Last night I put the finishing touches on my weblog note on Jena Osman & then lay awake for a while wondering at how much the world has changed in these past thirty years. Osman is one of several younger women poets whose work is so completely distinct & original that it is unmistakably their own – a degree of aesthetic commitment or integrity so powerful that it lies almost beyond the possibility of any meaningful criticism. I’m thinking here of the comments made now two generations ago by Robert Duncan describing his initial confrontation with the poetries of Helen Adam & Michael McClure – work with such force (whether we term it aesthetic, commitment or even just personality) that one can’t expect to shape or change it – you simply have to make room for it, regardless of how you imagine the world to have been composed previously.

 

In addition to Osman, other poets of roughly her generation – poets mostly in their thirties or maybe just now turning 40 – who strike me this way include Jennifer Moxley, Harryette Mullen, Lee Ann Brown and Lisa Jarnot, every one of them a major poet. The only male poet in that age cohort who seems likewise self-generating is Christian Bök.

 

Now this is not the only nor necessarily even the most important value one might have in one’s writing – craft-focused poets such as, say, Graham Foust or Eleni Sikelianos can make every bit as strong an argument for their own aesthetic path through the world. In my own generation of writers, I would tend to put Hannah Weiner, Robert Grenier, Barrett Watten, Bruce Andrews, Charles Bernstein & Leslie Scalapino into that first cluster – those with such strong a sense of direction the reader is forced almost just to take it or leave it. Lyn Hejinian, Bob Perelman, Rae Armantrout & Kit Robinson all strike me as following the other road. So this is obviously not a better vs. worse kind of distinction I’m fumbling my way towards (and I recognize, I think, that some folks would – presuming they even sense this same demarcation I’m trying to make – place that line differently). Duncan himself would have been in that latter category (and certainly knew it).

 

Part of this, I suspect, goes back to that sense of a map of poetry that each one of us carries around inside our head.* In some people this is a stronger thing than in others – indeed, around the School of Quietude it often appears to be paralyzing. My own sense (and I’m obviously one with a reasonably highly defined map of my own here) is that there are writers who extend that map of poetry & its tendencies & possibilities in whichever direction they see fit & then there are those – from Weiner & Watten to Osman & Moxley – who force us as readers & poets to completely rethink it. Both approaches give shape to the evolution of poetry, but they do so differently. Osman comes from a line of what are really disruptive influences – they force us to rethink what we thought we already knew. And it’s worth noting that you can’t really group them at all aesthetically, save maybe for the kind of crude thinking that would note that Watten & Grenier started a magazine together once, or that Lee Ann Brown once published a book by Hannah Weiner. The idea that Bruce Andrews & Charles Bernstein, for example, are “doing the same thing” (or ever did) is, frankly, laughable.

 

These disruptive poets are never very many – Ted Berrigan was one, but he’s the only member of the New York School who really was, just as Stein was the only one among the major American modernists. I’m of the impression that we should nourish & cherish every one, even when (& perhaps most especially when) we don’t fully sense that we “get it” yet as to what they’re doing. I’m pleased to see that we seem to have an abundance of such disruptive poets about right now, but I also think it’s worth noting that so many of them are women. It gives contemporary poetry a different feel than it had, say, in the 1970s or ‘80s. Myself, I like it.

 

 

 

* For a more detailed reference, look at the two versions Robert Duncan poses in his questionnaire for the Magic Workshop, which can be founded in the appendices to Jack Spicer’s Collected Books.