Crosstown poetics

Among critics of contemporary American poetry there has been surprising agreement on a certain historical narrative that we might call the Anxiety of Modernist Influence: first there were the bad New Critics who coerced all the innovative features of Modernism into narrow formalisms and prescriptions; along came Beats, Black Mountaineers, Confessionalists and Deep Imagists to pose a romantic rebellion centered on forms of expressivism; confession and personism gave way, under the historical pressures of Vietnam, Civil Rights, and feminism, to more collective forms of address; in the later 1970s and 1980s bardic or testimentary styles were rejected in favor of a muted, cosmoplitan voice best represented by John Ashbery; against the hegemony of creative writing workshop verse (the McPoem) emerged new formalisms (L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writing on the left, New Formalism on the right) or else new crossover performance modes (rap, slams, and interart collaboration). For the most part, this narrative has been movement-driven, based on manifestos and position papers that determine the form the story will take.

One thing that is painfully obvious in most rehearsals of this narrative is the disparity between the way “postmodern” is used in defining contemporary poetry and the way it is used in critical theory. With the exception of the journal boundary 2’s attempts in the 1970s to read postmodern literature through the lens of existential hermeneutics, there have been few attempts to situate the work of postwar poets in relation to developments in theory—reflecting, I suspect, the institutional distance between the English Department and the Creative Writing program on most campuses. Where other fields of literary endeavor are often defined by specific critical methodologies (early modern studies by New Historicism, film by feminist psychoanalysis or semiotics, francophone literature by postcolonial theory) the study of postmodern poetry has been read largely within the oedipalized narrative mentioned above. Attempts by vanguard groups like L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writers to critique the identity politics associated with expressivism have been met by accusations of elitism and aestheticism.

Maria Damon’s The Dark End of the Street: Margins in American Vanguard Poetry offers an alternative narrative, one that calls into question the myth of modernist anxiety and places postmodern poetry in its cultural milieu. It is a book that complicates the usual movement-driven format of most critical books by studying canonical (Robert Lowell) as well as unknown (Jack Spicer, Bob Kaufman) poets. It studies Gertrude Stein not as a representative modernist but as a Yiddish, lesbian writer informed by her immigrant past. Bob Kaufmann is seen less as a Beat populist than as a complex amalgam of Black, Jewish, surrealist, and Caribbean cultural tradtions. In her most controversial gesture Damon sets the work of Robert Lowell against the poetry of three unknown, unpublished South Boston high school girls. And to further complicate matters, Damon implicates herself as an intellectual, academic, woman, and Jew who exists “in a perpetually liminal stage in a vocational context that is itself liminal”(5). Her style is at times self-reflexive, witty, and arch in a deliberate attempt to link the minority discourse she studies and the discursive frames in which she writes.

The book’s title is taken from a 1967 soul hit about an ill-fated romance that occurs on “the dark end of the street.” Damon sees the song as allegorizing “the predicament of poetry, of social outcasts, of outsiders who are poets, who live in dark corners of social lacuna, in the psychic and physical slums of the marginal imagination”(2). But margins are porous; they “mean” differently depending on which neighborhood one occupies. Robert Lowell obviously lives in a very different Boston from that occupied by the high school girls Damon encountered while teaching in a South Boston General Equivalency Diploma (GED) program. Yet despite their obvious dissimilarities, Lowell in Life Studies and Charlotte, Susan, and Cheryl in their notebook poems share an oppositional...