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The
Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry Joanny
Moulin
This
is in fact a reprint of and anthology first published in 1986 by
the English publishers Faber & Faber. Even the 1985 introduction
has been left unchanged, but the book remains interesting by its
silences and the statements it insists on making once again, whether
implicitly or explicitly. The adjective contemporary here refers
to the second half of the twentieth century, rather conventionally
envisioned as falling into two halves, on both sides of World War
II, which correspond to the modernist and the post-modernist periods,
the latter being considered as a continuation of, and hardly at
all a rupture from the first. This is a selection from the works
of thirty-five poets, beginning with Wallace Stevens who is thought
to have come into his own only after 1955. The anthology is American
indeed, be it only by the dedication with which Helen Vendler strives
to demonstrate the American idiosyncrasy of the poetry she has chosen
to represent in these pages. She must be complimented for having
included brief biographies, "thinking especially of foreign
readers." This amounts to declaring the conviction that a poem
is best understood with at least some background knowledge of who
its author is, a good poem being always, for Helen Vendler, more
or less a "lyric" poem. But this must not be seriously
understood as anything like an effort to palliate this specific
lack of foreigners, which is bound to bar them access to "the
intimate linguistic charm of poetry" which "stops at the
frontiers of its original language, " whereas non-American
readers can only enjoy the "intellectual and moral command"
of the poems collected here. This
would be an unfair simplification, for this anthology includes poems
by Charles Simic, who was born in Yugoslavia and only educated in
the United States of America. It is merely that Helen Vendler is
a critic with a romantic sensibility of sorts, who believes in the
genius locii or sense of place, and in what Grace Paley
once called writing with an accent: poetry, for her, is primarily
a matter of ear before it is one of eye; or else if poetry looks,
what counts is its second look at the same thing. Music and rhythm,
although she will not harp on this now too well-known rapprochement,
is essential to her favourite experience of poetry, and she hears
the American language of the twentieth-century as having assimilated
the syncopation of jazz, so that what counts most is the "unjustified
margin of poetry," that is to say its "perpetual self-halting."
That is what distinguishes poetry from the transparent spool of
modern prose, that vanishes as soon as it has jettisoned the short-lived
information it is meant to merely convey. And in this sense she
would seem to implicitly agree with Williams that there is something
essentially un-American in poetry itself, which is "at odds
with the optimistic American dream of an ever-unrolling frontier."
Yet she is softly advocating the idea that "our second-generation
modernists," that is to say the post-modernist poets represented
in this volume, are at once involved in a "less embattled relationship
with Europe" and more self-confidently American than the modernists,
who were "Americans who had Europeanized themselves with a
vengeance." Part of the works of the American poets of the
second half of the century amounts to replications of the modernists,
whether "in homage" or "in quarrel," but they
are also characterised by a salvaging reliance on influences from
other parts of the world than Europe, or European cultures other
than those of "England and France." In a sense, these
more recent poets may have succeeded where the modernists had failed,
in "forming a gestalt of what we inherit." Characteristically,
whereas "Pound is all nominal phrases; Lowell is all syntax."
Remarkably, however, one eminently American development of post-modern
poetry has most probably been the unprecedented development of women
poets, because they have succeeded in "printing a new sign"
in "the zodiac of poetry" but they did so without any
role models, discounting at least two notable predecessors, Dickinson
and Moore. Yet, in spite of her conceding that this generation of
poets is stigmatised by what she calls "the absence of the
transcendent" and the radical replacement of metaphysics by
physical science, Helen Vendler keeps an unwavering faith in something
like "the zodiac of poetry," some transcendental pantheon
of stars where only the happy few "are elevated" to "canonical
status" by "authority of style." Poetry, for her,
has still very much the societal function of what T.E. Hulme once
called "spilt religion." Wordsworth retains much relevance
in her eye, as for instance when he declares that "poetry is
the history and science of feeling." Her staunch belief, derived
from Williams again, that a good poem is an illusionistic "machine
made out of words" and that "if it is properly constructed
it cannot fail to perform its function, which is so to control its
reader, by its selective and stylized processional means, that the
reader ‘cannot chose but hear’," is still redolent
of new criticism with a structuralist colouring, which proudly belongs
to the spiritual inheritance of the romantic ideology. Difficulty
or obscurity remains a token of poetic genius, and she will insist
with Stevens that "it isn't necessary that you understand [my]
poetry or any poetry. It is only necessary that the writer understand
it." All
this is very well, but it leaves out of the picture a whole movement,
that has gathered enough surface and impetus to be considered a
tradition, of poets who are not essentially interested in "understanding"
their poetry. A foreigner trusting to Helen Vendler's anthology
for a general survey of contemporary American poetry would be left
in total ignorance of "Language" poets or what is sometimes
called innovative poetry. One might vainly peruse the list of authors
and the index looking for the names of poets such as, for instance,
Antin, Bernstein, Howe, or even so-called Black-Mountain poets like
Creeley, Duncan or Olson. Naturally, this selection claims to be
representative of nothing else than the personal taste of its editor,
but the definite article in its title makes this silencing sound
like a slightly embarrassing erasure. In her own vocabulary, some
poets were left out because their poems seemed "thin."
For Helen Vendler sees modern America as essentially a "Freudian"
and a "post-Marxist" world characterized by "the
absence of the transcendent," yet which is still definitely
oriented towards a rather positivist sense-making quest romance
in which poetry is understood to play a leading part. "The
aim of poetry," she writes, "is to saturate every terrain,
every city, every village, so that every American child might find
a native landscape invested with language. This was, after all,
the normal condition of the European child." The new American
poetry as she sees it is aiming to equal the lurid accuracy of perception
and style which is that of a snapshot or photograph. After wondering
whether the cinema might not have made a more adequate image of
the condition to which the modern form of veteran poetry should
aspire, one is left in the end with one more stubborn revisiting
of Aristotelian mimesis and Horatian ut pictura poesis.
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