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WHOSE NEW AMERICAN

POETRY?

ANTHOLOGIZING N THE NINETIES

MARJORIE ERLOFF

In the two-year span 1993-94, no fewer than hree major poetry anthologies appeared hatfeatured he poetry of what has been called "the other tradition"-the tradition naugu-rated thirty-five years ago by Donald M. Allen's New American Poetry: 1945-1960.These three anthologies are, n order of publication, Eliot Weinberger' American Poetrysince 1950: Innovators and Outsiders, Paul Hoover' Postmodern American Poetry, andDouglas Messerli's From the Other Side of the Century. A New American Poetry 1960-1990.' In 1994, moreover, here were two other arge anthologies of alternate oetries by"younger" poets,2 these two in the tradition of Ron Silliman's In The American Tree:Language, Poetry, Realism and Douglas Messerli's earlier 'Language' Poetries: AnAnthology. They are Peter Gizzi, Connell McGrath, and Juliana Spahr's two-volumeanthology called Writingfrom heNew Coast,3 and Dennis Barone and Peter Ganick' The

Art of Practice: 45 Contemporary oets.Five volumes, then, of the "new" alternate poetries. And a sixth-this time a real

blockbuster-is in progress: Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris's two-volume Poemsfor the Millennium: The University f California Book of Modern and Postmodern Poetry,which differs from all of the above by covering poetry and poetics of the entire wentiethcentury and from around he world. The first volume of Poems or the Millennium, FromFin-de-Siecle to Negritude (1995), takes us from such "forerunners" f Modernism asBlake, H1lderlin, Dickinson, and Rimbaud hrough he Futurisms, Dada, Surrealism, ndObjectivism, along with complex "galleries" f individual poets, while the second-andsure to be more controversial-volume (1997)

bringsus

upto the

global present.A new avant-garde hus seems to be in the making-indeed, oxymoronic as it maysound, a new avant-garde onsensus. Yet the countercanonizing f the recent anthologiesis not without its own aporias. What these are is my subject here.

The Modest Opposition

My starting point s that of the avant-garde nthologists hemselves: Donald Allen's NewAmerican Poetry of 1960. From the vantage point of 1995, the most startling hing about

the Allen anthology-still acknowledged by all later anthologists as the fountainhead fradical American poetics-is its modesty. The New American Poetry runs to 454 pages,including statements of poetics, biographical notes, and a short bibliography; t containsforty-four poets, all of them having come to prominence n the period between 1945 (the

1. These will be subsequently ited in the text as DA, EW, PH, and DM.2. Iput "younger" n quotes because both editors understand hat there are "older" in years)

but still beginner poets who belong in these groupings.3. Strictly peaking, volume 1ofthis anthology s called Presentation nd s edited by Gizzi and

McGrath; volume 2, Technique, by Gizzi and Spahr. Volume 1 is devoted to poems, but volume 2

is not all critical prose; it too includes poem-manifestos, and so on.

104 diacritics 26.3-4: 104-23


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end of World War II) and 1960 (the date of publication). The four-page preface opens asfollows:

In the years since the war American poetry has entered upon a singularly rich

period. It is a period that has seen published many of the inest achievements ofthe older generation: William Carlos Williams'Paterson, The Desert Music andOther Poems, and Journey o Love; Ezra Pound's The Pisan Cantos, Section:Rock-Drill, andThrones; H. D. 's later work culminating n herlong poem Helenin Egypt; and the recent verse ofE. E. Cummings, Marianne Moore, and the ateWallace Stevens. A wide variety ofpoets of the second generation, who emergedin the thirties andforties, have achieved their maturity n this period: ElizabethBishop, Edwin Denby, Robert Lowell, Kenneth Rexroth, and Louis Zukofsky, oname only a few very diverse talents. And we can now see that a strong thirdgeneration, long awaited but only slowly recognized, has at last emerged. [xi]

Note that Allen introduces he "new" American poetry, not as an "alternative" o anythingelse but as the successor of two preceding generations. He does not quarrel about theModems: f Eliot isn't included n the above list, it is because he had stopped writing yricpoetry after Four Quartets and had turned o the theater. The cited second generation,moreover, is more "diverse" (Allen's word) here than it will ever be again in theanthologies: Bishop and Denby, Lowell and Rexroth and Zukofsky. And the thirdgeneration, presumably ollowing in the footsteps of the first and second, is now said tobe emerging.

Here Allenindulges

n a mildsleight-of-hand.

Charles Olson, thechefd'dcole

of TheNew American Poetry, was born in 1910, seven years before Robert Lowell. Othermembers of this generation ncluded by Allen are Robert Duncan (b. 1919), LawrenceFerlinghetti (b. 1919), Barbara Guest (b. 1920), Jack Kerouac (b. 1922), and DeniseLevertov (b. 1923). Allen is surely aware of these discrepancies but he evidently wantsto present his "new poets" as successors rather han rivals so as to strengthen is hand. Andthere s another reason that "thirdness" s emphasized:

These new youngerpoets have written a large body ofwork, but most of what hasbeen published so far has appeared only in a few little magazines, as broad-

sheets, pamphlets, and limited editions, or circulated in manuscript; a largeamount of it has reached ts growing audience through poetry readings. DA xi]

Here s the raison d'etre of Allen's anthology: he is introducing o the arger poetry public,which would notice Grove (Evergreen) Press books in the bookshops,4 group of poetswho have not yet been published, except in small-press editions, broadsides then muchless common than now), and the little magazines. Whereas Lowell's Lord Weary s Castle(1947) had been published by Harcourt, Brace and Life Studies (1959) by Farrar, traus,Olson's In Cold Hell in Thicket had been brought out by Cid Corman's esoteric little

magazine, Origin (1953), and The Maximus Poems 1-10 by Jonathan Williams's equallyesoteric Jargon Press n North Carolina 1953). The need to get the word out thus seemedurgent: "third generation," stensibly a chronological erm, meant something more like"third world"-the neglected Other.

4. The Grove Press had, by 1960, a reputation as an avant-garde e.g., Samuel Beckett) andunderground e.g., Henry Miller, William Burroughs) ublisher hat brought out primarilyforeignnovels (the nouveau roman ofRobbe-Grillet, Sarraute, Butor, etc.) and plays (Marguerite Duras),as well as "unpublishable" vant-garde works. But they had not undertaken o represent American

poets until Allen put out his anthology.

diacritics / fall-winter 1996 105


4/21

Accordingly, Allen felt little compunction or inclination) o theorize as to the natureof the New American Poetry. He tersely said:

[Thispoetry] has shown one common haracteristic: total rejection ofall those

qualities typical of academic verse. Following the practice and precepts ofEzraPound and William Carlos Williams, t has built on their achievements nd goneon to evolve new conceptions ofthepoem. These poets have already created heirown tradition, heir own press, and their public. They are our avant-garde, hetrue continuers of the modern movement n American poetry. Through heirwork many are closely allied to modern azz and abstract expressionist ainting,today recognized hroughout he world to be America's greatest achievementsin contemporary ulture. This anthology makes the same claim for the newAmerican poetry. [DA xi-xii]

Note the paucity of explanation: he New American Poets "reject ll those qualities ypicalof academic verse," and many are "closely allied" to jazz or abstract expressionistpainting. Period. The reader can expect poems written in free verse and an "open"typography ather han n meter and stanza forms, and there may well be jazz rhythms(however those are transferred o poetry) and/or verbal equivalents o "abstract xpres-sionist" painting.

Pound's "Make t New!" thus becomes Allen's "Keep it Brief!" Avoid theoreticaland deological battles, because your reader s bound o find exceptions. And indeed Allenis guided by two simple principles of selection: nonpublication n the major venues and,

as the editor now goes on to explain, group identity or what we might call community.There are five such groups n the anthology. The first comprises "poets dentified with thetwo important magazines of the period, Origin and Black Mountain Review" : CharlesOlson, Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, Edward Dorn, Joel Oppenheimer, JonathanWilliams, Paul Blackburn, Paul Carroll, Larry Eigner, and Denise Levertov [xii]. Notethat of these ten, only one (Levertov) is a woman-a fact which will become importantin alternate canon-making ater. And note further that Olson, Duncan, and Creeleyconstitute a kind of triumvirate, he other male poets being somewhat econdary, ven forAllen, as they will be for later anthologists. Indeed, one, Paul Carroll, has disappearedfrom

justabout

everyone'slist.

The second group s designated as the San Francisco Renaissance, Duncan emergingas the leading poet of this group even as he also belongs to Black Mountain. These poets,who largely became known through oral performance n the Bay Area, include thefollowing thirteen: Brother Antoninus (William Everson), Robin Blaser, Jack Spicer,James Broughton, Madeline Gleason, Helen Adam, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Bruce Boyd,Kirby Doyle, Richard Duerden, Philip Lamantia, Ebbe Borregaard, nd Lew Welch.

The San Francisco Renaissance is closely allied to the third group, "The BeatGeneration," he main difference being that he latter was originally associated with NewYork. It includes Allen Ginsberg, his young friend Peter Orlovsky, Jack Kerouac, andGregory Corso--only four poets, all of whom, incidentally, came into contact with thesecond group at readings n San Francisco.

The fourth group s that of the New York Poets: John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, andFrank O'Hara, who met at Harvard and migrated o Manhattan, where they in turn metEdward Field, Barbara Guest, and James Schuyler. This is of course the group allied withAbstract Expressionism. And finally, Allen isolates a fifth group of somewhat youngerpoets that "has no geographical definition." Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen, allied to theBeats, are more properly placed here, as are Stuart Perkoff, Michael McClure, RonLoewinsohn, Ray Bremser, David Meltzer, John Wieners, Edward Marshall, Gilbert

Sorrentino, and LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka). Again, there are overlaps: Baraka was a

106


5/21

close friend of O'Hara's n New York and edited Yugen; McClure was linked to the SanFrancisco Renaissance, and so on. As Allen says, his groups are "for he most part morehistorical han actual" nd "can be justified finally only as a means o give the reader omesense of milieu" [xiii].

Why should the publication of this relatively small anthology, comprised of forty-four then largely unknown poets, located primarily n New York, San Francisco, or, so tospeak, "On he Road," become such an historical event? First, because n the early sixties,there really was a dominant poetic discourse-a discourse, incidentally, hat, from ourvantage point n the nineties, was by no means that of the Modernism f the early century.In 1960, the Age Demanded hat a poem be self-contained, coherent, and unified: that tpresent, indirectly to be sure, a paradox, oblique truth, or special insight, utilizing thedevices of irony, concrete imagery, symbolism, and structural conomy. The paradig-matic poem was John Crowe Ransom' "The Equilibrists," r perhaps his "Bells for JohnWhiteside's Daughter." The speaker was "dramatized"-a persona, whose relation o the

poem's author was "hidden"; he norm was show, not tell, as Cleanth Brooks and RobertPenn Warren repeatedly pointed out in their Understanding Poetry.

In this context, it must have been wholly exhilarating o pick up The New AmericanPoetry and read, n its opening pages, a poem by Charles Olson called "The Kingfishers"that began "What does not change is the will to change," and then shifted o the narrativeof "He woke, fully clothed, in his bed. He / remembered only one thing, the birds .. ,"where the line break comes after "He." Again, it must have been exhilarating o read apoem called "Why I Am Not a Painter," hat begins inconsequentially with the "stanza,"

I am not apainter,

I am apoet.Why? I think I would rather be

a painter, but I am not. Well... [Frank O'Hara, DA 243]

And of course Allen included parts 1 and 2 of "Howl," known n 1960 only to those whohad heard Ginsberg's mpassioned readings n San Francisco or New York and to thosewho got hold of the little City Lights book from Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

I shall not rehearse yet again this familiar material. only want to remind he readerof how many now-classic poems first became known through Don Allen's anthology, asdid such pivotal poetic statements as Olson's "Projective Verse" with its call for"COMPOSITION Y FIELD" and its definition of the poem as an "energy onstruct" r"energy discharge," a projectile, in which "FORM IS NEVER MORE THAN ANEXTENSION OF CONTENT" and "ONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELYAND DIRECTLY LEAD TO A FURTHER PERCEPTION." Never mind that most ofthese prescriptions had been formulated much earlier by Pound and Williams (whomOlson now dismissed as the "inferior predecessors"'); n 1960 they helped clear the airwith the force of Olson's own "get on with it, keep moving ... USE USE USE THEPROCESS AT ALL POINTS" [DA 388].

The New American Poetry Revised: Familiar Outsiders

So popular was The New American Poetry that by the late seventies, Don Allen was beingurged on all sides to revise it and bring t up to date. Many of his "New American Poets,"after all, had not especially panned out: especially such of the more minor San Franciscopoets as Ebbe Borregaard, Bruce Boyd, Ray Bremser, and James Broughton, o take onlyfour. Others ike Jack Kerouac and Lew Welch had died prematurely. And there was, bythis time, a demand for more women. The result was The Postmoderns: The New

5. See my "Charles Olson and the 'Inferior Predecessors': Projective Verse Revisited."



6/21

American Poetry Revised, edited by Allen with the help of the late Olson scholar, editor,and poet George F. Butterick. As against the modest preface of the earlier volume, ThePostmoderns as amuch more serious ntroduction evidently written argely by Butterick),6and more comprehensive biographical and bibliographical materials. Of the forty-four

original poets, fifteen were dropped, ess on the grounds of absolute merit than becauseof their ack of ongoing production r, as in the case of Gilbert Sorrentino, shift to writingfiction rather han yric.' Nine poets were added: n alphabetical rder, Diane di Prima,Anselm Hollo, Robert Kelly, James Koller, Joanne Kyger, Jackson Mac Low, JeromeRothenberg, Ed Sanders, and Ann Waldman. And the geographical groupings wereeliminated n favor of a chronological arrangement.

With all this tinkering, he punch of the original New American Poetry was largelylost. Here Butterick's new preface is revealing. Opposition to "academic verse" and"formalism" s no longer enough: rather he new "experimental" oetry, so the editorsclaim, is

squarelyn "the mainstream of Emerson and Whitman, Pound and Williams"

[GB 9]. And we read:

For some, imagism has been a chief source of inspiration, or others-notablyO 'Hara andAshbery-the dissociations ofpost-symbolist French poetry. Theyrespond to the limits of industrialism and high technology often by a markedspiritual advance or deference, an embracing of the primal energies of a tribalor communal spirit, side by side with the most stubborn sort of Americanindividualism.... There are revolutionaries mong them, as well as quiet (butno less deliberate) practitioners. Their most common bond is a spontaneousutilization of subject and technique, a prevailing "instantism" hat neverthelessdoes not preclude discursive ponderings and large-canvased reflections ..They are most of them orward-looking at a time when concepts such as entropyand global village have entered daily life. [GB 9]

The difficulty here, of course, is that each of the characteristics isted could apply equallywell to an entirely different et of poets. Imagism as "inspiration": ell, yes, that certainlycovers the case of Mark Strand or Galway Kinnell, Louise Gluck and Charles Wright. The"dissociations of post-symbolist French poetry," otherwise known as Surrealism, are

notable n James Wright, Charles Simic, and Sylvia Plath. As for the "spiritual" esponseto the "limits of industrialism," hink of Elizabeth Bishop and Adrienne Rich, RichardHugo and William Stafford, "tribal and communal energies" (Butterick s evidentlyreferring o the ethnopoetics of Jerome Rothenberg) were turning up in the new blackpoetry-for example, Audre Lorde's and Michael Harper's, which is not included n ThePostmoderns. As for the "prevailing 'instantism,"' cited as the postmoderns' "mostcommon bond," surely Robert Bly could lay claim to this trait, as might W. S. Merwin.

"The passage of twenty years," claim the editors, "has brought onfirmation of theachievements of the poets represented" GB 11]. So it had, but as they themselvesrecognize, "confirmation" oes hand in hand with mainstreaming. There are countlessarticles and scholarly dissertations," we read, "devoted o [the poets'] work, translationsof their writings nto foreign anguages, biographies, bibliographies a recent comprehen-sive bibliography of Frank O'Hara's writings runs to well over three hundred pages),published nterviews, editions of their correspondence nd secondary writings" GB 11].Indeed, by 1982 those unknown broadside and "little mag" poets Robert Creeley and

6. Donald Allen has told me in conversation that this was the case. The anthology issubsequently ited as GB.

7. The ifteen eliminated are Helen Adam, Ebbe Borregaard, Bruce Boyd, Ray Bremser, amesBroughton, Paul Carroll, Kirby Doyle, Richard Duerden, Edward Field, Madeline Gleason, PhilipLamantia, Edward Marshall, Peter Orlovsky, Stuart Z. Perkoff and Gilbert Sorrentino.

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Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder had become nothing if not "respect-able." And although ome of the "Postmoderns" say, the difficult Jackson Mac Low andthe challenging Jerome Rothenberg) continued to be excluded from the mainstream

anthologies and the Norton Anthologies of Poetry, others, notably John Ashbery, were

winningall the Establishment

prizes.Indeed, by 1982 there was no longer a clear ine of demarcation etween the raw andthe cooked, the oppositional and the established, the "experimental" nd the "safe."Metrics-as-such was no longer a differentium because everyone was writing ree verse.Keep-It-Moving projectivism had ost some of its edge because poetasters ll over the USwere "keeping t moving" in dozens of little magazines and American Poetry Review.Then, too, latter-day New York or San Francisco Renaissance poetry, as in the case of AnnWaldman, Ed Sanders, and Joanne Kyger, no longer seemed especially revolutionary.Language Poetry, after all, had already reared its head-the journalL=A=N=G=U=A=G=E began to appear n 1978, and Ron Silliman reminds us in hispreface to In the American Tree that it was in the first issue of This (1971) that RobertGrenier, who cofounded the magazine with Barrett Watten, announced, "I HATESPEECH," battle cry that, however much we now take t with a grain of salt, "announceda breach-and a new moment in American writing" [IAT xv].

If The Postmoderns hus has something of a retro air, the problem s that he "radical"tradition of "Projective Verse," which was its point of departure, nd which was by thistime some thirty years old, was accepted by its adherents s normative without he furtherdebate which might have thickened he plot. Perhaps his happened because he Olsoniteswere still embattled, seeing that, in the larger world, "composition by field" had never

quite caught on. The same belatedness, n any case, characterizes Weinberger'sAmericanPoetry Since 1950: Innovators and Outsiders.

Weinberger's prefatory note begins with the (by now) familiar division into "twocamps." "On the one side is a ruling party hat nsists there s no ruling party... yet it isa party that clearly exists in the minds of those outside it, who have derided it withadjectives like conventional, establishment, official, academic, and have pitched theirown poetics as alternatives o the prevailing humdrum. On the other side is an oppositionstill intensely aware of its outsider status, yet now increasingly dissatisfied with thebanners under which it once rallied: avant-garde, experimental, non-academic, radical"[EW xi]. Yet, even if these "banners" o longer work, even if "the distinction between hetwo parties has always been blurred," Weinberger s nevertheless convinced that "in-equities .. have indeed existed. Today, n the current population xplosion of poets, theyare greater han ever" [EW xi].

But Weinberger' thirty-five chosen "innovators nd outsiders," ll of them from heUS (as in the two Allen anthologies, no poets from other English-speaking ountries areincluded) are an odd lot. His two principles of inclusion are (1) only poems first publishedin book form since 1950 and (2) no poets born after World War II. The resultingchronological list is as follows: William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, H. D., CharlesReznikoff, Langston Hughes, Lorine Niedecker, Louis Zukofsky, Kenneth Rexroth,

George Oppen, Charles Olson, William Everson, John Cage, Muriel Rukeyser, WilliamBronk, Robert Duncan, Jackson Mac Low, Denise Levertov, Jack Spicer, Paul Blackburn,Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg, Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, Nathaniel Tarn, GarySnyder, Jerome Rothenberg, David Antin, Amiri Baraka, Clayton Eshleman, RonaldJohnson, Robert Kelly, Gustaf Sobin, Susan Howe, Clark Coolidge, and Michael Palmer.

In a now-notorious essay for American Poetry Review, John Yau argues thatWeinberger has too readily taken over the aesthetic of Ezra Pound, an aesthetic, n Yau'swords, "which promotes assimilationism and imperialism" 45]. Thus Pound's Cathay,with its appropriation f China as some sort of exotic Other, s hardly he ideal yardstick

by which to measure he current work of the "innovators and outsiders," ome of whom



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happen o be Chinese, who are producing poetry n the US today. Indeed, Yau insists, thePound-Williams-H. D. "tradition" s used by Weinberger s license to create a genealogyof what are almost exclusively white male poets, especially those whose work displays"an acceptable onfluence of mythology, geography, history, and the exoticizing view ofthe Other"

Yau 48].Had

Weinberger begunwith

Gertrude tein rather han the Pound-Williams-H. D. tradition, Yau argues, he might have appreciated he value of BarbaraGuest, Rosmarie Waldrop, and Lyn Hejinian. And Yau now goes on to play the "whereis X?" game, castigating Weinberger for his omission of women and minorities, ofhomeless poets, of poets who have AIDS, and so on.

This objection strikes me as something of a cheap shot. Omission of one sort oranother s, of course, a defining feature of all anthologies: omeone s always going to beleft out and someone else is going to be indignant about t. But although Yau plays theminority card rather oo piously, and although his critique of Pound's representation fChina largely ignores the context in which Cathay was actually produced and dissemi-nated, Yau s onto something mportant: amely, he peculiar belatedness of Weinberger'narrative.8 Donald Allen's The New American Poetry, after all, was just that-New. Itcovered the years 1945-60. The preface paid homage to Pound and Williams, butcertainly didn't include their work. In Weinberger's anthology, on the other hand, the"new" in Allen's sense includes exactly four of the thirty-five poets: Sobin, Howe,Coolidge, and Palmer. The book begins with four Modernist masters Pound, Williams,H. D., Hughes) and goes on to include our Objectivists Niedecker, Reznikoff, Zukofsky,Oppen), fourteen poets from The New American Poetry, and three more from ThePostmoderns. That eaves eight poets who are what we might call Donald Allen should-

have-beens, in that they were excluded from the second gathering largely by fluke,belonging by rights to the congeries already represented. These eight are David Antin,William Bronk, John Cage, Clayton Eshleman, Ronald Johnson, Kenneth Rexroth,Muriel Rukeyser, and Nathaniel Tarn.

Innovators nd outsiders? Almost all of the above (Coolidge is an exception) havepublished with respected presses: New Directions, Black Sparrow, North Point, and, inRukeyser's case, Norton. And eight of the thirty-five-Niedecker, Olson, Creeley,Duncan, Ginsberg, Levertov, O' Hara, and Ashbery-are included n volume 2 of the mostrecent Norton Anthology ofAmerican Literature. ndeed, Weinberger' anthology s bestunderstood s a "New American Poetry-Plus," he ine being extended backward o Poundand Williams and forward o Susan Howe.

There s nothing wrong with this selection as such, given that Weinberger riginallypublished t in Spanish or Latin American consumption. On the contrary, t is wonderfulthat an anthology of such high-caliber and evidently largely unknown n Spanish) workwill be read by a new Latin American audience. For the US reader, however, the selectiondoes pose serious problems. Why, to begin with, the belatedness and buttressing, he need

8. It is interesting hat Jed Rasula, discussing the Weinberger nthology n an essay publishedin 1995 but evidently written before 1993-when Hoover and Messerli, not to mention Gizzi and

Ganick, brought out their volumes-holds up Weinberger s the voice crying in the wilderness,poised against the philistine others, especially J. D. McClatchy's Vintage Book of ContemporaryAmerican Poetry. Rasula admits that Weinberger "does not ... address the issue of culturalimperialism" [273], but, he suggests, if the choice is between Innovators and Outsiders andMcClatchy's Vintage Book, Weinberger's ultural "blindness" s regarded as a minor ault.

There s a cautionary ale here: we must beware of making arge generalizations about suchmatters as the state ofpoetry in late twentieth-century onsumer ulture, or, before we know t, thesituation we describe ust may have changed. So it is that between he writing ofRasula's essay andits publication wo or three years later, language poetry and related radical poetries, long poisedon the brink of recognition, uddenly ook off Which s not to say that the mainstream oetry scene

Rasula describes isn 't still the dominant one.

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to begin an anthology of contemporarypoetry with the work of the great Modernists? Anda related problem: by what criteria are the lesser poets in Weinberger' anthology-say,Nathaniel Tam and Ronald Johnson- superior o the mainstream-Berryman, Lowell,Jarrell, Bishop-whom Weinberger dismisses as purveyors of the "American mage ofthe

poetas an

overgrowndisturbed hild

prodigy" EW 397]? True, Weinbergerefers o

the "open-ended rather than closed forms" of his "innovators" and talks of their"simultaneity" nd "musicality" 399]. But when he concludes that "in the end, whatunited these poets was, in opposition to the prevailing canon, Pound's exhortation o'Make t new'" [399], he is applying he very standard Donald Allen used thirty-five earsearlier.

When a critic as sophisticated as Eliot Weinberger alls into this trap-and we willwitness the same phenomenon again and again in the anthologies of our decade-theremust be an explanation. My own sense is that we are suffering, n the poetically rich andperhaps excessively diverse 1990s, from what I should like to call the malaise of themidcentury. When Donald Allen (or, for that matter, his conservative antagonists)produced heir anthologies n 1960, there was little doubt as to the position of the GreatModernist Precursors. True, one could quarrel as to the relative merits of Robert Frost orof e. e. cummings; true, such forgotten women poets as Mina Loy and Laura RidingJackson had not yet been rediscovered. But whose list did not include Eliot and Pound,Stevens and Williams, Moore and H. D., Gertrude tein and Hart Crane? Add to these theEnglish poet Auden, the French Valery, Reverdy, Apollinaire, and Cendrars, he GermanRilke, Trakl, and Brecht, the Spanish Lorca, and the Argentinian Neruda, and you havea pretty fixed notion of what Modernism-in-Poetry would look like.

But there has never been this agreement about the midcentury. We are now as faraway from Charles Olson as Donald Allen was from Williams and Pound, and yet Olson'sstatus as "major poet" is hotly contested.9 Louis Zukofsky and his fellow Objectivists,whose early poetry s now a good sixty years n the past, are still not included n the NortonAnthology ofAmerican Literature. Critics who have no quarrel over Pound or Williamscannot agree on the hypothetical place of John Berryman r Elizabeth Bishop n the canon.And what about Allen Ginsberg? A great poet whose million dollar archive was wellworth the purchase made by Stanford University? The author, n John Hollander's view,of that "execrable little book" Howl? Or a poet, now turned cultural icon, whoseimportance rests on the earlier work?

Those on both sides of these arguments ontinue to be defensive, even though heyare battling not over who has "made t New" but over the always-already ried and trueand commodified. Hence the difficulty of waging the good fight, as did lesjeunes of 1914,for a new new poetry. And here I turn to the big anthologies of 1994, Hoover's andMesserli' s.

Blockbusters

Paul Hoover' s Postmodern American Poetry and Douglas Messerli' From he Other Sideof the Century are designed largely for classroom use. Hoover's Norton anthology is

9. In a review fPaul Hoover's Norton nthology f Postmodern oetryfor heNewCriterion,John Haines dismisses Olson as a poet of "formlessness," "posturing," and "self-promotion,"whose "oddities of phrasing" and "straining after effect" are just so much "gibberish" 70].Granted that the New Criterion epresents he acme of reactionary discourse on poetry, my pointis that there was no parallel in the 1950s and '60s. There were, ofcourse, reactionaryjournals henas now, but although, say, Williams may have been dismissed as rather negligible in these ournals,he was not dismissed, as Haines declares Olson to be, as unfit or inclusion in a comparableanthology.



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meant to complement (and be used in tandem with), the "regular" or "mainstream"Norton; t even has a teachers' manual. Messerli's aim is to put between two covers thevery best of the movement to which he himself belongs, Language Poetry, even as hewants to buttress and contextualize hat poetry by relating t to its sources and analogues.Postmodern American

Poetryhas 701

pagesand 103

poets;From the Other Side

ofthe

Century ncludes somewhat fewer poets (84) but runs to 1135 pages, which means thatits selections are much more comprehensive han what we usually find in anthologies. Isthere, hen, really so much more mportant oetry being written n America han here wasin Donald Allen's day, when a modest 454 pages could cover thirty-eight New AmericanPoets?

Or does size depend again on what we might call B & B, belatedness and buttressing?Hoover's anthology covers forty years; t begins with Charles Olson and John Cage, andits first 300 pages are devoted o poetry amiliar rom he Allen anthology; Messerli's spanis ten years shorter 1960-90), but here approximately 00 pages (one-third f the book)are given over to Donald Allen poets. A NewAmerican Poetry Messerli's subtitle) s thusnot-so-new. Still, this hyperinclusion s not without ts rationale. Hoover's anthology, obegin with, s designed to give us everything he other Nortons do not. True, here s someoverlap--of which more ater-but where Norton A (The Norton Anthology ofAmericanLiterature nd the Richard Ellmann-Robert O'Clair Modern Poems: A Norton Introduc-tion) goes from Robert Lowell, William Stafford, and Gwendolyn Brooks to HowardNemerov and Amy Clampitt, Anthony Hecht and James Dickey, Richard Hugo andMaxine Kumin, Galway Kinnell, W. S. Merwin, Philip Levine, and Adrienne Rich, AudreLorde and June Jordan, Norton B includes a wide variety of "others" rom Marjorie

Welish and Ann Lauterbach, Lyn Hejinian and Susan Howe, Rae Armantrout nd CarlaHarryman, Alice Notley and Eileen Myles, to mention only some of the women poetsincluded. Hoover covers almost as many language poets as does Messerli (but insignificantly shorter selections); and his anthology includes the communities of St.Mark's in the Bowery in New York, New Langton Street and Intersection n SanFrancisco, and a wide variety of performative poetics and work by minority poets.

As such, this anthology, with ts useful biographical eadnotes, tatements f poetics,and bibliography ills a large gap: t is astonishing and encouraging hat Norton elt calledupon to do it at all. At the same time, Hoover's rationale s less than clear. The adjectivepostmodern, he explains in his introduction, efers to "the historical period followingWorld War II." But since his anthology by no means ncludes all the prominent oets fromthat period, he specifies as follows:

[Postmodern] also suggests an experimental pproach o composition, as wellas a worldview hat sets itselfapartfrom mainstream ulture and the narcissism,sentimentality, and self-expressiveness of its life in writing. Postmodernistpoetry s the avant-garde poetry ofour time.... This anthology hows that avant-garde poetry endures in its resistance to mainstream deology; it is the avant-garde that renews poetry as a whole through new, but nitially shocking, artistic

strategies ...Despite their differences, experimentalists n the postwar period have

valued writing-as-process over writing-as-product.... Postmodernism ecen-ters authority and embraces pluralism. [PH xxv-xxvii]

Shades of Allen and Butterick's The Postmoderns, shades of Weinberger's nnovatorsand Outsiders. The trouble with all this talk of oppositionality o "mainstream deology"is that t doesn't get down to cases. Is Adrienne Rich's poetry, certainly not included here,"mainstream" n its ideology? Does it believe in a "centered" uthority? Her admirerswould

certainly sayno. On the other side, how

"initially shocking"are the "artistic

strategies" of, say, Andrei Codrescu's "Paper on Humor," which begins:

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Everything ounds unny in a funny magazine.For years now I have published my poems in funny magazinesso that nobody would noticehow sad they were. [PH 482]

Whatever he reason for the inclusion of this poem-and I will come back to this issue-it can hardly be the shock of the new. The same holds true or Messerli's poets. His "fourmajor gatherings" divide up "innovative" American poetry into those groups thatemphasize "(1) cultural ssues-overlapping ideas about myth, politics, history, place,and religion; 2) self, social group, urban andscape, he visual arts, (3) language, and (4)performance, oice, genre, personae" DM 32-33]. But Messerli s the first to admit hatthere is no hard-and-fast istinction between these gatherings and that, ndeed, his ownanthology s based on "specific aesthetic choices--eclectic as those might be" [DM 31-32].

What is this aesthetic, an aesthetic that admits Marjorie Welish but not AnnLauterbach, Diane Ward but not Kathleen Fraser, John Godfrey but not John Yau?Judging rom Messerli's own poetry and critical prose as well as from the books he haspublished over the years for his Sun & Moon Press (and before he founded he press, forhis journals Sun & Moon and Li Bas), Messerli's "aesthetic" s essentially that of themanifestos and statements f poetics collected n Bruce Andrews' and Charles Bernstein'L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book of 1984. But because he had already produced oneanthology of language poetries n 1987, and because he evidently felt, as did Hoover andWeinberger n their different ways, that he had to buttress he case for this "new American

poetry"as the heir to Donald

Allen's,he includes the

Objectivists,and a

good portionof

Black Mountain and San Francisco poets, as well as the New York poets of the O'Hara-Ashbery generation and a careful selection of their followers. This is, in other words, athesis-anthology: Messerli is in essence saying: "Take another ook at language poetry,this time in much fuller measure han in my earlier anthology, where space constraintswere imposed on me by the publisher New Directions). It really is the important oetrytoday: witness ts derivation rom Zukofsky and Oppen, O'Hara and Ashbery, and so on."

Yet for a complex set of reasons (the decline of poetry publishing by the maincommercial houses, the precarious place of "poetry" n the academic curriculum, herefusal of most critics to engage language poetries n any serious way even as, paradoxi-cally, some of the poets--Charles Bernstein, Susan Howe, Bob Perelman, MichaelPalmer-have been quite successful), Messerli is reluctant o say these things. And so,like both Weinberger and Hoover in their different ways, Messerli has produced an"avant-garde" nthology hat ncludes any number f poems-say those of John Ashbery-that are not only readily available from mainstream publishers ike Viking or Alfred A.

Knopf, but are also anthologized in such "enemy" anthologies as Helen Vendler'sHarvard Book of Contemporary Poetry. "These Lacustrine Cities," to take just one

example, appears n both.One might conclude from such overlaps that the "great" poets of the period will

eventually be seen to be those like Ashbery and O'Hara, Olson and Duncan, Creeley andGinsberg, Levertov and Snyder, who so to speak, transcend he "them versus us" deologyinitiated by Allen's New American Poetry, poets, let us say, who have made it into theNorton Anthology ofAmerican Literature. But it is not clear that his is the case, given theblatant omission of the Objectivists in the Norton or of Robert Creeley in Vendler'sHarvard Book. At the same time, the perpetuation f the countercanon-where "counter"is too often a marker derived from the sixties rather han strenuously reconstructed-seems to be perpetuating less than happy situation. Let me explain.



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Mainstream/Counterculture

Consider wo poems, both of them written and published n the midsixties, five years orso after the "revolution" f The New American Poetry.

1. The Breathing

An absolutepatience.Trees standup to their knees infog. The ogslowly lowsuphill.

Whitecobwebs, the grassleaning where deerhave looked or apples.The woodsfrom brook to wherethe top of the hills looksover the og, send upnot one bird.

So absolute, it isno other thanhappiness tself a breathingtoo quiet to hear.

2. Center

A birdfills up thestreamside bushwith

wasteful song,capsizes waterfall,mill run, andsuperhighway osong's improvidentcenterlost in the greenbush greenanswering bush:wind varies:the noon sun castsmesh refractionson the stream's amberbottomand nothing at all gets,nothing getscaught at all.

Each of these poems has twenty very short ines of free verse; in each, line breaks seem

to be determined y the process of voicing and breath unit outlined by Olson n "Projective

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Verse," breaking up grammatical units, as in "Trees stand up" n #1 "and "green bushgreen answering bush" n #2. In both cases, lineation coupled with repetition brings outlatent meanings, as in line 4 of #l--"fog. The fog"-and lines 18-20 of #2: "and nothingat all gets, / nothing gets / caught at all."

In both "TheBreathing"

nd"Center,"

heperspective

s that of thepoet,

who is neverspecified or even identified as "I"; he impetus, in both cases, is to record a particularmoment when something n nature tands out and triggers an internal eaction, a kind ofepiphany. "The Breathing" tracks the process whereby the poet's immersion in amomentary hick white fog produces a sense of almost mystical quietude. t begins with"An absolute patience," as the poet stops and is forced to take in the metamorphosis fnature he fog produces. The trees take on a life of their own; they "stand up to their kneesin / fog," which in turn becomes a river "slowly flow[ing] uphill," and the "grass" stransformed nto a network of "white cobwebs." The process that anthropomorphizesnature paradoxically dehumanizes living creatures: he "deer [who] have looked forapples" are gone, and "not one bird" appears on the hill that rises just above the fogline."So absolute" s the silence that he poet experiences a momentary ightness of being, "noother than happiness tself, a breathing" hat s, in this epiphany, oo quiet to hear.

"Center" embodies a similar paradox. The song of the bird that "fills up the /streamside bush" s "wasteful" because it can't be heard above the roar of the waterfall.The latter s seen as "capsized" ecause the eye, tracking he bird' movement rom streamto bush to the sky above, sees it as moving in reverse, and blending with "mill run and /superhighway" o as to decline from the "song's improvident center" up in the sky. Orrather, here s no center: he bird is "lost in the green / bush green / answering bush"; t

disappears and the wind changes. As for the stream, "the noon sun" now "casts meshrefractions" n its amber bottom, but this net of sunrays can capture nothing n its web:the bird song is gone. At the "center," he poet suggests, there is an enormous absence.

Both poems, then, use close observation of natural henomena nd the quick changesthese undergo to express the inner self: in "The Breathing," a momentary sense ofquietude and peace within the white blanket of fog, in "Center" a recognition ofdifference, of the moment-to-moment metamorphoses of nature as birdsong vanishesabove the sunny stream, without eaving a trace. In their positioning of the poet' s eye andear in a specific transitory natural setting, both poems are squarely in the Romantictradition: he observer reads meanings into the landscape which in turn constructs hepoet's identity in a momentary union of subject and object. The images, spare andcarefully chosen, are allowed to do the work; n neither nstance does the poet moralizeor generalize as to how one can capture he radiance of the visible. And the diction n bothcases is hushed and understated, ssonance and consonance e.g., "The og / slowly flows"in #1; "casts," "refractions," gets" n #2 replacing more rhetorical ffects.

Which of these poems is "establishment," hich "counterculture"? The Breathing"is by Denise Levertov and dates from her 1964 collection O Taste and See! "Center" sby A. R. Ammons and comes from Corson's Inlet (1965). Levertov, as we have seen, isincluded n every anthology I have discussed so far except Messerli's: that s, The New

American Poetry, The Postmoderns 1982), American Poetry Since 1950: Innovators ndOutsiders 1993), PostmodernAmerican oetry 1994), and he forthcoming Rothenberg-Joris Poems for the Millennium.'o Ammons appears in none of the above (nor inMesserli's), but he has, over the years, appeared n all the major "mainstream" ntholo-gies, including Helen Vendler's Harvard Book. And both Ammons and Levertov are

10. The omission suggests to me that Messerli s adhering o his own very particular anguagepoetics more rigorously than he cares to admit in his introduction. Evidently, he for one does see

that Levertov's s hardly the poetics of the countercurrent t has been taken to be.



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accorded almost exactly the same space (twelve pages) in the Norton Anthology ofAmerican Literature and in the Norton Modern Poems (six pages each).

How do we explain the discrepancy between two poets, whose work, udging fromthese representative oems, is by no means all that dissimilar? Is Levertov's form more

"open"han

Ammons's?Is hers a

"processive" mode,his a

"productive"?ers

decentered,his centered and unitary? I would suggest that we could go through any number ofAmmons and Levertov poems and although here are obvious differences, especially withrespect to gender definition and politics, one is hard put to find one more "oppositional"than the other. The difference-and this happens n canon making (even countercanonmaking) all the time, has to do with particular iterary and cultural affiliations.

Denise Levertov, let us recall, first came into prominence as a disciple of WilliamCarlos Williams. Born and brought up in England, she had only recently come to NewYork with her then-husband Mitchell Goodman, when in 1951 she was taken to meetWilliams, who had already had a serious stroke. "I have never forgot," Williams wrote toher in 1957, "how you came to me out of the formalism of English verse. At first as musthave been inevitable although welcomed you I was not completely convinced, after allI wasn't completely convinced of my own position, I wanted YOU to convince ME" [qtd.in Breslin 30]. Levertov was evidently quite willing to play this role: the poems in her firstAmerican book, Here and Now (1957), out-Williams Williams. "The Innocent," orexample, begins:

The cat has his sportand the mouse suffers

but the catis innocent

having no image of pain in him [31]

where lineation, language, and tone are markedly Williamsesque.Williams himself, as James E. B. Breslin points out, was somewhat patronizing o this

attractive young woman poet. In a 1954 letter he advises her:

You need a book of your closely chosen work. I think, if you thought out andselected your choice very carefully, t would be one of the most worthwhile ooksof the generation. It would have to be a small book squeezed up to get the gistsalone of what you have to say. Perhaps you will never be able to say what youwant to say. In that case you make me feel that the loss will be great. [qtd. inBreslin 32]

But whatever Williams's own reservations, Levertov was now taken up by Rexroth andCreeley and, most important, y James Laughlin. n 1959, Levertov had what she herselfcalls "the happiness and honor of becoming .. a New Directions author," nd she has beenone ever since. Indeed, her contract s such that Laughlin will publish any poetry (or

poetics) manuscript he cares to bring out."Donald Allen's New American Poetry appeared year after Levertov had become a

New Directions author, and quite naturally she was now included as a member of theBlack Mountain group, along with Creeley and Duncan. And there she has, so to speak,remained, her position being especially strong because she is one of the very few womenassociated with Allen's original groupings. Thus, when Weinberger and Hoover pro-duced their anthologies, Levertov became the emblematic poet of sixties oppositionality

11. James Laughlin xplained his o me n conversation. evertov s one of a small number

of New Directions uthors who has this privilege.

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(as opposed, say, to Adrienne Rich or Sylvia Plath), a position she has retained over theyears, even though her work has increasingly moved toward a linear (and rhetoricallyconservative) political protest poetry, oward confessionalism, and, most recently, owardChristian devotional poetry.

Meanwhile, what of Ammons, who was also a great admirer f Williams? By the latefifties, Ammons too was writing poems like "Jersey Cedars," whose opening adaptsWilliams's three-step ine:

The wind inclines the cedars and letssnow riding inbow them

swaying weeperson the hedgerows of

openfields [AACP 57]

And Corsons Inlet (1965) has a poem called "WCW" hat goes like this:

I turned nby the bayshore,and parked,the crosswindhitting me hardside the head,

the bay scrappyand working:what a way to readWilliams! illa woman cameand turnedher red dog looseto sniff(and pisson)the dead horseshoecrabs. [AACP147]

But Ammons, a Southerner erhaps never quite at home in the urban Northeast, was nota member of the Williams or, later, the Olson-Creeley circle. While Levertov and otherswere making he pilgrimage rom Manhattan o Rutherford n the fifties, Ammons was anexecutive vice president or a pharmaceutical ompany called Friedrich nd Dimmock,located, in what now seems like a delicious irony, n Millville, New Jersey, not far fromWilliams's own terrain. n these years, the two poets did meet once or twice, but in 1962

Ammons moved to Ithaca to teach at Cornell, where he has remained o this day. AtCornell, he met Harold Bloom, who was to become one of his most passionate advocatesand to place him firmly in the "visionary company" of Emerson, Whitman, and Stevens,a visionary company that excluded Williams, as it excluded Pound and Eliot.'2 The rest,as they say, is history.

12. In A Map of Misreading, Bloom makes a central distinction between "strong poets," ofwhom Stevens is the most important wentieth-century xemplar (and whose heirs Ammons andAshbery are) and "major nnovators" ike Pound and Williams, "who may never touch strength at

all " [9].



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The Fate ofAnthologizing

What lessons, if any, can we derive from this little narrative? First, that t is no longerpossible, as it was for Donald Allen, to present readers with an anthology of the or evena definitive New American

Poetry.In

1960,the scene was much ess

complicatedhan t

is today: there really was an East Coast establishment, onsisting of New England andNew York poets (mostly white men) and their publishers-the big houses like HarcourtBrace, Harper & Row, W. W. Norton, Alfred A. Knopf, and Farrar, traus. n this context,publication by New Directions or Grove Press was in itself an antiestablishment marker,and Don Allen, who had worked at New Directions before he went to Grove and rom hereto freelancing n San Francisco, could readily ntroduce his poets as the countercurrent.

But by the early eighties, when Allen and Butterick produced The Postmoderns, allthis had changed. For one thing, the communities of poets (raw or cooked, academic orantiacademic, ormalist or "open orm") had vastly proliferated nd the old dichotomieseroded. Creative Writing programs were now de rigueur at every college or university nthe land, and fellowships, NEA or otherwise, were available. Poets of the counterculturelike Allen Ginsberg and Robert Creeley now held university chairs and were selling theirpapers o university ibraries or good prices. Then, too, the more conventional poets werebeginning oexperiment with fragmentation, ypographic nnovation, and varieties of freeverse.

More mportant: he eighties witnessed he coming of the minority ommunities: irstwomen and African-Americans, hen Chicano and Asian-American nd Native Americanpoets, gay and lesbian poets, and so on. In their nception, many of these poetries were,

ironically, quite conservative so far as form, rhetoric, and the ontology of the poem wereconcerned. But counterculture oets and critics couldn't-and still can't-say this outloud because they would have immediately been labeled racist or sexist. And thus thepicture has become increasingly clouded. Add to this the increasingly vexing question ofUS hegemony, and the problems are compounded. Why should an anthology of cutting-edge poetry n English omit Australian nd New Zealand poetry? Why Canadian, s wasthe case in Silliman's In the American Tree, and which continues to be the case inHoover's and Weinberger's anthologies, though happily not in Messerli's?'" Why notpoetry n English written n Africa and India? And notice that I haven't even mentionedthe United Kingdom.

How should avant-garde anthologists respond to this situation? Here I am of twominds. On the one hand, I am personally delighted that n the past two years alone therehave been so many anthologies of alternate poetries, that the readers "out there" havefinally been forced to recognize the existence of Rosmarie Waldrop and Rae Armantrout,Bruce Andrews and Bob Perelman, Steve McCaffery and Nathaniel Mackey. I amgratified that we now have an anthology of post-language poets (from Oblek) and thatDennis Barone and Peter Ganick have anthologized orty-five younger or marginalizedpoets who were excluded from Ron Silliman's In the American Tree and Messerli's'Language' Poetries-poets who include Joan Retallack, Leslie Scalapino, Kathleen

Fraser, Hank Lazer, John Taggart, nd such younger Canadian vant-garde oets as KarenMac Cormack and Jeff Derksen. And I am eagerly ooking forward o the second volumeof Poems or the Millennium, published, after all, not by an impoverished mall press butby the University of California Press.

13. From the Other Side of the Century includes five Canadian poets: David Bromige,Nicole Brossard, Christopher Dewdney, Steve McCaffery, and bp nichol. In the case of Hoover'sPostmodern American Poetry, the decision not to include Canadian poets was evidently the

publisher's.

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At the same time, I wish the anthologies I have been discussing had been lessextravagant n their claims to represent he mportant r the cutting-edge poetry of the day.For in making such claims, the editors open themselves up to the sort of critique we havealready witnessed n the case of John Yau' s response o Eliot Weinberger. How "radical,"someone is sure to

ask,is the

ecological lyricof

Gary Snyder, really?Is he one of "us"

while, say, Charles Simic is one of "them," and if so, on what grounds? Or again, why isEd Dorn, whose Slinger was something of an underground lassic for the radical youngof the seventies, left out by both Weinberger and Messerli? If "aesthetic" onsiderationsgovern these choices, the reader has a right to know what these are. And not just ingeneralities about authority and hegemony versus experimentation nd innovation.

Perhaps the best solution in the poetically overpopulated, hyped-up nineties is tolower the volume and to admit to a degree of provisionality. Consider, or example, PeterGizzi's Exact Change Yearbook No. 1: 1995. In appearance, his deluxe 414-page bookis not exactly modest: its elegant and extravagant ayout was executed by a team ofproduction assistants and printed on glossy paper n Hong Kong, and t includes a CD ofreadings by twelve poets from Michael Palmer o Ted Berrigan.'4 But despite its stylish(detractors will say commodified) coffee-table-book appearance Michael Palmer, thefeatured poet, is glamorously pictured on the book's orange, black, and blue hard cover),the Exact Change Yearbook represents what is to my mind a breakthrough n theanthologizing of poetry.'5 Let me explain.

In their prefatory "Publisher's Note," Damon Krukowski and Naomi Yang (whodoubles as the book's designer) write that they wanted to replace the now defunct NewDirections annual by presenting "a large miscellany of avant-garde work, both contem-

porary and historical, chosen less to represent particular school,' and more n the spiritof learning what's out there." To this end, the publishers asked Peter Gizzi "to help us finda range of contemporary work that draws on the tradition we publish in our books ofSurrealist and other early twentieth-century xperimentation. ... To what came back weadded work by Exact Change authors Stein, Cage, de Chirico, Aragon], as well as a fewother discoveries we were eager to share" EC 7].

The obvious advantage a yearbook has over an anthology s that t doesn't have toprovide "coverage." The situation s fluid: if someone's not "in"-well, maybe he or shewill be in Exact Change No. 2. The downside, of course, s that, as a yearbook, he volumecan't claim to be "definitive" n any sense and is therefore unlikely to be a candidate orclassroom adoption or even for the sort of large-scale reviewing the Norton, Marsilio, andSun & Moon anthologies have been receiving. But on balance, his may not be such a badthing. The very notion of the Norton Anthology of X or Y or the view "from he other sideof the century" would seem to go against our postmodern wish to avoid what John Cagecalled a "polar situation." Why not, for that matter, given the rapidity with whichtextbooks now go in and out of print, "adopt" ne textbook or 1996 and another he yearafter?

Exact Change Yearbook No. 1, in any case, differs from all the "New AmericanPoetries" have been discussing in that t discards he exclusively national abel without,

on the other hand, becoming some sort of vapid World Reader. The book juxtaposesavant-garde poets and artists rom the US (ranging chronologically rom the ImaginaryElegies of the late Jack Spicer, and Fanny Howe's presentation of extracts from John

14. The CD is disappointing, there being no explanation of the eclectic mix of poetsrepresented, many of whom (e.g., Alice Notley, Kenward Elmslie) are not in the book at all andsome, like the Jack Spicer "Imaginary Elegies" (1957) and John Ashbery's "'They Dream Only ofAmerica'" (1962), stemming rom earlier decades. One could argue that the aim here, as in thebook, s to produce telling uxtapositions, but in practice, the sequence rom Michael Palmer to TedBerrigan creates more confusion than insight.

15. An earlier version of this discussion of Exact Change appeared n Sulfur 37.



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Wiener's very moving journal 707 Scott Street, to a "Gallery" of younger, largelyunknown poets like Paul Beatty, Tory Dent, and Jennifer Moxley) with their counterpartsabroad-specifically, in Britain, France, Germany, China, Russia-and, closer to home,the Caribbean and Canada. And as if these juxtapositions weren't enough, we can also

read Clark Coolidge's prose poem "Mary or Marie" (a "writing hrough" of Jean-LucGodard's film Hail Mary) or Susan Howe's 25-part sequence "Chanting t the CrystalSea"(first published n 1975) against Gertrude tein's Before the Flowers of FriendshipFaded Friendship Faded, which is printed or the first time (as Juliana Spahr explains nan excellent headnote), together with Stein's source text, Georges Hugnet's Enfance,exactly in the form they were originally published n the ournal Pagany (1930). Or again,we can read Barbara Guest's ecture "Poetry he True Fiction" against Hugo Ball's "GrandHotel Metaphysics," he "Radio Happenings" f John Cage and Morton Feldman againstErik Satie's "Dried Embryos," r Michael Palmer's "Circular Gates" and his "Site of thePoem

(An Impromptuor

[Octavio] Paz)" againstLouis

Aragon's"Peasant's Dream" or

the "Fragments" f De Chirico.Such collaging is not to be confused with what I have called the "buttressing nd

belatedness" of the new blockbuster nthologies. For the effect of reading he contempo-rary works in the Yearbook against particular Dada and Surrealist counterparts s toemphasize difference at least as much as similarity. The editor is not establishing atradition or line of poets. At the same time, the geographical range of the new workpresented gives, at least me, a sense of-forgive the taboo word-transcendence. Forinstead of the usual anthology wars (who's in, who's out, which editor is sufficientlymulticultural?) he Exact Change Yearbook ffers the most convincing evidence I've

seen to date that our own radical poetries are not some kind of local aberration, pawnedby a bunch of theory-crazed, eft-wing poets in New York and San Francisco, andperpetrated y lesjeunes at Buffalo and other out-of-the way stations-poetries, so themainstream would have it, to be ignored as thoroughly as possible by the various prize-giving foundations as well as most of the elite universities ncluding my own. Indeed, whatGizzi's juxtapositions of US and foreign portfolios suggest is that the attention o themateriality of language, o syntactic disjunction nd visual constellation o central o thelanguage poetries n Messerli's and Hoover's anthologies, and especially the attention othe reconfiguration of lyric as speaking, once again, not only for the "sensitive" and

"authentic" ndividual "Here's what I, Mary Smith, realized yesterday, s I was weedingthe garden") but for the larger cultural and philosophical moment-that all these are nowcharacteristic f poetries produced around he globe.

Take Jeff Twitchell's portfolio of the "Original Chinese Language Group." AsTwitchell explains, "Original, not in the sense of unique, but because of their nterest nthe earlier meanings and associations hat can be read in the Chinese written character... So, too, the recuperation f the original mpetus of poetry as the play in language" EC20]. The "Original Poets," Twitchell explains, go beyond their predecessors, he so-called"Misty" (because branded "obscure" by the official critics) poets of the late 1970s, ofwhom the best known in the US is Bei Dao. The 1988 "Original" Manifesto, reproducedhere, comes out strongly against the localism, ethnocentrism, and nationalism thatbedeviled Communist China until quite recently. The aim is to make contact with "modernWestern art," and the vehicle for such contact, the manifesto declares, is the writtencharacter, which, compared o spoken language, s "less polluted and pre-judged." Wedo not avoid," they declare, "the phrase word games' which already has aroused greatmisunderstanding. We even like it. "'Game' [yruxi] is a word connoting the profound,eerie spirit of art and philosophy" EC 36]. And the text gives way to the visual image ofa large black cross which represents he ntersection f"swim" (y6u)-to get in touch withreality-and "play" xi).

Twitchell's portfolio s taken from the selection that appeared n the British ournalParataxis (1994), edited by the poet Drew Milne. In translation, he poems themselves-

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by Che Quian-Zi, Zhou Ya-Ping, Yi Cun, Huang Gan, Xian Meng, and Hong Liu (the onewoman n this group)--don't quite ive up to that manifesto.16 "Word ames," n the senseof Steve McCaffery' or Joan Retallack' paragrammatic lay, are ess common than neo-Surrealist magery and the casting of a sharp eye on the "direct reatment f the thing,"in the Poundian

magistsense. Just as

Pound'sfabled "invention of China" urns out to

have little to do with the classical Chinese models which were his source, so the OriginalPoets' version of "language poetry" s more graphic and precisionist han, say, CharlesBernstein's or Bob Perelman' . Here, for example, is part 3 of Zhou Ya-Ping's "VulgarBeauty":

An afterbirth s unfolded, taking the shape of an umbrella.The ridges of an umbrella along yellow lines.Afetus like a coal cinder has long been reared in it,Lit by me, it will give off light.A white crane, unexpectedly covered by a black string-netA snake, bound with a copper wire, bodyLike a tightening spring, soft parts flashing. [EC 25]

We must remember hat n the Chinese, as J. H. Prynne notes in an Afterword hat sitself a kind of prose poem, the "iconic deployment of the language] by stroke play andcontexture makes a traffic with the eye worked by a different ground-plan" EC 39]. Atone point, the translators lanned o include some of the Chinese text so as to show howthe tactile element works, but the Originals themselves countered his idea because, as

Prynne puts it, "it would suggest exoticism or extraneous willow-pattern rnament; othem, we are the exotics, with our credit-card iew of the speech act" [EC 39].

The Russian portfolio, edited by Edward Foster and drawn rom he conference called"The New Freedom," which Foster organized at the Stevens Institute of Technology inApril 1994, raises similar issues. The work of Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, ven in thebrilliantly austere translations of Lyn Hejinian, s, like that of Alexei Parshchikov andAleksandr Eremenko, given to hyperbole and extravagant onceit, to manic, gargantuan,highly sensuous catalogues of images rather han to the abstraction nd citation we findin its US counterparts. At the same time, as locutions like "false, foil-like grounds ofgender" uggest, Dragomoshchenko as obviously earned a lot from his translator' ownbrand of verbal play:

I like to provoke the sensation of the thin, undependable, omehow alse,foil-like grounds of gender, bearing within tself a sleepy illusion of the laws ofgravity, as ifgoverned by my movements n the unconfining imits ofgravitationsand diversions ofspace. And when, n a radiant eclipse at the nevitable reunionwith earth, at the increasing of masses and the sweetest, strawberry reamliketerror of children, consciousness takes on the transparency f compressed ime,the theory offree fall blossoms with resh oxides on the lips, past which the wind

carries us.... [Phosphor, EC 145]

But perhaps the most surprising of the portfolios-surprising, that is, for a USaudience accustomed to the British anthologies put out by Oxford or Penguin or evenBloodaxe, is Tom Raworth's "Anglo-Irish Alternative." o used are we to the "gentility"

16. Ming-Quian a,a Chinese octoral andidate t Stanford, hohas published ssaysonCarl Rakosi, George Oppen, Susan Howe, and Lyn Hejinian, nd who s working n furthertranslations f the "Original" oets with Jeff Twitchell, ellsme that n the original, hepoems n

question re much more nonsyntactic nd disjunctive han n these ranslations.



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of the contemporary British verse we read n Grand Street or PN Review that he openingof the first poem in Raworth's portfolio, Denise Riley's "Burnt,"

And then my ears get full of someone's teeth again

As someone's tongue

as brown and lexible as a young giraffe'srasps all round someone else's story [EC 317]

is startling n its refusal to pretty things up, to get the erotic scene that follows exactly"right." n the headnote, Raworth remarcks hatlwhat unites his fourteen poets-amongthem, Catherine Walsh, D. S. Marriott, liassa Sequin, Ken Edwards, Maurice Scully, LeeHarwood, Wendy Mulford, Ulli Freer, Anthony Mellors, and Raworth himself (Prynne

beingincluded with the entire "Bands around the Throat" n the "Three

Chapbooks"section, along with Beverly Dahlen and Susan Howe)-is a "common distaste for whatis still passed off as British poetry ... the Hughes, Heaney, Harrison axis-the "NewGeneration" poets marketed ike sportswear .. the terrible drabness of Larkin whom Iimagine wrote 'They tuck you up / your mum and dad' and then rode the wave of a typo)"[EC3 15-16]. Here, as in Prynne's satiric demolition of the "credit-card iew of the speechact," one has the sense that, after years of Drab Age verse, un is once again part of theBritish poetry scene. And that sense is confirmed by Lee Harwood's superb rendition ofJoseph Cornell's box-making in the set of fifty fragments called "Days and Nights:Accidental Sightings" [EC 331-33].

"Vortex," he bard said, "is energy!" We are, as the Yearbook makes abundantlyclear, living in a great and varied moment or poetry. Rosmarie Waldrop's "Berlin(plus)Portfolio," or example, s absolutely tartling n its presentation f East and West Germanpoets, poets not always amicably related, but writing an explosive, daring, and sardoniclyric that gives our own language poetics a purposely nasty spin, rather ike putting aGeorge Grosz cartoon on top of a Jasper Johns drawing. The "Canadian Emergency"section, edited by Steve Evans and "From he Anglophone Caribbean" edited by MarkMcMorris) deserve an essay of their own: the relations of McMorris's poets to aFrancophone Caribbean poet like Aim6 Cesaire, for example (or, for that matter, o the

US poet Clayton Eshleman) deserve o be studied. But space forbids me to do so here, evenas I can't dwell on Cole Swensen's "Ecriture rangaise," fine selection from the work,somewhat better known to US readers han the other poetries discussed here, of Anne-Marie Albiach, Emmanuel Hocquard, Claude Royet-Journoud, Dominique Fourcade,and a number of others-poets closely associated with Michael Palmer and MichaelDavidson.

Exact Change Yearbook No. 1: 1995 has no mission statement, no textbookintroduction of what postmodern poetry is or isn't. But the juxtapositions I have beendescribing-the kinds of Berlin or Beijing poems that are placed side by side with theMichael Palmer eature and the three chapbooks of Jeremy Prynne, Beverly Dahlen, andSusan Howe-say it all obliquely. Like the Weinberger, Hoover, and Messerli antholo-gies, which intersect with Exact Change in so many fruitful ways, Gizzi's anthologyimplies that, whatever he local and topical importance of such celebrated US poets asAdrienne Rich and W. S. Merwin, Robert Hass, and Edward Hirsch, he real action todayis elsewhere. Many readers, of course, will disagree, but the whole conception of theYearbook makes it difficult for them to play the "where is X?" game or to expressindignation hat those included are not after all the significant postmoderns.

Does this make he Exact Change Yearbook he heir of Donald Allen's NewAmericanPoetry? Not at all, and that's precisely the point. An "Anthology beginning 'The,'" to

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paraphrase Zukofsky's lovely title, no longer seems to be what we need. And that,paradoxically makes the project of producing an anthology all the more challenging.

WORKS CITEDAllen, Donald M., ed. New American Poetry: 1945-1960. New York: Grove, 1960. [DA]Allen, Donald M., and George F. Butterick, eds. The Postmoderns: The New American

Poetry Revised. New York: Grove, 1982. [GB]Ammons, A. R. "Center" nd "WCW." Collected Poems 1951-1971. New York: Norton,

1972. [AACP]Barone, Dennis, and Peter Ganick, eds. The Art of Practice: 45 Contemporary Poets.

Elmwood, CT: Potes & Poets, 1994.Baym, Nina, et al., eds. The Norton Anthology ofAmerican Literature. d ed. Vol. 2. New

York: Norton, 1989. The editors responsible for the poetry sections are David

Kalstone and William H. Pritchard.Bloom, Harold. A Map of Misreading. New York: Oxford, 1965.Breslin, James E. B., ed. Something o Say: William Carlos Williams on Younger Poets.

New York: New Directions, 1985.Ellmann, Richard, and Robert O'Clair, eds. Modern Poems: A Norton Introduction. nd

ed. New York: Norton, 1989.Gizzi, Peter, ed. Exact Change Yearbook No. 1: 1995. Boston: Exact Change; Manches-

ter: Carcanet, 1995. [EC]Gizzi, Peter, Connell McGrath, and Juliana Spahr, eds. Writing rom the New Coast. 2

vols. Stockbridge, MA: Oblek, 1994.Haines, John. Rev. of Norton Anthology of Postmodern Poetry, ed. Paul Hoover. NewCriterion 13 (June 1995): 68-78.

Hoover, Paul, ed. Postmodern American Poetry. New York: Norton, 1994. [PH]Levertov, Denise. "The Breathing" nd "The Innocent." Collected Earlier Poems, 1940-

60. New York: New Directions, 1979.McClatchy, J. D. The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry. New York:

Random House, 1990.Messerli, Douglas, ed. From the Other Side of the Century: A New American Poetry,

1960-1990. Los Angeles: Sun & Moon, 1994. [DM], ed. 'Language' Poetries: An Anthology. New York: New Directions, 1987.

Perloff, Marjorie. "Afterimages: Revolution of the (Visible) Word." Sulfur 37 (Fall1995): 236-50.

. "Charles Olson and the 'Inferior Predecessors': Projective Verse Revisited." ELH40 (1973): 285-306.

Rasula, Jed. "The Empire's New Clothes: Anthologizing American Poetry n the 1990s."American Literary History. 7.2 (1995): 261-83.

Rothenberg, Jerome, and Pierre Joris, eds. Poems or the Millennium: The University ofCalifornia Book of Modern and Postmodern Poetry. Vol. 1: From Fin-de-Siecle to

Negritude. Berkeley: U of California P, 1995.Silliman, Ron, ed.. In The American Tree: Language, Poetry, Realism. Orono, ME:

National Poetry Foundation, 1986. [IAT]Weinberger, Eliot, ed. American Poetry since 1950: Innovators and Outsiders. New

York: Marsilio, 1993. [EW]Williams, William Carlos. Letter o Denise Levertov. 1954. Williams Collection. Beinecke

Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT. Breslin 32.-. Letter o Denise Levertov. 11 Feb. 1957. Williams Collection. Beinecke Library,

Yale University, New Haven, CT. Breslin 30.Yau, John. "Neither Us nor Them." American Poetry Review 23.2 (1994): 45-54.


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Perloff_whose New American Poetry