The Shape of the Dance by Michael Donaghy

Author:Michael Donaghy [Michael Donaghy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780330504928
Publisher: Pan Macmillan

Or take Simpson again, flag-waving in a 1979 issue of Poetry East:

The American form of government, as Lincoln said, is experimental, and so is American poetry. It is as natural for an American poet to try new forms as for an Englishman not to.

I hope this is getting your backs up.

This is the version of events I was force-fed as a student in the seventies. Curiously, Simpson himself started out as a rather dull formalist and converted to Whitmanian fundamentalism in response to a huge poetry book that shook America in the mid-fifties and increased enormously poetry’s cultural significance. If we look back to the fifties, we can spot the exact year it hit.

Between 1952 and 1959, Robert Creeley, then a relatively obscure avant-garde poet, published seven books and pamphlets of his own poetry. Six of the seven appeared in editions with a minuscule print run of 200 to 600 copies. Two years later his fortunes changed dramatically: in 1962 the New York publishing giant Scribners sensed a change in the market and brought out For Love, a collection of those very same poems; the first printing was over 6,000. Within ten years there would be 39,000 copies of this book in circulation.

What single event rocketed Creeley, and poets like him, to prominence?

‘I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical, naked’ – Allen Ginsberg’s Howl (1956). Its impact was unprecedented: to date there are 315,000 copies of the book in print. Its fame was more or less guaranteed when the San Francisco police confiscated copies of the book shortly after printing. I often think of that action by the San Francisco Collector of Customs turning the page to a line like ‘who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy’ as a turning point in American poetry. Within a very short time the book sold 50,000 copies. At the time, Kenneth Rexroth called Howl ‘the confession of faith of the generation that is going to be running the world in 1965 and 1975’. Rexroth was a prophet.

I was born two years before Howl was published and the first question on an exam I sat to enter graduate school in 1976 was to identify the first line of that poem. In the seventies poets like me were asked to believe that the avant-garde poets of the fifties were opposing a bourgeois establishment which by our time had accepted the avant garde as a style and paid to be outraged. For us, Ginsberg was the establishment.

One notion that came and went in the seventies which I attribute to the influence of Ginsberg was the mystique of spontaneity. When I was first scribbling in the Bronx in the early seventies, the official line from the poets-in-residence was that rhyme and metre were rational impositions on honest, spontaneous thought. No one ever bothered to explain what was rational about them or just how long you had to think about something before it stopped being spontaneous.

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