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  • Poetry:Since the 1940s
  • Frank J. Kearful

When it comes to poetry since the 1940s, where the action is depends on which band you hear playing. Henry Weinfeld's The Music of Thought in the Poetry of George Oppen and William Bronk calls the two poets "the finest among their generation, a generation that came to maturity around the beginning of the Second World War." Oppen is also well served by Thinking Poetics: Essays on George Oppen. Then there is Charles Olson, a member of the same generation whom some revere as a towering figure, but who is given short shrift by most. In "'Man Come by an Intolerable Way': Charles Olson's Archaeology of Resistance" Sasha Colby grants that Olson's poetry is "sometimes perceived as obtuse or hermetic," but he makes perfectly good sense on Olson's behalf. The nearer we approach contemporary poetry, the more marked divisions of taste become. Perhaps the only generalization one can safely make is that women are setting the pace where experimental poetry is currently headed. This year's chapter includes articles on Lyn Hejinian, Susan Howe, and Joan Retallack, and essays on several other avant-garde women poets in In the Frame: Women's Ekphrastic Poetry from Marianne Moore to Susan Wheeler. Daniel Kane's We Saw the Light: Conversations Between the New American Cinema and Poetry concludes with avant-garde poet Lisa Jarnot; Theresa Hak Kyung Cha features prominently in Timothy Yu's Race and the Avant-Garde: Experimental and Asian Poetry since 1965; and Daniel Grassian's Writing the Future of Black America: Literature of the Hip-Hop Generation lauds Alison Joseph. Two books bring together women poets of earlier generations. Brett C. Millier's Flawed [End Page 395] Light focuses on eight 20th-century poets, including midcentury poets Isabella Gardner, Elizabeth Bishop, and Jeanne Garrigue. Jane Hedley's I Made You to Find Me: The Coming of Age of the Woman Poet and the Politics of Poetic Address highlights Anne Sexton, Adrienne Rich, Sylvia Plath, and Gwendolyn Brooks.

i. Alcohol and Women Poets

Brett C. Millier's Flawed Light probes the role of alcohol in the lives and work of eight 20th-century poets: Dorothy Parker, Louise Bogan, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Elinor Wylie, Léonie Adams, and where this chapter comes in, Isabella Gardner, Elizabeth Bishop, and Jean Garrigue. The "flawed light" of the title comes from Bogan's "The Alchemist": "I broke my life, to seek relief / From the flawed light of love and grief." Millier did not ignore Bishop's alcoholism in Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It (1993) and got chastised for it by Anthony Hecht, who declared that Bishop when put up against male topers like Algernon Swinburne, Dylan Thomas, and John Berryman "is not in their league at all." Robert Giroux also gruffly dismissed any insinuation that Bishop might have been an alcoholic. Nothing daunted, in Flawed Light Millier makes ample use of scientific studies on the effects of alcohol on creativity, the susceptibility of writers and artists to alcoholic drinking, and ways in which the experience of drinking alcohol and the consequences of alcoholism are different for women. They get drunk faster and stay drunk longer on a third less alcohol; the length of time before physical dependence on alcohol sets in is much shorter, and cirrhosis of the liver occurs more quickly; and as drinkers they are more subject to feelings of low esteem, shame, and guilt and suffer more from depression. They also commit suicide more often. Social attitudes toward women drinkers remain harsher, and one study notes that even homeless, skid-row women typically drink alone, taking their bottle around the corner or across the park to drink. Millier remarks, "A drunken man may be amusing; a drunk woman is not." Female poets tend to be far more restrained in their self-representations as drinkers and drunkards, but Millier contends that alcohol and alcoholism imbue the form, imagery, and content of their poetry. She nowhere reduces the poets' work, however, to "the conditions of symptoms of a disease, or to the accidental effusions of an artist who has lost control of her art, and her life...

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