What Hewitt, Carroll, Padgett and Shapiro, in company with a slew of publicists for the New Poetry, were sitting on but largely oblivious to was the perspectival slippage that was beginning to make the "confessional" poem appear obsolete and susceptible to supplantation by the so-called "post-confessional" poem that proliferated almost uncontrollably during the next two decades. The features distinguishing these hybrid forms of the American lyric that dominated the second half of the 20th Century so insistently has been much discussed by, among others, Marjorie Perloff, Michael Davidson, and Gregory Orr, himself a practitioner of the "post" variety. In his essay "The Postconfessional Lyric" (incorporated into The Columbia History of American Poetry [1993]), Orr drops an unmistakable thematic plumb-line between the confessional and postconfessional modes. The confessionals, he writes,

injected into poetry an enormous intensity of self. Not only did [they] react against the system making of the High Moderns and reinstate the poetry of self but they also hauled in enormous and startling new areas of subject matter including madness, promiscuity, divorce, the violence of sexuality and relationships, alcoholism, women's rage against victimization, hymns to suicide, and unsentimentalized portraits of family members. . . All these new subjects were presented as personalized drama, all as implicit or explicit autobiographical encounter. . . .

     Included among his "classics of the confessional" are W. D. Snodgrass's Heart's Needle (1959), Robert Lowell's Life Studies (1959), Anne Sexton's To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960), Allen Ginsberg's Kaddish (1961), John Berryman's 77 Dream Songs (1964), and Sylvia Plath's Ariel (1966)--all being notable for having trained on their respective enormities "an adult viewpoint" banished from innocence and in exile from anything that might confuse sperm in alium with spem in alium. Postconfessionals on the other hand tend to be more retrospectively clinical and turn acid reflux syndrome into poetry feeding upon childhood and adolescent abuse. Their primary focus--again, according to Orr--is the exploration of "how a child feels, lives, survives; how a child interacts with parents and the world in its struggle to assume an identity." And they fall into three discrete, more or less generational outcroppings: the "elders" (among whose notable works in this vein include Randall Jarrell's "The Lost World"; Stanley Kunitz's "The Portrait," "The Testing Tree," and "The Magic Curtain"; and Elizabeth Bishop's "In the Waiting Room"); a somewhat younger group, whose leading lights are identified as James Wright, Philip Levine, and Adrienne Rich; and the youngest batch of all, whose most impressive contributions to this lyric mode include Frank Bidart's Golden State (1973), Orr's own Gathering the Bones Together (1975), Louise Glück's Descending Figure (1980), and Sharon Olds's The Dead and the Living (1984). Having listed its four distinguishing "strategies" as "eros," "sympathy," "symbol," and "proportionate ego," Orr concludes with the following characterization:

. . . The postconfessional lyric, in its various incarnations, again and again models an engagement with fundamental issues of personal life, an engagement in which the survival value of transcendence is asserted. One of the major contributions of the postconfessional lyric is to show how the self survives the miseries and trials in which it finds itself--both its own personal anguishes and what Keats calls "the giant agony of the world."

     Had the contributors to the anthologies hauled out of mothballs for this review been told at the time they were postconfessional poets and didn't know it, more consternation than kudos would have come the way of the whistleblowers. For one thing, they would have no doubt wondered, had they been able to access the future and mull over Orr's distinction between confessional and postconfessional poets, just what (apart from the somewhat nebulous differentiation based on childhood vs. adult "viewpoints") gave it critical substance. When you come right down to it, isn't the deviation between the two poetic modes a distinction without a difference, a rehash of the modernism vs. postmodernism debate, with its twin battenings of the same elitist hatch? Both groups of poets dramatized the self--launching into verse as an act of confession in which all strictures of privacy, decorum, and protective wit as had walled the poet in during more guarded set-tos with the muse when a poem might have been incompletely "outed," were cast off. Why should the mere appending of the prefix "post-" put the seal of authority on the illusion that holding nothing back was somehow dearer to the muse than "letting it all hang out," when of all media indistinguishable from their message in the McLuhan sense, the personal confession cries out "Look at me!" loudest of all? 
     Oddly enough--or insufficiently oddly, depending on one's point of view--seven of Gregory Orr's own poems appear in Quickly Aging Here, which activity he appears personally not to have been engaged in since he was all of 22 when the Hewitt anthology hit the book stores in 1969. The thematics of several of these poems betray the sexual fragility of a poet who from all appearances was struggling to adjust to a relationship that went south with less than perfect success. Not much "postconfessional" angst to be soaked up here, though the enormity of response lays waste to any subtlety that might have undercut a pride still mired in priapic postadolescence. A self-authored biographical note at the back of the volume has Orr revealing that he is "drawn now to dream imagery in an attempt to capture the uncensored emotion or matrix of emotions which is as close as we can come to the truth" (QAH, 343)--not that there is much censoring going on in the symbol-assigning process of "Dead Wasp":

Your abdomen still twitches, probing the air.
She says if you fly into the house I must kill you,
which makes sense. But when I have
swatted you, she screams and takes your reflex
throbbing for suffering. What can I do?
There is no way to act rightly.

There is no way for that "rightly" to sound right, given how it lies on the poem, ever so squatly, like the hand of the diarist Antoine Roquentin in Sartre's novel La Nausée (1938), which under pitiless scrutiny (his own) resembles "an animal turned upside down." But being young is to mostly survive one's sexual pratfalls and discover, as in "Being and Wind," that in an instant things can turn themselves around and give rise to simulacra of feelings much too real to have been mistaken for facts factitiously inflated:

Another day when being
alive is its own reward[.]
The wind defines me:
          hair in my face
       the open places

          between buttons.
I am its absence
stepping through space.

      Yet, does any of this really matter, this confessionalist-postconfessionalist scrum of angels dancing? Or is it all just another pinhead diversion of academe, a scam whereby scores of fledgling assistant professors can earn their critical wings--and tenure--with indefinite articles (in all the right journals) purporting to explain how the confessional lyre-bird, through a mere fanning of its tail, could become an ex post factoid rich and strange? Clearly something was happening in the 1960s not just in American poetry but to American poetry, or at least to that part of it not content with endlessly rebooting W. H. Auden's martiallings of lost arts. But weren't the most significant rumblings traceable to those haunts lately frequented by the Black Mountain poets and their cousins-once-removed, the Beats? For poets like Marvin Bell, confession was less a refitting of old clothes than a chore of discrimination delegated to the emotions. Here, from the Carroll anthology, is his poem "My Hate":

My hate is like ripe fruit
from an orchard, which is mine.

I sink my teeth into it.
I nurse on its odd shapes.

I have grafted every new variety,
walked in my bare feet,

rotting and detached,
on the fallen ones.

Vicious circle. Unfriendly act.
I am eating the whole world.

In the caves of my ill will
I must be stopped. (YAP, 74-75)

This isn't hate of the sort that can be resolved by invoking the "devils are angels and angels are devils" conversion schedule of Blake's The Proverbs of Hell. In the annals of contumacy Bell's antipathy can claim, as few others can, "I am become a destroyer of worlds, not just of things." A veritable python of malevolence, it seeks out contours of indifference where "vicious circles" dissolve their radii in secret, and then like the Schattenfreudendienst of unrequited bile that it is, skulks "in . . . caves of [its] ill will" and dreams benightedly of arrest. Yet its self-stabbing rancor to one side, "My Hate" is not the kind of poem that will go peacefully to the butcher's block of confessional or postconfessional poetry without some fists being thrown over whether its to be labeled fish or fowl. Since whoever identifies the bloodlines of a poem gets to fatten on its provenance, whichever critical position is sitting on the most I.O.U's at any given time is the one that will be judged Best of Show when the prizes are handed out. 
     A further variant, which, while remote from Bell's, seems closer to the statistical mean of Orr's standard deviation than the mode of confessional poetry favored by the Lowells and Plaths is Lewis MacAdams's "Red River," a poem in memory of the poet Frank O'Hara, killed in an accident at Fire Island in 1966:

Peter and Linda in my car gone to Easthampton.
In a bar on Third Avenue, the Rail. Enough money
from this job for beer. Swampy, unpleasant day
Phoebe coming in mad, and rightly so. False claim of facts.
No one home on the lower east side, streets are filled
with me too, uptown to dinner. Peter talks poetry,
explains circumstances, the food is rotten.
Linda says at the funeral friends stood in clumps,
like people in galleries who know each other.
Fire engines go back down Broadway.
Peter downtown writing all the details.
Phoebe and I go home too tired to straighten out.
The girl is sleeping, I'm smoking, inelegant
as was never allowed in his poems
which spoke of the small graces we must master
to live in ecstasy in New York City. (YAP, 255) 

Like fire-eaten coals in a darkening hearth, the implicit and explicit collapse together in this poem onto the spent force that once served as both radiant locus of and irrepressible vortex for the New York poets together again at last in Padgett's and Shapiro's anthology. O'Hara, everywhere conspicuated in its lines and spaces, darts out from behind jagged rhythms and transitionless blurtings, his mercurial immanence the perennial downtown to the eternally present and actionless uptown of his absence. A conjurer of "small graces," O'Hara somehow broached them incessantly, in poems that cascaded from him like manna from heaven, and which confirmed (with considerable Irish Catholic irony) the unprovisional providentiality of what he had been assured by the clerics of his youth--unpersuasively, as it turned out--was unending. Ninety percent of life, he believed with Woody Allen, was showing up; the other ten percent was showing off. Had he lived on into our world of email, internet and palm pilots, he would have reveled in the ease with which the hard copy of life could be made molten again in the soft copy of one of his poems' paeans to ardor and energy and forgetfulness. 
     Turn: An O'Hara poem is less a cri du coeur couched in verse than a booty call on the unused portion of the universe. It is always erotic in address (the ubiquitous "I" forever eyeing dots that scream out "Only connect!"); erotic in form (those lines and spaces in which he is everywhere present fill out, bulge, obtrude into the butt-ends of more than just days and ways); erotic in the détente it possibilizes between too much and not enough, here and for ever, mulch and life unrecyclable. Counterturn: It is that unique quality in O'Hara, of sex unceasingly on offer but only rarely touched beyond the raciness of stroke-and-shoot, that MacAdams aims to recover in "Red River." But to recover it he must-the who he is being the hanging indent of what he is--aim at retrieving O'Hara's electric obliquity with the targeting apparatus of a heterosexual, which, if nothing else, makes for the outing of some interesting differences. The most determinative of these perhaps is the right and privilege to smoke and be "inelegant," something, we are told, "was never allowed" in an O'Hara poem, the whole enterprise of such a contraption being poised on a mainspring of just that--poise. In his homage MacAdams remains respectful; but he is not willing to sign away all his prerogatives as a nostalgia buff who wants to remind us of an inner sanctum without insisting that we genuflect on entering it. Stand: The sort of O'Hara piece he is calling up before the bar of literary history is a poem like "Getting Up Ahead of Someone (Sun)":

I cough a lot (sinus?) so I
get up and have some tea with cognac
it is dawn
                   the light flows evenly along the lawn
in chilly Southampton and I smoke
and hours and hours go by I read
van Vechten's Spider Boy then a short
story by Patsy Southgate and a poem
by myself it is cold and I shiver a little
in white shorts the day begun
so oddly not tired not nervous I
am for once truly awake letting it all
start slowly as I watch instead of
grabbing on late as usual . . . (NYP, 428)

     Note that MacAdams doesn't even go near the sun-on style of emotional emjambment--that breathless familiarity with the quotidian that O'Hara was admired for, but not necessarily taken home and introduced to brothers for. O'Hara, somewhat like Rimbaud, was from the womb of the immortals untimely ripp'd; MacAdams, rather differently disposed of, simply slipped from the radar screen of American poetry without a trace. Which is a shame, because he could, when the spirit moved him, or moved in him, produce something nearly new, as this, "Warm Tea," is:

Too late, when you show some
unconcern, too late, gentle one person
loving you, honestly, over there
by the space drift, heater
drying her hair. When it's time
she's ready, but
you're due somewhere.
Awash with angels,
Reading alone in her chair. (NYP, 186)

It remains something of a tossup whether the capitalization of "Reading" should be taken as a misprint or as the launching of a new species of couplet: without rhyme; without reason; indeed, sans all but the good sense to mean nothing, to (merely) be. 
     Poetry, criticism, and even gossip concerning who makes what happen to whom in the giddy world of verse have all come a long way since the "Ars Poetica" of Archie MacLeish. Much maturing has occurred since then (1936); much prophylaxis to get the Symbolisme out of the teeth that were cut on its flinty abîmes; much learning to un-like T. S. Eliot while laboring to imagine Wallace Stevens greening all the blues and bluing all the greens that an utterly colorless academic postmodernism has made spectral in our time. If the last half-century of American verse has done anything, it has reattached the limb of work as an activity to the torsal "work" as clucked-over product of this sterile cuckoo or that. Though it is a fact unlikely to be admitted in some professional circles, the smell of sweat continues to rank high among indicators permitting a free-verse Rolex by, say, John Ashbery to be picked out from the welter of flatlining reports from the void which appear more or less indistinguishable from piebald snatches excerpted from W. C. Williams's Paterson or Robert Creeley's Day Book. Appear more or less indistinguishable, in all but radiance dispensed: seldom have five words counted for so much. (I exempt of course from my survey, "Never, never, never, never, never," whose devaluation ontologically, semantically, and ethically in the text in which it occurs places it hors de jeu for purposes of this discussion.) 
     As I pointed out earlier, the very heaven of being young and a poet in the late '60s underwrote the stretching of much that was already piebald in verse to extremes more commonly associated with the rudely prosaic--but then, "work" was hardly a notion that found much popular resonance in those anxiety-ridden and hedonistic times beyond the sweatshops of the "silent majority," especially among the young. In their world there was little point in cozying up to poetry's great models from the past because the past was the very "bucket of ashes"--to cite the phrase by which Henry Ford famously consigned history to history--that the present was being relentlessly urged not to become. Small bouillabaisse to be coaxed from that kettle of fish, it was thought, so why knock over chairs to honor a tradition that was no more than the highest common factor of its individual talents? 
     But not every poet within view of this overview was all that young in 1968-70, either. More than a few appearing in the Padgett and Shapiro volume have birthdates in the '20s, and one poet included by the editors, Edwin Denby, leaves them all eating dust with a posted year of 1903. Some of its contributors--John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and Kenward Elmslie--attained "senior" status by century's end, their later works having largely eclipsed their earlier, often trendy and shallow ones. This is certainly true of Ashbery, whose poetry of the '80s and '90s doesn't even try to reincarnate the bodiless lucubrations of Some Trees or The Double Dream of Spring. But for the presence of these elders as rudder, there would not have been enough of a course set to know when wandering off it was occurring. 
     No such navigational perquisites obtain in either the Carroll or the Hewitt collection. In those waters, uncharted by no authority but the Zeitgeist's--and then, only from time to time--steering is entirely by moistened finger, even if there's no detectable wind to declare as prevailing. Yet few within the creative community were particularly put out by this. "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows," Bob Dylan had squawked in the mid-'60s, and he wasn't only referring to politics. It was a time when almost everyone, not just aspiring poets, thought he knew which way the wind was blowing culturally because culturally meant counterculturally. A tsunami of tropisms eventually transformed what had begun as "hippie culture" into a mainstream critique of art and life on a scale not seen since European romanticism exploded onto the scene in the early to mid-19th Century. The binding stock of this phenomenon was of course the contribution of the Beats, who melded baroque spirituality, Eastern mysticism, and late-blooming European modernism (which by the '50s meant less a marriage of Lorcan heaven and Brechtian hell than a ménage a trois, with Theatre of the Absurd as homebreaker) into a mass of molten astringencies whose tenor consorted apocalyptically with that squarer of circles and archetype of le fin du monde en avançant, that timekeeper of assassins and honorary beatnik with a moneybelt--Rimbaud.
     Yes, back to him again, and why not? When from one end of the City of God to the other episcopates are imploding, and all up and down the Via Dolorosa noughts are outnumbering crosses three or four to one, you can bet that not only will all roads lead to Rome, but all that don't will promptly be rechristened bypasses and slipways. Which is a circuitous way of saying that the chore of saving poetry's bacon in a period given over almost entirely to street-theater imbroglios between pigs and bores fell not to establishment oracles like James Merrill and Robert Lowell, but to won't-get-fooled-again schriers like Mick Jagger, John Lennon and Pete Townshend. It was they, first emboldened and then embardened by sexual revolutions and Rimbaud's fête des assassins, who knew where it was at, told it like it was, and let it--that massive, monstrous, macrocephalic It that Georg Groddeck, cartographer of the unmappable Freudian Id, brought to Book--bleed for millions of adolescent shock troops who took advanced courses from them in symbolism, archetypalism, indeed the whole of the sieve that had once been Western Civ. But it was now no longer able to muster the requisite humaneness, humanity, and humanitarianism to call an America hellbent on bombing southeast Asia back to the Stone Age to account. While Apollo with self-regarding smile strummed childhoods impaled upon paters non-familias to mathematically compromised life--

Each thirteenth year he married. When he died
There were already several chilled wives
In sable orbit---rings, cars, permanent waves.
We'd felt him warming up for a green bride. . . .

Always that same old story-
Father Time and Mother Earth,
A marriage on the rocks. (James Merrill, "The Broken Home," 1966)

--Dionysus (no pretending to be single in Circe's ingle for him) sang suspiringly of "Strawberry Fields Forever," "Satisfaction," and "Desolation Row" to amphitheaters full of vested virgins and Wild Bill Hickok look-alikes. Few who wanted in on the action and had aged insufficiently so as to be still trusted (i.e., hadn't yet reached 30) could be convinced that warmed-over poetry-and-jazz was where the best chicks were. Nor were they thick on the ground at campus poetry readings, where the hottest action was likely to be the cerebral patty-cake involving some imported male spinster (who was either gay or terrified he might be) and couchfuls of flat-chested coeds with Dylan Thomas college tours dancing in their heads, content to sit there with eyes wide and legs tightly pressed together, while the capon du jour showed the hens in attendance how an egg got laid. What it didn't show was how the happening got laid. 
     More effective than mere matters of form in driving a wedge between academic poets and their younger rock-poet counterparts was the introduction of traumaturgy--almost wholly unacknowledged--in both British and American family life after World War II. Though irremediably middle-class (if often from its lower slopes, and therefore lacking the glossy overlays of affluence that novelistic portraits painted by Louis Auchincloss or John O'Hara laid on with a trowel), the bards of rock addled oöspheres that were as hard-boiled as any held suitable for pickling by "house poets" whose drug of choice was less often marijuana than alcohol, and who changed sex partners about as often as seven-year-itches needed to be scratched. A rock poet from England would be far more likely than his American counterpart to raid a "serious" writer like Philip Larkin or Arnold Wesker for material, if of course he'd read them. Over here, the road not taken led to the alternative of plundering the Beats and then cloaking all loot seized with filigrees of Woody Guthrie and Hank Williams.
     But weren't Beats like Gregory Corso just as likely to gut a Keatsian ode or split the difference between themselves and the Anima Mundi in--to quote Richard Howard--"Cocteau-haunted distichs," able to nail Beauty and Truth coming and going, as in the following:

The caryatid I am is Truth
Lo! My pediment of Lie?

Surely it's not unfair to finger Richard Howard for negligent Orphism, when in catching Corso in Cocteau reflectors he impanels mirrors to plumb fundamentals that rubber gloves alone (and who better here to call as a witness than the testamentarian of Orpheus himself) might have secured entrée to. As uninformed as it is to accuse rock musicians of being uniformly illiterate as a group, it is every bit as slanderous to accuse poets, whether directly or marginally energized by the Beats, of having turned their backs on "strong measures" to ingratiate themselves with the Great Unwashed. Frank O'Hara, whom few could fault for slumming in places where alba or pastourelle was spoken, was among the most flagrant of back-turners in this regard. He too could produce a card (countersigned, if not wholly endorsed, by Wallace Stevens) showing membership in good standing in the guild of modernists, and sound, as here below in "Poem," like a true symbolist when the spirit moved him:

At night Chinamen jump
on Asia with a thump

while in our wilful way
we, in secret, play

affectionate games and bruise
our knees like China's shoes.

The birds push apples through
grass the moon turns blue,

these apples roll beneath
our buttocks like a heath

full of Chinese thrushes
flushed from China's bushes.

As we love at night
birds sing out of sight,

Chinese rhythms beat
through us in our heat,

the apples and the birds
move us like soft words,

we couple in the grace
of that mysterious race.

     So, what are we to make of this largely informalist cat's cradle imbricating the last four decades of American poetry with a host of second-string doppelgängers busily authenticating from below such parallel universes of hip-hop and by-the-numbers as could be launched from that sepia-toned inferno whose superba, loosed unapologetically in "gangsta rap," is now incontestably the hum of moyen sensuel, American style? We are free to make of it what we like; but what we do choose to make of it cannot be disgorged from the entrails of the three anthologies under review. Why not? Because the print demons licensed to roam their pages are identical to those that continue to pit critics against one another in the Battle of the Books-About-Books, that rumble between forces of Light and forces of Darkness (or to put it less Miltonically, between the Perloffs and the neo-Wintersians--though you may wish to reverse these if you're of the Devil's party) that by now seems as ancient as Swift's obsessive contretemps. The two among our review books--the Carroll and the Hewitt--that denied publication to "anyone who has published a book, or been included in a major anthology"; and the remaining one--the Padgett and Shapiro--which flouted fashion by opening its pages even to middle-aged poets, have one astonishing editorial feature in common: a refusal to see themselves as the cutting edge of anything, let alone a revolution in cultural taste or perception. 
     Such self-restraint was, to say the least, refreshing; and particularly so, since the time of their time was indefatigably one in which outlandish claims for every imaginable social, political, and even literary pipedream were routinely floated, provided they were drenched in the right "politically correct" bravado. "It is doubtful," Geof Hewitt admits in his Introduction to Quickly Aging Here, "that any anthology, indeed any collection of anthologies, can adequately represent what is happening" (italics added). For him, as for other archivists of that deluvian time, what remained unrepresentable was not just the enormity of an age in which mindless ablutions eclipsed many of the most pressing concerns of the planet, but the pathos of a life-world in which non-combatants of conscience were driven to shape a counteractive moral existence from the detritus of inflated body counts and black church bombings throughout much of the deep South. In that "life-world" (to many the scare quotes seemed obligatory), every day fell victim to a different angst, a more wrenching version of the dilemma, "To be or not to be." The ethical contortions of the previous decade--often of a trendy existentialist or psychoanalytical nature--no longer accommodated the wheelspins of psychosis-roulette being played in the media and in the streets of American cities. Even so consequential a concoction as Norman Mailer's "The White Negro" (1957) could no longer be assured of playing to crowds used to browsing the alternative press to check on Che's last hours in Bolivia, as opposed to stories with a very different political agenda telling of Vietnamese child-sirens with razor blades in their vaginas luring American servicemen to their deaths. 
     By 1970, with the Third World teetering on the abyss of postcolonial disintegration, Mao's "Cultural Revolution" raging in China, and the United States about to implode from not being able to digest a civil war abroad it was having trouble keeping down at home, one would have thought the fate of poetry would have ranked low on the scale of most Americans' priorities. In fact, it did; but not to the same oblivious degree among the young, who pursued it avidly in their music, ingested it in their college courses, and made it the storm center of that hormonal havoc which accounted for much of their private life, as well as the life of their privates, both on the sit-in and rock concert trail and off. That its importance was viewed narrowly, if at all, by most Americans over 30 (the more politically rabid of whom preferred poetry neat, protean and pre-lingually accessible--in the taste thrills of war; in the wildings of hippie-bashing; in Kent State-style shootings of Hippies from the hip) was mostly offset by the rants of such as Vice-President Spiro T. Agnew, whose forays into the hinterland of poetry pandered, in their use of phrases like "nattering nabobs of nihilism," to those hard-hats with a beer in each hand convinced that anything shot from the mouth of their hero, and with alliteration to boot, couldn't be all bad. 
     Thus, by a strange inversion of cultural rumblings redolent not of East or West but of Irving Berlin, the question which then burned brightest for that herd of independent minds otherwise known as the New York literary establishment was: How are you going to keep them down in Paree (with the Jacques Préverts and the Yves Bonnefoys) after they've seen the farm (Yasger's, that is)? For out of that postage stamp of an acreage that withstood--though to this day nobody can say how--the pre-digestive, digestive and post-digestive leavings of nearly half a million vibe-hungry (not to mention horny) adolescents, there arose from the deep (with the self-righteousness of something not unlike swamp gas) a quiescent terrorism that put much of Western culture under the fatwa of a fundamentalism not seen between the Dukhobors and the Taliban--a fundamentalism of political correctness. 
     The problem was, very few of the young to whom poetry meant anything at all (other than as musically encrusted mantras to fuck by--Ravel's Bolero with words, sort of)--cared much about correctness, political or otherwise. What they did care about, like adolescents everywhere and from time immemorial, was getting laid. Virtually everything else occupied a raggedy second place position in their boredom-crowded lives, including ideology and whatever else there was about the debacle overseas that was not directly tied up with staying as far away from it as possible. The media-savvy politicos within their ranks--the David Dellingers and Tom Haydens who raged unceasingly against the Machine and made much cry about what it was doing to their beloved country, how it was causing whole legions of the underclass to be sucked down the Goya-esque maw of a military-industrial complex whose suppurating imperialism warranted comparison with Abyssinia's sacking by Rome (not of Claudius or Tiberius, but of Mussolini)--were really out of step with the three tenors of the time: sex, drugs, and rock 'n roll. To much of the nation's youth, ensconced in draft-deferred enclaves deftly masquerading as universities, their tirades had no more substance or intelligibility than so many magnesium flares that every now and then lit up the sky. They seemed all flash point with no content beyond a pain in the eye threatening to become a pain in the neck, should the field of vision be blacked out longer than it took a phonograph needle to go from the end of one cut on an LP to the beginning of the next. 
     But to give them their due, these harangues were one with the body of verbal culture that in the late '60s and early '70s was experiencing its final hurrah before the onset of a computronic revolution that would leave words with the dignity of phosphorescent dupes in a game of zero-sum, binary Bingo. America may have been awash in imagery, but images were things that one opened to and then left to slosh about in that module of the mental universe in which nerve endings vanish through a black hole and re-emerge as mind. Abandoned to the inner eye, they are then laid out like the fish of Professor Agassiz fame and interpreted. Suffice it to say that the broadswords of combat reportage were being melted down and reshaped not into ploughshares, but into the equivalent in words of Swiss army knives able to multitask the sentiments of the antiwar movement into immobiles as improbable as Simon Rodia's Watts towers. 
     No doubt few of these things occurred to the dispensers of these harangues. Their audience--which was composed of replicas of themselves, give or take a gene of increased verbal facility--could be counted upon to have attention spans the length of a Laugh-In segment and the cognitive retention of the ditz Goldie Hawn so convincingly portrayed on that TV show. So infected with careerism were the Dellingers and Haydens that they had no way of realizing that somewhere along the way they had traded intellectual integrity for a stony-faced and single-minded politics. Their draft cards long ago disposed of, Vietnam was to them an unpunchable ticket on an ideological gravy train sealed in Paris in May 1968 and unkeepable from its rendezvous with a destiny engineered by Ho Chi Minh and Mao Tse Tung. 
     This infection was pandemic to the extent that it was rooted in media culture and particularly those byways that led, by however circuitous a route, back to television. But though TV constituted a lion's share of the culture many of these poets had grown up with, their version of alienation derived from quite a different source than the mosaical swamps apostrophized by Marshall McLuhan. Search rather the revels of nightmare cinema hosted by snake-charmers of the unconscious like Jean Cocteau and Kenneth Anger for their place of origin. Whether they knew it or not, the real masters of their ceremonies--and johnsons--were in fact as remote from the world of Rowan's and Martin's wisecracking as could possibly be imagined. Cross-cuttings and montage sequences recalled from innumerable film society and art house screenings ran ceaselessly in their minds, and from those projection-room hot-houses of the imagination there emerged blooms of outlandishness scarcely conjurable to any but the Kerouackiest Mexico City Blues freak. More rhododendrons than orchids to be sure, but an arboretum filled to the rafters with such tropisms and tropes was bound by any measure to produce more elephant palm than lady's-slipper. Just what gradations of cinematic perception remain distinguishable on this cutting room floor of verse would take a Parker Tyler to sort out. Enough to note how widespread were the effects of this phenomenon, and to move on.
      But not without first casting a sidelong glance at some of those whose purview extends beyond rapid cutting and montage to encompass "imploded depth-of-field" and a wealth of proto-cinematic techniques not accounted for in such treatises as Sergei Eisenstein's Film Form and The Film Sense. A poem like Stan Rice's "On the Murder of Martin Luther King," for example, reads like a "treatment" or cinematic synopsis for a scenario on Aeschylean themes along the lines of "He whom the gods reward with strength cannot but invite their backhanded disfavor":

BANG!          Aeschylus, you said:
                    God marks that man with watchful eyes
                    Who counts his killed by companies;
                    And when his luck, his proud success,
                    Forgets the law of righteousness,
                    The dark Furies launch at length
                    A counter-blow to crush his strength
                    And cloud his brightness, till the dim
                    Pit of oblivion swallows him.

Not particularly cinematic, you say. Well, no, it isn't. But this, which sets off the poem's second section with a whimper's alter-ego and is titled "The young Texan sees the children with the crushed souls for the first time," is--

Suave children black and brown
stand in my ivy patch
knocking on the openings in bottles
with their palms.
Standing in the wide leaves
each still an ear of dew
making the bottles sound like 
they are grief stricken. Children without real eyes 
in their heads I think
standing in my ivy patch
if I struck their faces with my palm lightly
would thunk like bottles
so pure is their emptiness.
The physical world around them a mystery,
no lit animals,
no yellow,
just holes in their faces. The ivy is more human.

Give them many bottles,
wet their lips with Coke,
suave black and brown bodies full of echoes,
scary as Death in the ivy standing
knee-deep in the green ivy,
beating on the mouths of bottles with their palms,
grieving and smiling. (QAH, 218-19)

--even if it would take a Walker Evans with a digital movie camera to realize its potential in toto. 
      Admittedly, for most of the poets writing here, the same cannot be claimed with anything like the same authority. There are a few like Stan Rice--poets who must grind whether the axes are to hand or not--but the majority, who surrealize in short-line bursts the way amusement park cons tout the ease of prize-winning to passing rubes, write as though they wouldn't know a Satyajit Ray from a sting ray. Truth be told, the tone of Carroll's Young American Poets is that of a rack of energizer bunny-poems trying to drum up a dollar's pyrotechnical mileage out of a nickel or dime's worth of sparkler. As editor (to give credit where credit is due), Carroll did spot the quality of a Louise Glück a full decade before that much oohed-over roman candle, Descending Figure (1980), hit the skies, rocking all heaven with its fire--though, to be sure, it took only a modicum of critical acumen to sense that a poem like "The Inlet" (one of four by which she is represented in the collection) was headed in a different direction than the rest of the earthbound land-fill contending for attentional space alongside it:

Words fail me. The ocean travelling stone
Returns turquoise; small animals twinkle in a haze of weed
As this or that sequence of pod 
Rattles with complete delicacy on the rotten vine.
I know what's slipping through my fingers.
In Hatteras the stones were oiled with mud.
The sunset leaked like steak blood,
Sank, and my companion weaved his fingers
Through my fingers. Wood's Hole,
Edgartown, the Vineyard in the rain
Fuming like snow in Worcester, like gas in the coal
Country. Grass and goldenrod
Come to me, milkweed covers me over, and reed.
But this riddle has no name: I saw a blind baby try
To fix its fists in tendrils of its mother's hair
And get air. The air burns;
The seaweed hisses in its cistern. . . .

Something momentous is having its say here, and I don't just mean Ms. Glück's paysage démoralisé of burning air and hissing seaweed. As practicing poets (no pun intended), the contributors to these anthologies mostly abjure the prophetic strain of Walt Whitman (put through the dual filters of Pound and W. C. Williams) and opt for a freshly minted surrealist strain of fever-flower exacerbation readily associated with Edgar Allan Poe. (That it is further drenched in attar of Ginsberg, Kerouac, and a host of lesser Beats merely makes the cheese, as they say, that much more binding.) Which brings us back to the concerns first broached in this retrospective: the roots of our long-standing love affair with terrorism rationalized as empathy with "freedom fighters" and ardent nationalists, and how so much of our poetry, though not in itself overtly "political," as it is in other parts of the world, embraces violence by other means. Aroused sometimes to frenzy by America's imperialist adventures, but disinclined to muddy their poetry with patriotic gore splashed from either the pacifist left or the jingoist right, not a few of these young poets opted for a classic Freudian inversion. Since they couldn't--or wouldn't--expend the passions of their youth in opposition to the war, they would fan the flames of those passions serving as war correspondents covering the Armageddon unleashed by the sexual revolution. 
     No doubt the unsettling emergence of such a Gehenna made blanket coverage of its horrors an obligation and a beau geste; but at the outset (when the dailies were still promising), few suspected they would soon be dispatching whole files from the trenches as both combatants and correspondents. The experience was, to say the least, unsettling. On the one hand there was euphoria in reporting fearlessly from the front; on the other there was depression, as shell shock reached them in their earthworks, leaving them mutilés de guerre in a war between the sexes whose tactics were becoming dirtier by the score. When full awareness of this trickled down it left burn marks on a number of imaginations that had received their first impressions of bedroom apocalypse from either the dramas of William Inge or the boozy confabulations of Sexton and Lowell, Berryman and Roethke. Traumas thus undergone caused some to stray far from Ligeian shores (where shipwreck might at least have drowned them in pornography), out to where Poean currents gave way to a windless sea. It was here that pharmacology's tantras, rather than the eurekas of mechanized cosmology, laid a narcotized spin on the "horse" in horse latitudes--a nuance surely not wasted on the already wasted Jim Morrison, leader of the rock group The Doors, who gave the pun its moment in the sun with a song of the same name from their album Strange Days. Its text reads as follows:

When the still sea conspires an armor
And her sullen and aborted 
Currents breed tiny monsters
True sailing is dead

Awkward instant
And the first animal is jettisoned
Legs furiously pumping
The stiff green gallop
And heads bob up
Poise
Delicate
Pause
Consent
In mute nostril agony
Carefully refined
And sealed over

What most amazes about such a lyric is the agonistic splendor behind its assumption that something like this is not art song material and is therefore by sheer force of will chainable to a pounding rock beat. No evidence has ever surfaced that would place "Horse Latitudes" among those poems Morrison put aside, to be published separately from songs done by the band. Whatever his admirers might claim, the lyrics of his that fall into that category are largely dreary and eclectic affairs. At best they are points defining the periphery of a "lit" course in the Decadents mis à nu; at worst they conjure a raft of Medusas peddling lap dances to the already stoned.
     From what is known, the only degree Morrison's brief header down the Higher Education rabbit hole resulted in was a degree of vertigo, along with a kingsize contempt for the anality of academe. But he did complete--or somewhat complete--a handful of "in" literature classes at UCLA, the chief byproduct of which was a lifelong (and therefore necessarily brief) obsession with the life and works of Rimbaud. Not just as poète maudit, but as heir, also, to François Villon, the highwayman poet whose gallows humour led him to stretch his luck to the point of fatality and the representatives of the law to work a comparable magic with his neck. Out of that idée fixe grew a taste for the crotchety (and demi-crotchety) catch phrases of the New Surrealism that by the late '60s had hardened into rock clichés that would undoubtedly have had the wildest and most Orphic delinquent of all time climbing the wall. Danny Sugarman, compiler of The Doors: The Complete Lyrics (1992) and hyperbolist par excellence, sees Morrison as the single figure in whom the "lineage" encompassing "Nietzsche, Van Gogh, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Poe, Artaud, Cocteau, Nijinsky, Byron, Coleridge, Dylan Thomas, [and] Brendan Behan" most spectacularly culminates. Wallace Fowlie (who along with Enid Starkie constitute Rimbaud studies' Adam and Eve) similarly exalts Morrison's importance as a late 20th Century Orpheus in his 1993 "memoir," Rimbaud and Jim Morrison: The Rebel as Poet. 
     That clichés are faceless is itself a cliché; but the faceless clichés recycled by rock have an obduracy about them that makes the perma-Frost undercoating the late emissions of this arch-equivocator (the faux-sagacious "On Being Chosen Poet of Vermont" is certainly among the most egregious of his lapses) seem almost swampy by comparison. But catch phrases must originate somewhere. Where did these come from, and what dispersed the weapons-grade version of them into so much poetry of the last 30 years? Domestic surrealist clichés don't have the look and feel of baseline triviality; their home address almost always points to an arondissement of the abstract which George W. S. Trow has brilliantly identified as "within the context of no context." (I heartily recommend his book by that title to anyone who has tried to fathom, as I have, the vampiric run of television continuity's "And now this . . .", and come up snake eyes.) 
     One signature effect of this New Surrealism is the transformation of intransitive verbs into transitive ones: "When the still sea conspires an armor. . . ." Another hooks predicate adjectives to subject nouns to overcome incompatibility where incommensurability of qualities or idiomatic restiveness afflicting phraseology would otherwise reign, as in "True sailing is dead." And still another grounds transitions between stanzas in the shift from a voice whose grammatical mood is indeterminate to one governed by an action both immediate and shocking: 

True sailing is dead

Awkward instant
And the first animal is jettisoned
Legs furiously pumping . . .

For most poets of the Morrison persuasion, the name of the game is to land the reader in a duty-free zone where exotic (or more often, pseudo-exotic) juxtapositions of causality and unbrokered transactions between states of mind and out-of-body sensations unleashed by them disguise what anyone immune to their spell could not fail to spot as an absence of content. Sometimes the frangibility quotient of the reality nexus established in the poem seems higher than the poet likely was when it first found language adequate to its skirting of the probable, as in this passage from Jonathan Cott's "Angels Adoring":

                          . . .
Near the section of a thousand jails,
the beds displayed switches
for your short Swedish hair.
Where we lay
you imagined the children
turned into three white dogs.
The smallest, most deformed
moved into the tombs.
The shrubbery moved for him,
the pines nestled him closer down.

Though the stakes here remain unconscionably low, the poet chooses to cheat, anyway. His mise en scène, low-rent even from the vantage privileged by an intrahead cam, is the surrealist's same old-same old, a hole in logic dug by imagination and turned into a parking structure by dream. 
     No need to stress that this represented a seismic shift in terms of both where American poets thought they had proceeded from and where they believed themselves headed. The Whitmanic called forth waves of identification with the romantic ethos of vistas and democracy; of open spaces, open hearts, open minds; of Rousseau's controlled reveries of the solitary walker giving way to Thoreau's "love of the wild no less than the good." The contemporary cult of Mr. Poe ("our cousin," to Southern poet and pre-eminence grise, Allen Tate) reserves on the other hand its recombinant slaver for the machine rather than the garden. What Richard Wilbur characterizes in his famous Introduction to The Laurel Poe (1959) as a "mechanism of destructive transcendence" is to be found "everywhere in Poe." But certainly no less pervasive in his writings (and not least in his poetry) is the tendency--endlessly harped on by the French Symbolists--to work up the Aeolian and "correspondent breeze" (beloved of both Coleridge and Shelley) into a lusty tramontano of bells, clappers and balls. All of which tends to support the reverse encomium accorded him by Aldous Huxley, who noted (contra Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Valéry, et al.) "what a very great artist-perished on most of the occasions when Poe wrote verse." Yet, as always when idolatrous affairs are carried on with poets with neither their expressed consent nor their consented to expression, it's never what they actually wrote that becomes the stuff of obsession, it's what they would have written had they composed, rather than continued to decompose, in the time of the obsessor. In other words, had Poe lived in Chicago during the late 1960's, he might very well (so this reasoning goes) have sounded like this:

The dead knock about
not only in graveyards and in beds,
shopwindows, streetlamps, photographs
serve them almost as homes.
You'll want to be their friend.

In the dark
they've gotten clumsy;
they grope and don't understand.

They've no more substance
than all the breath
your life has left.

They empty the room.
The door they open
is your own.
Without your surprise
they won't come. (YAP, 301)

However, that reasoning would be wrong, or at best incomplete, because if William Hunt's "The Dead Knock About" reconstitutes a vanished Poe, it is one with the ex post facto influences of Jorge Luis Borges's Pierre Menard factored in. Which means that we are no longer trafficking in mere anachronisms, but rather consorting with an afflatus who is steeped not only in Whitman but also in any number of other poets, no less good and gray, who flourished well after Poe departed the scene in 1849. Not to mention the fact that there are some eerie correspondences breezing in and out of the time-cracks through which that necrophilic baroque so uniquely Poe's leaches into the mortificational postmodern of a Hunt (or is it vice versa?). In a brief biographical note (leeching encryptively, still, from Poe) Hunt delivers himself of the observation that "Experience is a wall; finally it excuses our presence," concluding by way of an afterthought, "I suspect that life should be a daydream without dreams." Doubtless this made sense to the knockabouts in charge of grants at the National Endowment of the Arts since Mr. Hunt (the anthology's editor tells us in a note) was the recipient of one in 1967. Apparently some knockabouts--pace Thomas Wolfe--know a tad more than Brooklyn; though it might not hurt here to remind ourselves that death was hardly something Walt Whitman, even less than Poe, skulked in fear of. 
     Still, not all versions of surrealism employ dreams to reduce the touring of that tract house most of us in our minds ball up with Death to the non-committal walk-through of a looky-loo. American surrealism, it is true, often appears to do this, though with more careful scrutiny first impressions of its superficiality prove, as with so many other things ripe with illucidity, less than reliable. Still, there not infrequently lurks in such roustings of the conscious mind--homegrown surrealism, unlike the European variety, treats the unconscious as something unworthy of belief--a terror of the known reformulated to the mundanities of the unknown, as though (looking forward to John Ashbery's much anthologized poem on "P's & O's") the paradox of the one were inherent in the oxymoron of the other. It being largely a fiction that good examples of surrealism abound in our poetry, looking to American novels such as Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust (1939) for undiluted dollops of it at least allows us, if nothing else, the shortcut of getting around one fiction by diving deeply into another. This then, is American surrealism and not some addled substitute thrown together in a lab pushing product once associated with André Breton:

". . . Have you seen what's in the swimming pool?"

She pulled him along.

The air of the garden was heavy with the odor of mimosa and honeysuckle. Through a slit in the blue serge sky poked a grained moon that looked like an enormous bone button. A little flagstone path, made narrow by its border of oleander, led to the edge of the sunken pool. On the bottom, near the deep end, he could see a heavy, black mass of some kind.

"What is it?" he asked.

She kicked a switch that was hidden at the base of a shrub and a row of submerged floodlights illuminated the green water. The thing was a dead horse, or rather, a life-size, realistic representation of one. Its legs stuck up stiff and straight and it had an enormous distended belly. Its hammerhead lay twisted to one side and from its mouth, which was set in an agonized grin, hung a heavy, black tongue.

"Isn't it marvelous!" exclaimed Mrs. Schwartzen, clapping her hands and jumping up and down excitedly like a little girl.

"What's it made of?"

"Then you weren't fooled? It's rubber, of course. It cost lots of money."

The same book by West made a distinctly unmemorable movie, whose callowness was further exploited by its insistence on playing the "surrealist" bits for all they were worth. Since filmmakers (with the exception of a few great Europeans such as Cocteau and Buñuel) have traditionally star-crossed surrealism with either creeping dementia or flatout bonkers, it should upset the apple cart of no major film theory were the term to be tilted so that its cinematic axis extends all the way from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari to Pi. But what is true of filmmakers in general is not always true of Hollywood in particular, though when movie minds meet, lost or otherwise, national boundaries are seldom observed. As Anthony Lane recently remarked in a New Yorker review of the new Ron Howard film, A Beautiful Mind (January 7, 2002 issue): "Movies, by and large, are themselves locked into the delusion that there is something liberating in the loss of sanity; Hollywood likes every savant to be touched with a trace of idiot, and vice versa, as if loath to suggest that doltishness should ever go unrewarded, or genius unpunished." Is it any wonder that at the vanishing point of cinematic art Richard Helfgott and Forrest Gump bring identical lumps to throats which, could they produce speech at such moments, would emit sounds not all that different from those playthings of fate's own. 
     As with the severed head of the prize thoroughbred that turns up in the bed of the Hollywood producer in the first of the Godfather movies, it is the motive accounting for the shocking unaccountability of the mise en scène itself that makes for surrealism, not, as in the case of the West, the trompe l'oeil born of a (tacky) desire to "amuse," or, reverting again to the screenplay by Mario Puzo, of the offer made "that he can't refuse." Rubber horse, real horse; Hollywood pool, Hollywood bed: all that it takes to kick American reality over into American surreality is a jumpstart by that credulity with which protagonists and antagonists alike swallow the hook, line and sinker of the American dream. That dream's logic has an energizing algorithm whose formulary might best grasped as a paraphrase of the oft-quoted Lyndon Johnson homily on aggression: "Nightmare ignored is nightmare unleashed." The reason it takes "lots of money" to program such effects into poetry is, quite simply, that its "screen" is much smaller than that of fictional prose. Then, too, the attention span of an audience becomes harder to sustain when either the grandiose goes miniscular or the miniscule (matching the high hopes of the ant floating down the moat on its back with an erection and yelling, "Raise the drawbridge!") reaches after boffo effects by relying on stilts supplied by the artificial enlargement of the medium. 
     As mentioned earlier, it was pressures first applied by the Beats and later co-opted by the psychedelicaticians of rock that induced more than a few "serious" poets to count on imagistic incommensurability alone to speak the volumes that verse--precarious medium that it is--long ago farmed out to opera and other remote outposts of the performing arts. Back in 1936, when surrealism bestrode the jade of the European avant-garde like a sexually implanted colossus, Herbert Read had the temerity to attribute its bumptious disregard for tradition to the "romantic principle" itself. At one end of the nightstick wielded by class-ridden culture, he suggested in "Surrealism and the Romantic Principle," there is the "intellectual counterpart of tyranny" we call "classicism," and at the other end, that furthest from the handle (where reinforced wood meets unreinforced flesh and bone) we find "surrealism." (Read preferred the term "superrealism," but his reasons for this need not detain us here.) Surrealism does not resolve the age-old conflict between classicism and romanticism "by establishing a synthesis which I was prepared to call 'reason' or 'humanism'-but by liquidating classicism, by showing its complete irrelevance, it anaesthetic effect, its contradiction of the creative impulse." 
     Read admits that what attracted him to surrealism was its revolutionary vigor--which is to say, its not at all secret complicity with the promptings of (pace Pope) the Great Anarch or Nietzschean Superman whose fortress of solitude is the anything-but-sacred heart. Thus, for Read surrealism may be "anti-rational, but it is equally anti-emotional."

If you wish to reduce surrealism to its foundations you will find the only basic elements on which any useful structure can be built--the basic elements of natural science and psychology. The surrealist builds on that materialistic basis. But he builds. He creates. And he has his method of building, his craft of logic, his dialectic.

He does temper his enthusiasm for this art-frisson of the moment, however, long enough to confess in his essay-cum-manifesto--Imamifesto might be more accurate still--that the term "surrealism" gained currency (over "superrealism") because "the public wanted a strange and not too intelligible word for a strange and not too intelligible thing," but he cedes no ground to those among his contemporaries who pooh-poohed the movement as the swan-song of Freud pursued by Lohengrins, of communist ploughshares beaten into not so gai sabers. To carpers such as they, surrealism's devices were less strange than the ease with which their repetitive effect brought the house of art appreciation down around its ears, in a Europe increasingly given over in the '30s to warmongering and out-of-town try-outs for the latest staging of Germany's wring cycle. For what could be more transparent, after all, than surrealism's pretense to an unintelligibility that could only be earned by monumentalizing its own strangeness to the nth degree? Had anything really changed between the crush-and-sniff diversions of Les Chants de Maldoror by the none too famous Comte de Lautréamont and the crush-and-snuff perversions of L'Histoire de l'Oeil by the all too infamous Georges Bataille? 
     And you, Garcia Lorca--blood wedding's Best Man--was that you down by the watermelons? By way of answering that--if a trifle circuitously--let me just say that Padgett and Shapiro present us with 27 poets that give New York as their place of residence, and not one, with the possible exception of John Ashbery, could be said--as of 1970--to have essayed Icarian heights on those wings so heavenly flight-tested on these shores by that Spaniard, that incomparable Spaniard, who among other things taught the city of Whitman it was refinado y hermoso to wear a fruit bowl on your head (hence reading Manhattan its Carmen Miranda rights for the first time); and left it--some even say abandoned it--to the blizzard of pixie dust it then had to dig itself out from. 
     Not so Jim Brodey, who in "Rosewood Vision" manages to lay down a flight path but gets no farther than the runway length of a Cessna before succumbing to plumage droop as hope of defying the sun buys the farm and several around it. While too lengthy to cite in full taxidermic extension, the poem can no less suitably be mounted in excerpts, so what follows may be taken as a little going a long way or as Brodey to-the-max, it makes no difference, either way: 

San Francisco
                    gentle in storms of fiery fogbank shower
                                                  & cat shit.

America
         Following America around on a motorcycle in a long cape
                                                     & mask.

quiet imperfect follies at the radiating source
change into heavenly poem energy

                   dark
                   as testimony in a Shoe

I'm at the desk, in Colorado, in Hollywood
In Mill Valley rainfall (in redwoods)

                               humming
                               into Michael's lion prose book

                                        latitudes of strength

          jaw-to-jaw, hour to hour

          the collected poems of Hart Crane. . . . (NYP, 295-96)

Well, you get the idea. The principle remains the same, as Winston Churchill said of Niagara Falls when forced to view it a second time: tremendous promise of power, but in its natural state little more than turbulence in need of a turbine. In rumor mills of talent where such as Jim Brodey are ground fine, poems abound but successes do not. In all too many poems of the sort Brodey goes in for, the only thing the reader has to go on is whatever an educated guess can make of the last non-sequitur that hit the pipeline. Images fall weightlessly upon one another in a parody of free association whose reference point seems less a seam common to several garments than a tuck in time in which bagatelle is being endlessly played by boys with undescending balls. While the average poetry reader would likely have made it through the whole thing (thinking, no doubt, of imaginary roach clips with real roaches in them), precious little would have been waiting for him at the end to make the trip memorable. And in the absence of even so much as a twitch of ecological concern-the poem's title is, after all, "Rosewood Visions"--he is left to his own devices, the poet's personal ones having proved inadequate to every task assigned them. Hence, unable to take Brodey at his own uninspired word, he can only remark of the drone of a poem he has been squandering time on that it toils not, neither does it spin. No use in trying to fathom why the bark of such doggerel is always biteless, or in noting that its rage to disorder is as long in the tooth as it is short on teapots to house its tempest whipped up on demand. 
     But speaking, as Brodey does, of Hart Crane, the connection between that uniquely American poète maudit and surrealism on both sides of the Atlantic look backward to Rimbaud and the later Symbolists and forward to the Beat and rock poets we've been talking about. Characteristic flights of technologically up-to-date poetics as may be seen in Rimbaud's "Ce qu'on dit au poète à propos de fleurs"--

De tes noirs Poèmes,--Jongleur!
Blancs, verts, et rouges dioptriques,
Que s'évadent d'étranges fleurs
Et des papillons électriques!--

or in "Mes petites amoureuses"--

Un hydrolat lacrymal lave
          Les cieux vert-chou
Sous l'arbre tendronnier qui bave,
          Vos caoutchoucs--

look ahead to Crane's "Lachrymae Christi"--

Whitely, while benzine
Rinsings from the moon
Dissolve all but the windows of the mills
(Inside the sure machinery
Is still
And curdled only where a sill
Sluices its one unyielding smile--

and "White Buildings, III":

Capped arbiter of beauty in this street
That narrows darkly into motor dawn,--
You, here beside me, delicate ambassador
Of intricate slain numbers that arise
In whispers, naked of steel; . . . 

     Of course, the poet Crane really looked to for hints on how to get it on with the world's "body electric" was not the loose sphinctered Rimbaud but the hermetically sealed Mallarmé, for whom eternity was but a branch office of the Ineffable and the azur a blue yonder of little or no kinship with the Rimbaldian call of the wild, waiting. Still, we are spinning far too centrifugally from the larger question posed a while back, and that is, Why did surrealism emerge as the dominant mode of poetry written in the wake of the Beats; and how did it manage to merge so effortlessly with the unblinkered idealism of Walt Whitman and the open-eyed objectivism of William Carlos Williams?
     So let's approach it this way. As little as we might like to see Rimbaud's image as universal solvent of the anti-modernist animus tarnished, it's hard not to wonder, as André Breton does in his "Second Manifesto of Surrealism" (1930), "who precisely Rimbaud was trying to discourage when he said that those who tried to follow in his footsteps would be struck dumb or driven insane" (Seaver and Lane trans. [1969], 177). This suggests that even if we view American surrealism as the dark side of a legitimating light ray emanating from the depths of the demos (as opposed to the Euro-version, where upheavals of dreamscape evince the liberated unconscious of communism thrown into bas-relief), it remains difficult to see it as anything more than love and death shadow boxing à la Leslie Fiedler, featherweight division. Breton thought himself and his fellow surréalistes, first, in the Manifesto of 1924 and then somewhat later, in the second of 1930, as on the brink of a new revolution of the Word--a revolution that would do nothing less than wipe away the petty complacencies of the last several hundred years of art and politics. A lot of blood, as they say, has flowed under the bridge since then, and it has stemmed from depths of political violence scarcely imaginable to the only true surrealists to have laid brush to canvas or pen to paper: Hieronymus Bosch, François Rabelais and Jonathan Swift. Was Rimbaud, then, not a surrealist? Or Lautréamont? Or Bataille?
     Clearly, much depends on how we define surrealism, whether we ground it in some dubious concept like the Freudian unconscious or the Marxian dynamic of history, or choose some other notion rather less sinkable than either of these. After all, the two great founders of surrealism, Rimbaud and Lautréamont, had no idea of what they had accomplished in this regard until their spirits were reanimated a third of the way through the last century in a conjoint hijacking of D. H. Lawrence's Fantasia of the Unconscious and Disney's somewhat mousier Fantasia. They did their respective impersonations of unsuckerable seer and Monk Lewis.com in utter disregard of the fact that they were retroactively playing back-up for the Breton lays of Aragon, Bataille, Tzara, and Eluard. And that fails to include in the discussion the blinding galère of painters not a whit more "surrealistic" than Paul Delvaux (whose name, one feels obliged to mention in passing, does not appear along with Buñuel's, Ernst's, Dali's, and Tanguy's among those rushing to defend Breton's largely unintelligible Second Manifesto in 1930) that found nothing exceptionable in the suggestion made by Nadja's author that firing a revolver randomly into a crowd was the one acte that would render gratuit any likeness drawn between surrealists and Gideans without having to utter a word.
     And besides, the surrealists from within Rimbaud's own tribe were renegades and jihadists split off from the fundamentalist Dada wing of the Bateau Ivriste school that the poet himself later outgrew. Breton's circle may have claimed him for their own, but no one can say he wouldn't have resisted those attempts at adoption as a move to draft a majority-of-one made by a league of minors. Yes, he was visionary, in the best (if not always the good) sense. But his revolt was always rooted in language and the plethora of worlds its intergalactic associations opened to view. It was never distilled from images drawn helter-skelter from a delinquent unconscious. Though for a time Rimbaud may have thought highly of crime as a means of shattering his own psychic log jams and displayed a sweet tooth for candied fruit from off the Forbidden Tree, he never once reveled in things bizarre or kinky for their own sake. Since he could neither coerce illumination from its cave, nor kidnap delirium from its meningitic kingdom, he settled for ways to simulate the first by dissimulating the second. After all, was not delirium merely illumination disreputabilized by lack of discipline and spiritual rigor? And illumination--was it not the result of saturnine right brain talking rings around Jovian and enlightened left? True poets winter in hell, finding the infernal, like the "unimaginable zero summer" of T. S. Eliot's Little Gidding quite unseasonable for the rest of the year. (Though no one should ever accuse this great poet of consistency. In the middle of his prosepoem "Adieu," from Une saison en enfer, he lobs, by way of an afterthought, this: "Et je redoute l'hiver parce que c'est la saison du comfort!") On the one hand he could hypostasize in "Délires II" (also from that work): "Je devins un opéra fabuleux: je vis que tous les êtres ont une fatalité de bonheur: l'action n'est pas la vie, mais un façon de gâcher quelque force, un énervement. La morale est la faiblesse de la cervelle"[;] while on the other he could write, with equal sangfroid in "Angoisse," from Illuminations--albeit within the protective zone of parentheses--"(O palmes! diamant! -- Amour, force! -- plus haut que toutes joies et gloires! -- de toutes façons, partout, - -démon, dieu, -- Jeunesse de cet être-ci : moi!)" His je could synonymize a shitload (his term) of autres, all convinced (in accordance with the ancient joke) they were a madman named Arthur Rimbaud. 
     And then, there's that other thing, but on this side of the Atlantic. Could all those budding young surrealists corralled by Carroll, Hewitt, Padgett and Shapiro not have known how distasteful les Surréalistes found almost everything American? Were they so far out of the loop that they remained ignorant of the fact that the Second Manifesto (which they dearly prized) demanded the severing of virtually all ties with predecessors, regardless of worth? How could they have overlooked that lengthy passage in which, "with [the single] exception [of . . .] Lautréamont" (who presumably died before he could do anything Breton deemed exceptionable), Sade, Baudelaire, Rabbe, Valéry are one after another tossed overboard--even Rimbaud himself, "for not having made completely impossible, certain disparaging interpretations of his thought, such as those made by Paul Claudel"? And that proposal made to all surrealists a little further down the page (before even more cant is piled on in denial of the house that Kant built) to ". . . in passing, spit on Edgar Poe"--how could they have missed that? Could the leaders of Al Qaeda possibly have stated what is reproduced below any more explicitly (it is in fact one of the few unambiguous statements to be found in the "Manifesto"):

. . . [If] we cannot find words enough to stigmatize the baseness of Western thought, if we are not afraid to take up arms against logic, if we refuse to swear that something we do in dreams is less meaningful than something we do in the state of waking, if we are not even sure that we will not do away with time, that sinister old farce, that train constantly jumping off the track [--shades of Lawrence of Arabia!--], mad pulsation, inextricable conglomeration of breaking and broken beasts, how do you expect us to show any tenderness, even to be tolerant, toward an apparatus of social conservation, of what ever sort it may be? . . .

     Denise Levertov, Basil Bunting, even that coolest of cool heads, Robert Creeley, after a while chanted only to the disinvestiture of attention that stared glassily back at them from the other side of college lecterns and podiums. Echoing his friend, mentor and colleague Charles Olson, Creeley (also responding to "The Writer's Situation" for NAR) averred that it was all about dealing with what is given.

. . . It is . . . something as actual as wood, or fish, that one has to do with. It's not in the mind in some sense that one can now exercise a discretion upon it-thinking about it in some privileged way. To the contrary, there is a feeling that adamantly does insist one is being told something and had better get it right the first time, else there won't be another chance. One is told once. For this reason I find it hard to revise--"re-see"--just because the initial seeing has to be responded to with all the ability possible because I'm not given another chance. . . I agree with Robert Duncan that choice is recognition--not a debate between alternatives. So if one doesn't know "what to do," given such circumstances, clearly there's nothing really to do.

The hipster-existentialist, Kerouac's voice-of Dharma, the Zen master's smack upside the head all speak in unison here; but in the end, it is a circus animals' desertion that strikes the tent and puts the hoops and highwires away for good. Though Creeley may have outlasted most of his contemporaries, few today would pretend his continuing trickle of poems are where it's at--if indeed anywhere is, when so-called "language poets" call the tune and the most heavily booked road show carrying most poetry magazines is the Ashbery Follies. Better in leaving these shoals to take solace in the lumpen digitalis of one of American surrealism's last heartfelt moments, as here preserved in "The Inhuman Rain Rejoiced" by Don Shea:

Black, the sun floats melting,
Solitary rocks, moss glow,
Naked, something cringes.

The sun carries mounded darkness
On the side of inland mountains.
Nobody will believe the baby.

Disguised, unnatural ways grew,
High the dark ocean meditates
Something ailing, nameless--a cask.

The elementary mists clutch
Needles fleeing black pastures.
Nothing walks moving out from thorns. (QAH, 209)

But who needs the flea market run by the surrealists when marvelous transformations are possible working with pure language alone. Baudelaire knew this, Rimbaud knew this, and Mallarmé as well. How come we can't fathom it? Evidence of it is everywhere to be stumbled on, tripped over, even drowned in, for heaven's sake. Add an "h" to "wacky" and a plain nut is suddenly elevated to the adjectival ranks of Genghis Khan and Attila the Hun. Or consider the range of turn-ons that open up when a single letter "u" converts "facet" to "faucet"; or the Derridean difference that kicks in when "careen" and "career" are set to vibrating together. From fortuitous beneficences of language such as these are genuine poems made. Rimbaud's tribe might have whooped its way to victory at the Great Poetry Uprising of the late '50s and '60s, but the spirit of Rimbaud himself was notably in absentia. We forget that his notorious declaration of principle, "Il faut être absolument moderne," was one of the observations with which he abandoned poetry. He had arrived quite independently at the realization that modernity and the modernism that he largely invented were not at all synonymous or even correlative. Before it even became fashionable in the salons of pre- and post-World War I Europe, Rimbaud was proclaiming that the distrust of modernism was the beginning of wisdom. 
     "In the destructive element immerse," advised Joseph Conrad, and what effluxions of modernisme and faux-modernisme followed! Isn't it time today's poets stopped taking the lesser clones of Ashbery for granted and realize that surrealism, the last child of that modernism which Rimbaud fathered but did not beget, never really progressed beyond the rebellious adolescent phase of its so-called "golden age"? Nor was the pseudo-visionary propheteering, sweatshop politics, and sexual Guignol laid on with a trowel that was hardly ever Grand because it could scarcely manage to be good at all what Poe had in mind as a future for American verse. Americans are so addicted to the overcharged daydreams of the out-of-control consumer that they have little energy left over to process the surplus value fantasizing on which surrealism thrives. This might be useful information for those still wondering why critics continue to marginalize the work of Nathanel West, Robert M. Coates, Anaïs Nin and John Hawkes. And they are among our best surrealists! Though he praises Hawkes's The Cannibal as possibly "the most profound novel written about [World War II]," and his The Lime Twig for "reveal[ing] a nightmare world of evil that is mitigated only by a unique style that reclaims man from the absurdity of his condition," Ihab Hassan--no mean connoisseur of postmodern horseflesh, and a long-time supporter of that writer's work--is quick to point out that Hawkes is "one who has been much neglected." Nor is this a mysterium difficult to penetrate. After somewhat briefly experiencing being oversold on the poetry market, Theodore Roethke and John Berryman mercifully did not live to see their stock plummet to the extremely low levels they presently occupy. Poe, too, had his ups and downs on that market but his stock holds steady, despite fluctuating PE ratios. 
     First of all, Poe's poems and fictions were not, as too many of his critics still insist, the products of some id-iotic "unconscious" the nebulous existential "proof" of which lay in psychic burps stemming from nocturnal dyspepsia and the innocent parapraxes of fouled-up tongues. They were machines for the manufacture of carefully contrived horrors whose sole données, in the Jamesian sense, were the familial fantasies that often inspired them. Which means that they're about as "surrealistic" as the devices implanted in Disneyland's popular "Haunted House" to "frighten" children of all ages. 
     Someone should tell today's Young American Poets what Paul Carroll could not have known to let his up-and-comers in on circa 1968. Succinctly put, it might go like this: "Immerse yourself in language, as Rimbaud did, and the world will dream with you. Surrealize, and you will dream alone."

Postscript 

As the year marking the onset of the new millennium ends rich in trial and error, one phrase above all others seems to have survived the dreary onslaught of ribbon news and bought itself at least a semblance of Warholian immortality: "ground zero." While it has had numerous rivals, history teaches that when a phrase attains the upper reaches of the cordillera of publicity, its power lies not in its stars but in its capacity to domesticate dread--which is to say, to cloak the unspeakable in vestments that have been borrowed from some instance of the horrific equally unprecedented, and no less remote in time and place, from some Ur-unleashing of carnage in whose shadow they find umbrage. Such recyclings of the monstrous not only keep our childhoods from sinking out of sight, but in addition guarantee that the language we speak will continue to reflect in every torsion and twist that many-tongued catachresis (now more street smart than bookish) whose center is nowhere and whose circumference is everywhere. In our corner of the Inferno it is synonymous with the litter of radio-rant and cyberchat that the runts of hatespeak and oblivion, backs arched and claws exposed, have been benightedly hissing over since Hector was a Victor pup. 
     But while cats and dogs have noisily reigned, masters of war have been noisomely at play and creating havoc that is more than phraseological. Nor is amuck all that these pushers of gimcrack have been running. Given the instantaneousness with which cliché today claims originality for itself, both in word and in (digitally enhanced) deed, it is inevitable that the droit de seigneur reserved for its predations on the collective imagination by advertising enables as well as empowers the wielder of its entitlements to trash privacy rights no less barbarously than it does the equally well established ones of self-possession. Today's score composers for motion pictures like Clockwork Orange and Platoon are no more required to ask if they can "take over" the music of Beethoven and Samuel Barber than are screenwriters adapting The Great Gatsby to poll audiences about whether those phenotypes so lovingly limned by F. Scott Fitzgerald in that novel can be expropriated and denatured into fantasial cut-outs of Robert Redford, Sam Waterston and Mia Farrow, in flagrante delicto as well as in excelsis. Ask and it shall be given to you; take, and the royalties and options rain down on you without asking. To the victor dog belong the spoils of reproduction, mindless and irresponsible though they might be. 
     The year 2001 certainly left the American version of Magna Romana with more than its usual allotment of cut-outs, accidental heroics, undisclosed locations. But it has yet to be determined if the watershed this twelve-month is believed to have been will leave us cleaving to cut-outs (whether of good-guy Giulianis or bad-guy bin Ladens matters little) or to phenotypes of greatness yet unglimpsed. Meanwhile, we are left with a yawning and still smouldering depression in our consciousness corresponding to the dead zone that continues to gape in lower Manhattan, in the lower torso of Manhattan, like a great wound. The charred ground of that zone, a downdraft hardened into rubble (since cleared away), is the zero degree, the no longer fungible core of what once stood proudly as The Big Apple. Having lost their mated sovereigns, the topless towers of modernity's Eternal City now look out over--with further apologies to Marianne Moore--an imaginary Ilium with real ruins in it and share a vacancy undyingly haunted by cytoplasm as much as by the architectural overconfidence of its Daedaluses. 
     But that place of zero degree articulates a silence even more sinister than its sister in cacaphony. Those Greeks who burnt those towers are still among us, and Ulysses, the terrorist who dreams of horses yet rides the whirlwind, continues to keep us--despite the remonstrance suffered in Afghanistan--in the grip of a most unheimlich maneuver. For his subalterns, postcolonialists all, are everywhere, crouching hairless and waiting, like the apocalyptarians they are, for the End. The cytoplasm sent into the air by the Al Qaedan "of many devices" (some of it, as we have seen, capable of mass destruction) has settled into cells dispersed across the globe, while we, proconsuls of Americana's pax, swaddled in imperium and with money to burn, have seen ourselves, on the stroke of midnight, turn unsettlingly back into Trojans. The Aeneas who founded our empire, having retreated in time past Romulus and well past avuncular Remus, is reduced once more to having to bear Anchises toward the toxic dreamcloud of the future.* What irony has skewered us that we should now be stalked by an Odysseus tied to a dialysis machine and stalked by Argus-eyed satellites overseen by the Poseidon of Big Oil? Clearly, a bastard poetry has fallen aslant our lives; and in the shadow of its bar sinister has woven our belittlements into a coat of arms, the blazonry of which reminds us that our cities have shrunk to no more than wind tunnels of plague and conduits of nerve gas. Since our Day of the Triffids, we inhabit a Pindaric ode in which strophe annihilates antistrophe and nothing is left standing. 
     Thus, whatever his fate, the contriver of our present misery has hijacked the planet and sent it hurtling toward the sun. Global warming, having confirmed what we most fear, has had added to it the sign of Circe, which now hangs over us all. As we watch and wait for ends to spring from their hiding, it is difficult, as prisoners of a dream no longer our own, not to wonder whether, in the sequel presently unfolding, the suitors will not somehow win leaving Penelope, bereft of terrorist husband and his progeny, to bear her concupiscence in silence and mortification, as the death of words and darkening age wind down her days. Nor is that scenario likely to change even if, as talk has it, that most fickle street on earth, the "Arab street," has reduced Osama bin Laden to but a reliquary of his own lust for mortality. Should that turn out to be the case, it would bespeak a poetry left unborne by the bearers of barnstorming politics who, in an earlier time managed to be at once beguiled by the equivalency of power with the barrel of a gun and the unbearable lightness of being. In fleeing poetry like a terrorist running for his life, Rimbaud might possibly have relished the irony in such homecomings to the roost. He never did shake all the Charleville dust from the youth that abandoned him when finally leaving Paris for points east. He was beckoned to by the wonderment and waste tout court that his own aptitude for gun-running eventually led him to-the same bleakness of soul, in other words, that could aim a 747 at the very citadel of mass destruction, the Pentagon, and try to level it. Henry Miller, who was himself haunted by the "Rimbaud problem," and driven to write an entire book about it, saw fit to title it with a phrase from its subject's own lexicon: The Time of the Assassins (1946). His point, pullulating as always beneath countless others, was that that time was now. 
     And so it is.
_____________________________

*One of the fringe benefits of the New Surrealism discussed earlier is the ability it confers to imagine time as something that flows backward as well as forward; to in fact conceive of its paths as a simultaneity of ricorsi or self-impersonating epic recurrences that can wear one another inside out like a reversible coat. Beyond the fringe of that benefit, we are discovering what it might be like to experience in fast rewind the assault on Troy as the original Trojans did, just as Joyce's Leopold Bloom was able to relive in fast forward--albeit less consciously than we--the 10-year homecoming of a certain wily Greek in Ulysses. With epic similes (as likely to be anti-heroic as heroic) wafted by the correspondent breeze now flying thick and fast, it is not at all hard to also imagine President Bush, his "Alfred E. Newman" klutziness aside, bearing his father (himself once king, but now old and made blind by the gods for braggadocio and the abuse of prophecy, having unwisely ordered them to read his lips) on his shoulders out of a city in flames. A twin-towering improbability this; but in the backwash--and blowback--of America's imperial destiny (one, we see now, rather overgiven to postmodernizing the heroic and lowering booms on boobs putting no stock in busts), who would deny the gods their dividend of laughter from seeing the mother of the President--"Aeneas's" mother--try to make the hook and eye of Aphrodite's girdle meet at the front?