Post-war poetry II: the US

Clockwise from top left:

Lawrence Ferlinghetti; Allen
Ginsberg; Frank O’Hara;
Audre Lorde; Adrienne Rich.
 Post-war America: prosperity and anxiety
• The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955) by Sloan Wilson was a best-
selling novel, made into an equally successful film a year later. The
popularity of both novel and film is in part due to their distillation of
pervasive anxieties in post-war American society.
• Tom Rath is a successful man with wife, children, house, income, but
struggles to find purpose in a materialist culture. A war veteran with
traumatic combat experiences behind him, Tom is hired in PR at United
Broadcasting Corporation, climbs the company ranks but eventually
cannot take the conformity of corporate life and leaves the rat race.
• ‘The man in the gray flannel suit’ enters the vernacular and becomes a
symbol for mid-century discontent, referred to popularly and among
sociologists.
• For a more recent example, Mad Men (2007-2015) articulates the same
dissonance.
• If people in business felt this pressure, poets of the era did too (to a much
greater degree).
 Post-war America: prosperity and anxiety
• After 1945, America is the leading nation of the western world, one of the two global superpowers
(along with the Soviet Union).
• Had suffered losses in war but no destruction on the US mainland (in sharp contrast to war-ravaged
Europe, with cities razed to the ground and a continent-wide refugee crisis).
• A wealthy (if divided) society, in receipt of war debt repayments from European nations. Buoyant
economy. But there are significant issues and divisions.
Issues
• Cold War and nuclear threat: Korea and Vietnam – unwinnable wars and heavy losses, protests at
home, antiwar movement.
• Legacies of slavery: segregation and violence in South, black poverty in Northern cities, civil rights
movement, Martin Luther King assassination, Black Panthers
• Patriarchal and heteronormative society: consumer society invested in ideal of suburban housewife,
curtailment of gay rights, Stonewall riots, assassination of Harvey Milk
• Conservative/Liberal divide: McCarthyism and communist witch-hunt (HUAC), Kennedy
assassination, mainstream and counterculture divided
 Headlines on postwar poetry
• The poetry of the era that we sample today would have been viewed as oppositional by the
mainstream at the time. That is, it considers subversive content and employs subversive poetics. It is
at odds with the acquisitive and conformist values of the dominant capitalist culture.
• The poet is a different figure here than in the UK – less establishment, more countercultural. There
are more ‘traditional’ poets working in conventional verse forms in America in the post-war era –
Randall Jarrell, Elizabeth Bishop, Delmore Schwartz – but they are (to our mind) less interesting than
today’s sample.
• Where the post-war UK scene arguably hadn't fully explored modernist possibilities, the spirit of
experimentalism carries through much more in the US – Ezra Pound's ‘make it new’ is still a mantra
here. Range of experiments in form and subject matter.
• The prevailing tone of the poetry combines extremes – ecstatic hopefulness alongside documents of
abjection.
• We’ll look at the Beat counterculture, New York School’s surrealist-indebted work, radical feminist
poetics, and the Black Arts Movement.
• The continued modernist project here signals both a potential difficulty – the work is complex – and
a reward for us.
A different kind of poet: Ginsberg giving a reading in
Washington Square Park, Greenwich Village, Manhattan (1966)
 An important anthology: The New Poetry,
1945-1960, ed. Donald Allen (Grove Press)
• ‘Following the practice and precepts of Ezra Pound and William
Carlos Williams, [the new poetry] has built on their
achievements and gone on to evolve new conceptions of the
poem. These poets have already created their own tradition,
their own press, and their public. They are our avant-garde, the
true continuers of the modern movement in American poetry.
Through their work many are closely allied to modern jazz and
abstract expressionist painting, today recognized throughout the
world to be America’s greatest achievements in contemporary
culture. This anthology makes the same claim for the new
American poetry, now becoming the dominant movement in the
second phase of our twentieth-century literature and already
exerting strong influence abroad.’
• Of our poets for this week, the anthology includes Ferlinghetti,
Ginsberg, O’Hara. (Rich and Lorde come to the fore slightly later.)
Starting with a poem: Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s
‘Sometime During Eternity…’
• Part of a sequence from A Coney Island of the Mind (1958).
• Irreverent, iconoclastic response to Christian scripture – still an authoritative source of meaning in mid-
century America. Voices scepticism – by the end of the poem, the Christ figure is ‘real dead’ – familiar by
this point and declared as long ago as Nietzsche.
• Also simultaneously repositions Jesus as one of the dispossessed. Likened to a (presumably black) jazz
player: he is the king cat / who’s got to blow / or they can’t quite make it’. Ferlinghetti a ‘committed’ writer.
• What’s new is the language of the street – ‘and that the cat / who really laid it on us / is his Dad’ (compare
Wordsworth’s ‘language really spoken by men’) – and the free verse rhythms.
• Rhythmically, this radically free poem is indebted to modernist models but also (more so?) to jazz form and
improvisation. Our first example of the much freer approach typifying American poetry.
• In the era’s most important statement on poetics, ‘Projective Verse’ (1950), Charles Olsen defined verse
according to breath and the body rather than traditional poetic form. He also proposed ‘composition by
field’ – using the entire page ‘as opposed to inherited line, stanza, over-all form, what is the “old” base of
the non-projective.’
• Ferlinghetti’s poem exemplifies this – the scattered organization on the page replicates a whole new way of
giving voice to poetry, according to the breath rather than extrinsic imposed patterns.
 Ferlinghetti as organizer; small presses and
independent bookshops
• Ferlinghetti’s role was not only that of poet. He also
ran City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, an
important venue for Beats and others.
• City Lights Books, Ferlinghetti’s press, ‘inaugurated
the concept of high-end literary paperbacks
designed to be carried in the back pocket of the
wayfaring bohemian poet’ (Maria Damon, ‘Beat
Poetry: HeavenHell USA, 1946-1965’)
• Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems and O’Hara’s
Lunch Poems both appeared in the Pocket Poets
series.
• This DIY approach to publishing and establishing
cultural communities, replicated by other
subcultures in many of America’s big cities, allowed
for the new tradition and reached the new public Left to right: Ferlinghetti, Bob Dylan, Ginsberg, out
that Donald Allen described. back of City Lights.
 Ginsberg and Howl
• Ginsberg – queer, Jewish – critiques bourgeois culture
throughout his work and perhaps most forcefully in this
his best-known poem. Beat manifesto.
• First performed at a now famous and much
mythologized group reading at Gallery Six in 1956. The
obscenity trial that it faced on publication indicates the
threat that it posed to the establishment.
• Dedicated to Carl Solomon, Ginsberg’s fellow inmate in
psychiatric hospital. Celebrates the ‘angelic’ lives of
misfits – ‘the best minds of my generation’ – but also
their suffering at the hands of a conformist society –
‘destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked’.
(Compare Byron’s outcast protagonists.)
• Raw. ‘Confessional’? Lyric and/or voice of a generation?
 Poetics of Howl
• ‘By 1955 I wrote poetry adapted from prose seeds, journals, scratchings, arranged by
phrasing or breath groups into little short-line patterns according to ideas of measure of
American speech I’d picked up from W.C. Williams’ imagist preoccupations. I suddenly
turned aside in San Francisco, unemployment compensation leisure, to follow my romantic
inspiration – Hebraic-Melvillian bardic breath. I thought I wouldn’t write a poem, but just
what I wanted to without fear, let my imagination go, open secrecy, and scribble magic
lines from my real mind – sum up my life – something I wouldn’t be able to show anybody,
write for my own soul’s ear and a few other golden ears.’ (Ginsberg, ‘Notes for Howl and
Other Poems’)
• ‘I depended on the word “who” to keep the beat, a base to keep the measure, return to
and take off from again onto another streak of invention […] Ideally each of the lines in
Howl is a single breath unit. […] my poetry is Angelic Ravings’
• Like Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg is clearly drawing on the same rhythmic energies outlined in
Olsen’s ‘Projective Verse’. The long line taps into a distinctly American tradition – perhaps
beginning with Whitman.
 Beat
• Beat – beatific/angelic, dispossessed/beaten down. The two senses are both present.
• ‘Against the tragic/triumphant contradiction of the United States’ emergence as an economic and
military superpower out of the ashes of the atom bomb and the crematoria, the Beats posited
their own oxymoronic yoking: drugs and spirituality, purity and abjection, voluntary poverty in the
nation of dollars, the derangement of the senses as response to the strict regulation of
pragmatism, the street as a viable alternative to the university.’ (Damon)
• With the collapse of the old pre-war revolutionary left-wing politics (under new pressure from
McCarthyism), radicals turned to revolution in lifestyle. What often gets credited to hippy culture
in the ’60s is actually set in motion by the Beats in the ’50s, though not immediately with the same
mass appeal and reach.
• Poetics: long line, broken line, surrealistic imagery, jazz rhythms and improvisation, street
vernacular and argots, authentic voice (‘nakedness’ and ‘candor’ are key terms for Ginsberg)
• Subject matter: queerness, eroticism, addiction and experimentation, squalor, unorthodox lives,
the self.
• Influences: French existentialism, Buddhism (esp. Zen) and eastern mysticism, Romanticism
(Ginsberg’s emulation of Blake as visionary).
Abstract expressionism: Jackson Pollock,
One: Number 31, 1950 (MoMA)
 Abstract expressionism
and the New York School (of poetry)
• Pollock’s action paintings and the drip method he used to achieve these vast canvases are
concerned with giving licence to the unconscious and moving beyond artistic intention. They
make a sharp formal break with art history (though not without precedent in earlier C20
modernist movements) – there is a different relationship between reality and the work of art.
• Frank O’Hara is strongly linked to abstract expressionism: he works for 10 years at MoMA,
becoming an associate curator, helping organize the 1958 exhibition ‘The New American
Painting’, featuring de Kooning, Kline, Pollock, and others; writes monograph on Pollock, and
poems about visual art (e.g. ‘Why I am not a painter’).
• ‘A handful of poets in New York interacting with visual artists who extended Surrealist principles
to invent action painting produced new work that grew exponentially, revolutionizing the
texture, scope, and tone of American poetry. Their poetic lines captured the flush and surge of
city life, cultivated the chance opportunity, and looked ironically on social forms. […] This
innovative writing, moreover, emerged in relation to everyday experience. The irrational was
inescapably folded into modern life, a Surrealistic view embraced by John Ashbery and Frank
O’Hara, although each unfolded that irrationality in different ways.’ (Edward Brunner, ‘New York
School and American Surrealist Poetics’)
 The stuff of life
• ‘Frank O’Hara wrote obsessively about Manhattan, and as fully deserves to be called the poet of mid-
twentieth-century New York as Baudelaire does the poet of mid-nineteenth-century Paris. He
cultivated numerous passionate friendships with a diverse circle of New York-based artist-friends –
dancers, painters, musicians, poets – who formed a kind of coterie his poetry both celebrates and
helps to keep creatively “humming”.’ (Mark Ford)
• ‘The possibility of using your dreams, your average thoughts, things you overhear people saying in the
street – anything that comes into your mind – as a raw material for poetry.’ (Ashbery)
• ‘It may be that poetry makes life’s nebulous events tangible to me and restores their detail; or
conversely, that poetry brings forth the intangible quality of incidents which are all too concrete and
circumstantial. Or each on specific occasions, or both all the time.’ (O’Hara)
• ‘The irreverence of the New York School writers is one of their most appealing qualities. In their
reaction against the serious, ironic, ostentatiously well-made lyric that dominated the post-war
poetry scene, they turned to the work of an eclectic range of literary iconoclasts, eccentrics, and
experimenters.’
• ‘The Day Lady Died’ – one of O’Hara’s ‘I do this, I do that’ poems, an elegy to Billie Holiday,
exemplifies all of these features.
 The personal [stuff of women’s lives]
is political
• As we saw with Plath last week, second-wave feminism was shifting the terms of debate about
gender roles from mid-century onwards. Earlier activism had centered on the franchise – votes
for women – but now combatting the operations of patriarchy in all areas of life was the
necessary action.
• You’ll hear more about this in relation to Caryl Churchill’s play Top Girls after reading week.
Here, suffice to say it is an important context for thinking about Adrienne Rich’s poetry.
• The New York School’s treatment of the everyday, the stuff of life, as subject matter for poetry
carries over and gains more distinct political dimensions in (radical) feminist poetry.
• It is important to read early and later poems by Rich. Plath’s poems are stylistically similar to
one another. Rich, who lives much longer, changes more.
• Poems written in the 1950s (e.g. ‘Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers’) chart the limitations on women’s
experience in circumscribed forms and registers. By contrast, those published in the 1960s
(e.g. ‘Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law’) and especially the 1970s (e.g. ‘Diving into the Wreck’)
delve deeper into female experience and employ looser, freer rhythms and forms to do so.
 Rich poetics
• ‘Snapshots…’ compares generations, the daughter ‘grows another way’ than those who went
before, i.e. she is more politicised and less compromising. The poem charts the broader
opportunities this brings, but also the hardships that must be endured by the non-conformist
(those who ‘smash the mold right off’). Compare others’ hopefulness/abjection.
• ‘Diving into the Wreck’ employs an extended metaphor for a discussion of the ongoing search
for the female self in a society that provides no maps for such an activity. It is motivated by an
insistence on registering the reality of women’s experience – ‘the wreck and not the story of
the wreck’.
• The formal shift goes hand in hand with one in subject matter (much of which is
autobiographical in origin, though seldom called ‘confessional’ as Plath’s poetry had been).
Rich was married to a man until his death by suicide in 1970; thereafter she is in a relationship
with Michelle Cliff, with whom she edits lesbian-feminist journal Sinister Women.
• As an editor and campaigner, Rich’s role is that of organizer (compare Ferlinghetti, etc.). Also
like Ferlinghetti, she is avowedly political (not only politics of gender).
 The Black Arts Movement
• Prominent through the 1960s and ’70s, the Black Arts Movement is the ‘aesthetic and spiritual
sister of Black Power’ (Larry Neal). Amiri Baraka, the Movement’s founder, is active in both poetry
and theatre.
• Counters centuries of European thought linking white to purity/good and black to taint/evil.
Addison Gayle, in 1971, initiates the idea that ‘Black is beautiful’ as a starting point for a revitalized
aesthetics. Draws on Harlem Renaissance figures of the 1920s (W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes)
who called for a black arts to counter racism.
• Values: independence, self-determination, sociopolitical change. Draws on but more radical than
civil rights-era predecessors.
• ‘BAM poets frequently repudiated standard modes of capitalization, spelling, punctuation, and
syntax in favor of typography and orthography meant to represent a written vernacular speech and
other sonic forms of black culture. Profanity and other provocative or shocking “street” language
regularly peppered BAM poetry, to signal racial “authenticity” and commitment to BAM ideology.
BAM poets often used such diction to critique the racism and classism of American society and to
call for radical change.’ (Evie Shockley, ‘The Black Arts Movement and Black Aesthetics’)
 Lorde and BAM
• It is easy to see elements of the BAM aesthetic in Lorde’s work – relatively free forms replicate her
community’s speech, etc. – but it is also useful to think through the ways in which she bristled at its
sometimes prescriptive nature.
• Lorde is most often remembered as important to the development of intersectionality. She is self-
described ‘black lesbian feminist warrior poet’, defined not by one marker of identity but by the
interaction of many. She is a friend of Rich and equally committed to feminist politics/poetics.
• Her poetry is perhaps most interesting when read in light of this. It articulates multivalent identities.
• ‘Echoes’ dramatizes the perennial poetic subject matter of finding one’s voice, from the perspective
of one belonging to several silenced groups: ‘not being heard / and knowing you are not being /
heard noticed only / by others not heard / for the same reason’.
• ‘Audre Lorde, whose political commitment to an intersectional analysis of oppression and identity
as an out lesbian placed her at odds with the Movement’s black nationalist stance, nonetheless
published [many of her poetry collections] with Broadside Press [the Movement’s house publisher].’
(Shockley)
• Separatism and inclusivity confront one another in her work.
 Conclusions – drawing likenesses
• Rejection of Eliotic impersonality in Beats, New York School, radical feminism, and Black Arts
Movement; the second wave feminist mantra that the ‘personal is political’ is widely
applicable.
• Countercultural positions and subject matter; lyric and documentary (authenticity in both).
• Confronting difficulties of being different in an age of conformity; but also holding faith in
the potential for change, hope.
• Different schools and styles of the post-war era all reacting against the status quo and
informed, in some way, by modernism’s example; alike and dissimilar, then, in the same way
modernisms had been.
• Rhythmic freedom – breath as the unit or building block for poetry, ‘composition by field’
(dispersal of poem across the page); rejection of cramped formalism.
• Legacies? Explosion of spoken word poetry (aka performance poetry), plus its impact on
poetry publishing, draws on trends in this period; revolution in who poetry is for has lasted;
ideas seeded across diverse artforms, not least music; models for art as dissent.
Next time…

Top Girls