Contemporary Poetry

introduction 9

have no / inner resources’.^19 To an extent the psychoanalytic turn
can be viewed as a belated identifi cation in poetry, corresponding
to Alvarez’s more recent essays on poetry, in which he notes that:

When during the celebration of his seventieth birthday,

one of his disciples hailed Freud as ‘the discoverer of the

unconscious’, he answered ‘the poets and philosophers before

me discovered the unconscious. What I discovered was the

scientifi c method by which the unconscious can be studied.’^20

Similarly, psychoanalysis in the confessional school acts as a
framing device rather than a stylistic determinant. Alvarez’s
anthology presented a post-World War II poetic that was urgently
attempting to address new subject matter for poetry, as well as
responding to the more constraining elements of The Movement,
in a desire to fi nd articulation, or what commonly became referred
to as ‘fi nding one’s voice’.
In the USA the emergence of Donald Allen’s collection of
American poets The New American Poetry ( 1960 ) collected three
general tendencies in American poetry. The fi rst was an exper-
imental grouping, collectively known as the Black Mountain
School, primarily identifi ed with the tutelage of Charles Olson
(Olson, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov). The
anthology also included poets from the San Francisco Bay Area
whose work probed the social aftermath of World War II, as well
as a general examination of new social collectives. Poets such as
Kenneth Rexroth, Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, Gary Snyder, Jack
Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Levertov
were collectively linked to the San Francisco Renaissance. Finally,
the New York School provided a collective naming to artists whose
work was loosely affi liated to the representational enquiry enacted
by abstract expressionism (Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Kenneth
Koch, Amiri Baraka (formerly LeRoi Jones), Helen Adam and
Levertov). In a retrospective note to the new edition of the volume,
operating under the title The Postmoderns: The New American
Poetry Revised ( 1982 ), Allen is keen to stress that the identifi ca-
tion of his anthology with the purely experimental runs a risk of
marginalising the work of the poets included: