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Poetry of Liberation Unit 15 POETRY OF LIBERATION Protest Movements and American Counterculture Authors and Works rights and protest movements reshape the notion of what it means to be an American? What connec- Featured in the Video: tions do you see between the poetry in this unit and Allen Ginsberg, Howl, “A Supermarket in Califor- the civil rights struggle? nia” (poems) I How would you describe the mood or abid- Adrienne Rich, “Diving into the Wreck,” “Power,” ing intentions of American literature during this “Transcendental Etude” (poems) period? How does the experience of the Vietnam Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), “Will They Cry When War affect the poetry of this period? What other You’re Gone, You Bet,” “A Poem for Willie Best” social or political forces shaped the poetry of this (poems); Dutchman (play) time? How does feminism influence the poetry of the period? Where do you see the influence of pop- Discussed in This Unit: ular culture? John Ashbery, “And Ut Pictura Poesis Is Her Name,” I Along with the New York school poets, the Beat “Illustration,” “Soonest Mended,” “Self-Portrait poets were deeply influenced by life in the city. In the in a Convex Mirror” (poems) late 1940s and early 1950s, writers like Allen Gins- James Wright, “The Minneapolis Poem,” “A Bless- berg, Jack Kerouac, and Lucien Carr, all of whom ing,” “The Journey,” “With the Shell of a Hermit had connections to Columbia University, met and Crab” (poems) discussed their new, experimental vision for poetry. Gary Snyder, “Beneath My Hand and Eye the New York culture, with its bustling nightlife and Distant Hills. Your Body,” “The Blue Sky,” hosts of adventurous students, musicians, and “Milton by Firelight” (poems) artists, offered much for young rebels struggling to Sylvia Plath, “Daddy,” “Lady Lazarus,” Ariel find a literary voice. By the middle 1950s, San Fran- (poems); The Bell Jar (novel) cisco also featured a lively and unconventional art- Audre Lorde, Zami, The Cancer Journals (prose non- istic community. When Ginsberg moved to San fiction); “Coal,” “Black Mother Woman,” “Chain” Francisco in 1954, he soon became a center of atten- (poems) tion in a book-loving, verse-loving North Beach Joy Harjo, The Woman Who Fell from the Sky, “Call It neighborhood where bohemian and gay lifestyles Fear,” “White Bear,” “The Flood” (poems) were tolerated to an extent that few other American Lorna Dee Cervantes, Emplumada, “Visions of metropolises could match. Literary historians often Mexico While at a Writing Symposium in Port regard Ginsberg’s first public performance of Howl Townsend, Washington” (poems) on October 7, 1955, as the inauguration of a “San Francisco Renaissance” and a demonstration that “Beat” culture had truly arrived. For more than thirty years after that night, San Francisco and New Overview Questions York City were meccas for radical and experimental art in America, places where authors such as Kero- I How do these authors broaden or complicate uac, Gary Snyder, Ginsberg, Amiri Baraka, and Audre our concept of what it means to be American? What Lorde learned from one another and formed power- strategies do these authors use to express the ful communities of verse. How does their urban set- predicament of marginalized peoples? How did civil ting shape the nature and themes of their work? 2 UNIT 15, POETRY OF LIBERATION I Gary Snyder, James Wright, and Theodore 5. describe postmodernism, discuss its causes and Roethke are often referred to as nature poets. What origins, and discuss ways in which the poetry in relationship do you see between their work and this unit responds to the postmodern condition. nature poets of the American nineteenth century? Where are the key differences? I Many of these poets used travel as a metaphor for a spiritual journey, and works like Jack Instructor Overview Kerouac’s On the Road enjoyed astonishing popular- ity during the 1960s. What relationships do you see After World War II, a complex and dynamic new between this yearning for the open road and the sen- chapter of American cultural history began, a chap- timents of earlier American writers? ter that in many ways is neither completed nor ea- I Describe some of the movements into which sily describable. After the worldwide depression and postwar poetry is classified. How did they develop? violence of the 1930s and 1940s, millions of people What interests and styles are identified with each hoped for some kind of respite, a period of peace, school? prosperity, and stability. Forty million people had I How does postwar poetry continue or transform died in places whose very names, to the generation the legacy of modernism? How do African American of the 1950s and 1960s, became a litany of massacre writers from this period build on ideas and politics and catastrophe: Nanking, Coventry, Pearl Harbor, inherited from the Harlem Renaissance? Bataan, Stalingrad, Omaha Beach, Guadalcanal, I How do the African American, Chicano, and Cassino, Dresden, Tokyo, Berlin, Hiroshima, Naga- Native American authors in this unit re-imagine saki. But the peace treaties and agreements worked American identity? How do they challenge the way out among the Allies soon gave way to a forty-year history has been told and recorded? What other “Cold War,” as the two nuclear superpowers, the myths about America are challenged by the poets in United States and the Soviet Union, contended with this unit? each other for ideological control of the world. Sorting out the various literary experiments, coteries, and insurgencies of the years between 1950 and the present would be a vast enterprise in itself, Learning Objectives complicated by the interventions of commercialism, pop culture, fads and fashion, and the enormous After students have viewed the video, read the head- expansion of the college and university system as notes and literary selections in The Norton Antho- a focus for youthful energy and as an arbiter of logy of American Literature, and explored related taste. If students are confused by the cacophony of archival materials on the American Passages Web monikers, slogans, and short-lived obsessions that site, they should be able to can be lifted from the pages of postwar history, you might encourage them to think about long-term and 1. discuss the political, historical, and social con- conflicting characteristics of those decades. The texts of postwar poetry, particularly the counter- American middle and upper classes experienced culture of the 1950s and 1960s; unprecedented comfort and prosperity, along with 2. discuss several different schools of poetry repre- an unprecedented threat of apocalypse—that this sented by poets in the unit, namely the Beat new life of ease and gadgetry could be obliterated movement, the New York school, confessional in a matter of minutes. Intercontinental nuclear poetry, feminism, and the Black Arts movement; weapons made the threat of annihilation very real 3. recognize and describe innovations in the poetry from the late fifties onward. And even as the techno- of the period; logical innovations and daily comforts of democracy 4. describe ways in which these poets differ from seem to have eclipsed the potential enemy of the their modernist predecessors and how postwar Cold War U.S.S.R., plenty of controversy remains as poets continue to challenge and expand our to whether the threat of nuclear war has subsided. notion of American poetry and the American Television proliferated in the West during the idiom; 1950s and 1960s; a virtual explosion of loud, fast, UNIT 11, INSTRUCTORMODERNIST PORTRAITSOVERVIEW 3 and lurid media brought news and spectacle into short-lived experimental college in North Carolina every corner of the United States, transforming where they taught for a while. These poets favored nearly every aspect of American public life—includ- open forms, sudden, unexpected imagery and dic- ing the social impact of the writer, and the nature tion and remarkable freedom in prosody. Theirs was and duration of literary celebrity. a verse in celebration of spontaneity. The New York The works in Unit 15 reflect numerous literary school, including Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, and groups that responded to the vast social changes Kenneth Koch, distinguished itself by its close asso- taking place, including the Beats (Ginsberg, ciation with the experimental painting underway in Snyder), confessional poets (Sylvia Plath, Robert the city and its environs. From abstract expression- Lowell, Anne Sexton), the Black Mountain poets ism, these poets learned to perceive the work of art (Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov, as what critic David Perkins calls a “chronicle of the Robert Creeley), Black Arts (Audre Lorde, Amiri creative act that produces it.” These writers were Baraka), the New York school (Frank O’Hara, John also influenced by composers dedicated to similar Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler), femi- values, including John Cage and Igor Stravinsky. nist poets (Adrienne Rich, Sylvia Plath, Audre This search for identity gave rise to the belief that Lorde), Chicano nationalists (Lorna Dee Cervantes), the personal is political, a notion that formed in the and latter-day transcendental and pastoral poets 1960s as artists, poets, and activists used their per- (Gary Snyder, Robert Bly, James Wright, Galway sonal lives to make political statements. In question- Kennell, and W. S. Merwin). To help situate students ing American identity, these authors confront the with respect to this multitude of literary move- problem of the divided self, whether it be Lorna Dee ments, you might present the Beats as a wellspring Cervantes’s division between her Chicana heritage of many other movements, the first widely cele- and her American life, Adrienne Rich’s identifica- brated “bohemian” experiment after World War II. tion as both a lesbian and a mother, Amiri Baraka’s Centered in Greenwich Village and San Francisco, personal variation upon doctrines of Black nation- the Beats became known for many traits and preoc- alism and American identity, or Joy Harjo’s Native cupations that showed remarkable durability.
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