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Four Poetic Projects of Countercultural Manhood Patriarchal poetry an entity. What is the difference between their charm and to charm. Gertrude Stein, “Patriarchal Poetry” The men are in a sense brand names themselves, a minor dream team representing jocular freedom and masculine America.1 Juliana Spahr, Power Sonnets 1. The Countercultural The works of Beat and “New American” poets of the 1950s in the Pound tradition were overtly countercultural and countercanonical. The poets stood on the periphery of American culture in chosen and flaunted marginality at the moment of the fixing of the Cold War and United States post–World War II hegemony. The most dramatic instance of cultural marginality was Charles Olson; he renounced two relatively centrist career paths (in the Democratic Party and its political appointments and in the normative university) to propose an alternative vision of the United States and an energetic geocultural vision.2 Olson emphatically did not accept “the Americanization of the world, now, 1950: soda pop & arms for France to fight, not in Europe, but in Indo China, the lie of it,” a prescient statement about the economic penetration of U.S. products, globalization, and the forthcoming American war in Vietnam (Olson 1987a, 44, 21 October 1950). He did, however, postulate a posthumanist American “ENERGY” (Olson 1987a, 34–46). Allen Ginsberg, who brought the Popular Front politics of the 1930s forward into the 1950s, articulated a visceral, principled identification with deviant Others—people in minority cultures, internal exiles for political reasons (Communists, anarchists, antibomb radicals), exiles for psychological reasons (the dissident/odd, psychotic, crazy, or driven mad), as well as sexual exiles and outcasts, mainly male homo­ sexuals, the sexually promiscuous, and others who did not enter the family economy. 90 part two Robert Creeley, uninterested (then) in these overt realms of sociopolitics , nonetheless ironically engaged normative gender tokens of the 1950s (home, family, breadwinner, wife, and husband, female and male), exploring the fissures and quirks within their putative ideological seamlessness . All three poets investigated United States culture; they resisted literary aestheticism, wanting to integrate research, social critique, and future-­ looking energies with artistic expression “as the wedge of the WHOLE FRONT” (Olson 1987a, 46; see also 11). Their poetry and poetics were proudly peripheral, stylistically nonconforming, and intellectually outspoken. These poets’ ideological, cultural, and political critique of the “American century” also implicated gender and revealed considerable opinions on manhood. They championed strong-­ minded, pushy, outspoken, feisty, shrill, self-­ consciously posing and even hysterical masculinities in contradistinction to the more buttoned-­ down, centrist manhood normalized in the 1950s. They voiced dissident and analytic critiques of masculinity yet simultaneously claimed the powers and privileges of conventional manhood. This combining of countercultural critique with the benefits accruing to normative gender roles is a central contradiction . To echo an observation of Australian sociologist R. W. Connell: they were “fighting against hegemonic masculinity while deploying its techniques” (Connell 2002b, 197). Creeley, Olson, and Ginsberg, like other countercultural U.S. male poets of the 1950s, brought normative male expectations into question. They aggressively displaced kinds of hegemonic masculinity by using mobile gender materials, fascination with male display and emotional minutiae and (in Ginsberg’s case) with a critical, though not necessarily self-­ critical, homosexuality. Indeed, Creeley, Olson, and Ginsberg even participated in the “male revolt” identified by Barbara Ehrenreich as a muted sociological motif throughout the 1950s, a critique of the “breadwinner ethic” and its economic arrangements (like family wage) (Ehrenreich 1983, 12–13). And the poets did so with very self-­ conscious tropes around maleness, sometimes assuming the exaggerated subjectivity and political position of hypermasculinity. Michael Davidson has proposed that among the Beats and the Spicer group emerged a new homosocial male subject, mainly among gay or bisexual men, who generally enacted this position in textual (not sexually expressive) ways. That is, the men’s links with each other were “homo-­textual”; gender bonding apparently overrode sexual preferences Poetic Projects of Countercultural Manhood 91 (Davidson 1995, 198; Davidson 2004, 14). To generalize from his finding, affective relations among men—friendships, cohorts, affiliative dyads— often reinforced male gender power in particularly compelling ways. One outcome of this generalized homosocial ethos was that in the 1950s these poets implicitly or explicitly rejected the possibility of making a bilateral critique of gender norms for women, thereby excluding females from the benefit that males got from destabilizing gender arrangements. Their resistance to a critique of women’s roles did not necessarily apply to some women’s attack on the sexual norms of the...

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