Poetry Today: Low Profile, Flatted Voice

By A.T. Baker

FOR more than a decade a gradual upheaval has been occurring in the world of poetry. Today, with more verse being published and read than ever before, those shifts in tone and style and direction, for good or ill, stand pervasively confirmed.

Many of the old leaders, modern masters who held sway over the youthful poetic imagination for years, have now been dismissed or at least promoted to emeritus status by a generation that has little patience with the cerebral and the courtly. Scores of collegiate poets and critics questioned by TIME correspondents on campuses across the U.S. found T.S. Eliot "irrelevant," Robert Frost "too provincial," Dylan Thomas a "phony Welshman," W.H. Auden "a poet for the middle-aged." These men still have admirers, but they lack followers. If among the enshrined elders the seating order has been changed--as in the latest photograph of the Soviet Presidium--William Carlos Williams is the new chief because he dealt with commonplace objects by using common speech, and he never rhymed anything.

Depending on the individual temperament, other gurus are Walt Whitman, and Ezra Pound (of the Cantos). A special niche is reserved for Robert Lowell. A genuine poet who happens to be a suffering man, he has inadvertently acquired followers who think suffering is the main thing and meticulously record their own under the impression that it is necessarily poetry.

On the whole, college-age poets have apprenticed themselves to a somewhat younger, far less celebrated set of leaders. There is no dominant star among them. Their work, naturally, is varied and individual, but some classifications can be attempted. They may be rudely divided into five groups: the Polemical Roarers, the Confessional Sufferers, the Tiny Imagists, the Compulsive Reporters and the Cult Poets.

THE POLEMICAL ROARERS are the most visible and vocal. Today they form part of the leading edge of youthful dissent and are largely responsible for the present popularity of poetry readings as a kind of folk festival. Their roots go back to the late '50s, when shaggy beatniks bellowed into the smoke-filled darkness along San Francisco's North Beach. Their once and probably future guru is Allen Ginsberg, now 45, and his Howl ("I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness") is still the best of the genre. Ginsberg made the poet into a folk figure again, and it was Ginsberg, too, who led the trek into Indian sutra land. Such preoccupations have taken more of his time lately than his writing, leaving Gregory Corso as his archdisci-ple. At 41, Corso has a tone a trifle less shrill, decorated with more literary allusions, perhaps more varied rhythmically than Ginsberg's. It is still a prosody deriving directly from Walt Whitman, full of "I saw," "I swear," "I weep," "I curse," "I look" and studded with sudden "O's" and exclamation marks.

Are not the army centers in Europe

ghettos?

They are, and O how sad how lost!

The PX newsstands are filled with

comic books

The army movies are always Doris Day What makes a people huddle so? Why can't they be universal? Who has smalled them so? This is serious! 1 do not mock or hate

this

I can only sense some mad vast

conspiracy!

In this same school can be found considerable work by Robert Bly, 44, a Harvardman, pacifist and founder of a poetry periodical devoted to new verse and progressively called The Fifties, The Sixties, The Seventies. Ely's The Teeth-Mother Naked At Last is a long, savage, sometimes murky lament against the horrors of the Viet Nam War.

Why are they dying . . .

They are dying because the President

has opened a Bible again. . . The Marines think that unless they die

the rivers will not move . . . But if one of those children came near

that we have set on fire, came toward you like a gray barn,

walking, you would howl like a wind tunnel in

a hurricane, you would tear at your shirt with blue

hands

It is hard to quarrel with such compassion. The trouble with the Roarers is that their sentiments too frequently lapse into mere bombast. Bad verse in a good cause is still bad verse.

THE CONFESSIONAL SUFFERERS have their enshrined god in Lowell. "Eliot talked about a world breaking apart at the seams from a stance reflecting personal control," explains Harvard professor Roger Rosenblatt. "What people today like most about Lowell is that he seems to be coming apart at the seams himself." But they also have a Virgin Mary--Sylvia Plath, a gifted American girl who wrote despairing verse until, aged 30, she put her head into a gas oven and died. Her poetry, taut with passion, has been aptly described as "the longest suicide note ever written."

It is never touched by self-pity, however, something that cannot be said about the verses turned out by scores of young poets who write in the confessional mode. Suffering, after all, is universal, and confessing it carries a certain social prestige. Precisely because it is so tempting, few poetical practitioners rise above the general ruck. One who does is Anne Sexton, 42, who has carried readers with her in and out of mental hospitals, through marriage to a Boston executive, two children and sundry passions. In her most recent volume, she writes in "For My Lover, Returning to His Wife":

She is so naked and singular.

She is the sum of yourself and your

dream. Climb her like a monument, step after

step. She is solid.

As for me, I am a watercolor. I wash off.

Denise Levertov ranges more widely and experiments more ingeniously with poetic form. She was born 47 years ago in England, the child of a Welsh mother and a Jewish intellectual who had become an Anglican priest. She lived through London's bombing raids and moved to the U.S. in 1948. Her commitment to matters political in part reflects the concerns of her husband, Writer Mitchell Goodman, who last year, along with Dr. William Spock, was convicted for urging students to resist the draft. But Levertov's most recent verse has been increasingly personal, an austere mixture of poise and passion.

Something in me that wants to cling to never,

wants to have been

wounded deeper

burned by the cold moon to cinder

THE TINY IMAGISTS more or less dominate the poetry establishment--at least by the measurement of sheer volume. They derive from the original imagist movement, formulated before World War I by (among others) Ezra Pound and British Critic T.E. Hulme in rebellion against the lofty subject matter, plushy rhetoric and rocking-horse rhyme scheme of the past. Pound demanded a poetry "direct, free from emotional slither." Hulme insisted "it is essential to prove that beauty may be in small, dry things." Williams Carlos Williams, whose five-line poem The Red Wheelbarrow is perennially quoted as the purest imagist creation ever, announced: "Anything that the poet can effectively lift from its dull bed by force of the imagination becomes his material. Anything. The commonplace, the tawdry, the sordid all have their poetic uses."

The new imagists, however, sometimes seem to forget that though their predecessors worked a revolution in the manner and matter of modern verse, they and their followers did much more than narrowly practice what they preached. The use of the commonplace as image did not mean that it would suffice merely because it was an image and commonplace. Eliot's evening is "spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherised upon a table"--the image is clinical and deflative, but its context is not. Nor is it just an observation of central-city decay when Eliot writes: "The worlds revolve like ancient women/ Gathering fuel in vacant lots."

Many of the new imagists too, have forgotten Pound's espousal of the "musical phrase" (v. the metronome) as the basis of rhythm. Instead they have largely adopted the dicta laid down by Charles Olson, who presided over North Carolina's Black Mountain school from 1951-56. Meter was obsolete, and form along with it, Olson declared. Instead, the poem could be given an organic structure: "The line comes from the breath, from the breathing of the man who writes, at the moment he writes." This dictum resulted in a whole generation of poets breathily crouching over their typewriters, using the space bar heavily to stop or start a line as a catch in the lungs might dictate. On the page, poetry so produced had an iconography of spattered phrases, nouns that hovered inches above a possible verb, floating prepositions, typographical whizbangs of all sorts that suggested E.E. Cummings gone mad. But it was ideal for the lecture circuit.

The current model for many younger poets is Robert Creeley, 45, a onetime colleague of Olson's at Black Mountain. Creeley writes poems of a haiku-like brevity, petering out on an exhausted breath, sometimes fixed in the senses by only the faintest suggestion of an image. One poem--on poetry--goes like this:

and there it was, a little

faint thing hardly felt, a kind of small nothing

But occasionally this kind of thing can attain a nagging sense of significance.

An unexamined hump at first of no interest lifting out of the beach at last devoured us all.

Other notable practitioners of the mode are Galway Kinnell, 44, and James Wright, 43. Kinnell's "Getting the Mail," which begins "I walk back/toward the frog pond, carrying/the one letter . . ." stirred British Critic Christopher Ricks to sharp-tongued criticism of the whole genre. Much of Kinnell's poetry, Ricks snorts, sounds like "one interminable hag-ridden letter" to his mother. "The bated breath," Ricks says of Wright's verse, "suggests that of some radio commentator in the moment before royalty arrives--I stand here under the great dome, etc. 'I open my eyes and gaze down/ At the dark water.' Such poetry has the right to take its time, but does it have the right to take mine?"

THE COMPULSIVE REPORTERS, naturally, are somewhat more verbose. Among the most celebrated today are the late Frank O'Hara, James Schuyler, 48, and Kenneth Koch, 46, who, besides eight volumes of genial verse, has written a remarkable book about teaching poetics to elementary school kids in New York City (TIME, Dec. 28). Schuyler writes:

My thoughts turn south

a white city

we will wake in one another's arms.

I wake

and hear the steam pipe knock

like a metal heart

and find it has snowed.

Koch is an expert parodist with a sense of humor. But he is also much given to recording reflections on the scene he passes in over-meticulous detail, or orchestrating it with a refrain:

Asleep with them: as in Tosca Sleeping with women and causing all

that trouble

As in Roumania, as in Yugoslavia Asleep and sleeping with them Anti-Semitic, and sleeping with women, Pro-canary, Rashomon, Shakespeare,

tonight, sleeping with women A big guy sleeping with women . . .

O'Hara, who died in 1966 in an accident on Fire Island, N.Y., tended to stick closer in his verse to New York and its environs than Koch, and his work more than anything else resembles a laconic journal kept for himself by an old young man in a dry year:

I cough a lot (sinus?) so I

get up and have some tea with cognac

it is dawn

the light flows evenly along the lawn in chilly Southampton and I smoke and hours and hours go by I read van Vechten's Spider Boy then a short story by Patsy Southgate and a poem by myself it is cold and I shiver a little

Fanatically intent on exploring their own particular circumstances, the Compulsive Reporters display reportorial virtues. Too often, however, their revelations merely seem miniscule, random and meaningless.

THE CULT POETS are more cherished for their life-styles than their verse. They have, indeed, many admirers who have never read a word they have written. Ginsberg and Corso both have such followers. But the primus inter pares just now is Gary Snyder, 41, who lives in a one-man commune in the wet, greeny valley of Nevada City, 150 miles northeast of San Francisco. Snyder wears buckskin vests and beads. He took off some years ago for a Japanese monastery, returning with a Japanese wife (Masa) and child (Kai), a set of Zen allusions, and a feeling for haiku. Snyder poems tend to go like this:

Masa in the warm dawn

naked

bending over Kai laughing, dripping

from both breasts

Another, in typical Snyder style, is called "Song of the Taste." and begins:

Eating the living germs of grasses Eating the ova of large birds

the fleshy sweetness packed around the sperm of swaying trees

Eating each other's seed

eating ah, each other.

All this is taken very solemnly. "Snyder and his school" explains Stanford's Donald Davy, "are relating man to nature, supplementing or correcting white Anglo-Saxon Protestant thought patterns with concepts derived from the American Indian, the Hindu and the Japanese."

Nearest counterpart to Snyder is Mark Strand, 37, born in Prince Edward Island, Canada. He studied at Antioch and Yale, and has since become a peripatetic poet in residence at U.S. universities from Seattle to (this year) Brooklyn. Strand is a figure of striking presence and panache, and if he occasionally suffers from the tiny-imagery syndrome, at his best he can be a harder-edged poet than Snyder: I have come this far on my own legs, missing the bus, missing taxis, climbing always. One foot in front of

the other, that is the way I do it.

It does not bother me, the way the hill

goes on . . . The longer I walk, the farther 1 am

from everything.

The cultist with the most fanatic following is big, disarming Richard Brautigan, who affects slouch hats and granny glasses, seems to spend much of his time in trout streams. He can be gently ironic and ironically tender, but is always quite capable of imposing on his abjectly devoted followers such a minim of the minimalist poem as "April 7, 1969,"herewith printed in full: I feel so bad today that I want to write a poem. I don't care: any poem, this poem.

THE SPECIALS. As always, the best poets tend not to fit into categories. Out of this middle generation, two poets in particular stand out as individual talents. One is W.S. (for William Stanley) Merwin, 44, who flutters female hearts on any campus he chooses to visit. Son of a New York clergyman and a graduate of Princeton University where he majored in medieval literature, Merwin made his way to Europe in 1948, accepted an invitation to tutor the children of the Duke of Braganza in Portugal, then apprenticed himself to Robert Graves in Majorca. Merwin's poetic specialty is the transmutation of modern dilemmas into the no-man's-land myth, a landscape of the imagination that is universal and particular at the same time. Behind his prosody, an attentive ear can detect something of the frightening magic of Yeats' birds crying in the desert, the dry exhaustion of Eliot's Gerontion. Merwin's Words from a Totem Animal, for instance, launches a long journey of the spirit:

Distance is where we were but empty of us and ahead of me lying out in the rushes thinking even the nights cannot come back to their hill any time . . .

When I stop I am alone

at night sometimes it is almost good

as though I were almost there

sometimes then I see there is

in a bush beside me the same question

why are you

on this way

I said I will ask the stars

why are you falling and they answered

which of us . . .

Send me out into another life

lord because this one is growing faint

1 do not think it goes all the way.

Merwin's seventh volume of poetry, The Carriers of Ladders, had just won the Pulitzer Prize. No such honor has yet descended on A. (for Archie) R. Ammons, 45, a shy professor, unknown to the lecture circuit, who teaches at Cornell and has only recently achieved any major critical attention. Where Merwin's landscape is general, Ammons' is scrupulously specific. But he has a pawky voice very much his own:

I live in a bodiless loft, no joists, beams, or walls:

I huddle high,

arch my back against the stiff

fact of coming down:

My house admits to being only above the level of most perception:

I shudder and make do: I don't look down.

Despite such men, the impression remains that although poetic output is enormous, poetic quality today is generally in a depressed state. The prevalence of acclaimed poets--and of poetry readings--is deceptive. For the large number of established poets form a closed mutual-admiration society whose members double as critics, reviewing one another's books and seldom saying an unkind word in public. The problem of who should be celebrated, of course, is not created by the indulgent poet-critics alone. As Robert Lowell justly remarked not so long ago: "Our culture is so heroically receptive, so willing to imagine that every straw in the haystack is a needle, that the real needle cannot be discovered."

At a time when many people are producing reams of declared verse, its fanciers all too often react like ornithologists examining a duck. The thing walks like a duck, its primaries are all in place, and its admirers--makers of ducks in their turn--discourse appreciatively on the exquisite joinery of wing and socket, the ingenious solution to the problem of melding emphatic beak with awkward neck. What nobody seems to notice--or if they do, are too polite to remark--is that the goddam bird does not fly.

In current poetry very little flies. The non-flying is, in fact, intentional. "Since around 1960, poets have worked for a deliberate flattening of style," admits Professor Kevin Starr, who teaches the "big" American poetry course at Harvard. Adds Yale Poet-Professor Maynard Mack: "Advertising and politics have corrupted the language so that students shy away from any pure verbal experience," from anything "compact, finished, polished."

The complaint against the corruption of language is just, but the poetic cure now practiced can be deadly. Among the college poets recently interviewed few could recite a line, any line from their favorite poets. "What sticks, in your mind," they explain, "is an emotional stance, a landscape of emotion." Perhaps so. Yet A.E. Housman's simple, frivolous test for real poetry seems more attractive: if he thought of a line while shaving, Housman said, "my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act."

Less frivolously, Gerard Manley Hopkins referred to "the roll, the rise, the carol, the creation." What matters in the long run are those few poems that imprint themselves on the world's memory --and change man's thinking and the sound of the language in his ear. Even granting that there are few such poems in any age, and fewer poets capable of producing them, today's intentionally unmemorable, flatted verse seems an unnecessary and misguided burden upon the ear and the imagination.

. A.T. Baker

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