When Contemporary American Poetry (the CAP in the title) plopped to my college freshman lap I thought, like all my classmates, that poets did nothing, they just, in the words of Bruce Springsteen, “stand back and let it all be.” Unbeknownst to me at the time, this sampling of poets from my father’s and grandfather’s generations (yes it was mostly men) would later become my education in poem writing, and not just mine. It became the standard reference work for the way creative writing programs at every American university wanted poems written, that is, in plain language and confined to personal experience.
Exquisitely compiled by A. Poulin, a most interesting figure who channeled tremendous disability into important acts of love for poetry, CAP offered discerning and generous selections, marvelous critical sketches, comprehensive bibliographies — even full-page photos of the poets. It was a book one would (and I did) spend time on, with so many different approaches on display for how to sound out feeling through words. The book itself, I later learned, was designed to correct a scandal from before I was born, the publication of two distinguished poetry anthologies (the so-called Pack-Hall-Simpson and Allen anthologies), both purporting to represent the best of the “new” American poetry but having not one poet in common. As the radicals of the 1960s were institutionalized in 1970s academia, the intoxicating blend in Donald Allen’s book of New York surreal, Boston post-Pound and San Francisco Zen was welcomed in, while the ivy hall of select men who are poets from the Pack-Hall-Simpson book retained the usual privileges of tenure, necessitating the need for a unifying standard for the next generation of university poets. CAP fit that need snugly by selecting almost exactly the same poets from the two earlier anthologies 15 years later.
It has been decades since I picked up the book — like most textbooks for most people it still collects dust on my shelves as some kind of homage to knowledge once pretended to — but I happened to consult it recently and was freshly taken with its innocence and scope. The first thing I noticed was — contrary to conventional wisdom — it is frighteningly easy to tell at a glance which poems “stand the test of time” and which ones stand out as sore thumbs. One cannot account for the difference by poet, school or time; it’s like the real poem chooses to disclose itself through a variety of guises.
The poems are presented one at a time, single file, no judgment but, honestly, wouldn’t you rather read to the end of this:
Filling her compact & delicious body
with chicken páprika, she glanced at me
twice.
Fainting with interest, I hungered back
and only the fact of her husband & four other people
kept me from springing on her
Than this?
A car radio bleats,
'Love, O careless Love . . . .' I hear
my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell,
as if my hand were at its throat . . . .
I myself am hell;
nobody's here—
Interestingly, the highly influential poet who wrote that goth-like bit (and it inspired paprika Henry) took two poet acolytes under his wing, two suicidally fearless, drop-dead gorgeous, genius IQ witches who showed the world how truly pissed off the muse had become:
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.
And:
I have ridden in your cart, driver,
waved my nude arms at villages going by,
learning the last bright routes, survivor
where your flames still bite my thigh
and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.
A woman like that is not ashamed to die.
It is here we see how the space given — the silence between the notes — makes genuine poetry. There’s no reason given why a daughter would harbor such emotions about her father, yet in that silence of every person having to feel it and figure it out for themselves all women are convincingly cast as Jews who fall in love with Nazis. Just as we understand with eerie precision the power that death confers on the powerless without ever knowing why the speaker’s need to love subjected her to being so roughly paraded around Boston in the first place.
And Boston is the setting for many of the anthology's poems, giving it a certain cold consistency of detail. Ten of the 40 poets represented were from the Boston area (also where the book was published). And of those ten with Boston accents (Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Creeley, Donald Hall (of Pack-Hall-Simpson), Galway Kinnell, Stanley Kunitz, Robert Lowell, Frank O’Hara, Charles Olson, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton) only Kunitz can be viewed as a minor or regional poet. Contrast that with New York City, the next-most represented city, which offered up Alan Dugan and David Ignatow (who on my fantasy team would be replaced by Delmore Schwartz and Louis Zukofsky), along with the great James Merrill (who as heir to the Merrill Lynch fortune grew up basically everywhere), W.S. Merwin (whose signature poems were written after he moved to Maui) and Richard Wilbur (who spent most of his life in the Boston area). For the record, the geographical breakdown of the remaining poets otherwise resemble the population demographics of the country at that time: San Francisco with its poetry renaissance brought three poets (Robert Duncan, Gary Snyder, Lawrence Ferlinghetti – who didn’t actually grow up in San Fran but, uh, founded City Lights bookstore), New Jersey contributed two (Amiri Baraka and Allen Ginsberg – way to represent, Garden State!), as did Detroit (Robert Hayden and Philip Levine) and Philadelphia (W.D. Snodgrass and Maxine Kumin – another migrant to Boston!), while Ohio pitched in another two (Kenneth Koch from Cincinnati and James Wright from Martin’s Ferry), Chicago one (Gwendolyn Brooks), Baltimore one (Adrienne Rich) and one from each of many states: North Carolina (A.R. Ammons); Oklahoma (John Berryman); Minnesota (Robert Bly); Tennessee (Randall Jarrell); Georgia (James Dickey); Iowa (John Logan); Kansas (William Stafford); Washington (Richard Hugo); rural Michigan (Theodore Roethke); and upstate New York (John Ashbery – who fellow upstate New Yorker A. Poulin didn’t seem to care for), while there were two American poets who did not come from the U.S. at all: Denise Levertov from the United Kingdom and Louis Simpson (of Pack-Hall-Simpson) from Jamaica.
Where is Los Angeles, one may rightly inquire, but that only leads to the giant missing Frankenstein head of Charles Bukowski, whose inclusion would have pissed off almost as many department heads as it would have brought in new readers. And where is Lorine Niedecker for god’s sake, or William Bronk (both discovered by Bostonian Cid Corman) — or Mr. University of Iowa MFA (from Florida, no less!) Donald Justice, for that matter? But best to leave the glare of hindsight behind, for it’s striking how representative of today’s reputations the actual book ended up.
Turns out the chilliness of this representation wasn’t just from being set in New England. I looked up the time of year the poets in CAP were born and, astoundingly, 16 of them were born in the winter, versus 3 in the summer, 10 in the fall, and 11 in spring.
It gets even more interesting when you group the poets by zodiac sign. The winter signs predominate, Capricorn with five (Bly, Duncan, Levine, Olson, Stafford), Aquarius with seven (Ammons, Bishop, Dickey, Dugan, Ignatow, Kinnell, Logan) and Pisces with four (Koch, Lowell, Merrill, Wilbur). Secretive Scorpio has six residents, most of whom are typically labelled confessional poets (Berryman, Levertov, Merwin, Plath, Sexton, Snodgrass). Voluble Gemini is next with five (Brooks, Creeley, Ginsberg, Kumin, Roethke), none of whom would be compared with any of the other ones. There are three Aries (Ferlinghetti, O’Hara, Simpson), Taurus (Jarrell, Rich, Snyder) and Leo (Ashbery, Hayden, Kunitz), and only two for both Libra (Baraka, Hall) and Sagittarius (Hugo, Wright), traditional bastions of poetic prowess. Amazingly, no Virgo natives make the cut and no Cancers.
For those keeping score, that’s 19 fixed signs, 11 mutable and 10 cardinal; 14 air, 10 water, 8 fire and 8 earth. Broadly speaking, the preponderance of fixed and air energies suggests a time of consolidation and clarification rather than one of innovation and creative destruction. Indeed, the 40 or so-year period distilled by CAP capped a magnificent time in American letters that channeled many streams borne on the wake of high modernism into a body of significant and varied achievement: historical epics (Maximus of Gloucester), perverse autobiographies (Dream Songs), jeweled formal verse (Pisceans Merrill and Wilbur), working-class laments (Not this Pig), revolutionary blues (Poem for Half-White College Students), de-subjugated feminist love poems (Dream of a Common Language), French surrealism set in pre-Stonewall New York (Ashbery and O’Hara), mystical verse both nature-based (Kinnell and Merwin) and spirit-centered (Bly and Wright), radical free verse inspired by eastern religions (Turtle Island), ecology poems (Traveling through the Dark), anti-war poems (Teeth Mother Naked at Last), religio-scientific nature poems (Corson’s Inlet), poems about poetry (Structure of Rime), poems about language (The Window), poems about nothing (Silence in the Snowy Field), poems that not only proclaimed but were proud of their otherness (Howl).
It’s hard to imagine – in the succeeding 45 or so years, when the quantity of poets and the formal study of poetry has expanded exponentially in America but readership has dwindled to virtually nothing – how one could take stock of it all in such a coherent manner and end up with anything but a collection of more diverse but inferior versions of what is in this book. That is a genuine achievement.
I’ll close with I think my favorite poem from the collection, Robert Hayden’s “The Night Blooming Cereus.” The title refers to the large desert cactus that only reveals its magnificent flowers in the darkness, an apt symbol for presenting in individual poetic terms the collective feelings inspired by the American civil rights movement:
And so for nights
we waited, hoping to see
the heavy bud
break into flower.
On its neck-like tube
hooking down from the edge
of the leaf-branch
nearly to the floor,
the bud packed
tight with its miracle swayed
stiffly on breaths
of air, moved
as though impelled
by stirrings within itself.
It repelled as much
as it fascinated me
sometimes–snake,
eyeless bird head,
beak that would gape
with grotesque life-squawk.
But you, my dear,
conceded less to the bizarre
than to the imminence
of bloom. Yet we agreed
we ought
to celebrate the blossom,
paint ourselves, dance
in honor of
archaic mysteries
when it appeared. Meanwhile
we waited, aware
of rigorous design.
Backster's
polygraph, I thought,
would have shown
(as clearly as it had
a philodendron's
fear) tribal sentience
in the cactus, focused
energy of will.
The belling of
tropic perfume–that
signaling
not meant for us;
the darkness
cloying with summoning
fragrance. We dropped
trivial tasks
and marveling
beheld at last the achieved
flower. Its moonlight
petals were
still unfold-
ing, the spike fringe of the outer
perianth recessing
as we watched.
Lunar presence,
foredoomed, already dying,
it charged the room
with plangency
older than human
cries, ancient as prayers
invoking Osiris, Krishna,
Tezcatlipoca.
We spoke
in whispers when
we spoke
at all . . .
