By Patrick James Dunagan
Donald Allen’s anthology The New American Poetry: 1945-1960 marks a clear demarcation point in any historical discussion of American poetry, deserving mention in the same breath with, say, Allen Ginsberg’s ’55 “Howl” debut at the Six Gallery in San Francisco. While Allen’s anthology suffers from a bountiful number of pitfalls, lack of race, class, and gender diversity among poets being only the most obvious, it serves, despite its drawbacks, as an extraordinary marker of its time, calling attention to a grouping of poets and poetics which otherwise subsisted beneath the radar of the vast majority of American literary culture. Its publication brought encouraging public acknowledgement of these poets from surprising quarters, such as Marianne Moore’s enthusing over Lew Welch’s poetry in her review of the book.
To this day, The New American Poetry offers a strident cross-examination of what might best define any standard of poetry: what it means to “be a poet” and what exactly qualifies as a “poem.” As the MFA program list grows larger and exponentially more poets find their way into print, the results of this expansion are the continual broadening (and general lampooning) of any such definable standard, in particular among the poetry communities in which The New American Poetry plays part. After all, Ginsberg became Professor Ginsberg, as did many of his peers, and The New American Poetry has moved well beyond its countercultural roots.
The essays in The New American Poetry: Fifty Years Later situate Allen’s anthology in this current state of affairs. Delving into why and how the anthology’s presence is so pervasive throughout poetry communities today where it is no longer so identifiably a sign of “Us vs. Them,” editor John R. Woznicki, while acknowledging previous critical discussions by Alan Golding, Marjorie Perloff, and Jed Rasula, argues this collection usefully entertains new areas of argument in a notably altered context. The essays extrapolate from and explore The New American Poetry’s depth of influence,
… how it has shaped us, as critics, readers and students of poetry—shaped our identity. When we do look back at its construction, we are readers who have already been influenced by its contents. I would like for readers to see our volume as one that extends in greater fashion the study of The New American Poetry’s reception rather than construction, its positive rather than negative value, its proactive rather than reactive activity, a generative rather than reflective work, and ultimately accepting its own self-exclaimed premise of its being. The New American Poetry is a visionary anthology of our time with a vision that extends beyond the boundaries of opposition, one that has not only shaped the canon and continues to do so, but shaped a culture—of critics, students, readers and writers of poetry.
Not too long ago Woznicki’s description of “our identity” would have only held water if he was speaking of a handful of particular poetry communities. The encouragement and support of readings, poetry exercises, and other curriculum and/or activity developed around Allen’s anthology (and/or poets found in it) was rare outside of clearly established venues like St. Mark’s Poetry Project, Naropa, Poetics at New College of California, and SUNY Buffalo. Yet less and less is it the case that aspiring poets of similar mindset to Allen’s anthology gravitate to San Francisco, New York, or Boulder. Even less so is it the case that classroom discussions commonly taking Allen’s anthology as a point of departure are only found in a handful of schools and programs. We are in decidedly new territory. Poets these days are as likely to grab influence from anyone and anywhere of any time or place, without care for overlapping contradictory traditions and practices.
Of course, this tendency of having an open mind towards one’s influences, particularly among poets just starting out, has regularly been the case the past fifty years. In “The New American Poetry’s Objectivist Legacy: Linguistic Skepticism, the Signifier, and Material Language,” Burt Kimmelman relates how for poet John Taggart, Allen’s anthology was at first even a bit too one-sided seeming:
Taggart recalls he “was a little suspicious of” the Allen book when he first laid eyes on it about 1963. He remembers “how mixed and molten a time it was,” and he had an “equal enthusiasm for [John] Berryman and Oppen and Duncan and Levertov [and] liked [James] Dickey, [and] Jerry Rothenberg was going to publish Don [Donald] Justice.”
However for Rachel Blau DuPlessis, another poet Kimmelman focuses his discussion upon, The New American Poetry offered the “sense that radical and exciting alternatives were available,” alternatives that contribute to the abundant variety of output by poets today.
The poems in The New American Poetry share a necessarily radical confrontation, stemming from the ongoing changing nature of experience in the contemporary era. As Peter Middleton remarks in “Science and The New American Poetry,” “New American poets were also committed to understanding, finding implicit order, and to observing whatever constituted the familiar world.” And Carla Billitteri claims in her Afterword:
What distinguishes The New American Poetry from its product-oriented antitheses is not just the commitment to process, which of course did result in discrete and memorable works of art, but the forms of subjectivity that the work embodied and helped to produce.
Poetry was never simply an isolated literary endeavor for the poets in Allen’s anthology. This was arguably more so the case in terms of sociopolitical contexts. Poetry is a confrontation with reality at large. Beyond a sense of how the poets think, read, and write, we’re given a sense of how they variously live. Allen’s vital inclusion of often substantial statements and additional material by the poets significantly adds to this effect.
The pervasive presence of Charles Olson as a key figure in the poetics presented in the anthology runs throughout The New American Poetry: Fifty Years Later. David Herd’s “ ‘In the Dawn that is Nowhere’: The New American Poetry and the State of Exception” connects Olson’s poetics via Allen’s presentation and use of them with Hannah Arendt’s what-was-then-simultaneously developing argument in her Preface to Origins of Totalitarianism (dated, “Summer 1950,” which Herd reminds us is Olson’s own period of time for key developments in his poetics):
The new “stance toward reality” that Allen identified in Olson and established as central to The New American Poetry, this is to say, involved both an explicit commitment to specificity and a commitment to a poetics of internationalism. How really that stance can be thought to be visionary, or anticipatory, or just still useful, is better understood through Arendt’s development of her opening position.
Olson’s work continues to encounter ongoing difficulty gaining a balanced critical reception. Most recently, Heriberto Yépez’s The Empire of Neomemory joins the list of Olson criticism that fails to offer any assessment that is not negatively predisposed. Accomplished comparisons of Olson’s work with figures such as Arendt will only help reenvision parameters of future engagement. Likewise, Joshua S. Hoeynck’s charting of Olson’s letting go of the “mammalia maxima” in his work, and the role his peer Robert Duncan plays (“it was not until Duncan chided him over his belief in a ‘mammalia maxima’ that he could erase his human hero”), accomplishes a clear point of contrast to the general negative views of Olson as a white, European culture-predator out to wreck “the Other”: ”Olson and Duncan concurrently put The New American Poetry forward into an observational and linguistic poetics that descries and transforms a plural ensemble of fluid events.” These discussions hopefully mark a rising tide to counter the often misplaced, yet nonetheless abundant, visceral disdain for Olson and his work.
Meanwhile, the ongoing mapping of specific lineages found in The New American Poetry is taken up by Paul R. Cappucci’s “ ‘Trying to Build on Their Elders’ Work’: The Correspondence of Donald Allen and William Carlos Williams.” Cappucci thoroughly guides us through an exploration of how “the Allen-Williams correspondence serves as a notable entryway into the formation and development of Allen’s landmark anthology. As evident in his preface, Allen traced the emergence of these younger poets to the poetic practices of Pound and Williams.”
In turn, Seth Forrest’s “Aurality and Literacy: The New American Poets and the age of Technological Reproduction” begins to offer a glimpse of the treasures awaiting scholars tuned into using the rich audio archives extant for these poets to annex an as-yet-undefined future study of the tradition. In particular, Forrest looks at differing public readings of Ginsberg’s “Howl,” as well as some readings by Olson, and transformations of Robert Creeley’s reading voice through the decades.
Although “opposing lines” of “radical” versus “conservative” are no longer as clear as they once were, ongoing dilemmas challenging the personal commitments of readers remain. Megan Swihart Jewell’s “Becoming Articulate: Kathleen Fraser and The New American Poetry” is a necessary critical exposé of Fraser’s lifetime confrontation with this predominately male lineage. Jewell describes how, ”When teaching poetry workshops, Fraser noticed how the male students were more at ease. Fraser recalls how her experiences with women students in her classrooms replicated a gendered pattern that she had experienced as a student.”
Fraser has battled it out over the years, striving to balance disparities of accessibility, while the ridiculousness of having to “battle” at all continues on. Her work with the splendid How2 is a testament to hidden lineages within lineages. It leads directly to the ongoing numbers-assessment-by-way-of-gender that organizations like Vida: Women in Literary Arts undertake today, the result of accomplishments of younger women poets, such as Juliana Spahr, Stephanie Young, and Amy King. In the end, no matter “how visionary” and central to forming “our identity” Allen’s anthology may be, much work remains to enlarge poetic consciousness. As poets, our experiences should of necessity be in a developing state of engagement. The New American Poetry: Fifty Years Later arrives at an opportune time to encourage ongoing reassessment of influences and responsibilities.
The New American Poetry: Fifty Years Later
Edited by John R. Woznicki
Lehigh University Press (2013)
ISBN: 978-1-61146-124-4
