The New American Poetry by John R. Woznicki

Author:John R. Woznicki [Woznicki, John R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lehigh University Press
Published: 2013-03-11T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eight

“In the Dawn that is Nowhere”: The New American Poetry and the State of Exception

David Herd

“The Visionary Anthology that Influenced Two Generations of Poets and Readers”

To assert, as The University of California Press does on the cover of the 1999 edition of The New American Poetry, that an anthology is (or was) “visionary” is to make a claim about the way the future has turned out. There are various ways to pitch such a claim, especially at it relates to poetry; “visionary” is not quite “prophetic,” though it does hint in the direction of poetry’s special powers. A less mystical formulation of the relation between a work and its subsequent future is offered by Ed Dorn who, in considering the durability of Charles Olson’s achievement—an achievement closely tied to the durability of The New American Poetry—suggested that Olson’s work “anticipates a millennium already underway in 1950.”1 “Anticipatory,” though less appropriate as sales pitch, better indicates the qualities of writing at issue, suggesting a watchfulness in the present capable of discerning subsequent events. Alternatively, to take up Olson’s language from the beginning, one might say that where an anthology has retained purchase on the future, what’s at issue is that the work is still of “use.”

The question I want to ask is what, in 1960, or between 1945 and 1960, can The New American Poetry be thought to have envisaged? In answering that question it is necessary at the outset to distinguish between the claims Allen made for the anthology in his “Preface,” and the insight or foresight demonstrated, though his editorial emphases, by the poets themselves. This is in no sense to diminish Allen’s role. It is to suggest, however, that the anthology projected successfully into the future despite certain editorial emphases, and that Allen’s real insight—the way he was exemplary as an editor—was to trust to the practice of certain key poets, not least Olson. The New American Poetry, this is to say, has proved durable despite certain editorial constructions, but also because, against the background of those constructions, Allen had the nerve to promote poets whose work appeared to him best to be articulating and apprehending new realities.

One area of editorial blindness, as has been well observed, regarded the question of identity. In putting together his list of contributors, Allen singularly failed to envisage the revolutions in race and gender politics that were already, at the time of the anthology’s conception, in an advanced stage of preparation. This thinking, or failure to think, about the question of identity generates only an implicit editorial claim; that aesthetically advanced poetry in America in the 1950s was a white male pursuit. A different area, if not of editorial blindness quite, then lack of foresight, connects to one of the two substantive claims Allen makes in his “Preface;” that, as he puts it, the new poetry, “has shown one common characteristic: a total rejection of all those qualities typical of academic verse.”2

There is a truth in this of course, to do with the influence of the New Criticism, but Allen’s claim was slackly formulated.

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