45 years ago was a barricaded, world-rocking year. Both in politics and in poetry.
Between January and the end of March came the beginning of both the Prague Spring and the Tet Offensive. North Korea seized the USS Pueblo and student protests broke out in Poland. Although the public wouldn’t know about it until a year later, soldiers of “Charlie” Company of 1st Battalion, 11th Infantry Brigade stationed in South Vietnam, slaughtered some 400 women and children at My Lai. Robert Kennedy entered the race for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, and President Lyndon B. Johnson withdrew from it.
Then, on April 4, came Memphis. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated on a balcony of the Lorraine Hotel. Followed by riots in major American cities. Followed by the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1968. Followed by student protestors shutting down Columbia University. Followed by Hair opening on Broadway. That was April.
In May, in Paris, rioters take to the streets. In June, Andy Warhol was shot as he entered his studio in NYC and Bobby Kennedy was shot as he exited the Ambassador Hotel in LA. In July Saddam Hussein led a coup d’etat in Iraq, while in Rome Pope Paul VI condemned birth control.
In August: Around the time Richard M. Nixon accepted the GOP nomination for president, nearly a quarter of a million troops and 5,000 tanks were putting an end to the Prague Spring. Same month: The Tet Offensive was winding down in South Vietnam around the same time peace protestors in Chicago clashed with police outside the Democratic Party convention.
Come October, ten days before the Summer Olympics, four dozen students were killed in street protests in Mexico City. Two weeks later in the same city, American athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their arms in a power salute from the medal stand after winning medals in a track and field event.
By the end of the year, Yale University announced plans to admit women, Mao Zedong ratcheted up the Cultural Revolution, Apollo 8 orbited the Moon, and the Beatles released the White Album.
Who won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry that year? Anthony Hecht for The Hard Hours, a splendid and frightening book about the inhumanity of World War II. Hecht’s coolness celebrates reason and rationality, in both form and function, in both emotion and content, over brutality and evil. The Hard Hours asserts the poetic and the civic sense of order over chaos.
The National Book Award was won by Robert Bly for The Light Around the Body, a quiet book of anti-war poems. Bly concluded his acceptance speech questioning the morality of book awards during a time of war: “I respect the National Book Awards, and I respect the judges, and I thank them for their generosity. At the same time, I know I am speaking for many, many American poets when I ask this question: Since we are murdering a culture in Vietnam at least as fine as our own, do we have the right to congratulate ourselves on our cultural magnificence? Isn’t that out of place? You have given me an award for a book that has many poems in it against the war. I thank you for the award, and for the $1,000 check, which I am giving to the peace movement, specifically to the organizations for draft resistance. That is an appropriate use of an award for a book of poems mourning the war.”
I adore both these books. But I also think they have had little influence on much of today’s caffeinated American poetics. Hecht’s poems are too poised and too steely, and Bly’s poems too whispery, even in their subversions. That’s too bad because they are both important books in the ways that they embody the range of American poetry between zones of disposition and zones of disturbance.
Other than those two award-winning collections, 1968 also launched the tinny, angular sort of poetry of withdrawal that many of today’s poets emulate. I’m thinking of George Oppen’s seminal book, Of Being Numerous, debatably the most influential volume that appeared during that difficult year over today’s poetics. Oppen strips away ornamentation and privileges self-perspective over poetic overtures. That’s a brushstroke we see everywhere today.
Published the same year: Robert Creeley’s Pieces and Lorine Niedecker’s North Central. From my perspective, both poets appear to exert a greater influence today than either Hecht or Bly. A little research reminds me that Etheridge Knight’s debut book Poems from Prison came out that year too. It’s a book that re-calibrated Confessional poetry and could use a friendly reexamination.
I’m not sure it’s worth the effort to try to find a “year of years” in American poetry. 1917? 1959? But I love the parlor game of it and it may result in some fresh reconsiderations. So I invite you to name your Year of Years in American Poetry in the comments below and tell us why. Rules: 1) Poems have to still influence today’s poetry. Explain why. 2) The poetry can’t seem dated.
Ready? Discuss.
16 responses
Such a tough one — thanks for the challenge! My first thought was 1923 for Stevens’ Harmonium and Frost’s New Hampshire (and many others, it turns out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1923_in_poetry). But then I checked out 1930: Crane’s The Bridge, Pound’s draft of the Cantos, Kunitz’s first volume (Intellectual Things)!
Really, 1968? Are you serious, David? You’re dating yourself, kind sir!
Let’s go with 1993.
Sherman Alexie, the preeminent Native American writer, poet, and comedian released 2 books of poetry and a book of Short Stories (which became the critically acclaimed motion picture, “Smoke Signals”) in 1993. Although, “First Indian on the Moon” tends to be the more critically acclaimed book of his poetry that year, I will focus on, “Old Shirts and New Skins.”
Right off, the title provides you with some powerful wordplay, as “Skins” is often a slang or derogatory term used to describe Native Americans, which is embedded in the playground language of basketball. Along with Alexie’s normal irony (pun intended), dark humor, and impeccable timing; he introduced his critically acclaimed, but reservation bound character, Lester FallsApart. FallsApart represents the Native Male population of the 60’s, 70’s, and early 80’s. Even some of the best of these men fell apart due to racial bigotry, cultural divides, and both geological and physical barriers to higher education and/or financial success.
FallsApart has been reverbrated by man Native poets since the development of this Native American Archetype, including by this years A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize winner, Geffrey Davis. You can find the influence most directly in his poem, “How Can I Be 1/32nd Blackfeet?”.
Alexie has become the most influential Native poet, comparable only to the first and second waves of the Native American Renassaince—combined.
Instead of giving you a paltry listing of American Book Award, National Book Award, and Pulitzer Prize winners; and the also-rans of that year, I will simply note that “Old Shirts and New Skins” created the unlikely duo of Sherman with fellow Native American poet, Elizabeth Woody as the cover artist.
Woody, an American Book Award winner herself, taught at the Institue for American Indian Arts, influencing countless poets, writers, and artists. She ,unlike any of the poets from 1968, 1959, or 1917; can proudly–and quite literally–proclaim, “I have influenced 100 % of the poets from my Nation (Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs.)
In closing, a statement from the American Book Award winner of 1993, AR Ammons: “I don’t know whether I can sustain myself for thirty minutes of saying I know nothing – or that I need to try, since I might prove no more than you already suspect, or, even worse, persuade you of the fact.”
1863: one of Dickinson’s most prolific/important years, adding–eventually–some of the greatest poems we are still reading, still astonished by.
I love Niedecker so much; right on Oppen, Creeley. Don’t forget, Hannah Weiner’s Code Poems MS is from 1968, and Book I of Ed Dorn’s Gunslinger! And Technicians of the Sacred (Jerome Rothenberg’s first attempt at an ethnopoetics anthology) came out that year too. The MS for the Clayton Eshleman bilingual edition of César Vallejo’s Poemas Humanas was completed. 1968 – look what Gwendolyn Brooks, Elizabeth Bishop, LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), and Barbara Guest were up to.
This list could go on.
Saw this chart of literary movements recently http://imgur.com/1OPu3vH — (literary movements of course having fuzzy boundaries and even names) but does anyone know of one out there that’s heavier on poetry and/or goes past Kerouac? I’d love to see one with music and movies in it too…
1968/Poetry Against the War organized by Alan Ginsburg/Robert Bly for nat’l reading.
In Portland, OR; at the time I was teaching at Lewis & Clark College/Reed College and
Invited as token black to recite “Dear John, Dear Coltrane†and ends with “Biafra Bluesâ€
A poem I wrote for Chinua Achebe, and though the assemblage thought my reading
Superfluous/irrelevant, as I was leaving the recital hall, early, Ginsberg stopped me
(obviously going out of his way) to assure me that “Biafra Blues†was appropriate, &
John Coltrane’s “Alabama‖a dirge for ‘4 girls blown up in that Alabama church’–
& Rev. King’s eulogy for the church bombing in, 9 15 1963 in Birmingham, AL, a Sunday.
Bly’s LIGHT AROUND THE BODY (1968) had won the NBA in Poetry; Lowell & Mailer
Were protesting Lyndon Johnson’s support of the Vietnam War; the Democratic Convention
In Chicago had already created a world-wide cacophony; Nixon was elected on a ‘stop the
War’ premise; at the time THE FOG OF WAR had not come to prominence, Robert McNamara’s
Policy agent of LBJ’s expanding of the war; and so on…
just to say this is an excellent idea , and I agree with you about the perhaps-unexpectedly great influence of the Objectivists and their heirs as compared with Hecht on one hand and Creeley on the other. Who talks about James Wright anymore — someone who was perhaps poised between the two above.
I wouldn’t be surprised to see some younger African American critic, or critic of African American poetry whatever her/his origins, reconsidering Etheridge Knight.
One should probably bow to Eliot, Pound, and Williams, but I’m still rather fond of 1956, when the world and Ginsberg had much to Howl about.
I like 1967 too, not so much for the politics, as for the fact that W.S. Merwin shook off his classical burden and published The Lice, which still amazes as much as anything he’s written since.
Well, none of the above would have been the same, if a small chapbook wasn’t self-published in Brooklyn on July 4, 1855.
’68 was one fabulous year but I’m researching the life of Lola Ridge who published “Sun-Up” in 1920, the same year of Hart Crane’s “My Grandmother’s Love Letters,” Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberly, Reznikoff’s Poems, Sandburg’s Steel and Smoke, Edna St. Vincent Millay, A Few Figs from Thistles (women and sex!) WCW’s Kora in Hell, Cummings’ “Buffalo Bill,” Yeats’ Second Coming and Teasdale’s very moving anti-war poem, “There will come Soft Rains.” The Lost Generation was getting lost,10,000 people were arrested for being union/socialist in the Palmer Raids, Pancho Villa surrenders, women’s suffrage is approved at last, and O’Neill wins the Pulitzer!
I’m seconding the year of Walt.
I’m thinking 1968 just might be it: the Rothenberg anthology certainly shaped, in it own quite way, our canonical skepticism, broadened our understanding of what poetry is/can be, and influenced many poets. Larry Eigner’s “Air the Trees” has recently been admired in Octopus Magazine by Nate Pritts. Olson is still vital to certain poets, and the second volume of the Maximus was published in 1968. Robert Duncan’s astonishing book, Bending the Bow, is recognized on the Academy of American Poets website as a “groundbreaking book.”
1970: “License to Carry a Gun” by Andrei Codrescu wins the Big Table Award and is published by Follet/Big Table. The book introduces three poets of Codrescu’s invention into English, and established Fernando Pessoa’s poetry hatchery in America. In the introduction to the book, Paul Carroll notes the meeting of Romanian, French, and Spanish avantgardes with the poetry of the of the New York School poets. This is a connection too unsettling to recognize for many years, but the force of it is felt by many successive poetry schools, and is finally articulated by Kenneth Warren when Codrescu’s “So Recently Rent a World: New and Selected Poems, 1968-2012” (Cofee House Press, 2012) makes it possible to see the arc of the poet’s development and the range of his influence. Don’t be put off by this claim because I am making it for the “Codrescu” whose name I share: many decades have past since “License to Carry a Gun,” and I look with detached interest at something real and, until recently, unacknowleged. American critical vocabulary about poetry’s more complex effects has been (and is, with exceptions) poor.
I’m going to limit myself to the 20th century. 1968 was a terrific year. I’d like to say 1932 when Robinson Jeffers appeared on the cover of TIME and inspired The Sierra Club. 1958 was a fine year with the birth of The Fifties, and 1964 birthed Kayak magazine and books. There is nothing like either one of these on the current Scene.
These are all good years, but I keep coming back to 1936. New Directions set sail that year, and so did the Iowa Writers Workshop. This last may be overlooked, but it’s surely the single most influential development in poetry in the century. The Workshop created the cottage industry of today’s “professional poetry,” and it forever altered the dynamic between writer and reader.
I’m not building a positive or negative case here (though doing either one could be instructive, even fun). I’m just acknowledging the power of the M.F.A. and undergraduate workshop over poetry in our time and not-too-distant past.
Of course, if I leave the 20th century, I’m comfortable joining the celebrants around the campfire of the year of Walt, and those who’ve nodded to Emily D.’s year(s).
1981: Hugo was still among us and had won the AAP fellowship. Schuyler won the Pulitzer for The Morning of the Poem. A bridge between east and west was solidified. Sure, works by Stern, Strand, Forche, Levine, Levertov were out that year, but several books published in 1981 have permanently needled themselves into American poetry consciousness: Ashbery’s Shadow Train, The Collected Poems of Plath, but most notably, A Light in the Attic by Shel Silverstein which single-handedly keeps poetry alive in our young people ensuring the future of poetry itself.
Of the many possibilities, I’m going for 1978, which, in Rukeyser’s words, split open the world for women. There was Adrienne Rich’s first overtly, fiery feminist book, “The Dream of a Common Language,” and The Crossing Press edition of Judy Grahn’s “The Work of a Common Woman” which also includes the earlier “Edward the Dyke.” Also in 1978: Pat Parker’s “Movement in Black,” Susan Griffin’s “Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her,” Audre Lorde’s “The Black Unicorn, and Marge Piercy’s “The High Cost of Living.” Also Toi Derricotte’s first book, “The Empress of the Death House.” Surely this period changed the world of poetry and of much else not only for feminists and LGBT people but everyone who reads, breathes, and thinks.
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