From Experience to Discourse: American Poetry and Poetics in the Seventies

Abstract

Given the rapid changes in taste, fashion, and values that seem to characterize contemporary culture, it would be surprising not to find contemporary poetry undergoing similar shifts. I cannot promise such a surprise. Instead I shall posit a general opposition between a poetics of immediate and a poetics acknowledging its status as discourse in the hope that this distinction can clarify the work of many younger poets only now developing mature voices. By setting their work in contrast to the self-consciously postmodern poetry of the sixties, I hope also to establish some specific ways of speaking about literary change and its relation to cultural change. And finally I want through my analyses to express a personal problem which I hope is a representative one: it seems to me that despite, or perhaps because of, these two different orientations, the poetry of the past two decades leaves us with an unresolvable dichotomy. Either poets recover religious dimensions of by invoking an immediacy that fails to voice the full ironic and self-reflexive play of mind or they dramatize their mastery as reflective, judging sensibilities by reducing the subject matter and scope of our lyric traditions. Religion comes to appear trivial or delusive and mature judgment to lack the impassioned self-dramatization of our most compelling lyric voices. A recent essay by Stanley Plumly provides a helpful basis for distinguishing the basic modes of the sixties and the seventies. Speaking for his generation of poets, Plumly characterizes the most problematic trait of their predecessors as a desire to make poetry capture experience in capital letters. Implicit in Plumly's critique is