Throughout the fifties and early sixties, new poets began to
emerge to move poetry in this direction. In 1956, Allen Ginsberg
published Howl and other Poems, a work that epitomized the "beat
generation" and has remained in print consecutively in each
decade since. In fact, Howl became the best known and most
influential poem of the contemporary period. The young Adrienne
Rich, whose lyrical gifts were evident in her early collection A
Change of World, which won the Yale Younger Poets prize for 1951,
began to write more fully about "experiencing [herself] as a
woman,"2 and her poetry inspired women throughout the world to
"break the silence" that kept them from expressing a woman's view
of reality as distinctive and separate from the views of their
male peers. In 1960, Sylvia Plath's The Colossus hinted at the
remarkable talent that was to emerge in her extraordinary
posthumously published work--work that concentrated her fury in
an original and unprecedented avalanche of shocking and powerful
images. In 1962, John Ashbery's The Tennis Court Oath, published
in the usually cautious Wesleyan series, introduced an avant-
garde poetics rooted in surrealism and linguistic innovation.
Ashbery was to become the most innovative poet of his generation,
moving the language in imaginative new directions with each
successive book. Ashbery's good friend, Frank O'Hara, whose
career was tragically curtailed when he died in an automobile
accident in 1966, invented a "seriously whimsical" poetry of the
moment, turning the mundane experiences of daily life into the
heightened intensity of poetic lines. In the same year that
Ashbery published The Tennis Court Oath, Robert Creeley's first
major collection, For Love, appeared revealing a new kind of
linguistically minimalist poetry that de-emphasized imagery and
metaphor and, following Olson's lead, stressed the primacy of the
writing process and the very breath of the poet writing. And both
Robert Bly and James Wright, influenced more deeply by Spanish
and Latin American writers than most American poets of their
generation, began to explore what they called the poetry of the
"deep image," that originated in myth and in the mysterious
symbolism of the unconscious. And Diane Wakoski began to
construct a "bio-mythography," a poetry which combined mythology
and personal experience to create a new blend of poetry from
which virtually no human emotional experience could be excluded.
These poets, taken together, drew up a new set of maps for
contemporary poetry that would move beyond the impersonal,
objectivist confines of modernism and toward a poetry centered in
the physical self of the poet who produced it. They participated
collectively in the mid-century poetic climate that
revolutionized poetry and greatly broadened its possibilities.

Allen Ginsberg (b. 1926)

On the back of the dust jacket of Allen Ginsberg's Collected
Poems, published in 1984, there is a photograph of Ginsberg
holding a bundle of small black and white City Lights paperbacks
--the individual pocket-sized volumes where most of the collected
poems originally appeared.3 To read these small books in
succession, from Howl and Other Poems (1956) through Plutonian
Ode (1982), is to confront chronologically arranged obituary
notices from the anguished soul of America during some of its
most troubled days. Ginsberg was always an intensely ambitious
poet: from early in his career he aimed at offering a quasi-
omnisicent view of the American spirit and a diagnosis of its
ills. He sought to express the repressed Dionysian spirit in
America, yoking the poles of the romantic sensibility--the
luminous visions of Blake with the democratic vistas of Whitman.
These ambitions were realized in the poetry he produced in the
1960s and early 1970s, which reached probably as large an
audience as serious poetry ever has reached in this country.
Ginsberg became a guru to thousands upon thousands of young
people who saw in what they perceived as his unrelenting honesty,
an alternative to the cant and doublespeak of establishment
America during the most hypocritical years of Vietnam and
Watergate.

News of Ginsberg during these years emanated not really from
his poetry, but rather from a series of important social,
political, and literary events in which he participated: Ginsberg
and the Howl obscenity trial; Ginsberg on the road with Ken
Kesey's merry pranksters; Ginsberg and the anti-war
demonstrations; Ginsberg and the trial of the Chicago Seven;
Ginsberg and LSD; Ginsberg and gay rights; Ginsberg expressing
outrage that Gregory Corso was denied the National Book Award for
Elegiac Feelings American one year, and then winning it himself
for The Fall of America another; Ginsberg protesting at a nuclear
facility in Colorado. No other contemporary writer has lived so
close to the historical edge of his time.

Though Ginsberg's poetic achievement diverged from the
impersonality of modernism, he admired Pound--especially Pound's
"musical" ear, and he became the embodiment of several of Pound's
most cherished conceptions of the role of the artist in the
twentieth-century. Two of the most important of these are
Pound's description of artists as the "antennae of the race" and
his insistence that a fundamental role of the poet is "to purify
the language of the tribe." This dual role, both prophetic and
cathartic, has been a part of Ginsberg's strategy from the
beginning. Like Frank O'Hara, a writer with whom he is not often
associated because of superficial academic distinctions between
the Beat Generation and the "New York School" of poets, he
created new possibilities for a younger generation of poets,
pushing them beyond the cool ironic stance of Modernism toward a
heated involvement in the experience of their time and place.

"Experience" is a key word in thinking about Ginsberg's
work, because the Eliot-Pound legacy demanded attention not so
much to the physical and human environment of an individual's
daily life, but rather to "tradition," to the historical record,
and to particular details of poetic craft that could be garnered
from that record. Pound's often repeated adage "make it new"
required a contemporary American poet to develop a sense of what
poets in the English language had achieved up to the present
moment. For most of the modernists, working in the forefront of
poetic innovation required an ability to subordinate one's
individual talent to the dictates of tradition. But Ginsberg,
following Whitman, shouted his "barbaric yawp" over the rooftops
of the world in Howl and began to change that conception and
validate the primacy of personal experience for contemporary
poets.

It is a mistake, however, to think of Ginsberg's poetry
exclusively in experiential terms. In addition to Whitman and
Blake, Ginsberg learned much about writing poetry from
Christopher Smart, the eighteenth-century British poet whose poem
"Jubliate Agno" ("Rejoice in the Lamb") is an important precursor
of Howl; from the English Romantics, whose rhapsodic visions of
nature inspired poems like "Wales Visitation" and others; from
John Milton; from Edgar Allan Poe; and, closer to his own
generation, from Pound and William Carlos Williams. He drew on
his own Jewish heritage for "Kaddish," the poem many regard as
his best, and his intensive study of Tibetan Buddhism has infused
his work with yet another layer of allusiveness. From the
perspective of the last decade of the 20th century we can now see
both the innovative aspects of Ginsberg's work and its
traditional base.

Richard Eberhart has described the unique quality of
Ginsberg's early poetry4 as "an aggression upon the unseen to
make it seen"5 The phrase seems particularly apt to describe the
seventy-eight stanza sentence beginning with the words "I saw"
which ushers the reader into the world of Howl. One is struck by
the sheer aggressiveness of the poem's language, as well as the
exotic and esoteric diction through which Ginsberg struggles to
make his vision palpable. For how does one "see" a mind destroyed
by madness? Ginsberg responds by creating images that give the
abstraction solidity. He learned early from Ezra Pound to "go in
fear of abstractions" and from William Carlos Williams, to "make
a start out of particulars." These intentions are realized
through the poem's thoroughly original diction--the first
important poetic use of the American hip vernacular--which gives
the madness described in the poem a peculiar and unprecedented
vitality. This effect is intensified by Ginsberg's startling
combinations of adjectives and nouns: "unshaven rooms," "ashcan
rantings," "hydrogen jukebox," "bop kaballa," "visionary indian
angels," "saintly motorcyclists," "wild cooking pederasty,"
"symbolic ping pong table," "hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude
watch," "naked and endless head," and dozens more.
Ginsberg's style has been so widely imitated in the popular
culture--especially by rock music lyricists--that it is hard to
recall that the language did not always appear to have this sort
of imaginative adaptability. To the several generations whose
cultural sensibilities have been shaped by the subversive rhythms
of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, and by the social
criticism of Bob Dylan, Howl may even appear conservative, but it
is important to recognize that Ginsberg influenced the lyrics of
all these cultural forces.

Structurally as well, Howl appears more orderly today than it
did when it first entered the literary landscape. Its three long
sections, each built around a "fixed base" ("who" in Section 1,
"Moloch" in Section 2, and "I'm with you in Rockland" in Section
3), successively offer a description of a generation; an
indictment of a merciless, post-industrial society that demands
human beings sacrifice their humanity; and a portrait of a single
individual (Carl Solomon) driven to madness by that society. The
symbolic use of Moloch, a Canaanite fire god "whose worship was
marked by parents burning their children as propitiatory
sacrifice" (Ginsberg 760), as an emblem for a society that
sacrifices its young to what Dwight Eisenhower called "the
military-industrial complex" is the poem's most memorable figure.
Though Ginsberg writes in a variety of styles characterized
by various line lengths, repetitive patterns, long Whitmanic
catalogs, and other devices suited to oral delivery, the
essentially visionary, prophetic, and cathartic quality of his
poetry has not changed a great deal since he made the
breakthrough evidenced by Howl. He has produced a substantial
number of memorable poems characterized by an extraordinary
openness to the experiences of his life and the socio-political
events of his time. "A Supermarket in California" has the young
poet encountering the spirit of Walt Whitman in the aisles of a
contemporary supermarket; "Kaddish" is a remarkable deeply felt
tribute to his mother Naomi that is structured on an ancient
Jewish tradition; "Siesta in Xbalba" is a lengthy meditation on
the relationship between an individual and the civilization of
his or her time; "Kral Majales" is a satirical examination of
both capitalism and communism in favor of Dionysian excess;
"Wichita Vortex Sutra" is a powerful indictment of the corruption
of language by both government and the media during the Vietnam
War; "Wales Visitation," one of Ginsberg's most delicately
crafted visionary poems, evokes the English Romantic literary
tradition more fully than anything else in his work, expressing
the timelessness of nature as he observes the fecundity of the
earth close up, involving all his senses in adoration of the
earth as the source and sustainer of all life. "Please Master" is
an extraordinarily frank and graphic description of a homosexual
act, that revels in its unapolegetically graphic sexuality. And
the long "Poem of These States," which occurs sporadically
throughout The Fall of America (1972), succeeds in its intention
"to cover like a collage a lone consciousness travelling through
these states during the Vietnam War."6

Ginsberg's poetry has continued to be both socially engaged
and linguistically inventive, although his later work has taken a
somewhat more introspective turn. As might be expected, the
poems in Mind Breaths (1978) and White Shroud (1986) deal more
deeply with the realities of aging and portents of death than
those written by the fire-breathing author of Howl. "Contest of
the Bards" and "Father Death" show a darker Ginsberg directly
confronting his own mortality.

Throughout his career, Ginsberg has given us a poetry whose
true power can be felt when it is read aloud. One of his most
important contributions to contemporary verse was to take poetry
out of the classrooms and into non-academic settings--coffee
houses, jazz clubs, large public auditoriums, even athletic
stadiums. Of all contemporary American poets, he has easily the
most substantial international reputation, and his work most
embodies the vastness and contradictions of America in the second
half of the twentieth century.

Adrienne Rich (b.1929)

For all its attention to contemporary social issues,
Ginsberg's poetry does not address one of the most revolutionary
social issues of our time--the change in the status of women and
the nature of women's roles that has dominated the later half of
the twentieth century. No American poet has chronicled this
issue more fully than Adrienne Rich. Rich's work established the
importance of gender in shaping a poetic consciousness, and she
became a mentor to thousands of women, enabling them to "speak
the unspeakable," to authenticate their unique experience of
reality.

The deleterious consequences of leaving things unspoken has
been an important continuing theme in Rich's poetry, evident even
in her earliest poems. She has insisted on the need to expose
the indirection and falsity of "civilized" discourse even when
her own poetry was saturated by its conventions. In her first
book, A Change of World (1951), several poems in orderly rhymes,
iambic meters, and structured stanzas pose the question of an
unarticulated rebellion beneath the genteel surface of civilized
life. In "Five O'Clock, Beacon Hill" the narrator sits sipping
"auburn sherry" with a young man who is given to allusive
literary conversation--high-class name dropping. At the poem's
conclusion the narrator remarks, "What rebel breathes beneath his
mask, indeed?/Avant-garde in tradition's lineaments!"7 Looked at
in retrospect, these lines seem to prefigure later developments
in Rich's work--the rebellion lurking beneath the "dutiful
daughter" of the Anglo-American literary tradition. In "Stepping
Backward," another poem from A Change of World, she asks "How far
dare we throw off the daily ruse,/Official treacheries of face
and name,/ Have out our true identity?"8 Even the titles of some
of the poems in this early collection reveal a preoccupation with
the unspoken: "An Unsaid Word," "Unsounded," "What Ghosts Can
Say."

For Rich, the most important of a poet's functions is to
find words for much of human experience which is ordinarily
ineffable--the physical or physiological, the intuitive, the non-
linguistic, and intensely private internal states of mind and
body. In a well-known passage from "Planetarium," (in The Will
to Change (1971)) she defines her role as a "translator" of the
non-verbal physicality of life:

I am an instrument in the shape
of a woman trying to translate pulsations
into images for the relief of the body
and the reconstruction of the mind. (Fact 116)

Though written earlier, "The Demon Lover" from Leaflets (1969)
goes even further; the poet not only reconstructs the mind but
reconstructs the world as well, because "Only where there is
language is there world" (Fact 84). Unless inner states of being
can be put into words they have no public existence. Their very
reality is ignored and denied in the social forum.

Like many of her contemporaries, Rich attempts to blur the
distinctions between her poetry and her life, though she is
certainly keenly aware of those distinctions. "What happens
between us," one lover tells another in "The Burning of Paper
Instead of Children,"

has happened for centuries
we know it from literature

still it happens

sexual jealously
outflung hand
beating bed

dryness of mouth
after panting

there are books that describe all this
and they are useless
(Fact 118-19)

Those last two lines identify the paradox at the center of Rich's
poetry: a poet committed to the primacy of experience over book
learning continues to write books to express the inexpressible.
As a poet she must be committed to language, but she recognizes
as well that "a language is a map of our failures" ("The Burning
of Paper Instead of Children" and that "the mind of the poet is
the only poem" ("Images for Godard"). Words can create our
realities, but they can also separate us from one another.
This dichotomy is reflected in the arresting beginning of
"Cartographies of Silence," one of the poems which define Rich's
concept of the poet's calling. Here she calls attention to the
irony inherent in the phrase "common language" by revealing the
isolation and impotence that lie behind our words:

A conversation begins
with a lie. And each

speaker of the so-called common language feels
the ice-floe split, the drift apart

as if powerless, as if up against
a force of nature
(Fact 232)

The poem differentiates between the language of poetry and the
language of conversation. Spoken words cannot be retracted; they
make tracks in the person they are spoken to, and they sometimes
even startle the person who speaks them. Spoken words that are
lies are self-generating, leading from one lie to the next to a
hypocritical and inauthentic existence. The spoken lies in this
poem mask what Rich calls the "unspeakable truth," and the unsaid
words reflect the historical condition of many women; they create
silences of the isolated self, cut-off from and unexpressed in
the cultural articulation of its time. Rich's notion of the poet
makes her a cartographer of silence--a maker of maps that
delineate the outer edges of our language for us. The poet can
never choose to acquiesce to the silences, but must choose
instead "these words, these whispers, conversations/from which
time after time the truth breaks moist and green" (Fact 236).

A luminous clarity emerges in Rich's later work as her
woman's voice seems to embody the language of so many of the
women of her generation. "I can never romanticize language
again," she writes in "The Images," "never deny its power for
disguise and mystification."9 For Rich it is important to say
the word "lesbian" because "to discard it is to collaborate with
silence and lying about our very existence; with the closet-game,
the creation of the unspeakable."10 This is not to say that her
poetry speaks exclusively to or about lesbians; instead it
affirms that the particulars of her experience are as equally
"universal" as the experiences of her male counterparts.
In Your Native Land, Your Life (1986) she probes deeply into
the sources of her personal identity--as a woman, daughter,
mother and wife, as a Jew, a lesbian, and feminist--each facet of
herself shaped by a connection to a community, a tradition, a way
of life, and a philosophy. "From where does your strength come?"
she asks in the remarkable long poem "Sources," which chronicles
her transformation from "The faithful drudging child/...whose
penmanship,/hard work, style will win her prizes" to "the woman
with a mission, not to win prizes/but to change the laws of
history."11 For Rich "Poetry never stood a chance/of standing
outside history" (Native 33); because it is rooted in the poet's
life, it is implicated in the history of its time and place. A
poem about the Canadian landscape painter Emily Carr makes an
analogy between Carr's choice of subject and Rich's own:

you found
yourself facing the one great art
of your native land, your life
(Native 64)

The long sequence, "Contradictions: Tracking Poems" takes the
reader deep into a poet's confrontations with the demons that
stalk her life and concludes with a sense of her own
uncertainties and contradictions. Though the poem seems to speak
for and to the suffering of many women, Rich insists that the
reader not take her words as gospel, but rather turn toward the
particulars of her own life:

You who think I find words for everything
this is enough for now
cut it short
cut loose from my words
(Native 111)

Rich continues to review the landscape of her personal life
in Time's Power (1989). The link between the personal and the
political, so characteristic of all of her work, is taken to an
even deeper level. She has mastered what Robert Peters
satirically calls the "you" poem--a poem addressed to a "you"
that the reader may or may not be able to identify.12 Almost all
of Rich's poems in these late collections are so addressed, but
the reader's reaction is not so much to be puzzled by who the
"you" might be, but rather to recognize the commonality of human
experience in relationships between children and parents,
husbands and wives, lovers, and friends. The particular "you" is
underscored by the use of very specific details, but it grows
into a generic "you" because of the inter-relatedness of humanity
and the constancies of human nature.
In "Solfeggietto" she describes her childhood struggle with
her mother over piano lessons, and the dispute between mother and
daughter is encapsulated in this musical metaphor:

The daughter struggles with the strange notations

--dark chart of music's ocean flowers and flags
but would rather learn by ear and heart The mother
says she must learn to read by sight not ear and heart.13

This conflict, between the received authority of traditional
forms and the intuitive and actual realities of experience,
summarizes the gist of Rich's development as a poet. As the late
Terence Des Pres observed, Rich's work began "in a formal self-
regarding mode devoid of politics...but...has gone on, by virtue
of attention to experience, to establish a major voice in forms
overtly political."14 Hers has become the collective voice of
contemporary women demanding attention to their presence, to the
realities of their experience, to the autonomy of their choices.
It is often a harsh, pained, and even anguished voice, but it is
also a voice of enormous strength and power, a distinguished and
wholly individual voice that reaches beyond itself to incorporate
the inner lives of so many of the women of her time.

Sylvia Plath (1932-1963)

Another kind of woman's voice altogether emanates from the
poetry of Sylvia Plath. Though her work has been in its own way
even more influential than Adrienne Rich's, that influence has
has been much more problematic. The first lines of her first
collection, The Colossus (1962) announce the theme she never
abandoned: "The fountains are dry and the roses over./Incense of
death. Your day approaches."15 These lines are from a poem
called "The Manor Garden" which, like T.S. Eliot's opening lines
of The Waste Land, reverses the traditional spring and rebirth
associations of pastoral poetry, evoking instead a sense of
nature's malevolence. The poem's speaker is apparently addressing
an unborn child, preparing it for its legacy of danger and
impending death. Life in this poem seems tenuous, fragile, and
slight as compared to the overwhelming power of death.
Other early poems make Plath's fixation on mortality even
more explicit. "Two Views of a Cadaver Room" recounts an
experience she had while dating a young Harvard medical student
According to Edward Butscher, one of Plath's several biographers,
she followed her boyfriend and some other medical students into
"an operating room where the students were soon busily dissecting
a preserved corpse" (Butscher ). Both horrified and mesmerized
by the experience, the narrator offers "two views" of the cadaver
room as alternate possibilities of depicting death in art. The
physical view of death as epitomized by the cadaver room is
contrasted with a romantic view of death, represented by a detail
from a Brueghel painting depicting two lovers, in the midst of a
scene of destruction and devastation, entranced by one another
and oblivious to the "smoke and slaughter" all around them. For
Plath, this second view was clearly untenable. Once you have
confronted the literal physicality of death (as the narrator does
in the first stanza), ignoring that reality (as the lovers do in
the Brueghel painting) seems hopelessly romantic and naive. The
only way to relinquish the painful awareness of impending death
and nothingness is to relinquish life itself--which is tragically
the alternative Plath chose. On February 11, 1963, at the height
of her poetic power, Plath committed suicide in her London flat
and thereby moved herself and her work into the domain of myth
and psycho-mystical speculation.

Though she was not the only poet of the contemporary period
to self-destruct (John Berryman and Anne Sexton also later
committed suicide), Plath's suicide frames and alters our
perception of her work. As George Stade remarks,
Our knowledge of her suicide comments on the poetry as we
read it. The image of the poet that rises out of the poetry
as we read it wears the aspect of her fate. Our knowledge of
her suicide not only clarifies what she said and what she meant-
-it also certifies that she meant what she said."17 Plath's
poetry may be read as a detailed chronicle of self-destruction,
although her best poems are redeemed by a startlingly vital
language that clashes with the blank walls of nothingness she
stares at. Although some readers have felt that her earlier poems
(those in The Colossus and the pre-Colossus poems gathered by her
husband, the British poet, Ted Hughes, after her death and
published in The Collected Poems [1981]) are quiet, carefully
crafted technical exercises rather than the death-obsessed lyrics
which emerge in Ariel (1965) and Winter Trees (1971), a closer
look at these earlier poems reveals the same suicidal fixations,
the same willingness to look death straight in the eyes, the same
Stephen Crane-like impressions of the natural and inanimate
worlds as indifferent to human concerns. The power of these
worlds is immense and their apparent tranquility is seductive.
The difference between Plath's earlier and later work is largely
a difference in technique, but that difference, as Hugh Kenner
has wryly observed, may be very large indeed: "As long as she
worked in the manner of The Colossus she kept safely alive. One
prefers one's poets kept alive."18

The publication history of Plath's work further complicates
our response to it. She published only one collection of poetry
(The Colossus) during her lifetime. Although she prepared the
poems in Ariel for publication before her suicide, the volume as
it actually appeared was significantly different than the one she
intended.19 A third and fourth collections, Crossing the Water
and Winter Trees appeared in 1971, but it was not until 1981 that
The Collected Poems, arranged in chronological order and
annotated by Ted Hughes, finally appeared. Because Hughes and
Plath were living apart at the time of her death, and because
many see her despair over the break-up of her marriage as a
primary factor in her suicide, Hughes's control over the release
of Plath's posthumous publications has been problematic.
Nonetheless, the assembling of The Collected Poems "in as true a
chronological order as is possible" (Plath 15) gives as complete
a sense of Plath's development as a writer as we are likely to
have.

Reading her poetry sequentially and tracing that development
makes clear that the poet who wrote the close-to-the-bone lyrics
of Ariel is also the poet who wrote The Colossus; there is not a
rupture between these two books, but rather a shedding of masks
and a movement closer to the austerity and purity of her single
major subject: her sense of impending death and her desire to
move language as close to the experience of death as is humanly
possible.

From the perspective of literary criticism, it is tempting
to ignore the fact that the writer of the harrowing self-
revelatory lyrics of Ariel and the later poems took her own life.
Judith Kroll, for example, in her stimulating study of Plath's
work argues for the necessity to approach the work objectively as
literature; Kroll believes that "the fact...that she killed
herself is irrelevant to the consideration of the meaning of her
work; as literature, the poems would mean what they do even if
she had not attempted suicide."20 But would they? Reading the
poetry as "Chapters in a Mythology," as Kroll does, puts it in a
positive, affirmative light, and protects us from the self-
destructive reality it chronicles. According to Kroll, virtually
all of the apparent "death wishes" in her late poems have the
ambiguity of a simultaneous wish for rebirth, which can only be
achieved through some kind of "death." It is not that life is
unacceptable, 'that life, even when disciplined, is simply not worth it'
(as Robert Lowell says in his foreword to Ariel), but that life
lived on the wrong terms, a life lived by the false self, is
not life but an intolerable death-in-life which can be
overcome only by dying to that life. The late poems are
really exploratory attempts to release the true self and to
establish an authentic existence. (Kroll 12).

Such a reading of the poetry ignores the fact that the
purveyor of these "exploratory attempts" annihilated both the
creative and the destructive aspects of her divided life. If the
true self is "released" only to destroy itself, one has to
question the validity of the search. Plath's most famous lines
from "Lady Lazarus," as well as the title and overall impressions
of that poem, clearly take on additional resonance when read with
the knowledge of her actual suicide. The poem deals with a
lifelong flirtation with suicide, and like the Lazarus of the
title, its persona miraculously survives each brush with death.
The lines, "Dying/Is an art, like everything else./I do it
exceptionally well" (Plath 245) are often cited as the center of
Plath's obsession, but Plath's actual suicide mocks their
efficacy. Dying, of course, is not an art (unless, as Plath
says, everything else is an art) though writing well about dying
is, and it is the latter, not the former that Plath did
exceptionally well. Her actual suicide attempts were botched and
gruesome, and even her final completion of the act was possibly,
according to A. Alvarez, a botched attempt to call attention to
herself.21

It is possible that suicide for Plath was a performance in
much the same way that her poetry was a performance, and both
performances are costly to attend. "There is a charge," she
writes, again in "Lady Lazarus,"

For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge
For the hearing of my heart-----
It really goes

And there is a charge, a very large charge,
For a word or a touch
Or a bit of blood

Or a piece of my hair or my clothes.
(Plath 244)

The charge is the emotional cost some readers pay for dwelling
long under the spell of Plath's seductive and hypnotic language.
The Lady Lazarus of Plath's poem at the end is reborn, but reborn
as a devourer of others. Like the "Lorelei" of The Colossus, who
seduce sailors to their deaths, her tense poetry drenched with
dread sometimes "Bears a burden too weighty/ For the whorled
ear's listening" (Plath 94).

Despite the fact that many have difficulty reading Plath in
large doses, her contribution to the language and imagery of
contemporary poetry is substantial. Her innovations include a
sense of language in extremis--words on the edge of existence
itself. One of her last poems, written just six days before her
suicide, is, in fact, called "Edge" and she writes about her
impending death with a detached stoicism.

At its best, Plath's work combines a dramatic sense of both
aural and visual imagery. Her poems are filled with questions and
exclamations, with startling and unexpected evocations of colors,
sounds, visual flashes. A few of the memorable lines from her
vast repertoire should make her originality clear:

What a thrill-----
My thumb instead of an onion.
The top quite gone
Except, for a sort of hinge
"Cut" (Plath, 235)
The womb
Rattles its pod, the moon
Discharges itself from the tree with nowhere to go.
"Childless Woman" (Plath, 259)

There's a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.
"Daddy" (Plath 224)

Those memorable lines about "Daddy," reflect as well the
lifelong impact of the early death of her father on Plath's work.
A German linguist and beekeeper, he died when she was nine years
old, and became, in her mind, a colossus; images of his life and
work permeate her poetry and surely dominated much of her inner
life. Perhaps she never really was quite able to say "I'm
through" until her suicide in 1963.

Frank O'Hara (1926-66)

When The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara was posthumously
published in 1971, five years after his tragic accidental death,
most readers and reviewers were taken aback by the sheer bulk of
the volume. Here was a book of 586 pages from a poet who died at
age 39 having published three slim collections of poems and a
handful of broadsides and pamphlets. As John Ashbery notes in
the book's introduction, O'Hara was not always driven to get his
work into print: Dashing off poems at odd moments--in his office at the
Museum of Modern Art in New York where he worked as an
Associate Curator, in the street at lunchtime or even in a room
full of people--he would put them away in drawers and cartons
and half forget them. Once when a publisher asked him for a
manuscript, he spent weeks and months combing the apartment,
enthusiastic and bored at the same time, trying to assemble the
poems. Finally he let the project drop, not because he didn't
wish his work to appear, but because his thoughts were
elsewhere, in the urban world of fantasy where the poems came
from.22

O'Hara invented a kind of free-form urban poetry that sharply
connected to the frenetic rhythms of New York life. It is a
poetry of its time and place, rooted in the immediate exigencies
of its author's life. Like the work of Ginsberg, Rich, and Plath,
it has had a wide and substantial impact on American poetry--
giving others the courage and permission to draw directly from
the materials of their lives, but it is unlike the work of those
poets in the freedom of its smaller scale, its playfulness, its
mockery of IMPORTANT ART and poetic ambition. O'Hara's work gave
American poetry an absolutely original voice--urban, funny, both
casual and serious at the same time. More than any of his peers
he was deeply influenced by the world of the visual arts,
especially the revolutionary aesthetic developed by "action
painting" or abstract expressionism--the dominant art movement of
the 1950s.

O'Hara's connection with the New York art scene dates from
the early fifties when he first worked at the Museum of Modern
Art and became acquainted with many of the most innovative
painters of the time. O'Hara wrote important art criticism and
developed a literary aesthetic that had clear affinities with the
paintings being produced by Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Mark
Rothko, Willem de Kooning, and other painters of The New York
School.23 For example, the "casual insight" that O'Hara finds at
the center of Jackson Pollock's achievement is a description as
well of his own poetic style. Writing about Pollock, O'Hara
finds the mimetic function of art in his work is limited to an
imitation of the artist's immediate sensibility--what he is like
at the moment he is painting the picture--not an external or
objective scene, and not a representation of universal human
values. The achievement of O'Hara and the abstract
expressionists demonstrates that transient matters can be dealt
with in an enduring way. The art of the moment does not always
have to be tied to rapidly changing social issues. When the
moment-to-moment reality of the individual becomes the focus, the
art becomes made up of the very stuff of life itself. Art has
always been preoccupied with the universal, these artists seem to
be saying, but life continues to serve up a steady diet of
particulars. It is as a careful chronicler of those particulars
that O'Hara has made his mark on literary history.
O'Hara's best-known and most often anthologized poem, "The Day
Lady Died," illustrates how carefully controlled and drafted his
"casual" art can be and how what is seemingly a random list of
selected moments from a day in the poet's life is actually a
tightly structured, artfully contrived series of effects. The
poem records the deep impression that the news of Billie
Holiday's death made on him. The emotional impact of that moment
is heightened by its juxtaposition of trivial and impersonal
details with O'Hara's recollection of hearing "Lady Day" sing.
The poem begins with facts and figures--impersonal, trivial and
routine. We learn what time it is, what day it is, what year it
is, and what the narrator's plans are for the day. Like Jackson
Pollock's "Blue Poles," a painting O'Hara considered "one of the
great masterpieces of Western art," random activity is here
contrasted with luminous and perceptive sensitivity. After
having a hamburger and a malted, going to the bank, browsing in a
bookstore, buying some liquor and cigarettes, the narrator in the
poem sees "a NEW YORK POST with her face on it" (Allen 325).
There is a stanza break recording the shock and stillness of the
moment, and the last four lines are virtually a single breath--
appropriately so, for their subject is breathlessness:

and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of
leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT
while she whispered a song along the keyboard
to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing.
(Allen 325)

Many of O'Hara's poems are playful, "casually insightful"
celebrations of the aesthetic autonomy of the creative act. The
last stanza of "Autobiographia Literaria" (the serious,
Coleridge-inspired title totally at odds with the spirit of the
poem) specifically celebrates the involvement of the ego with
esthetics:

And here I am, the
center of all beauty!
writing these poems!
Imagine! (Allen 11)

The wonder here is a mock-wonder, aimed at calling our attention
to the "action" of making the poem. Here, as elsewhere in
O'Hara's work the mock-heroic posturing is only superficially
satirical. Underlying the casual chronicles of everyday events in
his work is a deep commitment to the transformative qualities of
poetry--its ability to open our eyes, sharpen our perceptions,
and involve us more totally with the world around us. Though the
phrase may appear contradictory, O'Hara's whimsy is a "serious
whimsy." This tone, which permeates the work, is O'Hara's
response to the grandiose solemnity of his modernist predecessors
like Pound and Eliot.

"Memorial Day, 1950," one of his most remarkable poems,
chronicles the struggle of the twentieth-century artist to "make
it new" in Pound's famous phrase, to work on the cutting edge of
the art of the time and transform that art by utilizing its
elements in unprecedented ways. The artists and writers O'Hara
alludes to in the poem are all innovators who represent the
modernist break from traditional forms (except Auden, who
"extended" those forms). The question O'Hara seems to be asking
in the poem is how does a mid-century artist follow the
"destructive-constructive" revolution of the great modernists?
Pablo Picasso is likened to a "crew of creators" chopping down
plane trees outside his windows to make way for a new building.
This image evokes no lament for the destruction of nature by
modern civilization, but rather celebrates the urban energy of
modern art which made both the poet and the world "tough and
quick." For O'Hara, the choice between the urban world of
modernity and its pastoral precursors was no contest: "I can't
even enjoy a blade of grass," he wrote, "unless I know there's a
subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do
not totally regret life." (Allen 197)

Throughout "Memorial Day, 1950," O'Hara aligns his work with
that of revolutionary modernists like Picasso and Gertrude Stein
(as well as Max Ernst, Paul Klee, and the Dadaists), but playing
on the poem's title, he notes that "the war was over," that is,
the struggle to create a unique and distinctly twentieth-century
art had already been won. By 1950, the radical aesthetics of the
early part of the century--the literary theories of Pound, Eliot,
and Stein, the Cubism of Picasso, the Dadaism of Duchamp and
Ernst, the Bauhaus innovations of Klee and Kandinsky--all had
begun to seem increasingly remote from actual felt experience.
The "modern" had survived both the literal and figurative wars of
the century, but only as a highly intellectualized "ism," "and
even when you're scared," O'Hara writes, "art is no dictionary."

Drawn to both the serious, socially conscious art of
Picasso's Guernica, and the playful, childlike spirit of Klee,
the contemporary American artist, circa 1950, struggled to find a
new identity able to subsume both. American painters like Robert
Motherwell and Jackson Pollock were demonstrating that the
untrammeled freedom of "action painting" could be put to both
political and psychological uses. And O'Hara (who wrote
monographs on both of these artists) was searching for a poetry
that could combine the strong sense of physical action present in
the canvases of the abstract painters with a liberation from the
"cerebral" insistence of modernist poetics. He invented a poetry
that spoke squarely and assuredly from the poet's body: "My
mother and father asked me and/I told them from my tight blue
pants we should/love only the stones, the sea, and heroic
figures" (Allen 17).

The disapproval of the elders for the life of the body
leaves the imagination of a sexually-charged poet like O'Hara
devastated: "I wasn't surprised when the older people entered/my
cheap hotel room and broke my guitar and my can/of blue paint"
(Allen 17). This whimsical but serious allusion to that
modernist emblem of the imagination, "The Man with the Blue
Guitar" (from Wallace Stevens's poem of that name and Picasso's
painting), signals a major departure for contemporary poetry; for
the modernists (Pound, Eliot, Stevens), the imagination was
linked primarily to the life of the mind; for the generation of
poets emerging in the fifties (Ginsberg, O'Hara, Olson, Plath,
and others), it belonged to the body as well. Though it is hard
to imagine a poet whose work is further from the historical
density of Charles Olson's Maximus poems, O'Hara would certainly
have agreed with the pivotal Olson statement which began this
chapter: "Verse, now, 1950...must...put into itself certain laws
and possibilities of the breath, of the breathing of the man who
writes as well as of his listenings."23 "At that time," O'Hara
writes, "all of us began to think/with our bare hands" (Allen
17).

"Memorial Day, 1950" attempts to revivify poetry by tying it
directly to the poet's personal and physical world. It heralds a
poetry of the person, as O'Hara was to put it some years later in
his playful essay on "Personism," a poetry that affirms the
primacy of human experience and human relationships in a world
overly devoted to artifacts and artificiality: "Poetry didn't
tell me not to play with toys/but alone I could never have
figured out that dolls/meant death" (Allen 17). The lesson of
modern art, according to O'Hara, is vitality; it teaches us to

look things/ in the belly, not in the eye" (Allen 18).

John Ashbery (b.1927)

Unlike the other poets involved in the reshaping of American
poetry at mid-century, John Ashbery did not so much seek to bring
poetry back into the poet's body as he did to unhinge language
from its traditional referents and to create a kind of
"metapoetry," of language floating on the swells and ebbs of its
meanings. His first books of poems, Some Trees (1956),
displayed some formal innovation, though Ashbery utilized many
traditional forms, usually with a particularly contemporary
twist. His sestina, "The Painter," for example, shows the
influence of abstract expressionism (like O'Hara, Ashbery is a
professional art critic and has long associations with
contemporary artists) and draws a playful analogy between the way
in which a sestina "composes itself" once the poet has selected
the end words, and the way the abstract painting described in the
poem "expressed itself without a brush".

But the innovative elements in Some Trees were slight
compared to the radical linguistic disjunctions of The Tennis
Court Oath (1962). Here was a poetry of seemingly "pure"
language, words stripped of their traditional associations; its
lines led anywhere but where the reader might expect them to.
Yet it was also a poetry of subtle and insistent allusiveness
that required close attention and eluded paraphrase. The poem
"Our Youth," for example, initially seems cryptic and obscure,
but gradually reveals itself as a collective portrait of a poet's
youth, with allusions to E.E. Cummings, Eliot, Archibald
MacLeish, Stevens, W.B. Yeats, and others. "Leaving the Atocha
Station," one of the most widely discussed poems in this volume
because it appears in several anthologies, illustrates the free-
association method that characterized Ashbery's work at this
point in his career. The poem's images are generated by
subconscious associations, limited by the experience being
described. This is a poem about leaving the Atocha Station in
Madrid that attempts to capture the totality of the experience by
including what is going on (both consciously and subconsciously)
in the narrator's mind; what is going on around him in the
immediate vicinity of the railroad car (fragments of small talk
entering and receding from the narrator's consciousness); and
what is occurring in the larger, external environment (the
landscape flashing by). Seen from this perspective, the poem
emerges as an experiential "canvas" recording an individual's
consciousness at a selected moment of his life:

Leaving the Atocha Station steel
infected bumps the screws
everywhere wells
abolished top ill-lit
scarecrow falls Time, progress and good sense
strike of shopkeepers dark blood
no forest you can name drunk scrolls
the completely new Italian hair...24

This free association has affinities with O'Hara's "chronicle of
the moment" poems, but Ashbery's method is clearly more
experimental and less accessible.

Many of the poems in Rivers and Mountains, Ashbery's 1966
collection, extend this mode and show ways in which the self-
referential properties of language can construct their own
reality. Deeply influenced by the French surrealist Raymond
Roussel (the subject of his Master's thesis), Ashbery was struck
by the power of language to shape its own world. "These Lacustrine Cities" is a good example of poetry as generative language. The cities in the poem do not exist in the world outside of it.25 The exotic word "lacustrine" will send many readers to the dictionary and when they return to the poem armed with the knowledge that it means "near or by a lake" it will not help them to connect the reference to any "real" cities. These lacustrine cities grew out of loathing Into something forgetful, although angry with history. They are the product of an idea: that man is horrible, for instance, Though this is only one example. (Rivers 9)

Ashbery's lines seem to bring the cities into being as he writes
about them and they disappear shortly after they are created as
the poem moves on to other things like the "violent sea," "a
mountain of something," and a "single monument"
Whose wind is desire starching a petal,
Whose disappointment broke into a rainbow of tears.
(Rivers 9)

The "single monument" may be the poem itself which has created
lakeside cities, oceans, mountains, winds and even a "rainbow of
tears," all made out of words.

But "The Skaters," which also appears in Rivers and
Mountains, moves Ashbery toward a meditative, philosophical mode
that was to become more characteristic of his mature style. "The
Skaters" is absorbed by the question of what should go into art--
how many of our fleeting moments are worthy of recording, and
what about them makes them different from other moments? The act
of skating becomes a metaphor for the artist's graceful glide
over the flat surface of existence, leaving his or her mark.
Ashbery calls the reader's attention to the lines of the poem,
analogous to the lines the skaters make in the ice--neither
meaningful in the sense of needing further explanations, but each
recording its own presence as well as the absence of its creator:

But calling attention
Isn't the same thing as explaining, and as I said I am not ready
To line phrases with the costly stuff of explanation, and shall
not,
Will not do so for the moment. Except to say that the
carnivorous
Way of these lines is to devour their own nature, leaving
Nothing but a bitter impression of absence, which as we know
involves presence, but still.
Nevertheless these are fundamental absences, struggling to
get up and be off themselves.26

The theme of art recording both the presence of the artist
during the creative moment and his or her absence in our present
experience of it is one of Ashbery's central concerns. It is
more fully developed in Three Poems (1972), one of his most
innovative and unusual works. A long prose poem in three parts,
it experiments with a kind of language beyond cognitive meaning;
it is a symphony of sentences rising and falling, building and
deconstructing, swelling and imploding. One reads it with the
sense of hearing a distant music, catching snatches of lucidity
intermittently, but never quite grasping the whole of a
particular sequence. The reader experiences the poem as a faint,
lingering melody, a remembered performance, vaguely recalled, but
insubstantial as a waking dream. Its final lines are a self-
reflexive comment on the poem's own achievement: "The performance
had ended, the audience streamed out; the applause still echoed
in the empty hall. But the idea of the spectacle as something to
be acted out and absorbed still hung in the air long after the
last spectator had gone home to sleep."27

Three Poems is Ashberyat his most inventive and a work of literary art that is alandmark of its time. But even the achievement of Three Poems did not quite set thestage for the remarkable title poem in Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975), a tour de force of Ashbery's style at its apex.
The poem is an extended meditation (550 lines) inspired by a
small circular painting by Francesco Parmigianino, one of the
masters of the high Renaissance. Ashbery sets out to describe
the totality of the painting and its place in the world today--
its formal structure, the circumstances of its composition,
relevant facts about the life of the artist who produced it, its
historical importance, its relevance to contemporary experience,
and particularly the experience of the poet who is so moved by it
that he uses it as a basis for long meditation of the nature of
time, art, and human mortality.

The reader begins to see the painting as a synecdoche for
all art which passes down through time the souls of its creators.
All art, in this sense, is self-portraiture, for what else has
any artist to give us but the imaginative life within? Though
totally committed to language, Ashbery emphasizes its inadequacy
in conveying the internal life:

That is the tune but there are no words.
The words are only speculation
(From the Latin speculum, mirror):
They seek and cannot find the meaning of the music.
(Selected 189)

The artist desires to reveal his or her "self"--an
individual consciousness--in forms that are inherently without
consciousness: some paint on canvas, a block of wood, so many
words upon a page. Ashbery continuously contrasts the physical
actuality of the painting with its transcendent "meaning" and
tries to resolve the essential paradox between the physical and
the transcendent which characterizes art itself. This paradox
culminates in the final lines of the poem's breathtaking first
section which describes Parmigianino's gesture as
"pure/Affirmation that doesn't affirm anything."

The interaction between the artist and his audience is an
important subject of Ashbery's work. The narrator wonders
whether the ideals of Renaissance art can survive the turbulent
changes of the late twentieth-century. A new "wind" appears to
be blowing, a cosmic consciousness which makes human effort seem
trivial thus making us more alive to the present moment. Since it
is essential for any artist to be sharply attuned to present
experience, the contemporary artist faces the dilemma of whether
to continue to tie his or her work to the traditions exemplified
by the portrait or to embrace the newer consciousness of the
contemporary. This dilemma, however, is illusory, since art
remains rooted in individual experience and imagination and the
compilation of individual expressions creates traditions.
But it is certain that

What is beautiful seems so only in relation to a specific
Life, experienced or not, channeled into some form
Steeped in the nostalgia of a collective past.
(Selected 197)
Although we view the Great Masters in museums and read them in
anthologies as representatives of various epochs, movements,
styles, they are really harbingers of our own future: their works
are what ours shall become,
even as the public
Is pushing through the museum now so as to
Be out by closing time. You can't live there.
(Selected 199)

Art teaches us that the eternal present is the only place we can live.

Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror is Ashbery's masterpiece, a
poem that summarizes "where we live now," to use a phrase from a
poem called "Saying it to Keep it from Happening," included in
Houseboat Days, Ashbery's 1977 collection. The "where" in this
phrase refers not to a physical place, but to the moment of
collective consciousness those of us living in the western world
in the latter part of the twentieth century occupy. The idea of a
society or civilization inhabiting a particular psychic
historical moment, with the individuals alive at that moment
participating in a common, contemporaneous consciousness, is
another central idea in Ashbery's work and touches nearly all of
his collections since The Double Dream of Spring (1970). This
theme reinforces the notion that Ashbery is the most Emersonian
of contemporary poets, arguing at one and the same time for the
primacy of the self and individual experience (as in "Self-
Portrait in a Convex Mirror") and for the existence of a
collective sensibility--what Emerson called the Oversoul.
Ashbery puts it more flatly, but very succinctly:"Finally this is
consciousness/And other livers of it get off at the same stop."
(Selected 226)

The dimensions of contemporary consciousness are what Ashbery
has attempted to measure in his later work. From Houseboat Days
(1977) through As We Know (1979) and Shadow Train (1981) to A
Wave (1984), April Galleons (1987) and Flow Chart (1991) this
quest seems central. Equally important to his work, however, is
his desire to revitalize traditional poetic forms or discover new
ones that can embody that consciousness. "Litany," from As We
Know, is a long poem printed as two columns to be read
simultaneously; The Shadow Train is an entire volume of sixteen-
line poems consisting of four quatrains each; A Wave includes 37
haiku, a description of a masque, and an innovative form of prose
poem he calls "Haibun."

Those of us who live in the twentieth-century must confront
continually what Ashbery refers to as "a universe of pain." But
consciousness, even tragic consciousness, is its own rationale
for being, keeping us forever "in motion." His truest subject is
the wonder on the other side of despair:

To praise this, blame that,
Leads one subtly away from the beginning, where
We must stay, in motion. To flash light
Into the house within, its many chambers,
Its memories and associations, upon its inscribed
And pictured walls, argues enough that life is various.
Life is beautiful. He who reads that
As in the window of some distant, speeding train
Knows what he wants, and what will befall.
(Selected 231-32)

Robert Creeley (b. 1926)

Throughout the 1950s, Robert Creeley was associated with the
"Black Mountain Poets," a group of writers that included Denise
Levertov, Ed Dorn, Fielding Dawson, and others who had some
connection, however indirect, with Black Mountain College in
North Carolina. Creeley edited the Black Mountain Review and
developed a close and lasting relationship with Charles Olson,
who was the Rector of the college; the two engaged in a lengthy,
intensive correspondence about literary matters.29 Together they
developed the concept of "projective verse," a kind of poetry
that abandoned traditional forms in favor of a freely constructed
verse that took shape as the process of composing it was
underway. Olson called this process "composition by field," and
his essay on the subject, "Projective Verse" was as important for
the emerging generation of the fifties as T.S. Eliot's "Tradition
and the Individual Talent" was to the poets of the previous
generation. Olson credits Creeley with formulating one of the
basic principles of this new poetry: the idea that "FORM IS NEVER
MORE THAN AN EXTENSION OF CONTENT."30
Creeley was a leader in the generational shift which veered
away from history and tradition as primary poetic sources and
gave new prominence to the ongoing experiences of an individual's
life. Because of this emphasis, the major events of his life
loom large in his literary work: the early death of his father;
his upbringing on a small farm in West Acton, Massachusetts; his
formative years with the literary crowd at Harvard; his several
marriages and divorces; and his association with both the "beat
generation" writers of the fifties and the Black Mountain group.

Though Creeley published poetry and fiction throughout the
fifties and even established his own imprint, the Divers Press,
in 1952, his work did not receive important national recognition
until Scribners published his first major collection, For Love,
in 1962. This book collected work that he had been issuing in
small editions and little magazines for the previous decade. At
this point in his career, his distinctive poetic voice (and with
Creeley one uses the word "voice" both literally and
figuratively) gathered large numbers of followers and imitators.
It was a voice which conveyed, in William Spanos's phrase, "a
music from the edge" that epitomized the poetry revolution of the
period. Along with Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Paul
Blackburn, Gary Snyder, and other poets of the time who were
intent on linking poetry and performance, Creeley awakened a
sense of new rhythmical possibilities for the spoken word. The
memorable sound of his voice reading poetry typified Olson's
famous dictum that poetry needed to put into itself "the
breathing of the man who writes." His mentors were Pound,
Williams, Louis Zukofsky and Olson, and the odd, off-center sound
of his voice as he reads his work seems an amalgam of those
influences. "Williams showed me early on," he writes in A Sense
of Measure (1972),

that rhythm was a very subtle experience, and that words
might share equivalent duration even though "formally"
they seemed in no way to do so. Pound said, "LISTEN to the
sound that it makes," and Olson...made it evident that we could
only go "By ear."
Finally, there was and is the fact of, what it was one
had to say--in Louis Zukofsky's sense, "Out of deep
need..."31

The very first poem in For Love, "Hart Crane," with its
unorthodox, Williams-like line breaks, its nearly hidden internal
rhymes, its subtle assonance and sibilance, announces the Creeley
style:
He had been stuttering, by the edge
of the street, one foot still
on the sidewalk, and the other
in the gutter...

like a bird, say, wired to flight, the
wings, pinned to their motion, stuffed.32

That style is defined by an intense concentration on the
sounds and rhythms of language as well as the placement of the
words on the page. This intensity produced a kind of minimal
poetry that extracted the bare linguistic bones from ongoing life
experiences. In his "Introduction to New Writing in the USA,"
written in 1965, Creeley cites approvingly Herman Melville's
definition of "visible truth"--"'the apprehension of the absolute
condition of present things'"--and supplements it with William
Burroughs' famous statement from Naked Lunch about the writer's
task:

There is only one thing a writer can write about: what is in
front of his sense at the moment of writing...I am a
recording instrument...I do not presume to impose "story"
"plot" "continuity"....33

Applying Burroughs's assertion to poetry meant not imposing on
his work lyricism, metaphor, paradox, irony, closure, or any of
the other conventional elements of poetry. Creeley's most
memorable early poems nearly always adopted this antipoetic
stance toward both language and experience. They have avoided
poetic devices in favor of a keen attentiveness to experience and
to the ways in which a writer struggles to articulate
consciousness. Characteristically, the reader is plunged into
the middle of an ongoing occurrence by means of a snatch of
conversation, or more usually, an internal monologue which
recreates the feeling of a fleeting moment, a sudden awareness,
or a traumatic event. The poems are built around Creeley's
perception of the event and the "visible truth" he garners from
it. That is, he seems to be searching constantly for an absolute
truth in a fleeting moment. This pattern is true of almost all
of the most often anthologized poems, such as "I Know a Man,"
"The Whip," "The Warning" and "A Wicker Basket."
Creeley sharpened and developed this style throughout the
sixties and seventies in a series of books that seemed designed
to exemplify the principles of projective verse and the ideas
about poetry he proposed in a number of critical essays and
talks. For Creeley, without the words that emanate from
experience, life seems "a dull space of hanging actions," as he
puts it in a poem called "Waiting" from his 1965 collection,
Words. He uses poetry to takes stock of the world around him and
his own state of being at any particular moment.
In Pieces, A Day Book, Thirty Things and Hello, books
published from 1969 through 1976, Creeley attempted to break down
the concept of a "single poem" by offering his readers
sequential, associated fragments of poems with indeterminate
beginnings and endings. The 1976 book, Hello, deals with the
last days of Creeley's relationship with his second wife, Bobbie
Louise Hawkins. That marriage ended in divorce in 1976, the same
year Creeley met Penelope Highton, his third wife, on a trip to
New Zealand. There is a sense of deja vu about this book, and it
can be described in the same terms that Sherman Paul describes
For Love: "Poems of two marriages, the breakup of one, the
beginning of another."34

For all of Creeley's
experimentation, he has always been an exceedingly domestic poet; his mother, children, wives and close friends are the subjects of
his very best work.

It is not until Creeley's next major collection, Later
(1979), that the poetry shifts into a new phase, characterized by
a greater emphasis on memory, a new sense of life's discrete
phases, and an intense preoccupation with aging. He seems pained
by the inability of men and women to find happiness together in
the world, yet still seeks that elusive grail. These poignant
lines from "Myself" capture the exasperating futility as well as
the deep humanity that characterizes Creeley's later work:

I want, if older,
still to know
why, human, men
and women are

so torn, so lost
why hopes cannot
find better world
than this.35

While Creeley's earlier work is characterized by an
acceptance of things as they are, his later work is tempered by a
nostalgia for things as they were. Sometimes in these poems the
present seems less something to express wonderment about than a
great decline. In "Place," he writes:

I need the oldtime density,
the dirt, the cold,
the noise through the floor--
my love in company. (Later 13)
In Mirrors (1984) the commitment to identifying and
reconstructing those moments from the past that have most shaped
his life deepens. The collection is introduced by an epigram
from Francis Bacon:
In Mirrours, there is the like
Angle of Incidence, from the Object
to the Glasse, and from the Glasse
to the Eye.36

Creeley seems to see poetry as such a mirror: it reflects the
memory of past experience into our present awareness. Creeley
reaches into early childhood in a poem called "Memory, 1930" to
illuminate the moment he learned of his father's death at a time
when he was obviously too young to comprehend the impact it would
have on his entire life. He creates a picture of himself as a
child, witnessing what appears as a surreal scene:

I sit, intent, fat

the youngest of the suddenly
disjunct family, whose father is

being then driven in an ambulance
across the lawn, in the snow, to die. (Mirrors 4)

Although he had written about the death of his father more
obliquely in earlier work, he now brings that momentous event
clearly into focus, observing the impact it had on his young
self, who sits intently observing its occurrence. The older
Creeley watches the young Creeley watching his father being
driven away in an ambulance to die.
In poem after poem there are echoes of Ezra Pound's "dove
sta memora," that major theme of lost memories in the Pisan
Cantos, a poem Pound wrote at age sixty, determined to perpetuate
the things that mean most to him. Creeley concludes a poem
called "Song" with sentiments strikingly similar to the famous
"Pull down thy vanity" passage in Pound's poem:

...All vanity, all mind flies
but love remains, love, nor dies
even without me. Never dies. (Mirrors 6)

Love, and its devoted bedfellow, pain, have been constant
elements in Creeley's work, and his late poetry continues to
express both with a sensitivity and exactness that avoids the
sometimes maudlin excesses of "confessional" verse. Throughout
his career, he has remained committed to the poetic task of
getting things exactly right.

Robert Bly (b. 1926)

Born in the same year as Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg and
Frank O'Hara, and a classmate of John Ashbery's at Harvard in the
1940's, Robert Bly offers a sharp contrast to his urban
sophisticate peers. More than any other poet of his generation,
Bly believes that American poetry took a wrong turn when it
abandoned the inner life for William Carlos Williams's focus on
the external world of physical reality or Pound and Eliot's
cultural world of literary tradition. Bly's mentors and models
were South American and European poets, especially Spanish
writers like Antonio Machado and Federico Garcia Lorca, and Juan
Ramon Jimenez, whose work he and James Wright translated and made
accessible to American readers. For Bly, poetry becomes
intensified as it reaches and expresses the deepest regions of
the collective psyche. In his magazine, originally called The
Fifties (then The Sixties and The Seventies as time passed), he
developed an alternative poetic to what he regarded as the
debilitating "outwardness" of modernism, which feared the
instinctive life and power of spontaneity and wildness, qualities
which Bly believes nourish the very roots of poetry. A poem is
not a small machine made of words, as Williams believed, but
rather an expression of the human soul and its longing to be at
home in the world. The pre-meditated, mechanistic aspects of
Williams' work were anathema to Bly as he began charting a
different mythic and internal course for his own poetry and those
writers he published in his magazine. In the eleven issues of
that magazine published between 1958 and 1972 Bly railed against
what he called "old fashioned poetry" in America and sought a
poetry of revitalized language built around the primacy of the
image. The early issues of the magazine were particularly brash
and youthful and reflected the spirit of the times: "We have
grave doubts about the intelligence of most, if not all, the
older men in this country."37 Included among the poets Bly
published and wrote about in his magazine are Louis Simpson,
Robert Creeley, Donald Hall, W. S. Merwin, John Logan, Gary
Snyder, James Dickey, David Ignatow, and James Wright. Perhaps
prefiguring Bly's later involvement with men's issues, the only
woman poet included in all eleven issues is Denise Levertov.
Bly's magazine established an alternative to both neo-formal
traditional poetry, and avant garde extensions of modernism. The
map that he projected for contemporary poetry was shaped by
attention to the deep images of the psyche.

One of the unique features of Bly's Selected Poems (1986) is
a series of prose introductions, written by Bly, to the various
phases of his development as a poet. The book, divided into nine
sections of poetry plus a prose section called "Afterthoughts,"
introduces a number of Bly's critical ideas as they occur
specifically in his work. Each of the poetry sections, tied to
the sequence of his unpublished and published books, is prefaced
by a retrospective summary of Bly's poetic "stance" at the time
he wrote the poems that follow. The collection uniquely offers
its readers a sense of the education of this particular poet and
the course that his poetic career took.

Bly began as a writer of traditional English language
poetry, and his earliest attraction to poetry was to its music.
His first unpublished book, "The Lute of Three Loudnesses," was
written on what he calls the poetic "instrument of the English
poets constructed over centuries," largely the resonant iambic or
"accentual-syllabic" line. These early poems were metrical and
musical, but, as he puts it, "the 'I' in them had no weight."38
It was not long, however, before Bly's unique personal style
began to emerge. An early landmark poem, "A Man Writes to a Part
of Himself," began to define that style. Here Bly creates a deep
internal image of the unacknowledged inner life:

What cave are you in, hiding, rained on?
Like a wife, starving, without care,
Water dripping from your head, bent
Over ground corn...
(Selected 17)

It is a distinctly male poem, addressing the feminine aspect
of the inner male, and asking how men have become so separated
from their feelings. This prosaic summary does not suggest the
mythic dimensions of Bly's poem, but it does point to a larger
direction that his work began to take in the late '70s and '80s.
During that time, Bly became a leader in what has come to be
known as the "mythopoeic" wing of the Men's Movement, a
collective of male experience that recognized the terrible
psychic costs men have paid for being so out of touch with their
inner lives. In this role Bly brought poetry to a huge audience
of men and underscored the relationship among poetry, life
experience, and the deeper regions of a collective consciousness.
Bly's poetry has also always had a political edge to it. During
the Vietnam War he became particularly activist, organizing a
number of poetry readings against the war and speaking out
against what he regarded as American expansionism, often
comparing the United States to the Roman Empire in its declining
phase. His well-known essay "Leaping up into Political Poetry"
describes the life of a nation as existing beyond the
accumulation of individual lives within it. A poet with a strong
sense of an inner life can "leap up" into the larger psyche of
the nation and give us insights about the national consciousness.
Bly's fiery speech at the National Book Award ceremony in March
1968 attacked the publishing industry, the Catholic Church, and
the Metropolitan Museum of Art for their complacency about the
government's actions in Vietnam. David Ignatow describes the
scene: "for me the moment meant a complete and overwhelming
affirmation and vindication of all that Robert stood for as a
crusading, visionary figure in the literary world and in the
politics of our nation....It was Robert's finest hour and we who
were attached to him through admiration, faith and common goals
were affirmed through him and made to feel our significance
before the world."39

The idea of a "leap" in poetry is applicable not only to
Bly's political poems but is a central aspect of his poetic
values. Bly believes that poets need to leap in and out of their
unconscious to move a poem beyond the mundane realities of daily
life. "A great work of art," he writes in "Looking for Dragon
Smoke," "often has at its center a long floating leap, around
which the work of art in ancient times used to gather itself like
steel shavings around the magnet."40 For Bly this leaping
associative quality of poetry is not merely a technique, but an
element of poetic content. Poems that make this leap are the
ones we return to again and again for "News of the Universe."
The anthology Bly published under that title for the Sierra Club
in 1980 provides excellent examples of what he calls "poems of
twofold consciousness," that link the transitory with the
eternal, the individual with the universal, the conscious with
the unconscious, the story with the myth. Organized into six
sections, the book reflects Bly's views on shifts of human
consciousness that have occurred in the modern world. He
describes what he calls "the old position," the Descartean,
rationalistic university in which humanity and human rationality
is the measure of all things. Romanticism, especially in its
German manifestation, mounted an attack on that position
throughout the nineteenth-century and prepared the way for the
twofold consciousness that emerged at the beginning of the
twentieth-century and continued to develop through Bly's own
generation. This twofold consciousness conveys both the inner
and the outer world simultaneously and constitutes, for Bly, the
poetry of our time that will have enduring value.

Some mention must be made also of Bly's remarkable
achievement as a translator of world poetry. Throughout his
career he has sought out poetry of the inner landscape in many of
the world's languages. He has produced English language versions
of the near-Eastern mystics Rumi and Kabir, and definitive
versions of Rilke, Machado, Neruda, Vallejo, Lorca, and many
others. His little book, The Eight Stages of Translation (1983),
is one of the few practical, clearly written guides to the
translation process taking us from a literal version of the
translated poem to a final much revised version that takes into
account the meaning, sounds, tone, and mood of the original while
at the same time being aware of the contemporary idiom. Since
the fifties, Bly's major contribution to our poetry may be the
great enrichment he brought it through his tireless and energetic
translations.

As for his own poetry, it is hard not to agree with Richard
Jones and Kate Daniels who observe "What we most appreciate about
Robert Bly is his constant attempt to reintegrate poetry with
life--daily life, the life of the body, political life, moral
life" (Solitude v). Formally, it occupies a place between the
experimental, generative language of Ashbery and the
experiential, orally-based language of Ginsberg. In "Form that
is Neither In nor Out," he argues for an intermediate form
between the rigidly mechanical and totally open, drawn primarily
from the economy of nature. The more "living form" a poem
contains, "the closer it comes to a wild animal" (Solitude 26).

The overall contribution of Robert Bly to contemporary
poetry is very large. From his haven in Moose Lake, Minnesota he
charted a course that redirected poetic energy from the
impersonal, objective tenor of modernism and deepened the
connection of poetry to individual lives. He brought strains of
European, Latin American, and Near Eastern poetry into the
mainstream of American verse, freeing it from the limitations of
mechanism and from the nihilistic direction of late modernism. He
infused American writing with the universal implications of myth
and archetypes and through his work with tens of thousands of
men, showed how poetry illuminates and deepens our experience of
life.

James Wright (1927-1980)

James Wright was a student of John Crowe Ransom at Kenyon
College; of Theodore Roethke at the University of Washington
(where he completed a Ph.D. writing a dissertation on Charles
Dickens); and a protege of Robert Bly, with whom he translated a
number of Spanish language poets into English. He was a much
admired poet of his generation, and the outpouring of tributes
following his death in 1980 led Donald Hall to speculate whether
any other American poet has been the subject of so many elegies
as Wright. He produced eleven books of poems, three of which
were published posthumously and all of which are gathered in
Above the River: The Complete Poems (1991).

A sense of Midwestern American bleakness permeates much of
Wright's work; it often seems "exhausted by the silence of the
prairies," as he says of a locomotive in "A Poem Written Under an
Archway in a Discontinued Railroad Station, Fargo." The title of
that poem is characteristic of Wright. It seems important for
him to locate his poems geographically, from the evocation of Mid-
America landscapes in poems like "In Response to A Rumor that the
Oldest Whorehouse in Wheeling, West Virginia, Has Been Condemned"
and "The Poor Washed Up by Chicago Winter," or "Gambling in
Stateline, Nevada" to the more exotic place names of his Italian
period: "Winter, Basoano del Grappa" or "A Small Grove in Torri
Del Benaco" or "Above San Ferino." This heightened sense of
place seems a longing for a kind of
terra firma--as if Wright can count on nothing but the physical
ground beneath his feet.

Wright suffered from depression for much of his life, and
alcoholism took its toll of his creative energies. Like Anne
Sexton, a poet he mentored and became intimately involved with
early in the 1960s,41 he wrote surprisingly well despite these
difficult conditions. In addition to his own suffering, as Robert
Hass notes, "What has always been a remarkable, almost singular,
fact about his poetry is the way in which the suffering of other
people, particularly the lost and derelict, is actually a part of
his own emotional life."42 In his early work Wright buffered
this empathic sensibility by creating a series of personae or by
finding refuge in the restraint of traditional poetic forms. But
toward the end of his second collection, Saint Judas (1959), a
poem called "At the Executed Murderer's Grave" signals his
impatience with literariness and, as Jane Robinett observes, "is
perhaps the most dramatic example of the poet's struggle toward a
personal poetic" (Stitt 49). Wright taught himself to speak in
his own voice, to "name my name," as W. D. Snodgrass put it, and
the direct, startling opening of this poem has absorbed that
lesson:

My name is James A. Wright, and I was born
Twenty-five miles from this infected grave43

The poem chronicles Wright's continuing preoccupation with George
Doty, a murderer he had already written about in The Green Wall
(1957), his first collection, and with whom he clearly
identifies. Returning to Martin's Ferry, Ohio, his birthplace
(and Doty's), he visits Doty's grave:

where I might lie buried,
Had I not run away before my time.

Ohio caught George Doty.
Wright's connection to his native region is complex. Rarely
has a poet written so much about a place he feels so ambivalent
about, but it is the ambivalence after all that generates the
poetry. Sometimes the ambivalence gives way to pure sarcasm as
in Wright's most famous lines characterizing the area:
For the river at Wheeling, West Virginia,
Has only two shores:

The one in hell, the other
In Bridgeport, Ohio.

And nobody would commit suicide, only
To find beyond death
Bridgeport, Ohio. (Wright 173)

The memorability of Wright's poetry is one of its strongest
assets. There may be more memorable and anthologized poems in
The Branch Will Not Break (1963) than in any other single volume
of poetry in recent memory. Together with Shall We Gather at the
River (1968), the book marks the apex of Wright's achievement, a
move into a direct "humanly important" poetry, grounded in life
experience, rooted to the particulars of place, yet transcendent
and compassionate, permeated by both grief and the possibility of
wonder.

Wright raises serious questions about the vocation of poetry
in his well known "As I Step over a Puddle at the End of Winter,
I Think of an Ancient Chinese Governor." In 1960, while walking
in Minneapolis, the narrator momentarily and inexplicably thinks
of the ancient Chinese poet Po Chu-i, who represents for him a
worldly, distant culture, far beyond and outside of the
narrator's present Midwestern environment. He speculates as to
whether he, as a poet, can feel connected to a tradition, and
thus to other poets, including those who wrote in distant times
and places--or whether writing poetry is an essentially isolate
act, requiring solitude and separation from the cultural
productions of humanity: its civilizations. The "city of
isolated men" Po Chu-i is looking for beyond the mountains is a
place in posterity with other poets who have also sought "a
kindness of fate." Is Po Chu-i--whom Wright addresses as a
"balding old politician" rather than a poet--really remembered?
By whom? Of what does poetic fame consist? Is it solid and
substantial as the "terrible oak tree darkening with winter" in
the poem, or is it as fragile as the frayed rope that the poet
and his tenuous reputation have been clinging to for a thousand
years? (Wright 119) Of course, Wright provides no answer; the
poem is a meditation on his life's work and its usefulness in the
world.

One thing is clear. Wright wants to write a poetry
that matters, not one that is merely literary decoration or
linguistic acrobatics. In "Goodbye to the Poetry of Calcium"
(also in The Branch will not Break) he rejects the old formalism
which limited his vision and presented his poetry from breaking
into new territory. But how to write a poetry that matters
continues to preoccupy him. His most famous poem, "Lying in a
Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota" has
been read variously as a lament for wasted time or as a critique
of "busyness" which prevents us from seeing and experiencing the
world fully.44 The imagery of the poem, which involves all the
senses, becomes more and more vivid with each passing line,
transforming even fossilized horse manure into "golden stones."
This precise, methodical observation and deeply felt experience
is possible only through calmness and serenity. The poet has
wasted his life by not spending more time lying in the hammock,
experiencing the intensity of the physical world.
There are, in fact, a great many remarkable transformations
in Wright's poetry. Things become other things with an
astonishing, magical acuity:

Locusts and Poplars change to unmarried women
("Two Hangovers" 132)

My bones turn to dark emeralds
("The Jewel" 122)
Your hands turn yellow in the ruins of the sun
("In Memory of a Spanish Poet" 130)
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom
("A Blessing" 143)

These few examples merely give some indication of the
surrealistic tinge that emanates from Wright's often surprising
succession of images, although sometimes that imagery seems
contrived and precious, as when Wright describes "small
antelopes" who "Fall asleep in the ashes/ Of the moon." ("Spring
Images" 137), or when he asks what a tall woman is doing hiding
in the trees as he hears "rabbits and mourning doves whispering
together/In the dark grass" ("Fear is What Quickens Me" 123.)

"A Blessing" is widely regarded as one of Wright's best
poems. Norman Friedman notes that "'for sweetness, for joy, for
precision, for rhythm, for eroticism, for structure, for surprise-
-for all of these things, this poem is nearly perfect.'"45 "A
Blessing" is indeed a poem of lyrical transcendence,
choreographed like a ballet. Two friends come across two horses
behind a barbed wire fence off the highway. They feel a deep
affinity for and connection with the animals. The poem is filled
with a sense of fluid motion, nearly "liquefying" the experience,
blending the human, animal, and vegetal into one natural world.
The twilight is bounding on the grass; the horse's eyes "darken
with kindness," while the horses themselves "ripple tensely,"
unable to "contain their happiness." A beautiful, ballet-like
line transforms the horses into nearly actual dancers: "They bow
shyly as wet swans./ They love each other."

This lovely observation is followed by a truly surprising and
mysterious line, shifting the mood from evocative grace to a
sense of the apartness of the human and animal worlds: "There is
no loneliness like theirs." This line, occurring in the dead
center of the poem gathers the surrounding motion around its
stillness. It is followed immediately by movement, desire, more
physical sensations. The experience of being with the horses is
eroticized and leads to the poem's epiphany:

I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,
For she has walked over to me
And nuzzled my left hand.
She is black and white,
Her mane falls wild on her forehead,
And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear
That is delicate as the skin over a girl's wrist.
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom
(Wright 143)

The final lines flirt with the sorts of excesses that sometimes
mar Wright's work, but their sheer exoticism and verve allow us
to see them as another of his marvelous transformations, charging
an ordinary experience with hints of the miraculous.
In the latter part of his career, Wright moved toward a
sparer, less exotic style. "The kind of poetry I want to write,"
he wrote in "Many of Our Waters," "is/The Poetry of a grown man"
(Wright 212). Ironically this declaration of mature intentions
comes in a poem subtitled "Variations on a Poem by a Black
Child," which includes verbatim some words a child in New York
whispered to Wright while the two were watching men work on a
skyscraper's foundation. The child's words are contrasted with
the "mangled figures of speech" Wright associates with young New
York poets, and they represent a kind of ingenuousness that
Wright desires to achieve in his own poetry. Gaping into the
huge construction pit, the boy says

You know,
if a blind boy
ride his bicycle
down there
he might fall into that water
I think it's water
but I don't know
they call it acid
and if that poor boy
drive his poor blind bicycle
into that acid
he drown
he die
and then
they bury him
up
(Wright 211)

This "found poetry" gives Wright a model of simplicity,
directness and unflinching confrontation with fear and terror.
He follows it with autobiographical information and wonders if he
is really writing a poem or just rambling. He invites the reader
(or listener) to tune out:

This is not a poem.
This is not an apology to the Muse.
This is the cold-blooded plea of a homesick
vampire
To his brother and friend.
If you do not care one way or another about
The preceding lines,
Please do not go on listening
On any account of mine.
Please leave the poem.
Thank you. (Wright 212)

As the black child whispered to him of his fear, Wright
confides his truths and insecurities to the reader, learning
from a child, how to write the poetry of a grown man, a poetry
that speaks from his own body and experience and leaves behind
"influences," fashions, literary niceties:
All this time I've been slicking into my own words
The beautiful language of my friends.

I have to use my own now.
That's why this scattering poem sounds the way it does.
(Wright 216)
This poem ushers Wright into the third phase of his work: an
experiential poetry of plain statement and self revelation,
moving beyond the formalism of the early work and the
"literariness" of the surrealist-deep image phase toward an
unmediated personal voice. The tone is sometimes confessional
and confidential: "I am almost afraid to write down/This thing
(Wright 236), although the revelations in the post-confessional
world seem, if not ordinary, certainly not outrageous or overly
shocking. For example, the "thing" that Wright is afraid to
write down in a poem called "The Old WPA Swimming Pool in
Martin's Ferry, Ohio" is a childhood suicide attempt during which
an angel appeared to him urging him to choose life instead of
death. Following the revelations of Plath, Sexton, Lowell,
Berryman, and others, Wright's "openness" about this matter seems
circuitous and even guarded.

Wright's later work in a variety of forms, is for the most
part less successful, less memorable than the poems of the middle
period. While the new mode allows a more spontaneous expression,
it also produces some careless and forgettable writing, hardly of
the bone-deep intensity of The Branch Will Not Break and Shall We
Gather at the River. Though his love affair with Italy, and a
truer sense of Wright's affinity for nature emerges in Two
Citizens(1974), To A Blossoming Pear Tree (1978) and This Journey
(1982), his most memorable poems appear in the earlier books, and
it is those poems which most identify our sense of Wright's
poetic voice, which seems to speak to us from a cavern of
infinite sorrow that somehow embodies "the whole loneliness/Of
the Midwest" (Wright 119).

Diane Wakoski (b. 1937)

Between 1962 and 1991, Diane Wakoski published 40 books, and
although some of these repeat previously published material, this
is a prodigious poetic output. One of the most prolific poets of
her time, Wakoski's poetry is a mythic chronicle of her life,
gathering central images and personae that recur throughout the
work. A biographical note appended to several of her books
informs the reader simply that "Diane Wakoski was born in
California in 1937. The poems in her published books give all
the important information about her life."

This desire to bridge the gap between poetry and life
characterizes nearly all of her work. Like William Carlos
Williams, a poet from whom she learned a great deal, Wakoski
"makes a start from particulars" and her poetry goes in the
directions those particulars take her. She thinks of the body of
her poetry as an organic whole, almost as a kind of living
organism with inter-related parts. This Whitmanic sense of
poetry permeates all of the work, and the reader finds recurring
references to figures from what she calls her "personal
mythology" in books published many years apart.
For Wakoski, a personal mythology is essential to a poetic
vocation. Thematically, the creation of a personal mythology has
to do with locating those figures and images from life experience
and transforming them into mythic archetypes that have a
universal resonance. For example, in "The Father of My Country,"
a long lament about her absent father, a military man who rarely
stayed at home for long periods, her father metamorphosizes into
George Washington. Wakoski explains the transformation in an
interview: "Like my father...the figure of George
Washington...becomes a symbolized father figure. Because he was
the father of our country. I began to think of myself, partly
with a pun on the word cunt, as country. Again, country is a
feminine entity, and therefore what the country relates to is the
father, the masculine."46

Other figures in her work who operate in this mythic-
symbolic dimension include Beethoven (an artistic inspiration),
the Motorcycle mechanic (a lover who betrays her), the Steel Man
(a metamorphosis of her husband), the Silver Surfer (beautiful
California young men) and the omnipresent King of Spain, who
"becomes the symbolic figure for the eternal lover. That
mysterious missing lover who is always there because he is never
seen" (TNP 229-30).

For Wakoski, the male-female dynamic energizes and informs
her work throughout. She believes it is a powerful metaphor for
discussing human relationships generally "because of the sexual
act, meaning that two separate parts come together, not for the
purpose of transforming each other into like parts, but for the
pleasure of knowing each other's differences for a while, and
that...is a vision of wholeness and beauty, and what life should
be all about" (TNP 275). In a late poem from Medea the Sorceress
she puts it even more directly:

Dare I say it?
The secret of the universe:
civilization comes in two parts,
the male and the female. Androgyny a perversion
of this truth. The two MUST be separate,
yet cleave,
both must come together,
yet always
separate.47
And further in the same poem,
This man flaunts his salamander,
and this woman flaunts her moon.
Until they share the power,
offer it to each other in brief recurring moments of union,
neither will understand
the secret:
duality,

equality,

its power. (92)
Wakoski's vision of human nature is dualistic, with neither sex
viewed as self sufficient.

One of Wakoski's primary themes has been a feeling that she
has never been beautiful enough, a theme manifest in the almost
painfully self-effacing, "I Have Had to Learn to Live With My
Face," a poem which expands on the assertion "that reality
is/learning to live with what you're born with."48 The poem
underscores the costs of a women's dependency on physical beauty
to achieve self-worth, and although the self-loathing reflected
in this poem is paradoxical given the self-confidence it takes to
write such a poem, it is precisely this unique combination that
characterizes much of Wakoski's work.

Technically, Wakoski's use of personal mythology can be
illustrated by the manner in which so many of her poems are
constructed. Generally, she finds a resonant image from her past
and uses it recurrently throughout the poem, digressing from it
in various ways as the image gathers additional meanings. For
example, her poem "Smudging" (also the title of one of her
collections) refers to a process of lighting fires at night used
in orchards to protect the fruit trees from overnight frost. For
Wakoski, it evokes memories of her childhood in Orange County,
California. The image of smudge pots heating the trees is
connected to the narrator's need for continuing warmth in her
life. Smudge pots are evocative, she writes,

of my own unripe sour tight
globular fruit
hopefully ripening,
hopefully not killed off
by a frost.
Even now,
my leaves like toes
reach out
for warmth. (EI 152)
For Wakoski, it is essential to live a heated, impassioned
life.

A strong poem, "The Ice Eagle," extends this need to all of
America, a country she finds desperately lacking human warmth and
connectedness. Here the central image is an eagle carved of ice,
sitting in a punch bowl at a pretentious social affair where men
and women wear "masks" and relate to one another falsely and
without feeling. The ice eagle becomes an emblem for an America
that has lost its identity because it refuses to feel:

Look, look, look
I want to say; the eagle is a powerful bird.
In your fear, all you can do is carve him out of ice.
And that leaves only one alternative
in this temperate climate.
The ice eagle can do nothing
but melt. (EI 89-90).

In addition to the poems collected in Emerald Ice, a 1988
compilation of her most important "bio-mythic" poems, Wakoski's
most substantial achievement may be the long poetic chronicle
Greed (published in 1984 as The Collected Greed, 1-13) and her
innovative 1991 book, Medea the Sorceress. Wakoski began Greed
in 1967 with the intention of writing "a long, preachy, didactic
poem, using personal and trivial details, names of people, and
even gossipy hearsay. I wanted to pontificate about life, to
moralize, and yet somehow to write a poem which would have a
nobility to it."49 While these qualities are not absent in the
rest of Wakoski's work, the thematic unity of Greed and its sheer
length give it a quasi-epic feel and relate it to William Carlos
Williams' Paterson in its attempt to fashion an American epic
from material at the end of one's nose. Wakoski's risky
willingness to turn what are usually regarded as weaknesses in
poetry (didacticism, banality, triviality, self-indulgence, etc.)
into strength gives Greed an adventurous zeal, but it also limits
many readers' response to the work because it is hard to see how
the poem transcends its openly flaunted flaws. If it does it is
because of a kind of esthetics of truth that confronts the most
painful self-revelations with a courageous dignity, despite how
unfashionable the sentiments expressed may be.
Pain.
No man has wanted to spend his life with me.

The pain of sharks eating at my throat.
No man has asked me to share my life with him.
The pain of sharks eating at my lips.
No man has wanted to marry me.
The pain of sharks biting at my cheek.
No man has been willing to take care of me or give me
a home.
The pain of sharks eating at my ridged, aching back.
(Greed 67)

Through Greed Wakoski reveals things about herself (or at
least the self of her persona) that few writers would without a
substantial amount of distancing. Much of Greed seems to
celebrate pettiness, small-mindedness, and vindictiveness. These
are obviously basic human character traits which we all deny, but
which prevail everywhere. Most people are willing to attribute
these qualities to others, but Wakoski takes them on as her own,
despite the self-negation they evoke in her. After exposing her
envy and jealousy of other poets, as well as her negativity
toward married women ("I see every married woman as a living
symbol to remind me that I am unmarried and unmarriageable"), she
writes in a prose section of Greed, "How I hate myself for that.
Pettiness is a trait I cannot tolerate. It is the source of
evil. Not power, as some people say. Power only augments evil.
Pettiness creates it" (77).

One of the strongest sections of Greed is "The Water Element
Song for Sylvia," a poem that utilizes the Plath legend as a
symbol of Wakoski's alter-ego. Plath's desertion by Ted Hughes
was widely viewed as a prominent reason for her suicide (although
she was suicidal long before she met Hughes). The narrator in
Greed is, by contrast to Sylvia, a survivor of men's betrayals,
who can tough it out without a man, even though she feels deeply
the pain of desertion:

For a woman
there is only one thing which makes sense:
a man who loves her faithfully & keeps her warm at
night.
If he goes, her life does not go,
but it becomes a book with none of the pages in the
right order.
(110-111)

The Plath poem, Wakoski contends, was written in part to answer
"male chauvinist" critics who compared her work to Plath's, even
though they share little stylistic congruence--"as if all women
of the world who write well must be similar" (108).

More importantly, this poem provides a particularly good
example of using personal mythology to explore universal
feelings. In fact, Wakoski writes, "I don't for a moment feel
that this poem is in any way personal, tho it is written in the
most personal terms. If there is anyone who has not felt these
things [i.e., self-destructive urges, intense jealous, betrayal,
loss], he is either dishonest with himself or has so far had such
a charmed life that I would be loath to believe it were true"
(107).

Wakoski's personal mythology reaches its apex in Medea the
Sorceress (1991), the first volume in projected series with the
overall title of "The Archeology of Movies and Books." The truly
innovative structure of this work juxtaposes personal letters,
excerpts from a scientific study of quantum physics, commentary
on art, poetry, music, movies and other cultural artifacts to
create a uniquely contemporary synthesis. The setting shifts
from Los Angeles to Michigan, to Las Vegas, to Vienna--all
important landmarks in Wakoski's life and this shifting enables
her to move back and forth in time, providing a kind of
retrospective view of that life.

The strengths of the collection are the strengths of all of
Wakoski's work writ large: one has the sense of eavesdropping on
an ongoing life, participating in the unfolding drama of a
personal self. Wakoski always writes as if the most personal
things that happen to her will be of interest to everyone, and
because she writes with confidence about that, they usually are.
But Wakoski's work, though often compelling and original, is
sometimes weakened by the utter self-centeredness of her persona
who seems to regard the world outside of her head as some
illusionary phenomenon from quantum physics. It is as if she has
been talking aloud to herself throughout her life, reiterating
certain images, and through their reiteration, willing them into
being.
There is a poignant moment in the middle of this volume in a
poem called "Moneylight" when the narrator, dancing alone in her
room with her shadow has a surprising revelation: