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EN351: Contemporary American Poetry A Note on Categorization: These two…

- - - - 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. #
        
        "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)
      - 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.
        
        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)
      - As a queer poet, Pico is also largely concerned with unashamedly asserting his sexuality throughout his poetry and expressing different aspects of gay culture. # #
    - - 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.
        
        Jackson Pollock
      - 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.
        
        Like Pico, O'Hara is interested in representing his life in the city in an unadulterated way. #
  - - - 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.
        
        In some ways, Bishop's concern with place mirrors O'Hara's concern with New York. #
      - 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.
    - - Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000) was an African American poet from Chicago. She wrote poems about both racial and gender concerns in America, mostly asking her readers to consider the ways in which society marginalizes her various identities. # #
      - 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
    - - 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.
        
        Ginsberg, though not quite as revealing as Plath, can be considered to be a confessional poet as well. #
        
        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. #
      - 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.
        
        "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.
      - 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
    - - 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. #
- - - - 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 "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
    - - 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 (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. #
        
        "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
      - 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 #
  - - - 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.
    - - 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. #
        
        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 #
      - 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.
        
        "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)
      - 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.
    - - 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. #
    - - 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. #
        
        Like Goldsmith and O'Hara, Rankine's work is clearly in conversation with the artists of the time. She includes the work of many famous contemporary African American artists. # #
      - 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)