Poetry: The 1940s to the Present

Last year I declared that the only generalization one can safely make about contemporary American poetry is that women are setting the directions in which experimental poetry is currently headed. Lynn Keller's Thinking Poetry: Readings in Contemporary Women's Exploratory Poetics offers supporting evidence and indicates how diversely experimental and exploratory contemporary American women's poetry is. Norman Finkelstein's On Mount Vision: Forms of the Sacred in Contemporary American Poetry identifies a heterodox religious strain in experimental poetry and poetics. That six of the seven poets discussed are males—albeit three of them dead white males—gives some reassurance that male poets still are part of the experimental brigade. Up for grabs is just how contemporary contemporary is within the broad frame of poetry since the 1940s. Postwar may reasonably be taken as 1945-70, the period covered in Stephen Fredman's Contextual Practice: Assemblage and the Erotic in Postwar Poetry and Art. Robert Duncan does double duty, however, qualifying as a contemporary poet in Finkelstein's study and a postwar one in Fredman's. So much for how to divide poetry and poets since the 1940s into neat chronological subdivisions. There is also the problem, if one chooses to make it one, of determining who is sufficiently American to be an American poet. The publication of a Library of America edition of Anne Stevenson's Selected Poems (2008) would seem to leave no doubt in her case, but the University of Liverpool Press jacket copy for Voyages over Voices: Critical Essays on Anne Stevenson grants her dual status as an American-British poet, which perhaps is not altogether the same as a British American poet. Why not call Elizabeth Bishop a Canadian American poet? Or was she an American Canadian poet? Oops, make that a US-American Canadian poet. Given her long residence in Brazil and her poetry about Brazil, maybe we should call her a transnational poet and be done with it. A quandary of a different sort that I find myself in every year is how to give balanced attention both to books and to articles that strike me as especially notable and that cover a broad range of poets from the 1940s to the present. This year I have solved the problem, or rather not solved it, by reviewing only books. Perhaps next year I will review only articles.

i Elizabeth Bishop

Peggy Samuels's Deep Skin: Elizabeth Bishop and the Visual Arts (Cornell) contends that Bishop conceived of poetry as she did, and became the sort of poet she was, thanks crucially to her response to the visual art of Paul Klee, Kurt Schwitters, and Alexander Calder. Samuels cites revelatory passages, mostly from the late 1930s to mid-1950s, in Bishop's correspondence, notebooks, and unpublished drafts; her watercolors, midcentury art criticism, and New York Museum of Modern Art exhibition and correspondence files provide additional backing. Samuels's readings of Bishop's poems necessarily depend, however, on analogies. Words like like and corresponds crop up frequently. The entire book, in fact, hums with analogical operations of metaphors, beginning with Bishop's conception of the surface of the page of poetry as "akin to the surface of a painting," each surface being a "boundary at which interior and exterior encounter one another." As for "deep skin," when the "skin" of page or canvas becomes activated as the boundary between interior and exterior, it opens toward different kinds of watery depth, while water's plane serves as "an illusorily stable boundary between inner and outer." Auxiliary metaphors pitch in, as when Bishop is said to conceive of the nature of lyric as "a material where the pliable lattice of the poem's lines becomes a site for the embodied mind to open toward, receive, and tactilely interact with the world's disparate materials." Her lyric is, to give the pliable lattice metaphor a twist, "a membrane that allows layers of human experience—physical sensation, visual image, memory, word, emotion, thought—to meet, cross, absorb, and alter." Or to put it again differently, Bishop imagined verse as an immersible net and a fabric employed...