Contemporary Poetry

10 contemporary poetry

Increasingly literary and cultural historians have come to

recognize that these are among the most truly authentic,

indigenous American writers following in the mainstream of

Emerson and Whitman Pound and Williams.^21

Allen is keen to characterise the poems he selected under the rubric
of immediacy and spontaneity. Here we are far from the logical
restraints of retrospective refl ection and control through craft
that dominate the methodology of Conquest’s New Lines. Allen
suggests that the poets in The New American Poetry:

Respond to the limits of industrialisms, and high technol-

ogy often by a marked spiritual advance or deference, an

embracing of the primal energies of the tribal or communal

spirit, side by side with the most stubborn sort of American

individualism. Their infl uence on English speaking poetry

at large has reversed the longstanding obeisance to academi-

cally sanctioned formalism. Their most common bond is a

spontaneous utilization of subject and technique, a prevailing

‘instantism’ that nevertheless does not preclude discursive

ponderings and large canvassed refl ections. (p. 9 )

Turning to the essays of this anthology, compiled as The Poetics of
The New American Poetry, there is an immediate sense of poetry
as a plurality of responses to differing communities.^22 Central to
many of the discussions is the perception of poetry itself as per-
formance. Frank O’Hara’s mock manifesto ‘Personism’ ( 1959 ),
which is often read as an antidote to confessional poetry, chal-
lenges that ‘Personism, a movement which I recently founded and
which nobody knows about... has nothing to do with philosophy,
it’s all art’, adding ‘It puts the poem squarely between the poet
and the person’ (p. 354 ). In a spirit of playfulness, O’Hara poses ‘I
don’t even like rhythm, assonance, all that stuff. You just have to
go on your nerve’ (p. 353 ). Gary Snyder’s interests in Buddhism,
the environment and anthropology would later inform ecocritical
movements and studies in ethnopoetics. Amiri Baraka’s explo-
sive ‘State/meant’ ( 1965 ) written as a radical gesture during the
emergence of Black Power and Black pride in the mid-sixties,