American Poetry of the 1970s: A Preface

Abstract

In 1970 John Ashbery described theme and subject of his work, very broadly, as individual consciousness confronting or being confronted by of external phenomena. Ashbery's description might also summarize, again quite broadly, following collection of essays. Although nature of an individual consciousness and nature of external differ, often radically, for each poet and movement examined here, attempt to establish and understand relation between two can be seen as common problem for American poets in decade following Ashbery's comment. Read as whole, this collection traces and evaluates what David Kalstone has called the varying possibilities of writing about as explored by our contemporary poets. The first group of essays attempts to describe the relation of self to world (Marjorie Perloff's phrase) as seen in recent poetry as whole. Perloff begins by examining a representative poem of early sixties, James Wright's Snowstorm in Midwest. Wright's poem a late variant of paradigmatic modernist lyric in which an isolated speaker meditates on his relationship to external world, his emotive response portrayed in series of deftly interrelated images. Perloff pairs Wright's poem with Frank O'Hara's Lana Turner has collapsed! in order to demonstrate second way of responding to In O'Hara's poem, progression of events or pseudo-events allows poet to assess, however comically, his own place in universe. To tell story, she writes, is to find way sometimes only way of knowing one's world. As her title indicates From Image to Action: The Return of Story in Postmodern Poetry Perloff finds this second approach to be of most interest in recent poetry. In