Poetry's Afterlife: Verse in the Digital Age

Front matter

Verse in the Digital Age evin Stein

DIGITALCULTUREBOOKS is an imprint of the University of Michigan Press and the Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of Michigan Library dedicated to publishing innovative and accessible work exploring new media and their impact on society, culture, and scholarly communication.

VERSE IN THE DIGITAL AGE

Preface

Poetry today enjoys a spirited afterlife. Its aesthetic hereafter has come despite, or perhaps because of, two decades of commentary diagnosing American poetry as gravely moribund if not already deceased.' A little over twenty years ago Joseph Epstein’s provocative “Who Killed Poetry?” ignited torch-waving debate between opposing camps of the tweed sport coat and the black beret. Three years later Dana Gioia’s “Can Poetry Matter?” and Jonathan Holden’s sensible The Fate of American Poetry arrived on the scene, both proposing cures for what allegedly ailed our poetry. Even Donald Hall’s impassioned defense of the art invoked funereal lingo, exasperatedly calling for “Death to the Death of Poetry.”

As a writer, I’ve literally grown up with the notion that poetry was knocking on death’s door—or was it, a la Bob Dylan, knock, knock, knocking on heaven’s door? And all my teachers and most literary journals saw fit to remind me that I, as practitioner of said art, was bloodying my knuckles. Practicing a dead art was regarded as a literary badge of honorable dishonor. That poetry was unmarketable and maligned made it paradoxically the purest of art forms. Our small poetry circle, and the university culture into which it had retreated, elevated this isolation as redemptive not destructive of the art.

My sense of poetry’s near-certain passing was challenged in unexpected ways following my appointment as Illinois poet laureate in 2003. In short, I found myself sweetly flummoxed by the widespread public interest in poetry I encountered around the state. What fascinated me was the disparity between the profession’s notion of poetry’s mortality and the spirited reception poetry enjoyed when I presented well over one hundred readings in factories, nursing homes, churches, urban parks, and rural public libraries. Each foray I made into alternative means of promoting poetry was met with energetic approval. Goodly numbers of students, teachers, and the general public, for instance, visited Web sites I’d created to feature audio and video x / PREFACE poetry, and those same citizens welcomed an audio CD anthology featuring our State’s poets reading from their works. Over time, it occurred to me that literary reading among the public was actually experiencing, as the recent National Endowment for the Arts research report “Reading on the Rise” suggests, a Surprising revivification. It struck me then that poetic art had not given up its literary ghost. For a fated art supposedly pushing up aesthetic daisies, poetry these days is up and about in the streets, schools, universities, clubs, and online. Largely overlooked by national media, poetry flourishes among the people in a lively if curious underground existence. It’s this second life, or better, poetry’s afterlife, that interests me.

Poetry’s Afterlife thus focuses on three issues intersecting poetry and the increasingly digital culture that receives it. This book surveys the current poetry scene, traces how we arrived here, and suggests where we’re going. First, it considers the means by which a poet defines and necessarily redefines the individual poetic self amid the pendulum swings of large-scale aesthetic history. Next, this book examines the manner in which technological advances have changed how poetry is written, distributed, and received in American culture, focusing especially on poetry’s changing relationship with both traditional print-centered and experimental computer-based modes. Finally, it scrutinizes poets’ increasingly institutionalized roles as creative writing teachers and as public proselytizers of the art, assessing the classroom as the febrile site where students—our future poets—come to welcome or to reject the art. In short, Poetry’s Afterlife considers the intersection of poets’ private art across the culture’s communal interchange.

These essays are meant to be more investigative and propositional than doctrinaire. In form they are hybrids, blending the scholarly and the theoretical with the meandering pleasures of memoir. They are in turns aesthetic as well as social, theoretical as well as practical, and personal as well as communal.

The book’s initial section, On Poets & Aesthetic History, maps the curious (often thorny) path by which American poetry arrived at its present aesthetic moment. “Paper or Plastic, Pepsi or Coke, Irony or Sincerity?” traces the virtues as well as the trials of American poetry’s enduring tug of war between rival aesthetic poles. Extending this notion, “‘The Only Courage Is Joy!’: Ecstasy and Doubt in James Wright’s Poetry” then examines one poet’s career-long negotiation with a peculiar expression of these very dialectical extremes and exposes Wright’s private wrestling with large-scale aesthetic history. “Playing Favorites: American Poetry’s Top Ten-ism Fetish” reflects

PREFACE / xi generally on the rousing if bookish process by which poets forge personal

relationships to literary history and muses particularly on poets’ current

fascination with ranking their favorite books. Next, as its James Whitcomb

Riley-inspired title suggests, “‘When the Frost Is on the Punkin’: Newspaper Poetry’s History and Decline” investigates the heyday of American newspaper verse and its twentieth-century waning. Our nation’s renewed flirtation

with the newspaper as medium for public verse is the subject of “Aesthetic

Dodo,” particularly recent attempts to reintroduce this nearly extinct mode

into the dwindling wilds of the country’s daily rags.

The book’s next division, On Technology & the Writerly Life, considers poetic art’s evolving practices in an era rife with competing traditional and innovative technologies. This section opens with “Poems and Pixels: The Work of Art in an Age of Digital Reproduction,” revisiting Walter Benjamin’s landmark essay in light of recent innovations in digital creation and distribution of art in our Internet and YouTube era. Next, “A Digital Poetry Playlist: Varieties of Video and New Media Poetries” offers whatis arguably the first-ever print-based poet’s appraisal of digital poetry and theory. This essay explores electronic poetries that transport poems off the confines of the printed page and into the virtual world of the computer screen, also presenting an initial integrated discussion of video poetry and new media poetries. “These Drafts and Castoffs: Mapping Literary Manuscripts” then ponders paper-based poetry manuscripts’ revelations about the poet’s writerly process, the bewildering swirl of personaland communal aesthetic pressures. The section’s final essay, “Death by Zeroes and Ones: The Fate of Literary ‘Papers,’” examines implications for hard-copy manuscript materials, given changes wrought by computer-based methods of composing, revising, and archiving poetry.

On Teaching & the Writer’s Workshop shifts the book’s spotlight to the classroom where students directly engage poetry—in essence, the venue in which poetry’s future resides. “The Hammer” addresses the poetry workshop scene, focusing on the volatile pedagogical and emotional landscape found there. “Voice: What You Say and How Readers Hear It” speaks directly to young writers seeking a workable understanding of the ever-elusive notion of poetic voice. “Why Kids Hate Poetry” then assesses how schools’ current pedagogical approaches to teaching poetry tend to deaden rather than to entice students to the poetic arts. This section’s concluding essay, “Whitman’s Sampler: An Assortment of Youth Poems,” amounts to just that—an ample sampling and consideration of poems written by American youth.

The volume’s concluding section, “After Silence,” likens poetry’s current xii / PREFACE afterlife to the beguiling because unanticipated music-after-silence offered by the compact disk’s hidden track. The essay “(Hidden Track): Poetry in Public Places” thus considers my experiences promoting poetry as state laureate and suggests what results might reasonably be expected from such public outreach. In sum, this book responds to claims of poetry’s unfortunate demise by examining poetry’s afterlife—its revenant and sustaining music.

Much of the impetus for this volume of essays comes from my reading of and association with peers, poets who share what Hans-Georg Gadamer calls a generation’s “historical horizon.” The list numbers a dozen or so, thus looming impossibly long. Suffice it to say that my contemplation of their poems’ contributions to the contemporary world opened avenues of investigation Pd not have chanced upon otherwise. Other sources of useful prodding have been Bradley University’s poetry writing and literature students, whose curiosity and élan fueled my own inquiries. Thanks are due as well to numerous Illinois grade, middle, and high school students for offering the gift of their poems for my discussions.

Some essays within this manuscript have appeared previously. Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following editors and publications. “Playing Favorites: American Poetry’s Top Ten-ism Fetish” appeared within the pages of Richard Burgin’s Boulevard. “The Hammer” appeared originally in Clackamas Literary Review. “These Drafts and Castoffs: Mapping Literary Manuscripts” was chosen for the Kenyon Review by David Lynn, who also

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selected “Death by Zeroes and Ones: The Fate of Literary ‘Papers’” for feature in the inaugural issue of the Web magazine Kenyon Review Online. In addition, “Voice: What You Say and How Readers Hear It” was included in Jeff Knorr and Tim Schell’s Mooring against the Tide: Writing Fiction and Poetry. The essay “(Hidden Track): Poetry in Public Places” was published by Susan Hahn in TriQuarterly. Finally, David Fenza and Supriya Bhatnagar printed “The Only Courage Is Joy!’: Ecstasy and Doubt in James Wright’s Poetry” in AWP’s the Writer’s Chronicle.

Iam grateful for Bradley University’s support, which offered time to read and reflect as well as to write and revise these essays. For the balm of her spirit and her person, I am indebted to Deb and to our children, Kirsten and

Joe, for excusing (and often enlightening) my preoccupations.

Contents

ON POETS & AESTHETIC HISTORY

1. Paper or Plastic, Pepsi or Coke, Irony or Sincerity? 3 2. “The Only Courage Is Joy!”: Ecstasy and Doubt in

James Wright’s Poetry I7 3. Playing Favorites: American Poetry’s Top Ten-ism Fetish 42 4. “When the Frost Is on the Punkin”: Newspaper Poetry’s

CHAPTER I Paper or Plastic, Pepsi or Coke, Irony or Sincerity?

That question. No, THE question. Invariably, it arises in the post-poetry-reading Q&A, its terms variable but its agenda strikingly consistent. Sandwiched between the usual queries about where I get my ideas, whether I write at night or in the morning, and what books I’d recommend, someone sheepishly asks, as if soliciting a chef’s secret recipe, “What makes a good poem good—thinking or feeling?” Depending on the audience’s sophistication, the polar terms framing the query might instead invoke intellect or emotion, rhetoric or sincerity, learning or inspiration, text or performance, even skill or mere luck. Posed with all due seriousness, the question looms like Zeus’s thundercloud, the god ready to fling lightning bolts down upon the losing tribe too foolish to honor the Olympian truth, art’s true god of gods. Tendered fervently and achingly for aesthetic confirmation, the question admits of no namby-pamby ambiguity. It’s one or the other, pal, in the same way there’s paper or plastic, Pepsi or Coke.

The question is instructive for what it says about Americans’ conception of poetic art. In all its countless (dis)guises, the question devolves to something like this: to be a great poet, must one be learned and mannerly, or instead, must one be intuitive and wild? These poets and readers have tapped into American poetry’s longstanding AC/DC current. To them, it’s either Door 1 or Door 2, either True or False. And the poets they read and the poetry they themselves write register their ardent aesthetic claims. True enough, since the time of Emerson, American poetry has enjoyed—or suffered—a rousing dialectical conversation between opposing aesthetic camps. In Poetic Culture Christopher Beach describes this conversation as a series of revolutions and counter-revolutions forged by aesthetically combative adherents: “Poetic history over the past two centuries can in fact be characterized as a struggle for poetic legitimacy carried out either by individuals or by small and elite groups of writers who engage in a succession of successful or abortive revolutions.”! These camps have been variously labeled, as we shall see, but the characteristics that define each polar group have remained fairly constant. One faction is said to advocate, and to practice in its writings, a sophisticated, intellectual, and often ironic response to the world. The opposing faction pursues an intuitive, sometimes purposely primitive, experimental, and emotional mode of writing.

Camp A versus Camp B

A bevy of critics has exerted a great deal of energy analyzing and describing this bifurcation of American poetics that Emerson himself ruefully labeled a “schism.” Just past the turn of the twentieth century, Van Wyck Brooks studied the scene and concluded American writing fell into two divergent cliques, the “Highbrow” and the “Lowbrow.’” According to Brooks, the Highbrows mimicked the urbane and rational manners of the European upper classes. To the contrary, the Lowbrows wore their American primitivism too proudly, invokinga wildness andincivility attendant to their rebellious attitudes toward artin particular and life in general. Brooks feared the dialectic was a “deadlock” few American writers might successfully negotiate. Near the turn of the century, critic Philip Rahv identified what he believed were the fundamental “polar types” of American literature, to which he applied the now-indelicate terms “paleface” and “redskin.”* The paleface country club boasted members such as T. S. Eliot and Henry James, writers who evidenced an intellectual, often ascetic, and refined “estrangement from reality.” On the other hand, the redskins—the tribe of Whitman, Thoreau, and William Carlos Williams—shared an emotional, largely unrestrained immersion in their environment, even when “rebelling against one or another of its manifestations.”* The paleface, thus, stands apart from the proceedings of the world, reflecting intelligently even while experiencing a flow of events and attitudes. The redskin, though, rejects such Cartesian dualism and reacts intuitively, primarily emotively. In short, the paleface imposes order on what he experiences; the redskin perceives

a preexistent order with which to align himself.

Rahv viewed this polarity as a “split personality” or a “blight of onesidedness” in the American mind. Others noticed a similar disjuncture. Roy

Harvey Pearce labeled the two groups “mythic” and “Adamic,” while R. W. B.

Lewis, using Emerson’s terms, tagged them “the party of memory” and the “party of hope.” D. H. Lawrence offered up the terms “genteel” and “Indian,” while poet Robert Lowell characterized a poet’s binary options as the choice to write either “cooked” or “raw” poetry.° In his book on Lowell, Stephen Gould Axelrod expanded Lowell’s remark, suggesting that the divergent manner in which American writers react to “myths of experience” allows for a tangible division in our literature “between writers who experience primarily with the head and those who experience with the blood.”° In the mid-1980s, Charles Altieri defined this conflict as that existing between poets following either “ideals of lucidity” or “ideals of lyricism.” Sipping a cocktail blended equally of revelation and resignation, Altieri called the dialogue “the longest running play in our cultural history.””

In recent years, this dialectic has reasserted itself in the stark divisions between those poets labeled stodgily “academic” and those who adhere to a range of what Hank Lazer calls “oppositional poetries.” While academic poets tend to publish their work in hard copy largely via established journals and presses, “opposing” poets mostly reject those means of reaching the public. As the latter moniker implies, these poets set themselves in various modes of opposition to the work of poets connected to university-supported creative writing programs. In fact, the terms “academic” and “workshop” have become interchangeable as means to describe (and to dismiss) mainstream poets said to reject Modernism’s formal experimentation, to rely too easily on the straightforward lyric voice, and to decry the corrosive effects of literary theory and philosophy on American poetry.

Against the mainstream’s intellectual geezers, Lazer lassoes a wide range of poets within his “oppositional” camp, including “varieties of ethnopoetics, oral and performance poetries, and feminist poetries.” All these oppositional groups share, however, one intention: to “critique and contest assumptions and practices of more mainstream poetries.”® Chief among these poetries is Language writing, its practitioners a group of poets deeply influenced by philosophical and theoretical concerns and whose work thus “takes seriously those theories of the sign and those issues of representation that mainstream poetry repudiates.”’ In volume 2 of Opposing Poetries, Lazer focuses on poets associated with the Language movement, writers such as Charles Bernstein, Ron Silliman, Lynn Hejinian, Susan Howe, and Douglas Messerli.

Another cadre of these oppositional poetries is composed of performance, slam, and spoken word poets. Beach, in fact, devotes a chapter of his Poetic Culture to detailing the culture of slam and spoken word poets associated with New York’s Nuyorican Café. Here, the hoary historical dialectic narrows to those who favor performance over text. These poets live in the realm of oral presentation, in the flux of evolving text, and in authorial dependence on audience participation. They often shun the page altogether in favor of live performance before an audience equally committed to an expressive outcome. Slam poets such as Paul Beatty, Dana Bryant, Lisa Buscani, Marc Smith, and Maggie Estep have already developed a national reputation based on the live performance of their poems. Others such as Henry Rollins have blended poetry/music crossover formats to much success. MTV’s Affiliate Promotions Department sponsored the “Free Your Mind” spoken word tour, bringing these poets to college campuses across the nation. Some, such as Reg. E. Gaines, have recorded spoken word albums in an effort to reach audiences devoted to audio and disabused of the book." It is instructive to remember that in ancient Rome one went about “publishing” one’s poetry by reading it aloud before an assembled group. One could argue these contemporary spoken word poets have thus breathed fresh life into an ancient mode of delivering poetry to its audience. Even better, there’s a movement to link performance and print poets in anthologies such as The Spoken Word Revolution Redux, which presents poems in both print and audio CD versions." Poets as various as Billy Collins, Mark Strand, Lisa Buscani, Marc Smith, and Kevin Coval offer work on the page and in audio recitation.

Such oral poetries are attracting not only widespread public audiences but also devoted academic proponents. In fact, some surprising characters are attempting to unbrick the red-brick walls dividing “academic” and oral poets. In his Disappearing Ink: Poetry at the End of Print Culture, Dana Gioia— ironically regarded by practitioners of “opposing” poetries as a mainstay advocate of genteel, workshop, NEA-supported, traditionalist poetry and thus as the enemy—has roundly praised the emergence of spoken word and performance poetry as a life-giving development. The National Endowment for the Arts, which Gioia until recently headed, has initiated Poetry Out Loud, a national poetry recitation competition for high school students. This dalliance into oral poetry performance has had the curious result of simultaneously disaffecting many academic poets (who fear anything but the page as zone of performance) and discomfiting oral poets (who fear this incursion onto their turf beacons the establishment’s eventual co-opting of their countermovement).

Oral poetry is suddenly the hot topicin university hallways known mostly for their hushed reverence for the printed page. What many academics have viewed as a sham of antipoetry is increasingly regarded as historically rooted in poetry’s longstanding oral performativity across cultures and continents. For example, John Miles Foley’s exhaustively researched How to Read an Oral Poem traces oral poetry as an “international medium” across four continents dating from 600 B.C.E., introducing scholarly examination of performance modes embodied by a Tibetan paper-singer, a North American Slam poet, a South African praise poet, and an ancient Greek bard. Foley’s study demonstrates oral poetry’s vital cultural roles in the ancient world as well as in our own moment and suggests, provocatively, that the historical prevalence of oral poetry worldwide actually dwarfs “written poetry in size and variety.” ”

Further complicating this bifurcation is the ascendancy of numerous video and new media poetries occasioned by the computer’s technological innovations. Most of these electronic poetries place themselves in opposition to current print-based verse culture, so academic poetry now finds itself assailed not only by print- and oral-centered challengers but also by digital poets whose work has moved off the printed page and onto the computer screen. Digital poets such as Brian Kim Stefans, Loss Pequeno Glazier, and Jim Andrews fashion poetic expressions that decenter the authorial “I,” favor alterable as opposed to fixed texts, and invite reader interaction with digital poems. Known by a variety of names—e-poetry, Cin(E-)Poetry, rich.lit. Web. art, and so on—these modes blend word, image, sound, and music into anew language of digital poetic expression. Digital poetic modes envision image and word as not merely complementary but interchangeable artistic elements. So consequential do I consider these digital poetries that I’ve devoted chapter 7 to an extended discussion of their theories and expressions.

In sum, the differences among various manifestations of these two opposed poetic groups are significant and expressive. While the phrasing used to describe this dialectic again has shown itself to be protean, the fundamental division has retained its essential character. One trendy version of the dialectic recently prompted a topical symposium in the literary journal Boulevard, which framed the question in this fashion: Is contemporary poetry dominated more by irony, artifice, and indirection or by sincerity and direct emotional statement?

Again, the American Aesthetic Pendulum

See it swinging there, as one would in a clichéd horror film’s laboratory climax, its huge shimmering blade slicing the dank air of the literary castle, the very dungeon perhaps. There in black and white is the poet as evildoer with hands on the machine’s controls and the poet as innocent victim lashed to a metal table beneath the room’s swinging doom. There’s the poet as mad scientist relishing his own imminent destruction and the poet as buff hero bursting through the padlocked door to save himself from himself. The means of artists’ destructions are always their own aesthetic choices—irony and artifice sharpening one half of the blade, sincerity and emotion honing the other. We poets murder ourselves with our choices—or rather, we re-create ourselves, redeem ourselves, remake ourselves (and our art).

This notion has gotten me to thinking about Donald Hall’s circa-1962 complaint about the “eternal American tic of talking about art in terms of its techniques.” He’s right, of course, but what else do we poets have to discern why we like one thing and don’t like another? We’re doers and makers, evidenced by the Greek “poésis” glossing as “to make” and “poesie” serving as an exact Renaissance equivalent for “makers.” So we look to see how it’s done as a way of saying why we like it, believe it, want to do it ourselves just like that. (Most poets wouldn’t confess to that last part for fear of revealing envy as the basis of so much art.) Or we look to see how it’s done in order to figure out why we hate that writing and why others should too. Technique, we figure, is portal to character—both the poet’s and the poem’s. Thus, judging character, another eternal American tic, seeps into our judgments about the purpose, goals, and limits of art.

Irony or emotion? A form of this question faced the American Moderns at the turn of the last century. They saw before them a vast nineteenth-century wasteland of dripping sentimentality, moral uplift, and general good manners among the main guard of American poetry and asked what had come of it. The Fireside Poets—Holmes, Whittier, and Longfellow—had endeared themselves to a book-reading public not yet tempted by the not-so-subtle diversions awaiting twentieth-century citizens. In the absence of radio, telephone, film, television, easy travel by auto and airplane, and more recent developments of the cell phone, the camera, and the Internet, these poets commanded public attention in ways unimaginable to contemporary poets.

The public literally read their works by the dim glow of fireside and oil lamp. They amounted to a cultural linchpin, united and uniting, defining for a developing country what American poetry could and might be. And they defined for Americans what they as citizens might become. These poets were beloved as much for their avuncular, bearded images as for their homespun messages. For instance, Longfellow’s “A Psalm of Life” admonishes readers that “Life is real! Life is earnest!” and concludes with this call to action and sage advice: “Let us, then, be up and doing, / With a heart for any fate; / Still achieving, still pursuing, / Learn to labor and to wait.” In this fashion, art seemed to offer an appealing twofer: it bettered one’s character and delivered pleasure in the process. To read was to be edified. To be edified brought demure joy.

By the onset of World War I, a broad reading public had arisen, churned up by the notion that art’s noblest purpose amounts to prodessare et delectare,

“to teach and to delight.” Righto. The Moderns surveyed the scene and posed unsettling questions about art’s role in the supposed eternal upward spiral of societal evolution. They asked what to make of World War I’s machine gun, lethal gas, tank, and other means of mass and anonymous death the great minds of our culture had conjured up under the influence of art that taught and delighted. Consider the airplane, the Wright brothers’ darling and one of humanity’s greatest achievements, giving wings to humans who suddenly seemed, if not godlike, then at least demigods gifted with means to escape earth for the seeable heavens. Roughly ten years old by the time of the Great War, the airplane, humanity’s access to the clouds, had already been co-opted as a killing device. Goodbye Wright brothers, hello aerial bombardment.

No wonder those Moderns tossed aside the then-current mode of direct, emotional statement and sought newer ways to speak their poems. Speaking poems, after all, was a way of speaking their world. And that world, Pound’s

“botched civilization,” needed fresh ways to be called up and held accountable, as did poets themselves. In Dada and Surrealism, poets discounted meaning-making altogether, opting out of nineteenth-century poetry’s necessary function. Let’s play, let’s make baby-talk, let’s desecrate the very notions that had given themselves over to scientific and artistic evolution, an evolution with such proven lethal results. Eliot’s own Impersonal Theory of poetry was a flight away from personality and emotion in favor of universals, things that might bind not separate. It was a search for some means to gather the various pieces of shattered culture and glue them, staple them,

IO / POETRY’S AFTERLIFE duct tape them into an albeit fragmented but still not unworthy whole— ”these fragments I have shorn against my ruins.”

The problem with such a notion was not that Eliot had urged irony over emotion and artifice over direct statement. That’s one swing of the aesthetic pendulum. The problem was that there existed no aesthetic dialogue, no give and take, no lively quarrel among poets to keep their art alive. Deified, Eliot and his favored mob began to wear the robes of the gods. And this god indeed seemed all powerful. In his Autobiography, William Carlos Williams, adopting a metaphor of the atomic age, later described the advent of Eliot’s aesthetic as having destroyed his world “like an atom bomb.” Williams goes on to explain the effects on him in terms more suited to military not literary battle: “To me especially it struck like a sardonic bullet. I felt at once that it had set me back twenty years. . . . Critically Eliot returned us to the classroom just at the moment when I felt that we were on the point of an escape to matters much closer to the essence of a new art form itself.” Poetry in the American grain, innovative and forward-looking, as Williams conceived it, had given way to something else indeed, something refined and footnotable.

It’s not hard to foresee the subsequent arrival of the New Critics, those hoping to protect the pure mysteries of poetry against the encroachment of scientific positivism. When the New Critics “fled Imagism and Chicago,” as George Williamson describes it, “into the Metaphysical seventeenth-century,” they escaped Modernist chaos and thus reasserted lines of social governance and religious belief seemingly severed by the dominant culture. The New Criticism favored by poets such as John Crowe Ransom and by scores of university English Department scholars such as Cleanth Brooks leapt at Eliot’s complex poetry as a way to undergird a system of reading and writing that could be defined, evaluated, and defended. And they used the “classroom,” as Williams remarked, as setting and means to inculcate their way of reading poetry. Importantly, only certain poetry warranted and rewarded such close reading, so the effect was to silence other modes of writing via the blunt instrument of New Critical inattention. Hence, the New Critics became the curmudgeons (or saints) who ruled American poetry until the late fifties uprisings of Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Kerouac, Burroughs, and the rest of the Beats. Ginsberg’s “Howl” lamented the woeful fate of “the best minds” of his generation in an era of buttoned-down uniformity that cast out those scandalous others who possessed alternative aesthetics or lifestyles. Ferlinghetti’s poetry offered a carnivalesque Coney Island of the Mind that stood in riotous contrast to the conservative poet’s decorous Elbow-Patched Tweed Sport Coat of the Mind.

Surely, the so-called generation of ’62, Wright, Bly, Merwin, Kinnell, Levertov, Stafford, and others, faced a version of this question, as had the Moderns before them. New Critical irony, paradox, and tension reigned supreme—that half of the aesthetic blade—so what was a poet to do? Rebel, of course, as the lot of them did in sundry ways that shared one principle. That notion is a renewed appreciation of intuition and the inner life of the self moving among a world of fellow beings and, more important, a yearning for epiphanies to be had through modes of emotion the New Critics had outlawed or roundly castigated as sophomoric.

It wasn’t long before Gwendolyn Brooks, the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, adapted her beloved forms of inherited English tradition, say, the ballad, to the subjects of Chicago’s Bronzeville. She introduced into her work as well the language of street corner and tenement after a watershed moment at the Fisk Black Writers Conference in 1967, thereafter tapping into and giving life to the Black Arts Movement. This same “awakening” resulted in her refusal of major publishing houses in favor of smaller but exclusively black publishers, especially the Broadside Press. With the move, Brooks’s work also changed aesthetic locales, abandoning the compressed imagery and forms of her earlier work for a mode influenced by the improvisations of jazz. With similar rebelliousness, Adrienne Rich, precocious Yale Series of Younger Poets Award winner and one of the few female darlings of modern poetry, set fire to her aesthetic bed. In “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision,” Rich admits her early style was steeped in the patriarchal mode of male poets such as “Frost, Dylan Thomas, Donne, Auden, MacNeice, Stevens, and Yeats.”!° Born, as she describes it, “white and middle class into a house full of books,” Rich had redefined herself by 1970, she says, as “a radical feminist.” The transition was startling, and her edgy, socially conscious poetry shoveled fresh dirt upon the grave of New Critical propriety. Suddenly, the countermovement was THE movement.