POETICKS

Poetry Between 1960 and 2010

Wilshberia, the continuum of contemporary poetry composed
between around 1960 and the present certified by the poetry
establishment (i.e., universities, grants-bestowing organizations,
visible critics, venues like the New Yorker and the American
Poetry Review) begins with formal poetry like much of Richard
Wilbur’s work.  It descends into a different, lesser formality of neo-
psalmic poetry based on Whitman that Ginsberg was the most
well-known recent author of; next comes free verse that is
nonetheless highly bound to implicit rules, Iowa Plaintext Poetry;
slightly further from traditional poetry the nearprose of the many
followers Of William Carlos Williams who seem to try to write
poetry as close to prose as possible.  To this point, the poetry
is convergent, attempting to cohere around a unifying principle. 
It edges away from that more and more as we continue over
the continuum, starting with surrealist poetry, which diverges
from the world as we know it into perceptual disruption.  A bit
more divergent is the jump-cut poetry of the New York School,
represented at its most divergent by John Ashbery’s most
divergent poems and the jump-cut poetry of the so-called
“language poets,’ which is not, for me, truly language poetry
because grammatical concerns are not to much of an extent
the basis of it.

The Establishment’s view of the relationship of all other poetry
being composed during this time to the poetry of Wilshberia has
been neatly voiced by Professor David Graham.  Professor Graham
likens it to the equivalent of  the relationship to genuine baseball of
“two guys in Havre, Montana who like to kick a deer skull back &
forth and call it ‘baseball.’  Sure, there’s no bat, ball, gloves,
diamond, fans, pitcher, or catcher– but they do call it baseball, and
wonder why the mainstream media consistently fails to mention
their game.”  Odd how there are always professors unable to learn
from history how bad deriding innovative enterprises almost
always makes you look bad.  On the other hand, if their opposition
is as effective as the gatekeepers limiting the visibility of
contemporary poetry between around 1960 and 2010 to Wilshberia
has been, they won’t be around to see that opposition break down.
Unfortunately, the innovators whose work they opposed won’t be,
either.

Not that all the poets whose work makes up “the Underwilsh,” as I
call the uncertified work from the middle of the last century until
now, are innovative.  In fact, very few are.  But the most important
poetries of the Underwilsh were innovative at some point during
the reign of Wilshberian poetry.  Probably only animated visual
poetry, cyber poetry, mathematical poetry and cryptographic poetry
are seriously that now.  It would seem that recognition of
innovative art takes a generation

The poetry of the Underwilsh at its left end has always been
conventional.  It begins with what is unquestionable the most
popular poetry in America, doggerel–which, for me, it poetry
intentionally employing no poetic device but rhyme; next come
classical American haiku–the 5/7/5 kind, other varieties of haiku
being scattered throughout most other kinds of poetry–followed by
light verse (both known to academia but looked down on); next
comes contragenteel poetry, which is basically the nearprose of
Williams and his followers except using coarser language (and
concerning less polite subjects, although subject matter is not what
I look at to place poetries into this scheme of mine); performance
poetry, hypertextual poetry; genuine language poetry;
cryptographic poetry; cyber poetry; mathematical poetry; visual
poetry (both static and animated visual poetry) and sound poetry,
with the latter two fading into what is called asemic poetry, which
is either visimagery (visual art) or music employing text or
supposed by its creator to suggest textuality and thus not by my
standards kinds of poetry, but considered such by others, so proper
to mention here.

Almost all the poetries in the Underwilsh will eventually be
certified by the academy and the rest of the poetry establishment.
The only interesting questions left will be what kind of effective
poetry will then be ignored, and whether or not the newest poets to
be certified will treat what comes after their kind of poetry as
unsympathetically as theirs was treated.