American Literature: Poetry

D

New Directions

Many poets who had begun writing formal poetry in the 1950s and 1960s underwent changes similar to Rich’s, making striking alterations in their verse forms and opening their poetry up to more experimental rhythms and more radical social thoughts. Some poets, including Richard Wilbur, Donald Justice, and Anthony Hecht, have devoted their entire careers to writing elegantly structured poems, becoming among the most accomplished formal poets in American history. Others who started out as formalists gave up allegiance to traditional forms to explore and respond to radical political change by opening up their own work to new forms and structures.

W. S. Merwin, an admirer of Pound’s early work, wrote remarkable poetry in traditional forms in the 1950s. However, in The Moving Target (1963) he suddenly abandoned punctuation and created a haunting, new prophetic voice, free of conventional techniques. In later books such as The Lice (1967), he addressed societal ills, including the prospect of ecological disaster as a result of human irresponsibility. American poetry became less formal and more political, more engaged in the immediate moment during the 1960s, as America faced the social turbulence of the Civil Rights movement and protests against the Vietnam War (1959-1975).

This break from new formalism traces back to Black Mountain College, an experimental school in North Carolina, where Charles Olson taught, and where poets Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Ed Dorn, and others studied in the early 1950s (see Black Mountain Poets).

Olson owed much to Pound but had less interest in Pound’s love of tradition than in his attempt to construct a kind of poetic compendium of history and myth, as in the Cantos. Olson’s great work was The Maximus Poems (1953-1975), which focused on his hometown of Gloucester, Massachusetts, and owed much to Williams’s epic based on the city of Paterson. Olson developed a theory of poetry called projective verse, which called for poets to return to an organic basis for their form, to a poetic line controlled by the physiology of the poet's breathing instead of by pre-set meter. He urged an open form that would allow for poetry to be a process of discovery, where form emerged from the needs of the particular poem. Olson’s student Duncan later described the experience of reading and writing the new poetry as an “opening of the field,” the entering of a poetic space where one could wander and explore instead of being led along predetermined pathways. Olson’s call influenced many writers, who formed a variety of dissident groups from coast to coast—all dedicated to undermining the orthodox insistence on predetermined, closed form.

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The most famous of the dissident groups came to be known as the Beats, so named for their weariness with American materialism after World War II and their faith in a coming beatification, a new spiritual America. The movement attracted poets like Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso, and Gary Snyder. It began with a reading in San Francisco in 1955, when the greatest poet of the movement, Allen Ginsberg, read his free-flowing, surrealistic Howl, the poem that became the hallmark of the movement.

Initially dismissed as unpoetical by most established and academic writers, the Beat Generation writers eventually became some of the best-known and most widely read American poets. Whitman had displaced Eliot and Pound as the poetic source for the Beats, and Williams had an increasingly important influence. Ginsberg throughout his career celebrated Whitman and Williams as his poetic progenitors and followed in their tradition as an essentially urban poet. Snyder took the Beat sensibility in a different direction, turning to the wilderness tradition in American literature and combining Zen Buddhism, Native American mythology, and deep ecological awareness in poetry that speaks eloquently of the human responsibility to the natural world.

Following many different trajectories, dissident poets began to explore the ways poetry could combine politics, sexuality, autobiography, and spirituality in an improvisational, jazzy mode. From about 1960 on, an explosive new plurality prospered in American poetry—a sense of multiple directions with no controlling authority. One direction was a black arts movement during the 1960s. This flourishing of African American poetry that resulted was reminiscent of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s and early 1930s, when Langston Hughes, Alain Locke, Jean Toomer, James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, Sterling Brown, Arna Bontemps, Melvin Tolson, and Jessie Fauset were all active writers.

In the 1960s black poetry underwent redefinition and turned to a more confrontational style. Rejecting the old gradualist and integrationist model that saw blacks merging into white society, it became a poetry written in support of social revolution and sought to be a distinctive voice of the black community.

Gwendolyn Brooks had written poems about the Chicago slums since 1945, and in 1950 she became the first African American to win a Pulitzer Prize for poetry. But with the black arts movement of the 1960s, she redefined her poetic mission, writing more directly for a black audience and becoming, as she said, more “non-compromising.” LeRoi Jones, who later took the name Amiri Baraka, was a central figure in the movement. He specifically rejected Eliot and the modernists and embraced the chanting, rebellious voices of Whitman, Williams, and the Beats.

The new black poetry turned to the streets of the black communities for its language and to the powerful traditions of African American jazz, blues, and rock music for its rhythms. It also aligned itself with the poetry of oppressed people in other countries, particularly developing countries around the world.

A number of black poets developed the poetic possibilities of black urban speech in politically aware, performance-based writing, which sometimes involved chanting or rapping. These poets included Don Lee (who took the name Haki R. Madhubuti), Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, and June Jordan. Other black poets, such as Michael Harper and Pulitzer-Prize winner Yusef Komunyakaa, examined the deep ironies of African American history in a more formal voice, yet retained associations with jazz and blues. And still others, including Rita Dove, the first black poet laureate in the United States, produced striking, lyrical composites of autobiography, confession, black dialect, and African American history in a language of precise observation reminiscent of Moore or Bishop.

Another direction away from formal modernism led to deep image poetry, a name given to the work of Robert Bly, James Wright, Galway Kinnell, and others who were born in the 1920s. These poets rejected what they saw as capitalism’s sterile public facade and turned to what Bly called a “deep inwardness,” looking to internal spiritual sources that lie deep within the self and taking leaps into the unconscious to retrieve mysterious, disturbing, and often healing images.

Yet another direction led to the New York School, a group of artists, writers, and musicians in which John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara represented poetry. Ashbery and O’Hara wrote wildly experimental poetry that derived from dada and from an embrace of Whitman’s open-road aesthetic—namely a desire to keep moving and to celebrate change, instability, and chance. The resulting poems provide verbal trips through landscapes of shifting discourse with no center and no fixed voice: modes of speech alternate rapidly, high diction is mixed with street slang, and moments from different realms of experience are juxtaposed.

This work influenced Susan Howe, Charles Bernstein, and others who are known as Language poets. This group attacks the idea of a unified voice and, through collaborative work, disguises or erases the distinctions between individual poets. In doing so, the Language poets work to undermine all the institutions that are built on America’s infatuation with individualism, including much of American poetry itself.

It is impossible to name the myriad schools and movements in American poetry that flourished near the turn of the century, when vigorous and unbridled variety marked the poetic scene more than ever. Philip Levine, Frank Bidart, Sharon Olds, Louise Glück, and many other poets were developing the confessional poem in surprising ways, focusing autobiographical examination in more intense lyric forms than earlier confessional poets had. C. K. Williams added to the confessional poem a sometimes brutal narrative edge as he extended the possibilities (and the length) of the long line favored by Whitman and Ginsberg. Jorie Graham extended the poetic line as well, developing Stevens’s philosophical poetry through fascinating labyrinths of speculation and imagery that cross and juxtapose the multiple cultures of her experience.

E

Multicultural Voices

In the last decades of the 20th century American poetry gained much of its energy from a melding of America’s many distinct cultural traditions. For example, Asian American writers—themselves part of a diverse and multicultured community—turned increasingly to poetry as a means of exploring both their integration into American culture and their growing sense of distinctive ethnic identity within that culture. Garrett Hongo, Alan Chong Lau, John Yau, and Cathy Song are just a few of the recent and remarkable poets whose work expands the definition of Asian American poetry.

Chicano and Chicana poetry also has a long history in America, much of it centered in New Mexico, where Victor Bernal published intricate lyrics in the early 20th century. But the amount of poetry increased dramatically after 1967, when Quinto Sol Publications was founded to publish Chicano and Chicana work. José Montoya, Rudolfo Anaya, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Cherrie Moraga, Benjamin Alire Sáenz, and Gary Soto are among the innovative Chicano and Chicana writers. Much of their work blends poetry and prose, Spanish and English, and oral and written traditions.

Native Americans, of course, have the longest sustained tradition of poetry in North America, and many of the powerful Native American writers at work today ground their work in the long-standing traditions and oral cultures of their peoples. As with Chicano and Chicana writers, some Native American poets wrote in English early in the nation’s history. But most Native American poetry in English is of relatively recent origin. The highly original group of writers at work at the close of the 20th century included N. Scott Momaday (of the Kiowa people), Joseph Bruchac (Abenaki), Simon Ortiz (Acoma), Sherman Alexie (Spokane/Coeur d’Alene), Carroll Arnett (Cherokee), Roberta Hill (Oneida), Wendy Rose (Hopi), James Welch (Blackfeet), Paula Gunn Allen (Laguna), Linda Hogan (Chicasaw), Joy Harjo (Creek), and Ray Young Bear (Mesquakie).

V

New Sources and Forms

The history of American poetry is usually told as the story of great poets, from Anne Bradstreet through William Cullen Bryant, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, and Robert Frost. But these poets form a small part of America’s vast poetic production, much of which has been written by people whose names are forgotten. Journals and newspapers preserve much of their work, and scholars have just begun to rediscover 18th- and 19th-century American poetry in those archives. Similarly, much of the most popular, politically astute, and radical 20th-century poetry appeared in workers’ newspapers and journals and in popular songbooks. A great deal of this verse still awaits rediscovery.

The recent flowering of culturally diverse poetry has led scholars to seek out the roots of that diversity, and these sources continue to turn up in forgotten archives. Not only is current American poetry more diverse than it has ever been, but these discoveries mean that the poetry of the past is also more diverse than previously thought.

With the growth and reach of modern technology such as the Internet, American poetry in the 21st century has entered what is perhaps its most prolific period. The Internet dwarfs other mediums in its ability to make the work of thousands of new poets available to anyone who cares to read it. It also makes easily available a vast range of past poetic voices.

The Internet and its electronic environment are also altering the forms of poetry. Poets today experiment with kinetic structures in which words shift, alter, and transform themselves in innovative new ways, often combining with visual images and sound tracks. Hundreds of online poetry journals have emerged, making both traditional and radically new kinds of poetic expression possible. This work is sometimes grouped under the category of “new media poetry.” Some of this new poetry uses interactive software to actually involve the reader in the creation of the work.

This movement toward a merger of poetry with new delivery technologies had its beginnings early in the 20th century. The development of mass recording technology—such as the phonograph (record player)—allowed the easy distribution of songs, which began to fill the lyric needs of the culture as poetry once did. In the last several decades, songwriters such as Bob Dylan, Tom Waits, and Bruce Springsteen have gained notice as much for their poetic lyrics as for their catchy melodies. Harkening back to the jazz accompaniments of many Beat poetry readings, artists such as Ani DiFranco, Laurie Anderson, and Sekou Sundiata have blended poetry, music, performance, and visuals to create a hybrid and still unnamed new genre.

In recent years new forms continue to emerge that further connect poetry with its early oral roots. David Antin has been described as a “talk poet” whose performances mix comedy, storytelling, and poetry in intriguing ways. Poetry “slams” feature poets reciting their verse in competitions before boisterous audiences. Modern rap music artists produce dazzling works employing rhyme and rhythm, building on a largely African American tradition of urban poetry linked to black music. All of these developments show how the words of many poems today are not written on a page, but are sung, recited, improvised, cast into motion, and otherwise actively performed.

“To have great poets, there must be great audiences, too,” wrote Walt Whitman in 1855. His challenge remains valid today: Thousands of poets produce new work every year, all of them trying to connect with an audience. The demands on poetry audiences continue to increase as the range of poetic expression widens.

In the 21st century, scholars and lovers of poetry must be prepared to encounter a sometimes unsettling mix of styles, influences, traditions, and innovations. Diversity has always been the hallmark of American poetry, a characteristic that only intensifies as the notion of poetic “schools” gives way to an increasing blend of genres, voices, sources, and modes of production and distribution. Ultimately, however, whether it is in recordings or on the printed page, accompanied by music and videos or delivered in cyberspace, American poetry remains a vital and challenging part of America’s artistic production.