In his poem "The Rest" (1913), Ezra Pound alluded to the United States as a culturally backward country: "Artists broken against her,/A-stray, lost in the villages..." But by the end of World War II, the United States had become the primary exporter, as well as market, for advanced ideas in the arts. Today, the young Ezra Pound would leave his Philadelphia suburb of Wyncote not for London and Paris, but rather The Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church in the Bowery, San Francisco's New Langton Arts, or the Nuyorican Poet's Cafe. His work would be published in such magazines as "Sulfur," "Conjustions," "New American Writing," "O-BLEK," "Temblor," "The World," and "Hambone," and his books would be published by such presses as Black Sparrow, Coffee House, North Point, The Figures, City Lights, Kulchur, The Jargon Society, Burning Deck, Sun & Moon, and the Roof, which have joined New Directions in their commitment to avant-garde writing. In short, since 1950, the year Charles Olson's essay "Projective Verse" appeared, innovative poetry in the United States has flourished.
...In the last decade, two relatively marginal influences of the seventies, language poetry and performance poetry, have become increasingly the dominant postmodern modes. The first emphasizes textuality and therefore a degree of difficulty. Strongly based if theory, it requires an initiated reader. In its difficulty and literalness, language poetry is reminiscent of the High Modernism of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Yet language poetry is Marxist and feminist in theory and disdains Pound and Eliot for their politically conservative themes. Performance poetry, especially as it has evolved into poetry "slams," has its chief appeal with the popular audience. Its interest is not in the "poem as poem," but rather in using the words as script for spoken performance. In its verbal intensity, it recalls the Beat coffeehouse readings of the 1950s.
...Seeing a poem as an intellectual and sonic construction rather than a necessary expression of the human soul, language poetry raises technique to a position of privilege. Language poets see lyricism in poetry not as a means of expressing emotion but rather in its original context as the musical use of words. Rather than employ language as a transparent window onto experience, the language poet pays attention to the material nature of words. Because it is fragmentary and discontinuous, language poetry may appear at first to be automatic writing; however, it is heavily reworked to achieve the proper relation of materials. This approach is consistent with William Carlos William's definition of a poem as a "small (or large) machine made of words. When I say there's nothing sentimental about a poem I mean there can be no part, as in any other machine, that is redundant."
...The emphasis in language poetry is placed on production rather than packaging (beginning, middle, end) and ease of consumption. Gertrude Stein gave the credit for this egalitarian theory of composition to her favorite painter: "Cezanne conceived the idea that in composition one thing is as important as another thing. Each part is as important as the whole.
...A poem is not "about" something, a paraphrasable narrative, symbolic nexus, or theme: rather, it is the actuality of words.
Language poetry's resistance to closure, which infuses meaning throughout the poem rather than overlaying it in lyrical and dramatic epiphanies, may prove to be one of its most lasting effects. It has also revealed the limits of a "natural " or "organic" concept of poetry. In language poetry, as in Marshall McLuhan's theory of television, the medium is the message. Words are not transparent vessels for containing and conveying higher truth; they are instead the material of which it is shaped.
The work of Allen Ginsberg and Amiri Baraka has always lent itself to performance. But in the early 1070s, with David Antin's creation of the "talk poem," (Jerome)Rothenberg's performances of Native American chants, John Giorno's early electronic choruses, and the growing importance of performance as an area of conceptual art, the performance poetry entered a new phase. It was no longer based on reading to an audience from a printed text, but rather in extending the prepared text, if one existed, through theater and ritual. This returned poetry to its communal roots (if gallery goers can be said to constitute a community) and gave words a hopeful uncertainty as well as oracular sweep and confidence. Performance poetry implicitly challenged the preciousness of the page and the concept of a poem as a closed system. Always provisional, living, and dying dramatically in the air, the spoken word is also unconditionally public, and therefore frequently political or persuasive in character.
The multiculturalism of performance poetry is no accident. According to Gary Synder, "Of all the streams of civilized tradition with roots in the paleolithic, poetry is one of the few that can realistically claim an unchanged function and a relevance which will outlast most of the activities that surround us today." The activities that the multicultural poets resist are cultural genocide, the political and economic fallout from imperialism, and the homogenizing forces of modern technology. Orality, the primary means of communication among pre-industrial societies, enables the artist to achieve a ritual connection with his or her community, disparate as it may be. The effect of performance poetry has been to reinstitute its instrumental function as communication. The dilemma of performance poetry lies in a paradox of commodity. While performance art began as a way to decommodify the art object, its inherent theatricality quickly reinvests it with commodity value.
In "The Poetics of Indeterminacy," Marjorie Perloff traces the avant-garde from its infancy in symbolist poetry, especially that of Rimbaud: "it is Rimbaud who strikes the first note of that 'undecidability' we find in Gertrude Stein, in Pound, and Williams...and undecidability that has become marked in the poetry of the last decades." This inheritance includes futurism, Dada, surrealism, modernism, and the varieties of postmodernism we are now experiencing. The fin de siecle position of postmodern art suggests to some that it is in a state of exhaustion; in "Has Modernism Failed?," art critic Suzi Gablik argues unpersuasively that "innovation no longer seems possible, or even desirable." In fact, the poetry now being produced is as strong as, and arguably stronger that, that produced by earlier vanguards. As history remains dynamic, so does the artistic concept of "the new." The period since 1950 will be seen as the time when the United States finally acquired its full share of cultural anxiety and world knowledge, and thereby its most daring poetry.
