Jack Spicer (January 30, 1925 – August 17, 1965) wrote a poetry of imagistic and conceptual juxtaposition reminiscent, at times, of Dadaist randomness. He considered true poetry to be “dictated,” and thus removed from the conscious control of the poet…. Read More ›
Although Gilbert Sorrentino (April 27, 1929 – May 18, 2006) is not usually identified with the Beat poets, he was contemporaneous with them and published many as the editor of Kulchur magazine from 1961 to 1963. Significantly, Sorrentino’s first published… Read More ›
Among many evocative statements about his life and work, a particularly crucial one is Gary Snyder’s (born May 8, 1930) claim that As a poet, I hold the most archaic values on earth. They go back to the late Paleolithic;… Read More ›
Marie Ponsot’s (April 6, 1921 – July 5, 2019) use of her personal experiences never degenerates into the maudlin, nor does she invoke the circumstances of her life simply for dramatic effect. In Strange Good Fortune: Essays on Contemporary Poets… Read More ›
Kenneth Rexroth (December 22, 1905 – June 6, 1982) wrote in the tradition of contemplative, mystical, visionary, philosophical, and prophetic poets such as William Butler Yeats, D. H. Lawrence, Walt Whitman, William Blake, Dante, Du Fu, Zeami Motokiyo, and Sappho,… Read More ›
Charles Olson’s (27 December 1910 – 10 January 1970) poetry is political in a profound, not superficial, sense; it does not spend time naming “current events,” but rather devotes itself to defining “the dodges of discourse” that have enabled humanity… Read More ›
As presented in Bob Kaufman’s (April 18, 1925 – January 12, 1986) Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness, “Abomunist Manifesto” is a sequence of eleven parts. The title plays on The Communist Manifesto (1850) by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, but in… Read More ›
Anselm Hollo’s (12 April 1934 – 29 January 2013) poetry has a light and airy appearance, with short and sometimes abrupt lines of verse arranged sparingly on the page. While spare, the poems often demonstrate remarkable depth, and while often… Read More ›
Thom Gunn (29 August 1929 – 25 April 2004) first achieved notoriety in England, as part of what was called the Movement, an unofficial tag applied to some poets of the 1950’s who were, in Gunn’s words, “eschewing Modernism, and… Read More ›
Jack Gilbert lived outside literary circles, often abroad, in solitude or in the company of a woman whom he loved. He found these conditions necessary to be able to concentrate on being alive and to discover the fresh perceptions that… Read More ›
“Howl,” the poem that carried Allen Ginsberg (June 3, 1926 – April 5, 1997) into public consciousness as a symbol of the avant-garde artist and as the designer of a verse style for a postwar generation seeking its own voice,… Read More ›
Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s (born March 24, 1919) poetry may be looked on as a kind of travelog in which he has subjectively recorded choice experiences or montages from experience, often in a jazzlike or free-associative manner. For Ferlinghetti, “reality” itself becomes… Read More ›
Written between 1381 and 1386, Troilus is regarded by some as Chaucer’s finest work; Pearsall implies that Chaucer himself treated it as such, ‘quite self consciously and deliberately’ (Pearsall 1992: 170) and indeed Chaucer makes large claims for it in… Read More ›
The Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot offers an autobiographical image of the platform from which the critique of society in Epistles to Several Persons is launched; but in his poetry of the 1730s Pope increasingly utilised the Roman satirist Horace as… Read More ›
Paradise Lost is a poetic rewriting of the book of Genesis. It tells the story of the fall of Satan and his compatriots, the creation of man, and, most significantly, of man’s act of disobedience and its consequences: paradise was… Read More ›
Of the many metaphors that Robert Duncan (January 7, 1919 – February 3, 1988) applied to his poetry—and very few poets have been so perceptive and articulate about their own practice—those dealing with limits, boundaries, and margins are numerous and… Read More ›
Two strains pervade the poetry of Gregory Corso (March 26, 1930 – January 17, 2001): the Dionysian force of emotion and spontaneity, and a preoccupation with death. From Corso’s early poems to his later work, one finds the recurring persona… Read More ›
Living on the periphery of society, Charles Bukowski (August 16, 1920 – March 9, 1994) forged a brutally honest poetic voice. The futility and senselessness of most human endeavor conjoined with the desperation and essential solitude of the individual are… Read More ›
Because Paul Blackburn (November 24, 1926 – September 13, 1971) is a poet of immediate observation and spontaneous response, his poetry thrives on particular places. His work, however, is not rooted in a specific geographical location that is transformed into… Read More ›
Imagism is a term associated with an eclectic group of English and American poets working between 1912 and 1917, among them some of the most important writers in English of the first half of the 20th century: Ezra Pound, Amy… Read More ›
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