Tony Hoagland

What much of the American poetry now being written lacks is the edge of sustained, concerted thought.           But first, the good news. There's a revolution going on. We are witnessing an explosion of rich, even jubilant, freewheeling associative poetry. The ascetic and cerebral specter of Language poetry has failed in its bid to win the hearts and minds of young American poets. Instead, something more pluralistic and high-spirited has arisen.  The music of this revolution is the music of breaking chains.            What chains? Here's how critic Richard Silberg described it in l997 in Poetry Flash:

          There have been signs for many years now, throughout these anxious slippery nineties, that the American mainline poem, that hallowed formula for middle class sincerity and epiphany, is beginning to lose its grip.

          New abstract forms are becoming more prominent, sweeping away the confessional mode...momentum is building in American poetry for a change in form. The leading candidate is a way of writing that makes use of experimental styles by piecing together fragments, but softens that technique to include some narrative or philosophical thread.

          Epithlamion

          say amen somebody/  the pews are hickory-hard I'm tired of sitting/
                    sick of secondhand god
          I'm gawky and greedy/  full of longing like frankie in "a member of the
                    wedding"/  here comes andy
          alabaster betrothed:/his pierced wooden groom casts a doleful glance/
          his eye is on the sparrow

          They took my heart gave thanks and brake it./they are wounded by love:/
                    I must taste such a kiss/
          andy is lifted by outstretched arms./ slanted starlight and twisted shade./ 
                    I'm no more afraid
          secretly I've brought my valise:  /"they are the we of me" /
                    together we'll steal away steal away

          Powell's poem is rich in many ways.  From the impressionistic mix of internal and external details, the reader pieces together a plot (the speaker, at a wedding between two friends, is jealous and moved). Full of grief and irony, self-pity and longing, critical distance and intimate closeness, the poem is tonally complex and truly inventive in diction and phrasing. (This associative collage-style seems to have Berryman's  Dreamsongs in the background). And I love the way Powell allows his speaker passion and craziness. There's somebody home in this poem.
          What such a poem doesn't offer is the rigor of an intellect seriously in pursuit of something, turning this way and that as it limits and extends its exploration. It's too in love with the poetics of distractedness for that. It doesn't (and to be fair, isn't aiming to) Think Through.  In fact, it is almost impossible for a lyric-collage poem of this sort to muster that quality of sustained, concerted attention. Because it has abandoned the aesthetic devices (complex grammar, for instance) of coordination and qualification, it is a skittery and diffuse poem, despite its fine intensity. 
          Let me offer, as a contrasting example, the opening lines of Marriane Moore's "A Grave."  Neither confessional nor cerebral or even contemporary, it has an ominous authority, and a gaze as steady as laser surgery.

          Man looking into the sea,
          taking the view from those whose have as much right to it 
                    as you have to it yourself,

          it is human nature to stand in the middle of a thing,
                    but you cannot stand in the middle of this...

          What Moore accomplishes in her five lines is to begin a drama of self-qualifying thought, full of positions and implications which the following poem will develop. There's plenty of enigma and provocation here, --Where are we going? Why is she being so bossy?--and wit, too--but Moore also takes responsibility for organizing the scene. I love how she invokes the reader's self-doubt ("taking the view from those..")  and then restores it in the next line ("as you have to it yourself"). She then enlarges the scope of the poem with a proposition ( It is human nature to...."), which is, again, reversed in the next line ("but you cannot...").
          We don't know where we're going on this bossy rollercoaster ride, but we can see the scenery, even as our perspective keeps changing, and we know someone is in charge.  We participate in Moore's poem (as we do in Powell's), but someone is driving the car. 
          A poem of discontinuous collage is hard pressed to equal the coherence and precision of this kind of journey, or its potential for changing us. 
Let me make it clear: I don't think one of these poetic styles is better than the other. I am myself deeply attracted to the music and method of collage: Merwin and O'Hara are two of my heroes. But it is good, and important, to recognize the consequences of aesthetic choice.  Poetic conventions arise and break like waves, drenching everyone on the beach. It's fun to get wet, but what a tragedy it would be for a young poet, by nature best suited to, say, discursiveness, to subscribe to the aesthetics of collage. 
          In Ploughshares magazine (Winter 2001-2 Vol. 27, No. 4), guest-edited by Jorie Graham, one can see the style of breathless fragment in nearly all of the poems. Not surprisingly, this is how Graham herself is currently writing. 
          Here's one example from that anthology-of-the-moment: a nice poem by Katie Ford called "Last Breath in Snowfall," which begins:

          I loved one person do you see the evergreen there in fog one by one
          I was taught to withdraw first from him do you want to know how

          the mind works under extreme cold ice forming on the eyelid or wind thrown
          at me I felt every needle felt every breath I've seen a vision of you 
                    I was told and

          in it disobedience in it nakedness you have not surrendered
                    have not torn his letters
          liken yourself therefore to the messenger who broke the tablets....

          This mode of impressionistic collage (lots of little dabs)  is good for rendering an emotive voice caught in the tumult of experience; it is good for questioning and querying; it represents, one could say, the fluttering zigzag actuality of perception and thought. It lets the reader participate in the assemblage of meaning. It prefers not to exert narrative  or intellectual authority, or perhaps, even to assume emotional responsibility.  It refuses the pretense of "mastery" syntactic or otherwise.  But it can't think hard or deeply.
          No one ever talks about the pleasure of power, but we all know about it, don't we?  Do you know the pleasure of using power? Do you know the pleasure of someone exerting power over you?  One of the reasons for going to poetry is to encounter the power of speakers-- keen sensitive responsible speakers, or wild fierce, tricky ones, tough-hearted and hard-thinking speakers, working through something, with a commitment to discrimination, and a faith in arrival. 
          Let's build a boat, and let's sail across this goddamn sea. But first, I think we'll have to cut down some of these trees. To do that kind of work, baby, you need Edge.
 
 

Copyright 2002, Tony Hoagland

nidus is an online publication supported by the Writing Program at the University of Pittsburgh's English Department.