Gamechangers

Prepping for class today, I reread Helen Vendler’s account of meeting Seamus Heaney and first hearing the poems of North. Vendler calls that book one of those rare volumes (like Prufrock, Harmonium, and North of Boston) that profoundly influenced the course of poetry in the 20th century. It’s not that I disagree, either about North – there are reasons why I teach Heaney’s poems pretty regularly – or about the Eliot, Stevens, and Frost books to which she compares it – I teach those guys all the time too – but it struck me that Vendler’s list, aside from North, stops around 1923. So I started wondering what books I’d add. In the spirit of Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, which slim volumes (not already named) might make up the Top Five Poetic Gamechangers of the Century?

We’re looking, if Vendler’s list is a guide, for books whose poems not only strike us with particular power but also bring some alteration of form or rhetoric to bear on the specific character of their historical moment, for books whose poems not only strike us individually but also add up to a coherent and forceful whole. A couple of Yeats volumes come quickly to mind, though two (Wild Swans at Coole [1919] and Michael Robartes and the Dancer [1921]) are even earlier than the other modernist books above. And very recent stuff has not yet had a chance to exert any influence or demonstrate its staying power. So, for now, I’ll focus on the half-century between 1924 and 1975. Even here there’s an embarrassment of poetic riches, even if we set aside Pound’s 1925 Draft of XVI Cantos (great opening, vitally important middle, and strong ending, but some less crucial stuff scattered throughout) and, for fun, allow no repeat Eliot, Frost, Heaney, or Stevens. Which Bishop volume does one choose? Which Larkin? Do you go with an early, small-press Prynne or one of the more recent, Bloodaxe volumes? I’ll spread my list over a couple of posts, and I’ll take the cowardly judge’s dodge and name some Honorable Mentions to swell the list and accommodate more of my choices.

Sylvia Plath, Ariel (1965)
OK, some of this book’s influence might seem to be malign (see any of the hordes of poets who’ve taken from Plath an ambition to load every rift with emotional ore but who’ve left behind the formal mastery with which Plath actually at once achieves and transcends her strong emotional effects), and we’ll probably, at some point, have to have the conversation about which Ariel we’re talking about, given the alterations and emendations scholars have pointed out in the decades since the volume’s publication. Still, though, from the updated dramatic monologues of “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus” to the contained energy of the bee poems, Plath crafts from her enviable formal control crucibles in which to mold the molten resentments recognizable to women not only in the 1960s when she wrote the poems but also to generations since take profound and powerful shape.

Honorable Mention: Robert Lowell, Life Studies
It’s no insult to Plath to say that Ariel is unimaginable without the example of Lowell’s book, which precedes it by a couple of years and which also makes the poet’s self an emotionally fraught exemplum not only for feeling individuals but also for the pressures those “tranquilized Fifties” exerted on them.

Michael Harper, Dear John, Dear Coltrane (1970)
A tough call here over which makes the list and which is honorably mentioned, but the visceral power channeled through jazz rhythms and idioms just packs more punch to the contemporary ear than Hughes’s blues poems (great as they are). Or is it that the personal pain in Harper’s elegies for his newborn son, especially when articulated to the racial division and violence of the 1960s, lift the book to a higher level of power and potential influence? I think I’d maybe listened once to twice to Coltrane’s A Love Supreme before I read this book, but I went out and bought it and put it on constant repeat after I read it (which meant, really, listening to one half over and over because, um, this was back in the days of LPs; I can still hear the arm lifting the needle from the end of the record and swinging it back, then the hiss of the groove before the first sounds of the first movement sang out again). If you can get hold of the recording Harper did with Essex Hemphill on cello, do it. But even if you can’t, just read a poem like “Deathwatch” or “We Assume” out loud. Does America need a killing? I’d like to think not, but at the end of the poem, when Harper intones that refrain, it’s hard not to agree. And it’s cold compensation that “Survivors will be human,” but a compensation that’s earned by the poem’s clear-eyed confrontation with both personal grief and political grimness.

Honorable Mention: Langston Hughes, The Weary Blues(1926) According to Hughes, when he was reading poems from this book in a Harlem church, the pastor passed him a note telling him to stop reading the blues from his pulpit. It’s hard to recover the sense of violence against decorous norms that Hughes perpetrated in his early blues poems, and hard to remember until you reread them both the power and the political charge the poems bear. If it’s been a while, or if you’ve only read the Hughes poems typically anthologized, this one’s worth checking out.)

Next time: Ashbery? And Howe!