|
There is, of course, no telling what marvelous things might be going on
in the unpublicized wilderness of American poetry: in the smallest of
little magazines; in obscure online journals; in the bedrooms of living
Emily Dickinsons, who may be writing without looking toward publication
at all.
 On the other hand, what is going on among the recognized
literati, in the American poetic mainstream, in the camps of the
"dominant mode" is clear--American verse as generally practiced has
reached a dead end. As American "plain speech" continually tightened its
hold upon the various poetic communities in the '70's and '80's,
vociferous that poetry speak in the language of the (apparently not very
well educated) people, American poetry delivered exactly what it was
calling for--"poetry" that, verbally, in virtually no way differed from
the thousands of utterly tedious conversations all of us overhear or
participate in all the time, and immediately forget. Or perhaps there is
one difference--in the case of this poetry, we would mostly hope to
forget it without having to hear it first.
American verse became telegraphic (that is, shorter than prose),
without being sinewy or muscular. It became Aesopic (that is, almost
always ending with a pithy "life lesson"), without being in the least
charming or humorous. And if I may misquote, at this end of the century,
Ezra Pound writing from the other end of the century, this poetry ain't
nearly as well written as prose. (Not that our prose is exactly stellar
either--but that's another essay that needs to be composed by another
writer.)
Two groups, working sometimes as allies--the "new formalists"
and the proponents of the "new narrative" (may I call them the new
narrators?)--have suggested ways out of this cul-de-sac, but neither
group seems to be interested in working hard enough to achieve its stated
aims.
The new narrators, for one thing, tend to write in the same old
American plain speech as the reigning literati, with the distinction that
they are narrating instead of philosophizing. But their "verse" displays
none of the characteristics of verse which the plain speechers
jettisoned--i.e. any sort of regular rhythm beyond the limp iambic which
underlies most English language speech and writing; anything like a
plottable (or verifiable) rhyme scheme; and any verbal conceit of the
slightest complexity. Which means essentially that their stanzas can be
rearranged as paragraphs with no loss.
And what about their narratives as narratives? Well, the reader
is unlikely to encounter any technique that can have been considered
fresh or new at any point after the publication of The Waste Land or
Ulysses, but might very well stumble across the kind of regional or
dialectic ramble unseen since the death of James Whitcomb Riley.
The new formalists, for all their perhaps well-meaning
attentions, can't seem to scan! My God--you are forgiven for
wondering--haven't these people read Yeats, or Frost, or even Richard
Wilbur? Instead they seem content to block out lines that look roughly
the same length on the page, throw down an occasional end-rhyme (whether
it will be noticed by anything but the eye doesn't seem to matter), break
out the thesaurus regularly, and end up in the same place as the plain
speech boys--with a nice little "words to live by" finale worthy of
Reader's Digest.
|
