Poetry 1968

I delivered this talk to a general audience at a 1993 conference observing the passing of twenty-five years since that annus mirabilis (or was it an annus horribilis?) 1968. The occasion encouraged a sociological swerve in the discussion. Fifty years have now passed. I could not resist revisions.

     Just as language according to Saussure is a system of difference, literary history proceeds by contradiction and dialectic. Tradition and innovation are complements rather than opposites. A static code would be robotized and empty of information whereas one wholly free of convention would be unintelligible. As anyone who has witnessed an English department meeting is aware, literary people are fond of tossing words about endlessly, but this does not mean their disputes are meaningless. Just like the ancient Greek contention between the water-drinking poets and their wine-drinking colleagues or the eighteenth-century battle of the books, the 1968 “culture clash” in poetry represented real differences in values, literary practice, and culture generally.
     In fact ten years before 1968 the partisan lines were already well-defined. The fact is notorious that the two most prominent anthologies of new poetry in English – the 1957 New Poets of England and America edited by Donald Hall, Robert Pack, and Louis Simpson and Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry 1945-1960 – did not contain a single poet in common. So there was fierce controversy on strictly poetic turf, and the war of the anthologies defines the principal factions usefully and far more precisely than the labels formalist and anti-academic. Still, other oppositions occurred simultaneously. Within the boundaries of Allen’s collection, one might, for instance, imagine the scrimmage of the projectivists against practitioners of the deep image or the bicoastal competition between the boys from Artnews against the team from City Lights.
     On this occasion, though, I prefer to emphasize the intersections of the sociological with the literary and to highlight some works from that period that exemplify significant changes in the location of poetry in the fabric of American culture.
     Today as in the sixties most Americans consume poetry in the form of advertising copy. The clever writers who sell beer and detergents use every trick in the Renaissance manuals of rhetoric, and they doi gain their audience. The verbal magic of their technical skills, alas, is directed only at charming money from the consumer to the corporation, not a theme likely to generate soul-stirring and enduring texts. A few subgenres still persist with vigor: bumper stickers, internet memes, greeting cards, and the more extravagant varieties of slang. But poetry proper, the longtime honorific queen of the arts, is also the neglected step-daughter – without readership, without a context beyond the universities which continue to shelter a few queer cranks.
     In 1968 poetry was reaching new audiences and experiencing a miniature surge in popularity which, though never fully realized in new masterpieces, still carries momentum today in a thousand open readings in bars and coffee houses. This efflorescence did not emerge, though, from the heart of American poetic tradition alone, but was stimulated by social, political, and economic conditions and movements far outside the realm of the aesthetic.
     Several of the new popular artists and audiences were directly spawned by the political trends of the day. Protest rallies often included poets and musicians on the same stage with orators. In what was really a fainter echo of the proletarian art of the thirties, the sixties brought new art arose to make concrete the radical sentiments of the day: the new muralist movement ornamented some of the bleakest walls of American cities, Newsreel set out to chronicle the revolution on film, R. Diggs of Rip Off Press and Aaron Fagen of Rising Up Angry drew cartoons that were fierce as well as funny. There were even countries where the politicians were poets, a peculiar thought for Americans: Mao and Ho, Leopold Senghor of Senegal and Agostinho Neto in Angola. Protest poetry had been building, cultivated by Robert Bly who founded American Writers against the Vietnam War in 1966 and the following year held the first anti-war poetry reading and Old Leftist Walter Lowenfels whose anthology Where is Vietnam? appeared in 1967. Books like Ed Dorn and Gordon Brotherston’s Our Word: Guerilla Poems from Latin America not only were published, but enjoyed a certain popularity. Diane di Prima published the first of her self-dramatizing Revolutionary Letters. For a time, as a generation earlier, it seemed that writers and artists were united in opposition to an oppressive government.
     Black literary consciousness had already the tradition of the Harlem Renaissance and the thirties engagement with socialism. During the Depression Langston Hughes performed to the sound of jazz as well as composing in jazz-influenced verbal rhythms, and in the fifities black poets were welcomed in the counter-culture. Writers like Ted Joans, Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka), and Bob Kaufman read accompanied by small ensembles in bars, galleries, and coffee houses. On May 19 of 1968 (Malcolm X's birthday) Felipe Luciano, Gylan Kain and David Nelson formed The Last Poets in Marcus Garvey Park in East Harlem. That year Etheridge Knight went directly from prison to an appointment at the University of Pittsburgh on the strength of his Poems from Prison, and LeRoi Jones and Larry Neal came out with Black Fire, an anthology of African-American poetry which acknowledges, according to Neal’s “Afterword,” “History weighs down on all this literature,” and which thus seeks to represent , as Jones (Baraka) said in the “Foreward” “the striving of a nation coming back into focus.”
     The hip subculture, conceived at the time by some as the revolutionary youth movement, contributed to the radical critique of America. Though the Beat Generation was in fact a coterie of writers (Ginsberg liked to says it was simply himself and a few friends), by the late sixties it looked almost like a mass movement. The 1967 Human Be-in in San Francisco featured Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, and Snyder as well as Lenore Kandel who insisted on the vatic as well as the political role of poetry, saying “Poetry is never compromise. It is the manifestation of a vision, an illumination, an experience.” (Allen and Tallman 450) The Diggers publishing arm, the Communications Company, had already ceased printing by 1968, but their example spawned countless others. Paul Carroll, the Chicago poet who had come to some prominence when the University of Chicago refused to publish a number of the Chicago Review he had edited which featured William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac and he reacted by printing it himself as the first issue of Big Table, saw that his time had come and he published an anthology titled The Young American Poets which featured writers who had emerged after Allen’s anthology.
     Oral performance of poetry had, of course, been widespread throughout history, but with differing forms in different eras. Earlier generations of Americans had made celebrities of poets like James Whitcomb Riley, Amy Lowell, and Vachel Lindsay based on their live shows, but for the second half of the twentieth century the spoken word model (apart from university readings) was the Beat coffee house scene. By 1968 readings were proliferating across the country in a trend that continues to the extent that poetry may well be the most widely practiced art today.
     Considerably more influential than even the burgeoning hip movement was the evolution of popular music. In a general way the often sappy lyrics of fifties rock and roll, many of them written by Tin Pan Alley professionals, were replaced by more original, subtle, and inventive lyrics. Led in sales by Bob Dylan and the Beatles, much popular music came to be more artisanal than corporate, with every garage band playing originals, and millions of people who never would have read a poem consumed these oral texts with devotion and understanding. Instead of the Leiber and Stoller songs expressing teen-age frustrations with school (“Charley Brown”) and Parents (“Yackety-yak”), bands began to express youth culture with a more radical disaffection. The leading edge of this trend was perhaps embodied by John Sinclair and the MC5 and their White Panther Party (later the Rainbow people’s Party) who literally proposed a program of “rock and roll, dope, and fucking in the streets.” Even among the most popular artists, 1968 was the year of the release of the Rolling Stones’ “Street Fighting Man” with its declarations “The time is right for a palace revolution” and “I’ll kill the king.” By contrast in 1968 the Beatles recorded “Revolution” which satirically maintained “if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao/ You ain't going to make it with anyone anyhow.” (A few years later, in 1971 John Lennon was moved to announce a different reaction: “I really thought that love would save us all. But now I’m wearing a Chairman Mao badge, that’s where it’s at.” (Lennon Remembers) Meanwhile Mick Jagger was boasting that his father had been a working class Communist.
     The categories between the social, the political, and the artistic blur in Amiri Baraka’s comment on jazz: “The social consciousness displayed in that music . . . is more radical than sit-ins. We get to Feel-Ins, Know-Ins, Be-Ins.” (Black Music) In spite of the dated locutions, this might serve as a decent formulation of the Romantic definition of art.
     At the same time as poetry was influenced by the political and by popular art, experimental work continued in more purely artistic circles. The attacks on poetry written to order for New critical analysis continued on a variety of fronts: the confessional writers, the hip attempt to tap into pure consciousness, Bly’s “leaping poetry,” the search for the elusive breath unit, the exploration of oral literature by Snyder, Rothenburg, and others, to mention only a few.
     In terms of form itself the sixties represent a transition period during which the profoundly radical gestures which had originated earlier in the century when another war had estranged the artists and Dada had emerged were being integrated into established and academic journals, giving birth to a curiously sleek and prosperous avant-gardism. Before long, the very strategies which had been used to épater les bourgeoisie were receiving grants from major foundations founded by nineteenth century robber barons and even by the federal government without alarming an body except eventually in the nineties Jesse Helms and a few fundamentalists who had never before given a thought to art.
     Cage, MacLow, and Kaprow cultivated randomness and their attitudes were reflected in verse by writers like Ted Berrigan, Anselm Hollo, an d Lew Welch. The attempts to explode the text advanced, breaking first syntax (like Clark Coolidge) and proceeding to wholly non-verbal documents by people like Richard Kostelanetz very like to old-style Lautgedichte. Though such work was as much in a twentieth century tradition as it was experimental, it continued to attract practitioners in spite of its loss of the ability to surprise and shock.
     The concept of a “culture clash” moved from symbolic to physical described by Charles Simic in “On the Great Poets Brawl of 1968.” He recalls hostility to the old guard faction headed by longtime editor Henry Rago whom “lots of poets loathed” was sufficiently heated that fistfights erupted on the floor of the Stony Brook World Poetry Conference. Yet that same year Poetry published aging avant-gardists like Pablo Neruda, Denise Levertov, Robert Creeley, and Robert Duncan, political radicals like Muriel Rukeyser, and hip authors like Gary Snyder, as well as experimentalists of various schools such as Gerard Malanga, Ted Berrigan, and Larry Eigner.
     The proliferation of community poetry readings and the relative rise in popularity of readings by well-known authors is a lasting if limited effect of the tendency that, while it was hardly new, grew considerably in the late sixties. As M.F.A. programs have sprouted on all sides, the general poetic literacy has fallen precipitately. The poetic energy that for a time in the sixties bled into popular culture in a range of fresh and exciting directions, has, it seems to me, produced little promise of new work in our own time. Revolutionary political lyrics in rare survivals seem as robotized as the forgotten proletarian poetry of the thirties, though ethnic identity, gay, and feminist themes are prominent in prize-winning manuscripts. A solid advance is evident in the emergence of ranks of significant black writers, but political protest seems most vigorous in rap. The counter-culture, arguably already spent by 1968 – the Haight had observed “the death of hippie” toward the end of 1967 – is to most a somewhat silly memory rather than a renaissance. Its innovative forms have been coopted and digested by the marketplace. The sometimes witty, elegant, and outrageous head comics, it seems, served only to pave the way for Beavis and Butthead, the montage methods of the wildest underground movies appear in advertisements for underwear, and popular music has long returned to being a commodity. For my money, the present question is not in what direction the avant-garde will turn, but whether an avant-garde is possible at all in the twenty-first century.