That decade for me - for most of us, I imagine - had started out differently. In 1950 I was still a student, with David Antin & others, in New York's City College, and it was from there that I watched the war return to us in Korea, & with it the early repressions of the Cold War in its McCarthyite manifestations. I had declared myself a poet a few years before that - a kid's reaction or assertion of some degree of otherness against the years of war (world war) & holocaust that accompanied the early childhood. What I found most thrilling - needed - at the start was the work / the language of those poets who could lead me into acts of othering. Stein came early in that sense - as did Joyce & Cummings; or on another level, Dalí (in his writings too) and the rumored Dadaists, whose works we wouldn't read for another year or two but who we heard had written poems that did away with words. Williams and Pound came about the same time & carried Whitman in their wake. And we also read The Waste Land. What college did - but not to me alone - was to inculcate the sense that most of that was dead. That was the going wisdom then, & largely in the name of Eliot, whom Williams called - & rightly in that sense - "the great disaster to our letters."(1) The result - postmodern, after modern in the worst sense - was to throw us into a condition of what [my first poetry teacher] Delmore Schwartz then called "picking up again the meters" and continuing "the revolution in poetic taste which was inspired by the criticism of T.S. Eliot," or elsewhere: "the poetic idiom and literary taste of the generation of Pound and Eliot." As an example of that "revolution" he cited the following from W.D. Snodgrass:

The green catalpa tree has turned
All white; the cherrry blooms once more.
In one whole year I haven't learned
A blessed thing they pay you for

It was this, then, or something roughly equivalent to this that was being hammered home to us in our late teens & early twenties, & it followed me in 1952 when I went to the University of Michigan for a year of graduate study & draft evasion, most notably in the intelligent "new criticism" of Austin Warren & others that nearly spun my head around. I found myself there - curiously - as a lone defender of Walt Whitman, watching as Warren tried and failed to cope with both Whitman's monumental verse lines & his equally monumental stance-toward-reality. Against which the principal relief - along with Pound and Williams and a few of the other American rejects we still knew (Stein & Cummings certainly) - came through the (largely translated) works of a number of European poets and near- avantgardists: Rimbaud, Lorca, Mayakovsky, Rilke, Apollinaire [& so on] early in the decade, others (along with other American forerunners) as the decade swung around. It was at Michigan too that I came to my own discovery of Blake and Christopher Smart (I wrote my master's thesis on Smart's rhyming "hymns" while loving most his Jubilate Agno), and it was there that I discovered - in library stacks divorced from literature or poetry - the poetries of Africa and the Indian Americas that would reemerge for me well into the 1960s.

What I was unaware of - what we were unaware of where I roamed - was the widespread unrest within our generation & the ways in which the turnaround was getting under way - both in the States & elsewhere. My own way then went through two years in the army - most of it spent in (dreaded) Germany - & a return to New York & a company of friends (Antin, Kelly, Schwerner, others by the later 1950s), with whom it was possible to shape a mutual deliverance. The breakthrough, when it came, was a return at first to the ideas of poetry that the early years had nearly driven out of us. For me this had the sense of a renaissance, the rebirth or reawakening of a radical modernism that was not only rooted in the U.S. (out of Whitman) but had gone still further elsewhere - into shapes & forms (of mind as well as measure) that were the starters for a work that we would carry forward.

What finally brought me over the edge - along with the sense of an ever increasing company of poets & others in a circle-of- companions - was the work on New Young German Poets. (I had also, with Robert Kelly chiefly, coined the term & elaborated the practice of "deep image," a term that would later be associated with the considerably different practice of Robert Bly, another companion from that time.) The offer from Ferlinghetti to look into the "new" postwar German poets followed on what was in fact my first publication: a set of rhymed translations from the 1920s poet and novelist (cabaret poet, as I made him out to be) Erich Kästner, one of which (for the record) ran like this:

[reads]

AUTOBIOGRAPHY

For those who weren't born, it's all the same.
They perch upon some tree in Space and smile.
Myself, I never thought of it, I came,
A nine-months child.

I spent the best part of my life in school,
Cramming my brain till I forgot each word.
I grew into a highly polished, model fool.
How did it happen? I really never heard.

The war came next (it cut off our vacation).
I trotted with the field artillery now.
We bled the world to ease its circulation.
I kept on living. Please don't ask me how.

Inflation then, and Leipzig, and a whirl
Of Kant and Gothic and Bureaucracy,
Of art and politics and pretty girls,
And Sundays it was raining steadily.
At present I am roughly 31
And run a little poem factory.
Alas, the greying of my hair's begun.
My friends are growing fat remorselessly.

I plop between two chairs, if that's appealing,
Or else I saw the bough on which we sit.
I wander down the garden-walks of feeling
(When feelings die) and plant them with my wit.

I drag my bags around despite the pain.
The bags expand. My shoulders grow unsure.
In retrospect, permit me to explain:
That I was born. And came. And still endure.

New Young German Poets allowed me to be the first to publish a number of poems by Paul Celan in English versions, as well as the (probably) first English translations of poets like Günter Grass, Helmut Heissenbüttel, Ingeborg Bachmann, and Hans Magnus Enzensberger. (I also translated but didn't include two poems by Rainer Maria Gerhardt, the young poet to whom Olson dedicated - as "funeral poem" - "The Death of Europe.") In the act of translating I came to discover the existence of writings - of modes of poetry - that opened possibilities that were both like and different from the new poetry & poetics emerging in the U.S. (That every move I made added to my own resources as a writer was - how could it not be? - the still greater bonus.) Of the poets I then translated, Celan (early Celan, let me point out) was the most overwhelming, with the more "experimental" Heissenbuttel (for me, then) almost as important for the sense he gave me of new ways of form and language. Here, because I can't resist, are two examples:

[reads "Shibboleth" and "Combination II"]:

With the postwar German poets as my particular way in, the 1950s (as I came to them) were otherwise a time in which I got to know (& reassess by knowing) the work of both the earlier experimental modernists & those who were, like those I knew at home, opening (to use a World War II expression) a second front for modernism. Robert Motherwell's Dada Painters & Poets, which had been there since 1951, was in its way as important for me - for us - as the Allen anthology might be a few years later. (3) So too was the pervasive presence - in New York surely - of already visible and active avant-gardes in painting and music (both jazz and "new"), which created a viable alternative before the Beats & others made it still clearer in their acts of poetry. It was with this as a backdrop that Don Allen, when he came to make his statement for the "new American poetry" of the 1950s, placed it side by side as a revitalized form of modernism with "abstract expressionism" and jazz In doing this he made what was a wonderful & far-reaching assertion of a new American hegemony in the arts, saying of it on its poetry side: "This anthology makes the ... claim [that] the new American poetry [is] now becoming the dominant movement in the second phase of our twentieth-century literature and already exerting strong influence abroad." (That it was the Beat poets who were the leading wedge in this - rather than some others we might more have favored - is a point worth noting.)

My own take on these matters was different then & came to be still more different over the intervening years. While recognizing & participating in what was a crucial American moment, I saw what was happening in American poetry as part of a larger global manifestation, some of it (as I came to know later) occuring before or certainly apart from the American influence as such. It was for these reasons (& from an over-emphasis of my role as a translator) that Allen, in what may have been our only correspondence at the time, pinpointed me as a proponent of what he called, if I remember it correctly, the international style of poetry. In this, but in a way far different from how that term has since been used, I would like to think that he was absolutely right.

I am saying this, of course, with something like thirty-five years of hindsight. In the late 1950s most of what was revealing itself to us from the outside was from an earlier generation that we were still in the process of rediscovering. Just as word was coming back of the old "Objectivists" (themselves becoming active again as makers of a transitional American poetry), the recovered poets from elsewhere included the likes of Neruda and Vallejo; of Surrealist masters like Breton and Artaud (disregarded by the American middle-grounders - Robert Bly & company included - in favor of less "convulsive" practitioners like Eluard or Desnos); of Dadaists like Tzara and Hugo Ball or like Kurt Schwitters, whose work was hinted at - but only hinted at - in Motherwell; of a mysterious generation of Negritude poets in Africa & the Caribbean. And so on. Some of this I shared with those like Paul Blackburn or the older & incredibly active Kenneth Rexroth (or with Bly or Bill Merwin for all of that) as poets devoted to translation while - in Blackburn's case at least - remaining rooted in the sense of an American "duende" that spoke to us from deep within the language. And of those others I was then starting to meet, Duncan was (like Rexroth or Ferlinghetti - or Ashbery & O'Hara in a rather different way) remarkably open to the world at large; Olson and Snyder, say, much more nativist in their approaches both to past & present, though quite exemplary in leaps back into ancient worlds - both east & west - as far back as the paleolithic. (4) My own ventures, with Robert Kelly & others, into the shadier sides of deep-image writing (my coinage there, for worse or better) were in large part a revival of what was coming at us from the recent past of Europe.

What we knew then, much of it obscured by the anti-modernist turn at the beginning of the decade, was imperative for us to know. What we didn't know - obscured by our own breakthroughs as American poets [pre-Viet Nam] - was how much else was coming into presence then or had emerged, even in this most American of centuries & moments, without our blessings. Over the last few years I've had a chance - working with Pierre Joris - to go over the terrain of the immediate postwar decades (1945 to 1960, the years of the New American Poetry) as the opening wedge for the second volume of Poems for the Millennium, the "global" anthology that's been a central work of ours since 1990. This is in some sense fired by Pierre's nomadism, as well as my own: our sense of a community / a commonality of poets that both of us have known (& continue to know) across whatever boundaries. Being far enough away from the fifties now to have a wider view of the terrain, I see the "new American poetry" that so much defined us as itself a part (a key part, sure, but still a part) of a worldwide series of moves & movements that took the political, visionary, & formal remnants of an earlier modernism & reshaped & reinvented [extended] them in the only time allowed to us on earth. I believe at the same time that such a view is both truer to the facts & provides a richer source & context for later American postmodernisms ( that of the Language Poets, say) & for aspects of the experimental American '50s and '60s neglected in both earlier & later versions of The New American Poetry.

I would like to give you, then, a sense of the configuration, the reconfiguration we've attempted - both to see how the New American Poetry fits into that larger frame & how little of it was evident to us then. The first volume - for those who haven't seen it - covered a range of work "from fin-de-siècle to negritude" - from Mallarmé's Coup de dès of 1897 to work appearing in the midst of World War II. The division was into three "galleries" of individual poets & six sections devoted to the movements that typified the time but have been deliberately omitted or reduced to footnotes in most other gatherings of poetry. (These were, in order, Futurism [both Russian & Italian], Expressionism, Dada, Surrealism, the "Objectivists," & Negritude.) In doing this we were not being original (or even "ornery" in some sense) but asserting what for many of us was the actual configuration of that time. We were also setting the stage for the second volume - the present world in which we live & work.

With that second volume - from World War II to the present [& beyond] - there is no completion & the omissions & gaps are overwhelming. Having said that, I would like to go over the disposition of the contents - some portion of them - to give a view of American poetry & poets interspersed with sometimes equally experimental, sometimes more experimental poets from elsewhere. (For this reason, with America as the point of departure, the amount of U.S. poetry is & remains disproportionate.) Over all, the question of inclusion & exclusion, which can never be properly resolved, was less important with regard to individuals & movements - more with regard to the possibilities of poetry now being opened. There are two galleries this time around, the first & earlier consisting largely of poets who were or became active during the 1940s and 1950s - the subject in short of this gathering. And within these we've imbedded a number of groupings - somewhat like the movements of the previous volume, but often more localized or more restricted to moves in poetry rather than across the arts (although that poetry may itself show real amalgams with the plastic arts or music). After I give you a sense of what the juxtapositions here feel like, I'll end it with a reading from those clusters or mini-movements, which are contemporaneous with the New American Poetry or, in several instances, come before it. The point is not to trace influences from group to group or poet to poet (largely absent till the later 1950s/early 1960s) but to set out a range of responses to the postwar (cold war) era and the wars & holocausts that lay behind it.

The first gallery, then, consists of work from some fifty poets - from Marie Luise Kaschnitz born in 1901 to Gary Snyder born in 1930. It follows a section of poems by some of the poets who appeared in the earlier volume but whose postwar poetry - often "maximal" as Olson would have had it) showed a continuity between the century's two halves; namely Stein, Stevens, Joyce, Williams, Pound, H.D., MacDiarmid, Breton, Michaux, Zukofsky, Neruda, Ekelöf, Rukeyser, Césaire. (You will note already the gaps & omissions that any of us could point to.) But it's in the contents of the first gallery as such that the richness of the time begins to show itself - a richness measured in fact by its unboundedness. In sequence, then, the first twenty to appear run like this: Marie Luise Kaschnitz, Vladimir Holan, Samuel Beckett, George Oppen, Yannis Ritsos, Charles Olson, Edmond Jabès, John Cage, Octavio Paz, Bert Schierbeck, Robert Duncan, Yoshioku Minoru, Paul Celan, Mohammed Dib, Amos Tutuola, Helmut Heissenbüttel, Jackson Mac Low, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Vasko Popa, & Denise Levertov. (5) It is a configuration of contemporaries - ours - & of possibilities - ours also - with regard to which the vaunted American dominance (forty years later) seems a wild exaggeration. That we may feel a kinship (& sometimes open friendship) with all those named is a further point worth making.

Along with poets such as these - & there were, clearly, many more - groupings had begun to appear with some resemblance to the pre-war movements. Some were confined to a single place & language or to a set of places, others (the exceptions) to a sweep that cut more boldly than their predecesors across divides of place & nation. Six of the ones we've chosen were already active in the 1950s, two as far back as the later 1940s. The thrust in all was toward a rupture with the past, or a renewal of the interrupted ruptures of the pre-war avant- gardes, now made more urgent by the war & by a sense of dangers & repressions still persisting. As with those predecessors the urgency went back into the poem itself (the way the poem was made) - a point reiterated in those years (again, again) by William Carlos Williams. In America his rage for a new measure dominated - in Olson's sense of a projective verse, in Ginsberg's citation that "when the mode of the music changes, the walls of the city shake." The openings elsewhere - as among American avantgardists of another stripe [Mac Low & Cage immediate examples] - took different but equally dynamic turns.

As particular groupings - clusters - topoi - take the following.

The Wiener Gruppe [Vienna Group] kicks off in 1953, with the founding by H[ans] C[arl] Artmann of "a basement theater in Vienna (die kleine schaubühne) for 'macabre feasts, poetic acts', and pranks like black masses, an evening 'with illuminated birdcages,' or one 'in memoriam to a crucified glove'." (Rosmarie Waldrop) Early participants in the group were Artmann, along with Gerhard Rühm, Konrad Bayer, Oswald Wiener, and Friederich Achleitner, joined in 1957 by Ernst Jandl and Friederike Mayröcker. The range of work included a renewed exploration of visual and sound poetry and a high degree of vernacular language play, including works in Viennese dialect, "not in order to mimic speech or render local color" - writes Rosmarie Waldrop - "but as a reservoir of sounds and expressions ... that exploit the tension between the spoken immediacy and the outlandish look of the dialect words when spelled out on the page." Writes h.c. artmann in his 1953 eight point proclamation of the poetic act: "there is a premise which is unassailable, namely that one can be a poet even without ever having written or spoken a single word. / however the prerequisite is the more or less felt wish to act poetically. the alogical gesture can itself be performed such that it is raised to an act of outstanding beauty. ineed to poetry. beauty is however a concept which is here allowed a greatly enlarged field of play." And then, as poem, the following in Viennese dialect (translated by me into I don't know what kind of New York thing from childhood):

[reads]:

Or this [example of "new sentence," say] - in prose from Konrad Bayer:

[reads "The White and the Black Bones"]:

A second grouping, the self-proclaimed "Tammuzi poets," consisted of writers from Lebanon and Syria, who in 1956 came together around the Beirut magazine Shi'r [Poetry] - one of the key instances, in the two decades following World War II, of third-world liberation movements with their well-known cultural/political concommitants: the simultaneous demands for revolution & tradition. As poets of the Arabic language the Tammuzis not only proclaimed a relation to a deep tradition (an ancient order newly rediscovered) but spelled out a further struggle (a second liberation from within the culture & the language) to create "a poetry that establishes another concept of identity - one that is pluralist, open, aganostic, and secular." (Thus: the Syrian poet Adonis [born Ali Ahmed Said] on "poetry & apoetical culture.")

And this from the Lebanese poet Unsi al-Hajj in Pierre Joris's English version:

[reads "The Charlatan"]:

A still earlier movement - & one which would have a curious repercussion at a later time - was that of the artists & poets who came together, starting as early as 1948, under the coined name COBRA. "The choice of a name whicis not an ism, but that of an animal," said poet-artist Christian Dotremont in retrospect, & added: "We were in fact against all isms, against all that implied a system." The cities in which they worked - & whose opening letters formed their name - were Copenhagen, Brussels, Amsterdam; the participants themselves, mostly younger artists & poets, witnesses to mid-ecntury war & holocaust from which, in 1948, Europe was just emerging. Short-lived as the "movement" was (it would dissolve by 1951), it was to that degree "international," with links - often reiterated - to other postwar groups [Situationism, Lettrism] that sought new ways of life through art. An aspect of their project was therefore political & social - a belief in the transformation of art itself as instrument (in its experimental modes) of even larger transformations. In a move reminiscent of earlier Dadaist disgust, Cobra artists turned from "Western Classical c ulture," not so much to so-called "primitive" art (too often conflated with the "Non-Western") as to the art of children, say, & the "outsider art" of the insane. The result was a commitment to a rawness & openness of form ("we never permit ourselves to finish a poem" - C.Dotremont) & for many of them a further "erasure of the boundaries between the arts" (in the words of a major forerunner, Kurt Schwitters). Artists & poets worked together or crossed into each others' domains, "committed to marrying poetry with the plastic arts" (J.C. Lambert), or from a recognition (thus: Asger Jorn) that "painting and writing are the same."

Along with Jorn & Dotremont, the principal Cobra artists were the Belgian artist-writers Pierre Alechinsky and Hugo Claus & the Dutch experimentalists Lucebert, Constant, Gerrit Kouwenaar, & to a lesser degree Bert Schierbeck. A further connection - largely through the somewhat older Jorn - is to the Internationale Situationiste & to a lesser degree to the Internationale Lettriste of the 1950s/60s. The following is by Pierre Alechinsky, working here as writer/poet.

[reads "Ad Miro"]

What we have here is a language poetry - a poetry of diverse experimental means - two decades or more before a group of American poets would offer up their work as "language poetry" per se. And there is also a push in Cobra toward a coincidence of word & image that was being taken in new directions by the (so-called) Concrete Poets of the 1950s/60s - one of the few movements (like the closely related Fluxus) with a genuinely international standing. That many of its works could readily cross borders was in part a function of their stripped-down (= minimalist) nature: a reduction of the poem to a sign (often in bold typography, sometimes in color) that typically eliminated syntax & even words themselves, thus offered up an image open to interpretation (reading) at a single glance. In a larger sense the same mind-set that produced concrete poetry tied it not only to other (older) forms of visual poetry but - more surprisingly perhaps - to radical forms of sound poetry & textsound performances. Practitioners were also drawn to "process poetry" & to experiments with reduplicating verbal patterns or, as the semiotics of the work developed, to pieces that dispensed with words in favor of a purely visual, often photographic, image.

The following, however divergent from the concrete norm, is by the great American conretist Emmett Williams: a version of The Red Chair (circa 1960) - here set for three voices.

[reads "The Red Chair"]

The last grouping I'll mention is Japanese, & what I'll do here is read the opening paragraph of our introduction to the grouping in Millennium. (The Beats are also included, by the way, but no need to tell you about them; & still other movements are represented by scattered individual poets.)

[reads "The Arechi Poets & After" from volume two]

"Against the view - Japanese & Western both - of a traditional Japanese poetry defined by long-established canons of brevity & refinement, the work of post-World War II generations shows an enormity of means & voice that turns the old ways upside down (or seems to), while bringing those ways simultaneously into the present. Less resembling the mode of haiku and tanka (waka) - for those of us who view them from the outside - fthan that of a ghost-ridden poets' theater like the traditional Noh or contemporary Buthoh, their work becomes 'a celebration in darkness which is at once weird and refined, scatalogical and lofty, comic and serious.' (Thus: Yoshioka Minoru, early among the 'postwar' poets.) As with other new poetries, that of Japan's 'postwar' poets moves increasingly toward the demotic (colloquial, everyday), bringing in a range of new - often foreign - vocabularies & imageries, along with a mix of class & gender usages (long separated into discreet social levels) & a 'violation of grammatical norms carried to the point of linguistic rapine' (Roy Andrew Miller). On their literary side - Miller again - the resultant poems display a 'stripping-away of all the customary decorations and embellishments of traditional Japanese poetics' toward a 'naked language' (hadaka no gengo) & 'what may very well be their single most salient structural feature - the great freedom and variety displayed by the poetic line that they employ.'"

The following are examples, then, of how the Japanese "postwar" could function.

[reads from Takahashi, Shiraishi, et al.]

CONCLUSION. The point of this presentation is retrospective. It is not a point I would have made - or would easily have made - during the period itself. I understood that it was necessary at that time for American poets to make what George Quasha and I called (in our 1970 anthology America a Prophecy) "a declaration of independence" for American poetry. We were speaking then of the ongoing domination & intrusion of British letters and language that had haunted us into the 1950s, but we were aware at the same time that our work if it was to mean, to signify in that special sense, would have to take its place in a "revolution of the word" that had developed as well outside the native shores. We also found - increasingly - that it was possible to join & to make common cause with poets & artists everywhere (not an everywhere which was nowhere but an everywhere made up of many somewheres). If Charles Olson spoke of a "new localism" that would feed our historic & poetic senses, it seems to me now that it is increasingly possible - & necessary - to speak of a new globalism. That this has its own complications is obvious as well, but it also has its own richness & for many of us it has brought a sense of personal & artistic relationships & collaborations that have grown up over the last half century. In light of this it is time (& long past time) to consider the 1950s - the decade of the postwar & the burgeoning cold war - as the time also of a global awakening, & to view (or re-view) the New American Poetry as part of a greater, still more electrifying symposium of the whole.

(1) While he actually said it about The Waste Land, I preferred to apply it to Eliot ad hominem & to let The Waste Land (qua poem) off the hook.

(2) Antin, like myself & many others, had written in a similar mode as a kid.

(3) I announced - as a scheduled publication of Hawk's Well Press, which David Antin and I had founded circa 1957 - an anthology of Dada poetry in translation with the title That Dada Strain. It was intended to supplement Motherwell's anthology, which had very few poems as such, despite its other virtues. That Dada Strain never came out as an anthology, though I used the title much later for a book of my own poems.

(4) In the case of Duncan, I remember, in our first encounter, introducing him to Paul Celan qua poet & being introduced by him to Gershom Scholem.

(5) As the editors are well aware, there's a notable lack of women in these opening entries - offset, in the natural course of things by a strong female presence as the book & the century unwind. Thus in the second gallery (post-1960), eight of the last ten entries (six of eight by another count) are women - a change in the demographics of avantgardism & a far cry from the 1950s (since that's the topic now at hand).