A Controversy of Poets - The Deep Divide in American Poetry

Growing up in Napa, California during the 1950's and 1960's, I was more or less subject to the cultural opportunities afforded in public school, the local public library, and the one local bookstore. Our family was poor, we didn't travel, and my parents--though reasonably cosmopolitan--were completely unsophisticated when it came to music, literature, and the arts in general. 

When I graduated from high school in 1965, most of what I knew about poetry had come from what I had been exposed to in my English classes, and whatever I could find in the library (where I worked for 2 1/2 years at the end of high school). This was mostly hoary old anthologies edited by Louis Untermeyer or Oscar Williams, often in double-columned page-spreads, and with the oval "portraits" of poets mostly long-dead. The idea that there might be people actually writing contemporary poetry was almost unimaginable, since the society I lived in would have regarded such activity as a vanity, or as a symptomatic form of sexual deviance. 

Do I exaggerate? Not at all. Rural suburban California in the post-War period was a backwater, composed primarily of refugees from the East. It included x-servicemen, "Oakies" from the Depression, war factory transplants, and all manner of dispossessed arrivistes from other parts of the country. These people were unsophisticated in their tastes, and politically were what today would be described as "conservative" Democrats, for the most part. The burgeoning suburbs were filling up, experiencing the new post-War prosperity which our parents--who'd grown up during the Depression years--welcomed with unequivocal relief. 

Into this still pool of cultural deprivation in which we lived, one day, dropped a copy of A Controversy of Poets, An Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry, edited by Paris Leary and Robert Kelly.* I must have found it on the back shelves of the local book store, The Napa Book Company (run by the old Chronicle book reviewer, "Speed" Claus). Speed must have been into his early Eighties, but was chipper still, and would tell you about how he'd been tasked to read Gone With the Wind in one night, to get a review on the spike by the next P.M. 

A Controversy of Poets was a revelation to me. I'd not yet read, or even knew about, The New American Poetry (Donald Allen); the most "recent" poetry I'd read was 73 Poems, by E.E. Cummings (Harcourt Brace, 1973) who could on no account be considered a barometer of contemporary poetic trends.** What was most obvious about this anthology was that its joint editors agreed about nothing except the utility of exhibiting their separate viewpoints, as they described it in their curt Preface:

"This anthology is designed to turn the attention of the reader away from movements, schools or regional considerations. Hitherto some of these poets have been referred to by commentators more enthusiastic than accurate as belonging to this or that rival--and hostile--school. Such poetasting has only served to distract the reader from the poem and to divert his attention to supposed movements or schools, whereas the only affiliation finally relevant is that apparent from the work itself."

The division in values and approach which the collection exhibited would have been instantly familiar to any poet writing circa 1965, the year it was published. Ron Silliman, among others, has described at length, and repeatedly, the crucial differences of this generic bi-furcation of styles of writing, which have their roots far back into 19th Century American literature.  

It may have seemed an admirable goal, to Leary and Kelly, to "force" such hostile armies of the pen into the same compound, as an instance of controlled integration, but aside from this one occasion, there was no compromising effect, either then, or in the ensuing 45 years (and counting). Let's put the competing participants into their respective camps, with the Leary's "conservatives" on the left, and Kelly's "renegades" on the right (just for the sake of irony):

Gray Burr      John Ashbery

Peter Davison      Paul Blackburn

James Dickey      Robin Blaser

Edward Field      Gregory Corso

Donald Finkel      Robert Creeley

Anthony Hecht      Edward Dorn

Daniel Hoffman      Larry Eigner

Theodore Holmes      Theodore Enslin

X.J. Kennedy      Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Galway Kinnell      Allen Ginsberg

Melvin Walker La Follette      LeRoi Jones

Gerrit Lansing      Robert Kelly

Paris Leary      Denise Levertov

Laurence Lieberman      Jackson Mac Low

Robert Lowell      Edward Marshall

Thomas Merton      Michael McClure

W.S. Merwin      Georgia Lee McElhaney

Vassar Miller      Frank O'Hara

Robert Pack       Charles Olson

Kenneth Pitchford      Joel Oppenheimer

Ralph Pomeroy      Rochelle Owens

Adrienne Rich      Jerome Rothenberg

Stephen Sandy      Gary Snyder

Frederick Seidel      Jack Spicer

Anne Sexton Diane Wakoski

W.D. Snodgrass John Wieners

Nancy Sullivan Jonathan Williams

Robert Sward Louis Zukofsky

Theodore Weiss

Richard Wilbur

John Woods

As will be apparent from my lists, I've probably gotten a couple of the "conservatives" in the wrong column: Would Dickey, or Lansing, or Merton, or Sullivan have been Kelly's choices? Without a program, perhaps I wouldn't know who's on first! Their writing sure looks old-fashioned from the current perspective, though perhaps in those solemn days, even the smallest braveries may have sounded revolutionary.

What this anthology showed me, then, in 1965, as a high school senior, was that there was a political or aesthetic divide in contemporary American poetry, that there were poets on the one hand who wrote in strict quatrains, in tended rhyme and sanded edges, and those on the other hand who wrote with warts showing, whose wild kick-outs and lurching gesticulations seemed uninhibited and untamed. My unformed tastes then would explain why, for instance, I found O'Hara's 'Biotherm' undisciplined, scattered and indulgent, or Zukofsky's 'Poem Beginning "The"' so mysterious and arcane. As a fan of light verse, I would certainly have seen the tremulous faulty wit in X.J. Kennedy's 'A Water Glass of Whisky', or recognized Ferlinghetti's stale doggerel (even then) as the dated nonconformism it was. There were a few names I knew: Richard Wilbur, whose achingly polite and gentle rhetoric seemed like the adult version of what my parents may have imagined I myself should become; Gary Snyder, whose backwoods pretensions evoked our family camping trips to the Sierras; or W.S. Merwin's fashionable "European" seriousness; or Snodgrass's familiar Tennysonian elegy 'Heart's Needle'.  

 

A Controversy of Poets was, in fact, a unique moment not only in my writing life, but perhaps in the history of American poetry itself. An attempt to initiate a reconciliation at the precise moment in time that the crisis of modernity was coming to a head. Perhaps the last chance there was to broker some kind of rapprochement between the hostile camps. 

 

Clearly, the terms of the dialectic which A Controversy proposed/described have changed little since then. Today, it is as difficult to theorize a unified field of literary taste as it would have been then, and the lines may seem at times as graphically divisive as ever. Who, today, would think to mention Silliman's Alphabet in the same breath with Robert Pinsky's Collected Poems? A yawning gulf separates them, not only in terms of what kind of audience their work implies (and is designed to please), but the respective aesthetic pre-conceptions out of which each is composed.

 

Silliman has chosen to characterize the conservative faction as being the "Quietists"--derived, somewhat bogusly or speciously in my view, from his use of Poe--as if to give some quaintly progenitive precedent for his own view: "The phrase [School of Quietude] itself was coined by Edgar Allen Poe in the 1840s to note the inherent caution that dominates the conservative institutional traditions in American writing."  He continues:

"I've resurrected the term for a couple of reasons: It acknowledges the historical nature of literary reaction in this country. As an institutional tradition that has produced writers of significance only at its margins--Hart Crane, Marianne Moore--the SoQ continues to possess something of a death grip on financial resources for writing in America while denying its own existence as a literary movement, a denial that the SoQ enacts by permitting its practitioners largely to be forgotten once they've died. That's a Faustian bargain with a heavy downside, if you ask me, but one that is seldom explored precisely because of the SoQ's refusal to admit that it exists in the first place. Perhaps the most significant power move that the SoQ makes is to render itself the unmarked case in literature...while every other kind of writing is marked, named, contained within whatever framework its naming might imply. Hence Language Poetry, Beat Poetry, New Narrative, the San Francisco Renaissance, etc. This is perhaps nowhere more evident than in the few cases in which SoQ poetics has named some of its own subcohorts, such as the agrarians or new formalists. These can be read, rightly, as the sign of a struggle within the SoQ over relations of hierarchy & institutional advantage. The agrarians, as it turns out, were successful, the new formalists it would seem were not. I choose the School of Quietude category just to turn the tables here to call into question the issue of paleopoetics being the unmarked case in American writing. If I am correct in applying a social interpretation to their activity over the past 16 decades, the only way to unhinge them from their position of hegemony through blandness is to name them, to historicize them, maybe even to rescue some of their forgotten heroes so that we begin to understand the pathology at the heart of their poetry."

He has qualified this tendency towards categorical nicety:

"...my approach tends to be strategic: I deploy categories when & where I think they will do some good, and only to the degree that they might accomplish this. When I'm hurried or sloppy, the strategic tends to devolve into the tactical, but I'd like to think that I'm at least conscious of that as a problem, even if I don't entirely avoid it. I prefer post-avant precisely because the term acknowledges that the model of an avant-garde--a term that is impossible to shake entirely free of its militaristic etymological roots & that depends in any event upon a model of progress, i.e., teleological change always for the better--is inherently flawed. The term however acknowledges an historical debt to the concept & recognizes the concept as temporal in nature...the avant-garde that interests me is a tradition of consistently oppositional literary tendencies that can be traced back well into the first decades of the 19th century, at the very least. The term also has an advantage in being extremely broad...."

 

As Silliman knows only too well, trying to make negative judgments based on a "progressive" description of literary history is fraught with potential, contradictory complexities. The very word "traditional" itself seems problematic, since what anyone (even Silliman) wants, is to define a preferred tradition that legitimates itself through the positioning of its choices. 

 

What I find most refreshing about A Controvery of Poets, is its implicit acceptance of the notion that differences may not only be inevitable, but actually stimulating and useful. While it may be possible to say about a poet, like, for instance, Jack Gilbert, that his means are wholly traditional and predictably bland, the "stuff" of his sensibility is purely post-Modern:  Intuitive, disjunct, post-apocalyptic, and solitary--qualities which certainly have more to do with pre-Modern, and even more certainly pre-Renaissance and non-Western sources and "traditions" than anything one could predictably describe as "traditional" in form or significance (as an historical/aesthetic accusation).        

What, then, was I to make of an apparent monstrous unresolved stand-off in a literary landscape which I could not even begin to understand, circa 1965? Would my apprehension of the formal possibilities of writing poetry such as that which I understood through Zukofsky, for instance, be opposed by my appreciation of, for instance, John Logan, or Theodore Roethke? Would it, in other words, have been useful for me to have been persuaded to approach the field of possible voices--coming at me from multifarious directions--by imposing a sort of kangaroo court of discrimination, passing this one, rejecting the other, on the basis of how "traditional" or "innovative" each may have seemed? I would certainly have rejected that notion then, as I would probably now, except that the whole notion of "belonging" to this or that school or group or coterie, has crucial implications, not just for one's participation in the system of literature, but for anyone intending to pursue writing in a "serious" way, as a career. 

In the years following, as I matriculated to UC Berkeley, Iowa, and beyond, all these issues and conflicts and tendencies would become more vivid and concrete. I knew, without a doubt, that had I pursued a more narrowly conservative track as a poet during my years at Iowa, honing my oeuvre and style to please the reactionary editors and judges of the 1970's, my career as a writer would probably have led me towards a role that my parents--and their world, god help them!--would have understood, on some basic level. How would I ever have explained to them--as I could never have done--how a poem of Robert Creeley's or Frank O'Hara's spoke to me in a way that Longfellow's or Sandburg's would to them?  

That division, then, had deeper implications than mere literary styles. It expressed a schism in the possible audience for literature that was as real as the world that I had grown up in. The officially sanctioned body of acceptable literary taste exercised a subtle control over the means of dissemination. America's puritanical, artistically conservative and suspicious character guaranteed that a justly respectful and righteous attitude towards the familiar music of sentimental "verse" be maintained, against the untutored, rebellious experimenters. 

W.H. Auden has said that the reason for such variety [in A Controversy] is that America has no traditions, and that each artist struggles to create one--to which he can subsequently be faithful.  The riches of modern American poetry he ascribes to the solitude and independence in which the creative American mind comes to its own consciousness of itself.*** I myself made a point very like this, when I insisted in an online comment stream that the reason American poetry can claim so many variant channels is that it's too large to be unified (as it is in France or England): It's a collection of regional entities, with the Mid-Atlantic region (the powerhouse of publishing and reviewing) showing the greater dominance, but without the vertical integration so characteristic of European centres. Thus, we have San Francisco, Los Angeles, the Southwest, the Pacific Northwest, the South, The Mid-West, New England, the Prairie, and even our foreign "exile" contingent--all as separate, distinct, places, with separate, identifiable periods, with isolate(d) individuals scribbling away in a relative remoteness which makes them gratifyingly forsaken!, at least in the orderly, controlled manner in which American decency and propriety is interpreted.  

Ultimately, then, the effect upon me of this anthology, when I first acquired it, was of an eclectic debate. Unlike the Untermeyer and Williams carousels, which made of each poet a tended plot, with just the right amount of fertilizer and irrigation to keep it alive, the joint editors of A Controversy of Poets allowed their readers to imagine that the ultimate poetics was literally up for grabs, with the outcome very much in doubt. It didn't presume to say that everyone should, or could, think of all of its exemplars as inevitably chosen, but of all severally engaged in a colloquy of separate voices, none more "correct" than any other. It even implied that the process of selection--which involved, after all, as it always does, a series of exclusions--was open-ended, as Kelly made plain in his list of an additional 39 names, on the last page of the text, which might, in his words, have made "an anthology of comparable merit." Indeed, one wonders how--despite all possible excuses--Kelly could exclude Duncan, Oppen, Niedecker, and Whalen--while including Blaser, Oppenheimer, Owens, and Jonathan Williams?

All anthologies are doomed. Monuments to passing fashion. How few survive. Pound's Active Anthology [Faber, 1933]. Donald Hall's Contemporary American Poetry [Penguin, 1962]. Paul Carroll's Young American Poets [Follett, 1968]. Donald Allen's New American Poetry [Grove, 1960].    

_______________

*This was a paperback original first edition from Anchor Books (a division then of Doubleday), which is probably how it came to my attention; I would almost certainly not have discovered it, had it been published as a big, expensive hardcover. 

**To which could be added, John Updike (Verse, Fawcett, 1965), and May Swenson (To Mix With Time, Scribner's, 1963). Actually, I was a voracious reader of poetry in my early 'teens, but this was mostly confined to work written before 1940, i.e., Archibald MacLeish, T.S. Eliot, Rupert Brooke, Stephen Spender, W.H. Auden, etc.

***This reference is taken directly from Paris Leary's Postscript to A Controversy.