural lives of readers; many times, and in many regis- Contraries (1987), which was followed by four more 434 RUKEYSER, MURIEL collections of poetry. Rudman is also the author of My RUKEYSER, MURIEL (1913–1980) Muriel Sister-Life (1983), a translation of Boris Pasternak and Rukeyser’s poetry shares the ethics of the proletarian, winner of the Max Hayward Award for translation left writers of the 1930s, with whom her early work (1985), Robert Lowell (1983), and Diverse Voices: Essays was associated, and the formal and stylistic experi- on Poetry and Poets (1993). Rudman’s numerous hon- mentation of her contemporaries in literary MOD- ors include the Academy of American Poets Award ERNISM; her poetics also echoes the work of what is from Columbia University (1971) and a National Book perhaps Rukeyser’s single most significant literary Critics Circle Award (1994). influence, the 19th-century American poet Walt Whit- In a 1997 interview, Rudman explains, “A poem is man. Rukeyser’s earliest poetry also shows the influ- not just a repetition of something everyone knows, in ence of W. H. AUDEN, while as a Jewish woman social the Ecclesiastical sense. It throws a wrench into the activist poet in New York, Lola Ridge is another impor- knowledge that preceded it” (125). Rudman particu- tant predecessor. Late in her career, Rukeyser’s work larly wrenches our knowledge of human mourning, inspired a new generation of women poets searching memory, and grief. In The Nowhere Steps (1990), in for a distinctly FEMALE VOICE, FEMALE LANGUAGE, among which he elegizes his father, he writes briskly, “Mourn- them Adrienne RICH and Anne SEXTON, who famously ing is endless.” Just when it seems as if recovery is near, referred to her as “Muriel, Mother of everyone” (qtd. in grief seems to return: Like a “flash of sunlight on a Levi xvii). curb, you’re back in the work of grief, overcome.” Later Rukeyser was born and raised in New York. She was in the volume, a child’s death spurs him to reflect again educated at Vassar College and Columbia University, on the motion of grief; unable to define it precisely, he and she briefly attended Roosevelt Aviation School, an calls it “a gap, / [that] the mind can only go around.” experience informing her first volume, Theory of Flight For Rudman, mourning and grief are not simply expe- (1935), for which she won the Yale Series of Younger riences to be worked through or overcome; rather they Poets Award. She had one child, a son, William, and are a constant, uncontainable, and ungraspable was mentor to the American novelist Alice Walker. She reminder of loss. Rudman’s sounds further emphasize taught at Vassar, the California Labor School, and, for this endlessness, rolling across the page in a sea of many years, Sarah Lawrence College. Although her words composed of the letters s and l. father’s financial difficulties forced her to leave her In Rider (1994), Rudman asks, rhetorically, “Is there studies at Vassar, her coverage of the Alabama Scotts- ever an end to mourning work?” Later, in The Millennium boro trial in 1932 for Student Review (a literary maga- Hotel (1996), he writes, “Life is an apprenticeship in zine she founded with classmates Elizabeth BISHOP, mourning,” emphasizing the poetic nature of mourning Mary McCarthy, and Eleanor Clark) motivated her life- itself—the work of life as Rudman has come to know it. long commitment to the struggle for human rights; as In fact, Rudman’s body of writing is itself an apprentice- a journalist she also covered the silicon mining disas- ship in mourning, elegizing not only his personal losses ter in Gauley Bridge, West Virginia, and the Spanish but also history and the memories that comprise it. civil war. Living in what she referred to as “the first BIBLIOGRAPHY century of world wars” (“Poem” [1968]), Rukeyser was Orr, Linda. “Form and the Father: On Mark Rudman’s witness to and participant in some of the defining Poetry.” Agni 35 (1992): 299–302. events in the 20th-century quest for social justice. She Revell, Donald. “Rose as Decoy, Beauty as Use.” Ohio Review was arrested in Washington, D.C., for protesting U.S. 53 (1995): 150–163. involvement in Vietnam, and she later traveled to Rudman, Mark. “An Interview,” by Mark Rudman. Denver Hanoi; in the 1970s she went to South Korea as presi- Quarterly 31.3 (1997): pp. 119–131. dent of the American Center for PEN to protest the ———. “Notes.” Provoked in Venice. Hanover: Wesleyan death sentence of imprisoned radical Catholic poet University Press, 1999, pp. 201–202. Kim Chi-Ha, an experience that becomes the subject of Aimee L. Pozorski the poem “The Gates” (1976). In addition to poetry, RUTSALA, VERN 435

Rukeyser wrote biographies, children’s books, and ernists, including William Carlos WILLIAMS, and their plays and published translations of Octavio Paz and shared literary forebear Whitman, Rukeyser rejects Bertolt Brecht. Rukeyser won numerous awards and European elitism in the search for a uniquely American prizes, among them a National Institute of Arts and literature, and the poetics evident in “Käthe Kollwitz” Letters grant (1942), a Guggenheim Fellowship is one she developed early—a merging of proletarian (1943), and the Copernicus Award in recognition of subject matter with modernist aesthetics—and which her lifetime contribution to poetry (1977). remains fairly consistent throughout her career. From Considering Rukeyser’s association with the labor her earliest work in Theory of Flight to her work in her movement of the early 20th century, the midcentury last volume, The Gates, in 1976, Rukeyser’s poetry Civil Rights movement, and the late 20th-century documents and testifies to the struggle for social justice women’s liberation movement, Kenneth REXROTH iden- in the 20th century. tifies her as simply “a poet of liberty” (qtd. in Kertesz xii). In The Life of Poetry (1949), Rukeyser writes of BIBLIOGRAPHY Dickie, Margaret and Thomas Travisano, eds. Gendered Mod- poetry as a liberating practice, saying that “the total ernisms: American Women Poets and Their Readers. Philadel- imaginative experience [which is the end of Art] will phia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996, pp. 264–279. apply to your life; and it is more than likely to lead you Herzog, Anne F., and Janet E. Kaufman, eds. “How Shall We to thought or action, that is, you are likely to want to Tell Each Other of the Poet”: The Life and Writing of Muriel go further into the world, further into yourself, toward Rukeyse. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999. further experience” (26). Poetry, for Rukeyser, becomes Kertesz, Louise. The Poetic Vision of Muriel Rukeyser. Baton a form of social activism, and her strongest work— Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980. from “The Trial” (1935) to “The Gates”—is in direct Levi, Jan Heller, ed. A Muriel Rukeyser Reader. New York: response to social injustice. Norton, 1994. Fueled by the national zeitgeist, Rukeyser enjoyed a Rexroth, Kenneth. Foreword to The Poetic Vision of Muriel period of renewed literary production amid the social Rukeyser, by Louise Kertesz. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980, protest and revolution of the 1960s, as, at the same Rukeyser, Muriel. The Life of Poetry. Ashfield, Mass.: Paris time, many feminists and women poets were coming Press, 1996. to regard her—politically, if not aesthetically—as a lit- erary foremother. This regard is evident in that the Maggie Gordon titles of two POETRY ANTHOLOGIES edited and including work by women during this period—No More Masks! RUTSALA, VERN (1934– ) Vern Rutsala is a (1973) and The World Split Open (1974)—refer directly prominent Northwest poet and an important voice in to Rukeyser’s poetry. The latter alludes to the poem western American literature. Starting with the publica- “Käthe Kollwitz” (1968), in which the poet questions tion of his first collection, The Window (1964), his what the effect would be “if one woman told the truth poetry has sought to uncover the intricate relationships about her life.” In this poem Rukeyser identifies her in daily lives, with a particular focus on the importance double in the early 20th-century German artist whose of place. Like the earlier Northwest poet Theodore haunting black-and-white prints and woodcut images ROETHKE, his work finds its substance in exploring depict suffering caused by war and other social injus- regional differences and circumstances. Yet Rutsala’s use tices. The poem, separated into five sections, reflects of locality achieves universal significance through a con- Rukeyser’s tendency to group poems into sequences stant inquiry into shared existential conditions, and clusters (similar, in some ways, to those of Hart moments in the routine patterns of our lives when each CRANE; his THE BRIDGE is often likened to Rukeyser’s The- of us is confronted with the absolute freedom of choice. ory of Flight, because it is a modernist poem that uses What the critic Erik Muller calls “a critique of practical an object representative of technological progress as a living” opens the poems to a range of such concerns positive image of human potential). Like fellow mod- with the past and its place in the poet’s ongoing life (23). 436 RUTSALA, VERN

Born in McCall, Idaho, Rutsala has spent the tracking (1985). In these, Rutsala returns to his child- greater portion of his life in Portland, Oregon, where hood in order to explore how present-day experiences he teaches at Lewis and Clark College. He has are informed not only by our personal past but by our received fellowships from the National Endowment memories of a common past. for the Arts (1974 and 1979) and the Guggenheim In “Long Distance” (1985), Rutsala writes, “The only Foundation (1982). His most recent book, Little way out is against the law,” and against, that is, the Known Sports (1994), a collection of prose poems—of comfortable routines our lives create for us. Our rela- which he was an early practitioner, shaping the form tionship to the past is constantly refigured and for himself in the early 1960s—was the winner of the reformed, and the poet must be prepared to live in this Juniper Prize. continuum. “The present is all transition,” he writes, A proponent of free verse, Rutsala revels in the sub- “each man his own / agent against himself” “Long Dis- tleties of nuance and phrase associated with the com- tance.” In this way, the individual is paramount in Rut- mon American idiom (see PROSODY AND FREE VERSE). His sala’s understanding of the struggle of life; at some work over the years has developed through various point each must stand alone. And yet, throughout the phases of experimentation with line length and form, poems, the poet employs the language of common such as in the prose poem collections Paragraphs people, aware of the shared value of their failures as (1978) and Little Known Sports. The short, sometimes well as of their triumphs. almost voyeuristic views of the daily world found in Paragraphs reinforce the poet’s quiet intensity as a dis- BIBLIOGRAPHY Muller, Erik. Vern Rutsala. Boise, Idaho: Boise State Univer- coverer of the hidden workings of everyday life. Two of sity, 1998. his most important collections to date are the sequen- tial Walking Home from the Icehouse (1981) and Back- George Moore C S D

SALAAM, KALAMU YA (1947– ) Kalamu town, Massachusetts. He has also edited some of the ya Salaam is best known as a member of the BLACK ARTS most important African-American journals and MOVEMENT. The fundamental goal of these poets is the anthologies to date, including African American Review, liberation of African peoples from forms, images, and 360 Degrees, and the Black Collegian. subject matters that deny them complete humanity. His The core of Salaam’s poetry is revolution. Explicit poetic style is the epitome of the new black aesthetic and explosive imagery drive his poetry, as he tries to critics of the late 1960s. His use of “linguistic libera- shock the reader from mindless acceptance of main- tion”—an aggressive assault upon and refashioning of stream definitions. He also uses juxtaposition, showing the English language—attempts to make a foreign the irony or contradiction between verbalized princi- tongue speak for a group that the language has tradi- ples and actualized behavior. Salaam seeks to exploit tionally oppressed. As he says in the introduction to the the space between the rhetorical principles and the unpublished A Precise Tenderness, “I am always inter- behavior of the dominant class, which allows space for ested in propagating and extending the African aes- the oppressed to find their own humanity, beauty and thetic. What makes my poetry ‘Black’ is much more worth. This is seen in “Words Have Meaning / But Only than subject matter. World-view and structure. Tradi- in Context” (1989): “All men are created equal was first tion and innovation. Culture and consciousness. All said by people who owned slaves / The land of the free that” (3). Primary aspects of his poetry include the nar- was stolen from the native Americans.” He demon- rative stream of consciousness; linguistic liberation of strates that terms and meanings are arbitrary, political, terms, concepts, and icons; humor/satire; the applica- and subjectively fashioned and must be manipulated to tion of musical rhythms and structures in printed uncover our metaphoric essence through our actions. poetry; and didactic text. His work perpetuates the tra- In “Sun Song XIII” (1994), he redefines beauty: Beauty dition of Amiri BARAKA, Nikki GIOVANNI, Sonia SANCHEZ, is no longer in the eye of language’s power brokers, but Hoyt Fuller, Larry Neal, and Etheridge KNIGHT. in the actions of one who is able to rise above life’s Born Vallery Ferdinand III in New Orleans, his first oppression and grime and shine. At the center of his book, The Blues Merchant: Songs for Blkfolk, was pub- work is the desire to liberate people of color from a lan- lished in 1969. He is the recipient the 1995 Louisiana guage that has been used to oppress them. Literature Fellow, a 1997 Mayor Marc Morial’s Arts BIBLIOGRAPHY Award, the 1998 Louisiana Endowment for the Ward, Jerry. “Kalamu ya Salaam: A Primary Bibliography (in Humanities Award, and a 1999 Senior Literature Fel- Progress).” Mississippi Quarterly. LI.1 (winter 1997–98): lowship from the Fine Arts Work Center in Province- 105–148.

437 438 SALTER, MARY JO ya Salaam, Kalamu. Introduction to A Precise Tenderness. Salter’s extensive travels in Iceland, Japan, and Unpublished, manuscript courtesy of Kalamu ya Salaam, France have given rise to numerous poems in which 2001. travel and the experience of foreignness become C. Liegh McInnis metaphors for movement into different mentalities and perspectives. Craft and art are strong presences in SALTER, MARY JO (1954– ) A distinguish- Salter’s subject matter as well, and much of her work ing element of poetry is that a poem’s form can signify imagines the lives and preoccupations of artists and as much as its vocabulary—a relationship made par- inventors, from a sidewalk chalk artist in “The Rebirth ticularly apparent in the poems of Mary Jo Salter. A of Venus” to Emily Dickinson, Robert FROST, and superb craftsperson who delights in using form like a Thomas Jefferson to her own mother, a painter whose jeweler’s setting to display every facet of a word or work (and death from cancer) occasioned many of phrase, Salter deftly reveals the universal in personal Salter’s poems. Domestic objects—a refrigerator mag- experiences, objects, and places. Often humorous and net, the Christmas tree, her father’s home movies—are poignant at once, her poems have an appealing humil- treated with the same care as a painting by Titian. ity and a sure-footed confidence. Her love of double- Uniquely masterful in her exaltation of the daily and meanings and puns is much in evidence (showing the the domestic, Salter expresses the correlations among influences of W. H. AUDEN and James MERRILL). She the most mundane objects and experiences with a seem- uses her fluency with traditional forms to interpret ingly effortless interpolation of poetic resonance into and reinvent formal poetry, to both playful and everyday life, formalizing it as if to hint that a grand solemn effects. scheme does indeed underpin all human experience. Born in Detroit, Salter was educated at Harvard, BIBLIOGRAPHY where she studied under Elizabeth BISHOP and Robert Taylor, Henry. “Faith and Practice: The Poems of Mary Jo Fitzgerald, and at Cambridge University. In addition to Salter.” Hollins Critic XXXVII.1 (February 2000): 1–6. four collections of poems, Salter is the author of a chil- Whited, Stephen. “Mary Jo Salter.” Book (March/April 1999). dren’s book. She has received numerous awards, Available online. URL: www.bookmagazine.com/archive/ including an Amy LOWELL Poetry Travelling Scholar- issue3/poetics.shtml. Downloaded February 2003. ship in 1996, and she is a coeditor of the Norton Amy Glynn Greacen Anthology of Poetry. Her second collection, Unfinished Painting, was the Lamont Poetry Selection for 1988. SAMPERI, FRANK (1933–1991) Frank Sam- She has been the Emily Dickinson Senior Lecturer in peri sought the ideal in eternal forms and represented the Humanities at Mount Holyoke College. primarily single images in space and time. Particularly Salter exploits the familiar sounds and rhythms of Samperi considered the position of “the eternal” in time; formal poetry to evoke particular moods; she opens similar to the OBJECTIVIST poets, he refused MODERNISM’s “Chernobyl” (1989) with a familiar, singsong conven- nostalgic attempt to recover lost time. Instead he tion from children’s storytelling: “Once upon a time / focused on “the consciousness of objects in time, but The word alone was scary.” Her vocabulary and regu- removed from their dependence upon time” (Faust lar abab rhymed lines (a system in which alternating 248). Early influences on Samperi’s work include Louis lines rhyme), including many feminine endings, rever- ZUKOFSKY and Cid CORMAN. Samperi shared significant berate surprisingly against the poem’s grim subject correspondences throughout his life with Corman and matter to remind us of how quickly disasters become Theodore ENSLIN, as well as the Australian poet Clive distant stories. In “Elegies for Etsuko” (1989), the sui- Faust, and he admired his contemporary, Robert Lax, for cide of a young friend is treated in a series of poems “the Franciscan sensibility of his writing” (Miller and with structures from villanelle to free verse, creating a Zurbrugg 12). formal mirror of the many conflicting responses we Samperi was born in Brooklyn, a city often celebrated have to such losses. through “snapshots” in his poetry. He served in the SANCHEZ, SONIA 439

United States Army in the Korean War from 1953–55. tural nationalism and feminism, Sanchez has written Shortly after his return, he began to publish; his first col- extensively about issues of justice and equality in lection, Song Book, appeared in 1960. Samperi subse- American society, as a public intellectual and as a poet. quently published several extended series of poetry, such Among the poets that emerged from the Black Arts as The Prefiguration (1971) and Quadrifariam (1973). movement, including Nikki GIOVANNI, Haki MADHUBUTI, Samperi’s untitled poems are both spiritual and and Amiri BARAKA, Sanchez may be the most successful metaphysical: He calls, in Quadrifariam, for a “theolog- at adapting both form and content to reflect her ical” poetics, saying that he writes “for angels” and, con- growth as a poet and activist. sequently, does not “know the practical world.” Despite Sanchez was born Wilsonia Benita Driver in Birm- these transcendent ideals, however, Samperi is also ingham, Alabama, and moved to Harlem as an adoles- concerned with the details of ordinary life—depicting cent. She attended Hunter College, graduating in such images as pigeons flocking near a tree, a woman 1955, and studied poetry at New York University. She gathering hill flowers, and children in a valley. In The has taught at Temple University and has received Triune (1969), for example, Samperi describes “seeing numerous honors, including PEN writing awards children in the midst of a valley / the stars wood beyond (1969 and 1993) and an American Book Award for wood beyond a river.” Here Samperi not only renders homegirls and hand grenades (1985). the layering effect of the natural world, but he also fore- In 1974 Sanchez published A Blues Book for Blue grounds the position of the child in this vision. The rep- Black Magical Women, which traces the development of etition of “wood beyond” and other phrases gesture to a black female consciousness through poetry. The that mysterious “Eternal Form” that lies beyond the poems evoke the folk spirit of black cultural national- pastoral scene, just before the poem proceeds to ism through imagery and metaphor, as expressed in describe that “Back street / drunk” in the city. the sequence entitled “Part Two: Past,” in which she In addition to the tensions between the ideal and the describes African-American hairstyles and music as material, as well as life in the country and life in the city, cultural forms that are blended within American tradi- Samperi is also keenly interested in the legacy of the tions. Through metaphor, she suggests that the “birth” poet and his or her craft. For example, he claims in Anti- of her braids “cut a blue / song for america.” Hero (1973), that “it is not the writer’s job to seek out the Sanchez calls attention to trauma, healing, joy, and latest innovations; he has ancient teachers and with collective memory as expressed by black cultural tra- them he silently converses.” In silent conversations with ditions and family history, with many poems illustrat- his IMAGIST predecessors, Samperi wrote poetry that, like ing the uncertain progress of African Americans toward the haiku form, makes minimalist linguistic statements. justice and equality. “Sister’s Voice” (1995) describes These statements often only contain one- or two-word her brother’s internal struggles and eventual death lines, forcing confrontation with not only the words, but from AIDS, tracing his decline due to drug addiction, also the white space of the page that surrounds them. limited communication skills (“he specialized in gen- BIBLIOGRAPHY eralize”), and increasing isolation from family, commu- Faust, Clive. “Time and Eternity in Frank Samperi’s Letters.” nity, and history; ultimately he “denied his father’s Sulfur 31 (fall 1992): 245–252. signature / damned his sister’s overture.” Stylistically a Miller, David, and Nicholas Zurbrugg. Introduction to The subtly crafted rhyme scheme recalls the musicality of ABCs of Robert Lax. Devon, England: Stride, 1999, p. 12. African-American urban dialect, while the subject mat- Aimee L. Pozorski ter powerfully conveys the despair and restlessness that can result from unstable relationships with family SANCHEZ, SONIA (1934– ) Sonia Sanchez and community. began her career during the BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT of Sanchez depicts African-American cultural life real- the 1960s and 1970s, a period of black nationalist istically and sympathetically. Her rigorous attention to influence over art and politics. Inspired by black cul- form and idea reminds readers that the art of poetry 440 SANDBURG, CARL requires periodic reinvention, if it is to express the 1909–12, as a city hall reporter, as a secretary for the continuing struggles of ordinary people for justice, mayor of Milwaukee, as city editor of the Social Demo- love, and community unity. cratic Herald, and as a staff writer of the Milwaukee Leader. Sandburg won the Poetry Society of America BIBLIOGRAPHY Award (1919 and 1921), the Friends of Literature Evans, Mari, ed. Black Women Writers 1950–1980: A Critical Award (1934), the Roosevelt Memorial Association Evaluation. New York: Anchor Books, 1984. Quashie, Kevin Everod, Joyce Lausch, and Keith D. Miller. Prize for biography (1939), the Pulitzer Prize for his- New Bones: Contemporary Black Writers in America. Upper tory (1940) and for poetry (1951), and the American Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 2001. Academy Gold Medal (1952). Harriet Monroe, who published some of Sandburg’s David M. Jones CHICAGO POEMS in Poetry, officially introduced him to the world of poetry readers in 1914. Readers and crit- SANDBURG, CARL (1878–1967) Carl Sand- ics alike were captivated by his use of free verse (see burg, one of the most celebrated poets of his genera- PROSODY AND FREE VERSE) in such poems as “Chicago” tion, was devoted to issues of democracy and the voice (1914), which coupled innovative form and imagery to of the people in the tradition of Walt Whitman, Edgar introduce the city as a “Hog Butcher for the World” Lee MASTERS, and Vachel LINDSAY. The author of books and “City of the Big Shoulders.” His use of plain speech of poems, children’s books, biographies, and other in short, descriptive poems, such as “Fog” (1916), work, Sandburg was known for celebrating American which imagines the fog “on little cat feet” appearing folk life and for his experiments with language, “over harbor and city,” and his keen attention to devel- wherein he attempted to capture the voice of common oping the voice of working people redefined the Amer- people. His work experience as a manual laborer, cou- ican poetic tradition. pled with the vision of the United States he saw in his Cornhuskers appeared in 1918 to many of the same travels, proved foundational to his later effort at dem- positive reviews as the Chicago Poems (1916), all of ocratic verse. which generally noted Sandburg’s unusual use of form Carl August Sandburg was born to Swedish immi- and his dedication to democratic voices. “Gargoyle” grant parents in Galesburg, Illinois. Sandburg finished (1918) represents Sandburg’s experimentation with public schooling in 1891, upon his graduation from clear language: “A fist hit the mouth: knuckles of gun- eighth grade, when he began working a series of labor- metal driven by an electric wrist and shoulder. / It was intensive jobs, such as harvesting ice and delivering a child’s dream of an arm.” Three original collections of milk. In 1897 he left home aboard a railroad car, poems were published in the 1920s, Smoke and Steel choosing the life of a hobo, moving from town to town, (1920), Slabs of the Sunburnt West (1922), and Good and working odd jobs across the Midwest. Through Morning, America (1928). Two edited collections of these experiences, he developed a keen sense of “the Sandburg’s work, Hughes Mearns’s Poems and Rebecca people” and the great disparities between the wealthy West’s Selected Poems, appeared in 1926. Some critics and working class. In 1898 he served in the Spanish- objected to Sandburg’s work, calling it prose, but American War. Stationed in Puerto Rico, he wrote let- Aldous Huxley defended Sandburg in his 1923 essay ters home that were featured in the local paper. “The Subject Matter of Poetry.” Sandburg’s service as a veteran entitled him to receive From 1926 to 1939 Sandburg devoted himself to free college tuition, something he pursued by enrolling researching and writing two massive biographies about in Galesburg’s Lombard College upon his return home. Lincoln, the two-volume 1926 Abraham Lincoln: The From 1902 Sandburg worked for a series of small mag- Prairie Years and the four-volume 1939 Abraham Lin- azines while he toured the country giving speeches on coln: The War Years. Sandburg’s love of Lincoln was Whitman and Abraham Lincoln. Sandburg’s love of reflected in such poems as the 1918 “Cool Tombs,” politics played out in work as a journalist from which reflects on the role of death for both the famous, SANDERS, ED 441

who “forgot the copperheads and the assassin ...in nence in the late 1960s. Influenced by Allen GINSBERG the dust, in the cool tombs,” and ordinary people, who and first published by Lawrence FERLINGHETTI, Sanders’ “get more than the lovers . . . in the dust . . . in the poetry is a hybrid product of the hippie movement and cool tombs.” the Beat generation that preceded it. In this respect, he Sandburg’s epic The People, Yes, a book-length poem is in the company of activist poets, such as Charles on the Great Depression, was published in 1936. Sim- OLSON and John WEINERS. ilar to the poems before these, Sandburg’s voice medi- Sanders was born and raised in Kansas City, Mis- tated on the people, celebrating the possibilities of souri. He dropped out of Missouri University in 1958 democratic writing: “These are heroes then—among and traveled to New York City. In 1964 he helped the plain people—Heroes, did you say? And why not?” found the poetry-music ensemble the Fugs with Tuli Sandburg sought greater understanding of the role of Kupferberg, during a period in which Sanders owned poetry as a source of power through representation. the famous Peace Eye Bookstore in the East Village. After 1936 Sandburg worked for a series of newspa- Both the Fugs and the Peace Eye Bookstore were cor- pers and universities. His poetry moved away from nerstones of the emerging counterculture and were serious social commentary toward work about nature forums for Sanders’s poetry. Yet surprisingly, perhaps, and children. His later poetry consisted of Bronze Wood Sanders’s most famous and best-selling book is The (1941), Harvest Poems, 1910–1960 (1960), Six New Family (1971), a well-documented account of the Poems and a Parable (1961), and Honey and Salt (1963). Manson family murders, written in prose salted with He also continued as an active Lincoln scholar. In 1959 terse poetic commentary on the cataclysm that ended he gave the annual Lincoln Day address before a joint the 1960s. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship session of Congress. Sandburg’s impressive poetic (1983) and a National Endowment for the Arts Fel- career stretched to include 22 books of poetry, nine of lowship (1987). His book Thirsting for Peace in a Rag- which appeared posthumously, including collections ing Century: Selected Poems 1961–1985 won an and reprints of his earlier work, such as The Complete American Book Award in 1988. Poems of Carl Sandburg (1969 and 1970), and poetry Similar to the earlier Beat poetry, Sanders’s writing in for children. the 1960s was often overtly political and discussed social issues as a subtext. “We demand the Politics of BIBLIOGRAPHY Ecstasy!” was one of his most memorable mottoes and Epstein, Joseph. “‘The People’s Poet.’” Commentary (May reflects his participation in the political moments of 1992): 47–52. Huxley, Aldous. “The Subject Matter of Poetry.” In Collected that turbulent decade. “Hymn to the Rebel Café” Essays. New York: Harper, 1958. (1993), for example, opens with a tribute to the young Kostelnick, Charles. “Sandburg, Futurism, and the Aes- radicals of the 1960s: “They were planning a revolu- thetics of Urban Dynamism.” American Poetry 8 (fall tion / to end want & hunger.” 1990): 46–56. Sanders works in syllabically brief lines, often Niven, Penelope. Carl Sandburg: A Biography. New York: arranged in chaotic form on the page. He balances the Scribners, 1991. heavy introspection of the poetic impulse with a dose van Doren, Carl. “Carl Sandburg: Flame and Slag.” In Many of ribald humor: One of the defining qualities of his Minds. New York: Knopf, 1924. Reprint, Port Washing- work is its tone of sheer irreverence. In his poetry ton, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1966. Sanders celebrates nature, the animal urges that propel Yannella, Philip R. The Other Carl Sandburg. Jackson: Uni- us, and the organic functions of the body. versity Press of Mississippi, 1996. In college he was trained in the classics and studied J. Elizabeth Clark Latin and Greek. The classical influence persists in his poetry. “Under the Quercus” (1993), is composed in SANDERS, ED (1939– ) Ed Sanders belongs Latin and followed by Sanders’s translation in English: to the second wave of BEAT poets who came to promi- “Hic jacet Peeper/ qui anas celerrima et optima erat” 442 SANER, REG

(‘Here lies Peeper / who was a duck most swift and for his long-standing commitment to western Ameri- fine’).” Even more experimental works, such as “Sheep can concerns, in both his poetry and essays on nature. Fuck Poem” (1988), exhibit classical influences. More than a simple regionalist, Saner attempts to Sanders often punctuates his poetry with hand-drawn capture the open spirit of the West as it was before the hieroglyphs—sometimes reproductions from ancient displacement of Native peoples. At the same time, he Egyptian sources, more often of his own invention. is not an apologist for western expansion, but a poet Recently Sanders has devoted himself to the devel- concerned with the interaction of past and present cul- opment of what he calls “investigative poetry,” or tures. Many of his poems bear the titles of western poetry written in the style of investigative journalism, place names, such as “August Evening at Crater Lake” which is a medium that corresponds well to political (1976), “Anasazi at Mesa Verde” (1976), and “Reaching activism. Sanders has remained active as public Keet Seel” (1987). His Fulbright years in Italy also pro- reader of poetry—at times, linked to environmental- vided sources for his passion for cultures, in ways con- ism—and as a musician, often recording poetry and trasting with but also complementing his love of music together. American wilderness. In such poems as “Waking to the Ceiling of an Italian Farmhouse” (1984) and “The BIBLIOGRAPHY Vesuvius Variations” (1983), Saner revels in a thick his- Brooke, Horvath, ed. Review of Contemporary Fiction 19:1 tory of place; these poems are equal in their insights to (spring 1999). [Ed Sanders Issue]. Sanders, Ed. “Interview with Ed Sanders,” by Sean Thomas the western poems. “I need to travel to do my thing,” Dougherty. Long Shot 13 (1992): 87–90. Saner has recently said, “I have to be physically, wher- ever it is I’m writing about. In a way, I write with my Aaron Parrett feet” (qtd. in Libid). In “Road Life” (1982), he further explores this SANER, REG (1931– ) Reg Saner is part of a theme of geographical travel as the poet’s passage new generation of nature poets. His concerns are not through life. The speaker is called out into the world— solely with the beauty manifest in wilderness, such as ”U.S. 36 has always poured possibilities / through your that which surrounds his Boulder, Colorado, home, hometown”—only to find it always new—“Because but rather with the environmental concerns that would you’re a blur making time / like everyone else you’ve make such open spaces sustainable into the future. His had to re-invent the wheel.” Again, in “Skiing Alone free verse poetry continues a line of American roman- near the Divide” (1981), the poet writes of his experi- tic poets who descend from Walt Whitman and Wal- ence as explorer: The “compass is wind / incessant and lace STEVENS (see PROSODY AND FREE VERSE). But unlike westerly.” The poet’s identity forms through his con- Stevens, Saner avoids taking moral sides, preferring stant uncovering of natural and cultural places. instead to present the world as it is in its natural com- BIBLIOGRAPHY plexity. As a Shakespearean scholar, Saner writes with Libid, Jon. “Saner Retires while He Still Has ‘Juice,’” Caril- an understanding of the well-crafted rhythms and lon. Available online. URL: www.colorado.edu/Carillon/ wordplay of the Renaissance masters. volume34/stories/6–2juice.html. Downloaded October Saner was born in Jacksonville, Illinois. He took a 22, 1999. Fulbright Fellowship in Florence, Italy, in 1960. His Moore, George. “Essay on Air.” Bloomsbury Review. 5.9 (June first book, Climbing into the Roots (1976), won the Walt 1985): 12–13. Whitman Award. His second collection, So This Is the George Moore Map (1981), was selected by Derek WALCOTT for the National Poetry Series Open Competition. His fourth collection, Red Letters, was published as part of the SAN FRANCISCO RENAISSANCE In the Quarterly Review of Literature’s 1989 book award. Saner two decades following World War II, an overarching was also awarded the Wallace Stegner Award in 1998 reevaluation of art and its purpose occurred. This SAN FRANCISCO RENAISSANCE 443

reconsideration gave rise to a number of identifiable GIST precisionism; satire and self-projection; SURREAL- movements and schools worldwide in the same period; ISM; personalist meditation” (Davidson 4). Robert Dun- even though those movements had some philosophical can, Lew Welch, Kenneth PATCHEN, Bob KAUFMAN, and aesthetic similarities, each had distinctive qualities Diane DI PRIMA, and Lenore Kandel are also among that set it apart from the others. In the United States, those whose names often appear in assessments of the the postwar period saw the simultaneous emergence of renaissance, but any version of the list might include four particular poetic phenomena: the BLACK MOUNTAIN up to 30 names, from Amiri BARAKA and Charles SCHOOL, BEAT POETRY, the NEW YORK SCHOOL, and the San BUKOWSKI to Anne WALDMAN and David Rafael Wang; Francisco Renaissance. There is much description and not surprisingly, due to prevailing 1950s attitudes, definition that might seemingly fit any or all of these, there were few women and few minorities. and there are many individuals whose names legiti- The diversity of style so evident in the work of these mately are listed among the notable figures of more poets is balanced by a common goal and concern. San than one of them. Warren French, who tends to con- Francisco Renaissance poets wanted a reborn American flate the Beat and the Renaissance, sets the outer limits romanticism to embody poetry’s return from academic of the Renaissance period between the 1944 launch of institutions to the masses in the streets, to speak in the the first issue of Circle and the deaths of Kenneth language of the ordinary person (in the tradition of REXROTH in 1982 and Robert DUNCAN in 1988 (xviii), a William Carlos WILLIAMS) rather than of the academy, span of 40 years, but focuses on 1955–1960 as the and to concern itself with populist issues. Although oral most significant time. Michael DAVIDSON marks the performance is integral to their poetic practice (see Renaissance period “from the late 1940s to Jack SPICER’s POETRY IN PERFORMANCE), renaissance poets also found death in 1965” (6) and firmly situates it in the San outlets for their work in the pages of such periodicals as Francisco Bay area. George Leite’s Circle (1944) and, later, Barney Rosset’s One of the reasons for the familial relationship Evergreen Review (1957), and such publishing houses as between the so-called Beat generation and San Fran- Rosset’s Grove Press, James Laughlin’s New Directions, cisco Renaissance is that the renaissance, the rebirth of and Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Books (see POETRY PRESSES). poetry in San Francisco, is commonly dated from the Ferlinghetti, scholar and poet, has also been described incredible moment in October 1955 when the Six as “that rarest of persons—a practical-minded, vision- Gallery was the scene of Allen GINSBERG’s first public ary businessman” (French x). It took a San Francisco performance of HOWL, undoubtedly one of the most poet-publisher to recognize and promote so readily this important moments in American poetry; the master of poetry of place (although he resisted the strictures of ceremonies that evening was, REXROTH, who was a pre- regionally based definitions). The component parts of cursor influential in the development of most San San Francisco that provided the impetus for the renais- Francisco Renaissance poets, some of whom also read sance are its “long history of alternative religions . . . at that remarkable event: Philip WHALEN, Gary SNYDER, [and] long tradition of political radicalism” (Davidson Michael MCCLURE, and Philip Lamantia. Jack KEROUAC 11). Critic Michael Davidson’s analysis of the period was also there, liberally pouring out the wine and acknowledges, in fact, it stresses, the meld of historical musically urging the readers on with exclamations of context with cultural conditions that produced this par- “Go! Go!” This is the night which prompted Lawrence ticular poetics of place. Aboriginal and Asian religions, FERLINGHETTI to send Ginsberg the famous telegram, for example, are a major part of that “alternative” mix echoing Emerson’s to Whitman, welcoming him into and help to explain how San Francisco had “escaped his career and asking to publish the poem. The selec- the Puritan ethos” (Davidson 11) so dominant in the tion of poetry presented that night provides examples East. The hybrid culture produced in the Bay Area came of the variety of technique developing in these poets up against the diffused disillusionment of the and eventually encompassed by the term San Fran- post–World War II generation and thus generated a cisco Renaissance: “a vatic, CONFESSIONAL mode; IMA- regionally identifiable response. Only part of this 444 SAN FRANCISCO RENAISSANCE response is a concern shared by the New York Beat and long periods; Snyder spent nearly a decade living in renaissance poets. Asia. What unites them is their activist impulse, driven By virtue of his dual citizenship in these schools, primarily by their environmental conscience and paci- Ginsberg marks the similarities and differences in Beat ficist anarchism and addressing civil rights, gay rights, and renaissance sensibility. He is the clearest exemplar environmental issues, and American foreign and of the Beats, because his is enormous poetry, relentless domestic policy. These poets spoke in the vanguard of and overpowering, often right at the edge of compre- social and political movements; Ginsberg, for example, hensibility. It sustains an excruciating balance through voiced an antiglobalization position long before the the constant tension of its (and all Beat and renaissance term was coined. Davidson reports that, as “early as poetry’s) guy-wires: sex, politics, and mysticism—the 1958, Ginsberg was arguing with his father over the human body, mind, and spirit. The poems are physical need to reject monolithic solutions to world problems without shrinking from bodily function, intellectual in favor of more personal transformations” (29). without resorting to theoreticism, and spiritual with- Snyder likewise believed in the need for an immedi- out reduction to preaching. Although he speaks to the ate and local understanding as part of personal devel- universal, he does it through the particular, explicitly opment. Ultimately knowing place is essential to rather than metaphorically. These common aspects, knowing self, as the world is “an intense geography however, do not encompass all of the central concerns that is never far removed from [the] body” (qtd. in of renaissance poets. Ginsberg’s decidedly East Coast, Davidson 13). The landscape is part of the person, not urban poetry has no trace of the pronounced and par- something to have dominion over, but something to adoxical urban ecopoeticism of San Francisco. The honor and respect. This is an example of how the mul- West Coast was still close enough to its wilderness past tireligious historical background of San Francisco and present for the natural world to be an essential influences local attitude: The earth is not to be con- thread in the genetics of northern California poetry, quered and dominated in the way of the Old Testa- and its poets were still affected by that wilderness as ment, but it is to be lived with harmoniously, much as they were by the city. Kerouac’s city-boy recognizing that it is not separate, not an adversary. In inability to cope mentally with the seclusion of Fer- Hallelujah Anyway (1960), a book of picture-poems linghetti’s cabin in Big Sur or, on Snyder’s suggestion, blending language and image, Patchen writes, “Inside the isolation of a firewatch tower in the Cascades is the Flower there is room for every sower,” but “The partially the result of an eastern detachment from Best Hope Is that one of these days the ground will get nature and is the perfect demonstration of a funda- disgusted enough just to walk away,” because people mental difference between the two groups. are so involved with declaring platforms that they neg- Further Davidson points to the characteristics that lect the one on which they are physically supported. In differentiate the San Francisco poets from each other by “Junkman’s Obbligato” (1958), Ferlinghetti knows identifying their personal literary lineage: the apocalyp- “The real earthquake is coming. / [He] can feel the tic and bardic style of romantic William Blake and building shake” and waits, in “I Am Waiting” (1958), Whitman in Duncan, William EVERSON, and Rexroth; “for forests and animals / to reclaim the earth as theirs.” the biting satire of Guillaume Apollinaire and Jacques In these ways the poets warn of the dangers of abuse Prévert in the café poems of Ferlinghetti; Asian nature and neglect of the planet at the same time as they poetry and British romanticism in Rexroth, Snyder, underscore the reciprocity inherent in all aspects of Welch, and Whalen; the introspection of Samuel Taylor place. Any surrounding is more than merely a place to Coleridge in McClure, Whalen, and Duncan; Surreal- be—it affects the way of being. ism in Philip Lamantia, Duncan, Jack SPICER, Fer- Ginsberg would have us put our own “queer shoul- linghetti, Kaufman, and McClure (17). These poets led der to the wheel” (“America” 1956), whatever kind of very individual lives, unlike the somewhat communal shoulder we may have and whatever our wheel might Beats, traveling and living apart at great distances for be. The personality and disposition of the San Francisco SCHNACKENBERG, GJERTRUD 445

Renaissance poets varied widely; Thomas Parkinson O Books and has also received two National Endow- describes “the genuine vigor and force of Allen Gins- ment for the Arts Fellowships (1976 and 1986), a berg . . . the extraordinary wit and hilarity of Lawrence Before Columbus Foundation Award (1988), and a Ferlinghetti . . . the obvious intelligence, learning and Lawrence Lipton Award (1988). decency of Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen, the hard The central aim of Scalapino’s writing has been to integrity of Michael McClure” (qtd. in French 57). These make it as close to reality as possible, to do away with characteristics and the combination of common speech the separation of presentation and representation in and oral performance in San Francisco Renaissance language. In the recent book-length poem, The Front poetry create a dialogue between speaker and listener, Matter Dead Souls (1996), she describes this aim as a removing traditional boundaries so that the immediacy desire, “to bring (actually to be) ‘the American grain.’” and intimacy of the poetry become a personal call to a Scalapino seeks to integrate William Carlos WILLIAMS’s personal response of experience and activism. By exam- desire for an American vernacular with an analysis of ple, the poems model the need both to feel and to act in how we represent what we are able to understand and the body, mind, and spirit. witness in public spaces. In another recent book-length BIBLIOGRAPHY poem, New Time (1999), this aim results in a detailed Davidson, Michael. The San Francisco Renaissance: Poetics and social choreography, an attention to who moves and Community at Mid-Century. New York: Cambridge Univer- how they move, that makes apparent the social sity Press, 1989. processes by which action becomes meaning: “groups French, Warren. The San Francisco Poetry Renaissance ridiculing for playing, their being outside playing. but / 1955–1960. Boston: Twayne, 1991. ridiculing the characteristic which is that, their not A. Mary Murphy doing it.” The poem challenges the distinctions between thought and appearance and uses this to sug- SCALAPINO, LESLIE (1947– ) Leslie gest that “social existence” is comprised of both activity Scalapino’s work has made a significant contribution to (“playing”) and discourse (“ridiculing”). the understanding of poetry as a process engaged with Scalapino’s dense and elliptical style aims to disrupt questions of perception. Her questioning of how “phe- the processes that allow racism, sexism, and poverty to nomena appear to unfold” aims to create “a perspective appear natural. Her concern with producing the “real,” that is socially democratic, individual (in the sense of with pointing out that language both constructs and specific) and limitless” (119). She is often identified disrupts social meaning, has been consistently moti- with the LANGUAGE SCHOOL of writing, and her work’s vated by a critique of social injustice. interest in the connections between gender and repre- BIBLIOGRAPHY sentation has affinities with that of such poets as Elizabeth Frost. “Signifyin(g) on Stein: The Revisionist Poet- Bernadette MAYER, Lyn HEJINIAN, Susan HOWE, and Joan ics of Harryette Mullen and Leslie Scalapino.” Postmodern RETALLACK. Her interest in the interconnections between Culture 5.3 (1995). Available online. URL: http://muse. knowledge and repetition has been more broadly influ- jhu.edu/journals/postmodern_culture/v005/5.3frost.html. enced by the work of experimental such poets as Robert Downloaded January 2004. GRENIER, Gertrude STEIN, and Robert DUNCAN. Scalapino Leslie. “An Interview with Leslie Scalapino. Con- Scalapino was born in Santa Barbara, California, but ducted by Edward Foster.” Talisman 8 (1992): 32–41. spent significant parts of her childhood traveling in ———. How Phenomena Appear to Unfold. Elmwood, Conn.: Southeast Asia. She gained her B.A. from Reed College Potes and Poets Press, 1989. and her M.A. from the University of California, Berke- Nicky Marsh ley. Her first book, The Woman Who Could Read the Minds of Dogs, was published in 1976, and 17 collec- SCHNACKENBERG, GJERTRUD (1953– ) tions, which variously combine poetry, fiction, plays Gjertrud Schnackenberg is often identified with the and essays, have followed. She has been the editor of NEW FORMALISM movement, including Mark JARMAN and 446 SCHUYLER, JAMES

Rafael CAMPO. She is a traditional and highly intellec- lies, both personal and poetic, and the consequences of tual poet, and her more remote influences extend to art. The body of Gjertrud Schnackenberg’s work forms Dante, William Butler Yeats, and T. S. ELIOT. Her a record of a poet looking, throughout all time and lit- poems, like theirs, emphasize rhyme, meter, and story, erature, for her place in the world of poetry. while she seems to pursue a particular interest in the BIBLIOGRAPHY juxtaposition of history, art, and religion. Pettingill, Pheobe. “Painful Mysteries.” New Leader 83, no. 4 Schnackenberg was born in Tacoma, Washington. (September 2000): 38. She has been the recipient of numerous awards for her Warren, Rosanna. “A Gilded Lapse of Time—A Review.” poetry, twice winning the prestigious Glascock Award New Republic 209, no. 11 (September 13, 1993): 37–42. for poetry while a student at Mount Holyoke College (1974, 1975). She went on to receive the Lavan Anna Priddy Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets (1983), among other prizes and fellowships; she SCHUYLER, JAMES (1923–1991) James has also been made a member of the American Acad- Schuyler was a central member of what has come to be emy of Arts and Sciences (1996). known as the NEW YORK SCHOOL of poets. His most Schnackenberg’s early use of hymn meter (the meter characteristic poems are strikingly direct and simple, of Emily Dickinson) eventually was replaced by the “as clear and satisfying as a glass of water,” in the apt terza rima (three-line stanzas with interlocking end words of William Corbett (52). As with the manner of rhymes) of A Gilded Lapse of Time (1992). Although her the 17th-century Dutch painter Jan Vermeer, Schuyler’s later work employs several, sometimes looser forms, writerly artifice is so complete as to be almost unde- she remains a formalist. The poem “Imaginary Prisons” tectable. Such casually perfect creations seem to have (1985) contains lines that seem to encapsulate many of been discovered rather than rendered, implicitly chal- the concerns of Schnackenberg’s poetry: history, grief, lenging any easy distinction between the natural and and writing. As she wrote in that poem, “It isn’t history the artificial. In his mature work Schuyler found a way if it isn’t written— / It’s written here, and written here to be wholly himself without self-consciousness. In his in memory.” The lines draw a connection between his- effort to put his whole self on the page, Schuyler tory and writing, and their ability in some respects to proves his indebtedness and devotion to the model overcome the tragic aspects of mortality. and inspiration of Walt Whitman. Schnackenberg’s references and interests seem all- Schuyler was born and raised in Washington, D.C., encompassing at times, and her poems are populated and East Aurora, New York, near Buffalo. He attended by such figures as St. Augustine, Dante, Piero della Bethany College in West Virginia from 1941 to 1943 Francesca, Mantegna, and Osip Mandlestam. Her and moved to New York City in the late 1940s, where father was a professor of history, and his presence is he lived, off and on, for the rest of his life. His first much felt throughout her work, perhaps most strongly book, a novel, Alfred and Guinevere, was published in in her first two books: Portraits and Elegies (1982) and 1958. In 1969 his first major collection of poetry, The Lamplit Answer (1985). A Gilded Lapse of Time, her Freely Espousing, was published, along with a novel, A third book, is divided into three sections: One Nest of Ninnies, cowritten with John ASHBERY. His 1981 addresses Dante, the second addresses Christ’s suffer- book, The Morning of the Poem, won a Pulitzer Prize. ing and resurrection as depicted in Renaissance and In his poem “A Few Days” (1985), Schuyler consid- Byzantine paintings, and the last addresses the poet ers an Ashbery “poem written in two / columns sup- Russian Osip Mandlestam, who was to die in one of posed to / be read simultaneously” and comments, Stalin’s labor camps—the victim, in a sense, of his writ- “John is devoted to the impossible.” Schuyler, by con- ing. Schnackenberg’s The Throne of Labdacus (2000) is trast, is devoted to the real: “All things are real / no one an extended meditation on the fate of Oedipus. The a symbol,” as he writes in “Letter to a Friend” (1972). link between all of these topics is the lineage of fami- David LEHMAN remarks of Schuyler that he is “commit- SCHWARTZ, DELMORE 447 ted to a vision of things as they are rather than as they Bagatelles [1986]), playwright (Shenandoah [1941]), might be in some idealized or reconfigured state” and literary critic (Selected Essays [1970]), Schwartz (246). Reality, for Schuyler, is its own defense. interacted with nearly every modern American poet Ashbery said of Schuyler that he is “a poet who from the late 1930s through the 1960s, most notably knows the names for things, and whose knowing proves with Allen TATE, Karl SHAPIRO, and Howard MOSS. something” (12). Schuyler’s knowing of the names for Schwartz was strongly influenced in his early poetry by things, and his insistence upon basing his poetry on the MODERNISM of T. S. ELIOT and by the IMAGIST SCHOOL such candid naming, spurred him to be truthful about of Ezra POUND, typified for Schwartz in the work of his homosexuality in poetry long before it was the stan- William Carlos WILLIAMS. Schwartz developed his own dard to be so. For later gay writers Schuyler’s poetics of unique voice—that of an existentialist dealing with the truthfulness and naturalness provided a way out of the Jewish diaspora—and influenced the direction of con- closet of elegant W. H. AUDEN-esque generalizations (in temporary poetry in his examination of the isolated which the beloved is referred to and addressed as an individual consciousness. Schwartz’s work is read less ungendered “you”) and away from the hyperbolic con- in the years since he was writing, and yet his presence fessionalism of Allen GINSBERG and his followers (see BEAT has been memorialized in Saul Bellow’s fictionalized POETRY and CONFESSIONAL POETRY). rendering of Schwartz in Humboldt’s Gift as well as in a For Schuyler, homosexuality is yet another of highly acclaimed biography by James Atlas. nature’s odd blooms. To live is to be natural, and to be Schwartz was born in Brooklyn, New York. After natural is to live. Life itself is a miracle, which the poet briefly attending the University of Wisconsin, celebrates in one of his greatest poems, “Hymn to Life” Schwartz received a B.A. in philosophy from New York (1974): “The days slide by and we feel we must / University in 1935. He undertook graduate studies at Stamp an impression on them. It is quite other. They Harvard University but left in 1937 without complet- stamp us.” ing his degree. The publication of In Dreams Begin Responsibilities led to his appointment as poetry editor BIBLIOGRAPHY of Partisan Review in 1939 and to a Guggenheim Fel- Ashbery, John. “Introduction to a Reading Given by James lowship in 1940. In 1955 he would serve as poetry Schuyler.” Denver Quarterly. (spring 1990): 10–12. Corbett, William. “Poet of the Present.” Denver Quarterly. editor for the New Republic. He taught at Harvard and (spring 1990): 49–52. several other universities. Following the 1959 publica- Lehman, David. The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New tion of Summer Knowledge: New and Selected Poems, York School of Poets. New York: Doubleday, 1998. 1939–1958, Schwartz was awarded the Bollingen Prize for poetry. Both the professional security of academic Don Adams tenure and the personal happiness of permanent rela- tionships proved elusive for Schwartz. In “The King- SCHWARTZ, DELMORE (1913–1966) After dom of Poetry” (1959), he writes, “poetry is like light, the publication of his first book, In Dreams Begin and it is light.” In his unabashed love of the trans- Responsibilities (1938), Delmore Schwartz became one forming power of language—“For Poetry magnifies of the best-known and most highly respected poets of and heightens reality”—his life as an American poet his day. He is often called a poet of “the middle genera- was devoted to the remorseless pursuit of vision. tion”—that is, as Bruce Bawer explains, a group of Schwartz identified his Eastern European heritage as American poets born between 1913 and 1917 and central to his poetry. He lived in “The shadow of Israel sharing similar biographical characteristics and literary and the shadow of Europe,” as he wrote in Shenandoah. careers (3–4). Schwartz is usually thought of in con- In “The Ballad of the Children of the Czar” (1938), nection with his contemporaries Randal JARRELL, John Schwartz drew upon that heritage, making connections BERRYMAN, and Robert LOWELL. As poet, editor (of Parti- between his own childhood and that of Nicholas II’s san Review), essayist (The Ego Is Always at the Wheel: children. Schwartz’s grandfather had served in the czar’s 448 SCHWERNER, ARMAND army, but Schwartz does not rely upon biographical painting La Grande Jatte. In the technique there are, he detail alone to integrate his life into history. The setting noted in his journal, “violations of perspective to gain is 1916, the eve of the Russian Revolution. The children collective experience” (qtd. in Pollet 268). Schwartz is of Nicholas II play with a bouncing ball in their father’s similarly concerned in his poem with composition, garden while Schwartz sits, “aged two, irrational,” in his striving, as he also wrote in his notes on the Schapiro father’s house in Brooklyn. In true imagist fashion (as lecture, “to make something which is more than itself; Atlas observes [134]), the moon that hovers over the which is inexhaustible; which turns into its contrary” czar’s children, their bounding ball, and the buttered (qtd. in Pollet 269). Describing the painting, where potato that the two-year-old Delmore eats are united. In “Everyone holds his heart within his hands,” Schwartz the intersection of the individual and history, Schwartz wonders if “immortality” is possible through art, a task finds tragedy: “the innocent are overtaken, / They are that requires “the labors of Hercules, Sisyphus, not innocent.” All in the poem labor under the Flaubert, Roebling”—the efforts of myth, literature, inescapable burden of history. and engineering. Can we look at this painting and pro- If history brings burdens, philosophy offers little claim with Flaubert: “Ils sont dans le vrai!” (“Theirs is consolation. A student of Alfred North Whitehead at the right way?”) For Schwartz, permanency through art Harvard, Schwartz brought a philosopher’s metaphor may be possible, but there is no consolation for him: to bear in one of his most anthologized poems, “In the The figures may stretch out their hands, but they are Naked Bed in Plato’s Cave” (1938). The setting is early too far away. For the individual poet, a dark vision pre- morning, one in which a car’s headlights, not fire (as vailed. While his own redemption proved impossible, Plato had depicted in his imagined cavern), illuminate Schwartz rendered eternal verities of beauty and isola- the wall. The sounds of trucks and milkmen and tion in a unique American vision. horses’ hooves fill the air as morning melts the scene. BIBLIOGRAPHY But if “History is unforgiven” in creating this perpetual Atlas, James. Delmore Schwartz: The Life of An American Poet. scene, there is beauty here too, an elegance in the ren- New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1977. dering of a scene in which shadow yields to light and Bawer, Bruce. The Middle Generation: The Lives and Poetry of morning distinguishes the features of the room—The Delmore Schwartz, Randall Jarrell, John Berryman, and light “kindled the looking glass, / Distinguished the Robert Lowell. Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1986. dresser and the white wall.” The poem, as Bruce Bawer Pollet, Elizabeth, ed. Portrait of Delmore: Journals and Notes has written, “is the produce of a mind which believed of Delmore Schwartz, 1939–1959. New York: Farrar, 1986. that it can achieve something important by setting ———. Shenandoah. New York: New Directions, 1941. one’s heart’s anguish into the constraining contexts of Schwartz, Delmore. The Ego Is Always at the Wheel: history, religion, philosophy, and the literary tradition” Bagatelles, edited by Robert Phillips. New York: New Directions, 1986. (121–122). In a poem that utilizes Platonic metaphor, quotes the prophet Ezekiel, and pays homage to Eliot’s Norbert Elliot THE WASTE LAND, Schwartz has created an enduring image of 1930s America, reminiscent of the paintings SCHWERNER, ARMAND (1927–1999) of Edward Hopper. Armand Schwerner is best remembered for his transla- The visual techniques of painting, indeed, influ- tions and his performances, as typified in his book- enced Schwartz throughout his career, and this influ- length serial poem THE TABLETS (1999) (see LONG AND ence is most evident in “Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon SERIAL POETRY). As an avid translator, Schwerner was along the Seine” (1959). In 1945 Schwartz attended a concerned with the relationship between the spoken lecture by art historian Meyer Schapiro on the 19th- and written word and how the transition from one to century French postimpressionist Georges Seurat. the other affected the meanings of language (see POETRY Schwartz noted Seurat’s technique of pointillism (the AND TRANSLATION). His nonlinear style recreates the use of tiny, brush-worked dots to create patterns) in his fragmented and uncertain nature of experience. SCHWERNER, ARMAND 449

Throughout his life Schwerner studied Buddhism, first often finds emptiness—it is amidst this terrain that as a student, and later as a lay priest. This fascination Schwerner creates his poems. Like the Scholar/Transla- with spirituality, coupled with the difficulties of lan- tor, the fictive interpreter of The Tablets, Schwerner guage, locates Schwerner in a tradition that includes both creates and is created by the poem he renders, such poets as George OPPEN, Jerome ROTHENBERG, with each undergoing changes as the poem progresses. Michael HELLER, and David ANTIN. As in Buddhism, a poem is composed of a series of per- Schwerner was born in Antwerp, left Belgium for ceptions, many of which are illusory. Reality is nothing France, and, with the Nazi invasion of Europe immi- more than an amalgamation of those contingencies we nent, finally immigrated to the United States in 1936. accept as truths, and we accept them, because, in some He studied French literature at Cornell and Columbia way, our lives require us to do so. Says Schwerner in Universities and pursued graduate studies at Columbia Tablet XIX (1976): “magic word floats out of my need in anthropology and literature. He taught at several for it,” and as need creates language, so too is truth cre- colleges and universities, including the College of ated by circumstances. And a truth does not remain a Staten Island, the City University of New York. He truth for long. received several awards, most notably three grants This constant change and shifting creates a palpable from the National Endowment for the Arts (1973, anxiety in Schwerner’s work. On one hand, Schwerner 1979, and 1987) and an award for contributions to recognizes values (whether poetic or ethical) as some- American literature from the Fund for Poetry (1991). thing ever shifting, and his poetry attempts to overturn Despite these honors and the production of more than whatever truths it posits. His poem “blood” (1999) 20 volumes of translations and original poetry, his says that writers “‘begin in joy and gladness and work rarely received wide critical attention. Much of descend therefrom / into despondency and madness.’ this neglect owes to the performative nature of his or or or or or or.” The stereotype of the poet as a work, and indeed, Schwerner’s allegiance to the spo- brooding and volatile person, who cannot create ken word is plainly evident in his verse (see POETRY IN except in the grip of turbulent emotions, is dispelled PERFORMANCE), since it favors the whimsical nature of by a single word: or. Or suggests an alternative, a speech over the static materiality of written language, choice. And where tradition would have us believe as in this excerpt from “the work” (1977): “it’s no good poets incapable of writing unless half-crazed by it’s closed the door is closed the energy / wave’s short- “despondency and madness,” Schwerner makes the circuited impossible not to sing.” poet less heroic and, in the process, more human. That language is essentially transient allows for its The act of becoming human—and taking risks to volatile behavior, and the meanings given to words are achieve that end—is a primary goal of Schwerner’s equally unstable. Ultimately the poet owns neither the poetry. In it, we see the travails of a man performing, words nor their meanings. In “sounds of the river as Kathryn VanSpanckeren says, “an unembarrassed Naranjana” (1983), Schwerner writes, “what I hear surgical examination of living tissues of the mind” keeps changing, the flute becomes a garbage truck.” (16). This internal investigation is turned outward, as The poem goes on to list many common sounds that, the reader is expected to accompany Schwerner, shar- when heard at length, come to resemble something ing in his introspection, often risking (mis)under- else. Therefore a flute over the stereo may, for a fleet- standing along with the author, in a work, which, as ing moment, remind one of a sound made by a garbage Schwerner relates, “allow[s] the reader to fall into the truck. Likewise words can be used in ways that are holes again and again” (qtd in VanSpanckeren 31). incompatible with their traditional meanings, for, as In an essay on The Tablets, Hank Lazer points out Schwerner asks in The Tablets, “What sorts of things that “particularly if one can resist the lure of using the store concepts?” poem as a site to display one’s (personal) craft, mastery, For Schwerner, those concepts often reside in unex- or grace, the poem may become a treasured site for dis- pected places. Where one looks for substance, one covery” (150). During his life, Schwerner was many 450 SEIDMAN, HUGH things: a student of Buddhism, a trained musician, a then his poetry has won numerous awards, and his performer, a translator and a poet. These activities collection, Selected Poems, 1965–1995, was chosen as exhibit the inquisitiveness present in all of Schwerner’s one of “25 Favorite Books of 1995” by the Village Voice. pursuits. By these methods Schwerner learns the Seidman’s primary terrain is that of difficult or con- patience of effort—this process is growth—and, as flicted emotion—the personal triumph marred by Willard Gingerich points out, “the process is never echoes of global disaster, the joyous new love undercut complete, has no telos (Gk. end)” (20). The end product by memories of loss. In his early work he approaches is a body of work that resists generalizations. Schw- these subjects through precise, even scientific, dissection erner has very little to say that is easily said. As the poet of the moment and its feelings. Academically trained in himself pointed out in The Tablets, “The greatest daring mathematics and physics, he often uses the vocabulary of is in resisting what comes easily,” and his work was nei- these disciplines to redefine objects and how they are ther written nor can it be read without a considerable seen. A heart becomes “the long sought / perpetual degree of sacrifice. engine, entropy zero, here” (“Blood Lord” [1974]). What we sense is the desire of the poet (and humanity) to BIBLIOGRAPHY name and control experience through the discipline of Foster, Edward, ed. Talisman 19 (1998). [Armand Schw- language, poetry, or science, while remaining aware of erner Special Issue.] Gingerich, Willard. “Sacred Forgeries and Translation of the impossibility or danger of doing so. In his middle Nothing in The Tablets of Armand Schwerner.” Talisman work, he adds an archetypal dimension by making con- 21/22 (2001): 18–26. nections to Egyptian, Greek, and other mythologies: “Let Lazer, Hank. “Sacred Forgeries and the Grounds of Poetic the light be the gilt sistrum / Let a waitress be Egypt’s Archeology: Armand Schwerner’s The Tablets.” Chicago sixty centuries” (“Cult of Isis” [1982]). More recently, he Review 46.6 (2000): 142–154. has continued to explore these themes but has shifted the Schwerner, Armand. “Armand Schwerner: An Interview by balance in his poems toward the personal. One of the Willard Gingerich.” American Poetry Review 24.5 (1995): strongest series of poems in his work is that exploring his 27–32. complicated relationship with his parents as they lived, VanSpanckeren, Kathryn. “Moonrise in Ancient Sumer: fell ill, and died: “Forgive me if I lift my hand to affirm. / Armand Schwerner’s The Tablets” American Poetry Review Or is it to question?” (“Did I Say Father?” [1995]), he 22.4 (1993): 15–19. writes to his father. “But who shall speak for her? / Who Chris Pusateri shall say her name?” (“The Senile” [1992]), he asks of a mother who remembers nothing due to Alzheimer’s. SEIDMAN, HUGH (1940– ) Hugh Seidman At his best Seidman combines poetic virtuosity with is an important heir to Louis ZUKOFSKY and the OBJEC- an eye that creates experiences an almost dizzying TIVISTS on one side, and yet his work is also influenced change in perspectives, as when a toy bear near a pair of by the Peruvian poet César Vallejo. Seidman joins a lovers becomes an icon of a benevolent Ursa Major (“Mr. direct, unsentimental poetic style with a strong histori- Bear” [1992]). What results is a complex voice that is cal sense and social conscience. In both form and con- compassionate, powerful, intelligent, and exacting. tent, he plays with perspective, moving from the intensely personal to the universal and back again in an BIBLIOGRAPHY effort to document both subjective experience and the Joseph, Lawrence. “Pure Song.” American Book Review abstract theory, timeless moment, or wider historical (December 1993): 27. Tillinghast, Richard. “Pleasure and Dazzlement.” New York context to which it is ironically or tragically juxtaposed. Times Book Review, May 1, 1983, 15, 23. “Scientist of poetry,” he writes, “they’re burning Zavatsky, Bill. “Breaking In and Out of Self.” New York Times Newark.” (“The Last American Dream” [1970]). Book Review, December 26, 1971, 6, 15. Seidman was born in Brooklyn, New York. In 1969 he won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. Since Lily Phillips “SELF-PORTRAIT IN A CONVEX MIRROR” 451

“SELF-PORTRAIT IN A CONVEX MIR- painting and the flow of the poem enables Ashbery to ROR” JOHN ASHBERY (1975) Self-Portrait in describe, imitate, and challenge the painting at the a Convex Mirror, the volume in which the poem by the same time. same name first appeared, won the National Book Parmigianino’s self-portrait is devoted to portraying Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the National Book Crit- the central figure, the painter himself. It therefore ics Circle Award. The critical and commercial success seems a pure representation of an identity and a of the book made it a turning point in John ASHBERY’s moment. Compared with the painting, the poem career. Ashbery’s work, in general, is linked with the seems cluttered by extraneous details and associations. NEW YORK SCHOOL, a group of poets involved with art in Ashbery chooses not to describe his own face but to try New York in the 1950s and 1960s. to render the processes of his mind, including think- A long free verse poem of six unequal stanzas, “Self- ing, feeling, and sensuous apprehension. Although it Portrait in a Convex Mirror” is a meditation on the takes more time to read Ashbery’s poem than to glance 1524 painting by the Italian Francesco Mazzola at the painting, it could have taken the poet less time (known as Il Parmigianino). The poem’s title refers not to write it than it took Parmigianino to make the paint- only to Parmigianino’s painting but also to the poem ing. The poem therefore represents a more sponta- itself, a “convex,” or distorted picture of painter and neous image than the painting, though neither is the poet. Less elusive than the voice of many of Ashbery’s reality of identity. other poems, the speaker of this poem seems to be In spite of the apparent spontaneity of the poem, it Ashbery himself. He thinks out loud (or on the page) never wanders far from the painting as its subject. In about the painting; the speaker permits elements from the 1960s and 1970s, Ashbery wrote art criticism for his own biography (and Ashbery’s) to appear. Art News. “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” gave Ash- At the beginning of the poem, Ashbery quotes from bery an opportunity to integrate his poetic skills with Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculp- his interest in graphic art. The poem thus refers to tors and Architects (1550) to explain that Parmigianino Vasari and to Sydney Freedberg, an art critic who used a half ball of wood rather than a board or canvas wrote during Ashbery’s lifetime. Although Ashbery is as the surface for his painting. The artist then skillfully vague about the voices of quotations in many other painted his own youthful self-portrait on the ball so as poems, here he is careful to identify the sources of quo- to represent himself gazing into a convex mirror, a lit- tations he uses, as he would be if he were writing prose tle bit like a funhouse mirror. The result both is and is art criticism. not an accurate representation of the face, the first of Parmigianino’s painting is an exterior self-portrait several paradoxes identified in the poem. The unusual and is closed in the sense that it is physically limited by painting medium contributes to the oddity of the por- the block of wood on which it is painted. By contrast, trait, creating a surface that appears to have depth, rep- Ashbery’s poem as an interior portrait is more open. resenting a “soul that is not a soul,” and seeming to Insofar as it represents the workings of the poet’s mind, offer an “affirmation that doesn’t affirm anything.” it could go on as long as his mind does. The figurative “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” focuses on the accuracy of Parmigianino’s self-portrait allows us, hun- relationship between time and identity. Art tries to cap- dreds of years later, to think we know exactly what he ture the elusive present, but it captures only an image, looked like during the time when he painted the pic- not the reality. Attempting to stop time, paintings dis- ture. The inner state of the figure in the painting is, tort fluent reality. Parmigianino’s deliberate distortion however, much harder to understand. The poet can of his own image gives Ashbery the occasion for a only speculate about the painter’s thoughts and feel- poetic self-portrait, but words possibly represent the ings as he painted himself. “Reading” the painting cre- fluency of time (and all reality that exists in time) dif- ates a poetic self-portrait of which the opposite is true: ferently and perhaps better than a static visual image. From the poem, we know what the speaker is thinking The difference between the visual immediacy of the and feeling but not what he looks like. 452 “SEPTEMBER 1, 1939”

Speculate is an important word because, as Ashbery “dive . . . on 52nd Street” in New York City, Auden explains, speculate derives from the Latin word for a saw Europe from a distance and concluded that while mirror, speculum. The poem is thus a mirror facing a “accurate scholarship” can purport to explain war, the mirror. A mirror offers a reverse image, and in one real explanation is that “those to whom evil is done / sense that is what Ashbery’s poem offers to the paint- do evil in return.” ing. In another sense, a mirror facing a mirror would The poem as it was published in the New Republic in correct the reversal and actually render a more accu- October 1939 and in his 1940 collection Another Time rate image by recognizing ambiguities and distortions. rejected old political answers and looked toward For example, the hand the painter holds forth in the humanism in its most famous line, “We must love one painting might be either a shield (a protection) or a another or die.” Auden was later to reject the line, then greeting (an advertisement). eliminate the stanza in which it appears from his Col- Parmigianino’s painting is an odd experiment, giv- lected Poems. He ultimately categorized the entire poem ing Ashbery the occasion for an inclusive meditation as dishonest— “I shouldn’t have written it,” he told on identity. But the painting also frustrates the poet’s Daniel Halpern, “it’s a forgery” (137). He had earlier attempt to penetrate it. The painting is always there to reached the conclusion, justifying the excision of the be examined, but, paradoxically, it exists only when stanza, that “we must die anyway” (Foreword viii). living consciousness engages it in “its room, our Joseph Beach questions Auden’s judgment here, point- moments of attention.” “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mir- ing out that nothing in the stanza is inconsistent with ror” tries to bridge “the distance between us,” the poet the poet’s later philosophy: “The love for another that and the painter, vision and interpretation, artwork and we must have or die is directly opposed, in the manner audience, and, finally, Ashbery and the reader. of all his Christian writing, to the self-regarding BIBLIOGRAPHY Freudian Eros. . . . [T]here is no better statement of Bloom, Harold, ed. John Ashbery: Modern Critical Views. New Auden’s [subsequent] political and psychological posi- York: Chelsea House, 1985. tion” (50). The major anthologists of the day, Oscar Schultz, Susan M, ed. The Tribe of John: Ashbery and Contempo- Williams and Louis Untermeyer, retained the stanza. rary Poetry. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1995. Today almost every reprinting of the poem includes Shoptaw, John. On the Outside Looking Out. Cambridge, the stanza. Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994. “September 1, 1939” gained new life after the Sep- Thomas Lisk tember 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, as it became widely e-mailed, not just by devotees of poetry. Eric McHenry “SEPTEMBER 1, 1939” W. H. AUDEN hails its “prescien[ce]. . . . Zealotry and violence are (1939) “September 1, 1939,” written as Germany cyclical—‘The habit-forming pain, / Mismanagement invaded Poland, signaled the end of the 1930s era of and grief: / We must suffer them all again.’” political activism, at least for W. H. AUDEN, one the BIBLIOGRAPHY most important political poets of the 1930s. The Auden, W. H. Foreword to W. H. Auden: A Bibliography—The poem grew to have a significant place in the discus- Early Years through 1955, by B. C. Bloomfield. Char- sion of what makes a final, canonical version of a lottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1964, pp. vii–ix. poem, as Auden excised one stanza from his Collected ———. Interview with W. H. Auden, by Daniel Halpern. Poems (1945) and then later repudiated the entire Antaeus 5 (spring 1972): 137 poem. As World War II began, Auden saw, as he wrote Beach, Joseph Warren. The Making of the Auden Canon. Min- in the poem, the “clever hopes” of a “low dishonest neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1957. decade” dashed, dying as the threat of an evil nurtured McHenry, Eric. “Auden on Bin Laden,” SLATE Available on- by that decade—and, by extension, Auden and his fel- line. URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/115900/. Downloaded low leftists. The poem was also his farewell to England October 2003. and to himself as an English poet. Ensconced in a Tad Richards SEXTON, ANNE 453

SETH, VIKRAM (1952– ) In Vikram Seth’s Morse writes, “allusion is at the heart of Seth’s style, if work the elegant formalism typical of Victorian poetry not his voice” (140). The poem “Cant” (1990) engages is combined with a contemporary concern for post- this notion, which begins: “In Cant’s resilient, venera- colonialism, the only constant being Seth’s willingness ble lies / There’s something for the artists to take heart.” to experiment with form. From meticulously rhymed Seth’s themes, handled with a formalist’s eye and a sonnets set in modern-day San Francisco to free verse rhetorician’s gloves, include travel, family, heritage, translations of ancient Chinese poets (see PROSODY AND and music. From the sonnets in Mappings to the trans- FREE VERSE), Seth has proved elusive and inventive in lations of Mirza Ghalib’s ghazals in A Suitable Boy his approach to poetry. By and large, he is allied with (1994), Seth shows considerable range. NEW FORMALISM, in the tradition of a poet such as BIBLIOGRAPHY Robert Graves, though his diverse creative output— Currie, Jay, and Michèle Denis. “Hearing a Different Music,” novels, memoirs, children’s books—makes him diffi- January Magazine. Available on-line. URL: www.january- cult to classify. magazine.com/profiles/vseth.html. Downloaded June 2003. Born in Calcutta, India, Seth graduated from Oxford Morse, Ruth. “Rooted Cosmopolite: Vikram Seth and ‘The University (B.A., 1975), then went on to study eco- Scars of Middlemarch’” Etudes Britanniques Contemporaines nomics at Stanford, during which time he was also a 5 (1994): 139–157. Stegner fellow in Creative Writing (1977–78). Much of Ravi Shankar his first book of poems, Mappings (1980), comes from this period and includes translations of Chinese, Ger- SEXTON, ANNE (1928–1974) Anne Sexton man, and Hindi poets, plus a sense of how Seth felt as helped to expand the subject repertoire of CONFESSIONAL a cultural mongrel. The representative poem “Diwali” POETRY to include issues and experiences specific to (1979) is his call to exile, to those “Who are not home women: the fertility cycle, birth, child rearing, objecti- at home / And are abroad abroad.” After finishing his fication, and sexual violence. She is an important figure first book, Seth moved to China to study classical Chi- in the intersection of confessional poetry and feminist nese poetry at Nanjing University. He then hitchhiked poetry (see FEMALE VOICE, FEMALE LANGUAGE). Sexton is home to New Delhi via Tibet, a trip chronicled in the associated with Robert LOWELL, with whom she studied, memoir From Heaven Lake (1983). Travel also helped and with her friends Sylvia PLATH and George Starbuck, gestate Seth’s next collection of poems, The Humble both of whom influenced her work. W. D. SNODGRASS Administrator’s Garden (1985), which are cleverly and Maxine KUMIN were early mentors and close organized around plants and places. Seth’s subsequent friends. Sexton’s influence can be seen in the work of effort, Golden Gate (1986), confounded genre, as it was Plath, as well as Sharon OLDS, Adrienne RICH, and other billed as a novel, but it is actually an epic poem in the poets interested in women’s issues. mold of the romantic Lord Byron: a series of 690 Anne Harvey was born in Newton, Massachusetts, rhyming tetrameter sonnets that spins a satirical and attended boarding and finishing schools in the romance between two San Francisco “yuppies.” Seth’s Boston area. Indications of serious emotional prob- next book of poems All You Who Sleep Tonight (1990) lems began appearing early in adolescence, but her delves into darker material, such as the experience of a parents resisted placing her in treatment. It was only Nazi concentration camp commandant and a doctor in after a series of affairs threatened her marriage to Hiroshima the day the bomb dropped (see LONG AND Alfred Muller Sexton II, with whom she eloped in SERIAL POETRY). Seth has received a number of awards 1948, that Sexton turned to psychotherapy. Her emo- and honors including, in 2001, the Commander of the tional problems worsened—she was hospitalized Order of the British Empire. with postpartum depression after the birth of her first Much of Seth’s poetry possesses a graceful, if anti- child, Linda, in 1953, and struggled with break- quated craftsmanship. Golden Gate is based on Alexan- downs and suicidal urges thereafter. Treatment, der Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin (1833). The critic Ruth though only intermittently successful in relieving 454 SEXTON, ANNE

Sexton’s depression, did have the benefit of turning Lowell, however, is the more important influence on Sexton to poetry. In 1957 she followed her doctor’s her writing; it would not be entirely unfair to charac- suggestion to write as a form of therapy. A year later terize Sexton as his disciple. The narrative line in To she enrolled in Lowell’s seminar at Boston University, Bedlam and Part Way Back is clearly indebted to his where she met Plath and Starbuck. Houghton Mifflin depictions of hospitalization and recovery in Life Stud- accepted her first book, To Bedlam and Part Way Back ies (1959), as it is to his discursive, colloquial line. in 1960. In the mid-1960s Sexton became a poet Even the geography of her early work is derivative; celebrity, accumulating literary awards and academic railing at her “bachelor therapist / who sat on Boston’s positions—Live or Die (1967) was awarded the Marlborough Street” (“Flee on Your Donkey” [1966]), Pulitzer Prize—and drawing media attention as a tor- she poaches on her teacher’s Beacon Hill terrain. In mented, and attractive, artist. The lines between ther- some respects, however, her work differs importantly apy, art, and personal life were constantly blurred in from that of Lowell. Her scathing humor and prefer- her work, as they were in her life. Affairs with her ence for shock over personal examination distinguish teachers, her therapist, and her friends made their way her work from the start. One can indulge in the wicked into her poetry, and the public sensation of her poetry pleasure of her sarcastic characterization of her lover’s stimulated the daring and flamboyance of her life. In wife—“She is the sum of yourself and your dream / what has become a cliché of American celebrity cul- Climb her like a monument step after step” (“For My ture, she became more isolated and vulnerable as she Lover, Returning to His Wife” [1967])—or one can became more famous. Divorce, alcoholism, and a withdraw from it, but the brilliance remains. Hers is gradual loss of self-confidence as a poet left Sexton the brash, wounded voice at the back of the confes- with few resources to continue her struggle with men- sional congregation, drawing attention to herself, her tal illness. She died by carbon monoxide asphyxiation. pain, and not, as Lowell did so famously, to political In professional terms her career, though fairly short, and social anguish concentrated in the personal. As had been remarkably distinguished. Among her many critic David Perkins has noted, “Sexton’s aim as a poet other honors, she was elected a fellow of the Royal was to uncover painful, repressed emotions” (595), Society of Literature in 1965. much in the mode of psychotherapy. This constant Sexton’s verse is characterized by childlike rhyme focus on the self had its strengths and its drawbacks. schemes to suggest regressive states, resourceful use of Her willingness to explore such highly intimate subject simile and metaphor, and a reliance on lists, anaphora matter as masturbation, incest, menstruation, and (the repetition of words or phrases at the beginning of child abuse made her something of a pioneer in mark- lines), and parallel constructions. Her early poetry is ing out new subject matter. As a rule, however, Sexton formally constrained; her later work typically is in free stops short of personal reconciliation or insight: “In verse (see PROSODY AND FREE VERSE). The first stanza of this place everyone talks to his own mouth” (“Flee on the much-anthologized “You, Doctor Martin” (1960) Your Donkey”), she writes. She refers to a mental hos- shows her facility with compressed, associative pital, but her despair was more general, haunted by a metaphor and her indebtedness to other poets, in this lapsed Catholic’s sense of lost redemption. case, T. S. ELIOT and Lowell: “You, Doctor Martin, Of all the confessional poets, including the Catholic walk / from breakfast to madness,” she writes, the convert (later lapsed as well) Lowell, Sexton comes image fusing the impatient swiftness of his march closest to practicing confession in its primary sense of through the underground tunnel of the hospital with a public baring of one’s faults. She was “born / doing the manic swiftness of her own thought processes. Her reference work in sin, and born / confessing it” (“With vision of the hospital as an underworld of living dead Mercy for the Greedy” [1962]), she writes, but in the patients “thrusting against / cure” pays homage to absence of God or, just as important to her, a thera- Eliot’s THE WASTE LAND while adroitly stepping over the peutic authority she could fully believe and respect, line of good taste to a mad vulgarity. her confessions became repetitive dead ends. Sexton SHAPIRO, DAVID 455 was susceptible to criticism for self-indulgence and An Anthology of New York School Poets (1970). His work narcissism as a poet, but in this regard events were in develops the New York school’s play between a poem’s her favor. Plath’s suicide in 1963 and the publication depth and surface and, like the work of Ashbery and soon after of her Ariel poems validated the subject mat- Barbara GUEST, uses painting as a celebrated resource ter of women’s rage and self-destruction through the for rendering supple images and the shapes of percep- undeniable achievement of her expression. Sexton, a tion. Shapiro’s work as an art critic imaginatively dove- more glamorous public figure was left to explore this tails with his poetry. Words and ideas achieve a surreal bleak terrain on her own. Her celebrity increased in the and fluid flexibility within the frame of his poems, and absence of her friend, as did feminist interest in the definitions slide easily into the unexpected. As Joanna abject and self-destructive domestic lives of women. Fuhrman explains, “To read a David Shapiro poem is Helen Vendler characterized Sexton’s work as “car- to enter a space in which ‘emotion’ is as abstract as the- toons, malicious and often off target” (301), yet ory and an ‘idea’ is as visceral and tender as the best praised the occasional inventiveness of her satire and pop song” (1). phrasing. It is generally agreed that Sexton’s control of Shapiro was born in Newark, New Jersey; as a child her materials was uneven, and her rhetorical and tech- he was immersed in the arts. He recalls, “One of the nical resources narrowly defined. In her sensibility great influences of my life was my father constantly and technical repertoire she may be closer to BEAT memorizing Virgil, Shakespeare, Milton, and he had POETRY than to the rigorous intelligence of Plath, the me do the same, as soon as I could speak” (qtd. 1). poet with whom she is often associated. In any case, Before he became a published poet, Shapiro was an for the reading public, her celebrity as an attractive accomplished violinist. Thomas Fink writes that his and publicly self-destructive artist has outweighed the poems “abound” in “subtle, complex, often unpre- negative assessments of her work, and she remains dictable tonal shifts” (1993, 13). At 18 he published widely read and consistently anthologized. She was his first book, January: A Book of Poems (1965). His col- daring, humorous, and brutally honest. Her politically lection A Man Holding an Acoustic Panel was nominated informed and highly personal awareness of the body for a National Book Award in 1971. Among a number has grown only more pertinent with the passage of of other honors, Shapiro has also received the Ameri- time. Sexton’s poetry, like the best popular fiction, can Academy of Arts and Letters Morton Dauwen reads with swiftness, invention, and sensuality. Hers is Zabel Award (1977). an adult and courageous body of work, all the more As the title of his collection After a Lost Original liberating for its flaws. (1994) suggests, Shapiro’s poems investigate the possi- BIBLIOGRAPHY bilities for representation when a stable source of reality McClatchy, J. D. Anne Sexton: The Artist and Her Critics. cannot be found. His work alludes to many artists “who Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978. have mischievously concocted ironies about the perils of Perkins, David. A History of Modern Poetry: Modernism and referentiality” (Fink 1988, 29), though his voice retains After. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987. sincerity even as his lines take surprising or disjunctive Vendler, Helen. “Anne Sexton.” In The Music of What Hap- turns. Throughout his work Shapiro experiments with a pens: Poems, Poets, Critics. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard wide range of styles and devices that are charged with University Press, 1988, pp. 300–309. his knowledge of aesthetics and literature. Christopher Moylan One of many poems that reflects upon literature’s imaginative terrain, “To an Idea” (1983) explores a SHAPIRO, DAVID (1947– ) David Shapiro’s poet’s mind in the act of composition. He begins by imaginatively agile and erudite poems make him one articulating, then revising a desire to write out of the of the most eloquent poets of the NEW YORK SCHOOL’s experience of possibility that an abstract nothingness second generation. Shapiro wrote the first dissertation represents: “I wanted to start Ex Nihilo / I mean a on John ASHBERY’s work and edited, with Ron PADGETT, review of sorts.” The poem transforms itself into an ode 456 SHAPIRO, HARVEY to poetry, which has “carried [him] like mail / From strate the constancy of his setting and his exploration, one house to another.” Shapiro’s work attests to art’s along with a persistent sardonic wit. In “His Life” potential for taking readers and writers into meaning- (1966), Shapiro’s voice is emotionally disengaged ful uncertainties. while also focused, but it is one that does not contain sadness or disappointment: “When he writes about BIBLIOGRAPHY his life / He just rakes it back / And forth.” “New York Fink, Thomas. The Poetry of David Shapiro. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1993. Notes” (2001) offers a tone of whimsical approval and ———. “The Poetry of David Shapiro and Ann Lauterbach: acceptance measured with a knowingness born of After Ashbery.” American Poetry Review 17 (January/Feb- patience and experience: On the receiving end of ruary 1988): 27–30. New York sarcasm, Shapiro knows “I am home Shapiro, David. “Plurist Music: An Interview with David among my people.” Shapiro,” by Joanna Fuhrman, Rain Taxi Review of Books. Ignatow finds that Shapiro’s works “spring from a Available online. URL: www.raintaxi.com/online/Fall dual vision of the poet of disillusionment, and regen- 2002/Shapiro.shtml. Downloaded January 2003. eration born from disillusionment. . . . The permanent Kimberly Lamm and immutable are to be found in the processes of life itself of which we are one expression, no matter what SHAPIRO, HARVEY (1924– ) The year form of it we take” (531). This dual vision produces in 2003 marked Harvey Shapiro’s 50th anniversary as a Shapiro’s work, as Michael Collier notes, a “tumult published poet. His extensive corpus demonstrates an [that acts] as a metaphor for the chaos in our individ- affinity for an American OBJECTIVIST form, but personal- ual lives” (30). izes it with spare constructions that are used to detail a BIBLIOGRAPHY balancing of everyday urban affairs with the traditions Collier, Michael. “These Are the Streets.” New York Times of religious orthodoxy. Shapiro’s style is akin to those of Book Review, September 25, 1994, 30. William Carlos WILLIAMS, Charles REZNIKOFF, and David Flamm, Matthew. “I Sing the City Electric.” Nation 258 IGNATOW, as conciseness, detachment, and neutrality (June 13, 1994): 839. are challenged by vivid imagery, which exposes senti- Ignatow, David. “The Past Reordered.” Nation 204 (April 24, ment deeper than the scene itself describes. 1967): 531–532. Born in Chicago, Shapiro has lived most of his life Ray, David. “Harvey Shapiro—An Appreciation.” New Letters as a New Yorker, spending many of his young adult Review of Books 2:1 (1988): 4, 12. years in the jazz clubs of Greenwich Village. After Robert S. Friedman serving in the U.S. Army Air Force in World War II, he earned an M.A. in English from Columbia University. SHAPIRO, KARL (1913–2000) Karl Shapiro’s His first volume of poetry, The Eye, published in 1953, rise to national prominence after World War II signi- won the Swallow Press Award the following year. fied a turn away from socially conscious prewar verse Among other honors he has won a Pushcart Prize for and toward the more personal and experiential poetic poetry (1982). Shapiro has worked as an editor since voices that marked postwar poetry. As Shapiro reacted the mid-1950s at Commentary, the New Yorker and the against what he perceived to be the “paralysis” of high New York Times, and he has produced 11 volumes of MODERNISM’s sterile literary dogmatism, he began to poetry. He has also edited an anthology, Poets of World build a poetry that retained the expansive potential of War II (2003). free verse while simultaneously articulating his own Shapiro’s poems are notable for their use of con- southern Jewish perspective (Shapiro 37). His success crete imagery that exposes the tensions between the at articulating his distinctive American experience secular, urban cityscape of New York and the Jewish encouraged other poets to give voice to their own culture that sparks his constant search for existential experiences and contributed to the ascendance of the understanding. Two poems, 35 years apart, demon- poetry of personal confession (see CONFESSIONAL SILKO, LESLIE MARMON 457

POETRY). His influence emanated not only from his BIBLIOGRAPHY poetry, but also from his editorship of the magazine Hoffman, Daniel. “Constraints and Self-Determination.” Poetry (1950–56) and his academic leadership at the Poetry 114 (August 1969): 336–338. University of Nebraska (1956–66) and the University Shapiro, Karl. Reports of My Death. Chapel Hill: Algonquin of California, Davis (1968–85). Books, 1990. Shapiro was born in Baltimore. In 1932 he enrolled Spender, Stephen. “The Power and the Hazard.” Poetry 71 (March 1948): 314–318. at the University of Virginia but dropped out during his first year, citing antipathy toward his Russian-Jewish William Hecker background. His poetry only truly came to maturity after the army drafted him for service in the war. SILKO, LESLIE MARMON (1948– ) Amidst the notoriously brutal combat in the South Although Leslie Marmon Silko is best known as a nov- Pacific, he wrote and published two critically acclaimed elist, her fiction brings together poetry and prose to volumes of poetry, winning the Pulitzer Prize for the form a rich, evocative literary voice. As James WRIGHT second, V-Letter and Other Poems (1944). After winning observes, poems “rise out of the text” of her first novel, this prize, Shapiro served as the consultant in poetry to Ceremony (1977): “[I]t is astonishing,” goes a Wright the Library of Congress from 1947 to 1948. For his letter to Silko, “to see your mastery of the novel com- Selected Poems (1968), Shapiro shared the 1969 Bollin- bined with a power of poetry within it” (Silko and gen Prize for poetry with John BERRYMAN. Wright, 5). While Laguna Woman (1974) is Silko’s only In addition to the highly personal nature of published collection of poetry (other publications Shapiro’s poetry, his verse demonstrates an intense include poetry, but are mixed genre), poems do indeed dedication to poetic craftsmanship. In “Elegy for a rise out of all her texts—whether they are short stories, Dead Soldier” (1944), he uses traditional closed-form novels, essays, letters, or screenplays. In the canon of verse to portray the tension of being a soldier fighting American poetry, Silko—with her emphasis on such for a country that does not fully embrace his Jewish- subjects as exile, community, interconnections, the ness (see PROSODY AND FREE VERSE). The speaker criti- land—stands with Joy HARJO, Wendy Rose, Simon cizes his dead American comrade, because “He was ORTIZ, Wright, Gary SNYDER, Louise Erdrich, and N. ashamed of the down and out” and “Spurned the pan- Scott Momaday, among other contemporary writers. handler like an uneasy doubt.” Despite acknowledging Silko was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and his country’s social apathy, the speaker still hopes, raised on the Laguna Pueblo reservation. She has won amid the war’s ashes, that the next generation might many literary awards, including a MacArthur Founda- discover “whole toleration or pure peace.” Such poetic tion Award (1981), a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest resolutions to the problems of his American experience Foundation Writer’s Award (1991), a Native Writers’ followed Shapiro’s poetry throughout his career, even Circle of the Americas Lifetime Achievement Award as his work adopted more experimental styles. In The (1994), and a Lannan Foundation Award (2000). Bourgeois Poet (1964), for instance, Shapiro concedes Usually categorized with other contemporary Amer- that even middle-class aspirations make up part of his ican Indian writers, Silko suggests that while her con- poetic identity: “Your father becomes a businessman so temporaries “are ‘rescuing’ songs and stories from old you can get an education and become a writer. You Bureau of American Ethnology Reports,” she is “work- don’t want to give up those material things that you ing from a more vital source”—that is, directly from just got.” oral tradition (191). This “vital source” is grounded in Shapiro’s commitment to the craft of verse and the the land and the earth, as well as in stories, legends, fierce self-analysis of his writing make him one of his myths, and songs that were passed down to her. Dom- generation’s most compelling poets. At the center of his inant themes include the interrelationship between tautly written verse lies a profound vision of mid-20th- people and the earth, the need to restore balance and century American life. harmony, and the circularity of time and space. 458 SILLIMAN, RON

The structure of Silko’s poetry is perhaps best called Like most Language poets, Silliman is concerned organic: “I read [poems] the way I write them: by feel- with linguistic problems of representation and refer- ing my way to them” (Silko 23–24). Silko’s poems ence. Focusing on the relationship between the signi- move back and forth across the page, just as the cere- fier (the material word itself) and the signified (what monial dancers sway in “Coyotes and the Stro’ro’ka the word refers to), Silliman creates writing that treats Dancers,” as the storm winds blow in “In Cold Storm the materiality of the word, the signifier, as the heart of Light,” as the light on the canyon walls shifts in “Cot- all meaning-making activity. Silliman claims that the tonwood Part One,” or as the “cold water river” runs in signified has dominated conventional understanding “Indian Song: Survival,” all poems from her 1981 vol- of language, and he associates that dominance with ume Storyteller. capitalist oppression. He asserts that highlighting the While Silko’s fiction has been criticized as overly signifier raises a reader’s consciousness by illustrating a political and didactic, her poems have retained a purity change in the mode of language production from a and leanness, like a “lean gray deer / running on the capitalist mode, which creates an illusion that language edge of the rainbow” (“Indian Song: Survival” [1981]). is transparent, to a materialist mode, which calls atten- tion to the language production itself; this change is a BIBLIOGRAPHY form of opposition to capitalism. Barnett, Louise K., and James L. Thorson, eds. Leslie Mar- mon Silko: A Collection of Critical Essays. Albuquerque: To achieve these ends, in The New Sentence (1987), University of New Mexico Press, 1999. Silliman proposes a form of writing that treats the sen- Silko, Leslie Marmon. “Leslie Silko, Laguna Poet and Novel- tence as the fundamental unit of textual meaning. Con- ist.” In This Song Remembers: Self-Portraits of Native Ameri- sequently much of Silliman’s creative work consists of cans in the Arts, edited by Jane B. Katz. Boston: Houghton mosaiclike prose poems without syntactic links Mifflin, 1980, pp. 186–194. between sentences. ———., and James Wright. The Delicacy and the Strength of For example, Tjanting (1981) is a book-length prose Lace: Letters between Leslie Marmon Silko & James Wright, poem that contains one apparent non sequitur after edited by Anne Wright. Saint Paul, Minn.: Graywolf another: “A plausibility. Analogy to ‘quick’ sand. Mute Press, 1986. pleonasm. Nor that either. Planarians, trematodes.” Patricia Keefe Durso Although the reader might guess at associative mean- ings, there is no necessary meaning or narrative SILLIMAN, RON (1946– ) Ron Silliman, a beyond the material words themselves, leaving the prolific writer of poetry and criticism since the early reader with an opaque, and problematic, relationship 1970s, was one of the founding members of the San to the words on the page. Furthermore the poem’s pre- Francisco–based LANGUAGE poets. As a Language determined form (each paragraph has the number of writer, Silliman’s poetry resists what fellow Language sentences of the previous two paragraphs added writer Charles BERNSTEIN calls “official verse culture” together) constrains meaning and exposes the mode of (6) and instead is in the tradition of 20th-century poetic production. The question remains as to whether American avant-garde poetry. this difficult writing makes a difference politically; still Born in Pasco, Washington, and raised in Albany, Silliman’s poetic application of the “new sentence” California, Silliman has spent most of his life on the marks a significant innovation in late 20th-century West Coast, especially Berkeley, California. He received poetics that has challenged the conventional ways that his B.A. from Merritt College and did graduate work at poems convey meaning to their readers. San Francisco State University and the University of BIBLIOGRAPHY California, Berkeley. In addition to publishing more Bernstein, Charles, “State of the Art,” A Poetics, Cambridge, than 20 books of poetry and garnering many acco- Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992, 1–8. lades, Silliman won a National Endowment for the Arts Lazer, Hank. “Opposing Poetry.” Contemporary Literature 30 fellowship in 1979. (1989): 142–150. SIMPSON, LOUIS 459

Perelman, Bob. “Parataxis and Narrative: The New Sentence suddenly becomes the most ordinary of dogs: “The dog in Theory and Practice.” In Artifice and Indeterminacy: An got the stick and looked back at us. / And that was the Anthology of New Poetics, edited by Christopher Beach. whole show.” The world created by Simic has all the Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998. trappings of reality. It is familiar, because it is human, Mitchum Huehls a world readers recognize but without a consoling sense of relief. Instead the reaction is more like one of SIMIC, CHARLES (1938– ) Charles Simic is unease or self-estrangement. one of the most original and prolific voices in contem- The most recognizable feature of Simic’s poems is porary poetry. Born in Belgrade, in the former that they never take anything for granted. They create Yugoslavia, he has written thousands of inimitable their reality out of the most trivial, random, and inco- poems that bring a distinctly European perspective to herent parts of life, with a result that is often unset- American literature. This eccentric un-American per- tling, but also unexpectedly profound. His poems spective remains a recognizable part of Simic’s body of achieve transcendence by taking ordinary shortcuts. work, even though he has lived and worked in the BIBLIOGRAPHY United States his entire adult life. Simic, Charles. “Interview with Charles Simic,” by Eric Simic was born and raised in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. McHenry, Atlantic Unbound. Available online. URL: www. After he emigrated to the United States in 1954, he theatlantic.com/unbound/interviews/ba-2001-01-10.htm. received a B.A. from New York University. He served in Downloaded December 2003. the army from 1961 to 1963. Since 1973 he has taught Stitt, Peter. “Charles Simic: Poetry in a Time of Madness.” In creative writing at the University of New Hampshire, Uncertainty & Plenitude: Five Contemporary Poets. Iowa Durham. He has received several prestigious awards City: University of Iowa Press, 1997. and fellowships, including the Pulitzer Prize for The Weigl, Bruce, ed. Charles Simic: Essays on the Poetry. Ann World Doesn’t End in 1990. His numerous poetry vol- Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996. umes include Dismantling the Silence (1971), Classic Piotr Gwiazda Ballroom Dances (1980), Hotel Insomnia (1992), Jack- straws (1999), and The Voice at 3 A.M. (2003). He is also SIMPSON, LOUIS (1923– ) During the the author of several collections of essays and transla- 1950s, along with Galway KINNELL, David IGNATOW, tions, including, in 1992, Dime-Store Alchemy, a book James DICKEY, Donald HALL, and, most notably, Robert of essays and poems about the work of the modern BLY, Louis Simpson began using the individual voice American visionary artist Joseph Cornell. and open form, dismissing the conventions of rhyme, Simic’s poems offer an unusual mixture of realism meter, and regular stanzas. Simpson’s verse, along with and SURREALISM, often refined by an acute sense of the the others, became known as DEEP IMAGE, deploying absurd or simple black humor. This is not to say that story lines a reader could actually visualize. Marked by Simic’s poems are not serious. Simic can be funny, a spiritual intensity and transcendence of the self gaudy, and witty as a clown, but also incisive, terse, rather than CONFESSIONAL immediacy, Simpson was and elliptic as a monk. His poems are concrete and influenced by Spanish and Latin American writers, detailed, demonstrating a vast variety of modes and such as Frederico García Lorca and Pablo Neruda, moods. They shun abstraction and often focus on especially their surreal association of images (see SUR- everyday situations and objects, adding to them quali- REALISM), as well as the meditational work of Theodore ties that become unexpectedly fresh and fitting. ROETHKE, with his deep feeling for nature as a vehicle of In his early miniaturist poem “Fork” (1969), for spiritual transformation. example, Simic describes the utensil as the claw of Simpson, born in Jamaica, the West Indies, won the some terrifying primordial bird. In a late poem, “Coun- Pulitzer Prize for his book, At the End of the Open Road, try Fair” (1991), the opposite takes place. A six-legged Poems (1963). The Arrivistes (1949), from his first dog, billed as the principal exhibit at a country fair, book, was published while he was living in France. He 460 “THE SMILE ON THE FACE OF A KOUROS” studied and taught at Columbia University, later BIBLIOGRAPHY teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, as Simpson, Louis. “Capturing the World As It Is: An Inter- well as the State University of New York, Stony Brook. view with Louis Simpson.” Ohio Review 14.3 (spring He has garnered numerous honors and awards, 1973): 35–51. including the Pulitzer Prize for At the End of the Open Turner, Alberta T. 50 Contemporary Poets: The Creative Road, Poems (1963), and the Harold Morton Landon Process. New York: Longman, 1977, pp. 289–292. Translation Award for Modern Poets of France: A Bilin- Gerald Schwartz gual Anthology (1998). Simpson’s poems do not simply record situations, “THE SMILE ON THE FACE OF A events, and people as they appear to an imaginative KOUROS” WILLIAM BRONK (1969) “The and skilled poet; rather they locate the conditions Smile on the Face of a Kouros” is the first poem in shaping the life within: “I am writing poems based in William BRONK’s book The Empty Hands, which was experience and the images are related to the environ- named after a phrase from the poem that ends: “I tell ment,” he once said. “When one of these poems you, death, expect no smile of pride / from me. I bring works there’s no split between inner and outer you nothing in my empty hands.” This book marks the worlds” (“Simpson” 51). His themes are many and beginning of Bronk’s mature work. In this poem, Bronk varied: America, its character, spirit, and ethos; war, sees humankind as “unformed / or broken”; he is “puz- from the view of an infantry soldier; and the lives that zled,” because he feels “we live / in a formless world.” his actual and visualized ancestors led in Volhynia, a This is a postmodern understanding in which certain- part of ancestral Russia. His style is ever-developing: ties are no longer creditable. Bronk’s poetry insists that Early adherence to poetic conventions of rhyme, humans invent the terms and ways by which they meter, and regular stanzas turned to free verse in the attempt to understand life, but those are fictions, and 1950s, and in the 1970s, he began to write NARRATIVE the understanding is false. POETRY, convinced it was the form best suited to rev- In “The Smile on the Face of a Kouros,” the statue of elation. a young ancient Greek man smiles with pride at hav- “An Accident” (1997) turns the reality of a car wreck ing accomplished something, an end of his own mak- into an intense visualization of progress and material- ing; the word end in the poem means both a purpose ism gone awry: “Why are the cars slowing up? / An and a termination. The statue of the boy can be seen as Accident. To rubberneck.” The carnage we witness is a metaphor for humankind that individually chooses charged with reality. The persona fuses the poet and how to live, each person making her or his own life. his reader, and, using a technique of prose fiction, it Most people choose an end, a purpose, and use that to creates a narrative poem in much the same way that shape their actions and understanding of themselves, Anton Chekhov would with prose. Here is Simpson’s moving toward death with the illusion of achievement, willingness to make his proxy a participant in the of completed lives. Yet Bronk says the other way we scene, not its documentarian. And, if the speaker can go to death is “unformed / or broken, less than notices “gawkers,” then those of us who do “rubber- whole, puzzled.” This is the way for a person who rec- neck” are more attentive to the speaker. When the ognizes that the terms and forms of the world are of speaker looks at a road ahead, he sees it “either point- human construction, fictions all. The world provides ing at the sky / or falling off an edge into space.” The no forms; the comely form, or the perfect, unbroken reader is urgently, plainly taken to the physical frontier form, is what humans make, not knowing that these of trauma and presented with spiritual choices. As the are of their own design. distractions that the world presents as reality must be Because the speaker of the poem believes we live in understood for what they are and for what they are a formless world, he does not bring to death the self- not, Simpson’s poetry moves us to an understanding of constructed prizes of strength and virtue. There is no this less-than-complete life. “smile of pride” for him, because there is no end to be SMITH, WILLIAM JAY 461

“achieved.” There is, however, the poetry with which Natural symbols and forceful rhythms built on Bronk’s empty hands are full. If the poems are not a enjambment create an intensity in Smith’s work that source of pride, it is because Bronk saw them, not as Terry Hummer calls “tornadic” (76), capturing the things made, but as one of the few givens in life. drama and danger that sometimes disrupt daily life Bronk’s belief in our ignorance of the nature of the real (see PROSODY AND FREE VERSE). Attending to “the para- world is constant in all his writing, as is his belief in the doxical problem of making art out of the muck of the nature of poetry as something substantial. world around us,” as Bruce Weigl observes (69), Smith BIBLIOGRAPHY often structures his poems around physical journeys Clippinger, David, ed. The Body of This Life: Essays on that occasion psychic or spiritual ones. In “The Tire William Bronk. Jersey City, N.J.: Talisman House, 2001. Hangs in the Yard” (1981), the poet’s visit to a child- Foster, Edward. Answerable To None: Berrigan, Bronk, and the hood tire swing recalls his adolescent romances and American Real. New York: Spuyten Duyvil, 1999. jealousies, as well as the violent, rowdy life that he Kimmelman, Burt. The “Winter Mind”: William Bronk and escaped that others his age could not. Smith’s style American Letters. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson Uni- ranges from historical NARRATIVE to personal LYRIC, versity Press, 1998. POETRY, restlessly elevating ordinary speech into musi- Sherry Kearns cal, stately utterance. As he writes in “The Roundhouse Voices” (1985), an elegy for his dead uncle, “All day SMITH, DAVE (1942– ) Dave Smith is one I’ve held your hand, trying to say back a life.” Smith of the major southern poets of the last third of the 20th resists the temptations of nostalgia and personal con- century. His poems blend Robert Penn WARREN’s eleva- fession by emphasizing the struggle that physical exis- tion of regional subjects with James WRIGHT’s search for tence entails. And he acknowledges that language is beauty amid working-class life. Whether writing about what makes up experience, although “Words ...us/ the Virginia tidewater of his youth, the Midwest, or the no damn good. Do you hear that?” Yet Smith ever barren Utah landscape, Smith brings a rich and digni- strives to affirm the life in art. In “Driving Home in the fied vernacular music to his meditations on violence, Breaking Season” (1976), an almost blasphemous history, and the struggle for grace. exclamation results in grace: “Damn death. Today I do Born and raised in Portsmouth, Virginia, Smith not believe / a single sparrow will die but I will croak received degrees from the University of Virginia (B.A., back his life.” 1965) and Southern Illinois University (M.A., 1969) BIBLIOGRAPHY before serving in the U.S. Air Force (1969–72). After Hummer, Terry. “Dave Smith’s Homage to Edgar Allen Poe: earning a Ph.D. at Ohio University (1976), Smith ‘Pushed’ Time and the Obsession of Memory.” In The began a teaching career, serving most recently at Johns Giver of Morning: On the Poetry of Dave Smith, edited by Hopkins University. His first book of poetry, Bull Bruce Weigl. Birmingham, Ala.: Thunder City Press, Island, was published in 1970 and has been followed 1982, pp. 75–87. by 20 books of poetry, a novel, and several edited col- Weigl, Bruce. “The Deep Well of Celebration: Dave Smith’s lections of essays and verse. His book Goshawk, Ante- Goshawk, Antelope.” Poet Lore 75.1 (1980): 45–50. lope was a finalist for both the National Book Critics Robert Temple Cone Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize in 1979, and Dream Flights was a finalist for the Pulitzer in 1981. SMITH, WILLIAM JAY (1918– ) William Smith has received a number of fellowships, and, as Jay Smith’s poetry has helped to reinvigorate the lan- coeditor of the Southern Review during the 1990s and guage of the ordinary; it reestablishes plain speaking a poetry editor for Louisiana State University Press, he and nonsense as varieties of poetic dialect that continue has significantly influenced the direction of contem- to influence generations of poets to this day. In his light porary mainstream poetry, particularly among south- verse Smith translates the complex into simplistic ver- ern authors. bal pictures, frequently reproducing the verbal as visual 462 “SNAPSHOTS OF A DAUGHTER-IN-LAW” and forming his poems into rough images of his sub- with serious literary achievement and, indeed, some- ject, such as “The Typewriter Bird” (1954). In the tradi- times must exist for a poem to be successful. tion of John CIARDI, Smith’s verse crosses genres into the BIBLIOGRAPHY wide realm of children’s poetry, which exemplifies the Jacobsen, Josephine. “The Dark Train and the Green Place: ethos of light verse; for Smith, “light verse happily The Poetry of William Jay Smith.” Hollins Critic 12 (Feb. accepts the form that language both permits it and 1975): 1–14. imposes upon it. . . . It lives on change; it thrives on Smith, William Jay. Plain Talk: Epigrams, Epitaphs, Satires, variety. Rhyme is its regimen” (Smith ix). However, a Nonsense, Occasional, Concrete and Quotidian Poems. New large portion of Smith’s poetry has focused on weight- York: Center for Book Arts, 1988. ier subjects, and, like Ciardi’s, his poetry can become ———. “William Jay Smith At Eighty: An Interview,” by more personal, his subjects and diction complemented Robert Phillips. New Letters 65:3 (1999): 90–119. by tremendous work in both translation and prose. Andy Crank Smith was born in Winnfield, Louisiana, and raised, as his memoir Army Brat (1980) discusses, in Jefferson “SNAPSHOTS OF A DAUGHTER-IN- Barracks, near St. Louis. He was a Rhodes scholar and LAW” ADRIENNE RICH (1963) In its leap began writing poetry in the late 1930s. Smith was into radical expression and away from the fetters of tra- poet-in-residence at Williams College for an eight-year dition, this poem marks the emergence of Adrienne span starting in 1959 and spent his time in other RICH as a major feminist voice in American poetry (see schools, such as Columbia University and Hollins Col- FEMALE VOICE, FEMALE LANGUAGE). Similar to Sylvia lege. From 1968 until 1970, he served as poet laureate PLATH’s Ariel, written in 1962–63, “Snapshots” inflects of the United States. He has been a member of the CONFESSIONAL POETRY—which was in its infancy at the Academy of Arts and Letters since 1975, serving a brief time—with the concerns of the developing second- term as vice president for literature. Smith’s transla- wave feminism (which gathered momentum in the tions have also won him many awards and citations, mid-1960s), abandoning more muted concerns for the most notably from the Hungarian government. unflinching embrace of issues of creativity, sexuality, Smith’s interest is in marrying the motives of light and power. Before this poem, published in a book by verse, its emphasis on rhyme and form, with the the same name, Rich’s poetry was highly wrought and motives of “serious” poetry; he frequently constructs praised for its exquisite style and traditional forms (see his verse in the middle of this dialectic. In “American PROSODY AND FREE VERSE). The much-anthologized Primitive” (1957), for example, the speaker’s father “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers” (1951) exemplifies this, with becomes deconstructed and reimagined by the now- its formal control and careful progression of imagery. adult speaker. The familiar, childlike refrain, “Only my There is no I in the poem, which depicts its subject Daddy could look like that. / And I love my Daddy like aloofly. Its description of tigers pacing in “sleek chival- he loves his Dollar,” belies the heavier, darker reflec- ric certainty” might equally be applied to the poetry tions of his father, his gambling and desperation, the itself. “Snapshots” is an altogether wilder animal, with blue lips and cold hands, hanging “in the hall by his its sprawling, associative imagery and multifarious black cravat.” In this poem, as in others, Smith’s “light” allusions. The statement of poetics later articulated in diction and childish construction mutually reinforce “On Edges” (1969), whose speaker pledges to risk and underscore the space between the child’s mind and bloodshed rather than following the prescriptions and the adult’s memory. proscriptions of art—metaphorized as cutting “with Experimenting wildly within rigid forms, Smith’s blunt scissors on dotted lines”—is foreshadowed in verse exemplified a new movement, starting early in Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law. the 1960s, that rejected free verse and its emphasis on Rich began appending dates to her poems in 1954 the deregulation of form (see NEW FORMALISM). Smith and cites this as the moment of the shift toward politi- forced the idea that play could exist simultaneously cized poetry that Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law SNODGRASS, W(ILLIAM) D(EWITT) 463

embodies. Yet, for all its radicalism, the poem traces a founder of CONFESSIONAL POETRY, W. D. Snodgrass rejects theme of genealogy and inheritance, focusing on the the label for its religious, television, and tabloid conno- difficult emergence of the woman poet. It centers on tations. From the first, his art has offered an intimacy ideas of acceptable femininity—of “dulce ridens, dulce and sharing of personal experiences and emotions that loquens” (“laughing and speaking sweetly”), of were off-limits to his predecessors, who were influenced Thomas Campion’s Corinna with her lute (“When to by T. S. ELIOT and the New Critics (see FUGITIVE/AGRARIAN Her Lute Corinna Sings” [1601]), and the imperative SCHOOL). to ladies in Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing Born in Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania, Snodgrass (1600) not to sigh (instead the women should be escaped a constricting home life through service in the “blithe and bonny”). It considers the punishment for U.S. Navy during World War II. In “Returned to the transgression of these rules, such as the labels Frisco, 1946” (1959), the returning serviceman senses “harpy, shrew and whore,” which are applied to cre- lost freedoms in the irony offered by a flowered Alca- ative women. traz. Heart’s Needle (1959), his acclaimed first book, The poem pivots on a tension between two sets of won Snodgrass the 1960 Pulitzer Prize. In 1972–73 images—those of acceptable femininity (women doing Snodgrass was accepted into the National Institute of the work of nurturing, homemaking, and sweetening Arts and Letters and the Academy of American Poets. others’ lives) and those of the creative/transgressive In many poems Snodgrass uses his personal history, woman. The two blur when the objects of domestic 20th-century history, and timeless Orphic and Edenic accommodation are employed as instruments of self- myths to examine grief and loss. Candid and clinical, mutilation, culminating in the image of a woman Remains (1970) examines his family’s life and a sister’s burning her hand over a kettle. This suggests the death at 25. In “The Mouse,” much like poetic ances- oppression of the rituals of domesticity, and the sub- tor Robert Burns, he finds that a small creature chil- version of this through self-laceration: The woman’s dren feared dead becomes an emblem of lost agency is sublimated into the creation of her own innocence after the sister’s death. With cutting irony injury, with the hand of the housekeeper (a hand he observes, “Ridiculous children; we could bawl / described in Plath’s “The Applicant”[1962] as one sup- Our eyes out about nothing.” “After Experience posed to be “willing / to bring teacups and roll away Taught Me” declares training showed him that “you headaches”). Allusions to this tension in the life of must call up every strength you own / And you can rip Emily Dickinson build to a series of sharp, hard images off the whole facial mask.” Complacent students in reflecting the determination needed to overcome a pre- “The Campus on the Hill” atop the world believe they scribed life of drudgery, imagined in the metonymy of “have nowhere to go but down.” In “Heart’s Needle,” perpetual dusting. By the last stanza images of woman his child leaves, and he mourns how “Indeed our as helicopter retain this tension—through flying, her sweet / foods leave us cavities.” fine blades cause the air to wince. Snodgrass spent years on The Fuhrer Bunker (1977), a BIBLIOGRAPHY controversial sequence of dramatic monologues. In this Cooper, Jane R. Reading Adrienne Rich: Reviews and Re- multivoiced work, which Snodgrass calls “a sort of ora- Visions, 1951–1981. Ann Arbor: Michigan University torio for speakers” (192), first performed theatrically in Press, 1984. part in 1977, also adapted to the stage, various Nazi fig- Templeton, Alice. The Dream and the Dialogue: Adrienne ures speak inner revelations so repulsive that some crit- Rich’s Feminist Poetics. Knoxville: University of Tennessee ics reject the appropriateness of such work for literary Press, 1994. presentation. Snodgrass insists, however, that “nothing Felicity Plunkett human is foreign to us” (155). This work is a crowning achievement as an examination of evil great and small. SNODGRASS, W(ILLIAM) D(EWITT) Frequently Snodgrass has used a rhetorical strategy (1926– ) Long resistant to his reputation as a that moves from the general to the specific, from public 464 SNYDER, GARY to personal. While in his midcareer he tried freer forms, oped world have taken their role to be one of resistance later, with “For me: no music, no poem” (1999), he and subversion,” Snyder wrote in 1995. “[P]oetry can returned to the rhymes and metrical forms of which he disclose the misuse of language by holders of power, it is a master (see PROSODY AND FREE VERSE). Gavin Ewart can attack dangerous archetypes employed to oppress, declared Snodgrass “one of the six best poets now writ- and it can expose the flimsiness of shabby made-up ing in English” (Ewart 165). How one appraises Snod- mythologies” (Snyder “What Poetry” 92). grass depends, in large part, on larger questions about With this in mind, it is important to point out that what constitutes art, as well as about accepting intimacy Snyder’s poetry, poetics, and philosophy may be best and trusting the artist’s truthfulness. Such simplicity, approached through four main, interrelated prisms of ease, and directness combined with such craft makes thought: first, as mentioned, the importance of ecolog- some readers wary. Classical sincerity or a Trojan horse? ical and environmental concerns, manifested in his Intelligence, irony, and imagery presented musically and work as a kind of “ecopoetics” of bioregionalism; sec- metrically are Snodgrass’s prodigious gifts. Spirited and ond, his devotion to the intricacies and complexities of serious with a comical name, the poet asserts “Snodgrass American Indian and First Nations traditions, philoso- is walking through the universe” (“These Trees Stand” phies, and ways of life; third, his lifelong study of both [1981]). Chinese and Japanese poetry and art, as well as his BIBLIOGRAPHY ongoing engagement with Zen Buddhism and other Ewart, Gavin, “One Poet, Many Voices.” New York Times forms of Mahayana Buddhism; and fourth, his dia- Book Review, September 13, 1987. logue with the traditions and idioms of American writ- Haven, Stephen, ed. The Poetry of W. D. Snodgrass: Everything ing, especially in the inspiration drawn from such Human. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993. writers as Whitman and Henry David Thoreau, and in Snodgrass, W. D. After Images. Rochester, N.Y.: BOA Edi- the questioning and enlargement of modernist Ameri- tions, 1999. can poetic projects, such as those of Ezra POUND and Leslie Palmer William Carlos WILLIAMS (see MODERNISM). Shortly after his birth, Snyder’s family moved from SNYDER, GARY (1930– ) Few poets have San Francisco to a small farmstead on the outskirts of greater “proof” than the poet Gary Snyder of what Walt Seattle. It was there, in the rainy Northwest states of Whitman called the poet’s “proof . . . that his country Washington and Oregon that Snyder grew up, reading absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it” books by Thoreau and Ernest Thompson Seton, learn- (762). Variously described (and self-described) as a SAN ing a lifelong proficiency with the tools and animal life FRANCISCO RENAISSANCE man, BEAT poet, “wilderness- that surrounded him, and arriving at “an immediate, philosopher-activist” (according to Allen GINSBERG intuitive deep sympathy with the natural world” (Sny- [203]), scholar-guru-woodsman, and, infamously, as der Real 92). After graduating from high school in Port- the “number one Dharma bum of them all” (according land, Snyder was awarded a scholarship to Reed to Jack KEROUAC [10]), Gary Snyder is perhaps one of College, where he studied anthropology and mythogra- the most important and influential American poets, as phy. At Reed Snyder, along with Philip WHALEN and Lew well as countercultural figures. Marked by a profound Welch, began paying serious attention to writing and respect for the environment and a rigorous commit- publishing poetry in many of the literary magazines of ment to social responsibility and ethical action, Snyder the West Coast. By the time Snyder moved to San Fran- weaves such notions as watershed, bioregion, reinhab- cisco in 1952, his reputation as a poet had preceded itation, wild systems, mindfulness, and stewardship him, and he soon met Kenneth REXROTH, Ginsberg, and into his poetry, cultural theory, and public policy alike. Kerouac. Through Ginsberg and Kerouac, Snyder came Above all else, Snyder’s writing aspires to be political to be one of the poets who read at the Six Gallery read- and social in many radical ways: “For at least a century ing in 1955, which many claim sparked the beginning and a half, the socially engaged writers of the devel- of the San Francisco Renaissance. SNYDER, GARY 465

Although trying to define any set of poetics or sophic failures of Western culture juxtaposed against methodology for either the San Francisco or Beat poets the values of Buddhism and traditions of American is a thorny issue at best, it can be said that many of Indian culture. These preoccupations resonate their aesthetic preoccupations overlapped, especially throughout his poetry and manifest themselves in Sny- as seen in the extensions and revitalizations of an ear- der’s distinct stylizations of bare simplicity, directness, lier American generation in what has come to be and the attempts to render language as material, where labeled “open form” or “organic” poetry (see PROSODY “each rock a word / a creek washed stone” (“RIPRAP” AND FREE VERSE and ARS POETICAS). Similarities can also [1965]). This rendering is expressed in terms of what be seen in the revival of oral poetry and the power of Snyder often refers to as the juxtapositional logic of performance (see POETRY IN PERFORMANCE), experimen- “riprapping” (Afterword), a mode in which words and tation with CONFESSIONAL modes of poetry, through the images are placed “side by side” to “work like sharp widespread use of drugs and sexual freedom as vehi- blows on the mind” (“Statement” 421). Riprapping cles for creative expression, and, notably for Snyder, a draws its energy from the compositional impulses of commitment to Eastern religions. Snyder was many modernist poets, seen especially in what Pound appointed to the California Arts Council in 1974, labeled the ideogrammic method (see IMAGIST SCHOOL). where he served for six years as an active member. He “Riprap” (1959), “Piute Creek” (1965), and other has also been involved in local, regional, and national poems are excellent examples of Snyder’s efforts to knit political and educational efforts that include the estab- poetry to the physicality of the body, to work, and to lishment of “the Art of the Wild,” an annual conference the sheer immediacy of the real. As Snyder points out focused on writing and issues concerning the environ- in “Piute Creek,” “A clear, attentive mind / Has no ment. Snyder has taught creative writing at the Uni- meaning but that / Which sees is truly seen.” The point versity of California, Davis, since 1985. He won the is not so much to “show the world through the prism Pulitzer Prize for poetry (1970), the American Book of language” but to see the world “without any prism Award for poetry (1983), and the Bollingen Prize of language, and to bring that seeing into language” (1997). He has also received an American Academy of (Snyder “What Poetry” 67). Arts and Letters award (1987) and the Poetry Society of America Shelley Memorial Award (1986), as well as BIBLIOGRAPHY Dean, Tim. Gary Snyder and the American Unconscious: Inhab- several other awards and fellowships. iting the Ground. Basingstoke, England: Macmillan, 1991. Snyder’s experiences as a tanker seaman, logger, Ginsberg, Allen. “My Mythic Thumbnail Biography of Gary ranger, and trail-crew member in the Pacific Northwest Snyder.” In Gary Snyder: Dimensions of a Life, edited by were inspirations for his first two collections of poetry, Jon Halper. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1991. RIPRAP (1959) and Myths and Texts (1960). Soon after Halper, Jon, ed. Gary Snyder: Dimensions of a Life. San Fran- the Six Gallery reading, Snyder began a long 15-year cisco: Sierra Club Books, 1991. stint traveling between India, Japan, China, and the Kerouac, Jack. The Dharma Bums. New York: Signet, 1959. United States. During these travels he learned to speak Murphy, Patrick. Understanding Gary Snyder. Columbia: Uni- and write Chinese and Japanese, and he became a versity of South Carolina Press, 1992. devout Zen Buddhist in the Rinzai tradition. Promi- Snyder, Gary. Afterword to Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems. nent in Six Selections from Mountains and Rivers without New York: North Point Press, 1965. ———. “What Poetry Did in China.” In A Place in Space: End, Plus One (1965), a continuing cycle of poems Ethics, Aesthetics, and Watersheds. New York: Counterpoint affecting Mountains and Rivers Without End (1996), Cold Press, 1995, pp. 91–93. Mountain Poems (1965), The Back Country (1967), ———. The Real Work: Interviews and Talks 1964–1979. New and Regarding Wave (1969) braids the everyday with York: New Directions, 1980. the discipline of Zen Buddhism and other East Asian ———. “Statement on Poetics.” In The New American Poetry religious-philosophic practices. These collections also 1945–1960, edited by Donald Allen. New York: Grove address what Snyder sees as the ethical and philo- Press, 1960, pp. 420–421. 466 SOBIN, GUSTAF

Whitman, Walt. “1855 Preface to Leaves of Grass.” The Self as Instrument of Its Syllables” records this process Complete Poems, edited by Francis Murphy. New York: through the final gathering of words into a poem, Penguin, 1975, pp. 741–762. which is then seen as a “luminous salvage.” Releasing Jason Morelyle one from the surfaces of the ordinary and everyday, lan- guage becomes an end in itself: As Sobin says in “Trans- SOBIN, GUSTAF (1935– ) Gustaf Sobin is parent Itineraries: 1999,” collected in In the Name of the a poet of trancendence, seeking through language ways Neither (2002), language is “a density . . . in the service in which things of the world can be transformed and of its own evanescent releases.” elevated into exceptional beauty and delight. Influ- BIBLIOGRAPHY enced by Robert DUNCAN, Robert CREELEY, and René Baker, Robert. “The Manifestation of the Particular: The Thing Char, among others, his work bridges American and in Sobin and Heidegger.” Talisman 18 (fall 1998): 177–196. French poetic traditions. He has spent his life as a ———. “The Open Vocable.” American Book Review 20.2 writer entirely in France, which provides the setting for (January/February 1999): 4, 10. much of his work. Sobin, Gustaf. “An Interview with Gustaf Sobin,” by Edward Born and reared in Boston, Sobin graduated from Foster Talisman 10 (spring 1993): 26–39. [The Gustaf Brown University in 1957. He met the poet René Sobin Issue, edited by Foster.] Char, who invited him to his home in Provence in Edward Foster 1962. The following year Sobin made Provence his permanent home and learned “how to read the land- “SOMEWHERE I HAVE NEVER TRAV- scape [there] as one might read a text, a textus, a ELLED” E. E. CUMMINGS (1931) This woven fabric” (Foster 27). Provence provided him poem, published in the collection ViVa, illustrates the with time and freedom for the intensive study of influence of the modernist experimentation of such poetry and its potential transformative powers, a poets as Ezra POUND and T. S. ELIOT on E. E. CUMMINGS study that included discussions with Char and the and exemplifies the poet’s fusion of exuberant typo- philosopher Martin Heidegger. Sobin’s first book of graphical and grammatical play, a painterly exploration poems, Wind Chrysalid’s Rattle appeared in 1980. Voy- of imagery, and spare lyricism. While ViVa demon- aging Portraits (1988) includes “Portrait of the Self as strates Cummings’s increasingly idiosyncratic and Instrument of Its Syllables,” a key work in under- anarchic poetics and marks his emergence as a crucial standing Sobin’s poetics. His selected poems, By the player in bringing to American poetry the questioning Bias of Sound, appeared in 1995. Luminous Debris: and experiments of European literary and visual art, Reflecting on Vestige in Provence and Languedoc (2000) is “somewhere” combines formal radicalism with gentle a series of meditations on ancient objects and places in lyricism and shows the exquisite balance of Cum- his adopted homeland. To most readers Sobin is bet- mings’s best poetry (see EUROPEAN POETIC INFLUENCES ter known for his fiction than for his poetry. His nov- and MODERNISM). els include The Fly-Truffler (2000), a best-seller that The world of this poem is associative in its under- has been frequently translated. Similar to his essays stated metaphors and mobile in its shifting between and much of his poetry, the novel is set in Provence images. A self is a flower, fingers are petals, and and involves transformations of the ordinary through fragility is “intense.” The poem is about the courage of language, inner vision, and imagination. a joyous trust. Eyes have voices, roses depth, and the The specifics of landscapes and objects are necessary rain is delicate handed. This imagery shows the influ- preconditions for Sobin’s poetry. The capacity of lan- ence of SURREALISM and evokes the sensation of the guage to suggest possibilities beyond one’s immediate blurring of self and other that the delights of early love grasp of geography and objects, thereby going beyond bring. Boundaries collapse, and the self merges with the surfaces of the ordinary and everyday world, gives both the beloved and the world, especially the natural his poetry its fundamental dynamics. “Portrait of the world. The experience of “I,” the poem’s speaker, is of SONG, CATHY 467 the fear and exhilaration of loving. The poem whirls in 1982 and made Song a new figure of great promise in a celebration of wonder and risk, refusing stasis and the Asian-American literary scene. As the recipient of caution—a song to vitality. one of the more prestigious literary prizes in the Cummings called the revolutionary “i” of his poems nation, Song not only joins a highly select and influen- the “non-hero” (quoted in Kennedy 175). Here “i” is tial company of former winners, such as Adrienne paradoxical: Although far from the brash hero of clas- RICH, W. S. MERWIN, John ASHBERY, and Robert HASS, her sical and romantic love poetry, nevertheless “I,” a vul- sudden prominence also gives greater depth and nerably open lover, is heroic in embracing the risks of dimension to what is called “emergent” or “immigrant” loving. The poem’s economical diction reinforces this, literature, an important body of work that has forced juxtaposing fragility and power: The “most fragile ges- an expansion in the traditional canon to include texts ture” can “enclose” the speaker; the “slightest look” can by immigrants and people of color, such as Li-Young “unclose” him. The texture of fragility is eloquent and LEE, Derek WALCOTT, Leslie Marmon SILKO, Alberto RÍOS, compelling, and it has depth as well as delicacy. From and Lorna Dee CERVANTES. its overarching metaphor of the closed self opening A Korean and Chinese American, Song was born in and shutting, other connections ripple outward Honolulu, Hawaii. She graduated from Wellesley Col- through metaphor: A self closed “as fingers” is lege with a B.A. in 1977 and Boston University with an “unclosed” one petal at a time by the lover’s look and M.A. in creative writing in 1981, and she returned to is thus also compared with the rosebud, opened by live in Hawaii with her husband, son, and daughter in spring’s persuasion. 1987. Since her first volume of poetry, Picture Bride, The poem’s punctuation defies standard grammar, won the 1982 Yale award and was nominated for the reaching to express less rational connections. In the National Book Critics Circle Award, Song has pub- poem “since feeling is first,” Cummings’s ideas about lished three other books of poems: Frameless Windows, grammar are suggested through the metaphor of put- Squares of Light (1988), School Figures (1994), and Land ting aside “the syntax of things” to experience life more of Bliss (2001). fully. Cummings, pulled from childhood toward paint- Song’s work shows a strong talent notable for its ing as well as poetry, finds the expression of each word dense, intimate, and dazzling descriptions, its pene- maximized by its placement. The silences between trating exploration of those subjects closest to Song’s words invest simple term with great care. The poem experiences—the intricacies of Asian immigrant family “somewhere i have never travelled” avoids excess and relationships and histories, the places and landscapes has a simplicity in its diction and an unflinching emo- of her childhood, especially the rural plantation cul- tional openness. In true modernist form, its hallmarks ture of Hawaii, exile and reunion, and the ritual of are questing and experimentation, and it shows a revi- memory—and its engagement with various modes of talization of form and theme. expression—sewing perfect seams, preparing foods (alive with all the sensory sensations of taste, smell, BIBLIOGRAPHY sound, color, and touch), or decorating the world Norman Freidman. E. E. Cummings: The Art of His Poetry. around us with flowers, light, clothes, and sounds. In Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1964. Kennedy, Richard S. Dreams in the Mirror: A Biography of her poem “The White Porch” (1982), Song asks read- E. E. Cummings. New York: W. W. Norton, 1980. ers to think “of the luxury: how to use / the afternoon.” Her poems offer various, original, intensely specific Felicity Plunkett responses to the luxurious possibilities of how to use our time. Song shows great skill at fusing form, image, SONG, CATHY (1955– ) Cathy Song’s con- occasion, and emotion; the ability to bring concen- tribution to late 20th-century American poetry began trated life to her world; and careful explorations of the with the publication of her first book, Picture Bride, contact and occasional conflict between immigrant and which won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award in nonimmigrant cultures. 468 THE SONNETS

BIBLIOGRAPHY Poems in The Sonnets are significant for their lyrical Fujita-Sato, Gayle. “‘Third World’ as Place and Paradigm in beauty and their assault on sonnet conventions. No Cathy Song’s ‘Picture Bride,’” MELUS (spring 1988): 49–72. single poem conforms to the rules of established son- Lim, Shirley. “Picture Bride.” MELUS (fall 1983): 95–99. net structure. Elevated language typical of traditional Kenneth Speirs sonnets—for example, “O let me burst, and I be lost at sea!”—appears throughout The Sonnets, yet Berrigan THE SONNETS TED BERRIGAN (1964, 1967, combines it with a street-smart and wholly contempo- 1982, 2000) Ted BERRIGAN’s The Sonnets was first rary rhetoric: “fucked til 7 now she’s late to work” (son- published by Berrigan’s C Press in 1964. The book net LXIV). (and Grove Press’s 1967 edition) contained 65 sonnets. Altogether The Sonnets radically extends the possi- Reissues of The Sonnets by United Artists Books (1982) bilities of the traditionally conservative sonnet form, as and Penguin (2000) have respectively restored six and it continues to evoke 1960s ideals, including commu- seven previously omitted sonnets. Perhaps the most nity-building and democratic redistribution of “traditional” aspect of The Sonnets is that it can be read wealth—particularly the wealth of predecessor poetry. both as a cohesive book and as a collection of discrete BIBLIOGRAPHY poems. Thus the book belongs to the tradition of son- Berrigan, Ted. “Interview with Ted Berrigan,” by Barry net sequences stretching back to Shakespeare’s sonnet Alpert. In Talking in Tranquility, edited by Stephen Ratcliffe sequence and Petrarch’s sonnets to Laura. and Leslie Scalapino. Bolinas, Calif.: Avenue B/O Books, Similar to Shakespeare’s sonnets, Berrigan’s are 1991, pp. 31–54. addressed to various characters. And yet, as Alice NOT- Notley, Alice. Introduction to The Sonnets, by Ted Berrigan. LEY comments, “where Shakespeare’s plot is patterned New York: Penguin, 2000, pp. v–xv. chronologically [Berrigan’s] is patterned simultaneously, Rifkin, Libbie. Career Moves. Madison: University of Wis- and where Shakespeare’s story is overt [Berrigan’s] is consin Press, 2000. buried beneath a series of names, repetitions, and frag- Ward, Geoff. Statutes of Liberty. New York: St. Martin’s mented experience that in this age seem more like life Press, 1993. than a bald story does” (v–vi). Phrases, including “I like Daniel Kane to beat people up” and “feminine, marvelous, and tough,” are repeated throughout, lending a sense of SOTO, GARY (1952– ) Gary Soto, one of the consistency to the otherwise highly fragmented work. foremost Chicano writers of the 20th century, haunted The Sonnets also works to threaten conventional def- the poetry section of the library as an impoverished initions of authorship and originality. Lines from other young man and longed for the day when his own work authors, without attribution, are made a part of what, would reside on its shelves. At 16, Soto discovered in effect, is a collage—one half of “A Final Sonnet,” for Jules Verne, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, and example, is a word-for-word selection from Prospero’s Robert FROST. But he seemed most inspired by the final speech in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The Sonnets work of Knut Hamsun, the Norwegian writer whose is particularly noted for its references to NEW YORK novel The Hunger (1890) depicted a struggling and SCHOOL poets, and thus The Sonnets is a work in con- starving writer much like Soto himself. versation with select predecessor poets. By inserting Soto was born and raised in Fresno, California. An other writers’ works into his own, Berrigan reestab- adolescent in the 1960s, he noted how the picture of lished the practice of collage as a technique in the writ- idyllic family life presented on American television ing of poetry. Libbie Rifkin explains that collage can be seemed an ironic contrast to his own home, where the understood as collaborative, insofar as Berrigan con- inhabitants suffered “an ignorance that was stupefying ceived of “collaboration as an encounter between any for all of us that lived in the confines of a three-bed- number of different writings, set in motion but not room house” (Letter). Soto sold his first work at 19; a controlled by a single writer” (130). check arrived in time to purchase shoes and trousers SPICER, JACK 469

for his graduation ceremony (Letter). A graduate of SANCE lasted into the 1960s and included Duncan, California State University, Fresno, and the University Rexroth, William EVERSON, and Lawrence FERLINGHETTI, of California, Irvine, where he earned an M.F.A. in cre- among others. Spicer was also associated with writers ative writing (1976), Soto is known for his poetry, from BLACK MOUNTAIN College, such as Robert CREELEY short stories, and children’s books. He is the author of and Charles OLSON. While the movement featured 10 poetry collections. Among honors he has received many stylistic approaches, its poets tended to focus on are the Discover/Nation Prize (1975), two fellowships language and on a poetic form shaped by the sound from the National Endowment for the Arts (1982 and and rhythms of the voice; they also tried to make their 1991), and a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foun- poetry immediately present to the reader through dation (1979). He teaches at the University of Califor- everyday subject matter, words, and images. They nia, Riverside. inspired many West Coast writers who were connected Soto’s work speaks to young people and those who with BEAT POETRY, including Gary SNYDER, Michael feel out of place in the mainstream. Michael Manson MCCLURE, Philip Lamantia, and Philip WHALEN. suggests that Soto’s writing breaks “what critics have Although Spicer was not well known during his life- valued as the ‘continuity of American Poetry’ with time and avoided the limelight, he did attract a dedi- Puritanism” (263), confirming that even the most cated following of young poets who met with him “American literature” is a “border product reflecting regularly at his favorite bar. the plural origins of the United States” (264). Soto’s Spicer was born in southern California. He liked to poem “Oranges” (1985) depicts a young man of 12 say that he was born in 1946, the year he met Duncan attempting his first date, with a nickel and two oranges and Robin BLASER at the University of California, Berke- in his pocket. When the young girl chooses a candy ley. He spent the rest of his life in San Francisco, except bar that costs a dime, the speaker “took the nickel for brief stays in New York and Boston and a semester from / [his] pocket, then an orange.” Their eyes meet: of teaching at the University of Minnesota. He worked She knows “what it was all / About.” Before this bar- at Berkeley as a linguistic researcher until his death. tered exchange, the girl is referred to as “she.” As the Although Spicer was first published in the 1940s, young couple exits the store, her status has changed. his first well-known work, After Lorca, appeared in Soto writes that he “took my girl’s hand in mine.” Soto’s 1957, followed by Homage to Creeley (1959), Billy the work offers insightful reflections on childhood experi- Kid (1959), The Heads of the Town up to the Aether ences. While it reflects the “plural origins” of American (1962), and Language (1965). Much of his work was literature, it also dissolves “borders,” as readers recog- not in print until after his death, and it now includes nize elements of their own youth in his poems. lectures, letters, essays, plays, and recordings. Although he was poorly understood in his own life- BIBLIOGRAPHY time, he now attracts international favor, and his work Manson, Michael Tomasek. “Poetry and Masculinity on the continues to inspire gay and lesbian writers. Spicer Anglo/Chicano Border.” In The Calvinist Roots of the Mod- ern Era, edited by Aliki Barnstone. Hanover, N.H.: Uni- preferred the role of cultural outcast and, similar to so versity Press of New England, 1997. many writers on the cultural margins, he found relief Soto, Gary. Letter to Pamela Highet, April 22, 2001. in alcohol, which eventually caused his death. Spicer sees the acceptance of ambiguity and paradox Pamela Highet as the way to what he calls the “real.” As he said in his poetic “letters” to Federico García Lorca, “I would like SPICER, JACK (1925–1965) Jack Spicer was to point to the real, disclose it,” and it is the poet’s task a part of the bohemian movement that flourished in to use words to “drag the real into the poem,” that is, Berkeley and San Francisco after World War II, when to ranslate those real objects into words (After Lorca such writers as Henry Miller, Kenneth REXROTH, and 1957). Poetry is a process for Spicer; rather than tap- Robert DUNCAN lived there. The SAN FRANCISCO RENAIS- ping into the subconscious, the poet receives the idea 470 SPRING AND ALL for the poem from “outside” in the form of a “dictation” Spicer writes is already a “ghost.” For Spicer, things (Blaser 272). Instead of controlling or manipulating correspond rather than connect, and that allows the that material, the poet follows it step by step through “real” to be communicated “across language” and the process of composition, in what he called a “serial “across time” (After Lorca), which is why his poetry poem.” In “Imaginary Elegies” (1959), Spicer piles speaks so powerfully today. words onto each other as if they were objects, ques- BIBLIOGRAPHY tioning the power of poetry to do anything more than Blaser, Robin, ed. The Collected Books of Jack Spicer. Santa to provide visual images, as if it was “almost blind like Barbara, Calif.: Black Sparrow, 1980. a camera.” He moves from there to God’s “big eye” and Ellingham, Lewis, and Kevin Killian. Poet Be like God: Jack then to all of creation, the Sun, the Moon, heaven, and Spicer and the San Francisco Renaissance. Hanover, N.H.: hell, all unexplainable because, “Most things happen in Wesleyan University Press, 1998. twilight,” before he offers a warning about the enor- Finkelstein, Norman M. “Jack Spicer’s Ghosts and the Gno- mous responsibility of the poet: “Unbind the dream- sis of History.” Boundary IX.2 (winter 1981): 81–100. ers. / Poet, / Be like God.” That is, the poet must lead Foster, Edward. Jack Spicer. Boise, Idaho: Boise State Univer- the reader to the “real” by presenting a lasting image in sity, 1991. an act of imaginative creation, the poem itself. In verse Gord Beveridge IV, he repeats, “Time does not finish a poem”; it cannot be finished without the reader’s active participation in SPRING AND ALL WILLIAM CARLOS re-creating what the poet imagined. The poem ends as WILLIAMS (1923) First published in the periodi- the speaker transforms poetry itself into “Po-eatery,” cal the Dial (see POETRY JOURNALS) William Carlos something to be consumed by the reader. WILLIAMS’s Spring and All is a representative modernist One of Spicer’s most prevalent symbols is the ghost, text (see MODERNISM). It can be read along with T. S. a magical figure that brings together life and death, ELIOT’s poem THE WASTE LAND (which appeared in the interior and exterior, the past and the present, and that Dial in 1922) as an example of the experimental can, as Norman M. Finkelstein says, “hint at truths the approach to literature between the wars. But to read poet barely wishes to accept” (89). For example, Spicer Spring and All as simply a counterpoint to The Waste reveals his ambivalent feeling about the past in the sec- Land is to miss the radically distinctive presence of ond of “Six Poems for Poetry Chicago” (1966): Past Williams in the tradition of modernism. Eliot’s formal events are always present metaphorically, “Which method of allusion and quotation to and from other evokes Eliot and then evokes suspicion. Ghosts all of texts—Williams described Eliot and Ezra POUND as them. Doers of no good.” Spicer’s irony is apparent by “men content with the connotations of their masters” his allusion to T. S. ELIOT’s famous essay “Tradition and (Selected 21)—stands in sharp contrast to Williams’s the Individual Talent” (1919) in which Eliot stresses embrace of the dynamic innovations of the avant-garde. the importance of literary tradition to the writer (see As Williams explains, Spring and All “was written ARS POETICAS). Because the present is formed from the when all the world was going crazy about typograph- past, the past is always part of the present. However, ical form and is really a travesty on the idea” (Imagi- past writers are also “ghosts,” never fully present, and nations 86). An improvisational sequence of 27 therefore, “doers of no good.” Finally, the speaker tries untitled poems and associated prose fragments, Spring to envision himself as part of that procession of time: and All is a vital example of Williams’s early experi- “Rest us as corpses / We poets / Vain words,” but he is ments with form. The text of Spring and All is distinc- overwhelmed by the “impossible dimensions” of that tive for other reasons as well: It incorporates the realization. Still any communication must come from methods of collage and juxtaposition in the visual arts the past, because the words have already been uttered; of the period; it transgresses boundaries among gen- as Spicer says in After Lorca, “That is how we dead men res, raising fundamental questions regarding the dis- write to each other,” and indeed the “Lorca” to whom tinction between poetry and prose; it is a parody of ST. JOHN, DAVID 471 nationalistic postwar rhetoric in the United States; and ST. JOHN, DAVID (1949– ) David St. John it is a modernist manifesto on the social and cultural holds an important place within the modern concep- value of art. tualization of poetry as a mapping of consciousness The text of Spring and All introduced the poems that (see MODERNISM). His poetry bridges the gap between would become Williams’s most well known—includ- linear conceptions of thought found in NARRATIVE ing “Spring and All,” “To Elsie,” and “The Red Wheel- POETRY of the mid-20th century and the elliptical pat- barrow.” The poems reflect his abiding commitment to terns of the mind prominent in postmodern verse. He the local conditions and people of his time and place. once remarked, as the “image of the modern mind’s The poem later entitled “Spring and All” registers the discovery of itself” defined “poetic activity in the early mind apprehending to transitions in nature—“Now part of this century ...I seek the movement or pro- the grass, tomorrow / the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf— gression of the mind’s discovery of itself” (qtd. in Jack- and the poem known as “The Right of Way” gathers the son 78). Elizabeth BISHOP and John ASHBERY were major meaningful but transient particulars of our day-to-day influences upon his early poetry. Unlike other poets of lives—“an elderly man who / smiled and looked away.” his time, St. John moves between these two poles by Spring and All is not least a breathtaking commen- writing a poetry that dramatizes both Bishop’s acute tary on the necessary and continuing activity of imagi- attention to the details of the world and Ashbery’s tel- native labor. As Williams explains, “The imagination escopic motions of the mind. goes from one thing to another” (Selected 11); therefore St. John was born and raised Fresno, California. In the reader must remain attentive to the text’s move- 1974 he earned an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa ment from one thing to another. Not unlike Walt and published his first book, Hush, two years later. St. Whitman, Williams insists upon the reader’s active role John is the author of five other books of poetry, includ- in the production of meaning. The experience of read- ing Red Leaves of Night (1999), a finalist for the Los ing Spring and All is challenging for precisely this rea- Angeles Times Book Prize, and Study for the World’s Body son. As Williams insists in the prose of Spring and All, (1994), a finalist for the National Book Award. Along “There is no confusion—only difficulties.” In other with several fellowships from the National Endowment words, the confusion one may experience reading for the Arts (1976, 1984, and 1994) and Guggenheim Spring and All in no way implies a confusing text; on Foundation (1997), St. John has been awarded the the contrary, it is a condition naming the experience of Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts a reader, face-to-face with the generative state in which and Letters (2000) and the Prix de Rome (1984). the imagination becomes aware of itself. Fundamental to St. John’s search for a poetic expres- sion that enacts “the movement . . . of the mind’s dis- BIBLIOGRAPHY covery of itself” (St. John, quoted in Jackson 78) are a “A Symposium: Teaching (and Being Taught By) Spring and sensual connection to and rendering of the physical All.” William Carlos Williams Review 10.2 (fall 1984): 1–20. Long. Mark C. “‘no confusion—only difficulties’: William world alongside a longing for an ideal metaphysical Carlos Williams’s Poetics of Apposition.” William Carlos realm. He often plays these two elements out through Williams Review 23.2 (fall 1997): 1–26. characters involved in a drama of relationships, the Palattella, John. “But If It Ends the Start Is Begun: Spring and tensions of the encounter weaving together the interior All, Americanism, and Postwar Apocalypse.” William Car- drama of the self and the public drama of interaction los Williams Review 21.1 (spring 1995): 1–21. with others. In “A Fan Sketched with Silver Egrets” Whittaker, Thomas R. William Carlos Williams. New York: (1994), St. John uses the intensely physical to move Twayne, 1968. his characters toward a metaphysical realm, beyond Williams, William Carlos. Imaginations. New York: New language, wherein two people are joined in complete Directions, 1970. comprehension of one another. The fan, a vessel for the ———. Selected Essays. New York: New Directions, 1969. physical touch of the lovers, unfolds as the female Mark C. Long lover’s “kiss unfolds” and reveals “This scent of animal 472 STAFFORD, WILLIAM pleasure.” At the same time, the fan is also a physical after he graduated. He earned a Ph.D. from the Univer- emblem of the possibility of the pair communicating sity of Iowa in 1954, while on leave from a teaching “With no language / Except this single pulse” of the position at Lewis and Clark College in Oregon, where he fan, beating in the air of a crowded room. taught until his retirement in 1980. In 1960 when he St. John’s cinematographic imagery of moments ren- was 46 years old, he published his first book of poetry. dered in conversational tones is spiked with the flour- His second and most highly rated book by critics, Trav- ishes of baroque elegance, accentuating the extent to eling through the Dark, was published in 1962 and won which the world we perceive is the world we create the National Book Award in 1963. He went on to receive with the motions and the languages of our minds. many other prestigious awards and honors, including BIBLIOGRAPHY the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of Jackson, Richard. “Renaming the Present.” In Acts of Mind: America (1964). In 1970 he was appointed the consult- Conversations with Contemporary Poets. Tuscaloosa: Univer- ant in poetry to the Library of Congress, a position sub- sity of Alabama Press, 1983. sequently renamed poet laureate. St. John, David. “David St. John,” interviewed by Charles An incredibly prolific writer, Stafford published Harper Webb. Cortland Review. Available online. URL: more than 65 volumes of poetry and prose, refusing to www.cortlandreview.com/issue/11/stjohn11.htm. Down- edit his work or limit his output. His philosophy for loaded December 2003. teaching creative writing called for equality between Karla Kelsey teacher and student. He believed that the poet and cre- ative writing teacher had no role as critic, and he was STAFFORD, WILLIAM (1914–1993) Reject- often criticized for not setting standards. Even so, his ing the elitism, irony, and opaque techniques of the teaching method eventually gained acceptance with modernists (see MODERNISM), the formalism of the New the widespread influence of what is known as the Criticism (see FUGITIVE/AGRARIAN SCHOOL), in which he “process method of teaching composition,” in which was educated, and the CONFESSIONAL style of his con- the act of writing is emphasized rather than the prod- temporaries, William Stafford wrote poetry that is per- uct of that act. sonal, accessible, humane, and deceptively simple. As Characterized by a colloquial idiom and rhythm, Judith Kitchen argues, “both his themes and his style Stafford’s poetry has often been described as conversa- place him as a transitional poet, between generations” tional. His work is not conventionally formal, but (10). Influenced by Robert FROST, Stafford has more in Stafford adeptly uses rhythmic variations and oblique common with the younger generation of poets, includ- rhymes in his work for emphasis. While his diction is ing JAMES WRIGHT, Robert BLY, and Donald HALL, than often simple, his syntax and usage are not; he uses lan- with his near contemporary Robert LOWELL. guage in unusual and unexpected ways. In Writing the Stafford was born in Hutchinson, Kansas, into a Australian Crawl, he explains that “the successive dis- working-class family that was liberal and noncon- tortions of language have their own kind of cumulative formist. Following a peripatetic and impoverished potential” (60). childhood, Stafford worked his way through the Uni- The dominant themes in Stafford’s work have been versity of Kansas, where he was active in the early civil identified by Judith Kitchen as “a concern with family rights movement, graduating with a B.A. in 1937. Dur- and home which extends to the past,” “the West, which ing World War II, he registered as a conscientious objec- is for him equated with the wilderness and a com- tor and was stationed at civilian public service camps in munion with nature,” and “technology and the accom- Arkansas, California, and Illinois between 1942 and panying fear that the nation will fail to put it to its 1946, an experience that was to have a profound effect proper uses” (10). These themes remained remarkably on his writing. Stafford’s memoir about this experience, consistent throughout his career. Down in My Heart, became his master’s thesis at the Uni- Stafford’s work has been classified as regionalist, versity of Kansas and was published in 1947, the year environmentalist, antitechnology, and pacifist—classifi- STEELE, TIMOTHY 473 cations that fail, however, to capture the ambivalence poetry from its sources of rhythm, structure, and and complexity of his career-long explorations of both rational thought. Steele hopes to help restore the art of sides of every question, exemplified most clearly in his measured speech. A predominant figure in the NEW two most anthologized poems, “At the Bomb Testing FORMALISM, Steele synthesizes the erudite elegance of Site” (1960) and “Traveling through the Dark” (1962). Richard WILBUR with the counterromantic, antimod- Both of these poems explore seeming oppositions, ern, urbane plain style of Yvor WINTERS, J. V. CUNNING- humans versus nature and nature versus technology. HAM, and Edgar BOWERS in poems that address They do not favor one over the other, but instead they contemporary matters against a backdrop of classical explore the complexity and difficulty of these issues allusion and form. and argue for a responsible balance between the Born in Burlington, Vermont, Steele attended Stan- demands of human progress and the primacy of nature. ford University as an undergraduate and as a Stegner Grounded in an ethos of personal, moral, spiritual, fellow, and Brandeis University, where J. V. Cunning- and civic responsibility, Stafford’s work is imbued with ham directed his dissertation on detective fiction. both a childlike wonder and a sense of mortality. Many Steele has received a Guggenheim Fellowship (1984) of his poems are autobiographical, although not CON- and the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy FESSIONAL. The speaker in the poems is a wise, gentle, of American Poetry (1986). avuncular persona who perceives order and connec- While some critics praise Steele for his technical tion in the universe and offers hope for the future, mastery, his grace, and his polish, others call his while pointing out problems of the present. In the rhythms monotonous, his diction glib or crabbed, and poems there can be delight in the ordinary and the his themes limited or unoriginal. Although Steele’s possibility for transcendence through apocalypse— subjects are occasionally banal, as in “Anecdote of the necessary for personal, environmental, and societal sal- Sugar Bowl” (1994) and “The Sheets” (1986), Steele’s vation to occur. best poems capture the motion of a scene and the mind examining it, as in The Color Wheel’s (1994) “Depen- BIBLIOGRAPHY dent Nature,” “Practice,” and “Hortulus.” Andrews, Tom, ed. On William Stafford: The Worth of Local Things. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993. Uncertainties and Rest (1979) displays Steele’s formal Carpenter, David. William Stafford. Boise, Idaho: Boise State mastery. “Sunday Afternoon” and “Nightpiece for the University Press, 1986. Summer Solstice” treat Steele’s dominant subject: Holden, Jonathan. The Mark to Turn: A Reading of William domestic reality. In Sapphics against Anger and Other Stafford’s Poetry. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, Poems (1986), Steele takes on larger philosophical 1976. themes. The free verse “Snapshots for Posterity” and Kitchen, Judith. Writing the World: Understanding William the sestets of “On the Eve of a Birthday” treat the prob- Stafford. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 1999. lems of maturing in a materialistic world as Stoic moral Stafford, William. Writing the Australian Crawl: Views on the issues. “The Golden Age,” a poem in syllabics (in Writer’s Vocation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan which all lines contain a predetermined number of syl- Press, 1978. lables), argues that all times are corrupt, and an era Melissa Johnson only thrives if “friends sketch / The dust with theorems and proofs.” “Sapphics against Anger” meditates on STEELE, TIMOTHY (1948– ) Timothy anger and “the good life” and argues that though pas- Steele’s formal verse implicitly critiques the subjec- sion is “the holiest of powers,” it is “sustaining / Only tivism of much contemporary poetry. In books and if mastered.” The Color Wheel contains love lyrics, essays Steele argues that the modernists conflated out- poems on academic and domestic subjects, and several moded poetic diction and subject matter with meter poems of true wit. “Advice to a Student” counsels a and tradition and used free verse to destroy versifica- delinquent student on inventing clever excuses, “On tion (see PROSODY AND FREE VERSE), thus severing Wheeler Mountain” invites its addressee—a hiker—to 474 STEIN, GERTRUDE contemplate nature while its speaker lags, and “Past, Stein began study for a degree in psychology and phi- Present, Future” compares road rage to Greek tragedy. losophy at Radcliffe; subsequently she studied medi- As Kevin Walzer notes, Steele has been instrumental cine at Johns Hopkins (leaving in 1901, without in changing the course of contemporary poetry. Unlike finishing the degree). From 1903 until her death Stein some New Formalists, however, Steele seems less inter- was an expatriate, an American in France. When she ested in restoring form and NARRATIVE to poetry than in settled in Paris with her brother Leo, Stein’s identity demonstrating that there can be no vital poetry with- was firmly marked as a woman, a Jew, and a lesbian. out verse tradition. These attributes no doubt contributed to some of the negative response her publications have received, BIBLIOGRAPHY though they rarely determined the content of her work Sheehy, Donald G. “Measure for Measure: The Frostian in an overt way. There are the long poems “Lifting Classicism of Timothy Steele.” Robert Frost Review (fall 1995): 73–97. Belly” (1915–17), an ode to a lesbian relationship, and Walzer, Kevin. The Ghost of Tradition: Expansive Poetry and “Patriarchal Poetry” (1927), though neither was pub- Postmodernism. Ashland, Ore.: Story Line Press, 1998. lished in her lifetime (see LONG AND SERIAL POETRY). Stein’s only “profession” was writing, but she made no Richard E. Joines money from it until the 1930s. She lived off family investments, and when necessary she sold some of the STEIN, GERTRUDE (1874–1946) Gertrude many famous paintings that she had collected. In 1910 Stein’s radical language experiments and central Alice B. Toklas moved in with Gertrude and Leo, and involvement in the Paris art world from the early in 1913 tensions between brother and sister resulted in 1900s to her death have made her work and life Leo’s move to Italy. Toklas had by 1913 become famous. Much of her writing remained unpublished in Gertrude’s muse, typist, and essential partner in life. her lifetime, and she never received any awards, but Stein’s writing can be divided into early (1903–11), writers, musicians, painters, filmmakers, and dancers middle (1910–31), and late (1932–46) periods. The have all found her work inspiring. Stein’s favorite sub- early consists of the novels Q.E.D. (1903, published in ject was the human experience of thinking, feeling, 1950 as Things as They Are), Three Lives (1909), and and doing, especially how they happen simultane- The Making of Americans (1925). In her middle period ously; her favorite objects were America and family or Stein wrote poems, portraits, and plays, some of which power structures. After the 1950s, when the range of were collected in Geography and Plays (1922). In the her work became better known, such poets as John late period she wrote autobiography, opera, and lec- ASHBERY and Lyn HEJINIAN quickly recognized Stein’s tures. Stein dispensed with the intention to represent importance. As for Stein’s own influences, she read reality in language; instead her writing embodies the Shakespeare, and novelists from the 18th and 19th reality of lived experience, something that both varies centuries: Samuel Richardson and Laurence Sterne, and repeats itself. Similar to the cubist painters, Stein George Eliot and Henry James. The contemporaries experimented with perspective, the use of domestic who helped shape her writing were theorists in psy- materials, and writing without a “model.” In TENDER chology and science—including William James and BUTTONS (1914), a book that declared the beginning of Alfred North Whitehead—and painters, especially nonlinear writing, Stein announced: “Act so that there Paul Cézanne and Pablo Picasso. is no use in a centre.” “Why is there a difference,” asks Shortly after her birth in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, Stein, “between one window and another, why is there Stein moved with her family to Vienna, then Paris; her a difference, because the curtain is shorter.” The mean- family returned to America in 1880. English was her ing of these windows is thus determined by their con- third language (after German and French), and she text (the curtains and their different lengths); rather grew into adulthood on both American coasts, in Oak- than being inherent to the object, meaning is estab- land, California, and Baltimore, Maryland. In 1893 lished relationally. STEIN, GERTRUDE 475

In the 1920s and 1930s, Stein had a reputation as an round,” and “They say August is not April / But how extraordinary conversationalist and as a cubist writer; say so if in the middle they can not know.” When you visiting her and Toklas at 27 Rue de Fleurus, became a are in the middle of something, whether August or a rite of passage for writers, painters, and American plain, you cannot know what it is, only what it is not tourists. Stein was thus already well known when The (April or a mountain). “I have lost the thread of my dis- Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), a fanciful mem- course,” she admits at one point; however, “it makes oir of the Paris art world, made her a popular writer. In no difference if we find it / If we found it,” since it finds 1934 Stein returned to the United States for the first her, as long as she keeps writing. time in 30 years to lecture and tour. In 1929 Alice and T. S. ELIOT’s review of Stein in 1927 characterized Gertrude had begun self-publishing under their own her reception: “[I]t is not improving, it is not amusing, imprint, Plain Edition. Four titles appeared, including it is not interesting, it is not good for one’s mind. But How to Write (1931). The success of Autobiography, its rhythms have a peculiar hypnotic power not met however, finally brought a long-term contract from with before. It has a kinship with the saxophone. If this Random House and interest from other American pub- is the future, then the future is [something] in which lishers so that work began to appear regularly. In this we ought not to be interested” (595). Mina LOY com- late period some of the books are Lectures in America pared Stein in 1924 to the late 19th-century scientist (1935), The Geographical History of America (1936), Madame Marie Curie: Stein puts consciousness under Everybody’s Autobiography (1937), and Ida (1941). a microscope “to extract / a radium of the word” (94). As Stein predicted in her lecture “Composition as And in 1937 Samuel Beckett said that Stein was “a Explanation” (1926), her work became “classic” only mathematician [who] is in love with his figures; a after she was dead (496). During her lifetime her work mathematician for whom the solution of the problem was “outlaw” or “irritating annoying stimulating,” as she is of entirely secondary interest” (172–173). Treating characterized it (496). It is still classified in that way, words as a chemist or as a mathematician might, as if despite the number of forms she practiced: poems, por- words were elements or numbers, strip them of refer- traits, plays, novels, opera, autobiography, lectures, and ence—to other books and to history. History does not even a children’s book. Stein’s work has thus been clas- disappear; instead the past becomes something that sified as largely unclassifiable; even though her work is happens in the present, much as we experience a unmistakable, it is always unpredictable. memory as happening in the present. In this way, time Stanzas in Meditation (written in 1932, unpublished present is continuous, Stein insisted; even if we never until 1956) is Stein’s longest poem, which she wrote at forget the past, we live in the present, whether we her summer home in the French countryside; much of know it or not. Marianne MOORE favorably reviewed it seems to refer to the landscape around her and the The Making of the Americans in 1926; in her review, she people who visit. Stein loved to discriminate between quotes a passage from the novel: “[I]t is very difficult in similar words—in this case, between seeing and quarreling to be certain in either one what the other describing. She claims that she writes what she sees one is remembering” (129). Stein too wondered what without describing it. To “see” is to write about some- her readers would be remembering as they read. She thing that cannot be described but only enacted: the wanted them not to remember but rather to concen- tension between words, as objects, in relation to other trate on the present moment of reading. words/objects. The referents for words only play a part BIBLIOGRAPHY in meaning; language means according to how it is Beckett, Samuel. Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings, edited by used. As she writes the words split: “Because I know by Ruby Cohn. New York: Grove Press, 1984. weight how eight are eight” (emphasis added). To know Bridgman, Richard. Gertrude Stein in Pieces. New York: how many things there are, she assesses how much Oxford University Press, 1970. they weigh; knowledge is thus achieved indirectly. Curnutt, Kirk, ed. The Critical Response to Gertrude Stein. Consider these lines: “A plain is a mountain not made Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000. 476 STERN, GERALD

Eliot, T. S. “Charleston, Hey! Hey!” Nation & Athenaeum white began to appear in my cheek,” he wrote in “The 40.17 (January 29, 1927): 595. Bite” (1973). In 1998 he won the National Book Award Hoffman, Michael, ed. Critical Essays on Gertrude Stein. for This Time: New and Selected Poems. Stern’s recent Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986. work, Last Blue (2000) and American Sonnets (2002), Loy, Mina. “Gertrude Stein.” In The Lost Lunar Baedeker, continues to render his experiences—everyday occur- edited by Roger L. Conover. New York: Noonday Press, rences with mythic associations conveyed in NARRA- 1996, p. 94. Moore, Marianne. “The Spare American Emotion,” In The TIVE—in ways that prompt identification with the Complete Prose of Marianne Moore, edited by Patricia C. speaker’s voice. Willis. New York: Penguin, 1987, pp. 128–131. In “Peaches” (2002), a characteristic poem, Stern Stein, Gertrude. “Composition as Explanation.” In A Stein recalls throwing a peach stone over a fence at a Metro Reader, edited by Ulla E. Dydo. Evanston, Ill.: Northwest- North train station in Pennsylvania, dreaming that the ern University Press, 1993, pp. 495–503. stone would take root “in spite of the gravel and the ———. Stanzas in Meditation. Los Angeles: Sun & Moon newspaper, / and wasn’t I like that all my life, and who Press, 1994. isn’t?” The hope of growth in a sterile urban landscape ———. Tender Buttons. Gertrude Stein: Writings 1903–1932, and the search for commonality are brought forward edited by Catharine R. Stimpson and Harriet Chessman. by a speaker who, as John Rodden discovered in an New York: Library of America, 1998, pp. 313–355. interview with Stern, radiates with “joy, fun, super- Logan Esdale abundance, derring-do—though never far away from the perception of good fortune is a sense of tragedy STERN, GERALD (1925– ) Gerald Stern is and mortality, a keen awareness of loss and sadness— among the most important practitioners of voiced and of the fact that resurrection is impossible without poetry in the later 20th century. Frequently compared death” (98). Stern’s power rests in observation of the with Walt Whitman, Stern often takes as his subject particular and a heartfelt desire to find what is univer- the natural world. Yet his poetry is more than pastoral, sal among us. and he submits as his subject his own experiences as BIBLIOGRAPHY representational of the reader’s. Deborah Garrison Garrison, Deborah. “Lyricism Unplugged.” New Yorker 74.35 identifies the impact of this technique: “It isn’t often (November 16, 1998): 103–104. you come across poetry that makes you want to turn to Somerville, Jane. “Gerald Stern among the Poets: The the stranger next to you on the bus, grab him by the Speaker as Meaning.” American Poetry Review 17.6 collar, and say, ‘You have to read this!’” (103). Stern’s (November/December 1988): 11–19. verse may be compared with that of Stanley KUNITZ, Stern, Gerald. “Splendor in the Weeds: Gerald Stern,” by William STAFFORD, Robert BLY, and W. S. MERWIN, par- John Rodden. In Performing the Literary Interview: How ticularly in his use of archetypal images within the tra- Writers Craft Their Public Selves, by Rodden. Lincoln: Uni- dition of DEEP IMAGE POETRY. Stern may also be versity of Nebraska Press, 2001, pp. 97–121. compared with John ASHBERY in his use of irony. And in Norbert Elliot his use of discursive narrative, Stern’s poetry is similar to that of Edward DORN and Robert PINSKY. In the Jew- STEVENS, WALLACE (1879–1955) Along ish-American tone of his poetry, Stern’s lilt echoes that with T.S. ELIOT, William Carlos WILLIAMS, Marianne used by Allen GINSBERG. MOORE, and Hart CRANE, Wallace Stevens is associated Stern was born in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, the child with American high MODERNISM. Similar to Robert of Eastern European immigrant parents. Educated at FROST (with whom he sometimes fraternized on his the University of Pittsburgh (B.A., 1947) and Colum- vacations in Florida), Stevens theorized and practiced bia University (M.A., 1949), Stern came to national a poetry typical of writing from New England, which attention with the publication of Lucky Life (1977). “I looked for truth and reality in nature and the seasons; didn’t start taking myself seriously as a poet / until the however, Stevens’s “mind of winter” (a favored phrase STEVENS, WALLACE 477 in his poetry) is often more obscure than Frost’s, and unlikely and seemingly impossible fusions of ideas though his verse is, by turns, humorous, playful, and and emotions that become oddly reconciled, often musical, it is also stark, difficult, and deadly serious. allowing the reader to stand firmly in a new intellec- Stevens was born in Reading, Pennsylvania. He tual position, but one in which his or her previous attended Harvard for three years (1897–1900), where position is still visible and tangible, if also in sham- he became acquainted with the philosopher George bles. Stevens’s work makes frequent use of paradox, a Santayana, a figure who would become a model for technique that often place the reader in a new intel- Stevens’s own thinking and for whom he would write lectual position. In the third stanza of “Poem with one of his most well-known later poems, “To an Old Rhythms” (Date) Stevens writes of a woman who, Philosopher in Rome” (1954). Many early Stevens “weeps of [her lover’s] breast, though he never comes.” poems appeared in various Harvard publications, While it may be impossible to weep on the breast of including the Harvard Advocate, of which he became someone who is not present, the poem’s previous dis- president in 1899. Stevens wished to make a living at cussion of the size of shadows relative to the things writing, and his first job out of college was as a that cast them emphasizes that the mind has no trou- reporter for the New York Herald Tribune, though he ble growing to account for the various oddities, illu- quickly became unsatisfied with journalism as a pro- sions, and distortions of the physical world. For fession. Stevens’s father was dismissive of his son’s wish Stevens, the mind and the heart are inextricable, and to become a man of literature and encouraged him to in these lines the there/not-there paradox of the attend law school; Stevens entered the New York Law lover—while remaining physically unreal or impossi- School in 1901 and was admitted to the New York bar ble—is rendered emotionally and intellectually plausi- in 1904. He practiced law in New York City until ble. When the woman receives her lover into her 1916, when he moved to Hartford, Connecticut, to heart—when her heart, like the mind, “[g]rows large work for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Com- against space”—it is as if he were there to be wept on; pany, of which he became a vice president in 1934 and his absence is made present. For another example, one for which he would work for the rest of his life. Stevens of his most famous poems, “The Snow Man” (1923), began to contribute poems to magazines in 1914, and speaks of “Nothing that is not there and the nothing although he did not publish his first full-length collec- that is.” The poem describes the sights and sounds of tion of poems (Harmonium, 1923) until he was 44 a landscape as processed by the powers and limita- years old, Stevens managed to win nearly every major tions of “a mind of winter.” The small word the per- poetry prize before his death, including prizes from forms the Herculean task of separating two similar Poetry (1916) and the Nation (1936), the Harriet Mon- ideas (“Nothing” and “the nothing”), neither of which roe Poetry Award (1946), the Bollingen Prize (1950), has an available or specific referent. By highlighting two National Book Awards (1951 and 1955), and the both the vagueness and the specificity that vacancy Pulitzer Prize (1955). can contain, Stevens provides a clearer vision of noth- “We live in the mind,” Stevens writes in his 1949 ingness, which is also to say a more complicated idea essay “Imagination as Value,” (140), and indeed many of what nothingness might entail. (The profundity of of Stevens’s poems—including such well-known emptiness and the meaningfulness of small words was works as “NOTES TOWARD A SUPREME FICTION” (1942), echoed by later such poets as Robert CREELEY, William “The Emperor of Ice Cream” (1923), “Thirteen Ways BRONK, and George OPPEN.) of Looking at a Blackbird” (1923), and “THE IDEA OF Stevens’s poetry is often associated with exotic ORDER AT KEY WEST” (1936)—detail the movements and places, beings, and happenings, but these transcrip- mechanisms of this most mysterious organ, exposing tions are the product of a keen and active imagination both its weaknesses and its strengths. The simultane- rather than a detailed record of the poet’s life experi- ous resolution and maintenance of contradiction is ences. Although he traveled a bit on business and what fuels Stevens’s work, which often consists of indulged in a few pleasure excursions to the West 478 STEVENS, WALLACE

Coast, Florida, and Cuba, Stevens rarely left New Eng- PROSODY AND FREE VERSE). The first, which is evident in land. He never saw Europe, yet his poems—particu- many of his early poems, is a short line—likely derived larly in the earlier volumes—often contain a distinctly from the IMAGIST SCHOOL—that breaks sentences into European flair (see EUROPEAN POETIC INFLUENCE). syntactical units and varies with regard to the number Stevens also traveled in the mind by maintaining sev- of accents it may contain. This short line is perhaps eral long-distance correspondents, including Leonard best illustrated by such early poems as “Disillusion- van Geyzel (a Ceylonese plantation owner), Anatole ment of Ten O’Clock” and “Ploughing on Sunday” and Paule Vidal (Parisian book and art dealers), and (both from Harmonium), yet it does reappear even in José Rodriguez Feo (a Cuban poet). A collector of rare very late poems, such as “One of the Inhabitants of the and often expensive paintings and books (most of West” (1954). In an attempt to describe Stevens’s which he ordered from the Vidals), Stevens fueled his short-line metrics in prose, Justice relies on a loose imagination not with geographic wandering, but mathematical formula—“2 accents plus or minus 1 (or instead by reading books, looking at paintings, and lis- more)”—while also noticing that each line “contain[s] tening to music, all of which remain consistent figures matter of more than grammatical interest” (16–17). in his work. Stevens’s longer line, which dominates the late work, is The act of reading becomes one of Stevens’s most less image-oriented and likely arose, according to Jus- reliable tropes beginning in his second volume, Ideas tice, in order to allow for a more complex “develop- of Order (1936), which contains “The Reader,” a poem ment of ideas” that would be impossible in shorter, in which the speaker reads a book “as if in a book / imagistic lines (26). Stevens’s long line begins as fairly Of sombre pages.” At the end of the poem, the read- regular blank verse in early poems, such as “SUNDAY ing speaker—who has imagined himself to be “in a MORNING” (1923), and if, in later poems, he will stretch book”—looks up from the page and transfers his and torque this meter into various shapes of his own “bookness” to the world around him; pulled from his making, he never leaves his heroic iambs too far reverie by what is perhaps the “mumbling” of his own behind. “In the Element of Antagonisms” (from 1950’s reading voice, the reader sees the clear winter sky as The Auroras of Autumn) is a prime example of the ways “sombre pages [which bear] no print.” This “literate in which Stevens’s long line both adheres to and devi- despair” will recur many times over the course of ates from the “ancient accent” of blank verse, often Stevens’s poems, perhaps most noticeably in Transport extending the line beyond 10 syllables and varying his to Summer’s “The House Was Quiet and the World feet to accommodate the rising and falling of thought: Was Calm” (1947), in which he writes, “The reader “Birds twitter pandemoniums around / The idea of the became the book; and summer // night was like the chevalier of chevaliers.” conscious being of the book.” In this later poem, the Although Stevens is occasionally branded a hedo- winter of “The Reader” gives way to summer, and the nist, a decadent, and a dandy by critics, his influence reader’s becoming the book is stated rather than and popularity among poets is widespread and pro- merely implied. While Stevens never completely found. Like John ASHBERY, a poet whom many critics, deserts the playfulness and metaphor of his earlier including Harold Bloom, see as Stevens’s heir, Stevens work, his later poems tend to contain more direct has shaped and inspired writers of all types, from for- statements and less fanciful sentiments. One would mal and traditional “mainstream” poets, such as James be hard pressed to find such a line as “One feels the MERRILL and Theodore ROETHKE, to more experimental life of that which gives life as it is” (from 1951’s “The writers, such as Kathleen FRASER and Michael PALMER. Course of a Particular”) anywhere in his first book Even Jack SPICER, a militant outsider, who once claimed Harmonium. that “everybody in English departments who hates Donald JUSTICE observes that Stevens, though cer- poetry, which is just about everybody, loves Stevens,” tainly adept at traditional meters, favored two types of was forced to praise Stevens for his visionary—and free verse line throughout his published work (see revisionary—talents and tendencies (72). “STOPPING BY WOODS ON A SNOWY EVENING” 479

BIBLIOGRAPHY (1999) was honored with the National Book Critics Bloom, Harold. Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate. Circle Award in 2000. Stone’s eighth collection, In the Ithaca, N.J.: Cornell University Press, 1977. Next Galaxy, appeared in 2002. Justice, Donald. “The Free-Verse Line in Stevens.” In Obliv- Her husband Walter’s suicide in 1959 while the fam- ion: On Writers and Writing. Ashland, Ore.: Story Line ily was in England is a recurring lens through which Press, 1998, pp. 13–38. Stone examines love, loss, and mortality. “Every day I Riddell, Joseph N. The Clairvoyant Eye: The Poetry and Poet- dig you up,” she tells Walter in “Habit” (1972), “you ics of Wallace Stevens. Baton Rouge: Lousiana State Univer- sity Press, 1965. are my poem.” Time does not diminish the crackling Spicer, Jack. The House That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures immediacy of remembered emotions: “Our bed danced of Jack Spicer, edited by Peter Gizzi. Hanover, N.H.: Wes- on the floor / as if we had created a miracle” (“Happi- leyan University Press, 1998. ness” [1987]). There is a freshness to her work, as if Stevens, Wallace. “Imagination as Value.” In The Necessary the poet sees the world clearly in all of its loss and sad- Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination. New York: ness, as if she knows well what humanity is capable of, Vintage Books, 1951. yet she irrepressibly holds open the hope we will chose Vendler, Helen. Wallace Stevens: Words Chosen out of Desire. to do better: “I am a stranger crossing the bone bridge Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984. to meet the other,” she tells us in “For Eight Women” Graham Foust (1995), and “Our skulls shine like calligraphy in a longed-for language.” Note the clarity of her unex- STONE, RUTH (1915– ) For reasons of pected images and the connective tissue of assonance. temperament and circumstance, the development of An abiding interest in the sciences and an utter lack of Ruth Stone’s poetry has been strikingly independent of sentimentality also distinguish her work: “Oh world, all schools and alliances. She is, in Alicia OSTRIKER’s oh galaxy,” she sings in “End of Summer . . . 1969,” phrase, “a classic American maverick” (662). Stone’s “My error is to look for meaning in the sun / That first book, In An Iridescent Time (1957), shows a burns for burning.” marked musicality, a lightness and gaiety that echoes in BIBLIOGRAPHY the later volumes as a kind of antic irony animating the Barker, Wendy, and Sandra M. Gilbert, eds. The House Is tragic and hard-won wisdom of those poems. Made of Poetry: The Art of Ruth Stone. Carbondale: South- Ruth Perkins Stone was born in Roanoke, Virginia, ern Illinois University Press, 1996. into a family of writers, painters, and musicians. Stone Bennani, Ben, ed. The World of Ruth Stone, Paintbrush: A Jour- met her husband, the poet and novelist Walter Stone, nal of Poetry and Translation XXVII (2000–2001): 6–143. while they were students at the University of Illinois. Ostriker, Alicia. Headnote to selection of poems by Ruth Walter attended graduate school at Harvard, while Stone. Feminist Studies 25.3 (1999): 662. Ruth sat in on classes and was a part of the circle of Christine Gelineau poets there that included Richard WILBUR, Delmore SCHWARTZ, and Richard EBERHART. Some of her awards “STOPPING BY WOODS ON A SNOWY include a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute from EVENING” ROBERT FROST (1923) Although 1963 to 1965 (where she developed ties with other traditional in form (see PROSODY AND FREE VERSE), “Stop- Radcliffe fellows, such as Maxine KUMIN and Tillie ping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” is a modernist Olsen), two Guggenheim fellowships (1971 and poem in its use of a persona with a divided sensibility 1975), the Delmore Schwartz Award (1983), a Whiting (see MODERNISM). The speaker is divided between his Writers’ Award (1986), and the Paterson Poetry Prize sense of duty and a romantic aestheticism—his desire to (1986). During these years Stone produced three col- watch the woods fill up with snow. Unlike the works of lections. In 1990 she accepted a full-time appointment the 19th-century American transcendentalists, on which at Binghamton University (New York). Three more col- Robert FROST draws heavily in his poetry, “Stopping by lections appeared over the next decade. Ordinary Words Woods” does not reconcile these discordant selves. Like 480 STRAND, MARK many 20th-century American poets, Frost recognizes exhaustive and liquid initial consonants of “sleep,” epit- the impossibility of a fully integrated psyche. omizing the struggle of two selves throughout the poem. The speaker of the poem, who is traveling in a BIBLIOGRAPHY horse-drawn sleigh, pauses in his journey to watch Lentricchia, Frank. Robert Frost: Modern Poetics and the Land- someone’s woods fill up with snow. From the start, the scapes of Self. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1975. speaker admits that he knows who owns the woods by Poirier, Richard. Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing. New which he has stopped. His words reveal a sense of York: Oxford University Press, 1977. guilt, as though he were somehow trespassing. The play on legal (pragmatic) and poetic (imaginative) Edwin J. Barton ownership is reminiscent of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Nature” (1849) and Henry David Thoreau’s STRAND, MARK (1934– ) An extensive Walden (1854). For the moment, the speaker owns the writer of fiction, translation, and poetry, Strand’s poetry landscape, but, unlike the idealists Emerson and has generally been associated with the surrealistic verse Thoreau, he does not believe his ownership is philo- that reached its zenith in America during the 1960s and sophically legitimate and permanent. Instead he makes 1970s and has been practiced occasionally by such his horse a projection of his own conscience, which poets as W. S. MERWIN, Robert BLY, and James WRIGHT. judges his self-indulgence to be a moral error. His work is characterized by minimalism and symbolic The critic Frank Lentricchia associates “Stopping by imagery, and while not all his work is of a surreal nature, Woods” with other poems in which Frost’s speakers Strand’s poetry is generally noted for its dreamlike char- describe landscapes filling up with snow. Lentricchia acteristics that investigate the limitations of the internal suggests that these scenes are psychologically symbolic: and external worlds of the individual. His poetry is “[T]he speaker does not stop for long, perhaps because, dark, thoughtful, clear, humorous and, at times, meta- in his fascination with the woods, he senses in their dark- physical. Despite the fact that his poetry can be mysteri- ness, in their inhuman otherness, suggestions of his per- ous, it generally remains well grounded. Although Latin sonal end” (96). Nevertheless he does stop, for the American SURREALISM greatly influenced Strand’s style, appeal of this aesthetic moment is aural (based on the picturesque nature of his poetry is also reflective of sound) as well as visual. As Richard Poirier argues, the his early training as a painter, where his spacious lan- speaker “is in danger of losing himself; and his language guage is reminiscent of Albert Cuyp’s serene landscapes. by the end of the third stanza begins to carry hints of Born on Canada’s Prince Edward Island, Strand was seductive luxuriousness unlike anything preceding it” educated at Antioch, Yale, and Iowa. His books of (183). Frost expresses this aural appeal through sensu- poetry include Sleeping with One Eye Open (1964), Rea- ous, liquid consonants and long vowels. This same sons for Moving (1968), Darker (1970), The Story of Our melopoeia (the use of sound to charge language with Lives (1973), winner of the 1974 Edgar Allan Poe emotion) continues until the final stanza, where it is Award, Selected Poems (1980), The Continuous Life countermanded by the recollection of obligations. (1990), winner of the 1992 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt According to Lentricchia, the “aesthetic moment is National Prize for Poetry, Dark Harbor (1993), which defined as a moment of stillness . . . engendered by pure won the 1993 Bollingen Prize, and Blizzard of One contemplative appreciation. . . . But the moment of still- (1998), which won the Pulitzer Prize and Boston Book ness and freedom is tightly circumscribed: . . . our aes- Review’s Bingham Poetry Prize in 1999. He has also thetic man must yield to quotidian man” (96). Although published prose, translation, and children’s books, as the dutiful side of his character overcomes his desire for well as edited a number of anthologies. His latest work aesthetic pleasure, the speaker is aware of the cost. The is also his first collection of essays, The Weather of last two lines, identical in diction and syntax, express the Words (2000). His honors include a 1979 Academy of speaker’s weary resignation. The resonance of “miles,” American Poets Fellowship, a 1987 MacArthur Fellow- bespeaking the long journey, is juxtaposed with the ship, three National Endowment for the Arts grants STRICKLAND, STEPHANIE 481

(1968, 1978, and 1986), and an award from the Rock- newshour/bb/entertainment/jan-june99/pulitzer_4-15. efeller Foundation (2000). He is a former chancellor of html. Downloaded December 2003. the Academy of American Poets and served as poet lau- Salita S. Bryant reate of the United States in 1990. In a post–Pulitzer Prize interview with Elizabeth STRICKLAND, STEPHANIE (1942– ) Farnsworth, Strand remarked, “A poem releases itself, Stephanie Strickland is one of the most celebrated secretes itself slowly, sometimes almost poisonously, poets working in hypertext, a multilinear form of writ- into the mind of the reader....It does it by rearrang- ing that is specifically designed to be read on a com- ing the world in such a way that it appears new. It does puter, often incorporating elements of multimedia (see it by using language that is slightly different from the CYBERPOETRY). Strickland is also a print poet, but her way language is used in the workday world, so that work is only fully realized when the digital domain is you’re forced to pay attention to it” (Strand “Inter- also considered. She can be seen as continuing in the view”). An example of Strand’s use of this “rearranging” postmodernist tradition, as she is fascinated by the is the third section of Blizzard of One, a series of poems blurring of boundaries between different genres of written from the viewpoint of five grieving dogs that writing as well as different modes of thought. More- are free to say the things humans cannot or will not say. over her work incorporates the ideas of science and These confined and domesticated dogs easily sing at mathematics and is decidedly feminist in theme (see night to the “great starfields,” calling to the “wished-for FEMALE VOICE, FEMALE LANGUAGE). reaches of heaven.” This sense of delight and longing Strickland was born and raised in Detroit, Michi- allows for the exposure of the truth of human discon- gan. In 1978 she received an M.F.A. from Sarah nectedness. In a surreal world, where “The sky / Was a Lawrence College and an M.S. in 1984 from the Pratt sheet of white” and where there “was a dog in a phone Institute. Her first book, Beyond This Silence, was pub- booth / Calling home,” human readers find a voice for lished in 1988, the same year she received a grant the fear of being alone in the universe. The result of from the National Endowment for the Arts. She won this recognition of shared humanity is pure Strand, the Brittingham Prize (1993) for The Red Virgin: A where the only recourse can be an existential release Poem of Simone Weil. True North garnered her the Alice into universal oneness. In an earlier poem, “Eating Fay di Castagnola Award of the Poetry Society of Poetry” (1980), Strand again uses the image of man as America (1996), the Ernest Sandeen Poetry Prize dog; here the speaker becomes a dog after eating/read- (1997), and the Salt Hill Hypertext Prize (1998) for ing poetry only to frighten a librarian, when he gets the poem’s hypertext version. She received the Boston “on [his] knees and lick[s] her hand.” Book Review prize and About.com Best of the Net Poetry Strand’s poetry spans the gap between what we know Award for Ballad of Sand and Harry Soot in 1999, and is real and what is ethereal. It is clear that his vision, his in 2000 the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award for “V:The hope, is “that through the imaginary world that [poets] Wave Son.nets.” create . . . we see the real world more clearly” (Strand Like many writers working in hypertext, Strickland “Interview”). In “Eating Poetry,” the speaker claims, explores the larger implications of the form. In To Be “ink runs from the corners of my mouth. / There is no Here as Stone Is (1999), she makes a case for the relativ- happiness like mine.” While obviously imaginary, such ity and provisionality of knowledge best represented in a statement portrays the real world of the poet, and all hypertext as a guiding principle of the universe: those like him, who feast on poetry. “Objects are answers,” she writes, though the natural BIBLIOGRAPHY tendency of the cosmos is toward change. Anything that Aaron, Jonathan. “About Mark Strand: A Profile.” appears permanent—such as “extinguished starlight”— Ploughshares 21.4 (1995–96): 202–206. is an illusion, though we seek these isolated bits of per- Strand, Mark. “Interview with Elizabeth Farnsworth,” PBS manence out of our “persistent reverence for error.” This NewsHour. Available online. URL: www.pbs.org/ is the central tension of much of Strickland’s work: 482 THE STRUCTURE OF RIME

Human knowledge is limited and faulty, but it is all we books (I to XIII appear in Opening of the Field, 1960; have to make sense of experience. XIV to XXI appear in Roots and Branches, 1964; XXII to Along similar lines, Strickland examines the hyper- XVI appear in Bending the Bow, 1968; and XXVII to textual reading experience in Errand upon Which We XVIII, as well as “structure of Rime: Of the Five Songs,” Came (2001), written in collaboration with influential appear in Groundwork, 1984 and 1987), these poems hypertext writer M. D. Coverley. On the first page, are connected to each other only insofar as they are Strickland invites her readers to skip any parts of the generally prose pieces concerned with the larger themes poem he or she wants, adding, “Of course, it can be read of form and meaning. Otherwise they pick up on the straight through, but this is not a better reading, not a themes and motifs of the surrounding poems while also better life.” Images of frogs and butterflies play heavily commenting on these same themes and motifs. in the poem, as they move erratically (as the reader The word rime as defined by Duncan, is either might) and live in more than one element during their “form” and “rhythm” or “clearing” and “opening.” The life cycles. Here reading becomes organic and unpre- speaker in “The Structure of Rime I” introduces himself dictable, but Strickland’s text is in constant flux as well, as both master and servant to language (“speak! For I since each page gives way to the next after a certain name myself your master, who come to serve”) before amount of time. The reader may not “get anywhere” or going on to discover, in the course of the poem, that take away any hard, stable truths, but, for Strickland, while language has the power to shape the way things the reading is itself the point. She gives the reader a are, the way things are also shapes the language and glimpse into her own restlessly inquisitive mind. the writer (“In the feet that measure the dance of my BIBLIOGRAPHY pages I hear cosmic intoxications of the man I will Inez. Colette. “‘Beyond This Silence’—Strickland, S.” Prairie be”). In this way, then, Duncan establishes himself as Schooner 62.2 (1988): 134–136. both romantic and modernist, concerned with form as Kaufman, Ellen. Review. Library Journal (November 15, much as formlessness, order as much as chaos. As he 1981): 86. goes on to write in “The Structure of Rime II:” “‘What Muratori, Fred. “Ambiguity Isn‘t What It Used to Be—or Is of the Structure of Rime’ I asked. / An absolute scale of It?” Georgia Review 52.1 (spring 1998): 142–160. resemblance and disresemblance establishes measures Matthew Purdy that are music in the actual world.” It is important to note that although these first two poems are also THE STRUCTURE OF RIME ROBERT DUN- indicative of a mystical vision of the world and a belief CAN (1960) Emerging out of the modernist tradi- in the poet as seer that is evident throughout much of tion of the long poem (see LONG AND SERIAL POETRY), The Structure of Rime, Duncan does not endorse tran- Robert DUNCAN’s The Structure of Rime is a wide-ranging scendence. Rather he invokes such figures as exploration of linguistic and material correspondences. Mnemosyne (the goddess of memory), Jacob, and This series of poems is influenced by romantic writers, Christ to point toward his belief in the presence and such as William Blake and Samuel Taylor Coleridge; power of myth in our everyday lives. modernist long poems, such as Walt Whitman’s Song of BIBLIOGRAPHY Myself, Ezra POUND’s CANTOS, and H. D.’s Trilogy (see MOD- Davidson, Michael. “Cave of Resemblances, Cave of Rimes: ERNISM); and, later, by Jack SPICER’s development of the Tradition and Repetition in Robert Duncan.” In Conver- serial poem. Duncan, however, distinguishes himself by sant Essays: Contemporary Poets on Poetry. Detroit: Wayne his melding of tradition with the experimental, the ordi- State University Press, 1990, pp. 282–293. nary with the mystical. As he writes early on in “Pages Johnson, Mark Andrew. Robert Duncan. Boston: Twayne, 1988. from a Notebook,” “I don‘t seek a synthesis, but a melee.” Lori Emerson The Structure of Rime first appears in The Opening of the Field (1960) as one of several open-ended sequences SUN MICHAEL PALMER (1988) Sun is the (including PASSAGES). Interspersed throughout later title of two poems from Michael PALMER’s book of the “SUNDAY MORNING” 483 same name. The Sun poems address political ideas The Sun poems incorporate the aesthetics of Lan- and history through the medium of LANGUAGE poetry. guage poetry into a powerful discourse that questions The first poem has the same number of lines as T. S. popular notions of meaning. The poems address social ELIOT’s THE WASTE LAND, a poem that scholars consider concerns through multiple voices that are constantly central to 20th-century MODERNISM. However, Sun aware of their presence and place in the world. Resist- liberates modernist notions of collage and subtext ing the easy allure of the definitive, the poems instead from the conservative sensibilities that underscore revel in the complications of the abstract. Eliot’s work. BIBLIOGRAPHY Palmer rejects the overt way that the political often Palmer, Michael. “‘Dear Lexicon’: An Interview by Benjamin inhabits the subject matter of poetry, where poets are Hollander and David Levi Strauss.” ACTS: A Journal of “more than anything else, announcing in stale poetic New Writing 2:1 (1986): 8–36. language, ‘Look how much human feeling and fellow- Yenser, Stephen. “Open House.” Review of Sun, by Michael feeling I have,’” in a manner that seems more self-con- Palmer. Poetry (Aug. 1989): 295–301. gratulatory than a true expression of empathy or a true J. Andrew Prall representation of a political event or atrocity. Instead Palmer expresses the difficulty of human crises by “SUNDAY MORNING” WALLACE exploring the limitations of the language used to rep- STEVENS (1915; 1923) “Sunday Morning” is resent such situations. Therefore the speaker in the not only one of Wallace STEVENS’s most brilliant suc- second poem states, “I have been writing a book, not cesses as a poet, it also marks a pivotal moment in in my native language.” The language may be foreign, 20th-century American poetry whereby the philo- because it refuses to exploit personal experience as a sophical and the poetic are seamlessly blended into a commodity; instead it proliferates inside the multiple worldview that celebrates the world and poetry’s place possibilities of experience. in that world. When the poem was first published in These experiences result in an amplified vision of Poetry in 1915, the editor, Harriet Monroe, cut three the world. In this world, dust settles on whispers, of the stanzas and reordered the remaining ones so fields extend outward, and a voice invites the reader to that the final stanza became the second. In Harmonium “enter through the curtain / and swallow your words.” (1923), Stevens restored the poem to its original eight Language collects the dust of obsolescence, whether in stanza sequence, which more clearly presents the gist the form of a whisper or in the forms of words con- of the poem as a whole: The myths that have been the sumed by a field. To engage with the poems, readers mainstay of human civilization—and especially Chris- must pass through a curtain and broaden their field of tianity—have become hollow and empty, and we need expectations of how language conveys the reality of to establish a new mode of Being that fixes its atten- human joy and suffering. tion upon this world (the Earth), not upon the As a mediator conveying the experience of human assumptions of the next (the Christian promise of suffering, language cannot be trusted; in fact, it might eternal life and heaven). In this respect, “Sunday even be deadly. Early in the first “Sun” a voice says, Morning” announces the poetics of high MODERNISM “You bring death into your mouth—X / we are called and Stevens’s bold assertion that poetry, in the 20th —.” Palmer’s wariness of naming and representation century, should be regarded as the supreme religion. subverts the traditional assumptions about meaning The poem presents the tensions between this world and the authority of the poet’s voice. The poems are and the images of the next through a female persona, self-conscious, perhaps even self-critical, of their own who, in the opening stanza of the poem, is contem- artifice: “I now turn to my use of suffixes and punctu- plating her lush domestic surroundings (instead of the ation, closing Mr. Circle / with a single stroke.” Ulti- interior of a church) on a Sunday morning. The mately the poems challenge readers to define their own explicit tension between the Epicurean setting, with constructs of authority and power. its cockatoo, coffee, and oranges, is juxtaposed with 484 SURREALISM the image of death—the realm of “blood and sepul- Surrealism in poetry is characterized by dreamlike chre,” the cornerstones of Christianity. The central juxtaposition of images, the invitation of chance into thrust of the poem is phrased as the question of composition, and the suspension of many types of whether one should give one’s life over to death intentional discussion of themes. Surrealist techniques instead of celebrating one’s life in this world. Through are textual and psychological. Surrealist processes its various images, the poem makes an argument in include automatic writing, “slippage” and “first favor of the pursuit of beauty and asserts that life thought / best thought” to turn off conscious imposition should not be subservient to death but should follow of reason. Automatic writing, in which the writer simply the model of the ring of men in the poem, who begins to write or draw words without intentionally announce their devotion to the splendors of the sun in controlling those words differs from spirit dictation, an orgiastic circle. such as that used by William Butler Yeats, by source, The poem concludes, brilliantly and with great although occultism shaped surrealist writing. During intellectual poignancy, with the image of a flock of this type of writing, slippage and error interrupt narra- pigeons sinking into darkness “on extended wings,” tive or transcription while the writer is writing: Words which reinforces the theme of death and reframes the and images resulting from typographical mistakes dur- poem as a message to be alive in the poetic splendor of ing drafting, for example, are included in the work and this life. In this light, “Sunday Morning” articulates the result in a juxtaposition of symbols or words separate high modernist valorization of poetic artifice and the from linear logic. Found poetry, advertisements, and role of the artist as a lens to explore and perceive the other nonpoetic sources recognized as poems and nature of being human. chance operations, such as rolling dice to select words BIBLIOGRAPHY from a preexisting text, remove traditional connotations Bloom, Harold. Wallace Stevens: The Poems of our Climate. or denotations of phrases or sampled poems. Surrealism Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977. was not welcomed into the academic world, in part, Riddel, Joseph. The Clairvoyant Eye: The Poetry and Prose of because surrealists used drugs, sleep deprivation, and Wallace Stevens. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University pain to break down the boundaries of moral structures Press, 1965. so as to enable “sight” to aid composition. Vendler, Helen. On Extended Wings: Wallace Stevens’ Longer Early psychology shaped surrealism, and psycholog- Poems. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969. ical surrealism has been welcomed into the academic David Clippinger world as domestic surrealism or DEEP IMAGE. Hermetic symbols and their psychological interpretation can SURREALISM The term surrealism is an elision establish a unity behind a surreal poem separate from of super and realism. Surrealism was a movement com- story or form. A reading focusing on establishing rela- bining painting, writing, and other arts, formally tionships between the objects or persons in a surrealist beginning as a refinement of another art movement, poem, and therefore the relationship of a poem to dada, after World War I. Surrealism cut across national mythic structures, such as journeys, can lead to an boundaries, languages, and generations. Until recently understanding of a surreal poem. Surrealism’s ground- surrealist art and its techniques were rarely taught in ing in psychological or dream reality separates it from academia. Its influence on 20th-century American other movements. poetry was informal and various, but profound. Guil- Surrealism is also grounded in the more extreme laume Apollinaire and Tristan Tzara founded surreal- movement dada, which challenged the utility of lan- ism. It was defined by André Breton’s First Surrealist guage to describe reality. Dadaists, including Marcel Manifesto, signed in 1925 by Louis Aragon, Antonin Duchamp, sought refuge after World War I in New Artaud, Robert Desnos, Paul Élaurd, Max Ernst, and York, inspiring separate American surrealistic responses others. Breton wrote a Second Manifesto in 1929, but, to dada in poetry, such as Mina LOY’s. A more broadly by that time, the group had splintered. defined, second-wave surrealism moved to New York SWENSON, MAY 485 with Salvador Dali and Breton himself before World was one of the best-known American poets during the War II. Philip Lamantia deliberately sought out Breton decades of the cold war. in order to establish an American surrealist lineage. Born in Logan, Utah, Swenson grew up in a Swedish Lamantia, in turn, relocated to San Francisco, where he immigrant, Mormon family. Upon graduation from influenced the SAN FRANCISCO RENAISSANCE, BEAT, and Utah State University, she moved to New York City. now neosurrealist poetry. Caribbean francophone sur- Swenson’s first collection of poems, Another Animal, realist poets Aimé Césaire and Leopold Senghor have was published in 1954. Eleven volumes of poetry were influenced American poets (see CARRIBEAN POETIC INFLU- published during Swenson’s lifetime, including Half ENCES), as did British painter and writer Leonora Car- Sun Half Asleep (1967), Iconographs (1970), and New rington, who relocated to Mexico midcareer. American and Selected Things Taking Place (1978). She won Rock- poets translating surrealist writings into English include efeller (1955 and 1967), Guggenheim (1959), Ford NEW YORK SCHOOL poets John ASHBERY and Kenneth (1964), and MacArthur (1987) Fellowships for her KOCH, Richard HOWARD, who also has translated Charles poetry, as well as the Bollingen Prize for poetry (1981) Baudelaire and symbolist writers, and Harry MATHEWS, and a National Endowment for the Arts grant (1974). a member of OuLiPo, a largely French and Italian Swenson was a member of the American Academy and movement dedicated to writing that crossed surrealist Institute of Arts and Letters and served as chancellor of textual techniques with mathematics. Bernadette MAYER the Academy of American Poets. taught surrealist and OuLiPo techniques at the St. Critics have often called Swenson a nature poet, Mark’s Poetry Project in New York City (see POETRY pointing to her “knowing sympathy with wild creatures” INSTITUTIONS). Because of surrealism’s longevity, it has and “poems full of tents and cabins and out-of-doors” combined with nearly every major movement of 20th- (Wilbur 2). Swenson herself remarked, however: “For century American poetry, including the OBJECTIVIST and me, nature includes everything: the entire universe, the LANGUAGE SCHOOLS. city, the country, the human mind, human creatures, BIBLIOGRAPHY and animal creatures” (“Interview” 121). Indeed Swen- Caws, Mary Ann, ed. Surrealist Painters and Poets: An Anthol- son’s poems bespeak her wide-ranging fascination with ogy. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001. the physical world, from subway riding and space Halsall, Paul. “A Surrealist Manifesto,” Internet History exploration to sports and modern art. Her work is Sourcebook. Available online. URL: http://www.fordham. marked by a vigorous playfulness, seen both in her ele- edu/halsall/mod/1925surrealism.html. Downloaded May gant poetic riddles and her famous “shaped poems,” 2001. wherein the arrangement and spacing of words on a Catherine Daly page suggest the contour or movement of the object they describe (see VISUAL POETRY). Her understanding of SWENSON, MAY (1913–1989) A native the poem as a concrete, constructed unit characterized westerner who lived her entire adult life in New York her as a formalist. At the same time, however, Swenson and its environs, a self-proclaimed feminist who often acknowledged that good poetry also depends on nonetheless eschewed politicized writing, and a les- the subconscious and a trust in randomness. In a bian whose love poetry, almost always sexually neutral, posthumously published essay, “A Poem Happens to can often be construed as heterosexual, May Swenson Me,” she likened the act of writing a poem to “the open- wrote poems that radically challenge customary per- ing of neuron synapses to the brain after partaking of ceptions and stereotypes. Influenced by Emily Dickin- liquor or a drug” (77). Writing, Swenson said, “is death son, Swenson is often compared to Marianne MOORE and birth being brought to within a desperate circum- and Elizabeth BISHOP for her ability to make us see ferential hair’s breadth of each other—as if two stars of commonplace objects in a startlingly new way. Exten- opposite poles swept together and almost grazed!” (79). sively published and active as a writer-in-residence at Frequently Swenson wrote from an unusual view- numerous universities and artists’ colonies, Swenson point, describing a scene upside down or at 486 SWENSON, MAY extremely close range, or by forcing unexpected BIBLIOGRAPHY comparisons. She asks us to see a parallel between Swenson, May. “An Interview with May Swenson, July 14, “The DNA Molecule” (1970) and Marcel Duchamps’s 1978,” by Karla Hammond. In Made with Words, edited by Nude Descending a Staircase: “She is a double helix Gardner McFall. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, mounting and dismounting / around the swivel of 1998, pp. 121–133. her imaginary spine.” In her riddle poem “Speed” ———. “A Poem Happens to Me.” In Made With Words, (1975), Swenson depicts an insect-spattered wind- edited by Gardner McFall. Ann Arbor: University of shield as “a tender painting /...a palette, thick Michigan Press, 1998, pp. 75–79. Wilbur, Richard. Foreword to May Swenson: A Poet’s Life in impasto.” Wedding iconoclastic vision to disciplined Photos, by R. R. Knudson and Suzzanne Bigelow. Logan: aesthetic structure, Swenson compels us to cast off Utah State University Press, 1996, pp. 1–6. naive ways of perceiving, to see beyond surfaces even as we glory in them. Patricia G. King C T D

THE TABLETS ARMAND SCHWERNER Schwerner”). As Schwerner himself puts it in “Tablets (1999) A project of an epic scale comparable to Ezra Journals/Divagations,” a set of process notes appended POUND’s CANTOS and Louis ZUKOFSKY’s “A,” Armand to the poems themselves, “The Tablets live in a matrix of SCHWERNER’s The Tablets is a major poetic statement of unbreachable, ambiguous and antique silence,” but they the late 20th century (see LONG AND SERIAL POETRY). Its “also exist within a context of Heisenbergian invention. singular combination of deeply sincere cultural investi- Are The Tablets then blurrings within those two fixes, gation and ironic self-parody, a poetic strategy Burt one unreachable, the other scientifically ‘up-to-date’?” Kimmelman has called “at once primeval and postmod- (133). Earlier in “Journals/Divagations,” he suggests one ern” (70), places the work within a complex matrix of answer to the question: “The conflict between the come- contemporary aesthetic and spiritual concerns. On the dian and the mystic can make poems” (129). one hand, the work engages the movement known as The Tablets purports to be a collection of 27 texts ETHNOPOETICS, which attempted to widen the historical translated from 4,000-year-old Mesopotamian clay and cultural scope of poetic awareness to include little- tablets and cylinders written using a combination of known ancient and “primitive” literatures. Schwerner, a Sumerian pictographs and Akkadian cuneiform. The close friend of the movement’s central figure, Jerome texts are supposed to have come down to us through ROTHENBERG, has been associated with this movement, the labors of a figure known as the Scholar/Translator, which proposed “to allow a world to come into the and a large part of the humor and the pathos of the poem—not Europe only or a poetics bounded by an poems is derived from our sense of this figure bum- age-old partial view,” but a poetics that “at its most rad- bling through an immensely challenging project, ical” would “[carry] forward a search for poetries far always suspended between at least two poignant diffi- outside the imperium as such” (Rothenberg 733). culties: either a great proportion of missing or uncer- At the same time, The Tablets should be understood in tain material produces a fragmentary text whose terms of the procedure-oriented compositional strate- content is highly unstable, or, at times, a fine, com- gies of such contemporaries as Jackson MAC LOW and pressed lyric intensity shines through in what seem to John CAGE. The Tablets makes use of an elaborate formal be largely coherent passages—but is the Scholar/Trans- system, based on a fiction of anthropological/paleo- lator projecting his own desire for coherence into a tex- graphic research, which reflects, like Mac Low’s and tual condition where none exists? Cage’s procedures, “a typically postmodern skepticism The sequence begins with a high degree of uncer- regarding the unitary self and its expression in the tainty: “All that’s left is pattern* (shoes?)” reads the first poem,” according to Norman Finkelstein (“Armand line of Tablet I, and this is immediately followed by a

487 488 TAGGART, JOHN nervous footnote from the Scholar/Translator: “*doubt- of existence: physical suffering, bodily functions, the ful reconstruction” (13). The text is full of phrasings, natural world, sex, birth, childhood, aging, death, which do not fit neatly into English: The phrase “hang- divinity. When in Tablet III Schwerner writes, “I am ing-mackerel-tail-up-smoke-death” is purported by the missing, my chest has no food for the maggots / there Scholar / Translator to be a “virtually untranslatable” is no place for the pollen, there is only a hole in the evocation of a “coterminous visionary metaphysic” that flower,” he achieves, in a timeless sense, what the refers “to both time-bound organisms . . . and the Scholar/Translator has been at pains to locate histori- Death God, plonz, in his timeless brooding”; the line cally: the point in language where the concrete and the “they will-would-might-have-can-change the winter of abstract, the given and the created, intersect. NNE” contains a verb construction whose tense is “out- BIBLIOGRAPHY side Indo-European categories.” The multiplicity of Finkelstein, Norman. “Armand Schwerner,” Jacket. Available each utterance is unsettling; at the same time we get a on-line. URL: http://jacketmagazine.com/10/fink-r-schw. sense of language straining to recover the primary html. Downloaded December 2003. ground of experience. Indeed the Scholar/Translator Gingerich, Willard. “Sacred Forgeries and the Translation of shows himself to be obsessed with the recovery of ori- Nothing in The Tablets of Armand Schwerner.” Talisman gins: Uncertain whether to translate a particular word 21/22 (winter/spring 2001): 18–26. as “dry” or “unforgiving,” he notes, “We find ourselves Kimmelman, Burt. “Traces of Being: Armand Schwerner’s at or near the very point in time where the word, con- Ephemeral Episteme.” Talisman 19 (winter 1998/1999): crete in origin, shades off into an abstraction.” Similarly, 70–77. in Tablet VI, the Scholar/Translator thinks he may have Rothenberg, Jerome. “Prologue to Origins.” In Poems for the Millenium, Vol. One: From Fin-de-Siècle to Negritude, located the first “particularized man” in literature, and edited by Rothenberg and Pierre Joris. Berkeley: Univer- in Tablet XI he claims to see “the first socialist voice in sity of California Press, 1995. recorded human history.” But these revelations are always undermined by our knowledge that the Damian Judge Rollison Scholar/Translator is inevitably distorting his originals to reflect his own desire for discovery, and his intru- TAGGART, JOHN (1942– ) The poetry of sions into the text increasingly betray his own doubts: John Taggart gestures toward the influence of a num- “On occasion it almost seems to me as if I am inventing ber of important figures and movements in the land- this sequence.” scape of 20th-century American poetry: Wallace We readers know that the Scholar/Translator is a fic- STEVENS and high MODERNISM; Louis ZUKOFSKY, George tion as well. But as Finkelstein notes, the conceit OPPEN, and the OBJECTIVIST SCHOOL; and Charles OLSON underlying The Tablets should be recognized as “the and the BLACK MOUNTAIN SCHOOL. His poetry also draws deepest of deep parodies.” The unstable status of upon a number of other artistic influences—modern authorship in the sequence ultimately reflects Schw- and postmodern painting (especially Edward Hopper erner’s deeply held Buddhist beliefs in the unreality of and Mark Rothko), classical music, jazz, rhythm and the ego, and, as Willard Gingerich has written, the blues, and philosophy. poems excavate the paradox “that the inescapable and Born in Gutherie Center, Iowa, Taggart has pub- necessary ground of our being is the voice of the lished 11 books of poetry and two works of prose, Divine; but the Divine steadfastly refuses to speak. Remaining in Light: Ant Meditations on a Poetry by Therefore, we find ourselves, age after age, forced to Edward Hopper (1993) and Songs of Degrees: Essays on translate an immense silence, a translation whose pur- Contemporary Poetry and Poetics (1994), and he was the pose is to obscure the forgery of its source: the inartic- editor from 1966 till 1974 of Maps, a literary journal ulate Divine” (18). If The Tablets can be said to have a that featured many of the most significant but then thematic unity, it is to be found in their confrontation under-appreciated poets, including Oppen, William with the greatly mundane and greatly profound basics BRONK, Olson, and Zukofsky. TARN, NATHANIEL 489

Taggart’s first five books of poetry—To Construct a BIBLIOGRAPHY Clock (1971), Pyramid Canon (1973), The Pyramid Is a Daly, Lew. Swallowing the Scroll: Late in a Prophetic Tradition Pure Crystal (1974), Prism and the Pine Twig (1977), with the Poetry of Susan Howe and John Taggart. Buffalo, and Dodeka (1979)—clearly invoke the sparse lan- N.Y.: M. Press, 1994. guage and vision of objectivism and its tenet to cap- Howe, Susan. “Life in Darkness: John Taggart’s Poetry.” ture reality objectively. The books of poetry that Hambone 2 (spring 1982): 37–45. Johnson, Ronald. “On Looking up ‘The Pyramid Is a Pure follow—Peace on Earth (1981) and Dehiscence Crystal’ in Webster.” Parnassus 3:2 (1975): 147–152. (1983)—begin to break slightly with the earlier work and concentrate upon a poetic music indebted to jazz, David Clippinger especially John Coltrane (whose work is a palpable presence in Peace on Earth), Thelonious Monk, and TARN, NATHANIEL (1928– ) A profes- other giants of the 1950s and 1960s. Beyond the clear sional translator and anthropologist who has spent impact of jazz upon these later books, the poems also time in Guatemala and Burma, Nathaniel Tarn is asso- gesture toward Olson’s important 1950 essay “Projec- ciated with ETHNOPOETICS. Tarn’s poems revere world tive Verse” and its proclamation that the form of the cultures, diverse religions, and the natural environ- poem must embody the energy of the process of ment, while advocating political changes for their pro- poetic discovery (see ARS POETICAS). tection. His work is erudite, richly metaphorical, and The most original poetry collected in the more rhythmically vibrant; Eliot Weinberger writes, “What recent works, Loop (1991), Prompted (1991), Standing holds it together is Tarn’s ecstatic vision, his continuing Wave (1993), and Crosses (1998), seamlessly blends enthusiasm for the stuff of the world” (222). Similar to the visual acuity of objectivism, the musical harmonies Charles OLSON, Tarn juxtaposes various forms of poetic of jazz, and the ideational and poetic dynamics of “Pro- expression, including erotic love lyrics and political jective Verse” into a powerful and original poetics, as protests, with nonpoetic documents, from catalogues typified by the opening lines of “Rereading” from of Alaskan bird species to historical letters, to achieve Standing Wave: “He has closed the door to his room and a fullness that can “call into being everything there is” he is reading / he has closed the door and he is reading (“One” [1969]). a poem.” Taggart’s poetry gains linguistic and semantic Tarn was born in Paris, France. After earning a Ph.D. momentum through the repetition of words, phrases, in anthropology in 1957 from the University of Chicago, and ideas as the poem layers and builds its argument. he received the Guinness Prize for poetry in 1963 (and Similar to jazz, it establishes a theme that it asserts and has garnered a number of other honors over time), pub- repeatedly reasserts in a effort to eke out linguistic and lishing his first book in 1964. He was founding editor of ideational nuances. And, in keeping with “Projective Cape-Golliard Press and a professor of comparative lit- Verse,” the repetition builds “energy” in its pursuit of erature at Rutgers. Tarn has written or collaborated on those nuances. more than 40 books of poetry and translations. From these later books, “The Rothko Chapel Poem,” Motion and energy characterize Tarn’s style. His “Marvin Gaye Suite,” “Monk,” and “Poem Beginning sprawling, often unpunctuated lines transform the with a Line from Traherne” (all from Loop) and written page into a field, which depicts visually shifts “Rereading” and “Standing Wave” (from Standing Wave) in thought. His earlier poems are often spoken from are noteworthy as poems of great linguistic vitality, the persona of the Old Savage, who critiques and pities intelligence, and poetic resonance. Taggart’s poetry, in the decay of modern culture. Many of the later poems this regard, is visually, linguistically, and musically arise from events in Tarn’s own life, but he downplays innovative, and, in an age where the value of poetry is his own role in the events, instead considering how often challenged, Taggart’s philosophical investigation individual experience opens connections to the into the role of art as part of the living process offers a broader world. As Tarn has said, language “is the vehi- valuable statement regarding poetry’s vitality. cle of ever deepening attention” (222). 490 TATE, ALLEN

“Projections for an Eagle Escaped in This City, graduating from Vanderbilt, he remained in Nashville, March 1965” (1967) portrays the ironic event of a bald where he helped found the Fugitive. He later con- eagle’s flight from a Washington, D.C., zoo in order to tributed to I’ll Take My Stand (1930), a book that critique American involvement in Vietnam during the became a manifesto for the Fugitive movement. As edi- Vietnam War. Tarn warns, “To be evil is nothing more tor of the Sewanee Review and as an instructor at several than to be tired,” and he finds an alternate symbol of prominent universities, Tate wrote both poetry and crit- freedom in the hummingbird, a hero in American icism into his seventies and continued to exert consid- Indian myths, noted for remarkable physical erable force as a critic of American letters. His greatest endurance. Tarn announces that “his lungs will flower, achievement was being awarded the National Medal for his heart / bear fruit. Mounting up with wings as a literature in 1976. He won many other awards, includ- storm cloud, unafraid.” In “Olvido Inolvidable” ing the Bollingen Prize in 1956. He was elected to both (1976), Tarn uses ambiguous pronouns to describe the the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1964) and cosmos as a pair of lovers, sometimes with Tarn, his the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1965). wife, or the reader as one of the pair. The poem con- Critics have argued that Tate has been relegated to cludes with their union: “sun and moon wake in each the rank of minor poet, in part, because of his unwill- other’s arms surprised / and the stars make music ingness to break from his self-imposed formal rigidity together incessantly.” Ecstatic, erudite, and energetic, and overly cerebral subject matter. References to Tarn’s poetry embraces a world of cultural and natural ancient philosophers and obscure concepts abound in riches, confident that such love can lead to radical his work. Exile is a central theme in Tate’s poetry, along political change. with a profound sense of the past as imperturbable and BIBLIOGRAPHY all-encumbering: “What shall we say of the bones, Tarn, Nathaniel. “Nathaniel Tarn: ‘Over the fragile sails unclean, / Whose verdurous anonymity will grow?” he your hands would make.’” In Talking Poetry: Conversa- asks in “ODE TO THE CONFEDERATE DEAD” (1926), sug- tions in the Workshop with Contemporary Poets, edited by, gesting that our sins will outlast us. Tate’s fundamental Lee Bartlett. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico belief in our need for atonement is perhaps under- Press, 1987, pp. 209–233. scored by his conversion to Catholicism in 1950. Weinberger, Eliot. “Nathaniel Tarn.” In Contemporary Poets. Tate was an important influence on several promi- 4th ed, edited by James Vinson and D. L. Kirkpatrick. nent members of a subsequent generation of poets, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985. many of whom were his students, including Robert Robert Temple Cone LOWELL, Randall JARRELL, and John BERRYMAN. He urged adherence to traditional forms and the exploration of TATE, ALLEN (1899–1979) John Orley Allen abstract philosophical ideas. He was unwavering in Tate was a founding member of the famed poetry mag- his insistence on high aesthetic standards in poetry azine the Fugitive (see POETRY JOURNALS), a magazine and poetics. that advocated a formal approach to poetry and upheld BIBLIOGRAPHY the traditional values of the agrarian South in the face Arbery, Glenn Cannon. “Dante in Bardstown: Allen Tate’s of industrialism flowing down from the North (see Guide to Southern Exile.” Thought: A Review of Culture and FUGITIVE/AGRARIAN SCHOOL). Other key contributors to Idea 65:256 (March 1990): 93–108. the movement included John Crowe RANSOM and Bishop, Ferman. Allen Tate. New York: Twayne, 1967 Robert Penn WARREN. Tate was also a leading figure in Core, George. “Mr. Tate and the Limits of Poetry.” Virginia the literary movement known as New Criticism. Tate’s Quarterly Review 62:1 (winter 1986): 105–114. poetry is marked by its adherence to strict poetic forms Aaron Parrett and its intellectuality. Tate was born in Winchester, Kentucky. He attended TATE, JAMES (1943– ) James Tate is an college at Vanderbilt University in the early 1920s. After unconventional poet, often described as surrealist in his “TEACH US TO NUMBER OUR DAYS” 491

aims (see SURREALISM). When he received the National some insight or revelation” (qtd. in Baker 26). His Book Award in 1994, he stated that he began to write poems deliver on this objective, offering truth from his poetry at the age of 17 in order to “stay alive and make own strange perspective. sense out of life” (26). The sense Tate has made of it, BIBLIOGRAPHY within his poems, is very much his own. Tate has a tal- Baker, John F. “1994 National Book Awards.” Publisher’s ent for making the familiar fantastic, and his work is so Weekly 241.47 (November 21, 1994): 26. unusual that it is difficult to make comparisons, Denver Quarterly 33.3 (fall 1998). [James Tate: A Special Issue] although elements of the work of John ASHBERY might be Wright, Carolyne. “On James Tate.” Iowa Review 26.1 seen in Tate’s poems, and Tate’s humor is similar to that (spring 1996): 183–188. of his close friend, the poet Charles SIMIC. Tate was born in Kansas City, Missouri. In 1967 he Anna Priddy received an M. F. A. in poetry from the University of Iowa, where he studied with Marvin BELL. His first “TEACH US TO NUMBER OUR DAYS” major success occurred in that year, when his book The RITA DOVE (1980) “Teach Us to Number Our Lost Pilot (1967) was selected for the Yale Series of Days,” from Rita DOVE’s first full-length volume, The Younger Poets. Tate was only 24 at the time. Since that Yellow House on the Corner (1980), is significant for its initial success, he has published numerous collections ability to illustrate the ways in which individuals are of poetry, a novel, Lucky Darryl (1977), and a collec- shaped by both their inner and outer lives, and the tion of short stories, Hottentot Ossuary (1974). He also poem’s form—a free verse sonnet (see PROSODY AND edited the Best American Poetry 1997. He has been FREE VERSE)—suggests the tensions between constric- accorded nearly every poetry prize available. Tate’s tion and freedom. Worshipful Company of Fletchers (1994) won the In “Teach Us to Number Our Days,” as in work National Book Award; his Selected Poems (1991) won throughout her career, Dove writes as an African Amer- both the William Carlos WILLIAMS Award and the ican, but her work does not speak exclusively to the Pulitzer Prize. In 1995 Tate was the winner of the pres- black experience, nor does it limit what the black tigious Tanning Prize, the largest annual literary prize experience might be. In her introduction to her given in the United States. Selected Poems (1993), Dove says that one of the ques- The title poem from The Lost Pilot is perhaps Tate’s tions that most interests her when she writes is: “How most often anthologized work. It is a moving, but also does where I come from determine where I’ve ended unusual, elegy for his father, who was a war casualty. up?” (xxi). “Teach Us to Number Our Days” first The poem begins, “Your face did not rot,” before mov- depicts a scene that has socioeconomic and racial com- ing to a description of the copilot’s, whose did. The ponents to it; the poem then goes on to explore mov- horror of Tate’s father’s death becomes so grotesquely ingly the ways in which a person develops and grows terrible that the effect is ultimately comic. His “Good- up in a world of social constrictions. time Jesus” is another good example of a poem where The poem’s complex interweaving of social realities the worst of situations is treated with a deadpan non- and dreams, which can or cannot transcend external chalance. In a short prose poem of unrelenting dark factors, recalls Gwendolyn BROOKS’s famous “kitchen- humor, Tate’s Jesus awakens to a scene of apocalyptic nette building” (1945). But Dove’s poem is less hopeful nightmare, within which he decides to “take a little and less humorous. Dove’s title, which is a quotation ride on [his] donkey,” saying as he does, “I love that from Moses’s prayer in Psalm 90:12, places the poem donkey. Hell, I love everybody.” within a long tradition of black spirituals, many of As Tate has said elsewhere of his own work, “Truth which take Moses as a central figure, and suggests that is an elusive monster, and sometimes a poet must bend freedom will be found only in the next world. or squeeze the language to bring it into view. I’m will- The first stanza situates us, with its vernacular lan- ing to follow a poem anywhere so long as it promises guage and specific sensual details, in a contemporary 492 TEASDALE, SARA ghetto, a world of funeral parlors and “cops.” A boy quently in the public eye, Teasdale herself was not; tries to escape the constrictions in the world around she was a quiet and private person, sheltered him through his imagination and his dreams. The tel- throughout her life by parents, friends, and husband. evision antennae become for him a tic-tac-toe board. In her teens she and her friends founded an amateur He dreams he swallows a blue bean that, like the bean artists society for women called the Potters and pub- in the fairytale “Jack and the Giant Beanstalk,” grows lished a handwritten magazine called the Potters and grows. But the image of growth soon becomes Wheel, including original photography, sketches, ominous: Even in his dreams, the boy cannot escape poems, and prose. Her first book of poetry, dedicated constriction, the force that shapes the world around to a popular actress of the time, Sonnets to Duse and him, as the vines seem to blind him. Even the natural Other Poems, was published in 1907. She won the world now appears defined by human power, “knot- Poetry Society of America’s First Prize for unpub- ting like a dark tie.” lished poetry in 1916 and, in 1918, was the first In the boy’s world, “the patroller, disinterested, recipient of the Columbia Poetry Prize, later renamed holds all the beans.” The policeman’s “blue bullets” are the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. the beans, the source of power and what the boy Teasdale’s poetry is classic and lyrical in nature, dreams he has swallowed. Outside of its title, the poem unaffected by the experimentation in theme, capital- offers no escape. In the poem’s final image, a single-line ization, and style of her contemporaries, such as T. S. stanza, instead of a couplet or tercet, the “mum” flow- ELIOT and E. E. CUMMINGS. She believed that traditional ers become an image of raw emotion: a cry that will get forms of poetry allowed the reader to understand the no answer from the disinterested agents of power in emotions of the poem more easily, without having to this world. wade through MODERNISM’s new challenging structures BIBLIOGRAPHY and language. Her poems deal directly with universal Dove, Rita. Introduction to Selected Poems, by Dove New emotions, centering on women’s experiences. York: Pantheon, 1993. Contemporary critics often praised the musical Steffen, Therese. Crossing Color: Transcultural Space and Place quality of Teasdale’s poetry in both its rhythm and sim- in Rita Dove’s Poetry, Fiction and Drama. New York: Oxford plicity. Teasdale remarked, “I try to say what moves University Press, 2001. me—I never care to surprise my reader....For me Vendler, Helen. The Given and the Made: Strategies of Poetic one of the greatest joys of poetry is to know it by Redefinition. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University heart—perhaps that is why the simple songlike poems Press, 1995. appeal to me most—they are the easiest to learn” (qtd. Nadia Herman Colburn in Carpenter 331). The poem “The Fountain” (1915) showcases the musical quality of her writing with its TEASDALE, SARA (1884–1933) Sara Teas- strict rhythm and rhyme patterns and subtle shifting of dale was an important voice of woman’s poetry in the sound, as in “The fountain sang and sang / But the early 20th century (see FEMALE VOICE, FEMALE LANGUAGE). satyr never stirred.” In this poem the first hints of the Her work, consistently appearing in monthly national maturity appear, which she expresses in her later writ- magazines in the years before World War II, was well ing as she contrasts cyclical characteristics of nature received by the public and critics alike. She identified with those of her own experiences. In her last pub- with and is often compared to the 19th-century poet lished collection of poems, Strange Victory (1933), Elizabeth Barret Browning in theme, but her direct influ- Teasdale makes this same connection between herself ence was the Victorian Christina Rossetti, about whom and her natural surroundings: In “The Tree” she she had composed an unfinished biography. describes herself “Resting, as a tree rests / After its Teasdale was born in St. Louis, Missouri, and lived leaves are gone.” Teasdale’s poetry explores themes of in and out of sanitariums until her death from an love, joy, death, sorrow, and nature, rather than delv- overdose of sedatives. Though her work was fre- ing into social or political commentary. TENDER BUTTONS 493

BIBLIOGRAPHY For Bly, the psyche of America will pay for the atroc- Carpenter, Margaret Haley. Sara Teasdale: A Biography. Nor- ities and lies of the Vietnam war. In a surreal passage folk, Va.: Pentelic, 1977. Bly describes a speech by a lying president. Bly warns Drake, William. Sara Teasdale: Woman and Poet. San Fran- that this suggests the decline of the nation and asks, cisco: Harper and Row, 1979. “What is there now to hold us to earth?” Holly Salmon Even the political arguments Bly offers take on a sur- real uncanniness in their immediacy: Bly’s poem is an “THE TEETH MOTHER NAKED AT angry lament, a prophetic warning about the psychic LAST” ROBERT BLY (1986) One of the most death that threatens America as it piles horror on hor- important poems to come out of the Vietnam protest ror and turns its wealth and power to the production movement, “The Teeth Mother Naked at Last” repre- of death. sents Robert BLY’s seamless melding of political and BIBLIOGRAPHY contemplative poetry. Bly took inspiration from the Bly, Robert. “Leaping up into Political Poetry: An Essay.” In political poems of Latin American poets, including Talking All Morning. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, and from American Press, 1980, pp. 100–101. contemporaries Etheridge KNIGHT, Thomas MCGRATH, ———. “The Magic of the Muse,” Interview with Robert Bly James WRIGHT, and David IGNATOW, as well as the ear- by Roar Bjonnes, Magical Blend Magazine. Available on- lier American poets Walt Whitman and William Carlos line. URL: www.magicalblend.com/library/readingroom/ WILLIAMS, all of whom wrote about political crises. In interviews/bly.html. Downloaded September 2003. his 1980 essay “Leaping up into Political Poetry,” Bly Alan Bourassa argues for the power of contemplative poetry to engage with political questions: “The life of the nation can be TENDER BUTTONS GERTRUDE STEIN imagined also not as something deep inside our psy- (1914) Long before the popular success of her best- che, but as a psyche larger than the psyche of anyone known work, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas living, a larger sphere, floating above everyone. In (1933), the publication of Tender Buttons insured order for the poet to write a true political poem, he has Gertrude STEIN’s place among the experimental poets of to be able to have such a grasp of his own concerns the modern era. Tender Buttons divides into three sec- that he can leave them for awhile, and then leap up tions of prose poems, “Objects,” “Food,” and “Rooms,” into this other psyche” (100–101). each a unique meditation on the relationships and Bly’s greatest political poem was written in three ver- resemblances that structure language and thought. sions. The first appeared in his collection of the same Stein’s poetic diction is dense and complex, employing name (1970), the second in Sleepers Joining Hands repetition, puns, and ambiguity to create a playful tone (1973), and the third in Selected Poems (1986). In all of “joyous lightness and miraculous plentitude,” three versions, Bly is indebted to Spanish SURREALISM, and according to Marianne DeKoven (229). Although the his own DEEP IMAGE style allows him to employ powerful skepticism of early critics seemed to affirm Stein’s own dreamlike images in his description of political events. In claim that “the creator of the new composition in the his lament over the death of spirituality and thought, he arts is an outlaw until he is a classic” (514), Stein was evokes the strange image of books that do not want to be conscious that her experiments partook of a historical, with us any longer: “New Testaments . . . escaping . . . literary lineage. Edmund Wilson aligns her emphasis dressed as women .../ they slip out after dark.” The on connotation and suggestion with the methods of images are at times brutally direct. Bly describes an attack T. S. ELIOT, William Butler Yeats, and the symbolists, on a hut by high explosives: “The six-hour-old infant while Stein herself credits Walt Whitman as her pre- puts his fists instinctively to his eyes to keep out the cursor. Tender Buttons’s concise understatement also light.” The final image of the attack is plain and unflinch- influenced such writers as Ernest Hemingway, and its ing: “Blood leaps on the vegetable walls.” experiments with words as objects developed alongside 494 THOMAS, LORENZO the avant-garde work of painters, including Pablo Wilson, Edmund. Axel’s Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Picasso, who frequented her salon in Paris. In its play- Literature of 1870–1930. New York: Charles Scribner’s ful linguistic innovation, Stein’s poetry resembles the Sons, 1931. work of E. E. CUMMINGS, and it influenced later poets, Anthony Cuda including Frank O’HARA of the NEW YORK SCHOOL and the contemporary experiments of Charles BERNSTEIN of THOMAS, LORENZO (1944– ) Lorenzo the LANGUAGE SCHOOL. Thomas’s poetry and criticism have helped to show the The “carefully wrong” verbal still lifes of Tender But- relationship of poetry to music in the 20th century. His tons present the reader with no small challenge, argues works are infused with jazz influences and are a testa- Neil Schmidtz (165). Their playful, elusive logic ment to the exploration of social, political, and eco- seamlessly connects disparate words and senses, nomic culture in American society. As Thomas has prompting some critics to suggest that the poems said, “Poetry is one of the forms of music and always resemble riddles, and others to discern ambiguous has been” (121). Thomas has wanted to produce connotations of lesbianism and gender polemics. But, poems that sound like the jazz music he has enjoyed more importantly, the poems also address the very dif- by such artists as Lightnin’ Hopkins, Eric Dolphy, John ficulty they pose to readers, one of connection and Coltrane, and Charles Mingus. He has also been influ- correlation. How does “A Piece of Coffee” resemble enced by poets Langston HUGHES, William Carlos “More of a double,” or “A Cutlet” align with “blind agi- WILLIAMS, and Carl SANDBURG. tation?” In what Schmidtz calls their “principled eva- Thomas was born Panama. His family emigrated to sion of specific reference,” Stein’s brief lyrics address New York when he was a child. In the 1960s and and enact the problem of relationship, a fundamental 1970s, he was active in what became known as the philosophical question of logic and language (165). BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT that, as he said, brought “full For example, in “A Box,” Stein desires “to have a green maturity and strength and African song in American point not to red but to point again.” Instead of point- English, drawing upon the syntax of traditional ing to its conventional counterpart, Stein’s “green” proverbs and the tersely sentimental tone of Rhythm points toward “pointing” itself, the act in which a and Blues” (121). Thomas has taught at the University color (or a word) directs us toward another one. Her of Houston Downtown. He has twice won the Poets subtle experiments pose an enormous question: Can Foundation Award (1966 and 1974) and the Lucille language adequately address its own mechanisms? Medwick Prize (1974). Stein’s philosophical investigation into the nature of Thomas’s style is nonconformist insofar as it does poetry and language underlies the entire volume; its not follow stylized patterns of rhyme and meter (see vigor makes Tender Buttons a landmark of modernist PROSODY AND FREE VERSE). Some of his stanzas have sen- experimentation (see MODERNISM), a precursor to what tences with one word, while others have up to 10 would later become a particularly American vein of words. In his shorter sentences, he carefully chooses structural and linguistic innovation. words whose syllables make for a short and punchy effect. He has the ability to make his words dance as BIBLIOGRAPHY each line, staggered in verse, can be read rhythmically. DeKoven, Marianne. “Breaking the Rigid Form of the Noun: Reading the poems aloud allows for hearing the poems’ Stein, Pound, Whitman and Modernist Poetry.” In Critical intense beat. All of his poems contain themes of social Essays on Modernism, edited by Michael Hoffman. New and cultural woes in society. York: G.K. Hall, 1992, pp. 225–234. Schmitz, Neil. Of Huck and Alice: Humorous Writing in Ameri- In “Liquid City,”(1979), a slang term for Houston, can Literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, (“liquid” is slang for petroleum) Thomas treats the city 1983, pp. 160–199. as a metaphor for American greed and materialism. A Stein, Gertrude. The Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein, edited repeated stanza in the poem is “No Song,” meaning by Carl van Vechten. New York: Random House, 1962. that Houston makes money but fails to take care of its TILLINGHAST, RICHARD 495 poor and to connect, like music, with the human from healing. In contrast to soft-sounding alliterations spirit: “Glass is a shifting liquid stunned by flame and on “bl” (“blueblack”) and “w” (“weekday weather”), passersby; / a shame.” harsher sounds illustrate “the cold splintering, break- ing” (emphasis added). The crackling of burning, dis- BIBLIOGRAPHY integrating wood in an otherwise quiet home Saylor, Rita, ed. Liquid City: Houston Writers on Houston. Houston: Corona Publishing, 1987. announces warmth, but, to the son, it prefigures the Thomas. Lorenzo. “Neo-Griots.” In Extraordinary Measures: family’s “chronic angers,” which repeat the percussive Afrocentric Modernism and Twentieth-Century American k/kr-sounds of previous lines (“clothes,” “blueblack Poetry, edited by Charles Bernstein and Hank Lazer. cold,” “cracked,” “ached”). Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2000, p. 104. The adult persona illustrates his insights not only ———. “Poets on Poetry: Interview with Lorenzo Thomas,” through sound patterns, but also by zeroing in on his by Daniel Kane Writenet.org. Available on-line. URL: responsibility. While the ending of the first stanza www.writenet.org/poetschat/poetschat_l_thomas.html. acknowledges that the family showed no appreciation Downloaded December 13, 2001. for the father, the clearly personal narrative second Yvette R. Blair stanza, in which the child awakes and rises, prepares for the third stanza, in which the speaker rebukes him- “THOSE WINTER SUNDAYS” ROBERT self. As in the final line of the previous stanza, the HAYDEN (1962) Robert Hayden composed this speaker now uses the present continuous to stress the 14-line elegy at a time when leading African-American process, continuity, and current awareness of his artists promoted the notion that African-American ungratefulness for his father’s kind deeds. The closing poets must portray exclusively their own culture to lines express despair at this insensitivity. Regretting his support the struggle for freedom and equality (see the immature behavior, the grown son poetically defines BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT). Rejecting such strictures from his father’s Sunday sacrifices as “love’s austere and colleagues of any color or persuasion, Hayden created lonely offices.” While “austere” recalls the child’s poems on various people and topics, despite sharp crit- impression of a seemingly stern and cold father, icism from those who claimed that he betrayed his race. “lonely” conveys the man’s painful understanding of “Those Winter Sundays” has been read autobio- his father’s suffering at his son’s indifference. The reli- graphically as expressing Hayden’s conflicting feelings gious connotations of the final word, offices, elevate the toward his foster father. It ranks high among poems on father’s devoted service to his family—as depicted a child’s emotional response to a parent (and can be throughout the poem—to the level of worship. profitably compared to Theodore ROETHKE’s “ MY PAPA’S BIBLIOGRAPHY WALTZ” and Sylvia PLATH’s “ DADDY”). Similar to a double Fetrow, Fred M. Robert Hayden. Boston: Twayne, 1984. exposure on film, the persona’s boyhood routine Hatcher, John. From the Auroral Darkness: The Life and Poetry merges with his perspective as an adult reevaluating of Robert Hayden. Oxon, England: George Ronald, 1984. his memories. The speaker describes physical and emotional expe- Nassim Winnie Balestrini rience along with temperature changes and concomi- tant sounds. On Sundays his father makes a fire, cleans TILLINGHAST, RICHARD (1940– ) his son’s Sunday shoes, and only wakes up his family Richard Tillinghast’s poetry is infused with a strong once the rooms have warmed up. But the child gets up regard for history and autobiography. In many of his reluctantly for fear of “the chronic angers of that poems, Tillinghast discovers personal history through house,” which represents both the creaky building and his extensive travels. And a major theme found in his the disharmonious family. When the grown-up son poetry is the pervasive awareness of life’s imperma- remembers his father’s work-worn hands, he under- nence: “He writes out of a sense of loss in part, but stands that the Sunday family duties prevented them reclamation also,” Wyatt Prunty has commented (968). 496 TOLSON, MELVIN

Primarily using free verse (see PROSODY AND FREE VERSE), BIBLIOGRAPHY Tillinghast explores his personal history—childhood, Prunty, Wyatt. “Myth, History, and Myth Again.” Southern relationships, and influences—but also more univer- Review 20.4 (October 1984): 958–968. sally historical themes, such as the impact of the Civil Shoaf, Diann. “Review of Stonecutter’s Hand,” by Richard War and World War II, through which he ultimately Tillinghast. Ploughshares 21.1 (spring 1995): 200–202. questions society’s advances during postwar recon- Christopher Bloss struction. His teacher and mentor at Harvard, Robert LOWELL, was a major influence on his work. Lowell’s TOLSON, MELVIN (1898–1966) Though CONFESSIONAL poetics and free verse poems are espe- Melvin Tolson only published three volumes of poetry cially prevalent in Tillinghast’s early work. during his lifetime, he was internationally recognized Tillinghast was born and raised in Memphis, Ten- as a major contributor to modernist poetics (see MOD- nessee. Sleep Watch, his first book of poetry, was pub- ERNISM) generally and to African diasporic modernity lished in 1969. He was the recipient of an Amy LOWELL in particular. Such recognition led to Tolson’s being Traveling Fellowship in 1990–91. Tillinghast has been selected to serve as poet laureate for the Republic of the director of the Poets’ House in Ireland. Liberia (1947); he is the only American poet to have The Knife and Other Poems (1980) contains works been selected as laureate of another nation. More of reflecting a yearning for the past with a rather cynical Tolson’s works have been published posthumously, view of the future. “The Knife,” the title poem of this and he is increasingly seen by critics and general read- collection, is significant, because Tillinghast demon- ers alike as among the most significant of black Amer- strates a strong and positive connection with past, ican poets. present, and future: His newborn son’s “look” is “like Tolson was born in Moberly, Missouri. His family the river old like rain / older than anything that dies moved to Iowa when he was 14, and it was there that can be.” The knife, a gift from a grandfather, symbol- he published his first poem. He attended high school izes a cyclical relationship between Tillinghast, his in Kansas City, then enrolled at Fisk University in brother, and his son. With the symbol of the knife, 1918. The following year, he transferred to Lincoln Tillinghast embraces the past while noting the posi- University, which was to figure prominently in his later tive effect it holds for the future. Other poems in this poetry. After graduation, Tolson assumed a teaching collection express less-than-optimistic ideas about post at Wiley College, beginning a long and illustrious the future. career as an educator at historically black colleges that In Our Flag Was Still There (1984), Tillinghast con- was to take him to Langston College and back to Fisk. tinues his quest for the past through introspection. In Later graduate work at Columbia University in New his long poem “Sewanee in Ruins,” he establishes the York led to his thesis, which was among the first criti- history of Sewanee (the University of the South) to a cal examinations of the HARLEM RENAISSANCE. Though group of students through historical journals, letters, the thesis was accepted, Tolson neglected the formality and local history accounts of life following the Civil of applying for his degree for some years. It was offi- War: “But why do I let these ghosts talk / and tire you cially awarded in 1940. The thesis, The Harlem Group with their names and histories.” The purpose in this of Negro Writers, was published in book form in 2001. poem is to connect students with their geographical Nearly as much time passed between the composition roots. “Sewanee in Ruins” displays Tillinghast’s keen of the poems for Tolson’s first book and their eventual ability to reconstruct the past with acute detail, hoping publication. In his earliest years as a poet, Tolson wrote it will remain a fixture in the present for his students. a massive series of dramatic monologues, resembling Tillinghast contrasts past and present in his poetry, Edgar Lee MASTERS’s Spoon River Anthology in concep- often with reference to geographic location. His keen, tion, centered on the lives of characters in Harlem. detailed use of language and free verse convey a sense That book, A Gallery of Harlem Portraits (see HARLEM of longing for a past that can never be revisited. GALLERY), appeared posthumously in 1979. The first TOOMER, JEAN 497 collection of poems published in his lifetime was Ren- modern people carrying with them traditions whose dezvous with America in 1944. This was followed by value is denigrated by white society, even as that soci- Libretto for the Republic of Liberia (1953) and Harlem ety borrows heavily from them. Gallery: Book I, The Curator (1965). By the time of his Like W. E. B. DuBois and Alain Locke, Tolson last book, Tolson’s poetry was beginning to achieve the pointed often to the African and African-American sort of recognition his modern contemporaries had roots of modern Western aesthetics. In “The Negro long enjoyed. Tolson was invited to visit the White Scholar” (1948), Tolson observes: “The ground the House in the last year of his life, where he inscribed a Negro Scholar stands upon / Is fecund with . . . chal- copy of Harlem Gallery for President Lyndon Johnson, lenge and tradition.” Having learned from T. S. ELIOT’s and he gave a reading from that book at the Library of THE WASTE LAND, Tolson distances himself irreconcilably Congress, which was recorded for the library’s collec- from the cultural politics that poet embodied. In con- tion. Tolson was also awarded the American Academy trast to Eliot’s vision of Africa in his verse plays, Tolson of Arts and Letters Award for poetry (1966), Poetry presents Africa in Libretto for the Republic of Liberia as magazine’s Bess Hokin Award (1952), and first prize at “The ladder of survival dawn men saw,” and his poem, the American Negro Exposition (1939) for his long which pays tribute to more than a century of cultural poem “Dark Symphony” (see LONG AND SERIAL POETRY). contacts between Africa and America, proposes a new Tolson was also a renowned drama and debate teacher, Africa as “A moment of the conscience of mankind!” mayor of the town of Langston, Oklahoma, a frequent Throughout his career Tolson argued that African- public speaker and a regular columnist for the Wash- American poets must be part of contemporary move- ington Tribune newspaper. A selection from his editori- ments in poetry, such as modernism, but he was als was published in 1982 under the title Caviar and adamant that black poets could never simply be, as his Cabbage, which had been the title of Tolson’s column. colleague Robert HAYDEN put it, poets first who just hap- There has been much misunderstanding regarding pened to be Negro. In the end Tolson’s own poems the evolution of Tolson’s style and aesthetics, largely demonstrated the reliance of modernism upon black because so much of his work was unavailable to most culture, even as he charted new paths for the movement. readers for so many years. With the appearance of a BIBLIOGRAPHY selected edition, it is now possible to see his movement Bérubé, Michael. Marginal Forces/Cultural Centers: Tolson, from early free verse NARRATIVE POETRY to the highly allu- Pynchon, and the Politics of the Canon. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell sive style of his later poems. What has remained con- University Press, 1992. stant has been his dedication to modernist experiment, Farnsworth, Robert M. Melvin B. Tolson 1898–1966: Plain his development of memorable characters, his gift for a Talk and Prophetic Prophecy. Columbia, Mo.: University of highly lyrical narrative verse, and his ironic under- Missouri Press, 1984. standing of the racial politics of America. In Harlem Nielsen, Aldon Lynn. “Melvin B. Tolson and the Deterritori- Gallery, Tolson writes, “Black Boy often adds / the alization of Modernism.” In Writing between the Lines: Race dimension of ethnic irony / to Empson’s classic seven” and Intertextuality. Athens: University of Georgia Press, (a reference to William Empson’s widely read critical 1994, pp. 48–70. study Seven Types of Ambiguity [1930]). These lines typ- Aldon L. Nielsen ify Tolson’s stance with regard to modernist poetics. He takes up a skeptical, adaptive position within a mod- TOOMER, JEAN (1894–1967) Jean Toomer ernism that he redefines as African-derived. Through- is regarded as an influence on the writers of the HARLEM out his career, Tolson insisted that black poets must RENAISSANCE, yet he did not identify himself as one of participate in the artistic movements of their time, but them. While those writers tried to establish a new he was equally insistent that their participation must be voice to communicate the black experience in Amer- critical. The characters of his first free verse portraits, ica, Toomer attempted to write the literature of an like the characters of his Harlem Gallery, are essentially American melting pot, for a new American individual 498 TOOMER, JEAN representing racial unity, not a collection of component “chestnut” hair “coiled like a lyncher’s rope”—an races. Though he repudiated, for the most part, the acknowledgment of the slave past but also a represen- writing of explicitly African-American works, Toomer tation, through her hair color, of the blending of the did, according to Jon Woodson, bring “the techniques races into a new American one. The final lines, “her of literary MODERNISM to some of the most accom- slim body, white as the ash / of black flesh after flame,” plished of the young writers who gathered in Harlem reinforce Toomer’s illustration of a violent slave past in in the 1920s” (30). America but also a new America rising out of the ashes Toomer was born and was raised in the Washington, of the past. D.C., home of his grandfather, who had been an After Cane Toomer wrote short stories, articles, important Reconstruction-era politician in Louisiana. reviews, poetry, plays, four novels, and several works Living in a white neighborhood and recalling no racial of autobiography; most were never published. Much of prejudice among his white friends, Toomer developed this work is driven by Toomer’s vision of the American a sensibility different from many writers of the Harlem race, most vividly portrayed in his long poem “The Renaissance. After stints at several colleges, he began to Blue Meridian” (1936), a Whitmanesque discourse on write, influenced in part by the IMAGIST poets, as well this new American figure (see LONG AND SERIAL POETRY). as by futurism, symbolism, and impressionism. He Toomer died in 1967, feeling he had never realized his also met various authors, such as Hart CRANE. literary aims, but, ironically, he is now regarded as one Toomer’s reputation rests mostly upon Cane (1923). of the greatest artists in the canon of African-American A vision of the rural, black South, Cane is a collection literature in which he did not seek inclusion. of poems, character sketches, and a play set in rural Georgia, Chicago, and Washington, D.C., evoking a BIBLIOGRAPHY vanishing culture. The dominant persona is a man Fabre, Genevieve, and Michel Feith, eds. Jean Toomer and searching for his self-identity through a connection the Harlem Renaissance. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2000. with black heritage, though that search is unsuccessful. Woodson, Jon. To Make a New Race: Gurdjieff, Toomer, and A poetry selection from Cane, “A Portrait in Geor- the Harlem Renaissance. Jackson: University Press of Mis- gia,” exemplifies Toomer’s vision of the black experi- sissippi, 1999. ence as part of an American melting pot. An African-American woman is described as having Joseph Schaub C U D

UPDIKE, JOHN (1932– ) John Updike has and structured, yet their subject matter is gleaned from been the quintessential man of letters. In close to 50 mundane (sometimes scandalous) sources: a newspa- years, he has published more than 60 books, including per article, a naked female statue, a placard on a city novels, short stories, poems, and criticism. He is most bus. “On the Inclusion of Miniature Dinosaurs in famous for his novels, which often involve American Breakfast Cereal Boxes” (1993), a short poem of three middle-class values and characters. Updike’s poetry is quatrains, concludes: “I hide within the Raisin Bran; / typically metered and often rhymed (see PROSODY AND And thus begins the dawn of Man.” Updike seemingly FREE VERSE); much of his early work is light verse. His has the ability to take almost any facet of everyday poetry is related to that of Richard WILBUR and Anthony American life, its blessings and burdens, and fashion it HECHT, especially in its formal elements, use of light into a poem. verse, and subject matter. Updike’s book of verse Americana and Other Poems Updike grew up in Shillington, Pennsylvania, in a (2002) is a continuation of familiar themes and stylis- middle-class home. He studied at Harvard and spent tic choices. It is also, however, a slightly changed voice, 1954 to 1955 at Oxford University’s Ruskin School showing a nostalgic appreciation for a life now in its of Drawing and Fine Arts. He worked for the New decline: “The competition thins; so does my blood” Yorker for two years, leaving to pursue his writing (“On The Nearly Simultaneous Deaths of Harold Brod- career full-time. His first book was a collection of key and Joseph Brodsky”). Gone is the light verse and poems, The Carpentered Hen and Other Tame Crea- rhyming tactics of his earlier works, although the tures (1958). Updike has received just about every poems remain fluent and lucid; they are what the literary award that America has to offer. He has twice reviewer John Taylor calls “eminently readable” (294). won the Pulitzer Prize (1982 and 1990) and has This collection, perhaps his last, has a preponderance received a National Book Award (1964), American of iambic pentameter and somber themes. The poem Book Award (1982), and National Book Critics Cir- “New York,” for example, shows the lyrical intensity of cle Award (1982 and 1990). At 32 he was the Updike’s verse at its best: “this hell holds sacred youngest invitee in the history of the American Acad- crevices where lone / lost spirits preen and call their pit emy of Arts and Letters. a throne.” Updike’s Collected Poems 1953–1993 (1993), has Many of Updike’s poems portray contemporary more than 400 poems, which he calls his “oeuvre’s America as being gloriously flawed. A poignant fond- beloved waifs” (xxiv). They exhibit both a remarkable ness for and honest perception of America might very restraint and abandon. They are often carefully crafted well be his most enduring legacy.

499 500 UPDIKE, JOHN

BIBLIOGRAPHY Updike, John. Preface to Selected Poems 1953–1993. London: De Bellis, Jack. The John Updike Encyclopaedia. Westport, Penguin Books, 1993, pp. xxiii–xxiv. Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000. Michael Kuperman Schiff, James A. John Updike Revisited. New York: Twayne, 1998. Taylor, John. “Short Reviews.” Poetry 179.5 (February 2002): 294–302. C V D

VALENTINE, JEAN (1934– ) Jean Valen- work. At times separation is drawn in plain language, tine’s poems do not easily yield meaning, engaging the and the emotional impact is unspoken. In “The reader an unsettling dreamlike reality. Whether written Drinker” (2000), the speaker addresses one who is per- in the first person or as a third-person close observer petually “making for the door” and trying to step out of of others, Valentine’s poems are a quiet study of the his or her own life. The monosyllabic, flat language human condition. Her poems are marked by their underscores the speaker’s concession to the impossibil- brevity, in terms of both diction and the length of the ity of being anyone but herself. The self remains, Valen- poems themselves. “Valentine seeks refuge in a lan- tine asserts: Even “death / won’t take you out.” guage of silence, or extreme privacy,” notes Stuart Valentine also depicts separation in surrealistic terms Friebert (479). These deeply personal poems, offering (see SURREALISM). In “He leaves them” (2000), the effect “little exposition or context” (479), render them diffi- of the schism is so extreme as to be metaphorically cult to comprehend, but they never lack in specificity. transformative: “He turns into a moon .../ He turns Writing after the CONFESSIONAL poets, Valentine has the into strips of film.” For the speaker what remains of the freedom to be deeply introspective without overt, bla- man who leaves is ephemeral. He is transformed into tant self-disclosure. Her poems explore the issues of the Moon, which is constant in the sky, yet ever in flux. womanhood and roles of lover, mother, wife, and He becomes not a fixed, photographic image of the self daughter (see FEMALE VOICE, FEMALE LANGUAGE), but but “strips of film,” evoking a strip of negatives or Valentine’s poems would not properly be considered something that is torn into strips. No wholeness feminist. Gender issues inform her work, but the remains. Valentine’s poems often explore a fractured human condition guides her inquiry. world or a fractured self in the world. Silence, therefore, Valentine was born in Chicago and has lived most of becomes a crucial element in her poems. That silence, her adult life in New York City. She won the Yale Series which is also portrayed in the white space Valentine of Younger Poets Award for her first book, Dream employs on the page, stands along with language, not Barker and Other Poems, in 1963. She was awarded a in opposition to it. There is as much meaning vested in Guggenheim Fellowship in 1976 and won the Maurice Valentine’s silences as there is in her words. English Prize in 1991 and the Sara TEASDALE Poetry BIBLIOGRAPHY Prize in 1992. In 2000 Valentine received the Shelley Friebert, Stuart. “Introduction to Jean Valentine.” In The Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. Longman Anthology of Contemporary Poetry 1950–1980, Breaking from family or a beloved, whether by edited by Stuart Friebert and David Young, eds. New choice or by death, is a recurrent theme in Valentine’s York: Longman, 1983, pp. 478–481.

501 502 VAN DUYN, MONA

Muske, Carol. “Time into Language.” Nation (July 21, comfortable with making lofty generalizations about 1987): 36–40. nature, Van Duyn carefully observes and renders its Linda Levitt particulars—on terms entirely her own. BIBLIOGRAPHY (1921–2004) Mona VAN DUYN, MONA Burns, Michael, ed. Discovery and Reminiscence: Essays on the Van Duyn is an important postwar poet who, though Poetry of Mona Van Duyn. Fayetteville: University of exposed to poetic such movements as BEAT, CONFES- Arkansas Press, 1998. SIONAL, feminist, and NEW FORMALISM, never sacrificed Goldensohn, Lorrie. “Mona Van Duyn and the Politics of her own unique, engaging style and perspective and Love.” Ploughshares 4:3 (March 1978): 31–44. never succumbed to the leveling influences of various Leibowitz, Herbert. Review of Merciful Disguises by Mona poetic schools. Van Duyn has addressed a broader Van Duyn, New York Times Book Review, December 9, range of subjects than most other contemporary 1973, p. 4. poets—“She is not a confessional poet fingering her Prunty, Wyatt. Fallen From the Symboled World: Precedents emotional sores,” writes Herbert Leibowitz in the New for the New Formalism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. York Times Book Review (4)—and she has experimented with a broad range of forms, both conventional and Donna Potts free verse (see PROSODY AND FREE VERSE), even inventing her own poetic form, the minimalist sonnet, an abbre- VISUAL POETRY Visual poetry has long been viated version of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s 19th-cen- the poor cousin of the American poetry family, barely tury curtal sonnet (Hopkins had written “sonnets” of acknowledged by academia, but not altogether absent 10 and a half lines instead of the traditional 14). from the work of well-known poets, including Robert Van Duyn was raised and educated in Iowa. She CREELEY, Ezra POUND, John HOLLANDER, and Charles moved to St. Louis in 1950, where she taught night OLSON. Greatly overshadowed by LANGUAGE poetry as an classes for Washington University’s adult education experimental genre in the final decades of the 20th cen- program until 1967. Her writing career began when she tury, it has nevertheless persisted and seems likely to was 38 years old, and she eventually became one of the remain a potent alternative to conventional poetry most highly regarded poets in the United States and indefinitely. There are probably nearly as many defini- received many prizes and fellowships. At age 70 she tions of it as there are people making poems that won a Pulitzer Prize (1991) for Near Changes (1990), include graphics; for simplicity’s sake, however, the and in 1992 she was named the U.S. poet laureate. term will here mean simply poetry that includes visual Van Duyn’s first book, Valentines to the Wide World elements that seem (to a consensus of informed judges) (1959), introduces many themes that would remain aesthetically necessary to the final meaning of its words. central to her poetry: the romantic concept of the child A good example is E. E. CUMMINGS’s famous poem “r- as “father to the man,” the child’s inevitable loss of p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r” (1935). Among its many small but innocence, the possibility of restoring innocence charming typographical tricks, this work visually through art, the intimate relation between nature and shows us a grasshopper’s shift from lowercase incoher- human nature, and the stages of love. In “Falls,” a ence (“r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r”) to a sudden great, ener- longer poem from which the title of her most recent gized jumble (“PPEGORHRASS”) to something nearly book, Firefall, (1994), is taken, the choice that the recognizable, folded on itself (“.gRrEaPsPhOs”) to—at speaker makes as a teenager during her family’s visit to last—quiet identifiability (“,grasshopper;”). Take away Niagara Falls is emblematic of the choices she later the typographical arrangement of the poem or use makes as a poet. She describes driving to see the Amer- some word other than grasshopper, and you take away ican lip from Canada’s side, only to find that the whole its meaning. Text and graphics are equally necessary. “was beyond the grasp of [her] lens and [she] snapped A later, more sophisticated example is “Temple instead / a family of swans, a simpler sight” (77). Never Bells,” a minimalist haiku by Jonathan Brannen from VISUAL POETRY 503 his 1991 minibook, Sirloin Clouds, that consists, in its merely increased those pictures’ store of visual subject entirety, of the phrase a petal above the phrase a peal. matter. Around the same time, various dadaists (see Here six words, counting the title, make a pleasant pic- SURREALISM) and Russian futurists (see EUROPEAN POETIC ture of a petal and temple bells sounding in the back- INFLUENCES) were doing interesting things with cut-up ground. The petal, being singular, is almost certainly texts but with similarly small regard for the poetic adrift. The sounds of the words—the alliteration, asso- meaning of what they were doing. Pound was actively nance and consonance—and simple parallelism com- using graphic elements then, too—in the Chinese bine to give music to the picture. But there is not much ideogrammatic passages of his CANTOS (1930–70) and to it—except when viewed on the page. Then it in “In a Station of the Metro” (1913), which when becomes evident that the visual appearance of “petal” printed as Pound originally intended it to be, has two and “peal” is crucially important, for it acts as an large blocks of space interrupting each of its two lines. implict metaphor for what those words stand for, an A major pioneer in the art was Cummings, who was actual petal and actual peal of bells. A reader sensitive exposed to Apollinaire and much else that was going to visual poetry will observe at once and viscerally on in European MODERNISM early in the century. He was thrill to a wafted, exquisitely delicate but material writing full-blown visual poems as early as the 1920s. petal’s resolving itself into purely ethereal bell song, the By 1935 he had achieved the combined visual and way the word for “petal” shrinks from two syllables to conceptual sophistication of such poems as “poem one and becomes the word peal. The poem’s words and #70” from his collection no thanks. The subject of the visual appearance are equally essential for the poem’s poem is an awe-inspiringly brilliant star. In the poem final effect. Cummings (among other actions) takes the word bright Some scholars have traced visual poetry back to and, by repeating it, each time with a different letter ancient Egypt. Examples can be found from just about capitalized, then with question marks replacing letters, all eras and parts of the world, notably China and pre- moves it from “brIght” to “????T” to convey the word’s Columbian America. In the West, Christian-era poets growing mysteriousness. At the same time, he carries occasionally printed words or phrases honoring their out similar operations on the words star and yes, thus God in circles, in other geometric shapes, or as simple grouping “bright,” “star,” and the sense of affirma- crosswords. Pre-20th-century visual poetry peaked, in tion—glitteringly, via the unexpected capitalizations— the view of most observers, in the 1600s, with the as interconnected essences, or the same essence. “shaped” or “pattern” poems of George Herbert, whose Simultaneously extremely simple and extremely sub- lines, at appropriate times, are indented or cut short in tle, his poem monitors—and “visio-metaphorically” re- such a way as to make pictures of them. Thus Herbert’s creates—a star’s slow evolution from undifferentiated most famous shaped poem, “Easter Wings” (1633), brightness into final ascendant, affirmative mystery. looks like a pair of wings. Less well known and a little later than Cummings, The earliest widely discussed modern visual poems Kenneth PATCHEN contributed (in the view of many were published in Calligrammes, a book by the French current visual poets) equally to American visual poet Guillaume Apollinaire, in 1918, the year Apolli- poetry from the late 1930s through the 1940s and naire died in World War I. Its most famous visual 1950s, experimenting with different font styles and poem includes words about rain printed not across the the addition of purely graphic elements, eventually page but down it, in lines resembling streams of rain. integrating his own vividly full-colored paintings with A few years prior to this, the visual artists Pablo Picasso his texts, in a way that Cummings, entirely a type- and Georges Braque had begun to include textual ele- writer poet (although, appropriately, also an excellent ments in their work, but the collages resulting from painter), did not. their experiments and those of others did not incorpo- Among the other lesser figures who combined rate words and typography in any semantically mean- graphic elements with words in poems prior to the ingful way: They did not verbalize their pictures; they 1950s were Harry Crosby, best known for a poem 504 VISUAL POETRY consisting of a rectangle made up of the word black, set used. Among the American concrete poets were Aram in bold type to emphasize its blackness, and repeated Saroyan, Jonathan WILLIAMS, Ronald JOHNSON, Mary over and over with the word SUN in uppercase letters, Ellen Solt, and Emmett Williams (these latter two were printed only once in the center of the rectangle (“Photo- the editors responsible for the two main 20th-century heliograph” [1929]); Else von Freytag-Loringhoven, anthologies of visual poetry published in the United who made visual poems of herself by dadaistically wear- States, Concrete Poetry: A World View (1968) and An ing clothes to which she had pinned—along with Anthology of Concrete Poetry (1967), respectively). At assorted tin cans, spoons, and shovels—painted or col- about the same time, May SWENSON was making more laged texts; Bob Brown, whose visual poems included traditional visual poems, Hollander was following in found writings and texts worked out in freehand draw- the footsteps of George Herbert as a maker of shaped ings; Abraham Lincoln Gillespie, whose scores for vocal- poems, and d. a. levy was prolifically pioneering in ization and performance have sufficient extralexical visio-textual collage and various experiments in the devices, including dingbats and arrows, to qualify, for aesthetically expressive damaging of texts via erasure, some, as visual poems; Walter Conrad Arensberg, an smearing, wholesale obliteration with layers of ink, adherent of dada at one time, who specialized in the and similar tactics. visio-poetic device of “word fracture,” one of his poems Levy died a suicide at the age of 26; Swenson and beginning, with “Ing? Is it possible to mean ing?,” then Hollander never treated their modest ventures into going on to discuss the syllable; Marsden Hartley, who visual poetry as more than secondary to their unvisual included textual matter prominently in some of his poetry, and the others mentioned went on, for the most paintings and who also wrote poems that deployed part, to other sorts of writing after the 1960s, leaving punctuation and different fonts in a manner that hints of the field to a third generation still active, which later visual poetry; Wallace Berman, who wrote poetry includes Karl Kempton (a pioneer in the use of op art for the page and for rock paintings that could be in poetry and the editor of the longest-running Ameri- arranged to make different combinations of words along can periodical devoted to visual poetry, Kaldron), with Hebrew characters related to Kabbalistic mysticism Richard KOSTELANETZ (unquestionably the most prolific and who also as created collages, assemblages, and and best-known visual poet in the United States), Karl sculptures containing textual elements; and Kenneth Young (a noted converter of Asian and pre-Columbian REXROTH, whose little-known “cubist poems” are American materials into visual poetry and Web-master reminsicent of Cummings’s most unorthodox works, as of a Web site for visual poetry, light & dust), K. S. Ernst in a poem that contains four lines consisting of nothing (who has been a leader in the use of ceramic and other but “vvvvvvvvvvvv,” “vvvvvvvvvv,” “vvvvvvvv” and “v,” kinds of solid letters in visio-poetic sculptures), Marilyn respectively, and a later line in which six longish words Rosenberg (who is particularly well known for her are jammed together (“Fundamental Disagreement with bookworks, a major, though little-noted, form of visual Two Contemporaries” [1930]). poetry), Scott Helmes (a major innovator in mathemat- A second generation of American visual poets rose ical poetry, an offshoot of visual poetry), Bill Keith (who in the late 1950s, part of a worldwide wave of interest has come closer than anyone else to capturing the fla- in the field due, in large part, to the influence of Eugen vor and beat of jazz in his visual poetry), Joel Lipman Gomringer of Switzerland and the two de Campos (a master of satirical but also lyrically resonant visio- brothers of Brazil, who drastically deemphasized the poetic collages), Carol Stetser (the premier mixer of verbal content of their poems, producing work some- such sciences as archaeology and astronomy with times limited to a single word, as when Gomringer words to form visual poems), Harry Polkinhorn (who used the word silence eight times to construct a rectan- was among the first to use computers to give his visual gle around a blank area to create another order of poetry a “techno-now” ambience), and Guy Beining silence. They termed what they did “concrete poetry,” (the content of his visio-poetic collages ranges from the a near-synonym for “visual poetry” still frequently crudest men’s magazine images to drawings of his own VISUAL POETRY 505 that have a Matisse-like delicacy), who were fairly A silly, banal-seeming, but absolutely just-right expres- quickly followed by another generation that includes sion of contentment: the warmth of a woven blanket, Crag Hill, G. Huth, Jonathan Brannen, Mike Basinski, childhood delight (from the tiny boats, whether toy or Stephen-Paul Martin, Jake Berry, Miekal And, Liz Was, real), harbored security (since you rarely see many Bob Grumman, John Byrum, and John M. Bennett boats except in harbors), sea-gentleness (from the col- (some of whom are older than members of the previous ors and the rhythm of the printing), energetic cheer- generation but started later as visual poets)—with a fulness (from the colors), and, finally, fun (due to the side-generation consisting of such poets as Alan Sond- overprinted text’s needing to be figured out). heim, Ted Warnell, Jennifer Ley, and Chris Funkhouser Not much of note has yet been done with animated doing intriguing things visually in CYBERPOETRY. visual poetry (except by Kostelanetz and a few others), To suggest the value of visual poets, one can start by but the increasing use of sophisticated computer soft- pointing to such efforts at epic visual poems as Berry’s ware and the ever-increasing use of the Internet for ongoing, multivolume Brambu Drezi (Vol. 1, 1994), experimentation promise an explosion in that and which draws on just about every subject that can be related areas before long. In short, at the start of the put on paper, from alchemy to calculus, and Martin’s 21st century, the future for American visual poetry unceasingly innovative satire on the Reagan years, The looks to be as innovative as its past. Flood (1992). Great strides are beginning to be made in BIBLIOGRAPHY the use of color in visual poetry, too, such as in Ernst’s Grumman, Bob. Of Manywhere-at-Once. Port Charlotte, Fla.: “weavings” (2000). A particularly charming specimen Runaway Spoon Press, 1998, pp. 112–172. of these consists of the sentence, “I feel so nice, like Kostelanetz, Richard. A Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes. New thousands of tiny boats,” printed 22 times right to left York: Schirmer Books, 2000, pp. 22, 47, 143, 648. and 22 times sideways and perpendicular to (and on Young, Karl. “Notation and the Art of Reading.” Open Letter top of) the right-to-left lines. Most of the lines are in 5.7 (spring 1984): 5–32. shades of blue, but five are in red. So what do we have? Bob Grumman CWD

WAGONER, DAVID (1926– ) David Wag- has been seen as testifying to Roethke’s influence (2). oner is a regional poet of the Northwest. The influence Wagoner’s later works are not so much tied to a specific of Theodore ROETHKE can be felt throughout his early landscape. New and Selected Poems (1969) introduced works. Although his poetry ranges from the LYRIC and magic as a recurring motif in his poetry. elegiac to the satiric and the visionary, he has been “The Apotheosis of the Garbagemen,” published in most renowned for his poetic rendering of the land- Collected Poems, 1956–76 (1976) and included in Trav- scape of the Northwest. A versatile writer, he has pub- eling Light: Collected and New Poems (1999), shows the lished various collections of poetry as well as novels. mixture of the visionary and the satiric, the magic and Wagoner was born in Massillon, Ohio, and grew up the mundane, and the urban and the natural so char- in Whiting, Indiana. He received an A.B. from Penn- acteristic of Wagoner’s work. From the comical “slam- sylvania State University in 1946 and an M.A. from bang of their coming” and an elegiac invocation of the Indiana University in 1949. His first collection of “sea of decay where our founding fathers / Rubbled poetry, Dry Sun, Dry Wind, was published in 1953, fol- their lives” to the concluding lines that conjure a cele- lowed by his first novel, The Man in the Middle, in bration of nature within urban waste, the poem 1954. The Escape Artist (1965) was made into a movie adroitly intermingles contrasting moods and tones. by Francis Ford Coppola in 1982. Wagoner’s many This recurrence of the magical mundane becomes most awards and honors include an American Academy of acute in his urban poems. Wagoner’s poetry is Arts and Letters Award (1974) and the Ruth Lilly grounded in the landscape of the Northwest, deriving Poetry Prize (1991). A former chancellor of the Acad- enchantment and transcendence from the minute emy of American Poets, he has been the editor of detailing of material objects. Poetry Northwest since 1966 and has taught at the Uni- BIBLIOGRAPHY versity of Washington. McAulay, Sara. “‘Getting There’ and Going Beyond: David Despite the versatility of his later works, Wagoner is Wagoner’s Journey without Regret.” Literary Review 28.1 best known for his regional and landscape poems. (1984): 93–98. Critics have emphasised the importance of his “natu- McFarland, Ron. The World of David Wagoner. Moscow: Uni- ralist eye,” pointing out the “unsentimental, animistic versity of Idaho Press, 1997. acceptance of and reverence for the natural world” as Pinsker, Sanford. Three Pacific Norwest Poets: William the prevalent life-view that informs his works, accord- Stafford, Richard Hugo, and David Wagoner. Boston, Mass.: Twayne, 1987. ing to Sara McAulay (93). This “transmogrifying [of] landscape into language,” Sanford Pinsker points out, Tamara S. Wagner

506 WAKOSKI, DIANE 507

“THE WAKING” THEODORE ROETHKE WAKOSKI, DIANE (1937– ) Diane Wakoski’s (1953) The title poem of Theodore ROETHKE’s large body of work is notable for its narrative and Pulitzer Prize–winning book, The Waking, Poems: digressionary style and its consistent use of her per- 1933–1953 (1953), is a short, haunting meditation on sonal history and mythology to explore abstract living and learning, and it is one of the finest villanelles themes, among them the pursuit of beauty and iden- in English. Other villanelles in its class are “One Art” tity, loss, betrayal, and the world’s dualities. Her influ- (1979) by Elizabeth BISHOP and “Do Not Go Gentle into ences include writers associated with the SAN That Good Night” (1952) by Dylan Thomas. The rigid- FRANCISCO RENAISSANCE as well as Wallace STEVENS. ity of the villanelle form makes it so difficult that the Wakoski was born in Whittier, California, and truly great ones easily stand out above the rest, and began writing poetry at the age of seven. She pub- often above most other poetry. Such is the case with lished her first of more than 40 volumes, Coins and “The Waking,” which may be a philosophical out- Coffins, in 1962. Her many honors include the Bread growth of one of Roethke’s earlier, simpler nature Loaf Writers’ Conference Robert FROST Fellowship poems: As collected in The Lost Son (1948), the first (1966) and the William Carlos WILLIAMS Prize (1989) poem he titled “The Waking” is a series of descriptive for her selected poems, Emerald Ice (1988). She has quatrains about how wonderful it feels to stroll taught at a number of schools, principally at Michigan “across / an open field.” State University. In the later villanelle, Roethke seems to advocate an Critic Mark Harris divides her career into three almost Zen approach to learning, as if education is a nat- phases—the imagistic, the search for beauty, and the ural part of life: “I learn by going where I have to go.” musical; however, all of Wakoski’s work maintains a His advice is to relax and enjoy nature, not to strive too digressionary narrative style and uses individual expe- hard (like the lowly worm who pointlessly climbs the riences as a way of exploring more complex themes. winding stair) and not to become too worried about liv- Describing poetry as “a way of solving a problem” (qtd. ing or learning. The truly important knowledge, he in Erskine 5054), Wakoski is sometimes perceived as implies, will come just as easily as the trees change with angry, because of her recurrent focus on lost love. “Jus- the seasons. As the biographer Allan Seager quotes, tice Is Reason Enough” (1962) tells the story of a sui- Roethke once wrote, “I can sense the moods of nature cide, interjected with repeated questioning of “Why?” almost instinctively....When I get alone under an open As is often the case, toward the end of the poem, sky . . . I’m tremendously exalted and a thousand vivid Wakoski poses a resolution, “Justice is / reason enough ideas and sweet visions flood my consciousness” (55). for anything ugly. It balances the beauty in the / world.” “The Waking” seems to have been Roethke’s way of The later work continues the exploration of loss and putting his easygoing, nature-loving philosophy into a maintains the digressions that marked her early work; musical, semireligious form, a mantra that is both however, the problems posed in the poems tend soothing and instructive. It shows his reverence for the toward more affirmative resolutions, as in “To the Thin earth while giving valuable advice to future genera- and Elegant Woman Who Resides Inside of Alix Nel- tions. “The Waking” is one of his most accessible and son” (1976), which critiques American consumerism popular poems. and ideals of beauty by affirming the author’s growing recognition of beauty in what is natural. She encour- BIBLIOGRAPHY ages the woman to “dump fashion” and “love your own Blessing, Richard A. “The Shaking That Steadies: Theodore soft peachy cheeks.” Roethke’s ‘The Waking.’” Ball State University Forum 12.4 In an early interview Wakoski asserted that poetry (1971): 17–19. was “control through words” (9). Though her musing, Seager, Allan. The Glass House: The Life of Theodore Roethke. conversational style appears effortless, her exploration New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968. of conceptual dualities marks the complex refinement Jack Turner of her work. 508 WALCOTT, DEREK

BIBLIOGRAPHY mark, producing several collections of poetry, among Erskine, Thomas L. “Diane Wakoski.” In Critical Survey of them The Castaway (1965), Another Life (1973), The Poetry 7. Vol. 7; 2d. ed., edited by Philip K. Jason. Arkansas Testament (1987), and Omeros (1990). Wal- Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2003, pp. 4,052–4,060. cott won the 1992 Nobel Prize for literature, among Harris, Mark. “Diane Wakoski.” In Dictionary of Literary other awards and distinctions. Biography. Vol. 5, American Poets since World War II, edited Walcott’s poetry is shaped and colored by the tradi- by Donald J. Greiner. Detroit: Gale, 1980, pp. 355–366. tion of the Old World, by the figures of Adam, Robin- Wakoski, Diane. “An Interview with Diane Wakoski,” by Claire Healey. Contemporary Literature 18.1 (winter son Crusoe, and especially Homer. But in his 1977): 1–19. book-length poem Omeros, readers encounter a Homer who is not simply transplanted from classical Greece, Sharon L. Barnes but instead is a hybrid, a Homer who can speak in the Caribbean: “I said ‘Omeros,’ and O was the conch WALCOTT, DEREK (1930– ) Derek Wal- shell’s invocation, mer was / both mother and sea in cott is a playwright and poet of contrasts: a Caribbean our Antillean patois.” poet who weaves together the patois of his native St. Walcott fears neither the poetic forms nor the EURO- Lucia and the poetic styles, themes, and diction of clas- PEAN POETIC TRADITION. In “Ruins of a Great House” he sical Greece and the European tradition. Walcott’s writes, “Marble like Greece, Like Faulkner’s South in work contains references to and echoes of Homer, Vir- stone, / deciduous beauty prospered and is gone.” gil, Shakespeare, Dante, John Donne, William Blake, Later, in “The Schooner Flight” from The Star-Apple Charles Baudelaire, and T. S. ELIOT. By refusing to Kingdom (1979), using a traditional pentameter line choose between Europe and the Caribbean, Walcott and a complex rhyme scheme, he employs a different creates a truly brilliant hybrid voice and identity. voice, a Caribbean voice, that of Shabine, the restless Although he does not explicitly identify himself as an sailor: “I go draw and knot every line as tight / as ropes American poet, his work echoes the American poetic in this rigging; in simple speech.” Walcott looks to tradition of Walt Whitman, the first great American European and biblical traditions for a set of tools to see poet of the democratic voice, and Robert LOWELL, truly and to speak of his home for the first time, like whose historical sweep and formalism can be heard in Adam, a figure that comes up in the poem “New Walcott’s work. Walcott has also proclaimed an admi- World.” Walcott speaks of Adam’s postedenic life, of ration for the colloquial tradition in American poetry, his being thrown into the world of pain and labor: “O best represented by the African-American tradition of yes, the awe of Adam / at the first bead of sweat.” Etheridge KNIGHT. For Walcott, the figure of Adam represents the poet Walcott was born in Castries, the capital of the who both names the world and who is exiled from it. small Caribbean island of St. Lucia. His parents were This sense of exile makes Walcott a poet of traditions, Methodists in a largely Catholic environment, a fact because it is in the melding of European and CARIBBEAN that would later influence his understanding of the POETIC TRADITIONs and cultures that Walcott seeks to discipline of poetic craft. A prolific writer, Walcott find his place and his voice. published his first collection of poetry, 25 Poems, in He is a poet of craft because it is only the 1948. After a period of study in New York, he craftsperson—as in Walcott’s image of the disciplined returned to the Caribbean in 1959, where he lived in carpenter in “Cul de Sac Valley”—who will be able to Trinidad for the next two decades, until he was make a language with which to speak, a language appointed professor of creative writing at Boston Uni- both cosmopolitan and local, a poetry that is as mate- versity. In Boston he became acquainted with several rial as the carpenter’s wood. The poet handles words, American poets—Robert LOWELL, Joseph BRODSKY, and sounds, and shapes: “the fragrant Creole / of their the Irish poet Seamus Heaney. From the publication of native grain.” Walcott is a poet of landscape because In a Green Night (1962), Walcott has made his greatest it is in the complexity and beauty of the St. Lucian WALDMAN, ANNE 509 tropics that he comes face to face with the irreversible could draw on all those other voices and you could pay blending of nature and history. In “The Sea Is His- homage to ancestors and other languages—a poem tory” Walcott asks where the history of monuments, that would include everything and yet dwell in the of battles, of tribal memory may be found, and his interstices of the imagination and action” (Ricci). answer is, “The sea. The sea / has locked them up.” Waldman was born in Millville, New Jersey, and Finally, Walcott is a poet of reconciliation and raised in New York City. From an early age she was humanity, always working to escape the resentments influenced by the Greenwich Village arts scene of the and limitations of the colonial past and to construct a late 1950s and early 1960s. She graduated from Ben- language that will speak history in a new voice, not a nington College in 1965, moved back to New York voice of the colonial master but of ethics. In his 1993 and, with Lewis WARSH, started the literary magazine essay “The Figure of Crusoe,” Walcott says, “Crusoe is Angel Hair, and became the director at the St. Mark’s no lord of magic, duke, prince. He does not possess Poetry Project in the Bowery (see POETRY INSTITUTIONS). the island he inhabits. He is alone, he is a craftsman, In 1947 she joined with Allen GINSBERG to found the his beginnings are humble. He acts, not by authority, Jack KEROUAC School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa but by conscience” (37). In exile, in craft, in history, in Institute, an experimental Buddhist college in Boulder, the exploration of traditions both European and Colorado. As a powerful female presence in the over- Caribbean, Walcott forges this voice of conscience. whelmingly male beat literacy movement, Waldman has served as a role model for many younger poets. She BIBLIOGRAPHY is the author of more than 40 books. Waldman has also Bobb, June. Beating a Restless Drum: the Poetics of Kamau received many awards, including the Dylan Thomas Brathwaite and Derek Walcott. Trenton, N. J.: Africa World Press, 1998. Memorial Award (1967), the Poets Foundation Award Brown, Stewart, ed. The Art of Derek Walcott. Chester Spring, (1969), and the National Literary Anthology Award Pa.: Dufour Editions, 1991. (1970). Hamner Robert D., ed. Critical Perspectives on Derek Walcott. Although she had already published several books, Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press, 1993. her reputation was firmly established with her break- Hamner, Robert. Derek Walcott. New York: Maxwell Macmil- through collection, Fast Speaking Woman (1975), lan International, 1993. which returned to the chant as its primary from (see Terada, Rei. Derek Walcott’s Poetry: American Mimicry. POETRY IN PERFORMANCE). W. C. Bamberger has Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1992. described the chants in these poems as having replaced Thieme, John. Derek Walcott. New York: St. Martin’s, 1999. her earlier voice with “a petroglyphic scratchiness that Walcott Derek. “The Figure of Crusoe.” In Critical Perspec- rose up into their space” (131). Seeing Waldman tives on Derek Walcott, edited by Robert D. Hamner. Wash- ington, D.C.: Three Continents Press, 1993, p. 37. read/perform her poems is often likened to watching a shamanic ritual. Her most ambitious work is Iovis Alan Bourassa (1993), a long elegy, very much in the tradition of PATERSON and the CANTOS (see LONG AND SERIAL POETRY). WALDMAN, ANNE (1945– ) Anne Wald- Iovis ambitiously incorporates many forms, includ- man has been a dynamic voice in American poetry for ing prose excerpts from letters, news reports, and nar- more than three decades. While she has most com- rative summaries. In the poem Waldman also explores monly been associated with the BEAT writers, she also a wide range of male personae. She aggressively pushes has been an active member of the post-Beat New York this poem beyond its limits not only in terms of form, poetry underground. In her practice she reaches back taking the traditional collage nature of the elegy to to the archaic nature of poetry. She says of her work: “I extremes, but also at the level of the utterance: “work want [my poetry] to be ...a sustained experience, a this / doesn’t work it will, though / working words till voyage, a magnificent dream, something that would they work.” Just as Waldman invites her audience to take you in myriad directions simultaneously, and you participate in the energy field of her poems during an 510 WALDROP, KEITH

act of performance, here she invites the silent reader to the BEATS and academics (see POETRY PRESSES). In 1971 watch as she struggles with the act of composition. Waldrop received an Amy LOWELL Fellowship to study Early in book I of Iovis, Waldman gives credit to her in Europe. In Paris he met Anne-Marie Albiach and forefathers, “those epic masters, [William Carlos] Claude Royet-Journoud, two European poets, among WILLIAMS, [Ezra] POUND, [Louis] ZUKOFSKY, [CHARLES] many others, whose work Waldrop has translated into OLSON,” while making it evident that she is also ques- English. Waldrop has received fellowships from the tioning the male-dominated model of the elegy itself. National Endowment of the Arts (1991 and 2003) and For more than 40 years she has been making poetry, as the DAAD Berlin Artists’ Program (1993). A Windmill she remakes herself, evolving from a fast-chanting near Calvary (1968) received a National Book Award woman to a new epic master in her own right. nomination, and silhouette of the Bridge (Memory Stand BIBLIOGRAPHY Ins) (1997) received the Americas Award for poetry. Bamberger, W. C. “Emptiness inside the Compound: The Waldrop’s early poems are dense lyrics that combine Architecture of Anne Waldman’s Reality.” Talisman 13 (fall free and metrical verse (see PROSODY AND FREE VERSE). 1994–winter 1995): 130–136. His recent work has become increasingly austere and Notley, Alice. “Iovis Omnia Plena.” Chicago Review 44.1 draws on the book as an architectural form embodying (1998): 117–130. time’s passage. A book, such as Seramis If I Remember Ricci, Claudia. “Anne Waldman: A Profile,” Writers Online. (self portrait as mask) (2001), becomes an extended Available on-line. URL: www.albany.edu/writers-inst/ meditation on language shifting into and emerging out olv1n2.html. Downloaded September 2003. of the spaces of narrative and history; a map of Baby- Michael Strickland lon is that book’s guiding metaphor. Always elegiac, Waldrop consistently revisits the vicissitudes of mem- WALDROP, KEITH (1932– ) Keith Wal- ory—subjective, physical, collective—in a variety of drop’s work links metaphysical speculation to the literary forms. For Waldrop, the body is a doomed physical textures of spoken language. His poem create monument—simultaneously distant and proximate— momentary spaces where the spiritual and material memory allows the mind to intermittently behold. In meet. Waldrop cites the work of William BRONK as “Poem from Memory” (1983), Waldrop’s pithy lines “kin” and admires his early work “for its use of data enact the process of recalling his body as he “sift[s]/ from very disparate realms” (“Interview I” 278). Wal- ruins for / old manuscripts.” Memory and the materi- drop’s own poems are often collages of the composi- ality of literary history are spaces suspended between tional and the conversational. He once remarked, “I’m the body and the mind. The tightly enclosed lines interested in poets who start with spoken language, reflect the self’s precarious dependence on memory for and then make new written language out of it” (“Inter- its link to language, history, and self-consciousness. view II” 270). Like Robert CREELEY, Waldrop employs The formal clarity of Waldrop’s poetry contrasts with highly enjambed lines to enact the rhythm of speech his work’s philosophical risks. Waldrop tests the edges and thought as they are composed into emotional of language with song. reflection and echo into “the blank which follows” (Waldrop “Notes for a Preface” n.p.). BIBLIOGRAPHY Waldrop was born in Emporia, Kansas. After mili- Waldrop, Keith. “Interview with Keith Waldrop 1993–1997 tary service Waldrop enrolled in the University of [I], by Peter Gizzi.” Germ 4 (spring 2000): 275–305. ———. “Peter Gizzi Interviews Keith Waldrop 1993–1997, Michigan’s Ph.D. program in comparative literature, Part II,” by Peter Gizzi Germ. 5 (spring 2001): 270–319. where he completed a dissertation entitled “Aesthetic ———. “Notes for a Preface.” In The Opposite of Letting the Uses of Obscenity in Literature.” Since 1962 Waldrop Mind Wander: Selected Poems and a Few Songs. Providence, and his wife, the poet Rosmarie WALDROP, have been R. I.: Lost Roads Publishers, 1990, p. n.p. operating Burning Deck, a literary press established with the intention to join the falsely polarized camps of Kimberly Lamm WAR AND ANTIWAR POETRY 511

WALDROP, ROSMARIE (1935– ) Ros- tion, an unnamed you “hastily close[s] the window,” a marie Waldrop is often aligned with the LANGUAGE metaphor for how language can shut out understand- movement and feminist poets, such as Susan HOWE, ing. What is suggested finally, is that one might “stand Lyn HEJINIAN, Barbara GUEST, Leslie SCALAPINO, and Mei- outside logic”—and even be stripped of it—to reach mei BERSSENBRUGGE. Her work often contains various understanding and thus return to the possibility of lan- 20th century experimental devices, including collage, guage. The “you” and the “I” are separated by physical concrete poetry (see VISUAL POETRY), and procedural and linguistic barriers. Language both shuts out elements, in which linguistic and formal ingredients expressions and also opens the door to unexplored and are borrowed from other works. She is most known for entirely new concepts. That which is there is often also her serial prose poems, which have been compared to not, and vice versa. Waldrop reveals this perplexing the work of John ASHBERY, Robert CREELEY, and Ron SIL- notion of language, which, in turn, allows poetry to LIMAN (see LONG AND SERIAL POETRY). reveal its own lack, beauty, limits, and bounty. Waldrop was born in Kitzingen-am-Main, Germany, BIBLIOGRAPHY and emigrated to the United States in 1958 in order to Perloff, Marjorie. “Towards a Wittgensteinian Poetics.” Con- attend the University of Michigan, where she received temporary Literature 33.2 (1992): 191–213. a M.A. and Ph.D. In Michigan she became associated Retallack, Joan. “A Conversation with Rosmarie Waldrop.” with a group of writers who called themselves the Contemporary Literature 40.3 (1999): 329–377. “Walgamot Society,” who consisted of Keith WALDROP, Waldrop, Rosmarie. “Interview with Rosmarie Waldrop,” by X. J. KENNEDY, Donald HALL, Dallas Weibe, and W. D. Wendy J. Burch. Poetry Flash 243 (1993): 1–13. SNODGRASS. She has since lived in the United States as Amy Hezel a writer, professor, and translator. She is also the cop- ublisher of the small press, Burning Deck. Her first WAR AND ANTIWAR POETRY Twenti- book of poetry, A Dark Octave, was published in 1967, eth-century American war poetry rarely celebrates war and she has subsequently published numerous books as a great patriotic adventure; instead it often of poetry, including The Reproduction of Profiles (1987), describes, in gruesome detail, the horrors of modern Lawn of Excluded Middle (1993), A Key into the Language warfare, fought with airplanes, trenches, barbed wire, of America (1994), New and Selected Poems (1997), and poison gas, tanks, machine guns, and, of course, the Another Language: Selected Poems (1997). Her list of atom bomb. awards are extensive and include two National The widespread destruction of World War I Endowment for the Arts grants (1980 and 1994), a (1914–18) had a sobering influence on American war Rhode Island Governor’s Art Award (1988), and a poetry. Although fiercely neutral during the first years, Fund for Poetry Award (1990). the United States entered the war in 1917. American Waldrop’s work is rooted in a theory and practice poets, such as Alan Seeger and E. E. CUMMINGS fought in that investigates language as both material and the war. Seeger, however, enlisted in the French Foreign absence. Her experience learning English as a second Legion in 1914, saw much combat, and died two years language and her work as a translator have likely con- later. Seeger’s (and America’s) most famous World War I tributed to these artistic questions. In addition to poem is “Rendezvous” (1917), which proclaims: “I have employing various avant-garde literary techniques, her a rendezvous with Death / When Spring brings back poetic discussions of language are often drawn from blue days and fair.” The contrast of impending death historical and philosophical sources. She has received with the idyllic imagery of spring’s “blue days and fair” most acclaim for her work in prose poems, which are reflects the loss of innocence of those who fought the usually arranged in series. In one such book, The war and of the supposedly “civilized” Western nations Reproduction of Profiles, Waldrop writes: “Everything who fought the first truly mechanized war that accom- that can be thought at all, you said, can be thought plished killing on such a vast and unheroic scale. The over.” When the poem’s speaker asks for an explana- critic Paul Fussell complains that “American writing 512 WAR AND ANTIWAR POETRY about the war tends to be spare and one-dimensional” neither pious nor patriotic. . . . They viewed themselves (158). Indeed Seeger’s poem lacks the connection to as individuals caught in a machine so complex and far- classical literary works that British poets, including Wil- flung the mind could not encompass it” (Shapiro xxli). fred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, incorporated into The most anthologized American war poem from their war poems. While Seeger’s poem seems to show an the World War II is Randall JARRELL’s “ THE DEATH OF THE American independence from the European and classi- BALL TURRET GUNNER” (1945), in which the speaker is cal canons, other American poets, such as T. S. ELIOT and described as a sort of fetus in a mother’s belly. The Ezra POUND, would soon blast their American and Euro- result of the gunner’s encounter with the enemy “night- pean readers with classical references. mare fighters” is so gruesome that he says, “When I American poetry of the First World War was not died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.” written only by combatants. Already-famous American The stark images here do not include any further writers contributed their own poems on the war, and statements about the destruction of war, only a graphic these poems often reflected the view of the American description of a human being who is so destroyed by public toward the war. Edgar Lee MASTERS, best known the enemy that he must be washed out like an for the Spoon River Anthology, lauded France’s bravery unnamed mess. James Meredith asserts that, on the and sacrifice in “O Glorious France!” (1917). His lines, whole, Jarrell’s poems “are evocative of both the horror such as “O France, whose sons amid the rolling thun- of war and the balm of hope” (13). In Jarrell’s best- der / Of cannon stand in trenches where the dead / known war poem, however, there appears to be little Clog the ensanguined ice,” aspire to the pathos created hope for the slaughtered airman. Meredith, instead, by war in general but do not create the same irony as focuses on Jarrell’s “Eighth Air Force” (1947), a poem can be found in poems by Seeger. This difference high- that suggests the ambiguity of the American response lights the effect of the new carnage of this war on those to the war and to its warriors. In this poem Jarrell takes who experienced it intimately. Noncombatant poet up the problems of how soldiers keep their humanity Pound contrasts starkly with more patriotic poets, during war and of how combatants and noncombat- such as Masters, and captures the modernist view of ants respond to the death and destruction the soldiers the war and its effect on Western society in “Hugh Sel- inflict. His speaker calls the airmen “O murderers!,” but wyn Mauberly (Life and Contacts)” (1920). In section he also shows the soldiers between missions, playing IV of this poem, Pound accuses Western society of hav- “like puppies with their puppy.” The puppy here is a ing a deceitful hand in the death of the young men symbol of the innocent who has the potential to be a who “walked eye-deep in hell / believing old men’s murderer. Jarrell ends the poem unwilling to condemn lies.” But Pound saves his most bitter condemnation of the airmen as murderers or, conversely, to exonerate Western civilization for the slaughter of World War I them as innocents: “Men wash their hands in blood, as for section V of “Mauberly,” where he invokes the best they can: / I find no fault in this just man.” Despite image of “an old bitch gone in the teeth, / For a Jarrell’s ambiguous response to warriors in “Eighth Air botched civilization.” Force,” in other poems, such as “The Range in the American poetry of the Second World War often Desert” (1947), he asserts that war trivializes its own reflects a certain ambivalence to the carnage and pur- greatest products (“Profits and death grow marginal”) pose of war. Americans were not as naïve about their and laments that this destruction has failed to make a place in the world nor about the evils of modern war- change (“And the world is—what it has been”). In “The fare as they were in 1917. “The way trench warfare War in the Air” (1987), Howard NEMEROV portrays the dominates the imagery of World War I, the fleets of curiously antiseptic and absent nature of death for bombers and the smoking cities dominate the imagery those who flew. Those who died in the air “simply of World War II,” writes Harvey SHAPIRO in his intro- stayed out there / In the clean war, the war in the air.” duction to the 2003 Poets of World War II (xxlii). “The Depictions of the ground war in World War II added American poets of World War II wrote poems that are in all of the carnage that Nemerov’s sarcastic phrase “the WAR AND ANTIWAR POETRY 513

clean war” left out. Samuel MENASHE’s “Beachhead” war for Americans,” which was characterized by a (1961) uses the central image of a “skull / sea gulls peck.” “moral ambivalence of advanced technology” and a George OPPEN’s “Survival: Infantry” (1962) speaks of “the “backlash of public opinion” (185). Philip Beidler smell of explosives” and of “Iron standing in mud.” observes that the early Vietnam War poems were Where Nemerov was able to soar in a clean world, some “caught between ‘diatribe’ and ‘documentary’” and men, including the speaker of Oppen’s poem, went were written by such poets as Robert BLY, Denise LEV- about on hands and knees and were “ashamed of [their] ERTOV, and Allen GINSBERG (71–72). Bly’s “THE TEETH half life and [their] misery.” Poems of the ground war MOTHER NAKED AT LAST” (1973) chronicles the bombing often contain dirt, filth, and blood that reflect the soldier- of peasant huts and the burning of children by dispas- poets’ intimate experience of close combat. sionate airmen: “This is what it’s like for a rich country Although many of the poems written about World to make war.” Much poetry of the early 1970s comes War II depict battle or the results of battle, some are from soldiers, such as D. C. Berry and Frank Cross, resolutely critical of war. In one poem pacifist William whose poem “Rice Will Grow Again” (1976) recounts STAFFORD feels that his brother’s grave is used merely as the killing of a Vietnamese farmer and the lingering a patriotic symbol on Independence Day and calls his effects it has on the soldier-speaker. The world of the brother a “reluctant hero.” He asks, “Who / shall we Vietnam poem, says Beidler, is “a world of the maimed, follow next?” and “Who shall we kill / next time?” (“At the blasted, the dead,” which is “both literally and the Grave of My Brother: Bomber Pilot” [1970]). Per- metaphorically too awful for meaning” (131–132). The haps the most famous poem concerning World War II poems of Yusef KOMUNYAKAA reflect the observations pacifism is Robert LOWELL’s “Memories of West Street and experience of a soldier in lyrical detail. “Starlight and Lepke” (1959), in which the speaker is imprisoned Scope Myopia” (1988) talks of how “the starlight for a year as a “fire-breathing Catholic C.O. [conscien- scope” used to sight targets at night “brings / men into tious objector]” along with Louis “Lepke” Buchalter, killing range,” but much of the poem describes the the boss of the infamous organized crime gang Murder, scene of the Viet Cong moving cargo almost as a paint- Inc. In this poem Lowell is aiming for the irony of a sit- ing of “sandalwood & lotus” and of “the full moon / uation in which the speaker, who refuses to kill, is loaded on an ox cart.” The irony of this almost pastoral incarcerated in the same place as a man who has been approach is that the speaker is looking through the convicted for killing. starlight scope as he aims his M16 rifle at the beautiful World War II was also the last racially segregated scene he describes. war, and the segregation and inequality between cau- Among poets writing since Vietnam, poet-soldier casian and African-American soldiers is the subject of Bruce Weigl captures the lingering psychological several poems of the period. Witter Bynner’s “Defeat” trauma of that war on the Americans who fought it (1947) points out that white German prisoners on a both overseas and at home in “Song of Napalm” prison train eat at the same table as that of white Amer- (1985), in which he recounts the image of “the girl / ican soldiers, while “black soldiers sit apart”; he imag- running from her village, napalm / stuck to her dress ines that this separation will defeat the United States. like jelly.” Weigl’s idyllic home life with his wife (to The title character in Gwendolyn BROOKS’s poem whom the poem is dedicated) is interrupted by violent “Negro Hero” (1945) asks, “am I good enough to die recollections of wartime atrocities represented in the for them, is my blood bright enough to be famous photograph of Phan Thi Kim Phuc that spilled[?] . . . Am I clean enough to kill for them?” The appeared in Life magazine in June 1972. These lines Negro Hero, however, is not lauded like Stafford’s dead are reminiscent of World War I British poet Wilfred brother, but is a hero who saves a people who do not Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est” (1917). In “Song of wish to be saved by him. Napalm,” Weigl imagines that the girl “rises above the American poetry of the Vietnam War reflected, as stinking jungle and her pain / eases, and your pain, Jeffrey Walsh writes, a “radically new consciousness of and mine.” Such imagining seems to be a balm for the 514 WARREN, ROBERT PENN

wounded soul of the soldier, for his wife, who experi- he became involved with the FUGITIVE/AGRARIAN SCHOOL ences his trauma in her own way, and for America of poets, including Allen TATE and John Crowe RANSOM. itself, but Weigl says that this “lie swings back again,” The Fugitives identified themselves with the agrarian and he imagines that the girl is dead and laments that South and argued for tradition, regionalism, and par- “nothing . . . can deny it.” In these lines he captures ticularity of imagery in poetry. In 1929 Warren married the problem America faces with Vietnam: We can pre- Emma Brescia, from whom he was divorced in 1951. tend that everything turned out all right, but the truth In 1952 he married the writer Eleanor Clark, with undeniably returns to haunt us. whom he had two children. During his long and active Twentieth-century American war poetry thus life, he won many awards and honors, including three encompasses frank descriptions of carnage and soul- Pulitzer Prizes—two for poetry (1958 and 1979) and searching moral dilemmas. It is not gallant and heroic. one for fiction (1946)—the Bollingen Prize (1967), the War poetry of the 20th century finds little to celebrate, National Medal for Literature (1970), and the Presi- except, perhaps, “man’s ability, indeed his compulsion, dential Medal of Freedom (1980). to turn terror into art” (Shapiro xx). Warren’s early poetry was technically accomplished and demonstrated the tenets of New Criticism, an BIBLIOGRAPHY approach to reading poetry that emphasized close Beidler, Philip. American Literature and the Experience of Viet- nam. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1982. reading and literary analysis. His poetry was rhymed, Fussell, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory. New York: metered, carefully wrought, often ironic, and under- Oxford University Press, 1975. stated. But Warren practiced more than he preached, Meredith, James H. Understanding the Literature of World War and, as he grew older, his poetry became freer and II: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historical Doc- more discursive without completely losing its formal- uments. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999. ist underpinnings. Although many of his later poems Shapiro, Harvey, ed. Poets of World War II. New York: use rhyme, many are written in long free-verse lines, Library of America, 2003. sometimes with six or seven stresses (see PROSODY AND Walsh, Jeffrey. American War Literature 1914 to Vietnam. New FREE VERSE). York: St. Martin’s, 1982. The recurring subjects in Warren’s poetry are time, Gregory Byrd memory, love, and loss. A common approach in his work is the quest for self-knowledge, though he often WARREN, ROBERT PENN (1905–1989) doubts whether such knowledge is possible. His Although he wrote poetry throughout his career, poems frequently find metaphors in nature for states of Robert Penn Warren was, for much of the 20th cen- consciousness: “Watch the great bough lashed by wind tury, better known as a successful novelist and literary and rain. Is it / A metaphor for your soul?,” he asks in critic. The textbook he wrote with Cleanth Brooks, “Ah, Anima” (1977). His work reveals a hunger for the Understanding Poetry (1938), was extremely influential glory he found in early poetry, such as Milton’s Paradise in determining the way poems have been read in the Lost (1667), but his religious skepticism and doubt academy from the late 1930s to the late 1970s. Its that consciousness continues after death make him insistent focus on text per se encouraged the teaching ground his yearning in the experience of the present. of poems without reference to anything but what the One of his best late collections, Now and Then poem itself says. His works of fiction, especially All the (1978), is divided into two sections, “Nostalgic” and King’s Men (1946), were well received. It was not until “Speculative.” The nostalgia in the poems is compli- late in life that Warren’s poetry became his central cated by an acute awareness of the elusiveness of iden- interest, and in his sixties, seventies, and eighties he tity, and the speculative poems are anchored in the fact produced several books of magnificent verse. of mortality each of us must confront. The division and Warren was born in Guthrie, Kentucky. He gradu- the unity apply to most of Warren’s later work. War- ated from Vanderbilt University in 1925. At Vanderbilt ren’s poems use language as the means for a visionary THE WASTE LAND 515 search for self-knowledge and metaphysical explo- of the City University of New York, the Naropa Insti- ration and for the creation of the meaning to be found tute, and Long Island University. in beauty. Warsh’s writing emphasizes the fullness of daily BIBLIOGRAPHY experience through gritty immediacy, the rush of Bloom, Harold, ed. Robert Penn Warren: Modern Critical urban details, and the wonder at travel and interper- Views. New York: Chelsea House, 1986. sonal exchange. Along with Part of My History (1972), Grimshaw, James A. Understanding Robert Penn Warren. which records his interaction with fellow poets, Warsh Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001. has also written the autobiographical The Maharajah’s Strandberg, Victor A. The Poetic Vision of Robert Penn Warren. Son (1978), composed from actual letters to his par- Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1977. ents. Warsh’s poetry often reflects on its means of com- Thomas Lisk position, such as by typewriter, under a particular state of consciousness, or in conversation with others. WARSH, LEWIS (1944– ) Lewis Warsh is a Although much of his writing is built on what Daniel second-generation NEW YORK SCHOOL poet most famous Kane calls “a characteristically flat, reportage-like tone” for his association with the poetry scene in and around (156), in select moments, such as “Get the News” St Mark’s Poetry Project (see POETRY INSTITUTIONS). He (1970), Warsh’s poetry discovers a heightened emo- can be read as a diary poet, a chronicler of his genera- tional urgency just beneath the quotidian: “Pay atten- tion, and, in the New York school tradition, a collabo- tion: / get the New York News.” The verbal influx of rator with fellow poets, including Chicago (1969) with news about friends and loved ones reveals “the great Tom CLARK, which Warsh has called a “sweet burst of drama / of our destinies” as newsworthy poetic mate- reciprocal energy” (“Memoirs” 606). As with poets who rial in itself. In such moments his poetry offers an influenced him, such as Ted BERRIGAN, Warsh’s uncon- attentive approach to the world. ventional forms and subject matter do not fit well BIBLIOGRAPHY within academic tastes. He once suggested that being Clay, Steven, and Rodney Phillips, eds. A Secret Location on an “American poet” means “grooving on everything the Lower East Side: Adventures in Writing, 1960–1980. New that’s happening in the moment” (Part n.p.). York: Granary Books, 1998. Warsh was born in the Bronx, New York. He and Warsh, Lewis. “Memoirs.” In Angel hair sleeps with a boy in Anne WALDMAN met at the 1965 Berkeley Poetry Con- my head: The Angel Hair Anthology, edited by Anne Wald- ference and married at St. Mark’s Church in 1967. man and Lewis Warsh. New York: Granary Books, 2001, They cofounded Angel Hair magazine and books, pp. 573–607. which ran from 1966 until 1975. Upon his breakup ———. Part of My History. Toronto: Coach House Press, with Waldman, Warsh moved to Bolinas, California, a 1972. location that figures prominently in Part of My History Kane, Daniel. All Poets Welcome: The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960s. Berkeley: University of California (1972), his travelogue written using poetry, prose, and Press, 2003. photography. He and Bernadette MAYER were married from 1975 to 1985, and together they ran United Kaplan Page Harris Artists, one of the last mimeograph magazines, from their home in Lenox, Massachusetts. Warsh also writes THE WASTE LAND T. S. ELIOT (1922) fiction and has published several novels that have won First published almost simultaneously in the Dial, then critical praise. Among a number of honors, Warsh has in the Criterion in 1922 (see POETRY JOURNALS), The received the James Shestack Award from the American Waste Land is often called the most influential poem of Poetry Review (1993) and the Poets Foundation Award the 20th century. Ezra POUND edited the manuscript, (1994). He has taught at a number of schools, includ- and between his and T. S. ELIOT’s excisions, the length ing the State University of New York, Albany, Fairleigh of the poem was reduced considerably. The result is the Dickinson University, the New School, Queens College premier poem of MODERNISM, which in many ways was 516 THE WASTE LAND a reaction to romantic and Victorian poetic and cre- investigating fragments of myth in an effort to discover ative sensibilities. The Waste Land redefined poetry in an ancient protomyth from which all myths derive. the way Eliot’s contemporary James Joyce redefined Eliot’s poem is comprised of five sections: I. “The fiction. Many poets, such as Wallace STEVENS, Robert Burial of the Dead,” II. “A Game of Chess,” III. “The LOWELL, Marianne MOORE, and William Carlos Fire Sermon,” IV. “Death by Water,” and V. “What the WILLIAMS, as well as subsequent poetic movements, Thunder Said.” Even so, when read aloud the poem such as BEAT POETRY, were forced to react to the frag- presents a series of disparate voices not coincidental mentary method and impersonal poetic aesthetic with the sections. Eliot’s working title was “He Do the employed in The Waste Land. Police in Different Voices,” a reference to Charles Dick- The Waste Land is populated by both a myriad of ens’s Our Mutual Friend (1865), in which a character voices and a variety of sources, including Shakespeare, named Sloppy is Mrs. Higden’s preferred reader of the Dante, St. Augustine, the Bible, the Upanishads, a tarot newspaper because he invents voices. Consequently deck, Andrew Marvell, Charles Baudelaire, John Mil- the poem is appreciable not merely for its varied and ton, Ovid, Richard Wagner, nursery rhymes, historical esoteric allusions, but for its dramatic value. events, and even popular contemporary music. The In part I, the most prominent voice is that of Count- poem is, however, more than a cultural and literary ess Marie Larisch. She speaks of her youth, a time tense scavenger hunt. One need not comprehend all of with privilege and suggestive of a precocious sexual Eliot’s references in order to intuit the subtle historical awakening. Later in part I, the speaker—who may or and cultural accents each new narrative voice presents. may not still be Larisch—recalls an event in a hyacinth Any reader can ascertain the chaos and hopelessness garden that left her (or him) speechless and hopeless of generated by the competing voices and barrage of frag- salvation, which is evoked by a line from Tristan and ments; as a speaker in part V asserts, as if in defense of Isolde (1865), “Oed’ und leer das Meer” (“desolate and Eliot’s poetic method, “These fragments I have shored empty the sea”). against my ruins.” Indeed, as the word ruins suggests, Part I then undergoes a radical change in topic and Eliot believed that society was steadily deteriorating. voice, becoming almost playful in its rhythm and lan- The poem manifests Eliot’s critical method of align- guage. An anonymous speaker visits a Madame ing artistic talent with historical and artistic tradition, Sosostris, who speaks while providing a tarot reading. and it also reflects a second of Eliot’s aesthetic rules: The section closes with a more somber, unidentified Separate the personal life of the poet from the poem, voice contemplating death and the flow of humanity or, as he puts it in his essay “Tradition and the Indi- across London Bridge, likening it to the parade of souls vidual Talent” (1919), “the more perfect the artist, the bound for hell in Dante’s Inferno (ca. 1320). more completely separate in him will be the man who Part II starts with detailed setting that invokes the suffers and the mind which creates” (54). This separa- story of Philomela, from Ovid’s Metamorphoses (A.D. 1), tion is one reason for the poem’s unpredictable narra- in which Philomela is raped by Tereus, who then cuts tive voice. Philomela’s tongue out so that she cannot report his First-time readers may find the poem’s many allu- cruelty. There are also new voices in this section, this sions, languages, and images challenging, yet these time in dialogue: a beleaguered, melancholy man and fragments serve multiple purposes. The fragmentation a jittery, questioning woman. Critics interested in biog- in The Waste Land not only to evokes broken society raphical readings of the poem have said that this pas- and relationships, but also fosters a sense of discon- sage might suggest Eliot’s tumultuous relationship with nection between the reader and the familiar world and his first wife, a woman of uncertain psychological sta- its history. The fragments also suggest earlier, larger bility. Part II then introduces a second dialogue: two wholes from which each of the fragments is derived; women at a pub discuss the actions of a third woman, for this reason, Eliot’s notes to the poem mention Lil, who is absent. The topic is the impending return James Frazier’s Golden Bough (1890)—famous for of Lil’s husband from the war and his certain expecta- WATERS, MICHAEL 517 tion of sex. Lil is apparently unreceptive to his return, from the Fisher King (a Celtic myth of generation) to a at least, in part, because of an abortion that left her nursery rhyme to poets old and new, until all is quieted drained and aged. The section ends as the conversation by a repetition of the commandments and a hushing is increasingly interrupted by the English bartender’s prayer for peace. The poem ends thus, exhausted by call “HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME,” the equivalent of the collective weight of its own method. In its innova- “last call” for drinks. tive technique and representative expression of chaos Part III opens in the somber speaker’s voice, this felt by many during the period between world wars, time invoking an older, poetic language of Alfred Lord The Waste Land deserves its critical reputation as being Tennyson in the description of the river Thames flow- one of the most influential poems of the 20th century. ing but strangely devoid of the former detritus—empty BIBLIOGRAPHY bottles, cigarette ends, silk handkerchiefs—because Eliot, T. S. “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” In The “the nymphs have departed.” Critics have pointed out Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism. London: that the objects formerly carried by the river are the Methuen, 1920, pp. 47–59. leavings of a romantic rendezvous between lovers. Gardner, Helen. The Art of T.S. Eliot. New York: Dutton, 1950. Indeed many amorous pairings can be found in this Reeves, Gareth. T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. Hertfordshire, section—both willing and unwilling: Actaeon and U.K.: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994. Diana (hunter and goddess/huntress of Roman Southam, B.C. A Guide to the Selected Poems of T.S. Eliot. San mythology), Sweeney and Mrs. Porter (Sweeney is a Diego: Harcourt, 1994. recurring character in Eliot’s poetry), Tereus and Justin L. Blessinger Philomela, Eugenides and his companion (Eugenides is apparently unique to the poem, but the name means WATERS, MICHAEL (1949– ) Michael “born of a well,” strongly suggesting his connection to Waters has developed a distinctive, deeply layered, cisterns later in the poem), and a young carbuncular highly visual writing style. Much of his early poetry, as man and his dispassionate lover, perhaps a prostitute. seen in Not Just Any Death (1979), follows the CONFES- The voice changes a final time as the poem concludes SIONAL practice of developing universal insights based in another description of the river and of voyages, on individual experience. During the 1980s and punctuated by another couple—Queen Elizabeth I and 1990s, however, Waters moved toward NEW FORMALISM her preferred suitor the Earl of Leicester—and by and the IMAGIST SCHOOL, becoming more involved in Augustine’s voyage of conversion presented in his Con- the use of structure to drive meaning and in the fessions (ca. 397). detailed inspection of certain images that carry implicit Part IV is an adaptation of an early Eliot poem, significance, as in the work of Elizabeth BISHOP. His “Dans le Restaurant” (1918), and returns to the poetry also shows the influences of Theodore ROETHKE drowned man foretold by Madame Sosostris, continu- and John LOGAN, the latter being the focus of Dissolve ing themes of drowning and death. A character named to Island, a 1984 collection of essays edited by Waters. “Phlebas” is suggestive of Philebus (360 B.C.), Plato’s Waters was raised in Brooklyn, New York, and dialogue on pleasure. attended the State University of New York, Brockport, Part V is laden with biblical images, frequently of before studying in England for a year. He earned an Christ’s Passion; it opens with images from the Garden M.F.A. at the University of Iowa and a Ph.D. from Ohio of Gethsemane and Christ’s arrest. Later description University. Since 1978 he has taught at Salisbury Uni- evokes the story of the road to Emmaus. Throughout versity in Maryland. His first major publication was rain is sought by an unidentified beseeching voice. Fish Light (1975), and his most recent is Parthenopi: Another anonymous voice delivers a sermon on three New & Selected Poems (2001). Waters has published commandments of the Thunder—”Datta,” “Dayad- seven full-length books, has won an National Endow- hvam,” “Damyata”—drawing from the Hindu Upan- ment for the Arts fellowship (1984), two Pushcart ishads. The poem collapses in a cacophony of voices, Prizes (1984 and 1990), and numerous other honors. 518 WATTEN, BARRETT

The critic Floyd Collins has noted Waters’s “confla- by American avant-garde writing, such as that of Louis tion of narrative and lyric techniques,” which leads to ZUKOFSKY and what has come to be called the New “synoptic clarity” (653). In Waters’s later work, Collins American poetry, named after the 1960 anthology says, he “couples his gift for image and metaphor with edited by Donald Allen (see POETRY ANTHOLOGIES), and an increasingly dense musicality” (653). The content of by European theorists of culture and language, espe- his poetry shows a loving attention to humanity as well cially the Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky (see as a Wordsworthian appreciation for nature and its EUROPEAN POETIC INFLUENCES). From his earliest works, inherent ability to inspire and to heal. including the volumes Opera-Works (1975) and Decay One of Waters’s most anthologized poems is “The (1977), Watten has exposed how a reader’s common- Mystery of the Caves,” from Anniversary of the Air sense expectations about language and art derive from (1985). Here one sees another familiar Waters trait— institutional and historical influences that ought to be the seamless integration of literature with life. The recognized as political. young speaker in the poem is trying to escape his par- Watten was born in Long Beach, California. He ents’ quarrel by reading a story about a boy who is lost attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology among caves that are filling with water: “I couldn’t stop and received an A.B. in biochemistry from the Univer- reading the book .../ because my mother was leaving sity of California, Berkeley, in 1969. In 1972 he again. .../ The boy wasn’t able to breathe. / I think he received an M.F.A. from the Writers’ Workshop at the wanted me to help.” The “thin pencil of light” near the University of Iowa. Eight books of his poetry have end of the poem symbolizes both the escape and the been collected in the single volume, Frame hope that literature and writing can offer. In Bountiful (1971–1990) (1997). He founded two journals: This, (1992), Waters shows his virtuosity in the description with Robert GRENIER, in 1971, and Poetics Journal, with of nature with such poems as “Hummingbirds” and Lyn HEJINIAN, in 1982. In 1979 he won a National “Scorpions,” the titles indicating his ability to present Endowment for the Arts fellowship to complete both the beautiful and the horrible with the same Plasma / Paralleles / “X” (1979). mythopoeic intensity. All of his work is characterized by an inventive treat- Although Waters is an existentialist, the passion in ment of poetic form. The title poem of Complete his words and his obvious, voracious love for literature Thought (1982) is organized into 50 numbered two- and nature combine to form an unusual spirituality. He line stanzas. Each line is a sentence and plays sugges- exhibits a transcendence made possible by his careful tively against its companion, though it is difficult to attention to quotidian details. determine if connections between them are implied by BIBLIOGRAPHY the author or provided by the reader, as in XVI: “I am Collins, Floyd. “The Power of Language.” Gettysburg Review speaking in an abridged form. / Ordinary voices speak (winter 2000): 653–663. in rooms.” The voices of the second line would seem to Hardy, Nat. “Parthenopi: New and Selected Poems.” New Delta be less constrained than the speaker in the first, but a Review 18:1 (fall/winter 2000): 73–74. room is also a form of abridgement. No specific act of Turner, Jack. “Michael Waters.” In Dictionary of Literary Biog- speech can be isolated from its situation. Any utterance raphy. Vol. 120, American Poets since World War II, entails a position and often a politics. To this fact Wat- edited by R. S. Gwynn. Detroit: Gale, 1992, pp. 315–324. ten issues no objection. Instead his writing intercedes Jack Turner between displays of power and the contexts of lan- guage that make them possible. WATTEN, BARRETT (1948– ) Barrett Wat- If “Complete Thought,” like many of his early ten has been one of the leading proponents of the LAN- works, exposes the way ordinary language can be GUAGE SCHOOL, especially as it emerged in the San imbued with power, from Progress (1985) on, he has Francisco Bay area. Similar to other poets affiliated engaged more explicitly political phenomena. For with this informal movement, he has been influenced example, Bad History (1998), a long work in prose, “WE REAL COOL” 519 questions the rhetoric of the 1991 Gulf War, taking Loved” (1991) explains, “In the long run we must fix into account how the portrayal of bombs as “smart” our compass, / and implore our compass” in our search helped soften objections to military policy. Watten’s for direction. Instead of offering a renewed center, she work testifies to how such metaphors are integral to opts for a poetics of openness (a key term for Welish) historical narratives that disguise real damage. and indeterminacy, actively involving the reader in the BIBLIOGRAPHY making of poetic meaning. “The Poetry Project” (1993) Davidson, Michael. “‘Skewed by Design’: From Act to Speech simultaneously describes both reader and poem: “A Act in Language Writing.” In Artifice and Indeterminacy: An wave tangled up in itself, as though antirational /... Anthology of New Poetics, edited by Christopher Beach. information making no sense.” Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998, pp. 70–76. Welish’s association with Language poetry is not sur- Smith, Rod, ed. Aerial 8: Barrett Watten. Washington, D.C.: prising, given that her poems are highly self-reflexive. Edge Books, 1995. But it is her persistent redefinition of LYRIC POETRY that James Zeigler places her squarely within the realm of Language poetry, next to such figures as Lyn HEJINIAN and Rachel WELISH, MARJORIE (1944– ) Marjorie Blau DUPLESSIS, whose work is explicitly feminist. Stan- Welish is a poet, painter, and art critic. An important dard accounts of the lyric assume a subjectivity and contemporary innovator, she is often considered expressiveness that a Welish poem never asserts. As alongside NEW YORK SCHOOL poets, such as Barbara Welish has said of Guest in her on-line essay “The Lyric GUEST and John ASHBERY, with whom her early work has Lately” (1999), “The poet talking to herself is not at been compared. But, like Guest’s, Welish’s recent books issue. . . . The impersonal, not the personal, is valid.” have turned in the direction of LANGUAGE poetics. The- BIBLIOGRAPHY oretical and disjunctive, melodic and complex, her Gery, John. “Ashbery’s Menagerie and the Anxiety of Afflu- poems can seem difficult to approach. The emphasis is ence” In The Tribe of John: Ashbery and Contemporary on process and the multiple ways we make meaning. Poetry, edited by Susan M. Schultz. Tuscaloosa: University Born in New York City, Welish studied art history at of Alabama Press, 1995. Columbia University and began contributing art O’Sullivan, Maggie. Out of Everywhere: Linguistically Innova- reviews to local newspapers while still a student. Since tive Poetry by Women in North America & the UK. Cam- then she has written articles and criticism for Art in bridge: Reality Street Editions, 1996. America, Art International, and ARTnews, and she has Welish, Marjorie. “The Lyric Lately,” Jacket. Available on- provided the catalogues for various exhibitions. She line. www.jacket.zip.com.au/jacket10/welish-on-guest. has won many major awards and fellowships for her html. Downloaded March 2002. poetry and her painting, including the New York David Chirico Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in 1990 and the Howard Foundation Fellowship in 1998. She has “WE REAL COOL” GWENDOLYN taught at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. Her books of BROOKS (1960) One of the most celebrated poetry are Handwritten (1979), Two Poems (1981), The examples of jazz poetry, “We Real Cool” evokes the Windows Flew Open (1991), Casting Sequences (1993) tragic verve of black teenagers with sympathy and and The Annotated “Here” (2000). A volume of criti- unflinching clarity. Gwendolyn BROOKS published the cism, Signifying Art: Essays on Art after 1960, was pub- lyric as part of The Bean Eaters, a 1960 collection lished in 1999. noted for its explicit critique of the way in which Welish’s poems do not communicate experience or American society denied opportunity to African an image of the world directly. They focus on our Americans. “We Real Cool” does not condemn or visual and linguistic means of apprehending the world. romanticize the urban black youth it presents; instead Lacking a central point of reference, the result can be the poem’s rhythmic energy and colloquial diction disorienting. As “Respected, Feared, and Somehow bring to light an ignored milieu. The poem belongs to 520 WHALEN, PHILIP a tradition of politically concerned jazz poetry devel- effect of three-word sentences contrast with the oped earlier by Langston HUGHES and, later, by Amiri enjambment to evoke psychological nuance. “The end- BARAKA. ing WEs in ‘We Real Cool’ are tiny, wispy, weakly argu- The poem tells the story of seven youths who spend mentative ‘Kilroy-is-here’ announcements,” Brooks their days playing pool at “the Golden Shovel” pool hall. notes. “Say the ‘We’ softly” (185). Composed of eight sentences, the poem describes how BIBLIOGRAPHY the unnamed youths quit school, stay up late, perfect Brooks, Gwendolyn. Report from Part One. Detroit: Broad- their pool shots—“We / Strike straight”—and their fight- side Press, 1972. ing abilities, talk tough, drink alcohol, and cavort with Mootry, Maria K., and Gary Smith, eds. A Life Distilled: women. Brooks’s portrait of the youths complements her Gwendolyn Brooks, Her Poetry and Fiction. Urbana: Univer- portraits in other poems and in the work of African- sity of Illinois Press, 1987. American literature in general of black men whose lives are defined by limited and squandered opportunities. George W. Layng Significantly the youths in “We Real Cool” either speak as a chorus or are spoken for by one of their WHALEN, PHILIP (1923–2002) Philip unnamed members; no one has a distinct, individual Whalen is a West Coast BEAT poet whose poetry records identity: “The boys have no accented sense of them- a humane responsiveness to everyday experience in a selves, yet they are aware of a semi-defined personal deployment of “open-field” poetics (see BLACK MOUN- importance,” Brooks explains (185). The resort to a TAIN SCHOOL and ARS POETICAS). His poetry is also noted collective identity, in part, typifies adolescence, a for its wonderfully absurdist humor and its Zen Bud- period in which youths do not have the full legal rights dhist perspective of nonjudgmental receptivity to the of an individual adult. The individual anonymity also things, words, and thoughts of the world. represents the way in which black youths often are Whalen grew up outside Portland, Oregon, and seen as a collective “other” rather than as fully distin- attended Reed College, where his classmates included guished—and deserving—individuals. Gary SNYDER and Lew Welch. In 1955 Whalen partici- Yet Brooks presents characters who respond in a pated in the famous Six Gallery reading in San Fran- psychologically complex way to their circumstances. cisco where Allen GINSBERG gave the first sensational The opening sentence, “We real cool,” allows the reading of HOWL. Much of Whalen’s poetry of the speakers to assert a sense of stoical pride in the face of 1950s and 1960s is gathered in On Bear’s Head (1969), difficulty. Although widely used in American society, one of the major poetry volumes of the period. After cool originally was a black term and outlook that, like spending most of 1966 to 1971 in Japan, Whalen the blues, provided a way to preserve self-respect in a became an unsui, or Zen monk, and for many years he society that accorded little value to African Americans. was an abbot in San Francisco. His poetry of the 1970s The poem’s opening insouciance is then detailed in the is collected in Heavy Breathing (1983). next six sentences, which describe the youth’s exploits. Whalen characterized his poetry as a “picture or While these claims represent bragging, they cumula- graph of the mind moving” that aims to give a sense of tively paint a bleak portrait whose ultimate end is real- gestural immediacy (50). Central to Whalen’s poetic ized and stated bluntly at the poem’s conclusion, practice is notebook or journal composition: a daily which acknowledges imminent death. and unpremeditated approach to writing, in which Adding to the pathos of the poem is its jazz style. anything the poet happens to notice, experience, read, Instead of using strong rhyming couplets, Brooks or think about comes into the work. The extension of improvises: She syncopates the lines by ending on Whalen’s writing practice to include doodling and cal- “We,” a move that creates a halting, variable rhythm. ligraphic script is mostly lost in his printed volumes. The use of strong rhyme and alliteration, the forceful While tracking the leaping movements of his thoughts spondaic beat of single-syllable words, and the staccato and perceptions, Whalen’s self-reflexive writing WHEELWRIGHT, JOHN 521 process becomes the occasion for unanticipated tan- nificant event in Wheelwright’s life was his father’s gents the poem pursues. This self-awareness also man- suicide in 1912. From this experience came a spiri- ifests itself in the humorous deflation of any tendency tual revelation that drew the teenaged Wheelwright toward excessive self-seriousness, and in this sense to the Anglican faith. He became a socialist in 1932 Whalen stands against the prophetic earnestness of and edited Arise, the Socialist Party’s cultural venue. many other Beat and SAN FRANCISCO RENAISSANCE poets Two years later he was recognized by the Nation as with whom he has been closely associated. Whalen’s one of the outstanding revolutionary poets in the fine ear for the American colloquial accounts for much United States. All the same he never abandoned his of the vitality and intimacy of his work, yet it is not Anglicanism. His poems are fusions of high church self-tormented or typically CONFESSIONAL, despite a belief and left-wing rhetoric. His published volumes persistent sense of aloneness and uncertainty. are: North Atlantic Passage (1925), Rock and Shell Whalen’s work can be read as a sequence in process, (1933), the sonnet sequence Mirrors of Venus (1938), and much of the best is found in his longer poems, care- Political Self-Portrait (1940), and the unfinished Dusk fully pieced together from the notebooks (see LONG AND to Dusk, which appeared in its entirety in Collected SERIAL POETRY). The early “Sourdough Mountain Look- Poems (1972). out” (1956) records daily details and thoughts during In many ways Wheelwright fits the category of the the summer the poet spent working alone in a fire “New England poet,” subscribing to a theory of poetics tower. Moving beyond his sense of loneliness, he rumi- that is, in the words of two critics, “recognizably Emer- nates on transience and history, the interconnectedness sonian. . . . Like Emerson, he conceived of poetry as an of here and elsewhere, of the private self and the larger unsetting force that would liberate people by rousing cosmos, all of which culminates in an epiphanic accept- them from their daily habits of thought” (Rosenfeld ance that is characteristically counterbalanced by a final and Damon 321, 325). witty matter-of-factness: “Like they say, ‘Four times up, / This tradition is the canvas on which his Anglican- Three times down.’ I’m still on the mountain.” ism and his radical politics found fusion, as in his poem “Plantation Drouth” (1933), in which images of BIBLIOGRAPHY a depression-era dustbowl plantation (“It is April in the Christensen, Paul. “Philip Whalen.” In The Beats: Literary Bohemians in Postwar America. Part 2, edited by Ann Char- meadows / but, in the empty rice fields / it is winter”) ters. Detroit: Gale Research, 1983, pp. 554–572. mix with thinly veiled references in the final lines to Davidson, Michael. The San Francisco Renaissance: Poetics and Satan (“One horned beast trots from the herd”). Alan Community at Mid-century. New York: Cambridge Univer- Wald has written that “[t]he atmosphere of the poem is sity Press, 1989, pp. 112–124. ominously prophetic as the poet surveys the economic Whalen, Philip. “Since You Ask Me.” In Overtime: Selected wasteland of the South.” Nor is the demonic symbol- Poems, edited by Michael Rothenberg. Penguin, 1999, ism lost on Wald: “Diabolical allusions constitute one p. 50. source of its menacing tone—the sulfurous environ- Jeffrey Twitchell-Waas ment of smoldering cedar and smoking fields, the goat depicted as a ‘horned beast.’” WHEELWRIGHT, JOHN (1897–1940) John By the time his life was ended prematurely by a Brooks Wheelwright first established himself while an drunk driver, Wheelwright was an unlikely member of undergraduate at Harvard, with the so-called Harvard a small group of Trotskyist poets working in Boston. Aesthetes, which included E. E. CUMMINGS, Malcolm Despite the Marxism of his comrades, he remained a Cowley, and other experimental poets. In 1934, two devout Christian to the end. years after joining the Socialist Party, he formed the BIBLIOGRAPHY Vanguard Verse movement with like-minded poets. Rosenfeld, Alvin H., and S. Foster Damon. “John Wheel- Wheelwright was born in Milton, Massachusetts, wright: New England’s Colloquy with the World.” South- into a Unitarian Boston Brahmin family. The most sig- ern Review 8 (1972): 310–328. 522 WIENERS, JOHN

Wald, Alan. “‘Plantation Drouth’ in Context.” In The Poetry attempts to recover what is lost by turning to love and and Politics of John Wheelwright and Sherry Mangan. Chapel art. He crafts the poem like a painter, creating images Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983. with words, “Drawing the face / and its torture.” His Andrew E. Mathis creative act is one of redemption that expresses the struggle of artists to work with the material they have. WIENERS, JOHN (1934–2002) Considered His later writing delves into the darkness of the human both a BEAT writer and a practitioner of the “projective condition; in “Children of the Working Class” (1972), verse” of Charles OLSON and the BLACK MOUNTAIN poets, he describes the “poorhouses, the mad city asylums Wieners combined the poetic with the political and per- and re- / lief worklines” rather than the American that sonal in his lyrical free-verse (see PROSODY AND FREE Walt Whitman wandered. The poem gives voice to the VERSE); as he once said, “Lyricism is still a quality of a marginalized, to those who have been excluded from political career” (112). Donald Allen’s groundbreaking the rewards of modern society, and Wieners’s personal 1960 anthology The New American Poetry (see POETRY despair reflects the emotional cost of bearing witness to ANTHOLOGIES) includes Wieners among new poets “who such public suffering. have evolved their own original styles and new concep- BIBLIOGRAPHY tions of poetry” (xiii). Similar to Hart CRANE, Wieners is Allen, Donald M, ed. The New American Poetry 1945–1960. considered le poète maudit, a poet who is cursed by the New York: Grove Press, 1960. penetrating vision that allows him to see the alienation Howard, Richard. “John Wieners: ‘Now Watch the Windows and loneliness inherent in his society. Open by Themselves.” Iowa Review 1.1 (1970): 101–118. Wieners was born in Boston, and graduated from Wieners, John. “A Talk with John Wieners,” by Robert von Boston College. After hearing Olson read, he attended Hallberg. Chicago Review 26.1 (1974): 112–116. Black Mountain College for a year, then returned to Gord Beveridge Boston, where he published the literary magazine Mea- sure. He moved to California in 1957 and connected WILBUR, RICHARD (1921– ) Richard with Robert DUNCAN, the painter Robert LaVigne, and Wilbur is arguably the most technically accomplished other members of the SAN FRANCISCO RENAISSANCE. He of the generation of poets born in the 1920s whose was involved in antiwar and antiracism movements, early work was influenced by World War II, including and he defended the rights of women and homosexu- Howard NEMEROV, James DICKEY, James MERRILL, and als. Wieners was hospitalized periodically for drug and Louis SIMPSON. Having lived nearly all his life in New mental problems. His first book of poetry, The Hotel England, Wilbur’s LYRIC POETRY was greatly influenced Wentley Poems, was published in 1958; his other works by the traditional forms of Robert FROST and Edwin include Ace Of Pentacles (1964), The Asylum Poems (For Arlington ROBINSON (see PROSODY AND FREE VERSE). My Father) (1969), and Behind the State Capital (1975). Wilbur was a part of the New Critical school of poetry, His Selected Poems 1958–1984 was released in 1986. which, during the 1950s and 1960s, largely through Wieners’s poetry is often CONFESSIONAL, echoing the the influence of A. Richards, John Crowe RANSOM, and sensibility of a person who despises the way he is, yet Allen TATE (see FUGITIVE/AGRARIAN SCHOOL), placed who celebrates his differences from conventional soci- emphasis on a close reading of the work itself rather ety. It reflects a deeply personal engagement with the than psychological or biographical interpretation. world and with the reader, at times, eloquently, yet Wilbur’s work exhibits self-control, wit, grace, crafts- brutally frank. Like many of the BEATs, Wieners finds manship, and skill. his subject in what he sees as the debased and deca- Wilbur was born in New York City. He began writ- dent elements of life—poverty, drugs, homosexuality, ing poetry in the army (1942–45). He received a B.A. insanity, despair, violence—but he also celebrates the from Amherst (1942) and an M.A. from Harvard joy of creation and of art itself. In “A Poem for Painters” (1947). Wilbur has taught at a number of schools, (1958), he laments “Our age bereft of nobility,” but he most recently at Smith College (1977–86). His first WILBUR, RICHARD 523

book of poetry, The Beautiful Changes and Other Poems “LOVE CALLS US TO THE THINGS OF THIS WORLD” (1955), (1947), was published when he was only 24. Wilbur a definite shift in Wilbur’s poetry and the title poem has received many honors for his poetry and transla- from what he calls his “best book” (190), is perhaps the tions, including the Bollingen Prize (1971). His third finest example of Wilbur’s preoccupation with the collection, Things of This World (1956), won both the imagination, which Hill identifies in Wilbur as an Pulitzer Prize (1957) and the National Book Award “active, transforming, and enriching light” (190). In (1957). In 1987 he succeeded Robert Penn WARREN to the poem the soul or, alternately, the imagination become the second poet laureate of the United States, “shrinks / from all that it is slow to remember,” yet it and two years later he received a second Pulitzer Prize must impose itself on an awakened world and clothe for his New and Collected Poems. He is a member and both “the backs of thieves” and “the heaviest nuns” so past president of the American Academy of Arts and that they can live in the real world. In this third col- Letters. In 2003 he won the Academy of American lection, Wilbur simplified his language and became Poets’ Wallace STEVENS Award for demonstrated more direct in his observations, as is evident in “Dig- achievement and ability. ging for China” (1952). The speaker realizes his goal of As Wendy Salinger has commented, Wilbur “has digging to China has come to nothing physically, but always been praised for his virtuosity but too often he still finds it in his altered senses: “Until I got my bal- praised and dismissed because of it” (20). Randall JARRELL, ance back again / All that I saw was China, China, in a review of Wilbur’s second book, Ceremony and Other China.” In his next collection, Advice to a Prophet Poems (1950), summed up for many readers their dis- (1961), Wilbur’s technical skill and grace of language trust of Wilbur’s early success and what they perceived as find a “new outspokenness, an open commitment to his lack of risk-taking: “Wilbur never goes too far, but he personal views and feelings” (Hill 129). The imagina- never goes far enough” (qtd. in Salinger 48–49). As an tion must be involved with the things of this world, as advocate of traditional blank verse that is at odds with Wilbur himself notes: “To me, the imagination is a fac- the free verse of his contemporaries, Wilbur’s response is ulty which fuses things, takes hold of the physical and that, far from being restrictive, “formal verse is ...emo- ideal world and makes them one” (185). tionally comfortable” (27) and that the traditional tech- Many critics also see a moral design and religious niques he employs have “freeing effects” (92). quality to Wilbur’s poems. Robert Sayre argues that Robert Hill has identified four qualities in Richard “Wilbur is at present America’s most profound moral- Wilbur’s poetry: “a speculative and logical temper, ist of man’s relation with nature” (quoted in Salinger sharp and true observation, technical virtuosity, and a 161). Wilbur credits being raised on a farm for his “use kind of amused good humor” (19). From the begin- of natural imagery” (13). He begins with the external ning Wilbur was been noted for the ease and maturity world, the observed incident, that then takes on form of his writing. Despite his criticism Jarrell acknowl- shaped by the material: “Generally, what starts me off edged Wilbur’s skill and charm as a poet. Such poems is a perception of something in the external world in as “Still, Citizen Sparrow” and “The Death of a Toad,” which I feel the potentiality of an idea” Wilbur (23). both from Ceremony, show Wilbur’s agility, but they Material objects, like a toad or wash on a line, domi- also have a “deliberate extravagance” (Hill 80). In Peter nate his poems and are then transformed by the imag- Sacks’s view, this collection leaves behind the earlier ination. In the title poem from Walking to Sleep (1969), influence of Edgar Allen Poe’s dream world and “dram- the speaker says to “Open your eyes / To the general atizes Wilbur’s intended celebration of the ‘things of blackness not of your room alone / But of the sky you this world’” (550). In “The Death of a Toad,” for exam- trust is over it.” In “Seed Leaves” (1964), a poem writ- ple, a common toad, even with its dying eyes, is still ten in homage to Frost, the leaves emerge, but the able “To watch . . . The haggard daylight steer.” Hill plant is “resigned / To being self-defined / Before it sees this poem as a “gentle but high-spirited mock- commerce with the great universe,” a theme common ery”(80) that is also extravagant in its language. to Wilbur and a useful summary of his view of the 524 WILLARD, NANCY nature of poetry: “poetry makes order and asserts rela- Willard was born in Michigan and educated at the tions ...out of a confidence in ultimate order and University of Michigan and Stanford. Her 11 books of relatedness” (Wilbur 54). poetry include Skin of Grace, which won the Devins The “ultimate order” Wilbur sees in the seed leaves Award in 1967, and A Visit to William Blake’s Inn: Poems underlies a lifetime devoted to poetry. His work, for Innocent and Experienced Travelers, which won the William Meredith maintains, “has always been about Newbery Award for distinguished contribution to order in the universe” (quoted in Salinger 76). As a American literature for children in 1982. poet writing in the formalist tradition, Wilbur contin- Her first book, In His Country, was published in ues to exhibit a superb metrical ear and skill in defin- 1966. It included what was to become a staple of ing poetry’s ability to take the things of the world and Willard’s collections, a group of poems on a unified celebrate their transformation by the mind, which is theme—here the sculptures of Gustav Vigeland in constantly attuned to nature. Thus Wilbur can be seen Frogner Park in Oslo. Household Tales of Moon and as a successor to the American transcendentalists, Water (1982) contains a sequence, “My Life on the Ralph Waldo Emerson prominent among them. Road with Bread and Water,” which combines ele- Wilbur agrees with the Emersonian notion that “all ments of road saga, domestic drama, and fantasy. Her abstract words ultimately derive from things” (72); “Poems from the Sports Page” sequence, in Water these things become truth “because the imagination Walker (1989), moves from a literal to a spiritual/sur- belongs in the world” (51). real reading of such headlines as “Foxes Fall to St. Francis,” “Giants Meet Reviving Eagles on Monday BIBLIOGRAPHY Night,” and “Stars Nip Wings” (see SURREALISM). Hill, Donald. Richard Wilbur. New York: Twayne, 1967. Sacks, Peter. “Richard Wilbur.” In American Writers: A Col- Other books have been entirely thematic, rather than lection of Critical Biographies, edited by Lee Baechler and simply collections of LYRIC POETRY. Nineteen Masks for the A. Walton Litz. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1991, Naked Poet (1971) created the persona of a human poet pp. 541–565. (male) living in a world where one can invite the Moon Salinger, Wendy, ed. Richard Wilbur’s Creation. Ann Arbor: for supper, enter the sleep of the bees or the eye of the University of Michigan Press, 1983, pp. 153–161. snow, or, as in “The Baker’s Wife Tells His Horoscope Wilbur, Richard. Conversations with Richard Wilbur, edited by with Pretzels,” have his future revealed by “hundreds of William Butts. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, pretzels crossing their arms in prayer.” The Ballad of 1990. Biddy Early (1987), “the wise woman of Clare,” is a Gary Kerley cycle of poems about a 19th-century Irishwoman reputed to possess magic powers. Biddy Early recalls the WILLARD, NANCY (1936– ) Nancy William Butler Yeats of his Crazy Jane poems in its feel- Willard comes out of a poetic tradition that she ing for place and character, its suggestion of a story in describes in Testimony of the Invisible Man (1970) as discrete lyrics, and even its use of refrains. “Ding-poetics,” pioneered by Rainer Maria Rilke, Willard’s is a poetry of continuum. With grace, wit, William Carlos WILLIAMS, and Pablo Neruda, character- and close observation, she bridges the distinction ized by the “scrupulous examination of concrete between children’s and adult literature, between humans things,” and carried on in the DEEP IMAGE poetry of and angels, between the literal and the fabulous. Robert BLY and James WRIGHT. Willard, like Russell EDSON, has taken this careful realism in the fabulist BIBLIOGRAPHY direction of magic realism, often moving ordinary Danis, Francine. “Nancy Willard’s Domestic Psalms.” Modern Poetry Studies 9 (1978): 126–134. objects from daily household life into the area of the Tillinghast, Richard. “Poems of Innocence and Experience.” fantastic or the spiritual within the space of one line. Michigan Quarterly Review 37.4 (fall 1998): 35–37. “Mercy is whiter than laundry,” she writes in “Angels in Winter” (1982). Tad Richards WILLIAMS, JONATHAN 525

WILLIAMS, C(HARLES) K(ENNETH) lines, approaches his mother’s death: “Gone now, after (1936– ) More than any other postwar poet in the the days of desperate, unconscious gasping, the reflex- United States, C. K. Williams has frankly and relent- ive staying alive.” The details of her dying are the lessly challenged the anguish in our living experience. details of his pain. He wonderingly asks himself, “Is Moreover Williams has explored human suffering with- this grief?,” upon realizing that he is not making a out the seemingly rational comfort of a formal philo- scene, crying, or wishing to follow her in death. Slow, sophical system, such as existentialism (as in the work marching lines move in passionate spirals, like the of W. D. SNODGRASS), without the vague consolation of wailing of mourners at a funeral, and build to an faith or of a theological framework (as in the work of ecstasy in which the poet’s grief is microscopic in the John BERRYMAN), and certainly without the emotional- cosmos demonstrating adjustments made subjectively aesthetic buffer of a strong sardonic sense in the service to a universal world. of wary dexterity (as in the work Sylvia PLATH). “I real- BIBLIOGRAPHY ized that there was actually other people in the world Olson, Ray, “The Vigil: Poems.” Booklist (March 1997): 32. who were afflicted with the same sensibilities,” he has Williams, C. K. Poetry and Consciousness. Ann Arbor: Uni- written, “ the same moral confusion and uncertainty and versity of Michigan Press, (1998). despair I was, and realized, too, that I’d have to find a way to somehow include evidence of that in my poems, Gerald Schwartz that there wasn’t any point in writing unless I did” (16). Williams was raised in Newark, New Jersey. His first WILLIAMS, JONATHAN (1929– ) Jona- book was Lies (1969). He has received the Morton than Williams’s poetry exposes the sublime in the Dauwen Zabel Prize of the American Academy and marginalized. Believing that “‘poems’ are but the dei- Institute of Arts and Letters (1989), the Harriet Mon- fied prosaic speech of plain men and women,” roe Poetry Award (1993), and in 2000, the Pulitzer Williams commonly depicts folk life and language Prize for his eighth collection, Repair. Williams is a (“Logodaedalist” [1971]). Williams spent time at member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Black Mountain College in the 1950s, and his work, The Singing (2003) won the National Book Award. its dynamic sense of movement and creative use of His early poems, driven by anger, were short units page space, can be thought of in the context of the of clipped meter. Those poems are sonorous, yet BLACK MOUNTAIN SCHOOL; nevertheless the distinctly severe, lashing out against human indifference and independent Williams displays a unique, playful exu- duplicity. With Ignorance (1977) marked a stylistic and berance, and wry, eccentric humor. Central to thematic departure, honed by a distinct, visibly recog- Williams’s practice is the notion, rooted in the OBJEC- nizable form, stretching the lines of his verse from TIVIST SCHOOL, of the poem as object and the poet as margin to margin, exploring the psyche with a vernac- unencumbering mediator between the mind and real- ular, producing a dramatic, curious quality. Critic Ray ity. As founder and publisher of Jargon Society Press Olson argues, “His poems are ruefully, wistfully written (see POETRY PRESSES), Williams has enabled many from the perspective of someone for whom living has poets to gain a wider audience and influence suc- become a matter of watching the ongoing project of life ceeding generations. rather than being actively immersed in it. This would Born in Asheville, North Carolina, Williams has all be sentimental and mawkish if it weren’t for traveled extensively, eventually making Highlands, Williams’ erudition and that line, that lovely, musical North Carolina, his primary home. In 1961 Williams, line” (32). His subjects are love and death, secrets kept, an avid hiker, walked 1,457 miles along the pain unexpressed among intimates, social disorder, Appalachian Trail—from Georgia to New York State. despair, and everyday epiphanies. His first book was published in 1959. Williams was “Grief” (1997), a four-part, 51-line poem covering one of the original poets in the groundbreaking 1960 four full pages of Williams’s lengthy 20-plus-syllable anthology, The New American Poetry (see POETRY 526 WILLIAMS, WILLIAM CARLOS

ANTHOLOGIES). In 1998 Williams was inducted into the WILLIAMS, WILLIAM CARLOS North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame. (1883–1963) Although he was deemed a “poets’ Williams’s subject matter is bold and varied, ranging poet” for most of his life, William Carlos Williams is from southern Appalachian life to gay sexuality, classi- today considered to be one of the most important cal music, and political satire. His highly experimental modernist writers (see MODERNISM). He employed a work—some of which may be characterized as con- large variety of forms and genres (novels, short stories, crete poetry (see VISUAL POETRY)—often incorporates essays, autobiography, prose poems, long poems, and found material as well as drawings and designs indica- plays), but he is best known for his short free verse tive of his talent and early training in the visual arts. poems dealing with mundane objects in a language Williams also invented “Meta-fours,” a poetic form that was everyday, yet highly structured (see PROSODY consisting of virtually unpunctuated, four-line poems AND FREE VERSE). While heavily influenced by European with four words per line. movements—especially cubism, SURREALISM, and In Mahler (1964), a book of poems composed spon- dadaism—he nevertheless always insisted on the taneously to each movement of Gustav Mahler’s 10 necessity of a genuinely American poetry, based on the symphonies, Williams often explores the position of American idiom and on contact with the immediate the imagination amidst the realities of earthly exis- experience of local life and surroundings (see EUROPEAN tence. The second movement of the poem, “Symphony POETIC INFLUENCES). He insisted that “[p]lace is the only No. 3, in D Minor,” insists on nature’s agency in the universal” (“Axioms” 175) and distanced himself from imaginative process, quoting the 19th-century British the cosmopolitanism of the expatriates Ezra POUND and poet John Clare: “I found the poems in the fields / And T. S. ELIOT. Instead he looked for role models in mod- only wrote them down.” For Williams, nature is both ernist American painters and photographers, such as subject matter and creator, inviting us to engage the Marsden Hartley, Charles Demuth, Alfred Stieglitz, and world’s infinite possibilities, as in the first movement of Charles Sheeler, and, similar to Wallace STEVENS and “Symphony No. 1, in D Major,” in which “the sunshine Marianne MOORE, he sought to translate the findings of sings / all things / open.” European modernism into an American context. One of a series of poems documenting the words of Williams was born in Rutherford, New Jersey and, southern Appalachian mountain people, “The Hermit except for several short stays in Europe, spent most of Cackleberry Brown, On Human Vanity” (1971) points his life there with his wife and his two sons—practicing out the arrogance of those who see themselves as “bet- (since 1910) as a small-town pediatrician, while simul- tern / cowflop,” when “they aint,” a passage perhaps taneously writing his poetry (sometimes in-between rendered ironic in its presentation of folk language as patients) and mixing with a crowd of avant-garde artists published poetry, yet revealing, through carefully in nearby New York City on the weekends. After youth- enhanced line breaks, what Eric Mottram has called ful imitations of the romantic John Keats and Walt Williams’s “uncondescending demonstration of com- Whitman, Williams brought out his first “official” book monality” (103). Williams’s remarkable ear, sense of of poems The Tempers at the age of 30. The date of the daring, and penchant for spontaneous inclusion pro- small booklet is significant, since 1913 was also the year duce a provocative, hardy, and moving body of work. when Pound inaugurated the school of “Imagistes” in London (see IMAGIST SCHOOL) and the New York Armory BIBLIOGRAPHY Show brought modernist European painting in to a large Bassett, John E. “Jonathan Williams.” In Contemporary Poets, American public for the first time. In the years to come, Dramatists, Essayists, and Novelists of the South, edited by New York experienced the development of a genuine Robert Bain and Joseph M. Flora. Westport, Conn.: artistic avant-garde, which manifested itself in the open- Greenwood Press, 1994, pp. 525–534. Mottram, Eric. “Jonathan Williams.” Vort 4 (1973): 54–75. ing of numerous (mostly short-lived) little galleries and magazines. Williams, while never aligning himself with Judith Schwartz any particular “school,” quickly became a regular mem- WILLIAMS, WILLIAM CARLOS 527 ber of this sizzling scene, visiting galleries and private Stevens, is particularly interested in, and many of his salons, as well as editing and contributing to various “lit- poems are structured along these lines. While the result- tle mags,” including Others and Contact (see POETRY JOUR- ing dominance of images and the short free verse form NALS). The years between 1917 and 1923 also saw the align him with the school of imagism, Williams’s con- publication of his most important early volumes: Al Que cept of the poem itself as a tangible and autonomous Quiere! (1917), Sour Grapes (1921), and SPRING AND ALL object, “a small (or large) machine made of words”—his (1923), as well as the “surrealistic” prose poems of Kora description in the (“Author’s Introduction” to The in Hell: Improvisations (1920). These works, however, Wedge) (1944) was further developed by Louis ZUKOFSKY remained largely unacknowledged by critics, and and the OBJECTIVIST poets in the early 1930s. Williams did not earn a literary prize until 1926, when During the political and economical crisis of the he was given the Dial Award. Several smaller prizes fol- 1930s, Williams’s avant-garde poetry came heavily lowed in the 1930s and 1940s, but it was only in the under attack from leftist critics who demanded that the 1950s that he received broader recognition with, among poet should devote himself to the “real” problems of other honors, the National Book Award’s Gold Medal for “the people.” Probably as a reaction to this criticism, Poetry (1950), the Bollingen Prize (1953), and the Fel- but also as a consequence of Williams’s own political lowship of the American Academy of Poets (1957). stance, his next book of poems, An Early Martyr and Posthumously he received the Pulitzer Prize for his last Other Poems (1935), included a number of working- volume, Pictures from Brueghel (1962) in 1963. class portraits (reminiscent of the photographs of The poems of his earlier years are often characterized Walker Evans), as did his short stories and novels, as still lifes, poetry of things, or even linguistic objets which he started writing at the time. All in all, how- trouvés (“found objects”), reminding many critics of ever, the 1930s were a period of artistic crisis for Marcel Duchamp’s dadaistic “antiart” of the same period Williams, especially since the New York scene of artists (such Duchamp’s notorious “Fountain” of 1917). had not fulfilled his hopes for a cultural renewal, and, Descriptions such as these reflect Williams’s concentra- with the success of Eliot’s THE WASTE LAND (1922), he tion on the particular, mundane object, which he makes saw poetry fall back into the hands of “academics.” us see in a new light by putting it in the context of a for- The 1944 volume The Wedge in some ways marks mal piece of poetry. Famous examples of this artistic the overcoming of that crisis; after the end of World strategy are such poems as “Between Walls” (1938), War II, Williams entered a new phase of creative “This Is Just to Say” (1934), or the famous “Red wheel- development, characterized mainly by two linked proj- barrow,” from Spring and All, which declares that “so ects: the work on his long poem PATERSON (see LONG much depends / upon // a red wheel / barrow.” Williams AND SERIAL POETRY) and the development of a new famously stated, “[I]t is no longer what you paint or prosody—the “triadic” or “step-down line.” The latter what you write about that counts but how you do it: he discovered while writing a passage for book II of how you lay on the pigment, how you place the words Paterson (1948, later separately republished as “The to make a picture or a poem” (“American Spirit” 218). Descent”), which, fittingly, begins: The aim of such a formal transformation is the cleansing The descent beckons of the world and of language, the renewal of our per- as the ascent beckoned. ception of the world beyond hackneyed cliché and stereotype. “No ideas but in things” (“A Sort of a Song” The five books of Paterson (1946–63), which build [1944]) was Williams’s often repeated (and often misun- on the central anthropomorphic metaphors man/city derstood) credo; his poetry is a permanent attempt at and woman/flower, rank with other famous long poems “seeing the thing itself without forethought or after- of the early 20th century, including The Waste Land thought but with great intensity of perception,” as he (1922), Pound’s CANTOS (1930–70), and Hart Crane’s notes in the prologue to Kora in Hell (1957). Visual per- THE BRIDGE (1930). Moreover Williams’s idea of a struc- ception is what Williams, as well as the more skeptical tured, yet flexible “variable foot” influenced Charles 528 WINTERS, YVOR

OLSON’s concept of “Projective Verse” (see ARS POETICAS). Artists, edited by Bram Dijkstra. New York: New Direc- Williams’s volumes of poetry in the 1950s, The Desert tions, 1978, pp. 210–220. Music (1954) and Journey to Love (1955), are written ———. “Axioms.” In A Recognizable Image: William Carlos almost completely in this “new measure,” which he Williams on Art and Artists, edited by Bram Dijkstra. New himself considered to be his “solution of the problem of York: New Directions, 1978, pp. 175–176. ———. Selected Letters, edited by John C. Thirlwall. New modern verse” (Selected Letters 334). York: New Directions, 1957. By the middle of the century, when he was already in his sixties and partly paralyzed by several strokes, Franz Meier Williams had become a tutelary figure for many younger poets, whom he supported and promoted—especially WINTERS, YVOR (1900–1968) Yvor Win- those of the just emerging BEAT generation (among them ters’s development runs counter to the usual course of Allen GINSBERG, from Paterson, New Jersey) and the the career of the poet in 20th-century America. Unlike BLACK MOUNTAIN SCHOOL gathered around Olson, Robert many poets of his generation who broke with tradi- DUNCAN, and Robert CREELEY, including Denise LEVERTOV. tional poetry to adopt free verse, Winters began his But his influence did not remain limited to the United career by following in the footsteps of the great mod- States; it was soon spreading to Europe as well, to such ernists Ezra POUND and T. S. ELIOT, but he later turned poets as Charles Tomlinson in Britain. against MODERNISM in order to write very traditional It was only after his death in 1963, however, that verse in regular meter and rhyme (see PROSODY AND any discernible academic interest in Williams emerged. FREE VERSE). Winters justified his poetic practice in his Studies initially concentrated on his double life as poet critical writings, arguing against modernist poetic and physician, his complicated lifelong friendship with experimentation in such books as Primitivism and Pound, comparisons of his work with that of Stevens Decadence (1937) and The Anatomy of Nonsense (1943). and Marianne MOORE, and the influence of painting on His early style depended on feeling and rhythm for his poetry. In the meantime all aspects of his work have coherence, and it was often difficult to paraphrase, as been broadly covered by studies, and Williams has in the following couplet from “In Winter” (1922): “No become a well-established member of the literary Being / I, bent. Thin nights receding.” He later turned canon. His poetry forms a substantial part of an Amer- against this style in favor of a more formal and direct ican tradition that comes from Whitman, Pound, and manner, in which ideas could be expressed explicitly. Moore and leads to Ginsberg, Creeley, and Levertov. He has been an influence to many other poets, notably BIBLIOGRAPHY J. V. CUNNINGHAM, Edgar BOWERS, and Robert PINSKY. Axelrod, Steven Gould, and Helen Deese, eds. Critical Essays Born in Chicago, Winters was raised in Eagle Rock, on William Carlos Williams. New York: G. K. Hall, 1995. California, which was then a rural area. He attended Diggory, Terence. William Carlos Williams and the Ethics of the University of Chicago but had to abandon his stud- Painting. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991. ies due to tuberculosis. He later attended the Universi- Mariani, Paul. William Carlos Williams: A New World Naked. ties of Colorado and Idaho, and at Stanford University New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981. he earned a Ph.D. After his studies he became a mem- Markos, Donald W. Ideas in Things: The Poems of William ber of the Stanford faculty, teaching several generations Carlos Williams. Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson of students, including such poets as Thom GUNN, University Press, 1994. Robert HASS, and John MATTHIAS. Riddel, Joseph N. The Inverted Bell: Modernism and the Coun- Winters’s first book, The Immobile Wind, was pub- terpoetics of William Carlos Williams. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1974. lished in 1921 and showed the influence of the IMAGIST Terrell, Caroll F., ed. William Carlos Williams: Man and Poet. SCHOOL of poetry in its sparse language and careful ren- Orono, Maine: National Poetry Foundation, 1983. dering of precise visual details. Winters’s engagement Williams, William Carlos. “The American Spirit in Art.” In A with imagism and with modernism in general was Recognizable Image: William Carlos Williams on Art and strong during the early 1920s, and his correspondence WRIGHT, C. D. 529

with the poet Hart CRANE reflects his misgivings about received Guggenheim and Bunting Fellowships in the modernist movement. By the time The Proof was 1987, followed by a National Endowment for the Arts published in 1930, these misgivings had led Winters to grant (1988) and a Whiting Writer’s Award (1989). She reject his early style. “Inscription for a Graveyard” was named state poet of Rhode Island, a five-year post, (1930) and “The Empty Hills” (1930), among other in 1994 and given a Lannan Literary Award in 1999. poems from this period, are more traditionally formal She teaches at Brown University. than Winters’s earlier poetry. They also reflect his new While Wright’s poems can be allusive and elusive, sense that the poet’s work does not stop when he has she conveys warmth and compassion for her materials rendered the world: He must also make statements through the use of wit and a keen ear for regional about it and judge his experiences. This tendency to dialect and detail. Her work is grounded in the lives of judgment (which is as prominent in Winters’s literary working- and middle-class rural Americans, relating criticism as it is in his poetry) has led many readers to often forgotten aspects of these stories through nonlin- view Winters as a moralist. ear and unconventional forms. Two of the most distin- Much of the pleasure in reading Winters, however, guishing characteristics of her poetry are the mix of comes not from his strong moralism, but from his high and low diction—evangelical rantings, brand powerful sense of the western places he knew so well. names, and slang are used alongside sensual and ele- This is true of the early imagist poems and also of the gant metaphor—and the shift between rapturous joy later work, such as “A View of Pasadena from the Hills” and haunted despair that feels emblematic of her (1947), a classic poem of the California landscape. southern roots. Wright is also known for her dedication to preserv- BIBLIOGRAPHY ing the legacy of fellow Arkansas poet Frank Stanford. Comito, Terry. In Defense of Winters: The Poetry and Prose of In 1982 she published Translations of the Gospel back Yvor Winters. Madison: University of Wisonsin Press, 1986. Powell, Grosvenor. Language as Being in the Poetry of Yvor into Tongues, which she has called a tribute to Stanford. Winters. Baton Rouge: University of Louisiana Press, 1980. In it, her poems give the vernacular and the gritty details of the lives of poor southerners to bizarre Robert Archambeau magic, as Stanford did, epically, before her. In “Bent Tones,” an owl watchers over the people of the town WRIGHT, C. D. (CAROLYN WRIGHT) getting ready for a “dance at the black school”: “With (1949– ) C. D. Wright maintains a maverick posi- her fast eye / She could see Floyd Little / Changing his tion in late 20th-century American poetry. With Amer- shirt for the umpteenth time.” ican poetry divided along aesthetic lines, she remains Wright’s own work can also be epic. Deepstep Come nonpartisan. Her work bears both the LANGUAGE poet’s Shining (1998) is a poetic road trip that chronicles interest in fragment and surface as well as a NARRATIVE everyday terrors and beauties in a voice both personal attention to time and place, and she cites as influences (“I was there. I know”) and mythic (“Go to Venice; both Ron SILLIMAN and such regional writers as Frank bring me back a mason jar of glass eyes. They shall Stanford and Flannery O’Connor. She often mentions multiply like shadflies”). The book has brought Wright that she is the daughter of a judge and a court reporter, her highest acclaim to date, and in her own words, as if explaining her devotion to getting the story “Deepstep Come Shining is my rapture” (“Interview”). straight, and the work of many younger American Other projects, which include a photographic and women poets, such as Ange Mlinko and Stefanie poetic portrait of Louisiana prisoners with frequent Marlis, is informed by Wright’s attention to strange, collaborator Deborah Luster, supported by the fragmented, and place-specific detail. Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize from the Center for Wright was born in 1947 and raised in the Ozark Documentary Studies at Duke University in 2000, con- Mountains of Arkansas. In 1981 she was awarded a tinue her unique position as a poet dedicated as much National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. She to document as to daring. 530 WRIGHT, CHARLES

BIBLIOGRAPHY binds together this “lust” for purity and his profound Goodman, Jenny. “C.D. Wright.” In Dictionary of Literary attachment to landscape in lines of both praise and Biography. Vol. 120, American Poets since World War II, mourning: “It always amazes me / How landscape edited by R. S. Gwynn. Detroit: Gale, 1992, pp. 329–333. recalibrates the stations of the dead.” Such meditations Wright, C. D. “Looking for ‘one untranslatable song’: An liberate the poetic voice from personal history and Interview with C.D. Wright on Poetics, Collaboration, allow it to enter a liminal world inhabited by both the American Prisoners, and Frank Stanford,” by Kent John- living and the dead—and to face again the dilemma of son, Jacket Available online. URL: www.jacket.zip.com.au/ jacket15/cdwright-iv.html. Downloaded June 2003. the would-be visionary poet who cannot avoid seeing the image in language: “We who would see beyond Arielle Greenberg seeing / see only language, that burning field” (“Look- ing outside the Cabin Window, I Remember a Line by WRIGHT, CHARLES (1935– ) Charles Li Po” [1995]). One is reminded of William BRONK, Wright’s poetry has been admired for its passion and its who, in “The Real World” (1972), articulates this quest stunning combination of imagistic and metaphysical for what cannot be known: “There is a real world impulses. While the mark of Ezra POUND is unmistak- which does make sense. / It is beyond our knowing or able in his work, Wright transcends that influence to speaking but it is there.” The voice of Wright’s poetry forge a lyrical marriage of image and prayerful praise, longs to be both “beyond” and “there.” as in “Still Life with Stick and Word” (1995): “A slide BIBLIOGRAPHY of houselight escapes through the kitchen window. / Andrews, Tom, ed. The Point Where All Things Meet: Essays on How unlike it is. How like.” With one of today’s most Charles Wright. Oberlin, Ohio: Oberlin College Press, 1995. ambitious bodies of work, Wright’s poetry is deeply, Vendler, Helen. “The Transcendent ‘I.’” In The Point Where though often obliquely, rooted in place and landscape All Things Meet: Essays on Charles Wright, edited by Tom and revels in the New World (even as it so often Andrews. Oberlin, Ohio: Oberlin College Press, 1995. returns to the Old); it rejects a bland confessionalism 1–12. in favor of, as William Butler Yeats put it, “the fascina- Rose Shapiro tion of what’s difficult” (see CONFESSIONAL SCHOOL). Wright, born in Pickwick Dam, Tennessee, began publishing poetry in the 1960s, and his work, includ- WRIGHT, JAMES (1927–1980) James Wright ing his translations from the Italian, has earned him was part of a large and diverse community of Ameri- numerous important awards, among them the Pulitzer can poets born in America in the 1920s. John ASHBERY, Prize for Black Zodiac (1997) and the National Book Galway KINNELL, W. S. MERWIN, Robert BLY, Robert Award for Country Music: Selected Early Poems (1983). CREELEY, Donald JUSTICE, Gerald STERN, Carolyn KIZER, He attended Davidson College and the University of Maxine KUMIN, Kenneth KOCH, Phillip LEVINE, Adri- Iowa, where he studied under Donald JUSTICE, and has enne RICH, and Richard HOWARD were all born within taught at the University of Virginia. two years of Wright. His work as a whole speaks to the Wright’s work across several volumes appears as a rural and industrial landscapes of the American Mid- seamless whole, a kind of contemplative quest-epic, in west (particularly Minnesota and his native Ohio), the which three modes predominate: homage, elegy, and sad turbulence of war and politics, the beauty and meditation (see LYRIC POETRY). In his elegiac mode, complexity of humans and animals, and the bliss and claims Helen Vendler, “[t]he hunger for the purity of terror of addiction to both alcohol and love. Although the dead grows . . . almost to a lust” (10), as in “‘Where Wright lived a shorter life than many of the major Moth and Rust Doth Corrupt’” (1975): “I mimic the poets of his age, Wright’s body of work is talked about tongues of green flame in the grass. / I live in the one in terms of “early” and “late” perhaps more often than world, the moth and rust in my arms.” In a later poem, that of any other poet of this generation. The early “The Appalachian Book of the Dead” (1997), Wright formal poems, contained in The Green Wall (1957) and WRIGHT, JAMES 531

Saint Judas (1959), are highly metrical, reflecting poem, “Rain,” for instance, consists of a definition of Wright’s indebtedness to the work of Robert FROST, the poem’s subject (“the sinking of things”), followed Thomas Hardy, and Edward Arlington ROBINSON, while by a simple succession of imagistic events (see IMAGIST the later free verse poems, which first appeared in The SCHOOL): flashlights in the woods, kneeling girls, the Branch Will Not Break (1963), are heavily influenced closing of an owl’s eyes, the bones of the speakers by the many Spanish and German-language poets— hands “descending into a valley / Of strange rocks.” including Pablo Neruda, César Vallejo, Georg Trakl, The state and people of Ohio are a constant pres- and Herman Hesse—whom Wright helped bring to ence throughout the entire body of Wright’s work. In readers of English. “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio,” perhaps Wright was born in the industrial town of Martins Wright’s most well-known poem, the speaker—a spec- Ferry, Ohio, where he remained until he graduated tator at a football game—addresses a population (a from high school and joined the U.S. Army. After serv- “ruptured nightwatchman,” black blast-furnace work- ing in the postwar occupation of Japan, Wright left the ers, beer-drinking “Polacks,” working-class wives who army to attend Kenyon College on the G.I. bill and “cluck like starved pullets”) who, though present in the later completed an M.S. and a Ph.D. degree at the Uni- poem, are absent from the stadium due to their eco- versity of Washington, where he studied under the nomic or alcoholic occupations. This careful poem poet Theodore ROETHKE. (Like his mentor, Wright also proves that Wright did not abandon his close attention suffered from alcoholism and nervous breakdowns.) to poetic detail, as the entire poem hinges on a single His prizes included a Fulbright Scholarship, which word, therefore, which gives the poem its powerful allowed him to study in Vienna, and a Pulitzer Prize for sense of contingency and implication. When Wright his 1971 Collected Poems, which contains his first four closes the poem by placing this word, followed by a volumes (minus a few poems from the first book) as comma, before the lines “Their sons grow suicidally well as his translations. He held teaching positions at beautiful / At the beginning of October,” the effects and the University of Minnesota, Macalaster College, and operations of a particular social system are suddenly Hunter College. and intensely displayed. Rather than simply depicting In a 1979 interview, Wright stated that “an intelli- a bittersweet scene, Wright connects the facts of the gent poetry is a poetry whose author has given a great world to the factors of its construction. The boys “gal- deal of slow and silent attention to the problems of lop terribly against each other’s bodies” in the midst craft; that is, how to say something and say it in a of—and because of—the world into which they have musical way” (297). This interview was conducted been born. near the end of his life, but the presence of an intelli- Although the work in Collected Poems is far more gent, musical attention in the younger James Wright is well known than the material that followed its publi- made evident in the seemingly effortlessly rhymed cation, Wright was quite prolific in the 1970s, produc- lines of “Saint Judas,” the last poem from his second ing three more books of poetry, numerous prose book (1959). After this volume’s publication, Wright pieces, and scores of letters. (His correspondence with turned to a sparer, freer verse, which contained a the poet and novelist Leslie Marmon SILKO is collected slightly surreal bent likely gleaned from the authors he in the 1986 volume The Delicacy and Strength of Lace, had been translating. Though he acknowledged SURRE- edited by Wright’s second wife, Anne.) Critics have ALISM’s importance and its influence on his work and debated the merits of the late work relative to the first the work of his contemporaries, Wright’s last book of four books, although these discussions may point to poems, This Journey (1980)—published posthu- Wright’s turning away from tragedy and anxiety rather mously—contains a prose poem entitled “Against Sur- than to a decline in craftsmanship. The post–Pulitzer realism.” In the initial free verse poems, many of which writing indicates a calmer, though certainly no less are quite brief, Wright’s attention is focused on deep, careful, poet, who eventually managed to keep his concise images (see DEEP IMAGE POETRY). A six-line demons at a distance. 532 WRIGHT, JAY

BIBLIOGRAPHY once docked in Manhattan, also becomes the occasion Elkins, Andrew. The Poetry of James Wright. Tuscaloosa: Uni- for a desire to delve into the past and for a statement versity of Alabama Press, 1991. of poetic purpose: “I have made a log for passage, / out Smith, David, ed. The Pure Clear Word: Essays on the Poetry there, where some still live.” of James Wright. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982. Throughout his later work, Wright continues to Stitt, Peter, and Frank Graziano. James Wright: The Heart of explore multiple and hidden histories. His poems the Light. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990. about Benjamin Banneker in Soothsayers and Omens Wright, James. “Interview with Bruce Henricksen.” In Amer- ican Poetry Observed: Poets on Their Work, edited by Joe (1976) explore the ways in which racism lurks as a David Bellamy. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984, tragic stain on the Enlightenment ideals that formed pp. 296–309. America. The book-length poem The Double-Invention of Komo (1980) combines stories from West African Graham Foust mythology with various Western cosmologies. This project clearly recalls the synthetic “mythical method” WRIGHT, JAY (1935– ) Jay Wright is an of T. S. ELIOT and Ezra POUND, but, as Vera Kutzinski African-American poet whose work combines the den- notes, Wright wishes to “chart relationships between sity and allusiveness of High MODERNISM with a fervent cultures” in such a way that “vital differences need not interest in multicultural histories and mythologies. In be negated or leveled” to any “single, absolute frame of his poems he delves into his inheritances from African, reference” (72). European, and American cultures, celebrating both the Ultimately Wright matters, because he is a poet of hybridity and multiplicity of history. “A young man,” singular lyric force, a quality which is perhaps most on says Wright, “hearing me read some of my poems, said display in Elaine’s Book (1988), a series of poems about that I seemed to be trying to weave together a lot of dif- death and desire, in which he assures us in “Veil, I” that ferent things. My answer was that they are already there are harmonies promised in “the sunset’s veroni- woven, I’m just trying to uncover the weave” (12). ca’d blood.” Wright is also a writer of passionate lyric intensity, BIBLIOGRAPHY whose rich, musical verse echoes that of Hart CRANE Kutzinski, Vera. Against the American Grain: Myth and History and Rainer Maria Rilke. in William Carlos Williams, Jay Wright, and Nicolás Guillén. Wright was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987. has received numerous fellowships and was named a Wright, Jay. “‘The Unravelling of the Egg’: An Interview with fellow of the American Academy of Poets in 1995. He Jay Wright,” by Charles H. Rowell. Callaloo 19 (autumn received the Lannan Literary Award for poetry in 2000 1983): 3–15. and the Anisfield-Wolf Lifetime Achievement Award Ben Johnson in 2002. Wright’s first book, The Homecoming Singer (1971), lays out the major themes of his career. “Chapultapec “THE WRITER” RICHARD WILBUR (1976) Castle,” a meditation on the ill-starred Mexican One of the most praised poems in Richard WILBUR’s col- emperor Maximilian, is a poem about history’s contin- lection The Mind-Reader, “The Writer” is both typical of ued presence and its ability to linger in places and Wilbur’s scrupulous metaphors and unusual in its objects. In “The Homecoming Singer,” Wright cele- relaxed form. Wilbur is known for his careful and brates the ability of art to communicate suffering, as a adroit formalism, so this poem seems unusual, as it lonely night in Nashville fills with the voice of an neither rhymes nor adheres to a meter. Wilbur’s tercets anonymous woman whose song recalls “the waterboy, (three-line stanzas) are in a loose or accentual meter the railroad cutter, the jailed / the condemned, all that (moving freely between iambic and anapestic feet), had been forgotten.” In “Sketch for an Aesthetic Pro- with three, five, and three beats per line (see PROSODY ject,” a mournful rumination on the slave ships that AND FREE VERSE). This is worth noting, against the com- “THE WRITER” 533 parative strictness of Wilbur’s other poems, to show cess in her writing means a fortunate and graceful that one of poetry’s most gifted formalists sometimes escape. For her, as for any writer, he remembers, “It is loosens the reins. always a matter, my darling, / Of life or death.” The “The Writer” is more typical of Wilbur’s work, how- distant rhyme between “darling” and “dazed starling” ever, in its strict and careful attention to metaphor. The seems to confirm this comparison. Wilbur then wishes poem opens by describing Wilbur’s daughter, tenta- his daughter what he wished her earlier—“a safe pas- tively typing a story, as if writing meant setting out on sage”—but, this time, as the stakes are higher, he a sea voyage: Her room is like the prow of a boat, the wishes “harder.” Grace Schulman has called this image linden-tree outside toss like ocean-waves, the type- “one of the best metaphors I know . . . for the creative writer’s clatter sounds like an anchor-chain dragged process” (346), and it seems one of our poetry’s most over the ship’s edge. However, accuracy compels heartfelt benedictions for young writers. Wilbur to reject this first comparison in favor of BIBLIOGRAPHY another—a maneuver seen in other Wilbur pieces, Edgecombe, Rodney Stenning. A Reader’s Guide to the Poetry such as “Mind” (1956), “The Mind-Reader” (1976), of Richard Wilbur. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama “Trolling for Blues,” and “Lying” (both 1987). Hearing Press, 1995. the intense silence between the bursts of typing—the Jensen, Ejner J. “Encounters with Experience: The Poems of pause while his daughter strains for the right words— Richard Wilbur.” In Richard Wilbur’s Creation, edited by Wilbur remembers a bird, a “dazed starling,” that had Wendy Salinger. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, been trapped in his daughter’s room years ago. This 1983, pp. 243–264. starling, battering itself bloody against the windows Schulman, Grace. “‘To Shake Our Gravity Up: The Poetry of until it finds the single open one, becomes the vehicle Richard Wilbur.” Nation 223 (October 9, 1976): 344–346. of a new metaphor: Wilbur realizes that his daughter, Wai, Isabella. “Wilbur’s ‘The Writer.’” Explicator 53.4 (sum- mer 1995): 240–242. in her writing, is more like that wild and desperate creature than like a mercantile sailing-crew, and suc- Isaac Cates C Y D

YAU, JOHN (1950– ) John Yau’s lively poetic gate the rituals that foster social cohesion and position experimentation shares the intense investigation of the subjects within a culture” and to indicate how “the sound play, texture, and multiple meanings of words world” is “less predictable” (142). As one of the “Post- with the LANGUAGE poets, Clark COOLIDGE, and Harry cards from Trakl” (1992) declares, “You are a billiard MATHEWS, as well as with the wild humor, erotic aban- ball / falling out of a newspaper.” Part of the unpre- don, and imaginative breadth of the earlier surrealists dictablity conveyed in Yau’s writing involves what (see SURREALISM). In demonstrating the instability of Timothy Yu calls a “nagging” inability to “know what individual and collective identities and in exploring it means to be ‘Chinese’ anymore, even as we are con- perceptions of time, his work parallels John ASHBERY’s. stantly reminded of its centrality” (448). This is evi- In addition, Yau’s interest in poetic sequences recalls dent in Yau’s sequence, “Genghis Chan: Private Eye” BLACK MOUNTAIN poets, including Robert DUNCAN. And, (1989, 1992, 1996), spanning three books, which like many fellow Asian-American writers, he vigor- exemplifies his dizzyingly parodic recycling of anti- ously critiques white racism. Chinese racist tropes. Born in Lynn, Massachusetts, Yau grew up in the Yau’s poems often trace the perplexities and Boston area. Except for a British grandmother, his delights of sexual love. Disjunctive narratives speed ancestors are Chinese. Along with numerous books from comedies of miscommunication and indignation of poetry, he has written a novel, a short story col- to seduction lines, apologies courtly praise, and lection, and many volumes of art criticism. His first recognition of the another person’s inaccessible men- book of poems was Crossing Canal Street (1976). Ash- tal inwardness to rapprochement and language’s bery selected Corpse and Mirror (1983) for the inability to achieve it. In “Conversation at Midnight” National Poetry Series contest. Radiant Silhouette: (1996), a speaker, “sorry about the lump I left in your New and Selected Work 1974–1988 appeared in 1989. throat,” goes on to snarl, “Don’t talk to me like I am Yau has gone on to receive many other awards and some style of perishable food.” A passage from “Angel honors. Atrapado” (1992), a prose-poem sequence, views love In his early work Yau’s evocative descriptions stress as a crossroads that the speaker-negotiates: “I was a the dignity of Chinese people in New York’s China- moniker machine working the alley between the ‘you’ town. Turning to surrealism as a way of complicating and ‘I’ we constructed in the garage.” Yau’s poetic imagism (see the IMAGIST SCHOOL) and narration (see “moniker machine” offers fascinating wordplay, NARRATIVE POETRY) and deepening their imaginative demystifying parody, and trenchant probings of iden- impact, he seeks, as Priscilla Wald states, “to interro- tity in flux.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Yu, Timothy. “Form and Identity in Language Poetry and Fink, Thomas. “A Different Sense of Power”: Problems of Com- Asian American Poetry.” Contemporary Literature (fall munity in Late-Twentieth-Century U.S. Poetry. Madison, N.J.: 2000): 422–461. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2001, pp. 55–74. Thomas Fink Wald, Priscilla. “‘Chaos Goes Uncourted’: John Yau’s Dis(-)Ori- enting Poetics.” In Cohesion and Dissent in American Litera- ture, edited by Carol Colatrella and Joseph Alkana. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994, pp. 133–158. C Z D

ZINNES, HARRIET (1919– ) Harriet Zinnes’s poetic studies of chaos and order portray sys- Zinnes’s poetry explores issues related to the fragile tems as simultaneously arbitrary, inherent, and neces- human condition and its chaotic environment, partic- sary. As Zinnes states in the opening of Entropisms ularly as these issues pertain to the international polit- (1978), “To put it simply: the physical universe is ical confusion of her times. Her influences include entropic. Man’s imagination is antientropic.” American writers, such as Ezra POUND, John ASHBERY, Art is another interest highlighted in Zinnes’s poetry. and Frank O’HARA, and the French poets Charles Marcel Duchamp, in particular, influences both her Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Paul Verlaine. form and content. Yet, although Zinnes’s interests in art Zinnes was born Victoria Harriet Fich in Hyde Park, and science are pronounced, they are manifestations of Massachusetts. She received her doctorate in 1953 and a broader philosophical inquiry into the nature of life, in 1964 published her first collection of poetry, Waiting and, finally, it is language which is her primary concern. and Other Poems. Since then Zinnes has published nine BIBLIOGRAPHY more collections. In addition to poetry, Zinnes has Parisi, Joseph. “Harriet Zinnes.” In Contemporary Poets, 4th published two short story collections, Lover (1989) ed, edited by James Vinsonand and D. L. Kirkpatrick. and The Radiant Absurdity of Desire (1998) and has New York: St. Martin’s, 1985, pp. 960–961. translated poems by Jacques Prevert (Blood and Feath- ers [1998]). Zinnes has also been an influential literary Melissa Studdard and art critic, and her works on literary and visual arts are often linked, as in her book Ezra Pound and the ZUKOFSKY, LOUIS (1904–1978) Louis Visual Arts (1980). Zukofsky came to early public attention with his lead- In Zinnes’s poetry the reader notes the fusion of ership of the OBJECTIVIST movement in the early 1930s, eclectic intellectual interests. Zinnes’s husband was a but nonetheless he spent much of his career in obscu- professor of physics, and her bent for the humanities is rity. Only in the 1960s, when his poetry began to be complemented by an understanding and appreciation published in widely available editions, did he achieve of math and science. “Wily,” the first poem in My, some recognition as an important poet, and only since Haven’t the Flowers Been (1995), begins, “Time is full of his death has a larger readership come to recognize wiles and mathematics. Doesn’t time equal mathemat- Zukofsky as a major figure in 20th-century poetry, a ics / or perhaps the other way round?” Two of her col- crucial bridge between the high MODERNISM of Ezra lections, Book of Ten (1981) and Book of Twenty (1992), POUND, William Carlos WILLIAMS, and Marianne MOORE use numeric systems as their organizing principle. and the postmodern experiments of what is called “the

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New American poetry,” (after 1960 anthology of the latter movements make use of innovative translational same name) and the LANGUAGE school (see POETRY strategies, unconventional poetic forms, and dense ANTHOLOGIES). His work is dense and highly referential and complicated collages of earlier texts. “A”-24, the and tends to twist or entirely reject conventional Eng- poem’s final movement, is a musical score arranged by lish syntax, yet, at the same time, his poetry attains Zukofsky’s wife, Celia; it juxtaposes four different sets great heights of grace and complexity. of Zukofsky texts to George Friedrich Handel’s harpsi- Zukofsky was born in New York City, the child of chord pieces. Yiddish-speaking Eastern European Jewish immi- In his youth Zukofsky was deeply involved in leftist grants. He learned English in the public schools and politics, and many of the early sections of “A”, as well attended Columbia University, where he took an M.A. as many of the short poems from the 1920s and 1930s, in 1924. He taught for a single academic year make use of marxist rhetoric and dialectic. That polit- (1930–31) at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, ical emphasis largely disappears from Zukofsky’s work and for most of the 1930s he worked for various after the 1930s, however, and in its place emerges a Works Progress Administration (WPA) writing proj- fascination with the satisfactions of familial love, ects. In 1947 he joined the faculty of the Polytechnic reflected best in the many love poems and valentines Institute of Brooklyn, and he retired from that position included in his Complete Short Poetry (1991). Zukofsky at the rank of associate professor in 1966. remained enamored of systematic thinkers, however, Zukofsky wrote and published LYRIC POETRY while in and from first to last his writing reflects his interest in college, but his public career was sparked when he sub- the geometrically expressed philosophy of Baruch mitted his autobiographical “Poem beginning ‘The,’” in Spinoza and the “phase theory” of history advanced by part a satiric response to T.S. ELIOT’s THE WASTE LAND, to the American historian Henry Adams. Pound’s journal the Exile in late 1927. Pound viewed That “phase theory” led Zukofsky to his own theory Zukofsky as a potential protégé and encouraged him to of poetic language, according to which language exists get in touch with other American poets (among them in three states—solid, liquid, and gaseous, states which his friend Williams, with whom Zukofsky would form correspond roughly to the concrete image, the lyrically a lifelong friendship) and to form a literary “group” on musical, and the philosophically abstract. Zukofsky the model of the IMAGIST SCHOOL. Zukofsky resisted the clearly preferred “solid” to “gaseous” language, but his idea of such a group, but, for a while, and with some own critical prose (and sometimes his poetry) often ambivalence, he advanced his own cause and that of veers from the concrete and the musical into the some of his friends as “objectivists.” dauntingly abstract. Nowhere is this clearer than in Zukofsky began his career writing brief lyrics and Bottom: on Shakespeare, the massive commentary on continued writing short poems throughout his life, Shakespeare’s works which Zukofsky wrote between but from 1928 on devoted he much of his energies to 1947 and 1960 and which attempts to explain the the 24-section-long poem “A” (1978). The poem entire Shakespearean canon in terms of an emphasis begins at a performance of Bach’s “St. Matthew’s Pas- on the “clear physical eye” over the “erring brain.” sion”—“A / round of fiddles playing Bach”—and Zukofsky himself described Bottom as a long poem of music is a constant theme in the poem. The early sorts, and like “A” it is a vast collage of quotations from movements of “A” superficially resemble Pound’s CAN- previous texts that range across the entire history of TOS, but Zukofsky’s sense of poetic form is far more Western culture. The second volume of Bottom consists stringent than Pound’s, and while the first six parts of of Celia Zukofsky’s musical setting of the Shakespeare “A” make use of the same collage elements as The Can- play Pericles, Prince of Tyre, which Zukofsky read as a tos, they are also organized in a manner analogous to narrative analogous to Homer’s Odyssey. the baroque fugue. “A”-7 is a sequence of seven son- Between 1958 and 1966, Zukofsky, in collaboration nets, and from that point onward the movements of with his wife, translated the entire works of the Latin “A” become more and more formally inventive. The poet Catullus. This translation, which was published 538 ZUKOFSKY, LOUIS in 1969, represents a stupendous reimagination of ing the poem up to a wide range of interpretations and what the act of translating a foreign poet might involve reactions. The epigraph, for instance, begins “Heart us (see POETRY AND TRANSLATION). Zukofsky’s aim is not to invisibly thyme time / round rose bud fire downland.” render the dictionary meaning of Catullus’s words, but In the late 1950s, Zukofsky began to attract increas- to “breathe the ‘literal’ meaning”—to follow the sounds ing attention among younger poets, including Robert of Catullus’s Latin as closely as possible in the English CREELEY, Theodore ENSLIN, Robert DUNCAN, Ronald translation. The result is a rich and bewildering JOHNSON, Jonathan WILLIAMS, and Cid CORMAN, among melange of archaisms, obscure meanings, and slang, others. By the time of his death, he was widely recog- often verging upon incomprehensibility. Zukofsky, nized as an underappreciated master and had proved a however, adopted this mode of translation—or crucial influence on such Language poets as Michael “transliteration”—as one of his primary poetic modes PALMER, Bob PERELMAN, Ron SILLIMAN, and Charles BERN- in his later work, and passages of poetry directly STEIN, as well as on other poets, including Michael transliterated from other languages appear in many of HELLER, Rachel Blau DUPLESSIS, and Hugh SEIDMAN. the later sections of “A.” In addition to his poetry and critical works, Zukof- While Zukofsky tended to devote most of his ener- sky wrote a play, Arise, arise (1973), which deals with gies to large projects—”A,” Bottom: on Shakespeare, and his mother’s death; a novella, Ferdinand (1968), a full- the Catullus translations—he also wrote a large num- length novel, Little; for careenagers (1970), which treats ber of short poems, many of which are arranged in the- the childhood of his son Paul, the violin virtuoso; and matic or imagistic sequences. Such sequences as “I’s several short stories distinguished by the precision of [pronounced eyes]” (1959–60), “Light” (1940–44), their language and the angularity of their wit. The and “The Old Poet Moves to a New Apartment 14 scope, depth, and delicacy of his work make him one Times” (1962) combine the slight and humorous with of the major 20th-century American writers. the philosophically profound and showcase Zukofsky’s BIBLIOGRAPHY wry and sometimes recondite sense of humor. Ahearn, Barry. Zukofsky’s “A”: An Introduction. Berkeley: Uni- Zukofsky was always first and foremost a formalist, versity of California Press, 1983. a poet who was obsessed with the potentialities of the Leggott, Michele J. Reading Zukofsky’s 80 Flowers. Baltimore: forms in which verse is written. In his early work he Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. pursued conventional English poetic forms, such as Penberthy, Jenny. Niedecker and the Correspondence with the sonnet, and he would experiment with such Ital- Zukofsky, 1931–1970. New York: Cambridge University ianate forms as the sestina (in “‘Mantis’” [1934]) and Press, 1993. the canzone (in “A”-9), crafting these poems with a Perelman, Bob. The Trouble with Genius: Reading Pound, Joyce, fanatical attention to requirements of these demanding Stein and Zukofsky. Berkeley: University of California shapes. In later sections of “A,” Zukofsky fashioned a Press, 1994. Quartermain, Peter. Disjunctive Poetics: From Gertrude Stein poetics in which the length of the line is determined by and Louis Zukofsky to Susan Howe. New York: Cambridge word count, rather than by conventional accentual or University Press, 1992. accentual-syllabic meter: Each of the last-composed Scroggins, Mark. Louis Zukofsky and the Poetry of Knowledge. movements, “A”-22 and “A”-23, consists of 1,000 five- Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998. word lines. The poetics of these last movements—rigid ———., ed. Upper Limit Music: The Writing of Louis Zukofsky. word-counted lines that incorporate a breathtaking Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1997. range of allusion, adaptation, and translation—is Stanley, Sandra Kumamoto. Louis Zukofsky and the Transfor- essentially identical to that of Zukofsky’s last work, 80 mation of a Modern American Poetics. Berkeley: University Flowers (1978)—81 poems (including an epigraph), of California Press, 1994. each of them eight lines long, five words to the line, Terrell, Carroll F., ed. Louis Zukofsky: Man and Poet. Orono, about various flowers. In these poems syntax has Maine: National Poetry Foundation, 1979. become so elastic as to disappear almost entirely, open- Mark Scroggins APPENDIX I CD

GLOSSARY caesura A pause within a VERSE line, usually at approximately mid point. accent The STRESS on one or another syllable, espe- canon A term originally derived from the Roman cially when poetry is read aloud. Catholic Church having to do with church law, this accentual verse A system of VERSE throughout at term also refers to a body of literature that is gener- least a portion of a poem that depends on a certain ally accepted as exhibiting what is best or important fixed number of stresses in a line of poetry; this sys- in terms of literary art. tem, however, allows for any number of unstressed collagist poetry Poetry that employs the organizing syllables. element of collage or the bringing together of dis- allegory Extended metaphor or symbol with at parate material to create a new statement or vision. least two levels of meaning, a literal level and an conceit Not unrelated to the term concept, an unusual implied, figurative level; an allegorical narrative supposition, analogy, metaphor, or image, often clever. tells a story and at the same time suggests another connotation Meaning that is implied rather than level of meaning. stated directly as in DENOTATION. alliteration Repeating consonant sounds at the beginnings of words. consonance Repetition of identical consonant allusion Making reference to something or someone, sounds, within the context of varying vowel sounds. usually in an indirect manner. couplet Two VERSE lines in succession that have the anapest A metrical foot consisting of two soft stress- same END RHYME. When the two lines contain a com- es followed by a hard stress. See METER. plete statement in themselves, they are called a anaphora A word or phrase that is repeated at the closed couplet. See also HEROIC COUPLET. start of successive lines of poetry. dactyl A metrical foot consisting of a hard stress fol- apostrophe A turn away from the reader to address lowed by two soft stresses. another listener. denotation The literal meaning of a word or state- assonance Repetition of like vowel sounds, often in ment, the opposite of CONNOTATION. stressed syllables in close proximity to each other. diction Word choice, the actual language that a ballad A narrative in VERSE; the form derives from a writer employs. narrative that was sung. dimeter A VERSE line consisting of two metrical FEET. blank verse Unrhymed IAMBIC PENTAMETER. dramatic monologue An address to an interlocutor cadence The rhythm in language, a pattern that can (another potential speaker) who is not present; a lend a musical order to a statement. dramatic monologue has only one actual speaker. 539 540 APPENDIX I

elegy A poem mourning someone’s death. iamb A metrical FOOT consisting of a soft stress fol- ellipsis Part of a statement left out, unspoken. lowed by a hard stress. end rhyme A rhyme at the end of a VERSE line. iambic pentameter A five-FOOT line with a prepon- end-stopped A VERSE line that pauses at its end, derance of IAMBIC FEET. when no ENJAMBMENT is possible. image Language meant to represent objects, actions, enjambment A VERSE line whose momentum forbids feelings, or thoughts in vivid terms. a pause at its end, thus avoiding being END-STOPPED. internal rhyme A RHYME within a poetic line. epic A long poem that, typically, recounts the adven- masculine rhyme A RHYME depending on one hard- tures of someone in a high style and diction; classi- stressed syllable only. cally, the adventures include a hero who is at least metaphor An implicit comparison, best when partially superhuman in makeup or deed, and the between unlike things, made without using the events have special importance in terms of the fate words like or as. of a people. meter An arrangement of syllables in units called epigram A brief, witty statement, often satiric or FEET, such as IAMB or TROCHEE, and in numbers of aphoristic. feet to make a pattern, such as IAMBIC PENTAMETER; epithet A word or phrase that characterizes some- the syllables can be hard- or soft-stressed according thing or someone. to the type of FOOT or pattern to be employed. eye rhyme Agreement of words according to their metonymy The substitution of a word that repre- spelling but not their sound. sents an association with, proximity to, or attribute of a thing for the thing itself; this figure of speech is feet See FOOT. not unlike SYNECHDOCHE. feminine ending A VERSE line that ends with an extra monometer A VERSE line consisting of a single metri- soft stress. cal foot. feminine rhyme The rhyming of two words in more occasional verse VERSE written to celebrate or to than a single syllable. commemorate a particular event. figurative language Language that employs figures octave An eight-line stanza of poetry, also the first of speech such as IRONY, HYPERBOLE, METAPHOR, SIMI- and larger portion of a SONNET. See OCTET. LE, SYMBOL, METONYMY, etc., in which the language octet An eight-line stanza of poetry. See OCTAVE. connotes meaning. ode A lyric poem usually in a dignified style and foot A configuration of syllables to form a METER, addressing a serious subject. such as an IAMB, TROCHEE, ANAPEST, DACTYL, or onomatopoeia A word or phrase whose sound resem- SPONDEE. A line of one foot is called a MONOMETER bles something the word or phrase is signifying. line, of two feet a DIAMETER line, of three feet TRIME- oxymoron A phrase or statement containing a self- TER, of four TETRAMETER, of five PENTAMETER, of six contradiction. HEXAMETER, etc. paradox A statement that seems to be self-contra- free verse Poetry lacking a metrical pattern or pat- dictory but contains a truth that reconciles the terns, poetic lines without any discernible meter. contradiction. haiku A Japanese lyric form consisting of a certain pastoral A poem that evokes a rural setting or rural number of syllables overall and in each line, most values; the word itself derives from the Latin pastor, often in a five-seven-five syllabic line pattern. or “shepherd.” half rhyme A form of CONSONANCE in which final con- pentameter A VERSE line consisting of five metrical sonant sounds in neighboring stressed syllables agree. FEET. heroic couplet Two successive lines of END-RHYMING persona The speaker in a poem, most often the nar- IAMBIC PENTAMETER. rator; the term is derived from the Latin word for hexameter A VERSE line consisting of six metrical FEET. “mask.” hyperbole An exaggeration meant to emphasize personification Attributing human qualities to an something. inanimate entity. APPENDIX I 541

prosody The study of versification; the term is at strophe A STANZA, or VERSE paragraph in a prose times used as a synonym for METER. poem, derived from classical Greek drama. quatrain A four-line stanza of a poem, also a portion syllabic verse Poetry that employs a set number of of a SONNET. syllables in a line, regardless of STRESS. rhetorical figure An arrangement of words for one symbol A figure of speech that means what it says or another emphasis or effect. literally but also connotes a secondary meaning or rhyme Fundamentally, “agreement,” the term specif- meanings, and which usually conveys a concept, ically indicates the sameness or similarity of vowel motif, or idea. sounds in an arrangement of words; there can be synecdoche A figure of speech in which a part of END RHYME, INTERNAL RHYME, EYE RHYME, HALF RHYME, something is meant to signify the entirety of the FEMININE RHYME, etc. thing, such as a hand that is meant to suggest a rhyme scheme The arrangement of END RHYMES in a sailor whose hands are used in sailing a ship (as in poem, indicated when analyzing a poem with the “all hands on deck”). See METONYMY. letters of the alphabet, such as, for a poem in suc- synesthesia The mingling or substitution of the cessive COUPLETS, AA, BB, CC, etc. senses, such as when talking about a sound by men- rhythm A sense of movement created by arrange- tioning a color. ment of syllables in terms of stress and time. tanka A Japanese VERSE form consisting of five lines, sestet A six-line stanza of poetry, also the final large with the first and third line each containing five syl- portion of a SONNET. lables and the rest of the lines each containing seven. sestina A 36-line poem broken up into six SESTETS as tercet A three-line STANZA grouping. well as a final stanza of three lines, the six words end- terza rima Poetry comprised of TERCETS and an inter- ing the first sestet’s lines appearing at the conclusions locking RHYME SCHEME: ABA, BCB, CDC, etc. of the remaining five sestets, in one or another order, tetrameter A VERSE line of four metrical FEET. and appearing in the final three lines; these repeated tone A poet’s manifest attitude toward the subject words usually convey key motifs of the poem. expressed in the poem. simile A comparison using the word like or as. trimeter A VERSE line of three metrical FEET. slant rhyme A partial, incomplete RHYME, sometimes trochee A metrical FOOT consisting of a hard STRESS called a half, imperfect, near or off rhyme. followed by a soft stress. sonnet A poem of 14 lines, traditionally in IAMBIC trope A figurative or rhetorical mechanism, and at PENTAMETER, the RHYME SCHEME and structure of times a motif. which can vary. There are two predominant types of verse A line of poetry or at times a synonym for poet- sonnets: the English or Shakespearean, which con- ry or poem. sists of three QUATRAINS and a final COUPLET, usually vers libre FREE VERSE. with a rhyme scheme of ABAB CDCD EFEF GG; and villanelle A 19-line poem made up of six STANZAS— the Italian or Petrarchan sonnet, often with an initial five TERCETS and a final QUATRAIN—with the first ter- OCTAVE rhyming ABBA ABBA and a concluding SES- cet employing an ABA RHYME SCHEME that is then TET rhyming CDECDE. However, it is important to replicated in the following tercets as well as in the keep in mind that sonnet rhyme schemes can be final two lines of the quatrain. In addition, the first very different from the above. and third lines are repeated in lines 6, 12, and 18, spondee A metrical FOOT comprised of two hard and 9, 15, and 19, respectively. The poem’s first and stresses. third lines, and their subsequent iterations, carry a sprung rhythm Lines or STANZAS made up of a pre- special thematic weight, and the poem’s motifs are set number of hard syllabic stresses but any number brought together in the concluding quatrain. of soft stresses; the effect is a rhythmic irregularity. voice Not unlike the poem’s PERSONA, a sense of a stanza A group of lines of poetry. personality or speaker’s diction, point of view or stress The emphasis when reading a poem accorded attitude in a poem; voice can also simply refer to a to a syllable. poem’s speaker. APPENDIX II CD SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY ———. Cambridge Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Allen, Donald, and Warrent Tallman, eds. The Poetics Press, 2003. of the New American Poetry. New York: Grove ———. Poetic Culture: Contemporary American Press, 1973. Poetry between Community and Institution. Altieri, Charles. 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Osman, David. The Sullen Art: Interviews by David Hyderabad, India: American Studies Research Osman with Modern American Poets. New York: Centre, 1993. Corinth, 1963. Poirier, Richard. Poetry and pragmatism. Cambridge, Ostriker, Alicia Suskin. Stealing the Language: The Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992. Emergence of Women’s Poetry in America. Boston: Quartermain, Peter. Disjunctive Poetics: From Beacon Press, 1986. Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky to Susan Howe. Palmer, Michael, ed. Code of Signals. Berkeley, Calif.: Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University North Atlantic Books, 1983. Press, 1992. Parini, Jay. The Columbia History of American Poetry. Quartermain, Peter, and Rachel Blau DuPlessis, eds. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. The Objectivist Nexus: Essays in Cultural Poetics. Paul, Sherman. Hewing to Experience: Essays and Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999. Reviews on Recent American Poetry and Poetics, Nature Quetchenbach, Bernard W. Back From the Far Field; and Culture. Ames: University of Iowa Press, 1990. American Nature Poetry in the Late Twentieth Century. ———. In Search of the Primitive. Baton Rouge: Charlottesville, Virginia: University Press of Louisiana State University Press, 1976. Virginia, 2000. ———. Olson’s Push: Origin, Black Mountain and Ramazani, Jihan. Poetry of Mourning. Chicago: Recent American Poetry. Baton Rouge: Louisiana University of Chicago Press, 1994. State University Press, 1978. Rasula, Jed. The American Poetry Wax Museum: Reality Perelman, Bob. The Marginalization of Poetry: Language Effects, 1940–1990. Urbana, Ill.: National Council of Writing and Literary History. New Jersey: Princeton Teachers of English, 1996. University Press, 1996. Rexroth, Kenneth. American Poetry of the Twentieth ———, ed. Writing Talks. Carbondale: Southern Century. New York: Seabury Press, 1973. Illinois University Press, 1985. Roberts, Neil, ed. A Companion to Twentieth-Century Perkins, David. A History of Modern Poetry: From the Poetry. Oxford, England: Blackwell, 2001. 1890s to the High Modernist Mode. Cambridge, Rosenthal, M. L. Our Life in Poetry: Selected Essays and Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976. Reviews. New York: Persea, 1991. ———. A History of Modern Poetry: Modernism and ———. Poetry and the Common Life. New York: After. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Schocken, 1983. 1987. Rosenthal, M. L., and Sally M. Gall. The Modern Poetic Perloff, Marjorie The Dance of the Intellect: Studies in Sequence: The Genius of Modern Poetry. New York: The Poetry of the Pound Tradition. Evanston, Ill.: Oxford University Press, 1983. Northwestern University Press, 1996. Schweik, Susan. A Gulf So Deeply Cut: American ———. The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant Women Poets and the Second World War. Madison: Guerre, and the Language of Rupture. Chicago: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991. University of Chicago Press, 2003. Shetley, Vernon. After the Death of Poetry: Poet and ———. Poetic License: Essays on Modernist and Audience in Contemporary America. Durham: Duke Postmodernist Lyric. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1993. University Press, 1990. Silliman, Ron. The New Sentence. New York: Roof, 1989. ———. The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage. Simpson, Megan. Poetic Epistemologies: Gender and Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1999. knowing in Women’s Language-Oriented Writing. ———. Poetry On & Off the Page: Essays for Emergent Albany: SUNY Press, 2000. Occasions. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Spahr, Juliana. Everybody’s Autonomy: Connective Press, 1998. Reading and Collective Identity. Tuscaloosa: ———, ed. Postmodern Genres. Norman: University University of Alabama Press, 2001. of Oklahoma Press, 1989. Steele, Timothy. Missing Measures: Modern Poetry and ———. Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of the Revolt Against Meter. Fayetteville: University of Media. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Arkansas Press, 1990. Plakkoottam, J. L., and Prashant K. Sinha, eds. Stefans, Brian Kim. Fashionable Noise: On Digital Literature and Politics in Twentieth Century America. Poetics. Berkeley, Calif.: Atelos, 2003. 546 APPENDIX II

Thomas, Lorenzo. Extraordinary Measure: Afrocentric Von Hallberg, Robert. American Poetry and Culture, Modernism and 20th-century American Poetry. 1945–1980. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002. Press, 1985. Travisano, Thomas. Midcentury Quartet. Waggoner, Hyatt Howe. The Heel of Elohim, Science Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999. and Values in Modern American Poetry. Norman: Vendler, Helen. The Given and the Made: Strategies of University of Oklahoma Press, 1950. Poetic Redefinition. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Wagner, Jean. Black Poets of the United States: From University Press, 1995. Paul Laurence Dunbar to Langston Hughes. Urbana: ———. Part of Nature, Part of Us: Modern American University of Illinois Press, 1973. Poets. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Waldman, Anne, and Andrew Schelling, eds. 1980. Disembodied Poetics: Annals of the Jack Kerouac School. ———. Soul Says: On Recent Poetry. Cambridge, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1994. 1995. Wallace, Mark, and Steven Marks. Telling it Slant: ———, ed. Voices & Visions: The Poet in America. New Avant Garde Poetics of the 1990s. Tuscaloosa: York: Random House, 1987. University of Alabama Press, 2002. Verdonk, Peter. Ed. Twentieth Century Poetry: From Whitehead, Kim. The Feminist Poetry Movement. Text to Context. London: Routledge, 1993. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996. Vickery, Ann. Leaving Lines of Gender: A Feminist Williamson, Alan. Introspection and Contemporary Genealogy of Language Writing. Hanover, N.H.: Poetry. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Wesleyan University Press, 2000. Press, 1984. Vincent, Stephen, and Ellen Zweig. The Poetry Reading: Woznicki, John R. Ideological Content and Political A Contemporary Compendium on Language and Significance of Twentieth-Century American Poetry. Performance. San Francisco: Momo’s Press, 1981. Lewiston, N.Y.: Mellen, 2002. LIST OF Bourassa, Alan – St. Thomas University, Dague, Wilma Weant – Atchison, Kansas New Brunswick, Canada Daly, Catherine – Los Angeles, California CONTRIBUTORS Bourbeau, Lisa – Francestown, New Damon, Maria – University of Minnesota Hampshire Davidson, Chad – University of West Adams, Don – Florida Atlantic Brooks, Ron – University of Oklahoma Georgia University Bryant, Salita S. – University of Davis, David A. – University of North Alkalay-Gut, Karen – Tel Aviv University, Mississippi Carolina, Chapel Hill Israel Byrd, Gregory – St. Petersburg College Dobbelmann, Duncan – City University Allegrezza, William – Indiana University Byrne, Mairéad – Rhode Island School of of New York, Brooklyn Northwest Design Dozier, Judy Massey – Lake Forest Allen, Jessica – Seattle, Washington Calihman, Matthew – Washington College Archambeau, Robert – Lake Forest University, St. Louis Durand, Marcella – New York City College Camlot, Jason – Concordia University, Durgin, Patrick – State University of Austin, Nathan – State University of Montreal, Canada New York at Buffalo New York at Buffalo Cates, Isaac – Yale University Durso, Patricia Keefe – Montclair State Axelrod, Steven Gould – University of Chen, Ken – Yale University University California, Riverside Chirico, David – Broome Community Dworkin, Ira – University of Miami Baker, Peter – Towson University College Earley, Bernard – State University of New Balestrini, Nassim Winnie – Johannes Christensen, Paul – Texas A&M York at Cortland Gutenberg-Universitaet Mainz, University Elliot, Norbert – New Jersey Institute of Germany Christopher Moylan – New York Technology Barenblat, Rachel – Inkberry Literary Institute of Technology Emerson, Lori – State University of New Arts Center Clark, J. Elizabeth – City University of York at Buffalo Barker, Sue – Northwestern University New York, LaGuardia Encke, Jeffrey – Seattle, Washington Barnes, Sharon L. – University of Toledo Clippinger, David – Pittsburgh, Esdale, Logan – Chapman University Pennsylvania Barsanti, Michael – Rosenbach Museum Etter, Carrie – University of Hertforshire, and Library Cocola, Jim – University of Virginia Hatfield, England Barton, Edwin J. – State University of Coffey, Dan – Iowa State University Fagan, Cathy E. – Nassau Community California, Bakersfield Cohen, Alicia – Reed College College and Hofstra University Basinski, Michael – State University of Colburn, Nadia Herman – Columbia Ferguson, Kathryn – LaTrobe University, New York at Buffalo University Victoria, Australia Bergman, David – Towson University Cole, Barbara – State University of New Fernandez-Medina, Nicolas – Stanford Bernhardt, Kimberly – Rutgers University York at Buffalo University Bertholf, Robert – State University of Colligan, Colette – Queen’s University, Fifarek, Aimee – Louisiana State New York at Buffalo Ontario, Canada University Bettridge, Joel – University of Redlands Collins, Richard – Xavier University of Fink, Thomas – City University of New Beveridge, Gord – University of Louisiana York, LaGuardia Winnipeg, Canada Cone, Robert Temple – Wake Forest Fischer, Barbara – New York University Beyer, Shaileen – Baltimore, Maryland University Fisher, Thomas – Portland State Blair, Yvette R. – El Centro College, Conte, Joseph – State University of New University Dallas, Texas York at Buffalo Flannagan, Rebecca – Francis Marion Blessinger, Justin L. – Dakota State Cottingham, Reid – University of University University Chicago Fleischer, Doris Zames – New Jersey Bloss, Christopher – University of South Coursey, Freda Fuller – State University Institute of Technology Dakota of New York at Binghamton Foster, Edward – Stevens Institute of Boggs, Rebecca Melora Corinne – Yale Crank, Andy – University of North Technology University Carolina, Chapel Hill Foust, Graham – Drake University Bolt, Julie – Art Institute of Los Angeles Crumpton, Margaret – Georgia Institute Friedman, Dan – Yale University Bonczek, Michelle – Eastern Washington of Technology Friedman, Robert S. – New Jersey University Cuda, Anthony J. – Emory University Institute of Technology

547 548 LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Frye, Steven – California State Huehls, Mitchum – University of Marsh, Nicky – University of University, Bakersfield Wisconsin, Madison Southampton, England Funkhouser, Christopher – New Jersey Hulsey, Dallas – New Mexico Junior Mathis, Andrew E. – Temple University Institute of Technology College Maynard, James L. – State University of Furlani, Andre – Concordia University, Humphrey, Theodore C. – California New York at Buffalo Canada State Polytechnic University McBride, Sam – DeVry University, Galgan, Wendy – City University of New Johnson, Ben – Rutgers University, New Pomona York, The Graduate Center Brunswick McDaniel, Dennis D. – Saint Vincent Gaughan, Frank – Hofstra University Johnson, Jeannine – Harvard University College Gelineau, Christine – State University of Johnson, Melissa – Newberry College McDermott, Christopher – University of New York at Binghamton Joines, Richard E. – Auburn University Georgia Gerber, Natalie – University of Jones, David M. – University of McFeely, Maureen Connolly – Hofstra California, Berkeley Wisconsin, Eau Claire University Girardi, Judith S. – Notre Dame de Jones, Marie C. – University of North McGrath, Barbara J. – Illinois State namur University and West Valley Texas University College Kane, Daniel – University of East Anglia, McInnis, C. Liegh – Jackson State Glassmeyer, Danielle – Loyola University, Norwich, England University Chicago Kearns, Sherry – Cleverdale, New York McMillan, Laurie – Duquesne University Gordon, Maggie – University of Meier, Franz – Ludwig-Maximilians- Mississippi Kelsey, Karla – Denver, Colorado Universität, Munich, Germany Gordon, Stephanie – Auburn University Kelsey, Sigrid – Louisiana State University Meyer, Sabine – Rasmussen College Greacen, Amy Glynn – San Francisco Kerley, Gary – North Hall High School, Meyers, G. Douglas – University of California Gainesville, Georgia Texas, El Paso Greenberg, Arielle – Columbia College, Kimmelman, Burt – New Jersey Institute Moore, George – University of Colorado, Chicago of Technology Boulder Grotz, Jennifer – Univeresity of Houston King, Patricia G. – Central American Study and Service, Guatemala City, Morelli-White, Nan – St. Petersburg Grumman, Bob – Port Charlotte, Florida Guatemala College Gudding, Gabriel – University of Kuperman, Michael – Institue of Morelyle, Jason – Canmore, Alberta, Mississippi Technology, Taiwan Canada Gwiazda, Piotr – University of Maryland, Lamm, Kimberly – Pratt Institute Moylan, Christopher – New York Baltimore County Institute of Technology Lavazzi, Tom – City University of New Harris, Kaplan Page – University of York, Kingsborough Muller, Adam – University of Manitoba, Notre Dame Canada. Layng, George W. – Westfield State Hart, Matthew – University of College Muratori, Fred – Cornell University Pennsylvania Leising, Gary – Northern Kentucky Murphy, A. Mary – University of Calgary, Haynes, Robert W. – Texas A&M University Canada International University Leston, Robert – University of Texas, Murphy, Kelli – University of South Hecker, William F. – United States Arlington Dakota Military Academy Levitt, Linda – University of South Newberry, Jeff – Abraham Baldwin Hernandez, Carlos – Pace University Florida Agricultural College Heuston, Sean – Vanderbilt University Lisk, Thomas – North Carolina State Nielsen, Aldon L. – Pennsylvania State Hezel, Amy – Univeristy of Iowa University, Raleigh University Highet Hanford, Pamela – Shasta Lombard, Maria D. – University of South O’Connor, Jacqueline – Boise State Community College Alabama University Hofer, Matthew – University of Chicago Long, Mark C. – Keene State College O’Loughlin, Jim – University of Holbrook, Susan – University of Lundblad, Michael – University of Northern Iowa Windsor, Ontario, Canada Virginia Orange, Tom – Georgetown University Howard, W. Scott – University of Denver Lundquist, Sara – University of Toledo Overall, Keri – University of North Texas Howe, Andrew – University of Marion, Carol – Guilford Technical Palmer, Leslie – University of North California, Riverside Community College Texas LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS 549

Parrett, Aaron – University of Great Falls Sewell, Lisa – Villanova University Talley, Sharon – Texas A&M University, Payaslian, Arto – University of Shaner, Tim – State University of New Corpus Christi Massachusetts York at Buffalo Tanner, James T. F. – University of North Persoon, James – Grand Valley State Shankar, Ravi – Central Connnecticut Texas University State University Texter, Douglas W. – University of Pettinger, Terry Lynn – University of Shapiro, David – William Paterson Minnesota South Carolina University Tontiplaphol, Betsy Winakur – Peyster, Steven J. – New Salem, Shapiro, Rose – Fontbonne University University of Virginia Massachusetts Sherwood, Kenneth – Indiana University Trousdale, Rachel – Agnes Scott College Phillips, Lily – John Carroll University of Pennsylvania Turner, Jack – Wesley College Plunkett, Felicity – University of New Shingavi, Snehal – University of Tursi, Mark – University of Denver England, New South Wales, Australia California, Berkeley Twitchell-Waas, Jeffrey – OFS College, Poch, John – Texas Tech University Sievers, Stefanie – University of Singapore Potts, Donna – Kansas State University Wisconsin, Eau Claire Valdata, Patricia – Neumann College Pozorski, Aimee L. – Central Simpson, Megan – Penn State University, Van Dyke, Michael – Michigan State Connecticut State University Altoona University Prall, J. Andrew – University of Denver Skinner, Jonathan – State University of Vickery, Ann – University of Melbourne, New York at Buffalo Priddy, Anna – Louisiana State University Australia Smith, Joyce C. – University of Purdy, Matthew – University of Iowa Waddell, William – St. John Fisher Tennessee at Chattanooga College Pusateri, Chris – Seattle, Washington Sowder, Michael – Utah State University Wagner, Tamara S. – National University Richards, Tad – Marist College Speirs, Kenneth – City University of of Singapore Robbins, Amy Moorman – University of New York, Kingsborough Walpert, Bryan – Massey University, California, Riverside Spillane, Brian A. – Shasta College Palmerston North, New Zealand Rollison, Damian Judge – University of Stalling, Jonathan – State University of Warner, Diane – Texas Tech University Virginia New York at Buffalo Wattley, Ama S. – Pace University Rosenow, Ce – University of Oregon Stayer, Jayme – Loyola House, Berkeley, Wellman, Don – Daniel Webster College Rozendal, Michael – State University of Michigan Whiddon, Kelly D. – Valdosta State New York at Buffalo Stiller, Nikki – New Jersey Institute of University Russo, Linda V. – State University of Technology Wiens, Jason – University of Calgary, New York at Buffalo Strickland, Michael – Elon University Alberta, Canada Ryan, James Emmett – Auburn Studdard, Melissa – Tomball College Wilson, Nancy Effinger – Texas State University Stumpf, Jason – Washington University University, San Marcos Salmon, Holly – New Haven, in Saint Louis Wilson, Steve – Texas State University, Connecticut Sulit, Marie-Therese C. – University of San Marcos Schaub, Joseph – Newberry College Minnesota, Twin Cities Wolfe, Jesse – University of Wisconsin, Schwartz, Gerald – Rochester, New York Swihart, Megan – Duquesne University Madison Schwartz, Judith – University of Sylvester, William – State University of Woznicki, John R. – Georgian Court Pennsylvania New York at Buffalo College Scroggins, Mark – Florida Atlantic Taciuch, Dean – George Mason Zeigler, James – University of California, University University Irvine INDEX

Boldface page numbers denote Harlem Renaissance 201–204 Agueros, Jack 84, 85 “America” (Allen Ginsberg) 183, 444 main entries. Michael S. Harper 204 Ai (Florence Ogawa Anthony) 6, 403 Americana and Other Poems (John Robert Hayden 207–208 AIDS Updike) 499 A “Heritage” (Countee Cullen) Rafael Campo 76 American Book Award 403 “A” (Louis Zukofsky) 1–2 214–215 Mark Doty 134 The American Express (Gregory Ark (Ronald Johnson) 15 Langston Hughes 226–227 Thom Gunn 193 Corso) 104 Drafts (Rachel Blau Duplessis) James Weldon Johnson Rachel Hadas 197 American Indians 136 245–246 James Merrill 315 Sherman Alexie 7–8 long and serial poetry 285 June Jordan 247–248 Sonia Sanchez 439 Joy Harjo 199–200 objectivist poetry 350–351 Bob Kaufman 253–254 Aiken, Conrad vii, 6–7 Linda Hogan 216–217 Louis Zukofsky 537 Etheridge Knight 261–262 imagist school 233 Simon J. Ortiz 362–363 abstract expressionism xvii, 2–3 Yusef Komunyakaa 263 lyric poetry 294 Leslie Marmon Silko 457–458 John Ashbery 23 The Last Poets 272–273 George Oppen 359 America’s Favorite Poems (Robert Barbara Guest 190–191 Audre Lorde 286–287 poetry prizes 403 Pinsky and Maggie Dietz, eds.) Kenneth Koch 262 Nathaniel Mackey 296 Aiken Taylor Award for Modern 380 modernism 321 Haki Madhubuti 299 American Poetry 403 Ammons, A. R. 9–11 New York school 341, 342 Clarence Major 299–300 Akhmatova, Anna 153, 168, 421 Diane Ackerman 4 academic poetry ix–x, 389 Claude McKay 310–311 Albert, Sam 265 Alice Fulton 177 Academy of American Poets 394 Montage of a Dream Deferred Aldington, Richard Garbage 179–180 accent 539g (Langston Hughes) 323–324 European poetic influences Josephine Miles 318 accentual verse 539g Thylias Moss 329 153 poetry prizes 403 “An Accident” (Louis Simpson) 460 “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” H. D. 208 “Amplitude” (Tess Gallagher) 178 Acconci, Vito 269 (Langston Hughes) 337–338 imagist school 233–235 anapest 539g Ackerman, Diane 3–4 “Numbers, Letters” (Amiri Marianne Moore 325 anaphora 539g Adam, Helen x, 4–5, 5 Baraka) 347 poetry anthologies 388 anarchism x Adams, Leonie 429 poetry anthologies 388–389 Aleixandre, Vincente 374 Andrews, Bruce xi, 11–12. See also Aeneid (Ovid) 284 poetry journals 398 Alexander, Will 253 L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E African-American poets and poems xii Ishmael Reed 416–417 Alexie, Sherman 7–8 Charles Bernstein 39 Maya Angelou 12 Kalamu Ya Salaam 437 Algarín, Miguel 8, 85 Canadian poetic influences Russell Atkins 25–26 Sonia Sanchez 439–440 Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award 403 78 Amiri Baraka 30–31 “Teach Us to Number Our allegory 539g Anselm Hollo 218 Black Arts movement 47–49 Days” (Rita Dove) 491–492 Allen, Donald xi I Don’t have any paper so shut up, Gwendolyn Brooks 67–69 Lorenzo Thomas 494–495 Cid Corman 101 (or, social romanticism) 231 Sterling Brown 70 “Those Winter Sundays” The Jacob’s Ladder (Denise Language school 269–270 Caribbean poetic influences (Robert Hayden) 495 Levertov) 241 poetry journals 399 81–85 Melvin Tolson 496–497 Language school 269 poetry presses 401 Lucille Clifton 93–94 Jean Toomer 497–498 objectivist poetry 349 Anew (Louis Zukofsky) 286 Jayne Cortez 104 Jay Wright 532 poetry journals 398 Angelou, Maya 12 Countee Cullen 111 Afrika Bambaataa 84 poetry presses 401 Another Time (W. H. Auden) 28 Rita Dove 134–135 After a Lost Original (David Shapiro) alliteration 539g Ansen, Alan 197 Cornelius Eady 144 455 All the King’s Men (Robert Penn Anthony, Florence Ogawa. See Ai Nikki Giovanni 184–185 After Lorca (Jack Spicer) 5–6, Warren) 176 Antin, David xi, 12–13 Harlem Gallery (Melvin Tolson) 469–470 allusion 539g deep image poetry 123 200–201 The Age of Anxiety (W. H. Auden) 28 The Alphabet (Ron Silliman) 8–9 ethnopoetics 152

550 INDEX 551

Toby Olson 358 Robert Kelly 255 “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Hart Crane 104 poetry in performance 393 Kenneth Koch 262 Ohio” (James Wright) 531 Victor Hernández Cruz 109 poetry presses 401 Language school 269 avant-garde xii deep image poetry 122 “Anti-Oedipus” (Bob Perelman) 375 Ann Lauterbach 273 Ayschough, Florence 386 Diane di Prima 128, 129 anti-Semitism 31, 406 Harry Mathews 302 ethnopoetics 152 antiwar movement 57 New Formalism 340 B Lawrence Ferlinghetti 161–162 Anzaldua, Gloria 95, 160 New York school 341–344 Baca, Jimmy Santiago 29–30 Allen Ginsberg 181, 182 Apollinaire, Guillaume Frank O’Hara 353, 355 Bacon, Francis 150 Howl (Allen Ginsberg) European poetic influences poetry prizes 402 Baker, David 128 224–225 153, 154 Donald Revell 418 Baker, Robert 272 The Journals (Paul Blackburn) Frank O’Hara 354 Laura Riding 422 ballad 539g 248 San Francisco Renaissance 444 Stephen Rodefer 429 “Ballad of Ladies Lost and Found” Bob Kaufman 253–254 surrealism 484 David St. John 471 (Marilyn Hacker) 196 Jack Kerouac 257–258 visual poetry 503 James Schuyler 446 “The Ballad of the Children of the Joanne Kyger 267 apostrophe 539g “Self-Portrait in a Convex Czar” (Delmore Schwartz) Ron Loewinsohn 281–282 Applewhite, William, Jr. 295 Mirror” 451–452 447–448 Michael McClure 308 The Approach to Paris (Ezra Pound) David Shapiro 455 Baraka, Amiri (LeRoi Jones) xi, xii, Thomas McGrath 309 vii Gertrude Stein 474 30–31 Kenneth Patchen 371–372 April Galleons (John Ashbery) 25 Gerald Stern 476 Beat poetry 33–35 poetry in performance 391, “April Inventory” (W. D. Snodgrass) surrealism 485 Black Arts movement 47, 392 13–14 James Tate 491 48–49 poetry institutions 395 Aragon, Louis 484 Marjorie Welish 519 Edmund Kamau Brathwaite poetry presses 401 Arendt, Hannah 55, 56 Harriet Zinnes 536 61–62 poetry prizes 402 Arensberg, Walter Conrad vii, 504 Asian Americans Gwendolyn Brooks 67 Kenneth Rexroth 418 Arguelles, Ivan 116 Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Caribbean poetic influences Ed Sanders 441–442 “Ariel” (Sylvia Plath) 14–15, 159, 88–89 83, 85 San Francisco Renaissance 382 Li-Young Lee 274–275 Lucille Clifton 93 443, 444 Ariel and Other Poems (Sylvia Plath) Cathy Song 466 deep image poetry 124 Gary Snyder 464 “Ariel” (Sylvia Plath) 14 John Yau 534 Diane di Prima 128 Jack Spicer 469 female voice/language 159 As If (John Ciardi) 91 Langston Hughes 226 surrealism 485 “Lady Lazarus” (Sylvia Plath) assonance 539g Bob Kaufman 253 Anne Waldman 509 268 Atkins, Russell 25–26, 226 Jack Kerouac 257 The Waste Land (T. S. Eliot) Sylvia Plath 382 “At the Well” (Paul Blackburn) 26, Yusef Komunyakaa 263 516 Ark (Ronald Johnson) 15–16, 246, 50–51 “Numbers, Letters” 347 Philip Whalen 520 285 Auden, W. H. ix, 27–28 Rochelle Owens 365 John Wieners 522 “The Armadillo” (Elizabeth Bishop) John Ashbery 23 “A Poem for Speculative William Carlos Williams 528 16–17 John Berryman 41 Hipsters” 383–384 Beaudelaire, Charles 485 Armantrout, Rae xi, 17–18, 160, Joseph Brodsky 64 poetry journals 398, 400 Beckett, Samuel 418 222 The Changing Light at Sandover Sonia Sanchez 439 Before the Brave (Kenneth Patchen) Armory Show xvii (James Merrill) 89 Barnes, Djuna 154 372 ars poeticas 18–21 confessional poetry 98 Barnholden, Michael 77 Beining, Guy 504–505 After Lorca (Jack Spicer) 5 European poetic influences Barresi, Dorothy 403 Bell, Marvin 35–36, 491 Black Mountain school 51 155 Barreto-Rivera, Rafael 78 The Bell Jar (Sylvia Plath) 381 Passages (Robert Duncan) 370 Robert Hayden 207 Bashô 101 Bellow, Saul 447 prosody and free verse 410 Anthony Hecht 210 Baudelaire, Charles “Bells for John Whiteside’s John Taggart 487, 489 Daniel Hoffman 216 deep image poetry 123–124 Daughter” (John Crowe Ransom) Artaud, Antonin 150, 155, 484 John Hollander 217 Russell Edson 146 36, 174 Articulation of Sound Forms in Time Randall Jarrell 242 T. S. Eliot 148 Benedikt, Michael 146 (Susan Howe) 21–22 Weldon Kees 255 European poetic influences Benét, Stephen Vincent 36–37, 335 Art News 451 Maxine Kumin 265 153 Bennett, Guy 154 “The Arts and Death: A Fugue for lyric poetry 294 Harriet Zinnes 536 Bennett, Gwendolyn 203 Sidney Cox” (William Bronk) James Merrill 314 Beame, Jeffery 76 Bennett, Louise 83 22–23 W. S. Merwin 316 “The Bean Eaters” (Gwendolyn Bennington College 429–430 Asbestos Phoenix (Ramon Guthrie) modernism 322 Brooks) xviii, 31–32, 67 Benson, Steve 270 195 narrative poetry 335 “The Bear (Galway Kinnell) 259 Bergson, Henri 147–148, 233, 234 Ashbery, John xi, 23–25 Grace Paley 368 Beatitudes 253 Berkeley. See University of abstract expressionism 2, 3 poetry institutions 395 Beat poetry x–xi, 32–35 California, Berkeley Bruce Andrews 11 Adrienne Rich 421–423 abstract expressionism 3 Berkson, Bill 37–38, 92, 342 W. H. Auden 28 Laura Riding 422 Helen Adam 4 Berman, Wallace 504 April Bernard 38 Theodore Roethke 429 Amiri Baraka 30 Bernard, April 38–39, 403 Ted Berrigan 40 Jerome Rothenberg 432 Black Mountain school 54 Bernstein, Charles xi, 39–40. See Tom Clark 92 Muriel Rukeyser 434 Andrei Codrescu 94 also L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E European poetic influences Mary Jo Salter 438 A Coney Island of the Mind Bruce Andrews 11 153–155 “September 1, 1939” 452 (Lawrence Ferlinghetti) 97 ars poeticas 20 Flow Chart 166–167 Auster, Paul 359, 361 confessional poetry 98 Articulation of Sound Forms in Garbage (A. R. Ammons) 179 automatic writing 484 Clark Coolidge 100 Time (Susan Howe) 21 Donald Hall 197 “Autumn” (T. E. Hulme) 233 Gregory Corso 103–104 Canadian poetic influences 78 552 INDEX

Bernstein, Charles (continued) Molly Peacock 374 Black Mountain school x, 51–54 The Maximus Poems (Charles cyberpoetry 116 Muriel Rukeyser 434 David Antin 13 Olson) 306 Anselm Hollo 218 David St. John 471 Paul Blackburn 50 Josephine Miles 318 Susan Howe 223 Mary Jo Salter 438 “Cacti” (Joel Oppenheimer) 74 Jack Spicer 469 Language school 269–271 May Swenson 485 Robert Creeley 107 Blast! (Ezra Pound and Wyndham objectivist poetry 351 Michael Waters 517 deep image poetry 122, 123 Lewis) 406 poetry in performance 393 “Black Art” (Amiri Baraka) 31 Edward Dorn 132 Blizzard of One (Mary Strand) 480, poetry journals 399 Black Arts movement 47–49 Robert Duncan 139–140 481 Charles Reznikoff 420 Amiri Baraka 30 Larry Eigner 147 Blue Moon Review (e-zine) 400 Ron Silliman 458 “The Bean Eaters” (Gwendolyn Theodore Enslin 149 Bly, Robert ix, 56–57 Tender Buttons (Gertrude Stein) Brooks) 31 ethnopoetics 152 deep image poetry 122–123, 494 Gwendolyn Brooks 67 Kathleen Fraser 171 125 Berrigan, Ted xi, 40 Lucille Clifton 93 Gunslinger (Edward Dorn) 193 James Dickey 126 Joseph Ceravolo 87 Jayne Cortez 104 Anselm Hollo 218 Russell Edson 146 Tom Clark 92 Victor Hernández Cruz 109 imagist school 233 European poetic influences Andrei Codrescu 94 Cornelius Eady 144 The Jacob’s Ladder (Denise 155 Edward Foster 169 Nikki Giovanni 184 Levertov) 241 Donald Hall 197 Language school 269 Harlem Renaissance 203–204 Ronald Johnson 246 Galway Kinnell 258 New York school 342 Robert Hayden 207 The Journals (Paul Blackburn) Etheridge Knight 261 Alice Notley 343, 346 June Jordan 247 248 Joel Oppenheimer 362 Ron Padgett 367 Etheridge Knight 261 Denise Levertov 276 Robert Peters 376 The Sonnets 468 Language school 269 long and serial poetry 286 poetry and translation Lewis Warsh 515 The Last Poets 272–273 Nathaniel Mackey 296 386–387 Berry, Jake 505 Audre Lorde 286 Hilda Morley 327 Louis Simpson 459 Berry, Wendell 40–41, 356 Nathaniel Mackey 296 poetry institutions 395 William Stafford 472 Berryman, John ix, 41–42 Haki Madhubuti 299 poetry journals 398 Gerald Stern 476 confessional poetry 99 Clarence Major 299 poetry presses 401 Mark Strand 480 The Dream Songs 136–138 “Numbers, Letters” (Amiri poetry prizes 402 “The Teeth Mother Naked at “For the Union Dead” (Robert Baraka) 347 San Francisco Renaissance 443 Last” 493 Lowell) 168 poetry in performance 391, 392 John Taggart 487, 488 war and antiwar poetry 513 Fugitive/Agrarian school 176 Ishmael Reed 416 Jonathan Williams 525 Bodman, Manoah 168–169 Donald Justice 250 Kalamu Ya Salaam 437 William Carlos Williams 528 Body of This Death (Louise Bogan) Kaddish (Allen Ginsberg) 252 Sonia Sanchez 439 Blackmur, R. P. ix, 54–55 58 Philip Levine 278 Lorenzo Thomas 494 John Berryman 42 Bogan, Louise 57–58, 429 W. S. Merwin 316 “Those Winter Sundays” The Dream Songs (John Bok, Christian 78 narrative poetry 337 (Robert Hayden) 495 Berryman) 137 Boldereff, Frances 304, 357–358 Toby Olson 359 Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School Fugitive/Agrarian school 176 Bollingen Prize 403 Delmore Schwartz 447 47 W. S. Merwin 316 “Bomb” (Gregory Corso) 34 Karl Shapiro 457 Blackburn, Paul x, xi, 49–51 Black Power movement 47 Bonnard, Pierre 130 Allen Tate 490 David Antin 13 Black Sparrow Press 71, 92, 401 Bontemps, Arna 201, 203, 245, Berryman’s Sonnets (John Berryman) “At the Well” 26 Blake, William 389 42 Black Mountain school 51 After Lorca (Jack Spicer) 5 The Book of American Negro Poetry Berssenbrugge, Mei-Mei 42–43, George Economou 145 The Changing Light at Sandover (James Weldon Johnson) 214, 190 European poetic influences (James Merrill) 89 245, 389 Best American Poetry 402 155 deep image poetry 124 The Book of Job (William Blake) 372 “Beyond the End” (Denise Levertov) The Journals 248–249 Richard Eberhart 145 Booth, Philip 58–59 53 long and serial poetry 286 Flow Chart (John Ashbery) 166 Boss Cupid (Thom Gunn) 193 “Bialystok Stanzas” (Michael Heller) Ron Padgett 367 Allen Ginsberg 182 Boston Renaissance 272 43–44, 214 Ezra Pound 407 Howl (Allen Ginsberg) 224 Bottom: on Shakespeare (Louis Bidart, Frank ix, 44–45, 404 Black Mountain College x imagist school 233 Zukofsky) 537 Bishop, Elizabeth ix, xiii, 45–47 abstract expressionism 3 Richard Kostelanetz 264 Bottoms, David 59–60, 403 “The Armadillo” 16–17 Black Mountain school 51 James Merrill 315 Bowering, George 77 John Ashbery 23 Robert Duncan 140 George Oppen 361 Bowers, Edgar 60–61 April Bernard 38 The Maximus Poems (Charles Kenneth Patchen 372 J. V. Cunningham 113 Frank Bidart 44 Olson) 306 Theodore Roethke 430 Timothy Steele 473 Amy Clampitt 91 Hilda Morley 327 Mark Rudman 433 Yvor Winters 528 Deborah Diggs 128 Pieces (Robert Creeley) 376 San Francisco Renaissance 444 Boyle, Kay 61 female voice/language 158 poetry institutions 395 The Structure of Rime (Robert bpNichol 78 “The Fish” 164 Jack Spicer 469 Duncan) 482 Bradley, F. H. 148 Dana Gioia 184 John Wieners 522 Derek Walcott 508 Bradstreet, Anne 160, 294 Jorie Graham 186 Jonathan Williams 525 blank verse 60, 230, 408, 539g Brainard, Joe 342 “In the Waiting Room” John Yau 534 Blaser, Duncan 469 Brand, Dionne 78 237–238 Black Mountain Review (journal) x Blaser, Robin x, 55–56 Brannen, Jonathan 264, 502–503 Brad Leithauser 275 Black Mountain school 51 After Lorca (Jack Spicer) 5 Brathwaite, Edward Kamau 61–62, James Merrill 314 William Bronk 66 Robert Duncan 140 82, 153, 154 Marianne Moore 325 Robert Duncan 139–140 Gerrit Lansing 272 Breadloaf Writers’ Conference 25 narrative poetry 334–335 poetry journals 398 long and serial poetry 286 Breeze, Mary Anne 116 INDEX 553

Breton, André 154–155, 484 “Burning the Small Dead” (Gary Ark (Ronald Johnson) 15 The Changing Light at Sandover The Bridge (Hart Crane) 62–64, Snyder) 72 The Changing Light at Sandover (James Merrill) 89–90 105–106, 137 John Cage 75 (James Merrill) 89 long and serial poetry 284–285 Broadside Press 47 Sam Hamill 199 cyberpoetry 115 James Merrill 315 Brodsky, Joseph 64 Joanne Kyger 267 Drafts (Rachel Blau Duplessis) narrative poetry 334, 335 European poetic influences Jackson Mac Low 297, 298 136 Char, René 466 155 Mexico City Blues (Jack Kerouac) The Dream Songs (John Chase, Stuart 6 Robert Frost 173 317, 318 Berryman) 137 Chaucer 334 Linda Gregg 188 poetry institutions 395 Loba (Diane di Prima) 280 Chester, Laura 270 Derek Walcott 508 “Riprap” (Gary Snyder) 425 long and serial poetry 284–285 Chicago viii, 395 Bromige, David 64–65, 120–121 Armand Schwerner 449 Jackson Mac Low 298 “Chicago” (Carl Sandburg) 440 Bronk, William x, xvi, 65–67 Gary Snyder 464, 465 Maximum Security Ward (Ramon Chicago Aristotelians 297 “The Arts and Death: A Fugue Philip Whalen 520 Guthrie) 304 Chicago Poems (Carl Sandburg) for Sidney Cox” 22–23 Bukowski, Charles 70–71 The Maximus Poems (Charles 90–91, 440 Black Mountain school 51 Wanda Coleman 96 Olson) 305 Chicago Renaissance 301 Cid Corman 101 poetry presses 401 modernism 322 Chicana/Chicano poets. See Edward Foster 168 Al Purdy 412 Passages (Robert Duncan) 370 Hispanic-American poets Robert Frost 171 Bullock, Marie 394 Ezra Pound 406 “the child in the burnt house” George Oppen 359 Bunting, Basil x, 349 The Structure of Rime (Robert (Robert Peters) 376 poetry prizes 403, 404 Burkard, Michael 71–72 Duncan) 482 Chills and Fever (John Crowe “The Smile on the Face of a Burke, Kenneth ix, 176 visual poetry 503 Ransom) 176 Kouros” 460–461 Burning Deck press 510 Louis Zukofsky 537 Chinese poetry 386 Wallace Stevens 477 “Burning the Small Dead” (Gary Cardenal, Ernesto 85, 151 Christianity 27, 28 John Taggart 488 Snyder) 72 Caribbean poetic influences 81–86 “Christmas Poem 1966” (Robert Keith Waldrop 510 Burroughs, William S. Edmund Kamau Brathwaite Peters) 376 Charles Wright 530 Beat poetry 33, 35 61–62 “The Chronicle of Division” Bronowski, Jacob 431 Allen Ginsberg 181, 182 Nathaniel Mackey 296 (William Everson) 156 Brooks, Cleanth ix, 176, 514 Jack Kerouac 257 poetry in performance 392 Chronicles of the Hostile Sun (Dionne Brooks, Gwendolyn xii, xiii, xviii, The Business of Fancydancing surrealism 485 Brand) 78 67–69 (Sherman Alexie) 7 Derek Walcott 508–509 Churchill, Winston 83 “The Bean Eaters” 31–32 “The Bus Trip” (Joel Oppenheimer) Carpenter, David 156 Ciardi, John 91 Black Arts movement 47 72–73 Carr, Lucien 33 Donald Hall 197 Lucille Clifton 93, 94 Bynner, Witter 513 Carrington, Leonora 485 Frank O’Hara 354 Rita Dove 134 Byron, Lord 337 Carroll, Paul 51 Paterson (William Carlos female voice/language 160 Byrum, John 264 Carruth, Hayden 86 Williams) 373 Etheridge Knight 261 A Coney Island of the Mind cinema xvii lyric poetry 294 C (Lawrence Ferlinghetti) 97 City Lights Press xi Thylias Moss 329 “Cacti” (Joel Oppenheimer) 74–75, Paterson (William Carlos Beat poetry 34 poetry prizes 403 362 Williams) 373 Lawrence Ferlinghetti 161, 162 “Teach Us To Number Our cadence 234, 409, 539g poetry presses 401 Lunch Poems (Frank O’Hara) Days” Rita Dove 491 caesura 539g poetry prizes 403 292 war and antiwar poetry 513 Cage, John 75–76 Caruso, Enrico xvii Mexico City Blues (Jack Kerouac) “We Real Cool” 519–520 Caribbean poetic influences 84 Carver, Raymond 178 318 Brossard, Nicole 78 cyberpoetry 114–115 Cassady, Neal 33, 35, 182 poetry presses 401 Broumas, Olga 69–70 European poetic influences Cathay (Ezra Pound, translator) Jerome Rothenberg 432 Brower, Ruben 314 154 386 San Francisco Renaissance 443 Brown, Bob 504 Richard Kostelanetz 264 Cather, Willa xvii Civil Rights movement xi, 47 Brown, Sterling 70 Language school 269, 271 Catullus 428–429, 537–538 Clampitt, Amy 91–92 Harlem Renaissance 203 Jackson Mac Low 298 Catullus (Louis Zukofsky, translator) Clare, John 430 Michael S. Harper 204 Frank O’Hara 354 387 Clark, Eleanor 434 Etheridge Knight 261 poetry in performance 393 Cavafy, C. F. 134, 155, 168 Clark, Tom 92–93, 132, 515 Montage of a Dream Deferred Joan Retallack 417 Cavalcanti, Guido 2 classical poetry 284 (Langston Hughes) 323 California viii. See also San Cayley, John 116 “Class of 1934” (Kenneth Patchen) poetry anthologies 389 Francisco Celan, Paul 374, 418 372 Browning, Elizabeth Barret 492 Callaloo (journal) 399 Cendrars, Blaise 155 Clifton, Lucille xiii, 93–94 Browning, Robert xvi Calligrammes (Apollinaire) 503 Ceravolo, Joseph 86–87 female voice/language 160 Stephen Vincent Benét 37 Campbell, Bruce 121 Cervantes, Lorna Dee 87–88, 160 Pat Mora 327 Richard Howard 221 Campo, Rafael 76, 341, 446 Césaire, Aimé 253 poetry presses 401 long and serial poetry 284 Canaday, John 403 Jayne Cortez 104 poetry prizes 403 “The Love Song of J. Alfred Canadian poetic influences 76–79, Clayton Eshleman 150 Clinton, William J. 12 Prufrock” (T. S. Eliot) 288 393 European poetic influences C magazine 367 lyric poetry 295 Cane (Jean Toomer) 203, 498 154 Cocteau, Jean 154 Ezra Pound 406 canon 539g Bob Kaufman 253 Codrescu, Andrei 94–95 Bruce, Lenny 93 “Can Poetry Matter?” (Dana Gioia) surrealism 485 Cofer, Judith Ortiz 85, 95 Buber, Martin 125 183, 394 Cha, Theresa Hak Kyung 88–89, Cohen, Hettie 30, 34 Buddhism xi The Cantos (Ezra Pound) 79–81 95 Cole, Norma 78 Beat poetry 34 “A” (Louis Zukofsky) 1 chance 298 Coleman, Ornette 104 554 INDEX

Coleman, Wanda 95–96, 403 “My Papa’s Waltz” (Theodore Cox, Sidney 22–23 William Carlos Williams 528 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor Roethke) 333 C Press 40, 468 Louis Zukofsky 538 Bob Kaufman 253 Molly Peacock 374 Crane, Hart vii, ix, 104–106 “Crepe Myrtle” (Conrad Aiken) 294 Denise Levertov 278 Robert Peters 376 Articulation of Sound Forms in the Crisis (journal) Robert Lowell 291 Sylvia Plath 381 Time (Susan Howe) 21 Harlem Renaissance 202 San Francisco Renaissance 444 Theodore Roethke 429 R. P. Blackmur 54 Langston Hughes 226 The Structure of Rime (Robert Anne Sexton 453 The Bridge 62–64 “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” Duncan) 482 Karl Shapiro 456–457 James Dickey 126 (Langston Hughes) 338 collagist poetry 539g “Snapshots of a Daughter-in- The Dream Songs (John poetry journals 398 Collins, Billy 96–97 law” (Adrienne Rich) Berryman) 137 the Criterion 515 Collins, Jess 140 462–463 European poetic influences Crosby, Harry 503–504 Colossus and Other Poems (Sylvia W. D. Snodgrass 463 153, 155 Crozier, Andrew 350 Plath) 382 Gary Snyder 465 Fugitive/Agrarian school 174 Cruz, Victor Hernández 85, Coltrane, John 204 Richard Tillinghast 496 Allen Ginsberg 182 109–110 Columbia University Jean Valentine 501 Allen Grossman 189 The Crystal Text (Clark Coolidge) John Ashbery 23 Michael Waters 517 Robert Hayden 207 110–111 Beat poetry 32, 33 John Wieners 522 Bob Kaufman 253 Cubbison, Laurie 116 John Berryman 41 connotation 539g Jack Kerouac 258 Cullen, Countee xii, 111 Philip Booth 59 Conrad, Jospeh xvii modernism 322 European poetic influences Donald Finkel 163 consonance 539g Eileen Myles 331 155 Edward Foster 168 Contact (journal) 397, 527 Muriel Rukeyser 435 Harlem Renaissance 201, 203 Allen Ginsberg 182 Conte, Joseph 108, 285–286 Yvor Winters 529 Robert Hayden 207 Jorie Graham 187 Contemporary American Poetry Crapsey, Adelaide vii, 106–107 “Heritage” 214–215 John Hollander 217 (Donald Hall) 123 Creeley, Robert vi, x, 107–109 Yusef Komunyakaa 263 Ann Lauterbach 273 A Controversy of Poets (Robert Kelly “A” (Louis Zukofsky) 1 lyric poetry 294 David Lehman 275 and Paris Leary, ed.) 390 abstract expressionism 3 poetry anthologies 389 Robert McDowell 309 Coolidge, Clark 100–101 ars poeticas 20 poetry journals 398 Ron Padgett 367 ars poeticas 20 Amiri Baraka 30 cummings, e. e. vii, 111–113 Jerome Rothenberg 432 Canadian poetic influences 77 Paul Blackburn 50 Conrad Aiken 6 Muriel Rukeyser 434 The Crystal Text 110–111 Black Mountain school 51, 53 A Coney Island of the Mind Armand Schwerner 449 Language school 269 David Bromige 65 (Lawrence Ferlinghetti) Louis Simpson 460 Copper Canyon Press 401 William Bronk 66 97 William Jay Smith 462 Corbiere, Tristan vii, 158 Canadian poetic influences 77 Hart Crane 104 Marjorie Welish 519 Corman, Cid x, 100–102 Tom Clark 93 Lawrence Ferlinghetti 161 common language xv “The Arts and Death: A Fugue Cid Corman 101 “In Just-Spring” 236–237 Communist Party x, 291 for Sidney Cox” (William deep image poetry 123 Joel Oppenheimer 361 Complete Poems (e. e. cummings) Bronk) 22 Robert Duncan 139 poetry prizes 403 113 Black Mountain school 51 Theodore Enslin 149 “Somewhere I have never trav- “Complete Thought” (Barrett William Bronk 66 Robert Frost 171 elled” 466–467 Watten) 518 Canadian poetic influences 77 Robert Grenier 189 visual poetry 502, 503 “Composition as Explanation” Robert Creeley 108 Anselm Hollo 218 war and antiwar poetry 511 (Gertrude Stein) 475 Theodore Enslin 149 The Jacob’s Ladder (Denise John Wheelwright 521 conceit 539g Lorine Niedecker 344 Levertov) 241 Cunningham, J. V. ix, 113–114 A Coney Island of the Mind (Lawrence objectivist poetry 350 The Journals (Paul Blackburn) Thom Gunn 193 Ferlinghetti) 97–98 poetry journals 398 248 Timothy Steele 473 confessional poetry 98–100 poetry prizes 404 Jack Kerouac 257–258 Yvor Winters 528 Ai 6 Frank Samperi 438 Language school 269–270 Curry, Walter Clyde 174 “April Inventory” (W. D. Louis Zukofsky 538 Denise Levertov 276 cyberpoetry xvi, 114–117 Snodgrass) 13 Corn, Alfred ix, 102 long and serial poetry 286 Jackson Mac Low 297 John Berryman 41 Cornelius, David K. 122 The Maximus Poems (Charles poetry in performance 391, Edgar Bowers 61 Corretier, Antonio 85 Olson) 306 392 Michael Burkard 71 Corso, Gregory xi, 103–104 Mexico City Blues (Jack Kerouac) poetry institutions 396 “Daddy” (Sylvia Plath) 118 Beat poetry 33, 34 318 poetry journals 399 Alan Dugan 138 Robert Duncan 140 Hilda Morley 327 Stephanie Strickland 481–482 Tess Gallagher 178 Lawrence Ferlinghetti 161 objectivist poetry 351 visual poetry 505 Sandra Gilbert 181 Allen Ginsberg 181 Charles Olson 356–357 cybertext 115–116 Allen Ginsberg 181 Jack Kerouac 257 Toby Olson 358 Linda Gregg 188 poetry presses 400 Michael Palmer 368 D Howl (Allen Ginsberg) 224 “Corsons Inlet” (A. R. Ammons) 10, Pieces 376–378 dactyl 539g Richard Hugo 228 177 poetry institutions 395 dadaism 154, 484 Colette Inez 235 Cortez, Jayne 47, 83, 104 poetry journals 398 “Daddy” (Sylvia Plath) xvii, “In the Waiting Room” “Cosmopolitan Greetings” (Allen prosody and free verse 410 118–119 (Elizabeth Bishop) 237 Ginsberg) 183 Charles Reznikoff 420 confessional poetry 99 The Journals (Paul Blackburn) Coulthard, A. R. 12 Gustaf Sobin 466 female voice/language 159 248 counterculture vi, 441–442, 464 Jack Spicer 469 Sylvia Plath 382 John Logan 282 couplet 539g Wallace Stevens 477 Dahlen, Beverly xiii, 119, 286 Jackson Mac Low 297 Cousteau, Jacques 131 visual poetry 502 Dali, Salvador 485 INDEX 555

Dante Dickens, Charles 149, 516 Stanley Kunitz 266 Michael McClure 308 The Changing Light at Sandover Dickey, James 126–127 Li-Young Lee 274 Toby Olson 359 (James Merrill) 89 Fugitive/Agrarian school 176 Adrienne Rich 422 Michael Palmer 368 John Ciardi 91 Galway Kinnell 258 “Don’t Be So Sure (Don’t Be Passages 370–371 Cid Corman 101 Louis Simpson 459 Saussure)” (Charles Bernstein) 39 poetry institutions 395 Alfred Corn 102 Dickinson, Emily xvi Doolittle, Hilda. See H. D. poetry presses 401 Robert Duncan 140 Articulation of Sound Forms in Dorn, Edward x, 132–133 San Francisco Renaissance Flow Chart (John Ashbery) Time (Susan Howe) 21 Black Mountain school 51 443, 444 166 William Bronk 65 Gunslinger 193–195 Leslie Scalapino 445 long and serial poetry 285 Amy Clampitt 91 Charles Olson 356–357 Gustaf Sobin 466 “The Love Song of J. Alfred Lucille Clifton 93, 94 poetry institutions 395 Jack Spicer 469 Prufrock” (T. S. Eliot) 288 Judith Ortiz Cofer 95 poetry presses 401 The Structure of Rime 482 James Merrill 315 Hart Crane 105 Gerald Stern 476 John Wieners 522 narrative poetry 335 female voice/language 160 Dos Passos, John 112, 233 William Carlos Williams 528 Robert Pinsky 380 Robert Frost 171 Doty, Mark ix, 134, 403 Louis Zukofsky 538 Gjertrud Schnackenberg 446 Alice Fulton 176 The Double Man (W. H. Auden) 28 Dunn, Stephen 141–142, 216, 403 Dark Summer (Louise Bogan) 58 Susan Howe 224 Dove, Rita xii, xiii, 134–136 DuPlessis, Rachel Blau xiii, xviii, Darragh, Tina 269 Colette Inez 235 Marvin Bell 35 142–143 Dartmouth College 59 Jane Kenyon 256 Elizabeth Bishop 45 Edmund Kamau Brathwaite 62 Darwin, Charles 128, 321 Galway Kinnell 258 Harlem Gallery (Melvin Tolson) Drafts 136 Davidson, Donald 119–120, 165, Ann Lauterbach 273 200 female voice/language 160 174–175 lyric poetry 294 lyric poetry 294 long and serial poetry 286 Davidson, Michael 120–121, 124, Peter Meinke 311 narrative poetry 334, 337 objectivist poetry 351 443 Samuel Menashe 313 “Teach Us to Number Our duration 409 Davies, Alan 78 Sharon Olds 355 Days” 491–492 Dutton, Paul 78 Davies, Kevin 78 Adrienne Rich 421 “The Dover Bitch” (Anthony Hecht) “Dying Man” (Theodore Roethke) Davis, Ulysses 389 Theodore Roethke 429 211 294 Dawson, Fielding 365 Mary Jo Salter 438 Dowland, John 302 Dylan, Bob 257 Dawson, Leven 122 May Swenson 485 Drafts (Rachel Blau Duplessis) 136, “The Day Lady Died” (Frank diction 539g 286 E O’Hara) 121–122 Digges, Deborah 127–128 dramatic monologue 539g Eady, Cornelius 144–145 Lunch Poems (Frank O’Hara) dimeter 539g The Dream of a Common Language “East Coker” (T. S. Eliot) 170 292 Di Palma, Ray 78, 269 (Adrienne Rich) xv, 421, 422 East-West House 267 narrative poetry 336–337 di Prima, Diane xi, 128–129 The Dream Songs (John Berryman) Eberhart, Richard 145 Frank O’Hara 354 Amiri Baraka 30 136–138, 337 “Love Calls Us to the Things of “The Death of the Ball Turret Beat poetry 33–35 Dreiser, Theodore xvii, 301 This World” (Richard Wilbur) Gunner” (Randall Jarrell) 122, female voice/language 159 “The Dry Salvages” (T. S. Eliot) 287 242, 512 Loba 280–281 149, 170 Paterson (William Carlos de Burgos, Julia 85 long and serial poetry 286 DuBois, W. E. B. 202, 215, 280 Williams) 372 deconstruction 25 San Francisco Renaissance 443 dub poetry 83–84 Ruth Stone 479 deep image poetry 122–125 Discrete Series (George Oppen) Duchamp, Marcel xvii, 154, 484, Economou, George 145–146 Robert Bly 56 129–131 486 deep image poetry 124 George Economou 145 ars poeticas 19 Duffy, William 387 ethnopoetics 152 Robert Kelly 255 long and serial poetry 286 Dugan, Alan 138–139, 163 European poetic influences William Matthews 302 George Oppen 359–360 Duhamel, Denise 139 155 poetry and translation 387 poetry presses 400 Duino Elegies (Rainer Maria Rilke) 259 Rochelle Owens 365 Jerome Rothenberg 432 “Dissonance Royal Traveler” Dunbar, Paul Lawrence 226 Edson, Russell 51, 146–147 Louis Simpson 459 (Barbara Guest) 191 Duncan, Robert x, xi, 139–141 Edwards, Jonathan 132 Gerald Stern 476 Divers Press 50 abstract expressionism 3 Eigner, Larry x, 147 surrealism 484 Divine Comedy (Dante) Helen Adam 4 Black Mountain school 51 “The Teeth Mother Naked at The Cantos (Ezra Pound) 80 After Lorca (Jack Spicer) 5 Canadian poetic influences 77 Last” (Robert Bly) 493 The Changing Light at Sandover Black Mountain school 51–53 Cid Corman 101 Nancy Willard 524 (James Merrill) 89 David Bromige 65 Theodore Enslin 149 Deepstep Come Shining (C. D. John Ciardi 91 Canadian poetic influences 77 Einstein, Albert xvi, 51 Wright) 529 Alfred Corn 102 Cid Corman 101 Ekelof, Gunnar 155 de Kooning, Willem 262, 353 Flow Chart (John Ashbery) 166 Robert Creeley 107 Élaurd, Paul 484 DeMille, Cecil B. xvii Randall Jarrell 242 Beverly Dahlen 119 Electronic Poetry Center (EPC) 396 denotation 539g long and serial poetry 285 Michael Davidson 120 elegy 294, 540g “The Deodand” (Anthony Hecht) Ezra Pound 406 William Everson 156 “Elegy for Jane” (Theodore Roethke) 211 “Diving Into the Wreck” (Adrienne Thom Gunn 192 294 De Reryn Natura (Lucretuis) 284 Rich) xviii, 131 Kenneth Irby 238 Eliot, George 474 Derksen, Jeff 78 Dobyns, Stephen ix, 131–132, 403 Joanne Kyger 267 Eliot, T. S. vii, viii, ix, 147–149 “Design” (Robert Frost) 125–126 Dodge Poetry Foundation 396 Denise Levertov 276 “A” (Louis Zukofsky) 1 Desnos, Robert 154–155, 484 The Dolphin, (Robert Lowell) 290, long and serial poetry 286 Conrad Aiken 6, 7 the Dial vii, 397, 470, 515 294 John Matthias 303 ars poeticas 18, 19 Diamond, Stanley 152 Donne, John The Maximus Poems (Charles W. H. Auden 27 DIASTEXT 115 Joseph Brodsky 64 Olson) 306 R. P. Blackmur 54 556 INDEX

Eliot, T. S. (continued) Derek Walcott 508 ethnopoetics xi, 151–153 Adrienne Rich 421–422 Joseph Brodsky 64 war and antiwar poetry 512 European poetic influences Anne Sexton 453–455 Amy Clampitt 91, 92 The Waste Land 515–517 155 “Snapshots of a Daughter-in- confessional poetry 98 William Carlos Williams 526 poetry and translation 387 law” (Adrienne Rich) Hart Crane 104–105 Yvor Winters 528 poetry in performance 391, 462–463 e. e. cummings 112 Ellerman, Winifred 325 393 May Swenson 485–486 The Dream Songs (John Elliot, William Yandell 174 Jerome Rothenberg 432, 433 Sara Teasdale 492 Berryman) 137 ellipsis 540g The Tablets (Armand feminine ending 540g Richard Eberhart 145 Ellison, Ralph 204 Schwerner) 487 The Feminine Mystique (Betty European poetic influences Éluard, Paul 154–155 Nathaniel Tarn 489 Friedman) 158 153–155 Emerson, Ralph Waldo xvi European poetic influences vii, viii, feminine rhyme 540g Kenneth Fearing 157 Conrad Aiken 6 153–156 The Feminist Poetry Movement (Kim Lawrence Ferlinghetti 161 Black Mountain school 51 Mina Loy 291 Whitehead) 159 “The Fish” (Marianne Moore) Philip Booth 59 poetry in performance 391 Fenollosa, Ernest 386 164 William Bronk 65 “Somewhere I have never trav- Ferguson, Deanna 78 Four Quartets 170–171 Deborah Diggs 128 elled” (e. e. cummings) 466 Ferlinghetti, Lawrence xi, 161–162 Robert Frost 171–172 T. S. Eliot 148, 149 Wallace Stevens 478 Beat poetry 34 Fugitive/Agrarian school 175 Edward Foster 168 visual poetry 503 A Coney Island of the Mind Louise Glück 185 Robert Frost 171 William Carlos Williams 526 97–98 Jorie Graham 186 Denise Levertov 277 James Wright 531 Robert Duncan 140 Debora Greger 187 lyric poetry 294 Evergreen Review (journal) 398, 443 Allen Ginsberg 181 Ramon Guthrie 195 Pieces (Robert Creeley) 377 Everson, William (Brother Jack Kerouac 257 Donald Hall 198 prosody and free verse 410 Antoninus) viii, 156, 444, 469 Lunch Poems (Frank O’Hara) Harlem Gallery (Melvin Tolson) Edwin Arlington Robinson the Exile (journal) 537 292 201 426 “expansive poetry” 374 David Meltzer 312 Anthony Hecht 210 “Stopping by Woods on a An Explanation of America (Robert Mexico City Blues (Jack Kerouac) imagist school 233 Snowy Evening” (Robert Pinsky) 379 318 Josephine Jacobsen 240 Frost) 480 Exquisite Corpse: A Journal of Letters Frank O’Hara 354 Donald Justice 250 Richard Wilbur 524 and Life 94 poetry presses 401 Kaddish (Allen Ginsberg) 253 end rhyme 540g eye rhyme 540g Jerome Rothenberg 432 Yusef Komunyakaa 263 end-stopped 540g e-zine 400. See also cyberpoetry Ed Sanders 441 Li-Young Lee 274 Engel, Bernard 145 San Francisco Renaissance Denise Levertov 276 enjambment 409–410, 540g F 443, 444 “The Love Song of J. Alfred The Enormous Room (e. e. cum- “Fair Realism” (Barbara Guest) 191 Jack Spicer 469 Prufrock” 288 mings) 112, 113 “A Fan Sketched with Silver Egrets” Ferry, David 404 Robert Lowell 289–290 Enright, D. J. 97 (David St. John) 471–472 “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste” (Ezra Walter Lowenfels 291 Enslin, Theodore x, 149–150 Fast Speaking Woman (Anne Pound) 234, 406 lyric poetry 294 Black Mountain school 51 Waldman) 152, 509 Field Guide (Robert Hass) 205, 206 Archibald MacLeish 297 Canadian poetic influences 77 Faulkner, William 263 the Fifties (journal) 56, 387 Maximum Security Ward (Ramon Frank Samperi 438 Faust, Clive 438 Fighting Terms (Thom Gunn) 192 Guthrie) 304 Louis Zukofsky 538 Favorite Poem Project 380, 394 Figueroa, José Angel 85 “Miniver Cheevy” (Edwin environmentalism 40, 41, 464 Fearing, Kenneth x, 157–158 figurative language 540g Arlington) 320 epic 284, 285, 334, 540g Federal Writers Project 419 Finch, Annie Ridley Crane modernism 321–323 “Epigenethlion: First Child” (Donald Feeling as a Foreign Language (Alice 162–163 Marianne Moore 325 Hall) 198 Fulton) 177 cyberpoetry 116 narrative poetry 335, 337 epigram 540g Feldman, Irving 158, 294, 408 New Formalism 341 New Formalism 339 epithet 540g Felt (Alice Fulton) 177 Finkel, Donald 163 objectivist poetry 349 Erickson, Darlene Williams 164 female voice and language xiii, xv, Fir-Flower Tablets (Amy Lowell) “Ode to the Confederate Dead” Ernst, K. S. 504, 505 xviii, 158–161 288, 386 (Allen Tate) 352 Ernst, Max 484 April Bernard 38 “The Fish” (Elizabeth Bishop) 46, Pieces (Robert Creeley) Errand upon Which We Came Olga Broumas 69 164 377–378 (Stephanie Strickland) 482 Theresa Hak Kyung Cha “The Fish” (Marianne Moore) poetry in performance 391 Eshleman, Clayton 150–151 88–89 164–165 Ezra Pound 405 Wanda Coleman 96 Lucille Clifton 93–94 Fisk University 496 Mark Rudman 433 deep image poetry 124 confessional poetry 98 Fitzgerald, F. Scott 233 Gjertrud Schnackenberg 446 ethnopoetics 153 Diane di Prima 128 Fitzgerald, Robert 438 Delmore Schwartz 447, 448 European poetic influences Drafts (Rachel Blau Duplessis) Fletcher, John Gould 165–166, 174 Anne Sexton 454 155 136 Flint, F. S. W. D. Snodgrass 463 Language school 269 Denise Duhamel 139 European poetic influences “Somewhere I have Never poetry journals 399 Rachel Blau Duplessis 142 153 Travelled” (e. e. cummings) Espada, Martín 85, 151 Annie Finch 162 H. D. 208 466 “Essay on Psychiatrists” (Robert Alice Fulton 176 imagist school 233 Jack Spicer 470 Pinsky) 379 Marilyn Hacker 196 poetry anthologies 388 Spring and All (William Carlos Estes, Angie 403 Linda Hogan 216 Floating Bear (journal) 34, 128, 398 Williams) 470 Esteves, Sandra Maria 85 Susan Howe 224 Flow Chart (John Ashbery) 25, Gertrude Stein 475 Etcetera: The Unpublished Poems of e. Ann Lauterbach 273 166–167 Sun (Michael Palmer) 483 e. cummings (e. e. cummings) 113 Marge Piercy 378 Fluxus 269 INDEX 557

Folsom, Ed xv Richard Eberhart 145 Ginsberg, Allen x, xi, xiii, xviii, Goldbarth, Albert 185–186 foot 540g Donald Finkel 163 181–183 The Golden Bough (James Frazier) “For a Fatherless Son” (Sylvia Plath) Jeanne Robert Foster 170 Amiri Baraka 30 516 382 imagist school 233 Beat poetry 33–35 The Golden Gate (Vikram Seth) 285, Forché, Carolyn 168, 199, 403 Josephine Jacobsen 240 Canadian poetic influences 77 286, 340 Ford, Ford Madox 169, 233 Randall Jarrell 242 Tom Clark 93 Golden State (Frank Bidart) 44 For Lizzie and Harriet (Robert Jane Kenyon 256 A Coney Island of the Mind Golding, Arthur 284 Lowell) 290, 294 Kenneth Koch 262 (Lawrence Ferlinghetti) 97 Gomringer, Eugen 504 formalism. See New Formalism Maxine Kumin 265 confessional poetry 98, 99 “The Gone Years” (Alice Fulton) Forms of Expansion: Recent Long Poems Robert Lowell 289 Gregory Corso 103 177 by Women (Lynn Keller) 286 lyric poetry 294, 295 Hart Crane 104 “Goodbye Christ” (Langston “For Robert Kennedy” (Al Purdy) Robert McDowell 309 Victor Hernández Cruz 109 Hughes) 227 412 “Mending Wall” 313–314 Diane di Prima 128 Goodison, Lorna 82 For the Time Being (W. H. Auden) 28 James Merrill 314 Robert Duncan 140 Goodman, Mitchell 276 “For the Union Dead” (Robert Thylias Moss 329 European poetic influences Goodman, Paul 297, 361 Lowell) 167–168, 290 narrative poetry 335 153 Graffiti (Ramon Guthrie) 195 Foster, Edward 51, 168–169, 399 poetry anthologies 389 Lawrence Ferlinghetti 161 Graham, Jorie 186–187 Foster, Jeanne Robert vii, 169–170 Ezra Pound 405 Alice Fulton 177 Deborah Diggs 128 Four Horsemen 78 prosody and free verse 408 Albert Goldbarth 186 Mark Jarman 241 Four Quartets (T. S. Eliot) “The Road Not Taken” Allen Grossman 189, 190 lyric poetry 294 170–171 425–426 Howl 224–225 New Formalism 340 “Four Winds” (April Bernard) 38 Mary Jo Salter 438 Kaddish 252–253 Grahn, Judy 159 France 466 Gary Soto 468 Bob Kaufman 253 Graves, Robert xvii, 174, 423 Frank, James M. 174 William Stafford 472 Jack Kerouac 257 Gray, Richard xiv Frank, Waldo 106 “Stopping by Woods on a Loba (Diane di Prima) 280 Great Balls of Fire (Ron Padgett) Franklin, Jeffrey 404 Snowy Evening” 479–480 Ron Loewinsohn 281 367 Fraser, Kathleen xi, xiii, 171 Richard Wilbur 522 Robert Lowell 290 Great Migration 202 Drafts (Rachel Blau Duplessis) James Wright 531 lyric poetry 294 Greece, ancient 388 136 Frost Medal 403 The Maximus Poems (Charles Greger, Debora 187–188 female voice/language 160 The Fugitive (journal) 174, 398, Olson) 306 Gregg, Linda 188–189 poetry journals 399 490 Michael McClure 308 Grenier, Robert 189 Free Lance (journal) 25 Fugitive/Agrarian school viii–ix, Mexico City Blues (Jack Kerouac) Language school 269–270 free verse x, 540g. See also prosody 174–176 318 poetry presses 401 and free verse David Antin 13 Frank O’Hara 355 Leslie Scalapino 445 Diane di Prima 129 Donald Davidson 119 poetry in performance 392 Barrett Watten 518 Edward Dorn 133 Anthony Hecht 210 poetry institutions 395 “Grief” (C. K. Williams) 525 Sam Hamill 199 poetry journals 398 poetry presses 401 Grimké, Angelina Weld 203 Harlem Gallery (Melvin Tolson) John Crowe Ransom 415 poetry prizes 403 Grossman, Allen xiii, 189–190 201 Laura Riding 422 Ezra Pound 407 Grove Press 318, 401 imagist school 234 Allen Tate 490 prosody and free verse 409 Grumman, Bob 264 John Logan 282 Robert Penn Warren 514 Ed Sanders 441 Guest, Barbara xi, 190–192 Pat Mora 327 the Fugs 441 San Francisco Renaissance abstract expressionism 3 Anne Sexton 454 The Fuhrer Bunker (W. D. Snodgrass) 443–445 Kathleen Fraser 171 Wallace Stevens 478 463 James Schuyler 447 Kenneth Koch 262 John Wieners 522 Fulton, Alice 176–177 Gary Snyder 464 New York school 341 free verse (definition) 408–409 The Future of Music: Credo (John Anne Waldman 509 Frank O’Hara 353 Freud, Sigmund xvii Cage) 75 William Carlos Williams 528 “Guido’s Relations” (Ezra Pound) ars poeticas 18 futurists 291 Gioia, Dana xii, 183–184 385 Beverly Dahlen 119 Robert Frost 173 Guillen, Nicolas 85 deep image poetry 124 G Mark Jarman 241 Gunn, Thom 192–193 Deborah Diggs 128 Galeano, Eduardo 151 Weldon Kees 254 Edgar Bowers 60 modernism 321, 322 Gallagher, Tess 71, 178–179 Howard Moss 328 Paterson (William Carlos Freytag-Loringhoven, Else von 504 Ganick, Peter 116 New Formalism 339–341 Williams) 373 Friedman, Betty 158 Garbage (A. R. Ammons) poetry institutions 394 Yvor Winters 528 Friedman, Ed 365 179–180 Giovanni, Nikki xiii, 184–185 Gunslinger (Edward Dorn) Frierson, William 174 Garcia, Federico 153 Black Arts movement 47, 48 193–195 From the Other Side of the Century Garvey, Marcus 202 female voice/language 160 Guston, Philip 110 (Douglas Messerli) 390 Gasoline (Gregory Corso) 161 Sonia Sanchez 439 Guthrie, Ramon 195, 304 Frost, Robert viii–x, xiv, xvii, “Gay Chaps at the Bar” (Gwendolyn Glück, Louise 185 171–174 Brooks) 294 Discrete Series (George Oppen) H A. R. Ammons 9 Geography and Plays (Gertrude 129 Haavikko, Paavo 155 Philip Booth 59 Stein) 269, 474 Stephen Dobyns 132 Habermas, Jurgen 321 Joseph Brodsky 64 Geyzel, Leonard 478 female voice/language 159 Hacker, Marilyn xiii, 196, 295, Hart Crane 104 Ghalib, Mirza 453 George Oppen 359 341 “Design” 125–126 Gilbert, Jack 180–181 poetry prizes 403 Hadas, Rachel 197, 341 The Dream Songs (John Gilbert, Sandra xiii, 181, 403 Goat Dances: Poems and Prose (Ron haiku 540g Berryman) 137 Gillespie, Abraham Lincoln 504 Loewinsohn) 282 half rhyme 540g 558 INDEX

Hall, Donald 197–198 Mary Jo Salter 438 “Helen” (H. D.) 209 narrative poetry 335 Tom Clark 92 Wallace Stevens 477 Helen in Egypt (H. D.) 209–210, Howard Nemerov 338 deep image poetry 124 Ruth Stone 479 212–213, 337 Hopkins, Gerard Manley “The Fish” (Marianne Moore) John Wheelwright 521 Heller, Michael xiii, 213–214 Caribbean poetic influences 164 Richard Wilbur 522 “Bialystok Stanzas” 43–44 84 Jane Kenyon 256 Haskell, Dennis 122–125 objectivist poetry 351 Joseph Ceravolo 87 Brad Leithauser 275 Hass, Robert 205–207 Charles Reznikoff 420 Amy Clampitt 91 Archibald MacLeish 297 European poetic influences Hellman, Lillian 95 Deborah Diggs 127–128 Thomas McGrath 309 155 Helmes, Scott 504 Richard Eberhart 145 “Poetry” (Marianne Moore) John Matthias 303 Hemingway, Ernest 468, 493 Brad Leithauser 275 385 Robert Pinsky 379 Hemphill, Essex 286 modernism 322 poetry anthologies 389 poetry prizes 403 “Heritage” (Countee Cullen) 203, Horace 113 poetry prizes 403 Yvor Winters 528 214–215 Horan, Robert 287 David Rosenberg 431 Hatlen, Burton 143 heroic couplet 540g House Un-American Activities Louis Simpson 459 Hawk’s Well Press 432 “Heroic Stages” (Barbara Guest) Committee 309. See also William Stafford 472 Hayden, Robert xii, 207–208 191 McCarthy, Joseph, and Rosmarie Waldrop 511 Black Arts movement 47 Herrick, Robert 113 McCarthyism Hamill, Sam 199 Rita Dove 134 Hesiod 285, 305–306 “Housewife” (Anne Sexton) “Hamlet” (T. S. Eliot) 18 Michael S. Harper 204 hexameter 540g 220–221 Hamsun, Knut 468 Thylias Moss 329 Higgins, Dick 269 Housman, A. E. 275 Hands Collected (Simon Perchik) narrative poetry 337 Hill, Crag 264 Howard, Richard 221–222 375 “Those Winter Sundays” 495 Hillman, James 150 Alfred Corn 102 Hard Facts (Amiri Baraka) 31 H. D. (Hilda Doolittle) vii, viii, xiii, hip-hop 83–85, 392 Molly Peacock 374 Hardwick, Elizabeth 167 208–210 Hirsch, Edward ix, 215–216 surrealism 485 Hardy, Barbara 118 Robert Duncan 140 Hirsch, Sidney Mttron 174 How Does a Poem Mean? (John Hardy, Thomas 266, 335, 531 female voice/language 158–160 Hispanic-American poets xii–xiii. Ciardi) 91 Harjo, Joy 35, 199–200, 424 Helen in Egypt 212–213 See also Nuyorican Poets’ Howe, Fanny xi, 222–223, 365 Harlem Gallery (Melvin Tolson) imagist school 232–234 Café/Nuyorican Poetry Movement Howe, Florence 160 xviii, 200–201, 497 Loba (Diane di Prima) 280 Jimmy Santiago Baca 29 Howe, Susan xi, 223–224 Harlem Renaissance 201–204 Amy Lowell 288–289 Rafael Campo 76 Articulation of Sound Forms in Black Arts movement 48 lyric poetry 294 Lorna Dee Cervantes 87–88 Time 21–22 Gwendolyn Brooks 67 modernism 321–323 Judith Ortiz Cofer 95 Canadian poetic influences 78 Sterling Brown 70 Marianne Moore 325 Victor Hernández Cruz Drafts (Rachel Blau Duplessis) Countee Cullen 111 narrative poetry 334, 337 109–110 136 “Heritage” (Countee Cullen) poetry anthologies 388 Martín Espada 151 European poetic influences 214 Ezra Pound 405 Alberto Ríos 424–425 154 Langston Hughes 226 Adrienne Rich 421 Gary Soto 468–469 female voice/language 160 James Weldon Johnson 245 The Structure of Rime (Robert History (Robert Lowell) 290, The Maximus Poems (Charles Claude McKay 310 Duncan) 482 294–295 Olson) 306 Montage of a Dream Deferred The Heads of the Town up to the A History of My Heart (Robert Maureen Owen 365 (Langston Hughes) 323–324 Aether (Jack Spicer) 286, 469 Pinsky) 380 poetry institutions 394 “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” Heaney, Seamus 173 Hoffman, Daniel 216, 289 Leslie Scalapino 445 (Langston Hughes) 338 Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad) Hogan, Linda 216–217 HOW (ever) (journal) 399 poetry journals 398 xvii Holan, Vladimir 150 Howl (Allen Ginsberg) xviii, Melvin Tolson 496 Heart’s Needle (W. D. Snodgrass) Hölderlin, Friedrich 124 224–225 Jean Toomer 497 13, 463 Holiday, Billie 121 Beat poetry 33–35 Harlem Writers’ Guild 12 Hecht, Anthony 210–211 Hollander, John 217–218 A Coney Island of the Mind Harmonium (Wallace Stevens) John Hollander 217 W. H. Auden 27 (Lawrence Ferlinghetti) 97 477–478, 483 Mexico City Blues (Jack Kerouac) New Formalism 339, 340 confessional poetry 99 Harper, Michael S. 144, 204–205, 318 visual poetry 502, 504 Lawrence Ferlinghetti 161 226 New Formalism 339, 340 Hollo, Anselm 155, 218 Allen Ginsberg 181–183 Harryman, Carla xi, 160, 205, 269 John Updike 499 Holman, Bob 218–219 Kaddish (Allen Ginsberg) Hartley, Marsden 106, 154, 504 Heisenberg, Werner xvi, 51 Holmes, John Clellon 32 252–253 Hartman, Charles 115, 409 Hejinian, Lyn xi, xiii, 211–212 Holocaust 268, 418 Loba (Diane di Prima) 280 Harvard Aesthetes 521 ars poeticas 21 Holocaust (Charles Reznikoff) Mexico City Blues (Jack Kerouac) Harvard University Articulation of Sound Forms in 219–220, 350 318 Conrad Aiken 6 Time (Susan Howe) 21 Holub, Miroslav 102 poetry in performance 392 Bruce Andrews 11 Canadian poetic influences 78 The Holy Forest (Robin Blaser) 286 poetry journals 398 John Ashbery 23, 24 female voice/language 160–161 Homage to Creeley (Jack Spicer) poetry presses 401 April Bernard 38 Susan Howe 223 286, 469 San Francisco Renaissance John Berryman 42 Language school 269–270 Homage to Mistress Bradstreet (John 443–444 Elizabeth Bishop 45 “Poetry” (Marianne Moore) Berryman) 41 How to Paint Sunlight (Lawrence Robert Bly 56 385 The Homecoming Singer (Jay Wright) Ferlinghetti) 162 Robert Grenier 189 poetry presses 401 532 “How to Swing Those Obbligatos Donald Hall 197 Leslie Scalapino 445 Homer Around” (Alice Fulton) 177 “In Just-Spring” (e. e. cum- Gertrude Stein 474 The Cantos (Ezra Pound) 79 Hudgins, Andrew 341 mings) 236 Barrett Watten 518 Flow Chart (John Ashbery) 166 Hughes, Howard 193, 194 INDEX 559

Hughes, Langston xii, xviii, image 540g “In Memory of Sigmund Freud” (W. The Dream Songs (John 226–228 Image-Nation (Robin Blaser) 55–56 H. Auden) 294 Berryman) 137 Russell Atkins 25 Imagist Anthology 1930 (Glenn “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” (W. H. European poetic influences Amiri Baraka 30 Hughes and Ford Maddox Ford, Auden) 294, 423 155 Gwendolyn Brooks 67 eds.) 235 “The Instruction Manual” (John Fugitive/Agrarian school 176 Sterling Brown 70 Imagistes, Des (Ezra Pound) 388 Ashbery) 25 Stanley Kunitz 266 Caribbean poetic influences 85 imagist school (imagism) vii, xv, interactive poems 116 William Logan 283 Countee Cullen 111 xvii, 232–235 internal rhyme 540g Robert Lowell 289–290 Rita Dove 134 ars poeticas 18–19 international modernism vii–viii narrative poetry 335 European poetic influences W. H. Auden 27 Internet 392 John Crowe Ransom 415 155 Beat poetry 32, 33 Interrogations at Noon (Dana Gioia) Delmore Schwartz 447 Harlem Renaissance 201, 203 Black Mountain school 51 184 Allen Tate 490 Robert Hayden 207 Robert Bly 56 In the American Tree (Ron Silliman) war and antiwar poetry 512 Bob Kaufman 253 Kay Boyle 61 xi, 271, 390 Richard Wilbur 523 Vachel Lindsay 280 “Burning the Small Dead” (Gary In the Builded Place (Michael Heller) jazz lyric poetry 294, 295 Snyder) 72 214 Caribbean poetic influences Claude McKay 311 confessional poetry 99 In the Fourth World (Sandra Gilbert) 84–85 Montage of a Dream Deferred Hart Crane 105 181 Clark Coolidge 100 323–324 Adelaide Crapsey 107 “In the Naked Bed in Plato’s Cave” Jayne Cortez 104 Thylias Moss 329 Stephen Dunn 141 (Delmore Schwartz) 448 The Crystal Text (Clark “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” European poetic influences In the Outer Dark: Poems (Stanley Coolidge) 110 337–338 153 Plumly) 383 “The Day Lady Died” (Frank poetry anthologies 389 “The Fish” (Marianne Moore) “In the Tradition” (Amiri Baraka) O’Hara) 121 poetry in performance 391 164 31 Cornelius Eady 144 poetry journals 398 H. D. 208–210 “In the Waiting Room” (Elizabeth Donald Finkel 163 Lorenzo Thomas 494 Helen in Egypt (H. D.) 212 Bishop) 237–238 Howl (Allen Ginsberg) 224 Hughes, Ted 258, 268, 382 “In Just-Spring” (e. e. cum- Iovis (Anne Waldman) 509–510 Langston Hughes 226 “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” (Ezra mings) 236 Iowa Writers Workshop. See Bob Kaufman 254 Pound) vii, 320, 405, 512 The Journals (Paul Blackburn) University of Iowa Writers Language school 269 Hugo, Richard 228–229, 260 248 Workshop The Last Poets 273 Hulme, T. E. 148, 153, 233, 234 Amy Lowell 288 I Praise My Destroyer (Diane David Lehman 275 Human Wishes (Robert Hass) 206 lyric poetry 294 Ackerman) 4 long and serial poetry 286 Huncke, Herbert 33 modernism 321 Irby, Kenneth 238–239 Clarence Major 300 “Hunting Is Not Those Heads on the Marianne Moore 325 Isherwood, Christopher 27, 331 William Matthews 303 Wall” (Amiri Baraka) 384 “My Life by Water” (Lorine Mexico City Blues (Jack Kerouac) Hurston, Zora Neale 202, 323 Niedecker) 332–333 J 317, 318 Huth, G. 264 Paterson (William Carlos Jabès, Edmond 155 Montage of a Dream Deferred Huxley, Aldous 45, 440 Williams) 372 Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied (Langston Hughes) 323 Hymes, Dell 152 Robert Pinsky 379 Poetics (Boulder, Colorado) narrative poetry 336 hymn meter 446 poetry and translation 386 Clark Coolidge 100 Kenneth Patchen 371–372 hyperbole 540g poetry journals 397 Allen Ginsberg 182 David Rosenberg 431 hypertext 115–116, 481, 482 Ezra Pound 405 Joanne Kyger 267 Lorenzo Thomas 494 “Psalm” (George Oppen) 411 poetry institutions 395 “We Real Cool” (Gwendolyn I Frank Samperi 439 Anne Waldman 509 Brooks) 519–520 iamb 540g Jean Toomer 498 Jack Straw’s Castle (Thom Gunn) Jeffers, Robinson viii, 244–245 iambic pentameter 408, 540g Michael Waters 517 192–193 William Everson 156 “The Idea of Order at Key West” William Carlos Williams 526 Jacob, Max 154, 155 Robert McDowell 309 (Wallace Stevens) 230, 295 Yvor Winters 528 Jacobsen, Josephine 240 Edna St. Vincent Millay 319 Ideas of Order (Wallace Stevens) James Wright 531 The Jacob’s Ladder (Denise Levertov) narrative poetry 335 478 John Yau 534 241 Mary Oliver 356 “An Idle Visitation” (Edward Dorn) immigration xvi James, Henry 130, 148, 474 Al Purdy 412 194 improvisatory poetry 179–180 James, William 474 “The Purse Seine” 412–413 I Don’t Have Any Paper So Shut Up, “In a Prominent Bar in Secaucus James Laughlin Award 402, 403 “Riprap” (Gary Snyder) 425 (or, Social Romanticism) (Bruce One Day” (X. J. Kennedy) 256 Japanese poetry and theater 386 Jefferson, Thomas 80 Andrews) 231 “In a Station of the Metro” (Ezra Jarman, Mark xii, 241–242 Jews and Judaism xiii Ignatow, David 231–232 Pound) xv, 19, 234 Robert Frost 173 Michael Heller 214 objectivist poetry 351 Indiana, Robert 264 lyric poetry 294 Holocaust (Charles Reznikoff) Harvey Shapiro 456 individualism xiv Robert McDowell 308 219–220 Louis Simpson 459 industrialization xv–xvi New Formalism 341 David Lehman 275 “The Teeth Mother Naked At Inez, Colette 235–236 poetry prizes 403 Marge Piercy 378 Last” Robert Bly 493 The Inferno (Dante) 101, 406, 516 Gjertrud Schnackenberg 445 Karl Shapiro 456–457 The Iliad (Homer) 166 infraverbal poetry 264 Jarrell, Randall ix, 242–243 Joan of Arc 88 I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the “In Just-Spring” (e. e. cummings) Elizabeth Bishop 45 Joans, Ted 253 Agrarian Tradition (“Twelve 236–237 John Ciardi 91 John, Augustus 169 Southerners”) 175 Inman, P. 269 confessional poetry 99 John, Gwen 169 “I Love My Love” (Helen Adam) “In Memory of My Feelings” (Frank “The Death of the Ball Turret John Brown’s Body (Stephen Vincent 4–5 O’Hara) 237, 354 Gunner” 122 Benét) 37, 335 560 INDEX

Johnson, Helene 203 Flow Chart (John Ashbery) 166 Koch, Kenneth xi, 262–263 The Alphabet (Ron Silliman) 9 Johnson, James Weldon xii, Jane Kenyon 256 abstract expressionism 3 Bruce Andrews 11 245–246 Amy Lowell 288 Bill Berkson 37 Rae Armantrout 17 Gwendolyn Brooks 67 Ogden Nash 337 Joseph Ceravolo 86 ars poeticas 20 Sterling Brown 70 William Carlos Williams 526 European poetic influences Articulation of Sound Forms in Harlem Renaissance 202 Kees, Weldon 254–255 153–155 Time (Susan Howe) 21 Langston Hughes 227 Keith, Bill 504 Kathleen Fraser 171 John Ashbery 23 poetry anthologies 388–389 Keller, Lynn 136, 286 David Lehman 275 Charles Bernstein 39 Johnson, Linton Kwesi 83 Kelly, Robert 255–256 Harry Mathews 302 David Bromige 64 Johnson, Lyndon 497 deep image poetry 122–124 New York school 341 “The Bus Trip” (Joel Johnson, Peter 147, 403 George Economou 145 Frank O’Hara 353 Oppenheimer) 73 Johnson, Ronald 246 ethnopoetics 152 poetry prizes 404 Canadian poetic influences “A” (Louis Zukofsky) 1 Gerrit Lansing 272 surrealism 485 77 Ark 15–16 objectivist poetry 351 Koethke, John 404 Clark Coolidge 100 long and serial poetry 285 poetry anthologies 390 Komunyakaa, Yusef 263–264 The Crystal Text (Clark visual poetry 504 Jerome Rothenberg 432 poetry institutions 394 Coolidge) 110 Louis Zukofsky 538 Kempton, Karl 504 poetry prizes 403 Beverly Dahlen 119 Johnson, Stanley 174 Kendall, Robert 116 war and antiwar poetry 513 Michael Davidson 120 Jonas, Stephen 272 Kennedy, X. J. 256, 403, 511 Kootenay School of Writing 78 Rachel Blau Duplessis 142 Jones, David 303 Kenner, Hugh 115, 164–165, 326 Kostelanetz, Richard 264, 504 Larry Eigner 147 Jones, LeRoi. See Baraka, Amiri Kenyon, Jane 197, 198, 256–257 Kreymborg, Alfred 397 Alice Fulton 176 Jonson, Ben 113 Kenyon College ix, 210, 289 Kroetsch, Robert 76 Robert Grenier 189 Jordan, Judy 403 the Kenyon Review (journal) 196, Kumin, Maxine 264–266 Carla Harryman 205 Jordan, June xiii, 247–248 398 confessional poetry 98–100 Lyn Hejinian 211 Black Arts movement 47 Kerouac, Jack xi, 257–258 poetry institutions 394 Anselm Hollo 218 female voice/language 160 Beat poetry 32, 33, 35 Anne Sexton 453 Fanny Howe 222 Joy Harjo 199 Tom Clark 93 Ruth Stone 479 Susan Howe 223 Audre Lorde 286 A Coney Island of the Mind Kunitz, Stanley 266–267 I Don’t Have Any Paper So Shut The Journals (Paul Blackburn) 50, (Lawrence Ferlinghetti) 97 confessional poetry 98, 99 Up, (or, Social Romanticism) 51, 248–250, 286 Gregory Corso 103 Kathleen Fraser 171 (Bruce Andrews) 231 Joyce, James The Crystal Text (Clark Robert Hass 206 Ann Lauterbach 273 “A” (Louis Zukofsky) 1 Coolidge) 110 poetry institutions 395 Jackson Mac Low 298 Articulation of Sound Forms in Diane di Prima 128 poetry prizes 402 The Maximus Poems (Charles Time (Susan Howe) 21 Allen Ginsberg 181–183 Theodore Roethke 429 Olson) 306 Robert Duncan 140 Howl (Allen Ginsberg) 224 Gerald Stern 476 Bernadette Mayer 306 European poetic influences Bob Kaufman 253 Kupferberg, Tuli 441 Marianne Moore 325 154 Joanne Kyger 267 Kyger, Joanne xi, 267 New York school 342 Robert Frost 172 Mexico City Blues 317–318 Michael Palmer 368 Ezra Pound 405 Ron Padgett 367 L Bob Perelman 375 The Waste Land (T. S. Eliot) San Francisco Renaissance 443 Lady Faustus (Diane Ackerman) 4 Nick Piombino 380, 381 516 Gary Snyder 464 “Lady Lazarus” (Sylvia Plath) poetry and translation 387 “July in Washington” (Robert Khlebnikov, Velemir 153–154 268–269, 382 poetry in performance 391, Lowell) 295 Khoury-Ghata, Venus 196 Laforgue, Jules vii, 148, 153, 158 393 Jung, Carl 18, 124, 321, 322 Kimmelman, Burt xiii Lamantia, Philip poetry journals 399 Justice, Donald 250–251 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award 404 Beat poetry 34 poetry presses 401 Marvin Bell 35 Kinnahan, Linda 136 Jack Kerouac 257 “Psalm” (George Oppen) 411 Weldon Kees 254 Kinnell, Galway 258–260 San Francisco Renaissance Joan Retallack 417 lyric poetry 295 Ai 6 443, 444 Kit Robinson 426 Wallace Stevens 478 deep image poetry 124 Jack Spicer 469 Stephen Rodefer 426 Charles Wright 530 Richard Eberhart 145 surrealism 485 Leslie Scalapino 445 Robert Frost 172 Lancelot (Edwin Arlington Ron Silliman 458 K Joy Harjo 199 Robinson) 335, 427 surrealism 485 Kaddish (Allen Ginsberg) 252–253 Thylias Moss 329 Landor’s Poetry (Robert Pinsky) 379 Tender Buttons (Gertrude Stein) confessional poetry 99 Louis Simpson 459 L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E. See also 494 Lawrence Ferlinghetti 161 Kinsella, John 116–117 Language school Rosmarie Waldrop 511 Allen Ginsberg 182 Kipling, Rudyard 426 Bruce Andrews 11 Barrett Watten 518 Kaddish (Allen Ginsberg) 252 Kirp, David L. 76 Charles Bernstein 39 Marjorie Welish 519 Kahlo, Frida 88 Kissinger, Henry 93 Canadian poetic influences 78 C. D. Wright 529 Kahn, Otto 105 Kizer, Carolyn xiii, 260–261 Language school 270–271 John Yau 534 Kallman, Chester 27 Maxine Kumin 265 poetry journals 399 Louis Zukofsky 537, 538 Kandel, Lenore 443 Hilda Morley 328 language, common xv Lannan Literary Awards 404 Kandinski, Wassily xvii poetry institutions 394 The Language of Life (Bill Moyers) Lansing, Gerrit 124, 272 Karenga, Ron 48 Theodore Roethke 429 396 Larkin, Philip 138 Kaufman, Bob xii, 253–254, 443 Klobucar, Andrew 77 the Language school xi–xiii, xvii, Larsen, Nella 215 Keats, John Knight, Etheridge 47, 261–262, 493 269–272 The Last Poets 272–273 Amy Clampitt 91 Knock upon Silence (Carolyn Kizer) “A” (Louis Zukofsky) 1 Latino poets. See Hispanic-American Tom Clark 93 260 After Lorca (Jack Spicer) 5 poets INDEX 561

Laughlin, James 351, 400, 443 linguistics, speculative 116 Joy Harjo 199 Philip Levine 278 Lauterbach, Ann 3, 190, 273–274 Lipman, Joel 504 Alicia Suskin Ostriker 363 John Logan 282 Lawrence, D. H. xvii, 140, 233, Lippman, Walter 6 Adrienne Rich 421–422 lyric poetry 294, 295 430 “Literary Executor” (Rachel Hadas) Lost Generation 233 James Merrill 314 Lax, Robert 438 197 The Lost Son (Theodore Roethke) narrative poetry 335 Layton, Irving 77 “Little Gidding” (T. S. Eliot) 149, 98, 430 New York school 342 Leary, Paris 390 170 Love and Science (Theodore Enslin) Sharon Olds 355 Leaves of Grass (Walt Whitman) Little Magazine 399 150 Paterson (William Carlos ars poeticas 21 Little Review 397 “Love calls us to the things of this Williams) 373 Loba (Diane di Prima) 280 Loba (Diane di Prima) 280–281, world” (Richard Wilbur) Sylvia Plath 381 poetry presses 400 286 287–288, 523 poetry institutions 395 prosody and free verse 409 Locke, Alain 201, 202, 214, 389 The Love Poems of Marichiko John Crowe Ransom 415 Lecture on Nothing (John Cage) 75 Locus Solus (magazine) 302, 342 (Kenneth Rexroth, translator) Theodore Roethke 429 Lectures in America (Gertrude Stein) Loewinsohn, Ron 281–282 386, 419 David Rosenberg 431 270, 475 Logan, John 35, 282–283, 517 “The Love Song of J. Alfred Jerome Rothenberg 432 Lee, Li-Young 274–275 Logan, William 283 Prufrock” (T. S. Eliot) 288 Delmore Schwartz 447 Lee, Ulysses 389 London, England vii, viii T. S. Eliot 148 Anne Sexton 453–454 Lehman, David 3, 275 long and serial poetry 283–286 Four Quartets (T. S. Eliot) 170 William Stafford 472 Leite, George 443 “A” (Louis Zukofsky) 1 Kaddish (Allen Ginsberg) 253 Richard Tillinghast 496 Leiter, Lawrence 210 After Lorca (Jack Spicer) 5 modernism 322 Derek Walcott 508 Leithauser, Brad 275–276, The Alphabet (Ron Silliman) “Ode to the Confederate Dead” war and antiwar poetry 513 339–341 8–9 (Allen Tate) 352 The Waste Land (T. S. Eliot) Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize 403 A. R. Ammons 10 Lowell, Amy 288–289 516 lesbianism 474 Ark (Ronald Johnson) 15–16 Hart Crane 105 Lowenfels, Walter x, 291 “Let America Be America Again” Robin Blaser 55 e. e. cummings 111 Lowney, John 324 (Langston Hughes) 295 The Cantos (Ezra Pound) European poetic influences Loy, Mina vii, xiii, 291–292 Levertov, Denise x, 276–278 79–81 154 female voice/language 158 Black Mountain school 51, 53 Theresa Hak Kyung Cha 88 female voice/language 158 Jerome Rothenberg 432 Canadian poetic influences 77 Drafts (Rachel Blau Duplessis) John Gould Fletcher 165 Gertrude Stein 475 Cid Corman 101 136 imagist school 232–235 surrealism 484 Robert Creeley 107 Helen in Egypt (H. D.) 212 William Logan 283 LSD 193, 194 Robert Duncan 141 Holocaust (Charles Reznikoff) Robert Lowell 289 Lucretuis 284 female voice/language 159 219–220 lyric poetry 294 Lunch Poems (Frank O’Hara) The Jacob’s Ladder 241 Loba (Diane di Prima) 280 Edgar Lee Masters 301 292–293 Carolyn Kizer 260 Maximum Security Ward (Ramon poetry and translation 386 abstract expressionism 3 narrative poetry 337 Guthrie) 304 Lowell, James Russell 167, 289 David Lehman 275 Mary Oliver 356 The Maximus Poems (Charles Lowell, Robert ix, xvii, 289–291 Frank O’Hara 354 “O Taste and See” 364 Olson) 304–306 David Antin 13 poetry presses 401 Robert Peters 376 Mexico City Blues (Jack Kerouac) “The Armadillo” (Elizabeth Luster, Deborah 529 poetry institutions 395 317–318 Bishop) 16, 17 Lux, Thomas 293 poetry presses 400 “My Life by Water” (Lorine John Berryman 41 Lynen, John 125 poetry prizes 403, 404 Niedecker) 332 Frank Bidart 44 lyric poetry 294–295 William Carlos Williams 528 Passages (Robert Duncan) 370 Elizabeth Bishop 45 Maya Angelou 12 Levine, Philip x, 278–279 Paterson (William Carlos Caribbean poetic influences 81 W. H. Auden 27 levy, d. a. 504 Williams) 372–373 confessional poetry 98–100 Louise Bogan 57 Lewis, Wyndham 154, 233, 406 “The Presidents of the United James Dickey 126 David Bromige 65 Life Studies (Robert Lowell) States of America” (Jackson The Dream Songs (John The Changing Light at Sandover confessional poetry 98 Mac Low) 407 Berryman) 137 (James Merrill) 89–90 female voice/language 159 Gertrude Stein 474 European poetic influences Countee Cullen 111 Louise Glück 185 The Structure of Rime (Robert 155 “Daddy” (Sylvia Plath) 118 Kaddish (Allen Ginsberg) 252 Duncan) 482 female voice/language 159 Deborah Digges 127 narrative poetry 336 The Tablets (Armand “The Fish” (Elizabeth Bishop) Edward Foster 168 Anne Sexton 454 Schwerner) 487 164 Kathleen Fraser 171 Light and Dark (William Bronk) 22 Melvin Tolson 497 “For the Union Dead” Alice Fulton 176 Ligorano, Nora 272 Philip Whalen 521 167–168 Jorie Graham 186 Like a Bulwark (Marianne Moore) Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth viii, Kathleen Fraser 171 Barbara Guest 190 326 126, 335 Fugitive/Agrarian school 176 Sam Hamill 199 Lilly, Kuth 397 Look, Stranger (W. H. Auden) 28 Sandra Gilbert 181 Joy Harjo 199 Lindsay, (Nicholas) Vachel viii, Lorca, Federico Louise Glück 185 Mark Jarman 241 279–280 European poetic influences Robert Grenier 189 Robinson Jeffers 244 Stephen Vincent Benét 37 155 Helen in Egypt (H. D.) 212 Gerrit Lansing 272 Langston Hughes 226 Bob Kaufman 253 “In the Waiting Room” “Love calls us to the things of Edgar Lee Masters 301 Pat Mora 327 (Elizabeth Bishop) 237 this world” (Richard Wilbur) Montage of a Dream Deferred Louis Simpson 459 Donald Justice 250 287 (Langston Hughes) 323 Lorde, Audre xiii, 286–287 Kaddish (Allen Ginsberg) 252 Jackson Mac Low 297 poetry in performance 391 Olga Broumas 69 Stanley Kunitz 266 poetry institutions 394 Carl Sandburg 440 female voice/language 160 Brad Leithauser 275 Dave Smith 461 562 INDEX

lyric poetry (continued) Marxism-Leninism McKay, Claude xii, 310–311 Hart Crane 105 Marjorie Welish 519 Amiri Baraka 31 Caribbean poetic influences Countee Cullen 111 Richard Wilbur 522 Charles Bernstein 39 82–85 Robert Hayden 207 Charles Wright 530 Langston Hughes 227 European poetic influences lyric poetry 294 Louis Zukofsky 537 Language school 270 155 poetry prizes 403 modernism 321 Harlem Renaissance 201, 202 Laura Riding 423 M “Mary Desti’s Ass” (Frank O’Hara) poetry journals 398 Miller, Henry 469 Mac Cormack, Karen 78 293 McPhillips, Robert 340 Milosz, Czeslaw 155, 266, 380 MacDonald, Cynthia 374 masculine rhyme 540g Meadowlands (Louise Glück) 185 Milton, John 284, 285, 334 Machado, Antonio 125 Mason, David 341 Meinke, Peter 311–312 Min, Yong Soon 88 Mackey, Nathaniel 296–297 Masters, Edgar Lee viii, 301 Meltzer, David 312–313 Mindwheel (computer game) 380 Edmund Kamau Brathwaite 62 Etheridge Knight 261 Melville, Herman xvi, 224, 290, minimalism 376–378 ethnopoetics 153 Vachel Lindsay 279 357 “Miniver Cheevy” (Edwin Arlington Bob Kaufman 253 “Mending Wall” (Robert Frost) “Memorial to D.C.” (Edna St. Robinson) 320–321 long and serial poetry 286 313 Vincent Millay) 294 “Mr. Pope” (Allan Tate) 175 Harryette Mullen 329 Carl Sandburg 440 Menashe, Samuel 313, 513 Mitchell, Roger xv poetry institutions 394 war and antiwar poetry 512 Mencken, H. L. 175 Mitchell, Susan 404 MacLeish, Archibald 56, 112, 197, Materialism (Jorie Graham) 187 “Mending Wall” (Robert Frost) 262, Mlinko, Ange 529 297 Mathews, Harry 301–302 313–314 modernism vii, xvi, 321–323 Mac Low, Jackson 297–299 European poetic influences men’s movement 56, 57 “A” (Louis Zukofsky) 1 John Cage 75 155 Meredith, William 524 Conrad Aiken 6 cyberpoetry 115 New York school 342 Merrill, James 314–315 Amiri Baraka 31 deep image poetry 123 surrealism 485 W. H. Auden 27 Beat poetry 32 European poetic influences Matisse, Henri 153, 154 The Changing Light at Sandover Stephen Vincent Benét 37 154 Matthews, William 302–303, 403 89–90 R. P. Blackmur 54 Language school 269 Matthias, John 303–304, 379, 528 Cid Corman 101 Robert Bly 56 Toby Olson 358 Maximum Security Ward (Ramon Alfred Corn 102 Philip Booth 59 poetry and translation 387 Guthrie) 195, 304 European poetic influences Kay Boyle 61 poetry in performance 393 The Maximus Poems (Charles Olson) 155 Canadian poetic influences 76 poetry prizes 404 304–306 Debora Greger 187 The Cantos (Ezra Pound) “The Presidents of the United Ark (Ronald Johnson) 15 Rachel Hadas 197 79–81 States of America” 407 Black Mountain school 53 John Hollander 217 Cid Corman 100 MacNeice, Louis 27, 137 Alice Fulton 177 long and serial poetry 284–285 Hart Crane 105 Madhubuti, Haki (Don L. Lee) 47, Gunslinger (Edward Dorn) lyric poetry 294 Robert Creeley 107 299, 439 193 J. D. McClatchy 307 e. e. cummings 111 The Madwoman in the Attic (Sandra Loba (Diane di Prima) 280 narrative poetry 334, 335 Robert Duncan 140 Gilbert and Susan Gubar) 181 Maximum Security Ward (Ramon New Formalism 340 T. S. Eliot 147 Magritte, René 154 Guthrie) 304 poetry prizes 403, 404 Kenneth Fearing 157 Mahler (Jonathan Williams) 526 Charles Olson 356–357 Mary Jo Salter 438 John Gould Fletcher 165 Maillard, Keith 341 Mayakovksy, Vladimir 153–154, Merwin, W. S. 315–317 Four Quartets (T. S. Eliot) 170 “mainstream” tradition xii 354 Olga Broumas 69 Robert Frost 171 Major, Clarence 299–300 Mayer, Bernadette xi, 306–307 Tom Clark 93 Fugitive/Agrarian school 174 The Making of Americans (Gertrude New York school 342 deep image poetry 124 Debora Greger 187 Stein) 269, 400, 474–475 Leslie Scalapino 445 European poetic influences 155 Ramon Guthrie 195 Mallarmé, Stéphane 153–154, 281, surrealism 485 Galway Kinnell 258 Marilyn Hacker 196 536 Lewis Warsh 515 Mary Oliver 356 Helen in Egypt (H. D.) 212 Malroux, Claire 196 McCaffery, Steve 77–78, 115, 154 poetry presses 401 “The Idea of Order at Key Mandelbaum, Allen 300–301 McCarthy, Eugene 290 Gerald Stern 476 West” (Wallace Stevens) 230 Manning, Maurice 403 McCarthy, Joseph, and McCarthyism Mark Strand 480 “In Just-Spring” (e. e. cum- The Man with Night Sweats (Thom Langston Hughes 227 The Messenger (journal) 398 mings) 236 Gunn) 193 Bob Kaufman 253 Metamorphoses (Ovid) 284, 516 “The Love Song of J. Alfred Manzarek, Ray 308 Walter Lowenfels 291 metaphor 540g Prufrock” (T. S. Eliot) 288 Marconi, Guglielmo xvi Thomas McGrath 309 meter 234, 408, 540g Mina Loy 291–292 Marcus, Mordecai 126 McCarthy, Mary 434 metonymy 540g Archibald MacLeish 297 Mariani, Paul 105 McClatchy, J. D. ix, 102, 307–308 Mexico City Blues (Jack Kerouac) Jackson Mac Low 298 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso 153, McClure, Michael xi, 308 317–318 Allen Mandelbaum 300 154 Beat poetry 33 Caribbean poetic influences 84 Harry Mathews 302 Marlis, Stefanie 529 Canadian poetic influences 77 A Coney Island of the Mind “Mending Wall” (Robert Frost) Marquis, Don 361 Jack Kerouac 257 (Lawrence Ferlinghetti) 97 313 Martial 113 poetry in performance 392 The Dream Songs (John W. S. Merwin 315 Martin, John 71, 401 San Francisco Renaissance Berryman) 137 Josephine Miles 318 Martin, Peter 161 443, 444 Jack Kerouac 257 Montage of a Dream Deferred Martin, Stephen-Paul 505 Jack Spicer 469 midwestern poets ix (Langston Hughes) 323 Martin & Meditations on the South McDonald, Gerald 97 Miles, Josephine 318–319, 403 Marianne Moore 325 Valley (Jimmy Santiago Baca) 29 McDowell, Robert xii, 308–309, Millay, Edna St. Vincent viii, Michael Palmer 368, 369 Martz, William 138 401 319–320 “The Pangolin” (Marianne Marvell, Andrew 288, 314 McGrath, Thomas x, 309–310, 493 confessional poetry 98 Moore) 369, 370 INDEX 563

Paterson (William Carlos Robert Frost 172 Holocaust (Charles Reznikoff) poetry presses 401 Williams) 372 Donald Hall 198 219–220 poetry prizes 402 Simon Perchik 374 Richard Howard 221 Mark Jarman 241 Barrett Watten 518 poetry and translation 386 imagist school 233 lyric poetry 294 John Wieners 522 poetry in performance 392 Mina Loy 291–292 J. D. McClatchy 307 Jonathan Williams 525–526 poetry journals 397 modernism 322 Robert McDowell 308–309 new approaches poetry 393 poetry presses 400 “The Pangolin” 369–370 Stanley Plumly 383 The New Black Poetry (Clarence Ezra Pound 405, 407 “Poetry” 384–385 poetry institutions 394 Major, editor) 299 “The Presidents of the United prosody and free verse 409 Alberto Ríos 424 New Criticism ix States of America” (Jackson Gertrude Stein 475 Edwin Arlington Robinson 426 David Antin 13 Mac Low) 407 May Swenson 485 David St. John 471 R. P. Blackmur 54 “The Purse Seine” (Robinson The Waste Land (T. S. Eliot) Dave Smith 461 T. S. Eliot 148 Jeffers) 412 516 Melvin Tolson 497 Fugitive/Agrarian school Carl Rakosi 414 William Carlos Williams 526 C. D. Wright 529 175–176 Kenneth Rexroth 418 Moore, Merrill 174 Nash, Ogden 337 Anthony Hecht 210 Laura Riding 422 “The Moose” (Elizabeth Bishop) 46 National Association for the Robinson Jeffers 244 Edwin Arlington Robinson 426 Mora, Pat 327 Advancement of Colored People Jerome Rothenberg 432 Kit Robinson 426 “More Light! More Light!” (Anthony (NAACP) 202, 245, 398 W. D. Snodgrass 463 Jerome Rothenberg 432 Hecht) 210–211 National Book Award 403 Allen Tate 490 David St. John 471 Morgan, Frederick 403 National Book Critics Circle Award Robert Penn Warren 514 “Somewhere I have never trav- Morley, Hilda 327–328 403 Richard Wilbur 522 elled” (e. e. cummings) 466 Morris, Herbert 404 National Book Foundation 402 The New Criticism (John Crowe Spring and All (William Carlos Morris, Tracie 115 National Poetry Foundation (NPF) Ransom) 175–176 Williams) 470 Moss, Howard 328–329, 447 395, 401 New Directions publishers “Stopping by Woods on a Moss, Thylias 329 “National Poetry Month” 394 William Bronk 66 Snowy Evening” (Robert Mother Teresa 76 Native Americans. See American Paterson (William Carlos Frost) 479 The Mouse (W. D. Snodgrass) 463 Indians Williams) 372 “Sunday Morning” (Wallace Mousli, Béatrice 154 “Naturalism” (Mei-Mei poetry presses 400–401 Stevens) 483 Moyers, Bill 396 Berssenbrugge) 43 San Francisco Renaissance John Taggart 487, 488 “Mulatto” (Langston Hughes) 227 “Nature” (Ralph Waldo Emerson) 443 Melvin Tolson 496 Mullen, Harryette 329–330, 400 480 New England poetry viii, ix, 521 Jean Toomer 498 multimedia 88–89 Navajo songs 387 The New Era in American Poetry visual poetry 503 multimedia poetry 115 Neal, Larry 47 (Louis Untermeyer, ed.) xiv The Waste Land (T. S. Eliot) Murphy, Shiela E. 116 “The Negro Artist and the Racial New Formalism xii, 339–341 515–516 music viii, 75, 418. See also jazz Mountain” (Langston Hughes) John Ashbery 23 William Carlos Williams 526 Muske-Dukes, Carol 330–331 203 Rafael Campo 76 Jay Wright 532 Mussolini, Benito 80 “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” Amy Clampitt 92 Louis Zukofsky 536 “My Last Afternoon with Uncle (Langston Hughes) xviii, 226, J. V. Cunningham 113 Modern Verse in English, 1900–1950 Devereux Winslow” (Robert 227, 295, 337–338 Annie Finch 162 (Allen Tate) 389–390 Lowell) 290, 336 Neitzsche, Frederich 321 Dana Gioia 183 Moly (Thom Gunn) 192 Myles, Eileen 331, 342 Nemerov, Howard 338–339, 403, Marilyn Hacker 196 monometer 540g My Life (Lyn Hejinian) 211 512, 513 Anthony Hecht 210 Monroe, Harriet “My Life by Water” (Lorine neo-objectivism xiii Mark Jarman 241 imagist school 234 Niedecker) 331–333, 344 Neruda, Pablo Etheridge Knight 261 modernism 321 My Life by Water: Collected Poems Elizabeth Bishop 45 William Logan 283 poetry journals 397 (Lorine Niedecker) 331–332 deep image poetry 125 Robert McDowell 308 Carl Sandburg 440 “My Papa’s Waltz” (Theodore Martín Espada) 151 Peter Meinke 311 Montage of a Dream Deferred Roethke) 333 Carolyn Forché 168 Molly Peacock 374 (Langston Hughes) xviii, 227, My Sad Captains (Thom Gunn) 192 Pat Mora 327 poetry presses 401 323–325 “My Second Marriage to My First Simon Perchik 374 Gjertrud Schnackenberg Montale, Eugenio 154 Husband” (Alice Fulton) 177 Adrienne Rich 421 445–446 Montoya, Andres 403 “The Mystery of the Caves” (Michael Louis Simpson 459 Vikram Seth 453 Moore, Harry T. 99 Waters) 518 “The Teeth Mother Naked at William Jay Smith 462 Moore, Marianne vii, viii, xiii, xiv, “The Myth of Blackbirds” (Joy Last” Robert Bly 493 Timothy Steele 473 325–327 Harjo) 200 New American poetry xi Michael Waters 517 After Lorca (Jack Spicer) 5 The New American Poetry: 1945–1960 The New Masses (journal) 398 Russell Atkins 25 N (Donald Allen, ed.) xi New Narrative 241 Elizabeth Bishop 45 Nabokov, Vladimir 335 David Antin 13 “The New Negro” (Alain Locke) Cid Corman 100 Naropa Institute 395. See also Jack Paul Blackburn 50 202 Hart Crane 105 Kerouac School of Disembodied The Jacob’s Ladder (Denise New Negro Poets: USA (Langston Mark Doty 134 Poetics Levertov) 241 Hughes, ed.) 226 Robert Duncan 140 narrative poetry 334–337 Language school 269 The New Poets of England and European poetic influences Diane Ackerman 3 objectivist poetry 349 America (Donald Hall, Robert 154 Ai 6 Joel Oppenheimer 361 Pack, and Louis Simpson, eds.) female voice/language 158 Judith Ortiz Cofer 95 “A Poem for Speculative 389, 390 “The Fish” (Elizabeth Bishop) Edward Dorn 132 Hipsters” (Amiri Baraka) 384 The New Republic 379, 452 164 Martín Espada 151 poetry anthologies 389 The New School 37, 38, 431 564 INDEX

The New Sentence (Ron Silliman) 9, Niedecker, Lorine x, xiii, 344–345 Kenneth Rexroth 418 Oliver, Douglas 346 271, 458 Theodore Enslin 149 Charles Reznikoff 420 Oliver, Mary 327, 356, 424 New Spaces: Poems 1978–1983 (Joel female voice/language 160 Frank Samperi 438 Olsen, Tillie 479 Oppenheimer) 74, 362 Kathleen Fraser 171 Hugh Seidman 450 Olson, Charles x, xiv, 356–358, The New World (Frederick Turner) “My Life by Water” 331–333 Harvey Shapiro 456 469 284 objectivist poetry 349–351 surrealism 485 abstract expressionism 3 New York City vii, viii, xi, xvi. See The Night Abraham Called to the Stars John Taggart 487 Ark (Ronald Johnson) 15 also Nuyorican Poets’ (Robert Bly) 387 Jonathan Williams 525 ars poeticas 20 Café/Nuyorican Poetry Movement Night Inexpressible (Rafael Campo) William Carlos Williams 527 Paul Blackburn 50 Paul Blackburn 50 76 Louis Zukofsky 536 Black Mountain school 51, 53 The Bridge (Hart Crane) 63 “1992” (Alfred Corn) 102 Objectivist Press 400 David Bromige 65 David Ignatow 231–232 95 Poems (e. e. cummings) 113 An “Objectivists” Anthology (Louis “The Bus Trip” (Joel June Jordan 247 No Eyes: Lester Young (David Zukofsky, ed.) 389 Oppenheimer) 72 Richard Kostelanetz 264 Meltzer) 312 Objectivist school 488 Canadian poetic influences 77 poetry in performance 392 Northwest school 260 “O Black and Unknown Bards” Theresa Hak Kyung Cha 88 poetry institutions 395, 396 Norton and Company 390, 401 (James Weldon Johnson) Tom Clark 93 Donald Revell 418 “Notes on the poetry of deep image” 245–246 Cid Corman 101 Ed Sanders 441–442 (Robert Kelley) 124 occasional verse 540g Robert Creeley 107–108 The New Yorker “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” octave 540g Edward Dorn 132 Louise Bogan 57–58 (Wallace Stevens) 345–346 octet 540g Robert Duncan 139 Carolyn Kizer 260 Notley, Alice 346–347 ode 295, 540g Theodore Enslin 149 Sylvia Plath 382 abstract expressionism 3 “Ode to a Dressmaker’s Dummy” Clayton Eshleman 150 John Updike 499 Ted Berrigan 40 (Donald Justice) 295 Alice Fulton 177 New York school xi, xvii, 341–344 European poetic influences “Ode to the Chinaberry Tree” Anselm Hollo 218 abstract expressionism 2, 3 155 (William Applewhite Jr.) 295 Susan Howe 223 Bruce Andrews 11 New York school 342 “Ode to the Confederate Dead” Kenneth Irby 238 David Antin 13 poetry prizes 403 (Allen Tate) 295, 352, 490 Ronald Johnson 246 John Ashbery 23 The Sonnets (Ted Berrigan) 468 Odyssey (Homer) 79–80 Language school 269–270 Bill Berkson 37 “Numbers, Letters” (Amiri Baraka) The Odyssey (Homer) 166, 338 Gerrit Lansing 272 Ted Berrigan 40 347 “Of Being Numerous” (George Denise Levertov 276 Joseph Ceravolo 86 Nuriddin, Jalal 273 Oppen) 352–353 Loba (Diane di Prima) 280 Tom Clark 92 Nuyorican Poets’ Café/Nuyorican “Often I Am Permitted to Return to long and serial poetry 284–285 Andrei Codrescu 94 Poetry Movement a Meadow” (Robert Duncan) Maximum Security Ward (Ramon Clark Coolidge 100 Miguel Algarín 8 52–53 Guthrie) 304 Donald Finkel 163 Caribbean poetic influences 85 “O Glorious France!” (Edgar Lee The Maximus Poems 304–306 Kathleen Fraser 171 poetry in performance 392 Masters) 512 Michael McClure 308 Allen Ginsberg 181 poetry institutions 395 O’Hara, Frank xi, 353–355 Joel Oppenheimer 361 Barbara Guest 190 Nye, Naomi Shihab 347–348 abstract expressionism 2–3 Pieces (Robert Creeley) 376, The Journals (Paul Blackburn) Amiri Baraka 30 377 248 O Bill Berkson 37, 38 poetry in performance 392 Kenneth Koch 262 objectivist poetry x, xiii, xv, Ted Berrigan 40 poetry institutions 395 David Lehman 275 349–352 Tom Clark 92 prosody and free verse 409, Lunch Poems (Frank O’Hara) “A” (Louis Zukofsky) 1 “The Day Lady Died” 121 410 292 ars poeticas 19 European poetic influences Al Purdy 412 Thomas Lux 293 “Bialystok Stanzas” (Michael 153é155 Stephen Rodefer 428–429 Harry Mathews 302 Heller) 44 Kathleen Fraser 171 Ed Sanders 441 Bernadette Mayer 306 Black Mountain school 51 “In Memory of My Feelings” John Taggart 487, 488 Eileen Myles 331 “Burning the Small Dead” (Gary 237 Nathaniel Tarn 489 Alice Notley 343 Snyder) 72 Kenneth Koch 262 visual poetry 502 Ron Padgett 367 Cid Corman 100 Language school 269 Anne Waldman 510 poetry journals 399 Robert Creeley 108 David Lehman 275 John Wieners 522 poetry presses 401 Discrete Series (George Oppen) Robert Lowell 290 William Carlos Williams poetry prizes 402 129 Lunch Poems 292–293 527–528 Kit Robinson 426 Rachel Blau Duplessis 142 “The Memory of My Feelings” Olson, John 169 David Rosenberg 431 Theodore Enslin 149 237 Olson, Toby 358–359 San Francisco Renaissance 443 Michael Heller 214 narrative poetry 336 Omeros (Derek Walcott) 508 James Schuyler 446 Holocaust (Charles Reznikoff) New York school 341–343 “One: Many” (A. R. Ammons) 10 “Self-Portrait in a Convex 219–220 Ron Padgett 367 online journals 399–400 Mirror” (John Ashbery) 451 Nathaniel Mackey 296 poetry presses 401 On Love (Edward Hirsch) 215 David Shapiro 455 Marianne Moore 325 Stephen Rodefer 428–429 onomatopoeia 540g surrealism 485 “My Life by Water” (Lorine Tender Buttons (Gertrude Stein) “On the Pulse of Morning” (Maya Tender Buttons (Gertrude Stein) Niedecker) 332 494 Angelou) 12 494 Lorine Niedecker 343 Harriet Zinnes 536 On the Road (Jack Kerouac) 33, 34, Lewis Warsh 515 poetry anthologies 389 Olds, Sharon 355–356 257–258 Marjorie Welish 519 poetry journals 398–399 female voice/language 159 Onuora, Oku 83 New York University 12, 50, 433 poetry presses 400 objectivist poetry 351 “open field” verse 193, 520 Nichol, bp. See bpNichol “Psalm” (George Oppen) 411 Anne Sexton 453 open form 331, 465 INDEX 565

Open House (Theodore Roethke) Joseph Ceravolo 87 Perelman, Bob xi, 269–271, “A Poem for Speculative Hipsters” 429 European poetic influences 375–376 (Amiri Baraka) 383–384 The Opening of the Field 140 155 Perkins, David 86, 259 Poems for the Millennium (Jerome Open Letter 78 New York school 342 Perloff, Marjorie xii Rothenberg and Pierre Joris, eds.) Oppen, George x, xiii, 359–361 David Shapiro 455 persona 540g 387, 390, 432 Rae Armantrout 17 painting. See visual arts personification 540g Poems from the Floating World (maga- ars poeticas 19 Paley, Grace 368 Pessoa, Fernando 94 zine) 432 William Bronk 66 Palmer, Michael 368–369 Peters, Robert 376 “Poem with Rhythms” (Wallace Cid Corman 100 Canadian poetic influences 77 Peynetsa, Andrew 152 Stevens) 477 Robert Creeley 108 Michael Davidson 120 phanopoeia 38 Poetics Journal 211 Discrete Series 129–131 Language school 269 Philadelphia modernists vii Poetics Listserv 396 Theodore Enslin 149 objectivist poetry 351 phoneme 409 Poetry (journal) Kathleen Fraser 171 George Oppen 359 “Piazza Piece” (John Crowe Ransom) Hayden Carruth 86 Robert Frost 171 poetry institutions 394 174 imagist school 234 Michael Heller 213 Sun 482–483 Picabia, Francis 154 modernism 321 Holocaust (Charles Reznikoff) 220 “The Pangolin” (Marianne Moore) Picasso, Pablo 111, 153 poetry anthologies 389 Language school 269 369–370 Pieces (Robert Creeley) 376–378 poetry journals 397 long and serial poetry 286 Paradise: Piece by Piece (Molly Piercy, Marge 363, 378 poetry prizes 403 Lorine Niedecker 344 Peacock) 374 Pietri, Pedro 85 Marie Ponsot 404 objectivist poetry 349–351 Paradise Lost (John Milton) 284, The Pilgrimage of Festus (Conrad Ezra Pound 406 “Of Being Numerous” 352–353 285, 334 Aiken) 7 Kenneth Rexroth 419 poetry anthologies 389 paradox 540g Piñero, Miguel 85 Theodore Roethke 429 poetry journals 398 Parini, Jay xv Pinsky, Robert 378–380 Carl Sandburg 440 poetry presses 400 Paris vii Frank Bidart 44 Karl Shapiro 457 “Psalm” 411 Paris Review 92, 198 European poetic influences “Poetry” (Marianne Moore) Charles Reznikoff 420 Parker, Charlie 204 155 384–385 Wallace Stevens 477 Parker, Pat 286 John Matthias 303 Poetry and the World (Robert Pinsky) John Taggart 487, 488 Parmigianino (Francesco Mazzola) J. D. McClatchy 307 380 war and antiwar poetry 513 451 poetry institutions 394 poetry and translation 385–388 Oppenheimer, Joel x, 361–362 Parra, Violeta 88 Gerald Stern 476 Robert Bly 56 Black Mountain school 51, 53 The Partisan Review (journal) 398 Yvor Winters 528 Cid Corman 100 “The Bus Trip” 72–73 Passages (Robert Duncan) 286, 359, Piombino, Nick 380–381 George Economou 145 “Cacti” 74–75 370–371 Pitt Poetry Series (University of European poetic influences 155 Opportunity (journal) 398 Pass It On (Rachel Hadas) 197 Pittsburgh Press) 401 Rachel Hadas 197 oral tradition 457 Pastan, Linda 371, 403 The Planets: A Cosmic Pastoral (Diane Sam Hamill 199 “Oranges” (Gary Soto) 469 Pasternak, Boris 434 Ackerman) 4 Richard Howard 221 The Orators (W. H. Auden) 27–28 pastoral 540g Plath, Sylvia xiii, xvii, 381–383 long and serial poetry 284 organic poetry. See open form Patchen, Kenneth x, 371–372 “Ariel” 14–15 Allen Mandelbaum 300–301 Origin (journal) x European poetic influences Elizabeth Bishop 45 Hilda Morley 327 Black Mountain school 51 155 Lorna Dee Cervantes 88 poetry presses 400–401 William Bronk 66 Lawrence Ferlinghetti 161 confessional poetry 98–100 David Rosenberg 431 Cid Corman 101 poetry presses 400 “Daddy” 118–119 Jerome Rothenberg 432 Robert Duncan 139–140 San Francisco Renaissance James Dickey 126 Armand Schwerner 448 poetry journals 398 443–445 The Dream Songs (John Vikram Seth 453 Orlovsky, Peter 33, 181 visual poetry 503 Berryman) 137 surrealism 485 Ortiz, Simon J. 153, 199, 362–363 Paterson (William Carlos Williams) female voice/language 159 Louis Zukofsky 537–538 Ostriker, Alicia Suskin 265, 372–374, 527–528 Kathleen Fraser 171 poetry anthologies ix, 3, 291, 363–364 Ark (Ronald Johnson) 15 Sandra Gilbert 181 388–391 O’Sullivan, Maggie 154 The Changing Light at Sandover Helen in Egypt (H. D.) 212 Poetry Center and American Poetry “O Taste and See” (Denise Levertov) (James Merrill) 89 Kaddish (Allen Ginsberg) 252 Archives (San Francisco) 395 364 Alfred Corn 102 Carolyn Kizer 260 “Poetry In Motion” (subway poetry The Other Man Was Me: A Voyage to The Dream Songs (John “Lady Lazarus” 268–269 project) 374, 394 the New World (Rafael Campo) 76 Berryman) 137 Ann Lauterbach 273 poetry in performance 391–394. Others (journal) vii, 397, 527 Gunslinger (Edward Dorn) Robert Lowell 289 See also slam poetry Other Traditions (John Ashbery) 24 193 narrative poetry 334, 336 Miguel Algarín 8 OuLiPo 485 long and serial poetry 284–285 Molly Peacock 374 David Antin 12, 13 Ovid 284 narrative poetry 337 poetry prizes 403 Wanda Coleman 96 Owen, Maureen 365 Pieces (Robert Creeley) 377 Theodore Roethke 429 George Economou 145 Owens, Jesse 103 Peace Eye Bookstore 441 Anne Sexton 453, 455 ethnopoetics 152 Owens, Rochelle 124, 146, “Peaches” (Gerald Stern) 476 “Snapshots of a Daughter-in- Bob Holman 218–219 365–366 Peacock, Molly 341, 374, 394 law” (Adrienne Rich) 462 Etheridge Knight 261 oxymoron 540g pentameter 540g “Those Winter Sundays” Language school 269 The People, Yes (Carl Sandburg) (Robert Hayden) 495 Jackson Mac Low 298 P 441 Plumly, Stanley 383 Bernadette Mayer 306 The Pact (Robert McDowell) 309 Perchik, Simon 374–375 Podhoretz, Norman 182 Michael McClure 308 Padgett, Ron 367–368 Percy, William Alexander 174 Poe, Edgar Allan xvi, 126, 146, 334 Montage of a Dream Deferred Ted Berrigan 40 Perec, Georges 302 “poem #70” (e. e. cummings) 503 (Langston Hughes) 324 566 INDEX

poetry in performance (continued) “For the Union Dead” (Robert Spring and All (William Carlos Mona Van Duyn 502 poetry institutions 395 Lowell) 167 Williams) 470 Robert Penn Warren 514 San Francisco Renaissance 443 Jeanne Robert Foster 169 The Structure of Rime (Robert Richard Wilbur 522 Armand Schwerner 448, 449 Robert Frost 172 Duncan) 482 William Carlos Williams 526 Gary Snyder 465 Louise Glück 185 visual poetry 502, 503 Yvor Winters 528 Anne Waldman 509 Debora Greger 187 Anne Waldman 510 “The Writer” (Richard Wilbur) poetry institutions 394–397 Ramon Guthrie 195 war and antiwar poetry 512 532 poetry journals 397–400 Donald Hall 198 The Waste Land (T. S. Eliot) Proust, Marcel 89, 314–315 Black Mountain school 51 Harlem Gallery (Melvin Tolson) 515 Provincetown Players 319 Canadian poetic influences 77 201 William Carlos Williams 526 Prynne, J. H. 359 Robert Kelly 255 H. D. 208 Yvor Winters 528 “Psalm” (George Oppen) 411 Language school 269, 270 Helen in Egypt (H. D.) 212 Charles Wright 530 psychology 18 Ezra Pound 405 imagist school 232–235 Harriet Zinnes 536 Pulitzer Prize 402–403 poetry presses 400–401 Jane Kenyon 257 Louis Zukofsky 537 Purdy, Al 411–412 Bill Berkson 38 Language school 269, 271 Powers of Congress (Alice Fulton) “The Purse Seine” (Robinson Jeffers) Ted Berrigan 40 Loba (Diane di Prima) 280 177 412–413 Cid Corman 101 Ron Loewinsohn 281 The Prairie Schooner (journal) 398 Pushkin, Alexander 453 Language school 270 long and serial poetry 284, Praise (Robert Hass) 206 Jerome Rothenberg 432 285 The Prelude (William Wordsworth) Q poetry prizes 28, 402–404 “The Love Song of J. Alfred 284 “The Quaker Graveyard in the Poetry Project 3, 50 Prufrock” (T. S. Eliot) 288 Preludes for Memnon: or, Preludes to Nantucket (For Warren Winslow, Poetry Slam, Inc. (PSI) 395 Amy Lowell 289 Attitude (Conrad Aiken) 7 Dead at Sea)” (Robert Lowell) poetry slams. See slam poetry Robert Lowell 290 Prepositions (Louis Zukovsky) 19 294 Poetry Society of America (PSA) Mina Loy 292 Presentation Piece (Marilyn Hacker) Quasha, George 152 394 Archibald MacLeish 297 196 Quasimodo, Salvatore 154 Poets House 395–396 Jackson Mac Low 298 “The Presidents of the United States quatrain 541g Polkinhorn, Harry 504 Edgar Lee Masters 301 of America” (Jackson Mac Low) Quickley, Jerry 84 Pollock, Jackson 262, 353 John Matthias 303 407 Quinn, John 169 Pommy-Vega, Janine 365 Maximum Security Ward (Ramon Princeton University 316 “Pondicherry Blues” (Josephine Guthrie) 304 “The Pripet Marshes” (Irving R Jacobsen) 240 The Maximus Poems (Charles Feldman) 294, 408 RAD I OS (Ronald Johnson) 285 Ponsot, Marie 404–405 Olson) 305 Pritchard, Norman H. 329 Rakosi, Carl x, 414–415 Popa, Vasko 155 “Miniver Cheevy” (Edwin procedural poetry 114–115 Michael Heller 213 Pope, Alexander 314 Arlington) 320 “The Profit in the Sell” (Alice Holocaust (Charles Reznikoff) postmodernism xviii, 3, 370 modernism 321–323 Fulton) 177 220 Potters 492 Montage of a Dream Deferred “Program: ‘Objectivists’ 1931” Lorine Niedecker 344 Potters Wheel (magazine) 492 (Langston Hughes) 323 (Louis Zukofsky) 19 objectivist poetry 349–351 Pound, Ezra vii, viii, x, xiv, xv, xvii, Marianne Moore 325–326 projective verse George Oppen 359, 361 xviii, 405–407 narrative poetry 334–335 Edward Dorn 133 Randall, Margaret 124 “A” (Louis Zukofsky) 1 New Formalism 339 Pieces (Robert Creeley) 376, Ransom, John Crowe ix, xiv, Conrad Aiken 6 objectivist poetry 349, 351 377 415–416 Ark (Ronald Johnson) 15 “Of Being Numerous” (George John Wieners 522 “Bells for John Whiteside’s ars poeticas 18–19 Oppen) 353 William Carlos Williams Daughter” 36 Charles Bernstein 39 Frank O’Hara 354 527–528 Cid Corman 101 Paul Blackburn 50 Charles Olson 356–357 “Projective Verse” (Charles Olson) Donald Davidson 119 Black Mountain school 51 George Oppen 359 ars poeticas 20 John Gould Fletcher 165 R. P. Blackmur 54 Michael Palmer 368 Black Mountain school 51 Fugitive/Agrarian school Canadian poetic influences 77 “The Pangolin” (Marianne “Burning the Small Dead” (Gary 174–176 The Cantos 79–81 Moore) 370 Snyder) 72 Anthony Hecht 210 Theresa Hak Kyung Cha 88 Passages (Robert Duncan) 370 The Maximus Poems (Charles Robert Lowell 289–290 The Changing Light at Sandover poetry and translation Olson) 305 narrative poetry 335 (James Merrill) 89 385–386 prosody and free verse 410 New York school 342 Cid Corman 100 poetry anthologies 388, 389 prosody 541g Richard Wilbur 522 Hart Crane 104 poetry in performance 391 prosody and free verse 408–411 rap 392 Adelaide Crapsey 107 poetry journals 397 Carolyn Forché 168 Rasula, Jed xv e. e. cummings 111–112 poetry presses 400 Rachel Hadas 197 Ray, Man 154 Discrete Series (George Oppen) poetry prizes 403 Edward Hirsch 215 “Ray’s Mercedes” (Tess Gallagher) 130 prosody and free verse 409 John Hollander 217 178 Robert Duncan 140 Al Purdy 412 Colette Inez 235–236 “The Reader” (Wallace Stevens) Rachel Blau Duplessis 142 “Riprap” (Gary Snyder) 425 David Lehman 275 478 Richard Eberhart 145 David Rosenberg 431 Brad Leithauser 275 A Reading (Beverly Dahlen) 286 George Economou 145 Jerome Rothenberg 432 poetry anthologies 388 the Reaper (journal) 241 T. S. Eliot 147–148 Delmore Schwartz 447 Marie Ponsot 404 Rebekah Johnson Babbitt National European poetic influences Gary Snyder 464 “Psalm” (George Oppen) 411 Prize 404 153–155 “Somewhere I Have Never “The Purse Seine” (Robinson Rebel Angels: 25 Poets of the New Lawrence Ferlinghetti 161 Travelled” (e. e. cummings) Jeffers) 412 Formalism (Mark Jarman and John Gould Fletcher 165 466 W. D. Snodgrass 464 David Mason, editors) 341 INDEX 567

“The Red Wheelbarrow” (William Alicia Suskin Ostriker 363 “Those Winter Sundays” Sanchez, Walter 152 Carlos Williams) xv, 415, 471, poetry prizes 402, 404 (Robert Hayden) 495 Sandburg, Carl viii, 440–441 527 Muriel Rukeyser 434 David Wagoner 506 Chicago Poems 90–91 Reed, Ishmael 93, 416–417 Anne Sexton 453 “The Waking” 507 Adelaide Crapsey 106 Reed College 464, 520 “Snapshots of a Daughter-in- Michael Waters 517 European poetic influences Reese, Marshall 272 law” 462–463 James Wright 531 155 Region of Unlikeness (Jorie Graham) Richard, M. C. 361 Rogers, Pattiann 430–431 Kenneth Fearing 157 187 Richardson, Keith 77 romanticism 278 Fugitive/Agrarian school 174 “The Rejection of Closure” (Lyn Richardson, Samuel 474 Rose, Jacqueline 118 Robert Hayden 207 Hejinian) 21 Ridge, Lola 106, 434 Rosenberg, David 431–432 Langston Hughes 226 “Rendezvous” (Alan Seeger) 511, Riding (Jackson), Laura vii, 23, Rosenberg, Marilyn 504 Vachel Lindsay 279 512 174, 423–424 Rosset, Barney 443 Edgar Lee Masters 301 The Reproduction of Profiles Rilke, Rainer Maria Rossetti, Christina 492 Montage of a Dream Deferred (Rosmarie Waldrop) 511 Olga Broumas 69 Rothenberg, Jerome xi, 432–433 (Langston Hughes) 323 “Responsibility” (Grace Paley) 368 European poetic influences David Antin 13 poetry prizes 402 Retallack, Joan xi, xiii, 417 153, 155 deep image poetry 122–124 Lorenzo Thomas 494 John Cage 75 Irving Feldman 158 George Economou 145 Sanders, Ed 441–442 cyberpoetry 115 Randall Jarrell 242 ethnopoetics 151–152 Saner, Reg 442 Language school 271 Galway Kinnell 258–259 European poetic influences 155 San Francisco x–xi. See also Leslie Scalapino 445 Frank O’Hara 354 Robert Kelly 255 Language School; Six Gallery “A Retrospect” (Ezra Pound) 18–19 Rimbaud, Arthur vii, 146, Language school 269–270 reading, San Francisco Revell, Donald 303, 417–418 153–154 objectivist poetry 351 Rae Armantrout 17 Reverdy, Pierre 155 The Ring and the Book (Robert poetry and translation David Bromige 65 Rexroth, Kenneth viii, x, xi, Browning) 284 386–387 Lawrence Ferlinghetti 161–162 418–420 Ríos, Alberto 424–425, 467 poetry in performance 393 Lyn Hejinian 211–212 Robert Duncan 140 “Riprap” (Gary Snyder) 425, 465 poetry institutions 395 Bob Kaufman 253–254 William Everson 156 Rivers, Larry 262, 353 The Tablets (Armand Ron Loewinsohn 281–282 Lawrence Ferlinghetti 161 “The Road Not Taken” (Robert Schwerner) 487 John Matthias 303 Sam Hamill 199 Frost) 173, 425–426 Roub, Gail 333 Michael McClure 308 Robinson Jeffers 245 Robert H. Winner Memorial Award Roussel, Raymond 155 Kit Robinson 426 David Meltzer 312 404 Rowlandson, Mary 224 Jack Spicer 469 Mexico City Blues (Jack Kerouac) Roberts, Wally 134 “r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r” (e. e. cum- Barrett Watten 518 318 Robertson, Lisa 78 mings) 502 San Francisco Renaissance xviii, objectivist poetry 349 Robinson, Edwin Arlington vii, viii, Rudman, Mark 433–434 442–445 poetry and translation 386 xiv, 426–427 Rukeyser, Muriel x, xiii, 434–435 abstract expressionism 3 poetry anthologies 389 Etheridge Knight 261 European poetic influences 155 Helen Adam 4–5 “Riprap” (Gary Snyder) 425 lyric poetry 294 female voice/language 159 After Lorca (Jack Spicer) 5 San Francisco Renaissance Robert McDowell 309 Denise Levertov 277 Beat poetry 34 443–444 “Mending Wall” (Robert Frost) Sharon Olds 355 Robin Blaser 55 Gary Snyder 464 313 Adrienne Rich 421 A Coney Island of the Mind Jack Spicer 469 “Miniver Cheevy” 320–321 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize 403 (Lawrence Ferlinghetti) 97 visual poetry 504 narrative poetry 335 Rutsala, Vern 435–436 Robert Duncan 140 Reznikoff, Charles x, 420–421 poetry prizes 402–403 William Everson 156 Alfred Corn 102 Richard Wilbur 522 S Lawrence Ferlinghetti 161–162 Holocaust 219–220 James Wright 531 Saarikoski, Pentti 155 Allen Ginsberg 181 objectivist poetry 349–351 Robinson, Kit 270, 427–428 Sadness and Happiness (Robert Jack Kerouac 257 George Oppen 359, 361 Rodefer, Stephen 428–429 Pinsky) 379 Joanne Kyger 267 poetry anthologies 389 Rodgers, Carolyn 47 “The Saga of Stupidity and Wonder” long and serial poetry 286 poetry presses 400 Rodriguez, Richard 76 (Albert Goldbarth) 186 The Maximus Poems (Charles Harvey Shapiro 456 Rodriguez Feo, José 478 St. John, David 471–472 Olson) 306 rhetorical figure 541g Roethke, Theodore ix, 429–430 St. Mark’s Poetry Project poetry journals 398 rhyme 541g Louise Bogan 58 Bernadette Mayer 306 poetry presses 401 rhyme scheme 541g confessional poetry 98–100 poetry institutions 395 Kenneth Rexroth 418 rhythm 408, 541g Cid Corman 101 surrealism 485 Gary Snyder 464 Rich, Adrienne xiii, xv, xviii, James Dickey 126 Anne Waldman 509 Jack Spicer 469 421–423 “For the Union Dead” (Robert Lewis Warsh 515 surrealism 485 W. H. Auden 28 Lowell) 168 Salaam, Kalamu Ya 437–438 Diane Wakoski 507 Olga Broumas 69 Tess Gallagher 178 Salamun, Tomaz 375 Philip Whalen 521 Canadian poetic influences 78 Donald Hall 197 Salter, Mary Jo 438 John Wieners 522 “Diving Into the Wreck” 131 Richard Hugo 228 Amy Clampitt 92 San Francisco State University 308, The Dream Songs (John Carolyn Kizer 260 Brad Leithauser 276 426 Berryman) 137 lyric poetry 294 New Formalism 341 Santayana, George vii, 477 female voice/language 159 “My Papa’s Waltz” 333 Samperi, Frank 438–439 Sappho 88, 294 Carolyn Forché 168 Mary Oliver 356 Sanchez, Sonia 439–440 Satie, Eric 154, 354 Carolyn Kizer 260 Robert Peters 376 Black Arts movement 47, 49 Saturday Night (Bill Berkson) 38 Audre Lorde 286 poetry prizes 402 female voice/language 160 Scalapino, Leslie xiii, 286, 445 lyric poetry 294–295 Louis Simpson 459 poetry prizes 403 Schnackenberg, Gjertrud 445–446 568 INDEX

Schultz, Susan 162 Maxine Kumin 265 Gary Snyder 464 Soto-Velez, Clemente 85 Schuyler, James xi, 446–447 Sharon Olds 355 Philip Whalen 520 sound poetry 393 abstract expressionism 2, 3 Molly Peacock 374 slam poetry 218, 392, 395 Souster, Raymond 77 Kenneth Koch 262 Sylvia Plath 381 slant rhyme 541g Southern Renaissance 415 Harry Mathews 302 Muriel Rukeyser 434 Slate (online magazine) 379 Southern United States. See Eileen Myles 331 Shakespeare, William 288, 463, Sleepers Joining Hands (Robert Bly) Fugitive/Agrarian school New York school 341–343 468, 474 362, 493 Soviet Union x Frank O’Hara 353 Shapiro, Alan 404 The Sleeping Fury (Louise Bogan) 58 speculative linguistics 116 Schwartz, Delmore ix, 447–448 Shapiro, David 368, 455–456 “The Smile on the Face of a Kouros” Spencer, Anne 201, 203 The Dream Songs (John Shapiro, Harvey 456 (William Bronk) 460–461 Spender, Stephen Berryman) 137 David Ignatow 231, 232 Smith, Barbara 286 W. H. Auden 27 David Rosenberg 431 objectivist poetry 351 Smith, Dave 294, 461 Cid Corman 101 Ruth Stone 479 war and antiwar poetry 512 Smith, Marc 395 T. S. Eliot 149 Schwerner, Armand xi, xiii, Shapiro, Karl 456–457 Smith, William Jay 461–462 modernism 322 448–450 John Ciardi 91 “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-law” Spicer, Jack x, 469–470 deep image poetry 123 confessional poetry 99 (Adrienne Rich) xviii, 422, abstract expressionism 3 ethnopoetics 152 The Dream Songs (John 462–463 Helen Adam 4 objectivist poetry 351 Berryman) 137 Snodgrass, W. D. ix, 13–14, After Lorca 5–6 Jerome Rothenberg 432 Harlem Gallery (Melvin Tolson) 463–464 Canadian poetic influences 77 The Tablets 487–488 200 confessional poetry 98 Robert Duncan 140 Schwitter, Kurt 115, 155 Donald Justice 250 Anne Sexton 453 Edward Foster 168 science and technology xvi, xvii Delmore Schwartz 447 Rosmarie Waldrop 511 Kathleen Fraser 171 “The Science of the Night (Stanley Shaw, Albert 169 “The Snow Man” (Wallace Stevens) Joanne Kyger 267 Kunitz) 266 Shaw, Nancy 78 477 long and serial poetry 286 Searle, Leroy, F. 148 Shelly Memorial Award 403 Snyder, Gary viii, xi, 464–466 Josephine Miles 318 Seaton, Maureen 139 The Shield of Achilles (W. H. Auden) Beat poetry 33–35 San Francisco Renaissance Seeger, Alan 511 28 “Burning the Small Dead” 72 443, 444 “Seeing in the Dark” (Yusef “Shipwreck” (Russell Atkins) 25–26 ethnopoetics 152, 153 The Structure of Rime (Robert Komunyakaa) 263 Shklovsky, Viktor 518 Allen Ginsberg 182 Duncan) 482 Seidel, Frederick 137, 289 The Shrubberies (Ronald Johnson) Bob Kaufman 253 spoken word. See poetry in per- Seidman, Hugh xiii, 351, 450 246 Jack Kerouac 257 formance “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” Silence (John Cage) 75 Joanne Kyger 267 spondee 541g (John Ashbery) 24, 451–452 Silko, Leslie Marmon 457–458 Michael McClure 308 spontaneous composition 317 Senghor, Léopold 104, 485 Joy Harjo 199 Mary Oliver 356 Spoon River Anthology (Edgar Lee The Sense of Movement (Thom Gunn) Cathy Song 467 poetry in performance 392 Masters) 201, 301 192 James Wright 531 “Riprap” 425 Spring and All (William Carlos Sensual Math (Alice Fulton) 177 Silliman, Ron xi, 458–459 San Francisco Renaissance Williams) 286, 337, 470–471 Sentences (Robert Grenier) 189 The Alphabet 8–9 443, 444 Springing: New and Selected Poems The Separate Notebooks (Czeslaw Canadian poetic influences 78 Jack Spicer 469 (Marie Ponsot) 404 Milosz) 380 Anselm Hollo 218 Philip Whalen 520 sprung rhythm 541g Separations (Marilyn Hacker) 196 Language school 269–271 Sobin, Gustaf 466 Stafford, Jean 289 “September 1, 1939” (W. H. Auden) The Maximus Poems (Charles Socialist Party 521 Stafford, William 472–473 452 Olson) 306 Solomon, Carl 225 Robert Bly 57 September 11, 2001, terrorist poetry anthologies 390 “Somebody Blew Up America” Josephine Miles 318 attacks 31 poetry presses 401 (Amiri Baraka) 31 Naomi Shihab Nye 347 Service, Robert 126 C. D. Wright 529 “Some Notes on Organic Form” Gerald Stern 476 sestet 541g Simic, Charles 459 (Denise Levertov) 276, 277 war and antiwar poetry 513 sestina 541g Russell Edson 146 Something Else Press 269 “Stalin’s Genius” (Bruce Andrews) “Sestina: Altaforte” (Ezra Pound) Robert Lowell 289 Some Trees (John Ashbery) 24 11 406 Thylias Moss 329 “Somewhere I Have Never Travelled” Stanford, Frank 529 Seth, Vikram 285, 286, 340, 453 simile 541g (e. e. cummings) 113, 466–467 Stanford University The 17 Horse Songs of Frank Mitchell Simpson, Louis 459–460 Sondheim, Alan 115–116 Robert Hass 206 (Jerome Rothenberg, translator) deep image poetry 124 Song, Cathy 403, 467–468 Donald Justice 250 387 Galway Kinnell 258 Song of Myself (Walt Whitman) 338, John Matthias 303 77 Dream Songs (John Berryman) poetry anthologies 389 482 Robert Pinsky 378, 379 42, 136 “Sincerity and Objectification” “Song of Napalm” (Bruce Weigl) Timothy Steele 473 73 Poems (e. e. cummings) 113 (Louis Zukofsky) 420 513–514 Yvor Winters 528 Sewanee Review 490 Sister Carrie (Theodore Dreiser) xvii “Song of the Andoumboulou” stanza 541g Sexton, Anne xiii, 453–455 The Situation of Poetry: Contemporary (Nathaniel Mackey) 286 Stanzas in Meditation (Gertrude John Berryman 41 Poetry and Its Traditions (Robert Songs for a Son (Robert Peters) 376 Stein) 475 Elizabeth Bishop 45 Pinsky) 379 sonnet 294, 491–492, 541g Starbuck, George 265, 453 confessional poetry 98–100 Six Gallery reading, San Francisco “The Sonnet-Ballad” (Gwendolyn Steele, Timothy 473–474 James Dickey 126 xviii Brooks) 294 Stein, Gertrude vii, viii, xiii, female voice/language 159 Beat poetry 34 The Sonnets (Ted Berrigan) 468 474–476 “Housewife” 220–221 Michael McClure 308 Soon, Yu Guan 88 Bruce Andrews 11 Kaddish (Allen Ginsberg) 252 poetry in performance 392 Sorrentino, Gilbert 255, 292 David Antin 12 Carolyn Kizer 260 San Francisco Renaissance 443 Soto, Gary 468–469 John Ashbery 23 INDEX 569

Charles Bernstein 39 Reg Saner 442 Symon, Arthur 147 Theory of Flight (Muriel Rukeyser) e. e. cummings 111 “Sunday Morning” 483–484 Synder, Gary 123 434, 435 Beverly Dahlen 119 John Taggart 487, 488 synecdoche 541g They Feed They Lion (Philip Levine) European poetic influences 153 Diane Wakoski 507 synethesia 541g 278–279 female voice/language 160 The Waste Land (T. S. Eliot) 516 Third American Revolution xi Robert Grenier 189 William Carlos Williams 526 T Third World Press 47, 299 Richard Kostelanetz 264 Stevenson, Alec Brock 174 The Tablets (Armand Schwerner) “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Language school 269–270 Stevenson, Robert Louis 376 248, 448–450, 487–488 Blackbird” (Wallace Stevens) 477 Ann Lauterbach 273 Stieglitz, Alfred 154 Taggart, John 351, 358, 488–489 This magazine 189, 269, 270 Loba (Diane di Prima) 280 Stone, Ruth 479 Talisman (journal) 169, 399 Thomas, Dylan Mina Loy 291 “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy “talk poems” 12, 13 “Cacti” (Joel Oppenheimer) 74 modernism 322, 323 Evening” (Robert Frost) 265, talk-poetry xi Deborah Diggs 128 Harryette Mullen 329 329, 479–480 Tallman, Warren 77 Anthony Hecht 210 Michael Palmer 368 Story Line Press 401 tanka 541g Robert Lowell 290 poetry in performance 391 Strand, Mark 124, 258, 480–481 Tape for the Turn of the Year (A. R. modernism 322 poetry presses 400 Stravinsky, Igor xvii Ammons) 10 Theodore Roethke 429 Kit Robinson 427 “Street Corner Dialogue” (Grace Tarantino, Quentin 132 Thomas, Edward 425 Jerome Rothenberg 432 Paley) 368 Tardos, Anne 115 Thomas, Lorenzo 494–495 Leslie Scalapino 445 stress 541g Tarn, Nathaniel 152, 432, 489–490 Thomas Jefferson (Lorine Niedecker) Tender Buttons 493–494 Strickland, Stephanie 116, 481–482 Tate, Allen ix, 490 345 Steinbeck, John 468 strophe 541g Hart Crane 105–106 Thoreau, Henry David Steiner, George 118 The Structure of Rime (Robert Donald Davidson 119 Philip Booth 59 Stephens, Philip 341 Duncan) 370, 482 John Gould Fletcher 165 William Bronk 65 Stern, Gerald 274, 476 Summer Celestial (Stanley Plumly) Fugitive/Agrarian school John Cage 75 Sterne, Laurence 474 383 174–176 Robert Frost 171 Stetser, Carol 504 Sun (Michael Palmer) 482–483 Anthony Hecht 210 Gary Snyder 464 Stevens, Wallace vii, viii, 476–479 “Sunday, August 11, 1974” (Miguel Robert Lowell 289 “Stopping by Woods on a John Ashbery 23 Algarín) 8 lyric poetry 295 Snowy Evening” (Robert Rafael Campo 76 “Sunday Morning” (Wallace Stevens) New York school 342 Frost) 480 The Changing Light at Sandover 483–484 “Ode to the Confederate Dead” “Those Winter Sundays” (Robert (James Merrill) 89 Sun Under Wood (Robert Hass) 206 352 Hayden) 207, 495 Tom Clark 92 surrealism 484–485 poetry anthologies 389–390 Tillinghast, Richard 495–496 Cid Corman 100, 101 abstract expressionism 2, 3 Jerome Rothenberg 432 Tjanting (Ron Silliman) 458 Hart Crane 104–105 Helen Adam 4 Delmore Schwartz 447 “To an Idea” (David Shapiro) Robert Creeley 107 John Ashbery 23 Richard Wilbur 522 455–456 The Dream Songs (John Elizabeth Bishop 45 Tate, James 35, 490–491 To Be Here as Stone Is (Stephanie Berryman) 137 Robert Bly 56 Taylor, Edward 294 Strickland) 481–482 European poetic influences Kay Boyle 61 “Teaching Emily Dickinson” (Rachel “To Be of Use” (Marge Piercy) 378 153–154 Andrei Codrescu 94 Hadas) 197 Tocqueville, Alexis de xiv “The Fish” (Marianne Moore) The Dream Songs (John “Teach Us to Number Our Days” Toklas, Alice B. 400, 474, 475 164 Berryman) 137 (Rita Dove) 491–492 Tolson, Melvin xii, xviii, 496–497 Edward Foster 168 European poetic influences Teasdale, Sara 319, 492–493 Harlem Gallery 200–201 Robert Frost 171–172 153, 155 technology xvi, xvii Yusef Komunyakaa 263 Jorie Graham 186 “In Memory of My Feelings” Tedlock, Dennis 152, 270, 393 Tomlinson, Charles 528 Ramon Guthrie 195 (Frank O’Hara) 237 “The Teeth Mother Naked at Last” tone 541g Anthony Hecht 210 Robert Kelly 255 (Robert Bly) 57, 493, 513 Toomer, Jean 497–498 Edward Hirsch 215 Thomas Lux 293 “Temple Bells” (Jonathan Brannen) Hart Crane 105 “The Idea of Order at Key Harry Mathews 302 502–503 Countee Cullen 111 West” 230 New York school 342 Tender Buttons (Gertrude Stein) Harlem Renaissance 201, 203 imagist school 233 David Rosenberg 431 493–494 Robert Hayden 207 “In the Waiting Room” San Francisco Renaissance 444 European poetic influences 153 poetry journals 398 (Elizabeth Bishop) 237 Charles Simic 459 poetry presses 400 To Publishers (press) 400 Etheridge Knight 261 “Somewhere I Have Never Trav- Gertrude Stein 474 “Totem Sonnets” (Sherman Alexie) Ann Lauterbach 273 elled” (e. e. cummings) 466 The Tennis Court Oath (John 7–8 lyric poetry 295 Mark Strand 480 Ashbery) 24 “Tradition and the Individual talent” Maximum Security Ward (Ramon James Tate 491 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord 517 (T. S. Eliot) 18, 250, 470 Guthrie) 304 “The Teeth Mother Naked at tercet 541g translation. See poetry and translation James Merrill 314 Last” (Robert Bly) 493 Terrell, Carroll 395 Trilling, Lionel 126 modernism 322, 323 Jean Valentine 501 terza rima 446 Trilogy (H. D.) 280, 337, 482 Thylias Moss 329 visual poetry 503 Testimony (Charles Reznikoff) 350, trimeter 541g narrative poetry 335 William Carlos Williams 526 421 Tristram (Edwin Arlington “Notes Toward a Supreme James Wright 531 tetrameter 541g Robinson) 335, 426–427 Fiction” 345–346 John Yau 534 that they were at the beach (Leslie Trobar (journal) 123 objectivist poetry 350 Suzuki, D. T. 75 Scalapino) 286 trochee 541g Carl Rakosi 414 Swenson, May 287, 485–486, 504 Theogony (Hesiod) 285, 305–306 trope 541g Adrienne Rich 421, 422 syllabic verse 541g Theoretical Objects (Nick Piombino) Trotskyites x Kit Robinson 428 symbol 541g 381 Troupe, Quincy 85 570 INDEX

Trungpa, Chogyam 93 variable foot 409, 410, 527–528 “The Waking” (Theodore Roethke) Maximum Security Ward (Ramon Turner, Frederick 284 Varnes, Katherine 162 507 Guthrie) 304 Tuumbra Press 211 Vasari, Giorgio 451 “Waking in the Blue” (Robert “Miniver Cheevy” (Edwin “The 12th Horse Song of Frank Vendler, Helen ix, xii, 118, 336 Lowell) 290 Arlington) 320 Mitchell (Blue)” (Jerome Verne, Jules 468 Wakoski, Diane 507–508 modernism 322–323 Rothenberg) 433 verse 541g Olga Broumas 69 poetry journals 397 Tzara, Tristan 153, 154, 484 vers libre 541g Wanda Coleman 96 Ezra Pound 405 Vickery, Ann 271 Robert Kelly 255 Mark Rudman 433 U Vicuña, Cecilia 153 Josephine Miles 318 Delmore Schwartz 448 Ulysses (James Joyce) 172 Vidal, Anatole and Paule 478 Jerome Rothenberg 432 Anne Sexton 454 Umbra Workshop 47 Vietnam War xi Wakowski, Diane 124 Spring and All (William Carlos Under (Ron Silliman) 9 Robert Bly 57 Walcott, Derek xii, 508–509 Williams) 470 Understanding Poetry (Robert Penn Yusef Komunyakaa 263 Caribbean poetic influences Sun (Michael Palmer) 483 Warren, Cleanth Brooks) 514 Denise Levertov 277 81, 82 William Carlos Williams 527 Under the Vulture Tree (David Robert Lowell 290 Robert Frost 173 Louis Zukofsky 537 Bottoms) 60 John Matthias 303 Walden (Henry David Thoreau) “Watered Rock” (Charles Olson) Unending Design: The Forms of war and antiwar poetry 480 285 Postmodern Poetry (Joseph Conte) 513–514 Waldman, Anne 509–510 Waters, Michael 517–518 285–286 “View” (Rae Armantrout) 17 ethnopoetics 152 Watten, Barrett xi, 518–519 Unending Dialogue” Voices from an villanelle 541g Jack Kerouac 257 Michael Burkard 71 AIDS Poetry Workshop (Rachel Villon, François 428–429 New York school 342 Canadian poetic influences 78 Hadas) 197 Vintage Book of Contemporary poetry institutions 395 Clark Coolidge 100 Ungaretti, Giuseppe 154 American Poetry (J. D. McClatchy, Lewis Warsh 515 Robert Grenier 189 University of California, Berkeley ed.) ix Waldner, Liz 404 Language school 269–271 Thom Gunn 192 visual arts viii, xvii Waldrop, Keith 510, 511 The Maximus Poems (Charles June Jordan 247 abstract expressionism 2 Waldrop, Rosmarie 155, 511 Olson) 306 Josephine Miles 318 Bill Berkson 37 Walker, Alice 422, 434 Bob Perelman 375 Bob Perelman 375 Donald Finkel 163 Wallace Stevens Award 404 poetry presses 401 Jack Spicer 469 Susan Howe 223–224 The Walls Do Not Fall (H. D.) 209 Way (Leslie Scalapino) 286 University of Chicago 297–298 Kenneth Koch 262 Walrond, Eric 203 We a BaddDDD People (Sonia University of Iowa Clarence Major 300 Waltuch, Michael 375 Sanchez) 49 “April Inventory” (W. D. New York school 341–343 Walt Whitman Award 403 The Weary Blues (Langston Hughes) Snodgrass) 13 Kenneth Rexroth 418 Walzer, Kevin 309 Langston Hughes 226, 227 Marvin Bell 35 Muriel Rukeyser 434 war and antiwar poetry 511–514 Vachel Lindsay 280 Michael Burkard 71 Delmore Schwartz 448 Ward, Diane 78 Montage of a Dream Deferred Albert Goldbarth 186 “Self-Portrait in a Convex “The War in the Air” (Howard (Langston Hughes) 323 David St. John 471 Mirror” (John Ashbery) 451, Nemerov) 512 “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” William Stafford 472 452 Warren, Robert Penn ix, (Langston Hughes) 338 University of Iowa Writers David Shapiro 455 514–515 “weavings” (K. S. Ernst) 505 Workshop Mark Strand 480 “Bells for John Whiteside’s Webb, Kroetsch 78 Robert Bly 56 Tender Buttons (Gertrude Stein) Daughter” (John Crowe Webb, Phyllis 78 Tess Gallagher 178 494 Ransom) 36 Webster, Jean 107 Robert Grenier 189 Marjorie Welish 519 David Bottoms 59 The Wedge (William Carlos Donald Justice 250 William Carlos Williams 526, James Dickey 126 Williams) 527 Language school 269 527 Rita Dove 134 Weigl, Bruce 513 Simon J. Ortiz 363 C. D. Wright 529 Fugitive/Agrarian school Weil, Eric 299 Bob Perelman 375 visual poetry 502–505 174–176 Weinberger, Eliot 489 Barrett Watten 518 cyberpoetry 114 Robert Lowell 289 Weiner, Hannah 269 University of Washington 260 John Hollander 217 narrative poetry 335, 337 Weiner, Norbert 114 Unterberg Poetry Center 396 Susan Howe 223–224 poetry prizes 403 Weiners, John 272, 441 Untermeyer, Louis xiv, 90, 174 The Journals (Paul Blackburn) Dave Smith 461 Welch, Lew “Untitled (April ‘91)” (Michael 248 Warsh, Lewis 306, 515 Jack Kerouac 257 Palmer) 369 Richard Kostelanetz 264 Washington, Booker T. xvii, 202 Joanne Kyger 267 Updike, John 499–500 Kenneth Patchen 371 The Waste Land (T. S. Eliot) ix, San Francisco Renaissance Up from Slavery (Booker T. May Swenson 485 515–517 443, 444 Washington) xvii Rosmarie Waldrop 511 W. H. Auden 27 Gary Snyder 464 Jonathan Williams 526 The Bridge (Hart Crane) 62, 63 Philip Whalen 520 V voice 541g Hart Crane 105 Welish, Marjorie 190, 519 Valentine, Jean 501–502 vorticism 154, 234 T. S. Eliot 148–149 Wellman, Mac 154 Valentines to the Wide World (Mona European poetic influences “We Real Cool” (Gwendolyn Brooks) Van Duyn) 502 W 153–154 xviii, 69, 519–520 Valéry, Paul 281 Wagoner, David 506 Four Quartets (T. S. Eliot) 170 Wershler-Henry, Darren 78 Vallejo, César 125, 150, 450, 493 Richard Hugo 228 Robert Frost 172 Wesleyan University Press 401 van Doren, Mark 41 Carolyn Kizer 260 Harlem Gallery (Melvin Tolson) West, Dorothy 203 Van Duyn, Mona 502 Theodore Roethke 429 200 Wetzsteon, Rachel 403 Vanguard Verse movement 521 Wah, Fred 77 “The Love Song of J. Alfred Whalen, Philip xi, 520–521 Varela, Maria Elena Cruz 128 Wakefield, Richard 92 Prufrock” (T. S. Eliot) 288 Beat poetry 34 INDEX 571

Canadian poetic influences 77 “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” The Changing Light at Sandover Ezra Pound 405 Jack Kerouac 257 (Langston Hughes) 338 (James Merrill) 89 prosody and free verse Joanne Kyger 267 “Of Being Numerous” (George A Coney Island of the Mind 409–410 Alice Notley 346 Oppen) 353 (Lawrence Ferlinghetti) 97 Al Purdy 412 poetry in performance 392 Kenneth Patchen 372 confessional poetry 98 Carl Rakosi 415 “Riprap” (Gary Snyder) 425 poetry presses 400 Cid Corman 100 Charles Reznikoff 420 San Francisco Renaissance prosody and free verse 409 Alfred Corn 102 Adrienne Rich 421 443, 444 Al Purdy 412 Hart Crane 104 Kit Robinson 427–428 Gary Snyder 464 Edwin Arlington Robinson 426 Adelaide Crapsey 107 Muriel Rukeyser 435 Jack Spicer 469 Muriel Rukeyser 434, 435 Robert Creeley 107, 108 Leslie Scalapino 445 What a Kingdom It Was (Galway Carl Sandburg 440 Victor Hernández Cruz 109 Delmore Schwartz 447 Kinnell) 259 Reg Saner 442 Michael Davidson 120 Harvey Shapiro 456 What the Body Told (Rafael Campo) San Francisco Renaissance 444 Discrete Series (George Oppen) Gary Snyder 464 76 James Schuyler 446 130 Spring and All 470–471 Wheeler, Monroe 326 Gary Snyder 464 Robert Duncan 140 “The Teeth Mother Naked At Wheelwright, John x, 87, Spring and All (William Carlos Rachel Blau Duplessis 142 Last” Robert Bly 493 521–522 Williams) 471 Richard Eberhart 145 Lorenzo Thomas 494 “When de Saints Go Ma’ching Gerald Stern 476 Theodore Enslin 149 Anne Waldman 510 Home” (Sterling Brown) 70 The Structure of Rime (Robert European poetic influences The Waste Land (T. S. Eliot) When Things Get Tough on Easy Street Duncan) 482 154 516 (Tom Clark) 92, 93 Tender Buttons (Gertrude Stein) Flow Chart (John Ashbery) 166 Williamson, Allen 289 White Dove Review 367 493 “For the Union Dead” (Robert Williamson, Greg 341 Whitehead, Alfred North 448, 474 “The Teeth Mother Naked At Lowell) 168 Wills, Jesse 174 Whitehead, Kim 159 Last” Robert Bly 493 Robert Frost 171 Wills, Ridley 174 “White on Black Crime” (Haki Derek Walcott 508 Allen Ginsberg 181 Wilson, Woodrow 202 Madhubuti) 299 William Carlos Williams 526 Louise Glück 185 Winters, Yvor ix, 528–529 Whitman, Walt vi, xiv, xvi, xvii Wiater, Michael 269 Robert Grenier 189 Edgar Bowers 60 ars poeticas 21 Wieners, John xi, 522 Ramon Guthrie 195 The Bridge (Hart Crane) 63 Jimmy Santiago Baca 29 Black Mountain school 51 H. D. 208 Hart Crane 105 Beat poetry 32, 33 Joanne Kyger 267 “Housewife” (Anne Sexton) J. V. Cunningham 113 The Bridge (Hart Crane) 62 The Maximus Poems (Charles 221 The Dream Songs (John Chicago Poems (Carl Sandburg) Olson) 306 Howl (Allen Ginsberg) 224 Berryman) 137 90 poetry presses 401 David Ignatow 231 Fugitive/Agrarian school 176 Lucille Clifton 93 Wilbur, Richard ix, 522–524 imagist school 232 Thom Gunn 192 Andrei Codrescu 94 W. H. Auden 27 The Jacob’s Ladder (Denise Donald Hall 197 Alfred Corn 102 John Ciardi 91 Levertov) 241 Donald Justice 250 Hart Crane 104–105 Cid Corman 101 The Journals (Paul Blackburn) John Matthias 303 J. V. Cunningham 113 “Love calls us to the things of 248 J. D. McClatchy 307 James Dickey 126 this world” 287–288 Galway Kinnell 258 Robert Pinsky 378 The Dream Songs (John New Formalism 339 Yusef Komunyakaa 263 Timothy Steele 473 Berryman) 137 poetry prizes 404 Language school 269, 271 Witter Bynner Poetry Prize 403 Robert Duncan 140 Jerome Rothenberg 432 Denise Levertov 276 Wolfe, Thomas 258 T. S. Eliot 148, 149 Timothy Steele 473 Philip Levine 278 Wolpe, Stefan 327 Martín Espada) 151 Ruth Stone 479 Ron Loewinsohn 281 women’s poetry. See female voice Kenneth Fearing 157 John Updike 499 long and serial poetry 284–286 and language Flow Chart (John Ashbery) “The Writer” 532–533 Robert Lowell 290 WOM-PO (internet listserv) 162 166–167 Willard, Nancy 524 lyric poetry 295 Woolf, Virginia vi, 95 Allen Ginsberg 182 Williams, C. K. x, 424, 525 “Mending Wall” (Robert Frost) Wordsworth, William Albert Goldbarth 186 Williams, Jonathan x, 525–526 313 Conrad Aiken 6 Allen Grossman 189, 190 Ronald Johnson 246 modernism 321–323 ars poeticas 18 Donald Hall 198 Joel Oppenheimer 361 narrative poetry 336–337 Elizabeth Bishop 45 Edward Hirsch 215 visual poetry 504 New Formalism 339 Richard Eberhart 145 Howl (Allen Ginsberg) 224 Louis Zukofsky 538 Lorine Niedecker 344 Richard Hugo 228 Langston Hughes 226 Williams, Reese 88 Alice Notley 346 imagist school 233 David Ignatow 231, 232 Williams, Saul 84, 85 objectivist poetry 349, 351 “In the Waiting Room” Jack Kerouac 258 Williams, Tennessee 253 Frank O’Hara 354 (Elizabeth Bishop) 238 Galway Kinnell 258 Williams, William Carlos vii, viii, Charles Olson 356–357 Denise Levertov 278 Etheridge Knight 261 xv, xvii, xviii, 526–528 George Oppen 359 long and serial poetry 284 Gerrit Lansing 272 A. R. Ammons 9 Joel Oppenheimer 361 “O Taste and See” (Denise Li-Young Lee 274 Ark (Ronald Johnson) 15 “O Taste and See” (Denise Levertov) 364 Denise Levertov 277 Jimmy Santiago Baca 29 Levertov) 364 Edwin Arlington Robinson Philip Levine 278 Beat poetry 32, 33 Michael Palmer 368 426 Loba (Diane di Prima) 280 Paul Blackburn 50 Paterson 372–373 World War I vi, vii, xvii lyric poetry 294 Black Mountain school 53 Pieces (Robert Creeley) 377 Harlem Renaissance 202 Montage of a Dream Deferred Kay Boyle 61 poetry anthologies 389 H. D. 209 (Langston Hughes) 323 Canadian poetic influences 77 poetry journals 397 modernism 321 narrative poetry 334 Theresa Hak Kyung Cha 88 poetry prizes 403 surrealism 484 572 INDEX

World War II vi Wright, Jay 532 Harlem Gallery (Melvin Tolson) Cid Corman 100 “The Death of the Ball Turret “The Writer” (Richard Wilbur) 201 Robert Creeley 107, 108 Gunner” (Randall Jarrell) 532–533 Daniel Hoffman 216 The Crystal Text (Clark 122 Wyatt, Sir Thomas 361 Galway Kinnell 258 Coolidge) 110 H. D. 209 Wylie, Elinor 295, 429 Stanley Kunitz 266 Rachel Blau Duplessis 142 Anthony Hecht 210 Ron Loewinsohn 281 Theodore Enslin 149 Holocaust (Charles Reznikoff) X James Merrill 314–315 Robert Grenier 189 219–220 Xlebniko, Velimir 269 modernism 322, 323 Michael Heller 213 Weldon Kees 254–255 “Poetry” (Marianne Moore) 384 Holocaust (Charles Reznikoff) “Lady Lazarus” (Sylvia Plath) Y Ezra Pound 405 220 268 Yale Review 307 Adrienne Rich 422 Kenneth Irby 238 Ezra Pound 406 Yale Series of Younger Poets Theodore Roethke 429–430 Ronald Johnson 246 “September 1, 1939” (W. H. W. H. Auden 28 Gjertrud Schnackenberg 446 Language school 269 Auden) 452 Stephen Vincent Benét 37 surrealism 484 long and serial poetry 285, 286 William Stafford 472 Robert Hass 205 “Yet Do I Marvel” (Countee Cullen) Marianne Moore 325 Richard Wilbur 522 Daniel Hoffman 216 294 Lorine Niedecker 343 James Wright 531 John Hollander 217 Young, Geoffrey 270 objectivist poetry 349–351 Wright, C. D. (Carolyn Wright) poetry prizes 402, 403 Young, Karl 504 George Oppen 359 529–530 Muriel Rukeyser 434 “The Young Housewife” (William poetry and translation 387 Wright, Charles 403, 530 Hugh Seidman 450 Carlos Williams) 221 poetry anthologies 389 Wright, Franz 403 Jean Valentine 501 Yourcenar, Marguerite 88 poetry journals 398 Wright, James ix, xii, 530–532 Yau, John 534–535 Yugen (journal) 398 “Psalm” (George Oppen) 411 deep image poetry 124 Yeats, William Butler Kenneth Rexroth 419 Galway Kinnell 258 After Lorca (Jack Spicer) 5 Z Charles Reznikoff 420 narrative poetry 336 John Berryman 41 Zayas, Marius de 154 Frank Samperi 438 Al Purdy 412 The Changing Light at Sandover Zen Buddhism. See Buddhism Hugh Seidman 450 Theodore Roethke 429 (James Merrill) 89 Zinnes, Harriet 536 John Taggart 487, 488 Leslie Marmon Silko 457 European poetic influences 154 Zukofsky, Louis x, 536–538 Anne Waldman 510 William Stafford 472 Irving Feldman 158 “A” 1–2 Barrett Watten 518 Mark Strand 480 Jeanne Robert Foster 169 Ark (Ronald Johnson) 15 William Carlos Williams 527 “The Teeth Mother Naked At Louise Glück 185 ars poeticas 19 Last” Robert Bly 493 Allen Grossman 189 Black Mountain school 53