Though they themselves never called themselves by the name, Koch, Ashbery, Schuyler, and O'Hara have become known as the nucleus of poets that fall under the umbrella of NY School.
Frank O'Hara's work seems so effortless and spontaneous - almost as if he is improving. Though the poems are often coming straight from his life, the banal details are usually compiled in order to highlight some sort of larger "truth" - in this way they are not poems of spontaneous combustion, though they do resemble that type of consciousness. Like the others, O'Hara owes much to painting, specifically abstract-expressionism.
Main subjects of all the NY Poets in some form are Time and Mutability, or, how can we represent a aubject statically (in poetry or painting) when it is always moving through time. that is, by the time you have rendered your subject, it is no longer the same as it was when you began. The break down of the body over time, from disease and age, is also tied to that ideas. The perishability of emotions.
Wit, humor, irony, openness -- these are all aspects of all four of these poets' work.
Ashbery is a bit more sophisitcated and less accessible than O'Hara, but he is interested in many of the same themes. Ashbery also likes to play out the idea of whether or not language can ever really represent experience.
John Berryman, Allen Ginsberg, Wallace Stevens, Walt Whitman, French Art (specifically dada and surrealism), are artists/movements that have significance for these poets.
Kenneth Koch might be the most playful of all the NY School poets. His poems have an exuberance that the others don't carry with the same degree. Schuyler is the most obscure of the NY School. He wrote extensive diaries and letters that are interesting as part of a glimpse into the creative process and how art springs forth from the artist.
Tuesday, November 6, 2007
Personism: A Manifesto
As Manifestos go, this one by Frank O'Hara is ultimately funny, readible, and actually full of really good ideas. If you get past the smarmy jokiness of the piece, you start to get at some smart poetic philosophies -- things like going on feel, trusting instinct, and not taking oneself too seriously. there is also the same attention to voice that separates O'Hara (and the rest of the NY School poets, and many of the Beats, too) from the Modernism of Stevens, Williams, Pound, Eliot, etc.
Please Enjoy!
-----------------------------------------------------------------
FRANK O’HARA
from PERSONISM: A MANIFESTO
Everything is in the poems, but at the risk of sounding like the poor wealthy man’s Allen Ginsberg I will write to you because I just heard that one of my fellow poets thinks that a poem of mine that can’t be got at one reading is because I was confused too. Now, come on. I don’t believe in god, so I don’t have to make elaborately sounded structures. I hate Vachel Lindsay, always have, I don’t even like rhythm, assonance, all that stuff. You just go on your nerve. If someone’s chasing you down the street with a knife you just run, you don’t turn around and shout, "Give it up! I was a track star for Mineola Prep."
That’s for the writing poems part. As for their reception, suppose you’re in love and someone’s mistreating (mal aimé) you, you don’t say, "Hey, you can’t hurt me this way, I care!" you just let all the different bodies fall where they may, and they always do ‘flay after a few months. But that’s not why you fell in love in the first place, just to hang onto life, so you have to take your chances and try to avoid being logical. Pain always produces logic, which is very bad for you.
I’m not saying that I don’t have practically the most lofty ideas of anyone writing today, but what difference does that make? they’re just ideas. The only good thing about it is that when I get lofty enough I’ve stopped thinking and that’s when refreshment arrives.
But how can you really care if anybody gets it, or gets what it means, or if it improves them. Improves them for what? for death? Why hurry them along? Too many poets act like a middle-aged mother trying to get her kids to eat too much cooked meat, and potatoes with drippings (tears). I don’t give a damn whether eat or not. Forced feeding leads to excessive thinness (effete). Nobody should experience anything they don’t need to, if they don’t need poetry bully for them, I like the movies too. And all, only Whitman and Crane and Williams, of the American are better than the movies. As for measure and other technical apparatus, that’s just common sense: if you’re going to buy a of pants you want them to be tight enough so everyone will want to go to bed with you. There’s nothing metaphysical about it. Unless of course, you flatter yourself into thinking that what You’re experiencing is "yearning."
Abstraction in poetry, which Allen recently commented on in It is, is intriguing. I think it appears mostly in the minute particu1ars where decision is necessary. Abstraction (in poetry, not in painting) involves personal removal by the poet. For instance, the decision involved in the choice between "the nostalgia of the infinite" and "the nostalgia for the infinite" defines an attitude toward degree of abstraction. The nostalgia of the infinite representing the greater degree of abstraction, removal, and negative capability (as in Keats and Mallarmé). Personism, a movement which I recently founded and which nobody yet knows about, interests me a great deal, being so totally opposed to this kind of abstract removal that it is verging on a true abstraction for the first time, really, in the history of poetry. Personism is to Wallace Stevens what la poésie pure was to Béranger. Personism has nothing to do with philosophy, it’s all art. It does not have to do with personality or intimacy, far from it! But to give you a vague idea, one of its minimal aspects is to address itself to one person (other than the poet himself), thus evoking overtones of love without destroying love’s life-giving vulgarity, and sustaining the poet’s feelings towards the poem while preventing love from distracting him into feeling about the person. That’s part of personism. It was founded by me after lunch with LeRoi Jones on August 27, 1959, a day in which I was in love with someone (not Roi, by the way, a blond). I went back to work and wrote a poem for this person. While I was writing it I was realizing that if I wanted to I could use the telephone instead of writing the poem, and so Personism was born. It’s a very exciting movement which will undoubtedly have lots of adherents. It puts the poem squarely between the poet and the person, Lucky Pierre style, and the poem is correspondingly gratified. The poem is at last between two persons instead of two pages.
[9/3/59]
(Frank O’Hara "Personism: A Manifesto" from Yugen #7, copyright © 1961.)
Please Enjoy!
-----------------------------------------------------------------
FRANK O’HARA
from PERSONISM: A MANIFESTO
Everything is in the poems, but at the risk of sounding like the poor wealthy man’s Allen Ginsberg I will write to you because I just heard that one of my fellow poets thinks that a poem of mine that can’t be got at one reading is because I was confused too. Now, come on. I don’t believe in god, so I don’t have to make elaborately sounded structures. I hate Vachel Lindsay, always have, I don’t even like rhythm, assonance, all that stuff. You just go on your nerve. If someone’s chasing you down the street with a knife you just run, you don’t turn around and shout, "Give it up! I was a track star for Mineola Prep."
That’s for the writing poems part. As for their reception, suppose you’re in love and someone’s mistreating (mal aimé) you, you don’t say, "Hey, you can’t hurt me this way, I care!" you just let all the different bodies fall where they may, and they always do ‘flay after a few months. But that’s not why you fell in love in the first place, just to hang onto life, so you have to take your chances and try to avoid being logical. Pain always produces logic, which is very bad for you.
I’m not saying that I don’t have practically the most lofty ideas of anyone writing today, but what difference does that make? they’re just ideas. The only good thing about it is that when I get lofty enough I’ve stopped thinking and that’s when refreshment arrives.
But how can you really care if anybody gets it, or gets what it means, or if it improves them. Improves them for what? for death? Why hurry them along? Too many poets act like a middle-aged mother trying to get her kids to eat too much cooked meat, and potatoes with drippings (tears). I don’t give a damn whether eat or not. Forced feeding leads to excessive thinness (effete). Nobody should experience anything they don’t need to, if they don’t need poetry bully for them, I like the movies too. And all, only Whitman and Crane and Williams, of the American are better than the movies. As for measure and other technical apparatus, that’s just common sense: if you’re going to buy a of pants you want them to be tight enough so everyone will want to go to bed with you. There’s nothing metaphysical about it. Unless of course, you flatter yourself into thinking that what You’re experiencing is "yearning."
Abstraction in poetry, which Allen recently commented on in It is, is intriguing. I think it appears mostly in the minute particu1ars where decision is necessary. Abstraction (in poetry, not in painting) involves personal removal by the poet. For instance, the decision involved in the choice between "the nostalgia of the infinite" and "the nostalgia for the infinite" defines an attitude toward degree of abstraction. The nostalgia of the infinite representing the greater degree of abstraction, removal, and negative capability (as in Keats and Mallarmé). Personism, a movement which I recently founded and which nobody yet knows about, interests me a great deal, being so totally opposed to this kind of abstract removal that it is verging on a true abstraction for the first time, really, in the history of poetry. Personism is to Wallace Stevens what la poésie pure was to Béranger. Personism has nothing to do with philosophy, it’s all art. It does not have to do with personality or intimacy, far from it! But to give you a vague idea, one of its minimal aspects is to address itself to one person (other than the poet himself), thus evoking overtones of love without destroying love’s life-giving vulgarity, and sustaining the poet’s feelings towards the poem while preventing love from distracting him into feeling about the person. That’s part of personism. It was founded by me after lunch with LeRoi Jones on August 27, 1959, a day in which I was in love with someone (not Roi, by the way, a blond). I went back to work and wrote a poem for this person. While I was writing it I was realizing that if I wanted to I could use the telephone instead of writing the poem, and so Personism was born. It’s a very exciting movement which will undoubtedly have lots of adherents. It puts the poem squarely between the poet and the person, Lucky Pierre style, and the poem is correspondingly gratified. The poem is at last between two persons instead of two pages.
[9/3/59]
(Frank O’Hara "Personism: A Manifesto" from Yugen #7, copyright © 1961.)
Monday, October 29, 2007
Modernism fractures into Contemporary/Post WWII poetry
One things we will see in the coming weeks is how Modernism gave way to a more contemporary poetics. And when that happened many styles and movements emerged simultaneously--from the Beats and New York School to Confessional Poetry, Surrealism, The Black Mountain Poets, The Fugitives, Deep Image Poetry, The Black Arts Movement, etc. there were even what were called "The Anthology Wars," in which there was much infighting between academic poets and non-academic poets. To kick off this section of our course I give you an essay by Tina Cane. there will be much more to come, so stay tuned.
---------------------------
The Raw and the Cooked: Robert Lowell and the Beats
by Tina Cane
"The best obfuscation bewilders of meaning while reflecting
or intimating or creating a structure of a beauty that we know."
—Bernadette Mayer
"The raw and the cooked" is how Robert Lowell characterized the state of American poetry in 1960 when he accepted the National Book Award for his collection, Life Studies. With its intense emphasis on the personal and its shorter, free verse lines, Life Studies was a departure for the poet. Something less fettered was happening in Lowell’s poetry, and as he saw it, that something was cleaving the genre of poetry in two.
"Cooked" poetry, he contended, was "marvelously expert and remote... constructed as a sort of mechanical or cat-nip mouse for graduate seminars." Poets like Donald Hall and Louis Simpson were among its chefs. In contrast, Lowell regarded the "raw" as "jerry-built and forensically deadly...often like an unscored libretto by some bearded but vegetarian Castro." Lowell’s image of a barbed Communist was meant to conjure a vision of Allen Ginsberg, whose Howl had, fours years earlier, reinvigorated poetry for a younger generation. Ginsberg and other Beat poets, like Gregory Corso and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, were emerging from the margins, armed with open, jazz-infused songs of a whole new timbre. Champions of Whitman, the Beats celebrated themselves and their everyday lives, and took poetry from the podium to the street. By virtue of pitting the Beats against "cat-nip" academics, Lowell was publicly declaring them to be a force.
Although a descendant of the "cooked" tribe of meter and rhyme, Lowell had been writing in an increasingly confessional vein. At a crossroads in his own work, he was riled by the Beats’ "raw" sensibilities. "Hanging like a question mark" between the two camps, "I don’t know if it is a death-rope or a life-line," he wrote in a draft of his now famous acceptance speech.
While Lowell’s characterization may strike us today as somewhat dramatic, it aptly captured the creative and cultural tensions of the time. There was a palpable "us vs. them" climate that pervaded poetry and many other aspects of the larger post-fifties society. It was optimism vs. skepticism, complacency vs. complaint, sweetness vs. dissention. The polarity between the establishment and those who opposed it intensified and culminated in the social revolutions of the sixties. By then, the Beats would be lauded as heroes of the counter-culture and legitimized as luminaries of a literature in flux.
Seventeen years after his "raw" and "cooked" proclamation, Lowell did a joint reading with Allen Ginsberg at New York’s St. Marks-in-the-Bowery. The poets shared a podium—a hint that, in the interim, the battlelines had blurred. Gregory Corso rambunctiously heckled Lowell as he read his poem, "Ulysses and Circe." "Robert, you left out that great line about paranoid," Corso called out. Lowell responded with a quick "Point taken" and continued. "You treat us like a classroom," Corso shouted. Lowell responded that he, in fact, was a teacher and tried to let it go at that. The event was shaping up like a lopsided showdown when Ginsberg finally stepped forward and proposed that the crowd collectively invite Corso to "shut up." They did and Corso amicably exited, boots in hand, wife and baby at his side. To Lowell, the reading had turned into a veritable "happening." In retrospect, it signaled a reprieve. The "raw" and the "cooked" were no longer warring, and the tribes needed new names.
So what happened between 1960 and 1977? In one sense, the outsiders made it inside and the whole culture got "rawified." The media, as arbiter of popular culture, brought the Beats and the sixties’ movements to the fore. "Raw" writers challenged the establishment, changed it, and then became part of it. They taught university, went on television and became counter-culture celebrities. They didn’t so much as "sell out," as did the broader culture "buy in"—not necessarily to a new crop of values, but shrewdly to the appeal of those values. Popular stereotypes alternately romanticized, trivialized or criminalized the Beat lifestyle and sensibility. Still, their edgy creativity was in step with the changing times in a way that the blue-blooded Bostonian Lowell’s was not. Marketers capitalized on the cultural trickle-down of the Beat image to hawk everything from peace to personal computers. Years after Jack Kerouac appeared on The Steve Allen Show in 1974, Nike would recruit William Burroughs and Ginsberg would endorse Apple Computers. Consumption is cutting edge, we all learned, if you package it as such.
You can’t, however, judge a book by its cover and good literature stands the test of time. The true legacy of the raw and the cooked divide (and what Robert Lowell foresaw) is that tension forced the canon to open up and accomodate a broader range of work. Poetry is, as a result, more vigorous and varied today than it was in 1960. Any contemporary American poetry course worth its salt today will include Ginsberg, Corso, and Lowell, alongside Lucille Clifton, Richard Wilbur and John Ashbury. Split factions persist, but in civil coexistence.
---------------------------
The Raw and the Cooked: Robert Lowell and the Beats
by Tina Cane
"The best obfuscation bewilders of meaning while reflecting
or intimating or creating a structure of a beauty that we know."
—Bernadette Mayer
"The raw and the cooked" is how Robert Lowell characterized the state of American poetry in 1960 when he accepted the National Book Award for his collection, Life Studies. With its intense emphasis on the personal and its shorter, free verse lines, Life Studies was a departure for the poet. Something less fettered was happening in Lowell’s poetry, and as he saw it, that something was cleaving the genre of poetry in two.
"Cooked" poetry, he contended, was "marvelously expert and remote... constructed as a sort of mechanical or cat-nip mouse for graduate seminars." Poets like Donald Hall and Louis Simpson were among its chefs. In contrast, Lowell regarded the "raw" as "jerry-built and forensically deadly...often like an unscored libretto by some bearded but vegetarian Castro." Lowell’s image of a barbed Communist was meant to conjure a vision of Allen Ginsberg, whose Howl had, fours years earlier, reinvigorated poetry for a younger generation. Ginsberg and other Beat poets, like Gregory Corso and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, were emerging from the margins, armed with open, jazz-infused songs of a whole new timbre. Champions of Whitman, the Beats celebrated themselves and their everyday lives, and took poetry from the podium to the street. By virtue of pitting the Beats against "cat-nip" academics, Lowell was publicly declaring them to be a force.
Although a descendant of the "cooked" tribe of meter and rhyme, Lowell had been writing in an increasingly confessional vein. At a crossroads in his own work, he was riled by the Beats’ "raw" sensibilities. "Hanging like a question mark" between the two camps, "I don’t know if it is a death-rope or a life-line," he wrote in a draft of his now famous acceptance speech.
While Lowell’s characterization may strike us today as somewhat dramatic, it aptly captured the creative and cultural tensions of the time. There was a palpable "us vs. them" climate that pervaded poetry and many other aspects of the larger post-fifties society. It was optimism vs. skepticism, complacency vs. complaint, sweetness vs. dissention. The polarity between the establishment and those who opposed it intensified and culminated in the social revolutions of the sixties. By then, the Beats would be lauded as heroes of the counter-culture and legitimized as luminaries of a literature in flux.
Seventeen years after his "raw" and "cooked" proclamation, Lowell did a joint reading with Allen Ginsberg at New York’s St. Marks-in-the-Bowery. The poets shared a podium—a hint that, in the interim, the battlelines had blurred. Gregory Corso rambunctiously heckled Lowell as he read his poem, "Ulysses and Circe." "Robert, you left out that great line about paranoid," Corso called out. Lowell responded with a quick "Point taken" and continued. "You treat us like a classroom," Corso shouted. Lowell responded that he, in fact, was a teacher and tried to let it go at that. The event was shaping up like a lopsided showdown when Ginsberg finally stepped forward and proposed that the crowd collectively invite Corso to "shut up." They did and Corso amicably exited, boots in hand, wife and baby at his side. To Lowell, the reading had turned into a veritable "happening." In retrospect, it signaled a reprieve. The "raw" and the "cooked" were no longer warring, and the tribes needed new names.
So what happened between 1960 and 1977? In one sense, the outsiders made it inside and the whole culture got "rawified." The media, as arbiter of popular culture, brought the Beats and the sixties’ movements to the fore. "Raw" writers challenged the establishment, changed it, and then became part of it. They taught university, went on television and became counter-culture celebrities. They didn’t so much as "sell out," as did the broader culture "buy in"—not necessarily to a new crop of values, but shrewdly to the appeal of those values. Popular stereotypes alternately romanticized, trivialized or criminalized the Beat lifestyle and sensibility. Still, their edgy creativity was in step with the changing times in a way that the blue-blooded Bostonian Lowell’s was not. Marketers capitalized on the cultural trickle-down of the Beat image to hawk everything from peace to personal computers. Years after Jack Kerouac appeared on The Steve Allen Show in 1974, Nike would recruit William Burroughs and Ginsberg would endorse Apple Computers. Consumption is cutting edge, we all learned, if you package it as such.
You can’t, however, judge a book by its cover and good literature stands the test of time. The true legacy of the raw and the cooked divide (and what Robert Lowell foresaw) is that tension forced the canon to open up and accomodate a broader range of work. Poetry is, as a result, more vigorous and varied today than it was in 1960. Any contemporary American poetry course worth its salt today will include Ginsberg, Corso, and Lowell, alongside Lucille Clifton, Richard Wilbur and John Ashbury. Split factions persist, but in civil coexistence.
Harlem Renaissance
The following is taken from poets.org, which has a wonderful section on the Harlem Renaissance.
A Brief Guide to the Harlem Renaissance
In the decades immediately following World War I, huge numbers of African Americans migrated to the industrial North from the economically depressed and agrarian South. In cities such as Chicago, Washington, DC, and New York City, the recently migrated sought and found (to some degree) new opportunities, both economic and artistic. African Americans were encouraged to celebrate their heritage and to become "The New Negro," a term coined in 1925 by sociologist and critic Alain LeRoy Locke in his influential book of the same name.
No place embodied this new aesthetic more than Harlem, home to a thriving artistic scene of literary magazines like The Crisis (published by the newly established NAACP), cafes, jazz clubs, and scores of reading venues. The major figures of this movement, known as the Harlem Renaissance, were enlightened by education and nourished by folk sources such as black music and the black church. More than a literary revolution or social activism, the Harlem Renaissance extolled African American culture and celebrated its singular, unique expression.
In 1922, James Weldon Johnson's anthology, The Book of American Negro Poetry (Harcourt, 1922), introduced a national audience to those who would become the voices of the movement: Claude McKay, Jessie Fauset, and Paul Lawrence Dunbar. Other influential figures included Gwendolyn Bennett, Countee Cullen, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Arna Bontemps, and Jean Toomer.
Langston Hughes, often referred to as the "unofficial Poet Laureate of the race," remains the central figure of the Harlem Renaissance. In his essay, "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain," he proclaimed his lifelong calling: "to explain and illuminate the Negro condition in America." His achievements in poetry, fiction, drama, and nonfiction, as well as his role as editor of several collections of African American literature, produced a body of work that endures and offers a powerful portrait of the twentieth century artist.
James Weldon Johnson was both the elder statesman and the Renaissance Man of the Harlem Renaissance: in addition to his successful literary life as a poet, novelist, and editor, he served as secretary general of the NAACP and as a consul in the U.S. Diplomatic Corps. His God's Trombones, a sequence of sermons, captures the generic and at the same time highly individual voice of the Negro preacher. His "Lift Every Voice And Sing" was sung every morning by generations of children in segregated schools as "The Negro National Anthem."
Countee Cullen thought long and hard in his poems about his own and collective African-American identity. Some of his strongest poems question the benevolence of a Creator who has bestowed a race with such mixed blessings. Claude McKay, born and raised in Jamaica, wrote of the immigrant's nostalgia and the American negro's pride and rage. Jean (Eugene) Toomer remains a mystery. Light enough to "pass" and alone constituting the generation's Symbolist avant-garde, he appeared briefly on the Harlem Renaissance scene, became a follower of the mystic Gurdjieff, and disappeared into the white world.
Sterling Brown, for many years a professor at Howard University, emerged in the thirties with sometimes playful, often pessimistic poems in standard English and black vernacular and in African American and European forms. In many of Brown's poems strong men and women resist the oppression of racism, poverty, and fate.
The legacy of the Harlem Renaissance opened doors and deeply influenced the generations of African American writers that followed, including Robert Hayden and Gwendolyn Brooks. In the forties, fifties, and sixties, Hayden taught at Fisk University and the University of Michigan and served two terms as the Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress. Since the publication in 1945 of her first book, A Street in Bronzeville, Brooks has combined a quiet life with critical success. Her second book, Annie Allen, won the 1950 Pulitzer prize, the first time a book by a black poet had won that coveted distinction, and the last time until Rita Dove's Thomas and Beulah, almost forty years later. Brooks was a virtuoso of technique, her exquisite poems exploring, for the first time, the interior lives of African American individuals. Brooks' perspective shifted mid-career, her later work influenced by the politically and socially radical Black Arts Movement of the sixties.
A Brief Guide to the Harlem Renaissance
In the decades immediately following World War I, huge numbers of African Americans migrated to the industrial North from the economically depressed and agrarian South. In cities such as Chicago, Washington, DC, and New York City, the recently migrated sought and found (to some degree) new opportunities, both economic and artistic. African Americans were encouraged to celebrate their heritage and to become "The New Negro," a term coined in 1925 by sociologist and critic Alain LeRoy Locke in his influential book of the same name.
No place embodied this new aesthetic more than Harlem, home to a thriving artistic scene of literary magazines like The Crisis (published by the newly established NAACP), cafes, jazz clubs, and scores of reading venues. The major figures of this movement, known as the Harlem Renaissance, were enlightened by education and nourished by folk sources such as black music and the black church. More than a literary revolution or social activism, the Harlem Renaissance extolled African American culture and celebrated its singular, unique expression.
In 1922, James Weldon Johnson's anthology, The Book of American Negro Poetry (Harcourt, 1922), introduced a national audience to those who would become the voices of the movement: Claude McKay, Jessie Fauset, and Paul Lawrence Dunbar. Other influential figures included Gwendolyn Bennett, Countee Cullen, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Arna Bontemps, and Jean Toomer.
Langston Hughes, often referred to as the "unofficial Poet Laureate of the race," remains the central figure of the Harlem Renaissance. In his essay, "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain," he proclaimed his lifelong calling: "to explain and illuminate the Negro condition in America." His achievements in poetry, fiction, drama, and nonfiction, as well as his role as editor of several collections of African American literature, produced a body of work that endures and offers a powerful portrait of the twentieth century artist.
James Weldon Johnson was both the elder statesman and the Renaissance Man of the Harlem Renaissance: in addition to his successful literary life as a poet, novelist, and editor, he served as secretary general of the NAACP and as a consul in the U.S. Diplomatic Corps. His God's Trombones, a sequence of sermons, captures the generic and at the same time highly individual voice of the Negro preacher. His "Lift Every Voice And Sing" was sung every morning by generations of children in segregated schools as "The Negro National Anthem."
Countee Cullen thought long and hard in his poems about his own and collective African-American identity. Some of his strongest poems question the benevolence of a Creator who has bestowed a race with such mixed blessings. Claude McKay, born and raised in Jamaica, wrote of the immigrant's nostalgia and the American negro's pride and rage. Jean (Eugene) Toomer remains a mystery. Light enough to "pass" and alone constituting the generation's Symbolist avant-garde, he appeared briefly on the Harlem Renaissance scene, became a follower of the mystic Gurdjieff, and disappeared into the white world.
Sterling Brown, for many years a professor at Howard University, emerged in the thirties with sometimes playful, often pessimistic poems in standard English and black vernacular and in African American and European forms. In many of Brown's poems strong men and women resist the oppression of racism, poverty, and fate.
The legacy of the Harlem Renaissance opened doors and deeply influenced the generations of African American writers that followed, including Robert Hayden and Gwendolyn Brooks. In the forties, fifties, and sixties, Hayden taught at Fisk University and the University of Michigan and served two terms as the Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress. Since the publication in 1945 of her first book, A Street in Bronzeville, Brooks has combined a quiet life with critical success. Her second book, Annie Allen, won the 1950 Pulitzer prize, the first time a book by a black poet had won that coveted distinction, and the last time until Rita Dove's Thomas and Beulah, almost forty years later. Brooks was a virtuoso of technique, her exquisite poems exploring, for the first time, the interior lives of African American individuals. Brooks' perspective shifted mid-career, her later work influenced by the politically and socially radical Black Arts Movement of the sixties.
Black Arts Movement (BAM)
A movement originating in the sixties by African American artists (Amiri Baraka, among many others). there has often been criticism of the Harlem Renaissance for being too reliant upon establishment patrons to fuel it. This makes the Black Arts Movement different from the Harlem Renaissance.
In a 1968 essay, "The Black Arts Movement," Larry Neal proclaimed Black Arts the "aesthetic and spiritual sister of the Black Power concept." As a political phrase, Black Power had earlier been used by Richard Wright to describe the mid-1950s emergence of independent African nations. The 1960s' use of the term originated in 1966 with Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee civil rights workers Stokely Carmichael and Willie Ricks. Quickly adopted in the North, Black Power was associated with a militant advocacy of armed self-defense, separation from "racist American domination," and pride in and assertion of the goodness and beauty of Blackness.
the following is an excerpt from an article, written by Kalamu ya Salaam, and originally published in The Oxford Companion to African American Literature (New York, Oxford University Press, 1997)
Both inherently and overtly political in content, the Black Arts movement was the only American literary movement to advance "social engagement" as a sine qua non of its aesthetic. The movement broke from the immediate past of protest and petition (civil rights) literature and dashed forward toward an alternative that initially seemed unthinkable and unobtainable: Black Power.
In a 1968 essay, "The Black Arts Movement," Larry Neal proclaimed Black Arts the "aesthetic and spiritual sister of the Black Power concept."
Although often criticized as sexist, homophobic, and racially exclusive (i.e., reverse racist), Black Arts was much broader than any of its limitations. Ishmael Reed, who is considered neither a movement apologist nor advocate ("I wasn't invited to participate because I was considered an integrationist"), notes in a 1995 interview,
I think what Black Arts did was inspire a whole lot of Black people to write. Moreover, there would be no multiculturalism movement without Black Arts. Latinos, Asian Americans, and others all say they began writing as a result of the example of the 1960s. Blacks gave the example that you don't have to assimilate. You could do your own thing, get into your own background, your own history, your own tradition and your own culture. I think the challenge is for cultural sovereignty and Black Arts struck a blow for that.
Related Authors:
Amiri Baraka
Mari Evans
Nikki Giovanni
Gil-Scott Heron
Haki Madhubuti
Ishmael Reed
Kalamu ya Salaam
Sonia Sanchez
Ntozake Shange
Askia M. Toure
Marvin X
History and Context.
The Black Arts movement, usually referred to as a "sixties" movement, coalesced in 1965 and broke apart around 1975/1976. In March 1965 following the 21 February assassination of Malcolm X, LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) moved from Manhattan's Lower East Side (he had already moved away from Greenwich Village) uptown to Harlem, an exodus considered the symbolic birth of the Black Arts movement. Jones was a highly visible publisher (Yugen and Floating Bear magazines, Totem Press), a celebrated poet (Preface to a Twenty-Volume Suicide Note, 1961, and The Dead Lecturer, 1964), a major music critic (Blues People, 1963), and an Obie Award-winning playwright (Dutchman, 1964) who, up until that fateful split, had functioned in an integrated world. Other than James Baldwin, who at that time had been closely associated with the civil rights movement, Jones was the most respected and most widely published Black writer of his generation.
While Jones's 1965 move uptown to found the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School (BARTS) is the formal beginning (it was Jones who came up with the name "Black Arts"), Black Arts, as a literary movement, had its roots in groups such as the Umbra Workshop. Umbra (1962) was a collective of young Black writers based in Manhattan's Lower East Side; major members were writers Steve Cannon, Tom Dent, Al Haynes, David Henderson, Calvin C. Hernton, Joe Johnson, Norman Pritchard, Lenox Raphael, Ishmael Reed, Lorenzo Thomas, James Thompson, Askia M. Touré (Roland Snellings; also a visual artist), Brenda Walcott, and musician-writer Archie Shepp. Touré, a major shaper of "cultural nationalism," directly influenced Jones. Along with Umbra writer Charles Patterson and Charles's brother, William Patterson, Touré joined Jones, Steve Young, and others at BARTS.
In a 1968 essay, "The Black Arts Movement," Larry Neal proclaimed Black Arts the "aesthetic and spiritual sister of the Black Power concept." As a political phrase, Black Power had earlier been used by Richard Wright to describe the mid-1950s emergence of independent African nations. The 1960s' use of the term originated in 1966 with Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee civil rights workers Stokely Carmichael and Willie Ricks. Quickly adopted in the North, Black Power was associated with a militant advocacy of armed self-defense, separation from "racist American domination," and pride in and assertion of the goodness and beauty of Blackness.
the following is an excerpt from an article, written by Kalamu ya Salaam, and originally published in The Oxford Companion to African American Literature (New York, Oxford University Press, 1997)
Both inherently and overtly political in content, the Black Arts movement was the only American literary movement to advance "social engagement" as a sine qua non of its aesthetic. The movement broke from the immediate past of protest and petition (civil rights) literature and dashed forward toward an alternative that initially seemed unthinkable and unobtainable: Black Power.
In a 1968 essay, "The Black Arts Movement," Larry Neal proclaimed Black Arts the "aesthetic and spiritual sister of the Black Power concept."
Although often criticized as sexist, homophobic, and racially exclusive (i.e., reverse racist), Black Arts was much broader than any of its limitations. Ishmael Reed, who is considered neither a movement apologist nor advocate ("I wasn't invited to participate because I was considered an integrationist"), notes in a 1995 interview,
I think what Black Arts did was inspire a whole lot of Black people to write. Moreover, there would be no multiculturalism movement without Black Arts. Latinos, Asian Americans, and others all say they began writing as a result of the example of the 1960s. Blacks gave the example that you don't have to assimilate. You could do your own thing, get into your own background, your own history, your own tradition and your own culture. I think the challenge is for cultural sovereignty and Black Arts struck a blow for that.
Related Authors:
Amiri Baraka
Mari Evans
Nikki Giovanni
Gil-Scott Heron
Haki Madhubuti
Ishmael Reed
Kalamu ya Salaam
Sonia Sanchez
Ntozake Shange
Askia M. Toure
Marvin X
History and Context.
The Black Arts movement, usually referred to as a "sixties" movement, coalesced in 1965 and broke apart around 1975/1976. In March 1965 following the 21 February assassination of Malcolm X, LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) moved from Manhattan's Lower East Side (he had already moved away from Greenwich Village) uptown to Harlem, an exodus considered the symbolic birth of the Black Arts movement. Jones was a highly visible publisher (Yugen and Floating Bear magazines, Totem Press), a celebrated poet (Preface to a Twenty-Volume Suicide Note, 1961, and The Dead Lecturer, 1964), a major music critic (Blues People, 1963), and an Obie Award-winning playwright (Dutchman, 1964) who, up until that fateful split, had functioned in an integrated world. Other than James Baldwin, who at that time had been closely associated with the civil rights movement, Jones was the most respected and most widely published Black writer of his generation.
While Jones's 1965 move uptown to found the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School (BARTS) is the formal beginning (it was Jones who came up with the name "Black Arts"), Black Arts, as a literary movement, had its roots in groups such as the Umbra Workshop. Umbra (1962) was a collective of young Black writers based in Manhattan's Lower East Side; major members were writers Steve Cannon, Tom Dent, Al Haynes, David Henderson, Calvin C. Hernton, Joe Johnson, Norman Pritchard, Lenox Raphael, Ishmael Reed, Lorenzo Thomas, James Thompson, Askia M. Touré (Roland Snellings; also a visual artist), Brenda Walcott, and musician-writer Archie Shepp. Touré, a major shaper of "cultural nationalism," directly influenced Jones. Along with Umbra writer Charles Patterson and Charles's brother, William Patterson, Touré joined Jones, Steve Young, and others at BARTS.
Sunday, October 14, 2007
Modernism continued
Modernism, like any largescale poetry movement is chock full of a vast array of different styles. With the imagists we saw poets who stressed a breal from Romanticism (as evidenced by Pound's poem "The Pact," in which he begrudgingly acknowledges Whitman's importance).
With Wallace Stevens, D. H. Lawrence, and Hart Crane (and to a lesser extent, Moore, MacLeish and Auden) we see a questioning attitude, especially toward Nature and God/divinity, a more "Modern" doubt, but nonetheless we can trace these poets' lineage back to Whitman, Dickinson, and also Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake and other Romantic poets.
In fact, Pound and Stevens, though both Modernist poets, were at opposite poles in the era, and neither seemed to particularly like/respect the other poet. As Marjorie Perloff writes in Pound/Stevens: Whose Era--
"On October 26 1955 William Carlos Williams wrote to Ezra Pound at St. Elizabet's, asking him if he would care to comment on the obituary essay he had just written on Wallace Stevens, then two months dead, for Poetry Magazine. Pound replied:
. . .as to yr/ pal/ Wally S/ . . .it wd/ be highly improper for
me to have opinions of yr/ opinion of a bloke I haven't read
and DOUBT like all hell
that yu will be able to PURR-suade me to venture on
with such a
hellUVAlot I don't know and WANT to find out.
If this sounds unnecessarily dismissive, compare it to Stevens' curiously similar response to Pound. In 1947 Theodore Weiss invited Stevens to write something for a special Pound issue of the fledgling Quarterly Review of Literature. Stevens replied curtly: "Nothing doing about Pound. I should have to saturate myself with the work and I have not the time."
Time for you and time for me--it seems that neither Pound nor Stevens could allow for it. We, reading these two great Modernists in the late decades of the twentieth century, tend to ignore such mutual distrust, positing that of course Pound and Stevens are among the four or five great American poets of the century."
As you can see, these poets, and others of the time, did not always see eye to eye when it came to ideas of poetry.
Stevens, besides his poems, wrote many essays about the Nature of poetry, and of writing poetry--being very very opinionated on the subject.
"In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all."
"The poet is the priest of the invisible."
"Accuracy of observation is the equivalent of accuracy of thinking."
"The most beautiful thing in the world is, of course, the world itself."
Here are links to some Brief guides from Poets.org from the Academy of American Poets.
A Brief Guide to Modernism
A Brief Guide to Imagism
With Wallace Stevens, D. H. Lawrence, and Hart Crane (and to a lesser extent, Moore, MacLeish and Auden) we see a questioning attitude, especially toward Nature and God/divinity, a more "Modern" doubt, but nonetheless we can trace these poets' lineage back to Whitman, Dickinson, and also Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake and other Romantic poets.
In fact, Pound and Stevens, though both Modernist poets, were at opposite poles in the era, and neither seemed to particularly like/respect the other poet. As Marjorie Perloff writes in Pound/Stevens: Whose Era--
"On October 26 1955 William Carlos Williams wrote to Ezra Pound at St. Elizabet's, asking him if he would care to comment on the obituary essay he had just written on Wallace Stevens, then two months dead, for Poetry Magazine. Pound replied:
. . .as to yr/ pal/ Wally S/ . . .it wd/ be highly improper for
me to have opinions of yr/ opinion of a bloke I haven't read
and DOUBT like all hell
that yu will be able to PURR-suade me to venture on
with such a
hellUVAlot I don't know and WANT to find out.
If this sounds unnecessarily dismissive, compare it to Stevens' curiously similar response to Pound. In 1947 Theodore Weiss invited Stevens to write something for a special Pound issue of the fledgling Quarterly Review of Literature. Stevens replied curtly: "Nothing doing about Pound. I should have to saturate myself with the work and I have not the time."
Time for you and time for me--it seems that neither Pound nor Stevens could allow for it. We, reading these two great Modernists in the late decades of the twentieth century, tend to ignore such mutual distrust, positing that of course Pound and Stevens are among the four or five great American poets of the century."
As you can see, these poets, and others of the time, did not always see eye to eye when it came to ideas of poetry.
Stevens, besides his poems, wrote many essays about the Nature of poetry, and of writing poetry--being very very opinionated on the subject.
"In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all."
"The poet is the priest of the invisible."
"Accuracy of observation is the equivalent of accuracy of thinking."
"The most beautiful thing in the world is, of course, the world itself."
Here are links to some Brief guides from Poets.org from the Academy of American Poets.
A Brief Guide to Modernism
A Brief Guide to Imagism
Sunday, September 30, 2007
Modernism (The Imagists and more)
As you have seen with some of this initial reading, Modernism ushers in a style of poetry and thinking that sought, actively in some cases, to erase or turn a back on many of the main philosophies of the Romantic Tradition. This can be evidenced in the Ezra Pound poem "The Pact," which was written to Walt Whitman, whom Pound often criticized. Pound along with others (H. D. among them) championed a "school" of poetry known as imagism. The following excerpt from some of Pound's essays dictates three of the main philosophies of imagism (see bolded portion of the essay). Pound, as well as being a strong poet, was a figure that was not only important in scholarship/criticism, and for championing a poetic style/"school", but he was also responsible for discovering poets and helping gain them noteriety and furthering their careers. Famously, Pound severely edited T. S. Eliot's "The wasteland," a poem that has become "THE" poem that is associated with Modernism as a movement - it is the public face of Modernism, as it were.
The Modern period was also known as being a period in which radical experimentation takes place, with kanguage, syntax, the primacy of the self as represented by the poet's various speakers'. Think of the vast array of styles we've seen, just in the last week--from WCW's "no ideas but in things," to Stein's language object experiments, to Pound and Eliot's highly and densely Allusive collage-style poems, to Pound's one-image poem "In a Station of the Metro." And this is just the beginning; we'll see more variances as we stay with the Moderns for a couple more weeks.
----------------------------
Ezra Pound - "A Retrospect"
[A group of early essays and notes which appeared under this title in Pavannes and Divagations (1918). 'A Few Don'ts' was first printed in Poetry, I, 6 (March 1913).
There has been so much scribbling about a new fashion in poetry, that I may perhaps be pardoned this brief recapitulation and retrospect.
In the spring or early summer of 1912, 'H.D.', Richard Aldington and myself decided that we were agreed upon the three principles following:
1. Direct treatment of the 'thing' whether subjective or objective.
2. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.
3.As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome.
Upon many points of taste and of predilection we differed, but agreeing upon these three positions we thought we had as much right to a group name, at least as much right, as a number of French 'schools' proclaimed by Mr Flint in the August number of Harold Monro's magazine for 1911.
This school has since been 'joined' or 'followed' by numerous people who, whatever their merits, do not show any signs of agreeing with the second specification. Indeed vers libre has become as prolix and as verbose as any of the flaccid varieties that preceded it. It has brought faults of its own. The actual language and phrasing is often as bad as that of our elders without even the excuse that the words are shovelled in to fill a metric pattern or to complete the noise of a rhyme-sound. Whether or no the phrases followed by the followers are musical must be left to the reader's decision. At times I can find a marked metre in 'vers libres', as stale and hackneyed as any pseudo-Swinburnian, at times the writers seem to follow no musical structure whatever. But it is, on the whole, good that the field should be ploughed. Perhaps a few good poems have come from the new method, and if so it is justified.
-------
As to Twentieth century poetry, and the poetry which I expect to see written during the next decade or so, it will, I think, move against poppy-cock, it will be harder and saner, it will be what Mr Hewlett calls 'nearer the bone'. It will be as much like granite as it can be, its force will lie in its truth, its interpretative power (of course, poetic force does always rest there); I mean it will not try to seem forcible by rhetorical din, and luxurious riot. We will have fewer painted adjectives impeding the shock and stroke of it. At least for myself, I want it so, austere, direct, free from emotional slither.
What is there now, in 1917, to be added?
The Modern period was also known as being a period in which radical experimentation takes place, with kanguage, syntax, the primacy of the self as represented by the poet's various speakers'. Think of the vast array of styles we've seen, just in the last week--from WCW's "no ideas but in things," to Stein's language object experiments, to Pound and Eliot's highly and densely Allusive collage-style poems, to Pound's one-image poem "In a Station of the Metro." And this is just the beginning; we'll see more variances as we stay with the Moderns for a couple more weeks.
----------------------------
Ezra Pound - "A Retrospect"
[A group of early essays and notes which appeared under this title in Pavannes and Divagations (1918). 'A Few Don'ts' was first printed in Poetry, I, 6 (March 1913).
There has been so much scribbling about a new fashion in poetry, that I may perhaps be pardoned this brief recapitulation and retrospect.
In the spring or early summer of 1912, 'H.D.', Richard Aldington and myself decided that we were agreed upon the three principles following:
1. Direct treatment of the 'thing' whether subjective or objective.
2. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.
3.As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome.
Upon many points of taste and of predilection we differed, but agreeing upon these three positions we thought we had as much right to a group name, at least as much right, as a number of French 'schools' proclaimed by Mr Flint in the August number of Harold Monro's magazine for 1911.
This school has since been 'joined' or 'followed' by numerous people who, whatever their merits, do not show any signs of agreeing with the second specification. Indeed vers libre has become as prolix and as verbose as any of the flaccid varieties that preceded it. It has brought faults of its own. The actual language and phrasing is often as bad as that of our elders without even the excuse that the words are shovelled in to fill a metric pattern or to complete the noise of a rhyme-sound. Whether or no the phrases followed by the followers are musical must be left to the reader's decision. At times I can find a marked metre in 'vers libres', as stale and hackneyed as any pseudo-Swinburnian, at times the writers seem to follow no musical structure whatever. But it is, on the whole, good that the field should be ploughed. Perhaps a few good poems have come from the new method, and if so it is justified.
-------
As to Twentieth century poetry, and the poetry which I expect to see written during the next decade or so, it will, I think, move against poppy-cock, it will be harder and saner, it will be what Mr Hewlett calls 'nearer the bone'. It will be as much like granite as it can be, its force will lie in its truth, its interpretative power (of course, poetic force does always rest there); I mean it will not try to seem forcible by rhetorical din, and luxurious riot. We will have fewer painted adjectives impeding the shock and stroke of it. At least for myself, I want it so, austere, direct, free from emotional slither.
What is there now, in 1917, to be added?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
