The American Century: Literature since 1945 607department, and – in fact – off the printed page. The printed word has made poetry
so silent.” Ferlinghetti was speaking for a more demotic, populist poetry than the
kind preferred by many of the San Franciscans – including Duncan, even in his early
years – but he still spoke for more than himself. Immediacy, drama, above all lan-
guage and a line shaped by the voice, in conversation or declamation – these were the
priorities of a group of otherwise different poets who wanted to liberate poetry from
the academy.
Ferlinghetti’s own poems illustrate this interest in oral impact: many of them
were, in fact, conceived of as “oral messages” and have been performed to a jazz
accompaniment. The line is long and flowing, often using Williams’s “variable foot”
to govern the pace; the language is strongly idiomatic, the imagery colorful to the
point of theatricality. As Ferlinghetti sees him, in “A Coney Island of the Mind”
(1958), the poet is at once a performer, “a charleychaplin man,” and a pedagogue, a
“super realist” who is willing to risk absurdity as he strives not only to entertain but
to instruct. “Balancing ... / above a sea of faces,” he uses all the tricks at his disposal,
“entrechats” and “high theatrics,” to perceive and communicate “taut truth.” “Only
the dead are disengaged,” Ferlinghetti has insisted and his poetry, while indulging
in slapstick and corny jokes, is seriously engaged with the issues of the day: the
“engines / that devour America,” the absurdities of institutional life, the humorless
collectives called nation-states. The energy of his voice, in fact, expresses the coher-
ence of his vision, which is that of the anarchic individualist who waits hopefully for
“the final withering away / of all governments” – and the day when “lovers and
weepers / ... lie down together / in a new rebirth of wonder.”
Someone else from the San Francisco area who used roaming verse forms and a
declamatory style was Brother Antoninus: a writer who, after his departure from the
Dominican Order in 1970, published under the name of William Everson
(1912–1994). Like Ferlinghetti, Everson also favored such devices as incremental
repetition and a paratactic syntax. In his case, though, the poetry that resulted has a
rugged, flinty quality to it, an austere intensity. None of his work has the flat speech
rhythms that characterize so much late twentieth-century verse. On the contrary, it
fluctuates between a long, wavering line that can approach the stillness of a moment
of contemplation, and a line that tightens together into an abrupt, insistent rhythmic
unit. Whether recording the harsh landscapes of the West Coast and the “wild but
earnest” forms of life that inhabit them or rehearsing more immediately personal
experiences of love, religious faith and doubt, his work is notable for a diction that
ranges between the brutally simple and the lofty, imagery that can be at once
primitive and apocalyptic, frequently incantatory rhythms and a general tone that
recalls the work of Robinson Jeffers (a poet to whom Everson professed an allegiance).
“A Canticle to the Waterbirds” (1950) is exemplary in many ways. It opens with an
invocation to the birds, inviting them to “make a praise up to the Lord.” The Lord
they are asked to praise is no gentle Jesus, however, but the creator and overseer of a
“mighty fastness,” “indeterminate realms” of rock, sea, and sky. And the praise they
are asked to give is not so much in the saying as the being. What Everson celebrates
is the capacity these birds possess for living in the Now; they have none of the humanGGray_c05.indd 607ray_c 05 .indd 607 8 8/1/2011 7:31:34 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 34 PM