566 The American Century: Literature since 1945Carol Frost (1948–), Yusef Komunyakaa (1947–), Naomi Shihab Nye (1952–), and
Elizabeth Spires (1952–). Kumin, as her Collected Poems 1960–1990 (1997) illustrates,
has explored the darker side of suburban living. Kizer has found an edge and a new
range for her poetry in feminism (“We are the custodians of the world’s best-kept
secret: / ” she announces in one of the poems in Calm, Cool and Collected (2000),
“Merely the private lives of one half of humanity”). Wright, as shown in his Selected
Poems (1987), has linked his own life as an African-American to the histories of
Africa, America, and Europe in the belief that all cultures share a common mythic
ground. And Simic, a sample of whose work can be found in Weather Forecast for
Utopia and Vicinity: Poems 1967–1982 (1983), has discovered an outlet for his
absurdist vision – founded in his childhood in wartime Yugoslavia where “Hitler
and Stalin fought over my soul, my destiny,” as he puts it – in becoming what he
calls “a realist and a surrealist, always drawn between the two.” Likewise, in the later
generation, Ai, born Florence Anthony and, as she describes herself “one-half
Japanese, one-eighth Choctaw, one-fourth black, and one-sixteenth Irish,” has used
dramatic verse monologues to explore the roots of American violence. “The history
of my family is itself a history of America”; and the titles of her collections – among
them Cruelty (1973), Sin (1986), Greed (1993), and Vice (1999) – show what she
believes American history to be. Frost, in such collections as Love and Scorn:
New and Selected Poems (2000), subdues the verse of self within what she describes
as “the harmony and breaking down of such harmony that is the passing world.”
Komunyakaa, as his Pleasure Dome: New and Collected Poems (2001) shows, links his
African-American heritage to the traditions of European and American romanti-
cism, or what he terms “my impossible white wife,” while Nye, in collections such as
19 Varieties of Gazelle (2002), refracts her meditations on the “secrets of dying”
through the contemplation of simple objects, minute particulars. And Spires,
a disciple of Bishop, sets the particulars of experience in the pattern of circumstance,
the rhythms of process since, as she puts it, “only when we are ‘in the process’ do we
lose our sense of time rapidly passing and, for a little while, escape death.” For all
these poets, forms – cultural or mythical, literal or visionary – become a means of
connecting the personal by what Kizer calls “invisible wires” to the lives of others,
living and dead. So, in a poem by Kumin called “Woodchucks,” the mundane task of
ridding a garden of a pest can lead to a meditation on the Holocaust. And, for Jay
Wright, in “The Homecoming Singer,” the experience of returning home can inspire
a celebration of the way all people in all cultures return “home,” to the common
ground of archetypal experience.
The difference with other practicing poets wedded to a more confessional mode
is perhaps a difference of inclination. It is, nevertheless, a radical one. There is still a
poetry of the primal scream: speech that, in obedience to one of the most fundamental
American impulses, springs immediately out of the depths of the self – and finds its
vital life there. Poets of one generation, born just before World War II, who sustain
this allegiance to the innermost recesses of identity include Audre Lorde (1934–1997),
Diane Di Prima (1934–), Lucille Clifton (1936–2010), Diane Wakoski (1937–), and
Frank Bidart (1939–). From another, later generation they number among themGGray_c05.indd 566ray_c 05 .indd 566 8 8/1/2011 7:31:31 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 31 PM