Comments on: All Night, He Was a New American, Part One

By: Henry Gould

Henry Gould — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 04:14:44 +0000

I’m surprised to find myself saying it, but I think Ann Lauterbach’s description of group identification, quoted here, is quite superficial and cynical. Groups coagulate less out of a desire for “name recognition”, than out of a spirit of emulation of the poets they like & admire. This is how schools are formed : by the charismatic example of highly gifted poets. Their style creates a wave, so to speak.
The brand names & journalistic tags come later, after the inchoate wave has formed. & by the time the tags crystallize, the wave has already passed on to something else.
The other point of Lauterbach’s remarks, that we are really only interested in the individual poets, is also something of a simplification & a cliche. Because poetry happens within a sort of indefinite liminal region, between individual talent and common reality. It is personal; it is impersonal. Whitman & Dickinson grappled with this problem in complementary ways : Whitman by seeking a vatic enthusiastic epic Everyman-speech; Dickinson by writing a kind of pithy, epigrammatic abstract-from-particulars (by way of a common hymnody form).
It is rather late in the day for a Critique of the New American Poets. Everyone knows their severe limitations. The ones I like the best, in the Allen anthology, were never very successful as literary artists or professionals or even as adults; they certainly never had jobs in Creative Writing, or won any awards!
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By: Reginald Shepherd

Reginald Shepherd — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 21:20:18 +0000

Dear Alicia,
Thanks for your comment, with which I am in complete agreement. I particularly echo the distinction you make artistic “progress,” presumably toward some goal (which the very phrase “avant-garde,” with its military associations, conveys), and innovation or experimentation, which is a matter of exploring, exploiting, and expanding the possibilities of the medium. In the history of visual art there have been some developments that could be considered progress, such as the invention of single-point perspective, but I’m not sure one could even say that about literature. Certainly there’s no technique in use today that wasn’t being used one hundred years ago; many of them can be found in Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy or in Richard Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. (The agedness of the avant-garde has often been commented on.) And new works, new techniques, or new modes of art (unlike new scientific paradigms) don’t render previous works, techniques, and modes obsolete. All the art that’s ever been made, although it was produced in time, exists in a space of simultaneity, what T.S. Eliot called an ideal order.
Dear John,
Thanks for your comment as well. I agree that much of the controversy my post evoked had to do with folks’ sense of ownership of the NAP, that there were some who could legitimately lay claim to that heritage (that version of what Harold Rosenberg called the tradition of the new) and some who could not, perhaps because they lacked the proper “bohemian” credentials, as some interlocutors asserted.
I also agree with what you say about influence. It’s often crucial to immerse oneself in another’s work in order to absorb its necessary lessons. I emphasized the other side of influence to make a point that one need not memorize and recite back another writer’s work like a school lesson in order to be usefully influenced by it.
I was aware of Duncan’s fondness for Helen Adam’s ballads, and mention that later in the piece, but I didn’t know that it was because of him that she was included in the anthology. That says even more about the book’s gender politics. But I also wonder what other women were writing and publishing in that mode at the time. The only one I can think of is Diane di Prima, whose first book was published in 1958. Joanne Kyger’s first book wasn’t published until 1965, and Anne Waldman’s (who was only fifteen in 1960, when NAP was published) not until 1968. I don’t think that Allen was engaging in deliberate exclusion.
Take good care, and thanks for reading and commenting.
all best,
Reginald
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By: john

john — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 14:58:45 +0000

Reginald,
The storm of controversy over your recent post struck me similarly: poets who considered themselves followers of the Allen-identified N.A.P. got grumpy about poets they didn’t approve of being included in the list of followers. And what you say is true: Influence has always operated by people picking and choosing and misunderstanding and reusing and refashioning. Of course, some people deplore that tendency, and believe we must take the authors whole, like children at the dinner table, and clean our plates. As a general prescription, I agree with that too: Deep curiosity about a writer from whom one finds inspiration serves one well. And you can bet my five-year-old son doesn’t get dessert if he doesn’t clean his plate.
I would alert you to something, though: Helen Adam is still known by some. My college poetry teacher taught her in the early ’80s; she appeared, to great effect, in the classic ’80s poetry documentary “Poetry in Motion” (definitely worth checking out: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084514/ ); and a new anthology of her work came out just a few months ago, which I haven’t seen and would like to.
Adam is anomalous in the N.A.P., focusing on metered, rhymed ballads. I believe Ron Silliman reported on his blog not too long ago that she wouldn’t have been included in the anthology if Robert Duncan hadn’t advocated for her. Duncan’s statement on poetics in the book remains gripping — a founding document of post-modernism (by which I mean a poetry influenced by modernism but no longer driven by the quest for innovation) — and he cites Adam’s blend of anachronistic style and contemporary relevance as a revelation to him.
Looking forward to your future posts in this series. Thanks.
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By: Alicia (AE)

Alicia (AE) — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 07:06:12 +0000

I’m glad “progressive” poetries is in quotation marks. Innovative or experimental is one thing–since there is always change and renewal–but I certainly don’t buy the idea of continuous “progress” in the arts or evolution towards some higher state, or furtherance along a journey towards perfecton, metaphors from religion and the sciences.
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By: Reginald Shepherd

Reginald Shepherd — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 17:54:59 +0000

Dear Sina Queyras,
I am a great admirer of your anthology Open Field, which will (I hope) do a lot to open American’s eyes to the exciting things going on in Canadian poetry. A Canadian poet friend of mine, Diana Adams, has been sending me books for several years, introducing me to such wonderful poets as Tim Lilburn, Don McKay, Roo Borson, and Tim Bowering.
The gendering of the New American Poetry is indeed an issue, one I address in a later portion of this piece. Out of forty-four contributors to the anthology, only four were women, and of those four, only two, Barbara Guest and Denise Levertov, are still known today. So the New American Poetry was indeed a heavily masculine assemblage, which is problematic.
Take good care.
Reginald Shepherd
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By: Sina Queyras

Sina Queyras — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 15:22:33 +0000

Donald Allen, Peter Gay, Ezra Pound, Bloom, Poe, Mallarme…finally we get to Lauterbach. It’s fascinating how gendered this kind of assembling seems to be. One has to comment. One tires of being invisible to the process and conversation. And yes, we are indeed thankful for Marjorie Perloff.
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