EN351: Contemporary American Poetry
A Note on Categorization: These two categories are by no means exclusive. Many of the poets that we have studied in this class could fit into either of these categories as they all tend to ask questions about the self, identity, and how marginalized identities fit into society. In categorizing this way, I hope to show each poet's primary thematic and personal concerns when writing.
Poetry Addressing Personal and/or Identity Concerns
Poetry Addressing Social Concerns
Experimental Forms
Somewhat Traditional Forms and Poetic Aesthetics
Tommy Pico
Frank O'Hara
Elizabeth Bishop
Poets Concerned with Black Liberation
Poets with Book-Length Poem Projects #
Allen Ginsberg
Tommy Pico (1986-) is a Brooklyn-based poet who is also a Kumeyaay Native American. Though he is interested in broader social concerns of Native Americans, in his book Nature Poem he is primarily concerned with negotiating his personal unwillingness to conform to American stereotypes of Native American people. #
Pico resists traditional forms throughout his book making his poetry largely experimental. He has little pattern to his stanzas throughout the book and no meter or rhyme. He also integrates digital culture and language into his forms, using tweets, hashtags, and tumblr posts in his poetry.
"I can't write a nature poem
bc it's fodder for the whole noble savage
narrative. I wd slap a tree across the face,
I saw to my audience." (2)
"I can't write a nature poem
bc I only fuck with the city" (4)
"I can't write a nature poem bc that conversation happens in the Hall of
South American Peoples in the American Museum of Natural History" (56)
the fabric of our lives #death
some ppl wait a lifetime for a moment like this #death
reach out and touch someone #death
he kindly stopped for me #death
kid-tested, mother-approved #death (32)
Frank O'Hara (1926-1966) was from the New York school of poets. Though he was a poet, he was interested in the visual arts which influenced his work. He was particularly interested in abstract expressionism. He aimed to do the same thing that abstract expressionists did- but with poetry. He wanted to chronicle his own movement in his work, as Jackson Pollock did with his paintings.
Though O'Hara wrote in some traditional forms, such as sonnets, he primarily refrained from a steady meter, rhyme scheme, or stanza pattern. Instead, his uneven form reflects the movement that he was interesting in creating in his poetry.
O'Hara wrote "I do this, I do that" poems, which often simply express where and he went during the day he wrote. To this effect, the poems glimpses into O'Hara's New York and his unique perspective as he traveled about the city.
"Steps"
How funny you are today New York
like Ginger Rogers in Swingtime
and St. Bridget's steeple leaning a little to the left (1-3)
"The Day Lady Died"
It is 12:20 in New York a Friday
three days after Bastille day, yes
it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine
"A Step Away From Them"
It's my lunch hour, so I go
for a walk among the hum-colored
cabs.
Jackson Pollock
Like Pico, O'Hara is interested in representing his life in the city in an unadulterated way. #
Gwendolyn Brooks
Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) was a poet who wrote in both America and England, where she eventually committed suicide. Plath is considered a confessional poet, a severely personal style of writing where the poet reveals dark versions of themselves.
Plath committed suicide when she was 31 and has been romanticized as the tragic heroine poet of American poetry.
Plath adhered to more traditional forms than her contemporaries. She often wrote in tercets or other types of sustained stanzas in her work. Her controlled forms reflect an attempt to put structure on her wild, untamed feelings of despair.
Ginsberg, though not quite as revealing as Plath, can be considered to be a confessional poet as well. #
Plath was concerned with issues relating to her gender in her poetry, such as motherhood and societal attribution of rigid gender roles. #
"Morning Song"
I'm no more your mother
Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow Effacement at the wind's hand
"Lady Lazarus"
And I a smiling woman.
I am only thirty.
And like the cat I have nine times to die.
This is Number Three.
What a trash
To annihilate each decade.
Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) was an American poet from Massachusetts who also lived in Brazil for 15 years. Because she was able to live off her father's inheritance, she was able to spend a lot of her time thinking about her sense of place in terms of geography.
Bishop was interested in her own personal relationship to the world around her. In her poetry, she attempts to picture herself in different locations around the world, sometimes adopting other voices, such as Robinson Crusoe.
Bishop employed fairly traditional forms in her writing such as repeating stanza lengths and often used traditional rhyme schemes. Perhaps her most famous poem "One Art" is in a villanelle form, which has 5 tercets and then a quatrain.
"One Art"
The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster
Lose something every day, Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.
"Night City"
No foot could endure it,
shoes are too thing.
Broken glass, broken bottles,
heaps of them burn.
Over those fires
no one could walk:
those flaring acids
and variegated bloods.
In some ways, Bishop's concern with place mirrors O'Hara's concern with New York. #
Brooks uses rhyme in her poetry to give her language a heightened sense of importance and memory persistence. In some ways, this is similar to Bishop's "One Art" #
Brooks' "the mother" details the vast array of emotions and memories associated with abortion. Throughout the poem, the speaker portrays her aborted children with life, ultimately rendering the abortions in a tragic light.
"the mother"
I have heard in the voices of the wind the voices of my dim killed children.
I have contracted. I have eased
My dim ears at the breasts they could never suck.
I have said, Sweets, if I sinned, if I seized
Your luck
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha
Cha (1951-1982) was born in South Korea during the Korean war and then moved to America when she was 10. Her poetry largely deals with questions of Asian American identity and the ways in which language places barrier between immigrants and white Americans. #
The book is also comprised of many different languages, including English, French, and Chinese. As such, the reader has the same limited access to the text as many immigrants have to the language and communication when coming to the United States.
Her poetry is largely experimental. Cha's book Dictee uses many different materials and mediums, including text, images, and maps. As such, Cha's work is a prototype for many of the experimental poetry that would follow in the later 20th and 21st century.
"Aller à la ligne C'était le premier jour point
Elle venait de loin point ce soir au dîner virgule
les familles demanderaient viergule ouvre les guile-
lemets Ça c'est bien passé le premier jour point
d'interrogation ferme les guillemets..."
Open paragraph It was the first day period
She had come from a far period tonight at dinner
comma the families would ask comma open
quotation marks How was the first day interroga-
tion mark close quotation marks..." (2)
Like Pico, who is concerned with Native American identity, Cha asks her readers to consider how English is inherently colonial and the social impact of adhering to white linguistic structures #
Kenneth Goldsmith
Goldsmith (1961-) was born in New York and trained originally as a sculptor and worked with text-based art. In his poetry, he wanted to take the ideas from conceptual art and transfer them to literature.
Like Frank O'Hara, Goldsmith was heavily influenced by the artistic movements of the period in which he worked. #
conceptual art/poetry: work that is rooted more in the idea behind the piece than in the formal structures that comprise it
This artistic movement is thought to be founded by Marcel DuChamp with his piece "The Fountain" in 1917
Goldsmith's work Seven American Deaths and Disasters is a series of transcriptions of various broadcasts/audio sources that chronicle monumental tragic events in American events. The work asks its readers to consider how reportage influences the way Americans react to deaths and disasters.
"John F. Kennedy"
Well of course the major attention is being focused on the condition of the president. No one yet has any authoritative report on the nature of the wounds to Governor Connally. Bullet wounds were plainly visible in Connally's chest, so we know that he was shot in the chest. His condition, however, remains more of a mystery than that of the President of the United States. The president is clearly gravely, critically, and perhaps fatally wounded.
Like Plath's obsession with the Holocaust, Goldsmith has an interest in appropriating events he did not experience or witness for his own literary goals. #
Claudia Rankine #
Though Rankine (1963-) was born in Jamaica, she has lived most of her life in America as a playwright and a poet. She has published many books of poetry, the most famous being Citizen where she examines what it means to be black in America in the modern day. #
Like Cha, Rankine's Citizen is not simply comprised of text. It is a textual assemblage of poetry written by her and fine art done by others which all show the disconnect between black and white Americans. #
Citizen chronicles how small micro-aggressions against African Americans can turn into some of the most pressing race related issues in our country, such as police brutality and shootings of black men. She employs a second person POV throughout her poetry which places the reader in the perspective of African Americans who experience these racial biases daily
"You like to think memory goes far back though remembering was never recommended. Forget all that, the world says. The world's had a lot of practice. No one should adhere to the facts that contribute to narrative, the facts that create lives. To your mind, feelings are what create a person, something unwilling, something wild vandalizing whatever the skull holds." (61)
"And when the woman with the multiple degrees says, I didn't know black women could get cancer, instinctively you take two steps back though all urgency leaves the possibility of any kind of relationship as you realize nowhere is where you will get from here" (45)
Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997) was a popular poet and writer who was an extremely influential figure in the "beat poetry" movement. He was active in both the New York and San Francisco poetry scenes where he wrote a great deal of poetry that condemned American society
Though Howl and Other Poems is not comprised of only one poem, the titular poem is long and fragmented like the projects done by Cha, Rankine, and Goldsmith. The poem is comprised of different parts of scenes that are purposefully disorienting.
"Howl" is a poem that is decidedly about the outsiders in American society, who Ginsberg refers to as "the best minds of [his] generation." Ginsberg was a radical leftist and his poetry is a pushback against the homogenous, mainstream version of America.
"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 fix,
"Footnote to Howl"
The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy!
The nose is holy! The tongue and cock and hand
and asshole holy!"
Ginsberg was a queer poet and, like Pico, asserts queer sexuality as a recurring theme and presence in many of his poems.
Audre Lorde
Lorde (1934-1992) was a black, queer, warrior poet concerned with liberation from the white, patriarchal, heteronormative structures at play in American society. She is famous not only for her poetry but also for her feminist essays and writings.
Lorde and her work was of the 3rd wave feminist movement, which was largely interested in showing that feminism's focus should not only be on straight white women. Her poetry shows these concerns sometimes quite explicitly, like in "A Woman Speaks"
"A Woman Speaks"
"I have been woman
for a long time
beware my smile
I am treacherous with old magic
and the noon's new fury
with all your wide futures
promised
I am
woman
and not white."
"The Woman Thing"
Meanwhile
the woman thing my mother taught me
bakes off its covering of snow
like a rising blackening sun.
In her essay "Poetry is not a Luxury," Lorde says that poetry is a necessary force to bring light to the innermost dreams and wishes regarding liberation. She says "poetry is a way to give a name to the nameless" (37) . For her, poetry is a tool for self discovery which can be, in turn, effective for mobilizing to dismantle power structures in American society.
Lorde's idea of poetry as a tool to bring a name to the nameless is useful in considering Plath's confessional poetry. She uses her poetry to name the dark pain that she feels. #
Lorde's "Coal" is a speaker very similar in nature to Lorde herself. The speaker is proud to be black, and in identifying and proclaiming her blackness, she is fighting against white erasure of blackness in America.
Her idea of dismantling white structures is much different than Baraka, who is more about active destruction through violence #
"Coal"
Love is a word, another kind of open.
As the diamond comes into a knot of flame
I am Black because I come from the earth's inside
now take my word for jewel in the open light
Amiri Baraka
LeRoi Jones, (1934-204) who later adapted the pseudonym Amiri Baraka, was a revolutionary poet, playwright, and essayist associated with the Black Arts Movement. His work is highly controversial, as he has Black Nationalism, anti-semitic, sexist tendencies in his poetry
Baraka's poetry is violent and phonologically dense. Through sounds and words, Baraka conveys a desire to rip apart whiteness in America and to take down the racial hierarchy by any means necessary. HIs essay "The Revolutionary Theatre" explicitly asks his readers to brutally condemn white people.
"Black Art"
"Poems are bullshit unless they are
teeth or trees or lemons piled
on a step."
"Numbers, Letters"
A black nigger in the universe. A long breath singer,
wouldbe dancer, strong from years of fantasy
and study. All this time when, for what's happening
now. All that spilling of white ether, clocks in ghostheads
lips drying and rewet, eyes opening and shut, mouths churning.
Baraka worked in the same vein as Malcolm X, who said that "While King was having a dream, the rest of us negroes are having a nightmare." Baraka wanted to forcefully show this nightmare in his work. In many ways, this is similar to Rankine's "you" which forcefully puts the reader in a black POV. #
Jayne Cortez
Jayne Cortez (1934-2012) was an African American poet who was working in the same vein as Baraka. She is concerned with identifying white people as inherent oppressors and murderers. Like Baraka, she was also interested in the ways in which Black Art can be political. #
Cortez is less concerned with shining light on oneself, like Lorde, and more concerned with directly fighting against the suppression of black lives in America #
"There It Is"
My friend
they don't care
if you're an individualist
a leftist a rightist
a shithead or a snake
They will try to exploit you
absorb you confine you
disconnect you isolate you
or kill you"
"The Oppressionists"
Art
what do they care about art
they go rom being contemporary baby kissers to
old time corrupt politicians
to self-appointed censorship clerks
X.J. Kennedy
Kennedy's poem "September Twelfth, 2001" is a personal reflection on what it's like to be alive after the tragic attacks on the World Trade Center on 9/11. The poem is largely about the speaker's satisfaction with the mundane aspects of the world after seeing something so terrible.
Kennedy's poem is more formally traditional than other poets of the 21st century. The poem is neatly organized into three quatrains that contribute to the quietness of his own personal reflections.
"September Twelfth, 2001"
Alive, we open eyelids
on our pitiful share of time,
we bubbles rising and bursting
in a boiling pot
Unlike Goldsmith, this poem is a more personal and reflective piece than the wide scope of his conceptual representation of 9/11. #
