The American Century: Literature since 1945 619clear differences have emerged between them. The poetry of Barbara Guest
(1920–2006), for instance, as her Selected Poems (1995) indicates, is edged with deli-
cacy of feeling and a frail exoticism: “In the golden air, the risky autumn / leaves on
the piazza, shadows by the door / ” her poem “Piazzas” begins; “on your chair the red
berry / after the dragon fly summer.” Schuyler similarly recomposes landscape in a
painterly manner, finding new shapes and patterns, but he possesses an intrinsic
reverence for nature that is rare among the group. These lines taken from his elegy
to O’Hara are a poignant illustration, not only of tenderness, but of difference of
sensibility between their author and their subject (who once claimed that “One need
never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes”):Delicate day, setting the bright
of a young spruce against the cold
of an old one with unripe cones
each exuding at its tip
gum, pungent, clear as a tear ...Some of the poems of Ted Berrigan are embarrassingly derivative of O’Hara: “Today
I woke up / bright and early,” “Today in Ann Arbor” (1969) begins, “ / Then I went
back to sleep / I had a nice dream.” What is more, they imitate O’Hara’s reverence for
detail while missing his extraordinary modulations of tone, his split-second dissolves
and syntactic displacements; as a result, the mood is slack, tending toward a simple
empiricism, a catalog of particulars that do not really add up. At its best, though,
Berrigan’s work has a memorable clarity that issues from his willingness to put the
“I”/eye of the poet at the center of things: as he says of New York, “it’s only here you
can turn around 360 degrees / And everything is clear from the center / To every
point along the circle of the horizon.” This clarity can sometimes be the clarity of
consciousness (he can create hallucinatory effects out of the condition of “Sleep half
sleep half silence”), the clarity of American speech (many of his poem’s – like
Williams’s – are vignettes of urban life and idiom), or forthright clarity of feeling.
So, in “Last Poem,” the epitaph he composed for himself and included in A Certain
Slant of Sunlight (1987), Berrigan declares simply: “Love, & work, / Were my great
happiness, that other people die the source / Of my great, terrible, & inarticulate one
grief.” “In my time,” he adds, “I grew tall & huge of frame, obviously possessed / Of
a disconnected head, I had a perfect heart. The end / Came quickly & completely
without pain.” Kenneth Koch (1925–2002) is less immediately serious than this:
“I think I have three souls,” he announced in “Alive for an Instant” (1975), “ / One
for love one for poetry and one for acting out my insane self.” His poems are alive
with wild, surreal comedy, rambunctious rhythms, and verbal inventiveness; it is as
if they were written by a Kafka with a slapstick sense of humor. His aim, he says, is
to “recreate the excitement,” the spontaneity and exuberance, he has found in French
poetry; and the main objects of his aesthetic loathing are what he calls the “castrati
of poetry,” “Young poets from the universities” who write “elegant poems” in “stale
pale skunky pentameters.” At the heart of his writing is an absurdist sense that poetsGGray_c05.indd 619ray_c 05 .indd 619 8 8/1/2011 7:31:35 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 35 PM