Voices of the New Generation
STEPANCHEV, STEPHEN
WRITERS&WRITING Voices of the New Generation By Stephen Stepanchev There is so much whoring after the young in literary circles these days that one cannot help but look at a book entitled The...
...Yet, because of the diversity of talents working under its banner, I find it difficult to define the New York school or to isolate its distinguishing characteristics...
...And he seems unaware of the very promising work of Karen Swenson, Cliff Rugg, Clayton Eshleman, Bill Little, Barry Seiler, Lloyd Ruza, Joyce Peseroff, Jerry Gliber, Louis Nayman, and P. J. Blumenthal...
...Sometimes he exhibits a wild sense of humor, as in his "Sonnet," which, like minimal painting, exists by reason of a pointed awareness of the tradition it rejects...
...Among the poets of the New York school represented in the anthology are Tom Clark, Peter Schjeldahl, Michael Benedikt, and John Perreault...
...She is a compelling and powerful poet...
...paperbound, $3.95) with a certain amount of jaundice...
...In this poem he links a newspaper story about a murder in a room he has recently looked into with a sudden and strange withdrawal of light from the sky...
...James Welch is a remarkably gifted American Indian poet (he is a Blackfoot from Montana) who writes, predictably, about Western landscapes under various weathers and about the consequences to his people of the bloody encounters between them and the white man...
...over a third of the poets are associated with it...
...I think I can say that the New York style is witty, colorful, urbane, and sophisticated...
...In the meantime, it is good to have this brilliant testimonial to the continuing vitality of American poetry...
...Snodgrass have made popular...
...his strikingly original imagery has a technological cast, even when he deals with emotionally charged subject matter, as in "A Beloved Head," where he describes a woman in terms of treadles, light switches, and control panels...
...Tom Clark's vision is equally original, drawing objects into unexpected relationships and unities...
...It is art-directed and neo-surrealistic in imagery...
...Their influence is clearly waning...
...Lou Lipsitz is less passionate, but his poems are very appealing in their exactness and seeming simplicity as they explore social scenes and social problems...
...Imaginative, whimsical, highly personal in her subject matter, she is a darling of New York City coffee houses and art galleries...
...Diane Wakoski is one of the most lyrical poets of the '60s...
...The term "generation," of course, is synonymous with "decade" in our accelerating age...
...My own preferences among the poets in the anthology are Michael Benedikt, Tom Clark, Kathleen Fraser, Lou Lipsitz, Ron Padgett, Peter Schjeldahl, Charles Simic, Kathleen Spivack, Diane Wakoski, and James Welch...
...I must say, however, that Paul Carroll has overlooked a number of talented young poets on the scene, notably the two outstanding Negro poets, Lorenzo Thomas and David Henderson...
...Ron Padgett has an overwhelming sense of the distractions and horrors of city life, notably in the subtle veering and image-shading of "Passage Charles Dallery...
...One can, of course, pick and choose among the many new and unknown poets in the anthology, and one's preferences must necessarily be based, except in a few cases, on the sample of work that Paul Carroll has provided...
...It tends to be camp in its treatment of old films, comic-strip heroes, and drug-induced fantasies...
...By contrast, Kathleen Spivack's world is surreal, transmogrified by euphoria and depression, as in "High," or delineated with the precise but hallucinatory imagery that art critics call magic realism...
...Kathleen Fraser is always emotional and sometimes child-like in her response to the wonders and disappointments of the world...
...A man in his 20s is much more likely to be a good poet than a good novelist or dramatist...
...Sonnet" is delightfully anti-Petrarchan in its free-form treatment of a love theme developed in terms of a textbook account of a woman's orgasm...
...Why doesn't some publisher bring out an anthology of poems by "neglected middle-aged poets" or "new poets in their 70s...
...Unfortunately, her language tends to be loose and repetitive, and most of her poems cannot stand up under scrutiny, largely because she would rather write a new poem than revise an old one...
...One of the notable features of the work of these poets is a dramatic shift away from the "breath line" and the mannerisms of the "projective verse" movement of Charles Olson and Robert Creeley...
...He will be persuaded that the poetry of the '60s is far better, both in substance and technique, than the drama or the fiction...
...WRITERS&WRITING Voices of the New Generation By Stephen Stepanchev There is so much whoring after the young in literary circles these days that one cannot help but look at a book entitled The Young American Poets (Follett, 508 pp., $6.95...
...It isn't a particularly attractive idea, I know...
...Art, after all, implies man...
...It represents the assiduous editorial efforts and considered judgment of Paul Carroll, a Chicago-based poet, who selected the work of 54 poets in their 20s and early 30s from a mass of manuscripts submitted by some 400 of their contemporaries...
...I find several of his poets merely loud and bizarrely costumed, and though I am completely open to experimentation of every sort, I think all means should be judged by the ends they serve...
...But at her best, as in poems like "Sometimes Even My Knees Smile" and "Apparitions Are Not Singular Occurrences," she wholly deserves the enthusiasm of her public...
...He has a poem, for example, about a man who was told he didn't publish enough to be promoted to the rank of associate professor, and another about the Dionysian fantasies of people who hate their work...
...Charles Simic is impressive for the simplicity of his diction and the brilliance and depth of his images, which carry the force of a conviction generated by years of brooding about history, human destiny and death...
...He is proud and angry and skillful in his use of the white man's language...
...The chief school, or movement, represented in the anthology is the so-called "New York school...
...Though vividly rendered, Simic's world is recognizable in everyday terms...
...An even more introspective poet, Peter Schjeldahl, provides humorous self-analysis in a poem entitled "Alcohol" and an ironic, rational examination of love in a poem he calls "Soft Letter...
...Reading Schjeldahl, one is afraid that the poem will collapse at any moment under the weight of his abstract vocabulary, but it never does, and he often succeeds brilliantly in exploring his own and the world's anxiety neuroses...
...But the break with traditional metrics that occurred in the 1950s has been confirmed in the continuing emphasis on free forms which modulate with the poet's feelings and perceptions...
...The young poets talk about themselves, to be sure, but with irony and fantasy and considerable detachment...
...Michael Benedikt is one of the coolest poets in the anthology...
...It describes "The trembling finger of a woman" as it "Goes down the list of casualties...
...The poet says, "The list is long...
...Its metaphors range from art galleries to gutters...
...All our names are included...
...The poets of the school like to take risks with language...
...Having offered it, I must also acknowledge that many poets achieve a crystallization of their talent at an early age, John Keats and Dylan Thomas being obvious examples...
...they ride centrifugal, irrational momentums as far as possible without actually disrupting the formal unity of a poem...
...His poem "War" is characteristic...
...In fact, his poems are among the most tightly controlled in the anthology, reminding one of the work of William Stafford...
...Another interesting feature is the absence of lachrymose, self-pitying, confessional poetry of the sort that Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, and W.D...
...I doubt, for instance, that chance factors and mechanical permutations of words and phrases will ever supplant the imagination in joining the disparate elements of reality in attractive and meaningful ways...
...It contains a symbolic record of the anxieties and ecstasies of the new generation—in images that are an authentic expression of the contradictions of contemporary reality, inner and outer...
...Hovering above them in the background are such first-generation New York school poets as John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and Frank O'Hara, each wearing his nimbus...
...I recommend the book to anyone who likes poetry...
...The poems are very attractive and enjoyable, wonderfully alive in their formal tensions...
...I was also impressed by some of the poems of George Amabile, James Applewhite, Harold Bond, Phillip Hey, John Perreault, and Saint Geraud...
...The book is a valuable index to the poetry scene of the '60s...
...her firm technique ably supports her insights, as in the vivid particularities of "Change of Address," where she tells a former lover that she is now married and no longer available...
...And the present anthology is really a very good one...
...No doubt some unknown, brooding Arkansas farm boy will suddenly surprise all of us...
...I enjoyed, in particular, "Montana, Nothing Like Boston" and "Blackfeet, Blood and Piegan Hunters...
Vol. 51 • October 1968 • No. 20
