POETRY
Never look back
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`This is a fine guide book and an informative introduction to American poetry.'
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AMERICAN poetry came into being in the 20th Century. Yes, they had their Emersons and Poes and Longfellows, but they (except Whitman) were imitating the English. Classical allusions were something they couldn't avoid. If Thoreau wrote on smoke he would talk of Icarus ("Light-winged Smoke, Icarian Bird"). Herman Melville in his "Maldivian Shark" did make the blood course with a line like "From his saw-pit of mouth, from his charnel of maw", but he too spoilt things by talking of the shark's "Gorgonian head". Hence, the best thing about this book is it never looks back.
Twentieth Century American Poetry by Christopher MacGowan (an authority on Willaim Carlos Williams) is one in a series of Blackwell Guides to Literature. It is a solid book starting with brief chapters on subjects like "Transatlantic Connections", "Rebellion in the Fifties and Sixties" and "The Poetry of Change". Change gets reflected not only in the anti-war poetry of the Vietnam War days by Denise Levertov, Robert Lowell, Adrienne Rich, Muriel Rukeyser and Galway Kinnell, but also in the writing of Black poets.
Well researched
Helen Vendler had started her famous anthology The Harvard Book of Contemporary American Poetry by talking of "the American language" as "separate, in accent, intonation, discourse, and lexicon". MacGowan spares us this kind of talk. The book contains a chapter on every important American poet. Even poets like Amiri Baraka, the Chicano poet Sonia Sanchez, Susan Howe, Louise Gluck have chapters devoted to them. And a hundred pages are devoted to important texts from Robert Frost's North of Boston, Pound's Des Imagistes and The Pisan Cantos, Eliot's "The Waste Land", to Baraka's Black Magic and Rita Dove's Thomas and Beulah (1986).
The book is well researched replete with insights. Where else would the general reader learn, for instance, of Ezra Pound's statements in his manifestoes "between 1912 and 1914" that "poetry was behind the novel , painting and music, in finding a contemporary form for the new century"? Or that American poets thronged to Paris in the 1920s not just for its culture but also because the ratio between the devalued frank and the dollar allowed them a better lifestyle? (Two Americans, Robert McAlmon and William Bird set up publishing houses in France offering poets small print runs. Pound of course moved to Paris and then Italy "declaring England to be in the last stages of a fading and corrupt empire.")
How else would we have known that most poets, including William Carlos Williams, financed their first volumes of poetry themselves? And small details: that Rita Dove's poem "Parsley" is based on an incident when the Dominician dictator "Rafael Trujillo had 20,000 Haitian canefield workers killed on October 2, 1937,because they could not pronounce the Spanish word perejil correctly".
An American speciality
The arts and poetry charged each other and American poets looked to painters, sculptors and photographers for direction rather than their poetic ancestors. The long poem was an American speciality ("Pisan Cantos", "Four Quartets", and the lesser known "Brigflatts" by Basil Bunting, "Howl" by Allen Ginsberg, to name just a few). The understatement and psychological explorations of novelists influenced poets like Frost and Edwin Arlington Robinson to "enrich narrative poetry with psychological depth."
Photographers stressed light, shape, texture and pattern in their compositions. Poets started foregrounding their most "expressive materials"— language and space. Literary magazines like The Dial carried "experimental" photographs. Pound cited the novels of Henry James, Kandinsky's paintings, the music of Claude Debussy and the sculptor's hard-edged surfaces and multiple plains as examples for modern poets to emulate. The collage is too well known to need elaboration. In the late 1960s, as I recall from the magazines one read, typography and layout of poems became almost central to the poem. Langston Hughes, "a central figure in the Harlem Renaissance", integrated the rhythm of the blues into his poetry. (He has a fine poem called "The Weary Blues".)
Informative introduction
The book gives very few quotes, which poetry criticism needs, specially in the case of Afro-American poets who hardly figure in American anthologies and who, stylistically, have branched out at a tangent. Yet, to be fair, one quote from Amiri Baraka (born LeRoy Jones) lights up black consciousness. Baraka, before he became a Muslim (in 1967) did not write political poems. Then he put white culture behind him. Here's what he says in his poem "Leroy": "When I die, the consciousness I carry I will to/ black people. May they pick me apart and take the/ useful parts, the sweet meat of my feelings. And leave/ the bitter bullshit rotten white parts/ alone."
A book of this kind could have culled things from interviews — what writers said about their own work or their lives. For instance when Ezra Pound was asked about his long incarceration, he replied "I suffer from cumulative isolation ... fifteen years living more with ideas than with persons." Or, when Carlos Williams was asked what he had "left of special value to the new poets" (?) answered "The variable foot— the division of the line according to a new method that would be satisfactory to an American." Or that the Pound-prosecutors asked Williams to listen to some records "and swear it was Pound." But all in all this is a fine guide book and an informative introduction to American poetry.
KEKI N. DARUWALLA Twentieth Century American Poetry, Christopher MacGowan, Bl
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