SOURCE: "Embarrassed Palefaces," in The Nation, Vol. 246, No. 21, May 28, 1988, pp. 756-60, 62.

[In the following review, Klawans criticizes the works featured in American Poetry Since 1970: Up Late for their unworldliness and absence of emotion, although he notes their wit and clever observation.]

Randall Jarrell once remarked that the poet in our time is like a maker of stone hand axes. That was forty years ago. From the vantage point of the 1980s, most poets would agree that Jarrell didn't know how good he had it. Contemporary poetry, according to the conventional wisdom, is that which goes unread. It is, however, argued over, and with a vehemence that sometimes seems livelier than the poems themselves. Consider this sampler of recent invective.

Mary Kinzie: "Ashbery is the passive bard of a period in which the insipid has turned into the heavily toxic."

Louis Simpson: "Most American poets lack a theme…. After a while they are reduced to making casual remarks about matters of no importance."

Robert Dana: "'Tired' is the word for most contemporary poetry. 'Competence' ad nauseam. Minor brilliances…. [Much] of our present poetry seems the product of a single, generalized voice and mind. Poet copying poet."

And here, in a now-legendary example, Diane Wakoski attacks John Hollander for his apostasy against free verse. Through his sin. Hollander became a figure like Milton's Satan, "full of spite from lack of recognition and thinly disguised anger, one who was frustrated and petty from that frustration."

One begins to envision poetry, like the contested estate in Bleak House, as having long since disappeared, while the arguments over it continue to rage. Thus, it is with a sense of relief that I recommend Andrei Codrescu's plump new anthology, American Poetry Since 1970: Up Late. Here are real, live poets, 104 of them.

And here, too, is an argument. Introducing his book, Codrescu gets into the spirit not by praising the poets but by attacking David Perkins, the Harvard professor who recently brought out A History of Modern Poetry: Modernism and After. Perkins, says Codrescu, is one of those professor-poets guilty of maintaining "the proposition that poetry, like all things, has been getting worse since the days of the gods, in this case Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot but mostly Eliot."

Against this version of American poetry—whether it really is Perkins's version remains to be seen—Codrescu puts forth an anthology of outsiders. It is a forthrightly exclusive selection, which does not try to summarize all the poetries of the past two decades but rather takes a stand for some of them. Thus, there are no rhyme-and-meter mongers here. Although the so-called New Formalists have been at the center of recent debates, you would not know from Codrescu that they even exist. Nor does Codrescu include the Creative Writing poets—the ones with the carefully controlled voices, reciting carefully graded lists of images that drop away to a carefully pained aperçu. Neo-Surrealists are included, but not the ones who practice an artful, Ashbery-style verse. Codrescu's Surrealists are closer to the original models, who disdained art itself. "The majority" of the poets, Codrescu writes, "are anti-literary, as avantgardists have always been. This is, however, an avantgarde without a single program, in a country where the term 'avantgarde' never even took root, having been supplanted by the more academic and ambiguous 'modernism.'"

In other words, these are the poets who say no—no to professionalism, no to inclusion in a canon, no to quibbles about form, no to literature itself. If they feel allegiance to any tradition, it seems to be one not of writing but of generalized opposition: "New American Poetry, since Whitman, has been at odds with official culture over the facts of America," Codrescu writes; and that's as much of an appeal as he gives to any figure earlier than Frank O'Hara. These up-late poets do not intend to have their measurements taken and compared with those of other known specimens, because they suspect they're being fitted not for their laureates' robes but for a casket. Whatever their various purposes, they do not write to be judged by David Perkins. I suspect they shouldn't be subjected even to the indignity of this review.

Nevertheless: Having noted the principal negative virtues of these poets, let me mention the positive as well. The first is rapidity. You don't have to wait for anything to happen in these poems. Sometimes it's the writer's feelings that come at you in a rush, as in Maureen Owen's "African Sunday":

     Fuck I want to be bound by
      devotion!     Tortured
     by passion!
       just like the ad says
                  for d h Lawrence's
     Sons and Lovers        in today's
       Sunday Times        instead I'm
     here with you …

Sometimes the rushing you hear is language itself blowing by. Here is the start of "Redo" by Lyn Hejinian:

     Agreement swerves
     a sonnet to the consonants.
     Sparrows. As a wind
     blows over the twigs of a rough nest
     entered by a bird that impales
 
     a vowel on its beak …

One way or the other, these poets seem determined to step on the gas and go.

Despite this insistence on contemporaneity, this passion for writing in the moment, a few of the up-late poets retain their sense of history, literary or otherwise. Ed Sanders is represented here with his long and lovely "Yiddish Speaking Socialists of The Lower East Side":

      Oh they failed
      but I can hear their ghosts
      walk down the cobbles
      outside the St. Mark's church

Sam Abrams contributes "The World Is With Me Just Enough," a tribute to being tickled by a 7-year-old, which contains his declaration, "i'd rather be a pagan/tickled in a creed outworn."

Another virtue appears: lightness of tone. The poets here who prefer personal statement avoid the deep, hollow tones of sincerity; the collagists, the Surrealists, and the more impersonal writers manage to avoid the drone, the boom, the bardic wheeze. Even the explicitly political poems—Michael Brownstein's "Declaration of Independence," Bernadette Mayer's "The Tragic Condition of the Statue of Liberty," Codrescu's own "A Petite Histoire of Red Fascism"—tend toward the quick, the satirical, even the burlesque.

On first glance, then, the Codrescu-Perkins split is the latest skirmish in that old war of redskins against palefaces. Given that it is now fifty years since Philip Rahv identified the combatants, back when Jarrell was a mere youth, one might mutter, "plus ça change" and go home. If you do intend to leave now, I hope you will do so with a copy of Up Late under your arm. But if you suspect, as I do, that something else is going on, turn with me now to A History of Modern Poetry.

Granted, this book comes with the full backing of Harvard University, which in this case means it costs $25 in hardcover and has a typo on every page. Perkins, for what it's worth, goes by the title of John P. Marquand Professor of English and American Literature. If you don't hold that against him, you will quickly discover that he's far from the single-minded bore Codrescu portrays. In fact, he is generous, sympathetic, sensitive, inquisitive and has a goodly streak of common sense.

These are the virtues one hopes for in a literary historian; and that may be one reason Codrescu treats Perkins so harshly. Literary history itself has become something of a lost art in recent years. People who have studied literature—and I would bet that includes every one of the uplate poets—used to be drilled in the explication of texts. That went on from the 1950s through the early 1970s; since then, literary theory has taken over. (All right, this is a caricature and doesn't even mention feminist and Third World criticism—but as a picture of official literary studies, it's close enough.) Thus, for two or three generations, students have been told only in passing that literature might be an object for history. Witness Terry Eagleton's little book on literary theory, which has become a one-volume Cliff's Notes for the deep-thinking set. The names Auerbach and Curtius appear only once in it, and then as symbols of a quaint, half-forgotten past.

Perkins, evidently, has not forgotten. He approaches his subject with an initial impartiality, knowing that his own judgments cannot alter the facts: These were the poets who wrote during these years. Though Codrescu would have you believe that Perkins's interests are narrow, his focus in fact is as wide as he can make it, and his first effort is always to understand. Here is Perkins quite far afield from T.S. Eliot, explaining the open form of Charles Olson and Robert Duncan:

At least in theory, writing a poem was for these poets not different from any spontaneous act of living. Like most modern artists, moreover, they were impressed by the formal differences between life and the traditional work of art. The work was organized for an aesthetic purpose, selective in its use of experience, delimited and meaningful. Life, on the other hand, is unselective, for it presents anything and everything. It flows on and on, and nothing within it is isolated, nothing exists as a completed entity.

In this sense, Perkins writes, open form was not an aesthetic strategy but rather "a matter of faith." This is as clear and meaningful an explanation as I've found. It is so good, in fact, that it elucidates much of the poetry in Up Late.

One can find passage after passage like this in Perkins. On the poets of the counterculture: "When a poet's transvaluations dramatically challenged the accepted norms of society, and his way of life proved his sincerity by what it sacrificed, immense moral power accrued. Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder sometimes write very well, but their great influence has derived from the image we have of their lives in conjunction with their poems." And here is Perkins explaining how Pound and Williams became the great influences on American poetry after World War II: "Pound and Williams were of the high Modernist generation. They carried the prestige of the 1920s and could hand it on, as the ancient fathers of Israel passed the tribal blessing to their sons. They were in the United States. You could visit them. They were interested in your work. You could write them, enclosing poems, and Williams, at least, sent enthusiastic replies."

Clearly, Perkins has a talent for getting under the skins of different styles and into the heads of people who lived in the recent past. It is also clear that his history is not a traditionalist's polemic. His discussion, through the 1960s, is wide-ranging. Only when he gets to the 1970s does he narrow the field; and then he does so to give in-depth analyses of two poets, John Ashbery and James Merrill, who have firmly established their reputations.

This is where Codrescu begins to quarrel with him in earnest. One can say in Perkins's defense that it may be too soon for a historian to deal with poets of the 1970s and 1980s. One might add that Perkins praises Ashbery and Merrill highly, but not past reason. But this, I suspect, is just what bothers Codrescu. It is Perkins's moderation, his broad sympathies, that set off the argument against him. Why?

The answer may be that Perkins is capable of absorbing even the up-late poets into the body of literature. His fault lies not in having ignored them now but in showing a willingness to understand, sort and label them twenty years from now. This is precisely what these poets fear. The real question, then, is why they should be afraid—why bother to write poetry if you don't want to be part of literature? Till now, I've taken the up-late poets at face value, as hot-heads in full revolt. Now it's time to question them more closely.

"The making of community against anti-social technology is the chief object of the poetry gathered here," Codrescu writes. But what sort of community is being made? Think for a moment of the places where people come together. They form communities where they work; but there is not a single poem in Up Late about labor. Nobody sells insurance; nobody doctors in New Jersey. Bernadette Mayer writes about not living on a farm, and that's it for the world of work. People also get together through sports. Sometimes, in fact, I think sports is the only unifying element in American society. There is only one poem that involves sports (a very good one, by Elinor Nauen). People get together through voluntary associations: They attend church, form political groups, play in garage bands. But they don't do any of those things in Up Late. Then there is the street where one lives, the neighborhood, the town. Nobody writes about those places, either, although Jim Gustafson has poems on the idea of San Francisco and Detroit. Ethnic groups are communities, but the poets in Up Late who bother to think about that form of society are, not surprisingly, Lorenzo Thomas, Alberto Rios and Victor Hernandez Cruz. Finally, there is the most obvious form of community, the family. In 568 pages of text, I found only three poems that had anything to do with families.

To complete my survey, I then checked how many of the poets in Up Late write about being poets. The answer is roughly a third.

It becomes obvious, then, that Codrescu is talking about making a community of poets. That, I believe, is the guilty secret of Up Late. In the old battle, the writers of sensibility and tradition were the palefaces; the writers of raw experience were the redskins. But here the rebellious, risk-taking poets are forming, of all things, a republic of letters. In 1988! No wonder they become uneasy when David Perkins walks into the room—they've already done half his work for him. These are not redskins—they are embarrassed palefaces.

I have characterized the poetry here as rapid and light in tone, even when its subjects might invite a weightier treatment. Those are indeed virtues, in the better poems. In the worse, one begins to get a sense of skimming along. It is then that one feels how little the poetry is engaged with the world at large, and how much it cares about the world of poetry. Here, for example, is a poem by Bill Berkson, "Star Motel," in its entirety:

     Inside I could hear
     a party of people
     the aimless cars
     and in the middle distance
     inexorable murmurs
     of the ice machines.

Well, it's a poem. It's not bad. But think of it this way: If you were to come on with this intensity on a date, you would be home, alone, by about 10:30.

People who are interested in literary history may discern the genealogy of poems such as this, with their pretense of worldliness masking a priestly disengagement. They are the offspring of Frank O'Hara, in particular the poems he referred to as "I do this I do that." Now, I do not mean to disparage O'Hara, an admirable poet, but merely to point out a fact of literary inheritance: It is often the weakest part of a writer's work that becomes the most influential. That's because the weakest part is the most easily imitated; and in O'Hara's "I do this I do that" poems one may find the beginnings of the living-in-the-moment in much of Up Late, and of its accompanying fault—an absence of deep emotion.

Of all his "I do this I do that" poems, probably none pulls off the trick so well as "The Day Lady Died." The bulk of it runs on from mundane detail to detail:

      and for Mike I just stroll into the
       PARK LANE
      Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of
       Strega and
      then I go back where I came from to
       6th Avenue
      and the tobacconist in the
       Ziegfeld Theatre and
      casually ask for a carton of
       Gauloises …

And so forth. The poem departs from thisness-and-thatness only in its last lines, when O'Hara, having picked up a copy of the New York Post, sees that Billie Holiday has died. Then, all at once, he feels himself back at the Five Spot,

      while she whispered a song along
       the keyboard
      to Mal Waldron and everyone and I
       stopped breathing

So the accumulation of ordinary detail gives way at last to the memory of a moment of transcendence, a sudden loss of breath. The poem works. But for all O'Hara's unpretentious, plain speech, I feel there's something dishonest going on here. The moment of transcendence wasn't his creation; it was the work of Billie Holiday. O'Hara points to her and says, "See, she was great," and then takes credit for her art.

Why shouldn't poets give their readers what Billie Holiday gave her audience every night? They used to. Indeed, even today, there are poets who can deliver something very like her electric charge. As evidence, here in its entirety is an early poem by Rita Dove (who is not included in Up Late). It is called "Nigger Song: An Odyssey," and it doesn't just point to Billie Holiday, it embodies her.

     We six pile in, the engine
     churning ink:
     We ride into the night.
     Past factories, past graveyards
     And the broken eyes of windows,
       we ride
     Into the gray-green nigger night.
 
     We sweep past excavation sites;
       the pits
     Of gravel gleam like mounds of ice.
     Weeds clutch at the wheels;
     We laugh and swerve away, veering
     Into the black entrails of the earth,
     The green smoke sizzling
       on our tongues.
 
     In the nigger night, thick
       with the smell of cabbages,
     Nothing can catch us.
     Laughter spills like gin from glasses,
     And "yeah" we whisper, "yeah"
     We croon, "yeah."

You remember this, don't you? It's poetry, the real stuff. Some of the poets in Up Late remember it, too. A lot of them don't. Instead of poetry, they provide good company, wit, clever observation, the occasional puzzle to solve. That's a lot, certainly enough to make the book worth your while. But the best thing I can say about Up Late is also the worst: It's the fastest read of any poetry anthology I've seen.

I expect that someday, David Perkins will indeed write a history that includes many of the poets in Up Late. He will bring out all their best qualities and probably deal more gently than I have with their shortcomings. He also will thank Andrei Codrescu, as he should, for assembling them and for having the courage and intelligence to be their advocate. By that point, of course, Codrescu and his fellow poets will have flown off into some new and still-unnameable realm, from which they will view Perkins's efforts with derision. And that, too, is as it should be. I only hope that by then, this useless railing against literature will have ceased. There is nothing cowardly about wanting to write literature—Rita Dove and thousands of others have proved that. Problems arise only when people are too sure of what they mean by literature. In that sense, as an anthologist of the contemporary, Codrescu is every bit as timid as he accuses Perkins of being. Where are the song lyrics? Where is August Darnell of Kid Creole and the Coconuts—a true Surrealist if ever there was one—or that plain-spoken populist Springsteen or all those adversarial rappers? Where is American folk poetry, such as "Here I sit, all brokenhearted"? And has no one noticed that David Mamet, single-handedly, has brought back verse drama? Contemporary poetry, in some of its guises, is indeed marginal to American life; but in other guises, it has come very close to the heart. Up Late and A History of Modern Poetry might both have benefited from including the truly popular forms of poetry. With their somewhat incompatible virtues, though, they deal very well with what they attempt to cover. My advice is to read them both, then set out into the wider world, with Providence, Rita Dove and Kid Creole as your guides.