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.
Monday, October 29, 2007
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
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
