Contemporary Poetry

26 contemporary poetry

Al Alvarez in his retrospective account of post-war poetries
The Writer’s Voice ( 2006 ) identifi es a key moment in the history of
American poetry. He recalls a reading by Allen Ginsberg at SUNY
Buffalo in 1966. Ginsberg’s notorious opening to his early poem
‘Howl’ – ‘I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving hysterical naked, / dragging themselves through
the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fi x’ – generates
expectations of countercultural critique, musicality and perform-
ance.^2 However, Alvarez’s comments on Ginsberg’s reading indi-
cate a discomfort regarding the poet as prophetic voice:

I now understand what I was witnessing that evening in

Buffalo was something new and strange: the transformation

of poetry into showbiz... Poets were private people and

reading their work was still a private pleasure... Ginsberg

changed all that by sheer force of personality. Or rather by

using verse as a vehicle of showmanship, he helped turn a

minority art into a form of popular entertainment based on

the cult of personality.^3

Echoing Eliot’s critique of personality, Alvarez points us towards a
central and basic conundrum of recent poetry: in order to address
its audience compellingly, does the contemporary poem always
necessitate extremity of emotion and personality? Writing over two
hundred years ago William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge
claimed in their introduction to Lyrical Ballads ( 1798 ) that:

Poetry is the spontaneous overfl ow of powerful feelings: it

takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the

emotion is contemplated till by a species of reaction the tran-

quillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that

which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually

produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind.^4

Following this Romantic precedent in considering the poets
from the United Kingdom, USA, Jamaica and India, we will con-
template how the personal lyric in contemporary poetry conveys
subjective states of mind and how the personal poem adapts its