TRADITIONALISM
T raditional writers include
acknowledged masters of traditional forms and diction who write with a readily
recognizable craft, often using rhyme or a set metrical pattern. Often they
are from the U.S. Eastern seaboard or from the southern part of the country,
and teach in colleges and universities. Richard Eberhart and Richard Wilbur;
the older Fugitive poets John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Robert Penn
Warren; such accomplished younger poets as John Hollander and Richard Howard;
and the early Robert Lowell are examples. They are established and frequently
anthologized.
The previous chapter discussed the refinement, respect for nature, and
profoundly conservative values of the Fugitives. These qualities grace much
poetry oriented to traditional modes. Traditionalist poets are generally
precise, realistic, and witty; like Richard Wilbur (1921- ), they are often
influenced in these directions by 15th- and 16th-century British metaphysical
poets brought to favor by T.S. Eliot. Wilbur's most famous poem, "A World
Without Objects Is a Sensible Emptiness" (1950), takes its title from
Thomas Traherne, a metaphysical poet. Its vivid opening illustrates the
clarity some poets have found within rhyme and formal regularity:
The tall camels of the spirit
Steer for their deserts, passing the last groves loud
With the sawmill shrill of the locust, to the whole honey
of the arid
Sun. They are slow, proud...
Traditional poets, unlike many experimentalists who distrust "too
poetic" diction, welcome resounding poetic lines. Robert Penn Warren
(1905-1989) ended one poem with the words "To love so well the world that
we may believe, in the end, in God." Allen Tate (1899-1979) ended a poem,
"Sentinel of the grave who counts us all!" Traditional poets also at
times use a somewhat rhetorical diction of obsolete or odd words, using many
adjectives (for example, "sepulchral owl") and inversions, in which
the natural, spoken word order of English is altered unnaturally. Sometimes
the effect is noble, as in the line by Warren; other times, the poetry seems
stilted and out of touch with real emotions, as in Tate's line:
"Fatuously touched the hems of the hierophants."
Occasionally, as in Hollander, Howard, and James Merrill (1926- ),
self-conscious diction combines with wit, puns, and literary allusions.
Merrill, who is innovative in his urban themes, unrhymed lines, personal
subjects, and light conversational tone, shares a witty habit with the
traditionalists in "The Broken Heart" (1966), writing about a
marriage as if it were a cocktail:
Always that same old story -
Father Time and Mother Earth,
A marriage on the rocks.
Obvious fluency and verbal pyrotechnics by some poets, like Merrill and
John Ashbery, make them successful in traditional terms, although their poetry
redefines poetry in radically innovative ways. Stylistic gracefulness makes
some poets seem more traditional than they are, as in the case of Randall
Jarrell (1914-1965) and A.R. Ammons (1926- ). Ammons creates intense dialogues
between humanity and nature; Jarrell steps into the trapped consciousness of
the dispossessed -- women, children, doomed soldiers, as in "The Death of
the Ball Turret Gunner" (1945):
From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.
Although many traditional poets use rhyme, not all rhymed poetry is
traditional in subject or tone. Poet Gwendolyn Brooks (1917- ) writes of the
difficulties of living -- let alone writing -- in urban slums. Her
"Kitchenette Building" (1945) asks how:
Could a dream send up through onion fumes
Its white and violet, fight with fried potatoes
And yesterday's garbage ripening in the hall...
Many poets, including Brooks, Adrienne Rich, Richard Wilbur, Robert Lowell,
and Robert Penn Warren began writing traditionally, using rhyme and meters,
but abandoned these in the 1960s under the pressure of public events and a
gradual trend toward open forms.
Robert Lowell (1917-1977)
The most influential recent poet, Robert Lowell, began traditionally but was
influenced by experimental currents. Because his life and work spans the
period between the older modernist masters like Ezra Pound and the
contemporary writers, his career places the later experimentalists in a larger
context.
Lowell fits the mold of the academic writer: white, male, Protestant by
birth, well-educated, and linked with the political and social establishment.
He was a descendant of the respected Boston Brahmin family that included the
famous 19th-century poet James Russell Lowell and a recent president of
Harvard University. Robert Lowell found an identity outside his elite
background, however. He went not to Harvard but to Kenyon College in Ohio,
where he rejected his Puritan ancestry and converted to Catholicism. Jailed
for a year as a conscientious objector in World War II, he later publicly
protested the Vietnam conflict.
Lowell's early books, Land of Unlikeness (1944) and Lord Weary's
Castle (1946), which won a Pulitzer Prize, revealed great control of
traditional forms and styles, strong feeling, and an intensely personal yet
historical vision. The violence and specificity of the early work is
overpowering in poems like "Children of Light" (1946), a harsh
condemnation of the Puritans who killed Indians and whose descendants burned
surplus grain instead of shipping it to hungry people. Lowell writes:
"Our fathers wrung their bread from stocks and stones / And fenced their
gardens with the Redman's bones."
Lowell's next book, The Mills of the Kavanaughs (1951), contains
moving dramatic monologues in which members of his family reveal their
tenderness and failings. As always, his style mixes the human with the
majestic. Often he uses traditional rhyme, but his colloquialism disguises it
until it seems like background melody. It was experimental poetry, however,
that gave Lowell his breakthrough into a creative individual idiom.
On a reading tour in the mid-1950s, Lowell heard some of the new
experimental poetry for the first time. Allen Ginsberg's Howl and Gary
Snyder's Myths and Texts, still unpublished, were being read and
chanted, sometimes to jazz accompaniment, in coffee houses in North Beach, a
section of San Francisco. Lowell felt that next to these, his own accomplished
poems were too stilted, rhetorical, and encased in convention; when reading
them aloud, he made spontaneous revisions toward a more colloquial diction.
"My own poems seemed like prehistoric monsters dragged down into a bog
and death by their ponderous armor," he wrote later. "I was reciting
what I no longer felt."
At this point Lowell, like many poets after him, accepted the challenge of
learning from the rival tradition in America -- the school of William Carlos
Williams. "It's as if no poet except Williams had really seen America or
heard its language," he wrote in 1962. Henceforth, Lowell changed his
writing drastically, using the "quick changes of tone, atmosphere and
speed" that Lowell most appreciated in Williams.
Lowell dropped many of his obscure allusions; his rhymes became integral to
the experience within the poem instead of superimposed on it. The stanzaic
structure, too, collapsed; new improvisational forms arose. In Life Studies
(1959), he initiated confessional poetry, a new mode in which he bared his
most tormenting personal problems with great honesty and intensity. In
essence, he not only discovered his individuality but celebrated it in its
most difficult and private manifestations. He transformed himself into a
contemporary, at home with the self, the fragmentary, and the form as process.
Lowell's transformation, a watershed for poetry after the war, opened the
way for many younger writers. In For the Union Dead (1964), Notebook
1967-69 (1970), and later books, he continued his autobiographical
explorations and technical innovations, drawing upon his experience of
psychoanalysis. Lowell's confessional poetry has been particularly
influential. Works by John Berryman, Anne Sexton, and Sylvia Plath (the last
two his students), to mention only a few, are impossible to imagine without
Lowell.
Robert Creeley (1926- ), who writes with a
terse, minimalist style, was one of the major Black Mountain poets. In
"The Warning" (1955), Creeley imagines the violent, loving
imagination:
For love -- I would
split open your head and put
a candle in
behind the eyes.
Love is dead in us
if we forget
the virtues of an amulet
and quick surprise
The San Francisco School
The work of the San Francisco School -- which includes most West Coast poetry
in general -- owes much to Eastern philosophy and religion, as well as to
Japanese and Chinese poetry. This is not surprising because the influence of
the Orient has always been strong in the U.S. West. The land around San
Francisco -- the Sierra Nevada Mountains and the jagged seacoast -- is lovely
and majestic, and poets from that area tend to have a deep feeling for nature.
Many of their poems are set in the mountains or take place on backpacking
trips. The poetry looks to nature instead of literary tradition as a source of
inspiration.
San Francisco poets include Jack Spicer, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Robert
Duncan, Phil Whalen, Lew Welch, Gary Snyder, Kenneth Rexroth, Joanne Kyger,
and Diane diPrima. Many of these poets identify with working people. Their
poetry is often simple, accessible, and optimistic.
At its best, as seen in the work of Gary Snyder (1930- ), San Francisco
poetry evokes the delicate balance of the individual and the cosmos. In
Snyder's "Above Pate Valley" (1955), the poet describes working on a
trail crew in the mountains and finding obsidian arrowhead flakes from
vanished Indian tribes:
On a hill snowed all but summer
A land of fat summer deer,
They came to camp. On their
Own trails. I followed my own
Trail here. Picked up the cold-drill,
Pick, singlejack, and sack
Of dynamite.
Ten thousand years.
Beat Poets
The San Franciso School blends into the next grouping -- the "Beat"
poets, who emerged in the 1950s. Most of the important Beats (beatniks)
migrated to San Francisco from the East Coast, gaining their initial national
recognition in California. Major Beat writers have included Allen Ginsberg,
Gregory Corso, Jack Kerouac, and William Burroughs. Beat poetry is oral,
repetitive, and immensely effective in readings, largely because it developed
out of poetry readings in underground clubs. Some might correctly see it as a
great-grandparent of the rap music that became prevalent in the 1990s.
Beat poetry was the most anti-establishment form of literature in the
United States, but beneath its shocking words lies a love of country. The
poetry is a cry of pain and rage at what the poets see as the loss of
America's innocence and the tragic waste of its human and material resources.
Poems like Allen Ginsberg's Howl (1956) revolutionized traditional
poetry:
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,
starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking
for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection
to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night...
The New York School
Unlike the Beat and San Franciso poets, the poets of the New York School are
not interested in overtly moral questions, and, in general, they steer clear
of political issues. They have the best formal educations of any group.
The major figures of the New York School -- John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, and
Kenneth Koch -- met while they were undergraduates at Harvard University. They
are quintessentially urban, cool, nonreligious, witty with a poignant, pastel
sophistication. Their poems are fast moving, full of urban detail,
incongruity, and an almost palpable sense of suspended belief.
New York City is the fine arts center of America and the birthplace of
Abstract Expressionism, a major inspiration of this poetry. Most of the poets
worked as art reviewers or museum curators, or collaborated with painters.
Perhaps because of their feeling for abstract art, which distrusts figurative
shapes and obvious meanings, their work is often difficult to comprehend, as
in the later work of John Ashbery (1927- ), perhaps the most influential poet
writing today.
Ashbery's fluid poems record thoughts and emotions as they wash over the
mind too swiftly for direct articulation. His profound, long poem, Self-Portrait
in a Convex Mirror (1975), which won three major prizes, glides from
thought to thought, often reflecting back on itself:
A ship
Flying unknown colors has entered the harbor.
You are allowing extraneous matters
To break up your day...
Surrealism and Existentialism
In his anthology defining the new schools, Donald Allen includes a fifth group
he cannot define because it has no clear geographical underpinning. This vague
group includes recent movements and experiments. Chief among these are
surrealism, which expresses the unconscious through vivid dreamlike imagery,
and much poetry by women and ethnic minorities that has flourished in recent
years. Though superficially distinct, surrealists, feminists, and minorities
appear to share a sense of alienation from white, male, mainstream literature.
Although T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and Ezra Pound had introduced
symbolist techniques into American poetry in the 1920s, surrealism, the major
force in European poetry and thought in Europe during and after World War II,
did not take root in the United States. Not until the 1960s did surrealism
(along with existentialism) become domesticated in America under the stress of
the Vietnam conflict.
During the 1960s, many American writers -- W.S. Merwin, Robert Bly, Charles
Simic, Charles Wright, and Mark Strand, among others -- turned to French and
especially Spanish surrealism for its pure emotion, its archetypal images, and
its models of anti- rational, existential unrest.
Surrealists like Merwin tend to be epigrammatic, as in lines such as:
"The gods are what has failed to become of us / If you find you no longer
believe enlarge the temple."
Bly's political surrealism harshly criticized American values and foreign
policy during the Vietnam era in poems like "The Teeth Mother Naked at
Last":
It's because we have new packaging
for smoked oysters
that bomb holes appear in the rice
paddies
The more pervasive surrealist influence has been quieter and more
contemplative, like the poem Charles Wright describes in "The New
Poem" (1973):
It will not attend our sorrow.
It will not console our children.
It will not be able to help us.
Mark Strand's surrealism, like Merwin's, is often bleak; it speaks of an
extreme deprivation. Now that traditions, values, and beliefs have failed him,
the poet has nothing but his own cavelike soul:
I have a key
So I open the door and walk in.
It is dark and I walk in.
It is darker and I walk in.
WOMEN AND MULTIETHNIC POETS
W omen's literature, like minority
literature and surrealism, first became aware of itself as a driving force in
American life during the late 1960s. It flourished in the feminist movement
initiated in that era.
Literature in the United States, as in most other countries, was long based
on male standards that often overlooked women's contributions. Yet there are
many women poets of distinction in American writing. Not all are feminists,
nor do their subjects invariably voice women's concerns. More often than not,
they are humanists. Also, regional, political, and racial differences have
shaped their work and given them food for thought. Distinguished women poets
include Amy Clampitt, Rita Dove, Louise Glck, Jorie Graham, Carolyn Kizer,
Maxine Kumin, Denise Levertov, Audre Lorde, Gjertrud Schnackenberg, May
Swenson, and Mona Van Duyn.
The second half of the 20th century has witnessed a renaissance in
multiethnic literature. Beginning with the 1960s, following the lead of
African-Americans, ethnic writers in the United States began to command public
attention. During the 1970s, ethnic studies programs were begun. In the 1980s,
a number of academic journals, professional organizations, and literary
magazines devoted to ethnic groups were initiated. By the 1990s, conferences
devoted to the study of specific ethnic literatures had begun, and the canon
of "classics" had been expanded to include ethnic writers in
anthologies and course lists. Important issues included race versus ethnicity,
ethnocentrism versus polycentrism, monolingualism versus bilingualism, and
coaptation versus marginalization. Deconstruction, applied to political as
well as literary texts, called the status quo into constant question.
Minority poetry shares the variety and occasionally the anger of women's
writing. It has flowered recently in Hispanic- Americans such as Gary Soto,
Alberto Rios, and Lorna Dee Cervantes; in Native Americans such as Leslie
Marmon Silko, Simon Ortiz, and Louise Erdrich; in African-American writers
such as Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Michael Harper, Rita Dove, Maya Angelou,
and Nikki Giovanni; and in Asian-American poets such as Cathy Song, Lawson
Inada, and Janice Mirikitani.
Chicano/Hispanic/Latino Poetry
Spanish-influenced poetry encompasses works by many diverse groups. Among
these are Mexican-Americans, known since the 1950s as Chicanos, who have lived
for many generations in the southwestern U.S. states won from Mexico in the
Mexican-American War ending in 1848. Among Spanish Caribbean populations,
Cuban- Americans and Puerto Ricans maintain vital and distinctive literary
traditions. For example, the Cuban-American genius for comedy sets it apart
from the elegiac lyricism of Chicano writers such as Rudolfo Anaya. Recent
immigrants from Mexico, Central and South America, and Spain constantly
replenish and enlarge this literary realm.
Chicano, or Mexican-American, poetry has a rich oral tradition in the corrido,
or ballad, form. Recent works stress traditional strengths of the Mexican
community and the discrimination it has sometimes met with among whites.
Sometimes the poets blend Spanish and English words in a poetic fusion, as in
the poetry of Alurista and Gloria Anzaldúa. Their poetry is much influenced
by oral tradition and is very powerful when read aloud.
Some poets write largely in Spanish, in a tradition going back to the
earliest epic written in the present-day United States -- Gaspar Pérez de
Villagrá's Historia de la Nueva México, commemorating the 1598 battle
between invading Spaniards and the Pueblo Indians at Acoma, New Mexico. A
central text in recent Chicano poetry, Rodolfo Gonzales's (1928- ) I Am
Joaquin (1972), laments the plight of Chicanos:
Lost in a world of confusion
Caught up in a whirl of a gringo society,
Confused by the rules,
Scorned by attitudes,
Suppressed by manipulations,
And destroyed by modern society.
Nonetheless, many Chicano writers find sustenance in their ancient Mexican
roots. Thinking of the grandeur of ancient Mexico, Lorna Dee Cervantes (1954-
) writes that "an epic corrido" chants through her veins, while Luis
Omar Salinas (1937- ) feels himself to be "an Aztec angel." Much
Chicano poetry is highly personal, dealing with feelings and family or members
of the community. Gary Soto (1952- ) writes out of the ancient tradition of
honoring departed ancestors, but these words, written in 1981, describe the
multicultural situation of all Americans today:
A candle is lit for the dead
Two worlds ahead of us all
In recent years, Chicano poetry has achieved a new prominence, and works by
Cervantes, Soto, and Alberto Rios have been widely anthologized.
Native American Poetry
Native Americans have written fine poetry, most likely because a tradition of
shamanistic song plays a vital role in their cultural heritage. Their work
excels in vivid, living evocations of the natural world, which become almost
mystical at times. Indian poets also voice a tragic sense of irrevocable loss
of their rich heritage.
Simon Ortiz (1941- ), an Acoma Pueblo, bases many of his hard-hitting poems
on history, exploring the contradictions of being an indigenous American in
the United States today. His poetry challenges Anglo readers because it often
reminds them of the injustice and violence at one time done to Native
Americans. His poems envision racial harmony based on a deepened
understanding.
In "Star Quilt," Roberta Hill Whiteman (1947 - ), a member of the
Oneida tribe, imagines a multicultural future like a "star quilt, sewn
from dawn light," while Leslie Marmon Silko (1948 - ), who is part Laguna
Pueblo, uses colloquial language and traditional stories to fashion haunting,
lyrical poems. In "In Cold Storm Light" (1981), Silko achieves a
haiku-like resonance:
out of the thick ice sky
running swiftly
pounding
swirling above the treetops
The snow elk come,
Moving, moving
white song
storm wind in the branches.
Louise Erdrich (1954- ), like Silko also a novelist, creates powerful
dramatic monologues that work like compressed dramas. They unsparingly depict
families coping with alcoholism, unemployment, and poverty on the Chippewa
reservation.
In "Family Reunion" (1984), a drunken, abusive uncle returns from
years in the city. As he suffers from a heart disease, the abused niece, who
is the speaker, remembers how this uncle had killed a large turtle years
before by stuffing it with a firecracker. The end of the poen links Uncle Ray
with the turtle he has victimized:
Somehow we find our way back, Uncle Ray
sings an old song to the body that pulls him
toward home. The gray fins that his hands have become
screw their bones in the dashboard. His face
has the odd, calm patience of a child who has always
let bad wounds alone, or a creature that has lived
for a long time underwater. And the angels come
lowering their slings and litters.
African-American Poetry
Contemporary black Americans have produced many poems of great beauty and
considerable range of themes and tones. It is the most developed ethnic
writing in America and is extremely diverse. Amiri Baraka (1934- ), the best
known African-American poet, has also written plays and taken an active role
in politics. Maya Angelou's (1928- ) writings have taken various literary
forms, including drama and her well-known memoir, I Know Why the Caged Bird
Sings (1970), in addition to her collection of verse, Just Give Me a
Cool Drink of Water 'fore I Diiie (1971). Angelou was selected to write a
poem for the inauguration of President Bill Clinton in 1993.
Another recently honored African-American poet is Rita Dove (1952- ), who
was named poet laureate of the United States in 1993. Dove, a writer of
fiction and drama as well, won the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for Thomas and
Beulah, in which she celebrates her grandparents through a series of lyric
poems. She has said that she wrote the work to reveal the rich inner lives of
poor people.
Michael Harper (1938- ) has similarly written poems revealing the complex
lives of African-Americans faced with discrimination and violence. His dense,
allusive poems often deal with crowded, dramatic scenes of war or urban life.
They make use of surgical images in an attempt to heal. His "Clan
Meeting: Births and Nations: A Blood Song" (1971), which likens cooking
to surgery ("splicing the meats with fluids"), begins "we
reconstruct lives in the intensive / care unit, pieced together in a
buffet...." The poem ends by splicing together images of the hospital,
racism in the early American film Birth of a Nation, the Ku Klux Klan,
film editing, and X-ray technology:
We reload our brains as the cameras,
the film overexposed
in the x-ray light,
locked with our double door
light meters: race and sex
spooled and rung in a hobby;
we take our bundle and go home.
History, jazz, and popular culture inspire many African- Americans, from
Harper (a college professor) to West Coast publisher and poet Ishmael Reed
(1938- ), known for spearheading multicultural writing through the Before
Columbus Foundation and a series of magazines such as Yardbird, Quilt,
and Konch. Many African-American poets, such as Audre Lorde
(1934-1992), have found nourishment in Afrocentrism, which sees Africa as a
center of civilization since ancient times. In sensuous poems such as
"The Women of Dan Dance with Swords in Their Hands to Mark the Time When
They Were Warriors," she speaks as a woman warrior of ancient Dahomey,
"warming whatever I touch" and "consuming" only "What
is already dead."
Asian-American Poetry Like poetry by Chicano and Hispanic writers,
Asian-American poetry is exceedingly varied. Americans of Japanese, Chinese,
and Filipino descent may have lived in the United States for seven
generations, while Americans of Korean, Thai, and Vietnamese heritage are
likely to be fairly recent immigrants. Each group grows out of a distinctive
linguistic, historical, and cultural tradition. Recent developments in
Asian-American literature have included an emphasis on the Pacific Rim studies
and women's writing. Asian-Americans generally are resisting the orientalizing
racial stereotype as the "exotic" and "good" minority.
Aestheticians are beginning to compare Asian and Western literary traditions
-- for example comparing the concepts of tao and logos.
Asian-American poets have drawn on many sources, from Chinese opera to zen,
and Asian literary traditions, particularly zen, have inspired numerous
non-Asian poets, as can be seen in the 1991 anthology Beneath a Single
Moon: Buddhism in Contemporary American Poetry. Asian-American poets span
a spectrum, from the iconoclastic posture taken by Frank Chin, co- editor of Aiiieeeee!
(an early anthology of Asian-American literature), to the generous use of
tradition by writers such as novelist Maxine Hong Kingston (1940- ). Janice
Mirikitani, a sansei (third-generation Japanese-American) evokes
Japanese- American history and has edited several anthologies such as Third
World Women, Time to Greez, and Ayumi: Four Generations of
Japanese in America.
Chinese-American Cathy Song's (1955- ) lyrical Picture Bride (1983)
also dramatizes history through the lives of her family. Many Asian-American
poets explore cultural diversity. In Song's "The Vegetable Air"
(1988), a shabby town with cows in the plaza, a Chinese restaurant, and a
Coca-Cola sign hung askew become an emblem of rootless multicultural
contemporary life made bearable by art, in this case an opera on cassette:
then the familiar aria,
rising like the moon,
lifts you out of yourself,
transporting you to another country
where, for a moment, you travel light.
NEW DIRECTIONS
R ecent directions in American poetry
include the "language poets" loosely associated with Temblor
magazine. Among them are Bruce Andrews, Lyn Hejinian, Douglas Messerli [editor
of "Language" Poetries: An Anthology (1987)], Bob Perelman,
and Barret Watten, author of Total Syntax(1985), a collection of
essays. They stretch language to reveal its potential for ambiguity,
fragmentation, and self-assertion within chaos. Ironic and postmodern, they
reject "metanarratives" -- ideologies, dogmas, conventions -- and
doubt the existence of transcendent reality. Michael Palmer writes:
This is Paradise, a mildewed book
left too long in the house
Bob Perelman's "Chronic Meanings" begins:
The single fact is matter.
Five words can say only.
Black sky at night, reasonably.
I am, the irrational residue...
Viewing art and literary criticism as inherently ideological, they oppose
modernism's closed forms, hierarchies, ideas of epiphany and transcendence,
categories of genre and canonical texts (accepted literary works). Instead
they propose open forms and multicultural texts. They appropriate images from
popular culture, the media, and fashion and refashion them. Like performance
poetry, language poems often resist interpretation and invite participation.
Performance-oriented poetry (associated with chance operations such as
those of composer John Cage), jazz improvisation, mixed media work, and
European surrealism have influenced many U.S. poets. Well-known figures
include Laurie Anderson, author of the international hit United States
(1984), which uses film, video, acoustics and music, choreography, and
space-age technology. Sound poetry, emphasizing the voice and instruments, is
practiced by poets David Antin (who extemporizes his performances) and New
Yorkers George Quasha (publisher of Station Hill Press), Armand Schwerner, and
Jackson MacLow. MacLow has also performed visual or concrete poetry, which
makes a visual statement using placement and typography. Ethnic performance
poetry entered the mainstream with rap music, while across the United States
"poetry slams" -- open poetry reading contests that are held in
alternative art galleries and literary bookstores -- have become inexpensive,
high-spirited participatory entertainments.
At the opposite end of the theoretical spectrum are the self-styled
"New Formalists," who champion a return to form, rhyme, and meter.
All groups are responding to the same problem - - a perceived middle-brow
complacency with the status quo, a careful and overly polished sound, often
the product of poetry workshops, and an overemphasis on the personal lyric as
opposed to the public gesture. The formal school is associated with Story Line
Press; Dana Gioia (a businessman-poet); Philip Dacey, and David Jauss, poets
and editors of Strong Measures: Contemporary American Poetry in Traditional
Forms (1986); Brad Leithauser; and Gjertrud Schnakenburg. Robert Richman's
The Direction of Poetry: Rhymed and Metered Verse Written in English Since
1977 is a recent anthology. Though these poets have been accused of
retreating to 19th-century themes, they often draw on contemporary stances and
images, along with musical language and traditional, closed forms.