The Perils of Prizeworthiness

In 1955 both Frank O'Hara and John Ashbery entered the annual competition for the Yale Younger Poets Award. The outcome of this contest is one of the nice ironies of literary history. The judge that year was W.H. Auden, and he originally declared that none of the manuscripts submitted deserved to win the prize.

...someone, a mutual friend, possibly Chester Kallman, told Auden—by that time he'd gone to Ischia for the summer—that Frank and I both submitted. And he asked us through his friend to send our manuscripts, which we did, and then he chose mine, although I never had felt that he particularly liked my poetry, and his introduction to the book is rather curious, since it doesn't really talk about the poetry.

Why is Kafka's extraordinary lucidity, the natural speech and "normal" syntax that paradoxically conveys the densest and most ambiguous meanings, no longer a viable model? There is no easy answer... but we might begin with the notion that whereas Kafka positioned himself vis-à-vis the discourses of law, of justice, and of the bourgeois respectability and normalcy that characterized the Prague of his time and place, our own contact with these discourses tends to be always already mediated by a third voice, the voice of the media. [from Radical Artifice]

Perloff... sets up a kind of "us vs. them” opposition, which is of course a favored rhetorical tool used by avant-garde schools in the past from Futurists and Dadaists to Language School poets. Avant-garde manifestos have always assumed a tone of masculine and expansionist militancy, enforcing an aggressive divide-and-conquer framework to grab the reader’s attention. Of course, this “us vs. them” rhetoric can be used to an exhilarating effect when there is a revolutionary legitimacy to that opposition, when “we” are the rabble-rousing outliers and “they” are the hegemonic majority. But Perloff sets up an opposition that’s far more disconcerting: oddly, the hegemony has become the nameless hordes of “African Americans, other minorities, and post-colonials"....

Accuracy is not this editor’s strong suit: the “serious artists” of the early twentieth century were not “affected by” modernism; they created it. The Beats did not “clear a trail” for the Confessionals: the two groups coexisted and sometimes overlapped throughout the 1950s and ’60s. And higher education may be credited with many things but perhaps not with casting a “spell” over fledgling poets. As I was reading these curious assertions, it occurred to me that perhaps this Penguin anthology was designed for Junior High School students—kids forced to study something called poetry, who would find those references to “crawling out of the wreckage of the Civil War” or to the “take-no-prisoners approach” of the Beats both accessible and colorful. “Into this disquieting age strode Wallace Stevens”: it sounds like a sentence in a Victorian children’s book. And since the editor is an undisputable star, the recipient of just about every prize and award there is, a former poet laureate, and currently a commonwealth professor of English at the University of Virginia, one evidently wants to read her anthology to learn not about American poetry of the twentieth century but about her likes and dislikes.

If we are to acknowledge that there are formal choices that define avant-garde poetry such as polyvocality, hybridity, collage, stream-of-conscious writing, and improvisation, these techniques were not only used but were actually first inaugurated by African American writers or they were America's early practitioners. Jean Toomer’s Cane, written in 1923, is an uncategorizable cross-genre book that is wide-ranging in its experimentations with fragmentation, stream-of-consciousness, and surrealist wordplay. Before academic words like hybridity and heteroglossia became en vogue, Harlem Renaissance socialist poet Claude McKay—whose work inspired key figures like Aimé Césaire and Leopold Senghor from the Negritude movement—experimented with Jamaican dialect and code-switching in his collection Constab Ballads.

Around me roar and crash the pagan isms
To which most of my life was consecrate,
Betrayed by evil men and torn by schisms
For they were built on nothing more than hate!

John Brown's Body

Sandy

It is important to understand what is involved. From Edmund Spenser onwards in English verse the finest art was employed in running over the verse line so as to build up larger units of movement such as the strophe, the Miltonic verse paragraph, or, in Shakespearean and other theatrical poetry, the sustained dramatic speech.... the grammatical unit, the sentence, is draped over the metrical unit, the line.... This is not to “break” the pentameter (or more generally the verse-line of whatever length), but rather to submerge it, by incorporating the line into the building of larger and more intricate rhythmical units.... It was only when the line was considered as the unit of composition, as it was by Pound in Cathay, that there emerged the possibility of “breaking” the line, of disrupting it from within.

Allen Ginsberg, calling on Pound in 1967, explains to the (nearly silent) old poet that he has been able to find certain works of art in Venice, say, a fountain or a fresco or “the casa que fue de Don Carlos,” merely by following the “descriptions—of exact language composed” —the “tin flash in the sun dazzle” and “soap-smooth stone posts” of the Cantos. When Pound demurs, declaring that “any good [in the Cantos] has been spoiled by my intentions—the preoccupation with irrelevant and stupid things,” Ginsberg replies: “Ah well, what I’m trying to tell you—what I came here for all this time—was to give you my blessing then, because despite your delusion... my perceptions have been strengthened by a series of practical exact language models which are scattered throughout the Cantos like stepping stones.”

Pound has provided a box of tools, as abundant for this generation as those Spenser provided for the Elizabethans, and a man who is not influenced in this sense of trying to use at least some of those tools, is simply not living in his own century.