Dear Steve,
The coincidence of adolescence and the Norton’s Anthology has ruined many a productive citizen, I think. I have sometimes heard the opposite claimed — that teaching poetry in an academic setting ruins poetry, not adulthood, for kids. But I don’t remember teachers shredding poems. I do remember leafing through classroom anthologies and being stopped cold by, oh, the usual suspects: Prufrock, The Snow Man, God’s Grandeur, Batter My Heart …. Chestnuts all! Adolescents aren’t totally original (which is why they don’t blow us out of the water with their poems, despite their overflow of feeling), and neither was I.
I love the idea of your new book, The Forms of Youth: 20th-Century Poetry and Adolescence, because I certainly feel my poetic identity crystallized at “sixteen or seventeen” (to borrow the Muldoonism you identify). And I think your thesis, that modern adolescence and modern poetry intersect at the desire to resist closure/identity and maintain possibility, is right on. Do you think poetry without romance is sustainable? Or to put it another way, what does grown-up poetry look like by contrast?
I suppose I am thinking of your section on Bunting. I never once considered Briggflatts in the context of “the sixties,” nor did I know that Bunting started to grow his hair and change his clothes style after the “youth movement.” (I don’t read literary biographies, but I think I’ll make an exception and read the Caddell-Flowers.)
You write:
The five “movements” of Briggflatts present conflicting versions of adolescence. Is it the crucible of the later self or a purgatory through which all selves must pass? Is it, instead, a height fro which all adult experience is a falling away?”
Since adolescence was the absolute nadir of my life, I think I can answer that for myself: it was purgatory, no height. But it carries a trace of some sort of authentic self before it is subsumed into socialization. This alternative conception of self is hinted at when Bunting tells Jonathan Williams: “My autobiography is Briggflatts — there’s nothing else worth speaking of.”
As poems go, Briggflatts is stupendous; as autobiographies go, it’s not entirely coherent. Does this indicate that lyric and autobiography are somewhat at odds, or does it present a strange, new concept of personhood through lyricism?
But let’s go back to the idea that there is adolescent poetry and grown-up poetry. (Sorry if I’m jumping around. This is more brainstorming than lit crit, and I have more questions than answers.) You find Christian Wiman’s criticism of Bunting complementary, if not sympathetic, with your analysis. Wiman writes:
To locate your life’s ideal in that instant is, finally, deeply sentimental, and there is a direct connection between that psychological occlusion or willed immaturity and the idolatry of form, or technique, or style …
Oh my god, I thought. I think that’s me! I haven’t read Wiman’s essay, but now I certainly must. Am I — housewife, mother, taxpayer — essentially a bull-headed adolescent hellbent on fireworks? (But I am in good company, according to your book.) I wonder — not sarcastically — if grown-up poetry has any function. Was Whitman a grown-up? Was Dickinson? Isn’t it quintessentially adolescent to say you know poetry when it takes off the top of your head?
Best,
Ange
I hope it’s OK, as a sort of resident expert on Bunting, to add that the poem, which BB dedicated as “An autobiography /// For Peggy” is acompanied by his own brief notes, at the end of which he explains:
“An autobiography, but not a record of fact. The first movement is no more a chronicle than the third. The truth of the poem is of another kind.”
At a reading in Buffalo, he remarked that the poem follows the “phases of a lifetime in line with the phases of a year without any attempt to bring in historical facts.”
BB had met his first and eventually long lost love, Peggy Greenbank, in 1912, and this poem to her was written to her in the mid-1960’s: it articulates adolescence as seen by a man growing older and looking back… way back.
The poem was first published in Poetry 107, no. 4 (January 1966), [213]-237.
See stuff here.
Don, please do share your Bunting expertise. I think he has a lot to teach us about handling materials — not only vowels and consonants, but the “material” of our lives — and I’m constantly trying to get a handle on it. It seems like the lyric force leads us away from historical facts and more toward movements, phases, abstract things. It’s very useful.