Poetry and the Counter-Culture

Abstract

classroom is that his generation has broken with the past-and he can sometimes cite evidence from the arts, as well as from the Movement, to prove his case. In the theater he can point to off-offBroadway, where avant-garde experiments in static form vie with electronic circuses, and both vie with the underground cinema where sequential action has been repudiated altogether. In music (if he lives in a world more rarified than rock), he can point to the battle between chance composition and total serialization and to the performance of electronic sound on tape. In poetry he can point to the emergence of the beat-antiformalists over the academic poets who dominated his teacher's education; or if he is particularly sophisticated, he may know of concrete, aleatoric, or mixed-media experiments. From his vantage point, poetry, too, appears to have rejected the past. It is tempting for the teacher to ignore this student's concerns and to continue to teach literature without reference to the values (or anti-values) of the present. On the other hand, an exploration of the assumptions underlying current experiments might help both teacher and student to find a perspective from which the past may be viewed. These avant-garde experiments in poetry are premised on iconoclastic assumptions about meaning, form, and the relationship between the poet and his audience. In the world of the New Aesthetic, the poet no longer tries to present a classical vision of preconceived order or a romantic vision of organic form. Instead, he presents fragments which the reader must piece together by supplying the connectives. In concrete poetry, where referential meaning is subordinate to the meaning found in the similarities between words, letters, and phonemes, the reader perceives order in formal spatial and oral relationships. In aleatoric poetry, where order depends on a chance shuffling of pages, the reader-listener supplies the connectives between these changing parts and comes to seek form within the fluidity. In mixed-media poetry, where the aim is to arouse all the senses, where incense and lights may accompany recitation of a collage of fragmentary statements prerecorded on an