A History of American Literature

(Marvins-Underground-K-12) #1
The American Century: Literature since 1945 615

down by any of the institutions or forms that we use to organize life, whether they
involve meter, stability of mood, or marriage. Chameleon-like, his is the voice of
fluidity and change, the American as underground or confidence man. In his own
way, in fact, Corso tried to do what the novelist Ken Kesey attempted in prose: “to go
with the flow,” as Kesey put it, to “exist in the moment itself – Now!” – and to do this
by means of mockery of other people’s “movies,” conventional notions of the serious
and the significant.

Reinventing the American self: The New York poets


Another, rather different vision of alternative America surfaces in the work of a
group whose main connections have been with the visual arts, both “high” and
“popular.” The group known as the New York poets includes Frank O’Hara, Kenneth
Koch, Ted Berrigan, and John Ashbery. “Poetry was declining” wrote the leading
member of this group, Frank O’Hara (1926–1966), in one of his poem–painting
collaborations with the painter Larry Rivers, “/ Painting advancing / we were
complaining / it was ’50.” O’Hara felt at odds with most of the poetry that was being
written in America in the 1950s. He deeply disliked the confessional poets,
complaining that Lowell’s “confessional manner” let him “get away with things that
are just plain bad,” “but you’re supposed to be interested,” he added, “because he’s
supposed to be so upset.” Ginsberg was a personal friend, but O’Hara studiously
avoided the beat poet’s revolutionary fervor and prophetic assumptions: politics and
metaphysics were not among his immediate interests – “I don’t believe in God,” he
said, “... You just go on your nerve.” As for the Black Mountain group, O’Hara was
wary of what he saw as their programmatic approach. Of Olson he remarked, with
a characteristic blend of sympathy and acumen, “I don’t think that he is willing to be
as delicate as his sensibility may be emotionally and he’s extremely conscious ... of
saying the important utterance.” He was less generous toward Creeley and Levertov,
however, observing that they “pared down the diction” to the point that what came
through was “the experience of their paring it down” rather than “the experience
that is the subject.” All these poets had too palpable a design on the reader, he believed:
at some point, no matter how circuitous the route, they began to spin off beyond the
hard material surfaces and processes of their purported subject. “The objective in
writing is to reveal,” O’Hara insisted, “It is not to teach, to advertise, not to see, not
even to communicate ... but to reveal.” Too often this objective was ignored:
succumbing to the “symbols of an over-symbolic society,” writers assumed an
aesthetics of transcendence rather than what should be the case – an aesthetics of
immediacy, of presence.
“I am needed by things,” O’Hara declared, “as the sky must be above the earth.”
His aim was to defamiliarize the ordinary, even what he felt was the “sheer ugliness
in America.” In order to do this, he wanted to be as attentive as possible to the world
around him. It was the artist’s “duty to be attentive,” he felt, so the artists he cherished
were those like his friend Larry Rivers who, as he put it, “taught me to be more
keenly interested while I’m still alive.” “Perhaps this is the most important thing art

GGray_c05.indd 615ray_c 05 .indd 615 8 8/1/2011 7:31:34 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 34 PM

Free download pdf