Word: oneness
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...wrote poems about our depressions and called it "the drifting, fading and languishing school." Then we wrote liberal poems about our childhoods and families (discreetly calling it nothing but knowing in our hearts that it was "the Life Studies school.") An occasional tic of style would distinguish one of us from the others-and the style was good, don't get me wrong, competent and finished-but we had sheepishly to admit that we could spot each others' line sequences from a mile away and that those oh so-recognisable adjective arrangements sometimes haunted us in our sleep. We published...
...spoke also of the extinction of ego, the ability to lose yourself into what you're writing poems about, to become like the haiku artist-the bursting of silence, the frog into the night pond, the sound of one hand... And all of this in an age of writing focussed so compulsively inward! In the tradition that extends from Eliot to Lowell and those between, most poets write of themselves, in a style which Bly calls the reporting of "news of the human mind." Involved, ego-centered, almost embarrassingly self-aware, many contemporary poets seem to live to reveal...
achieves an emotional consummation that just cannot be improved. Like the Lincoln Continental, these revelations-of-mind are a polished but exhausted perfection. Where can one go from here except to the distressing extreme of Anne Sexton writing "In Celebration of My Uterus?" The poetry of discovery and sincerity becomes a simplistic, gratuitous poetry of exposure, and that sacred "space" vanishes at the boundaries of private experience...
Then, almost as a tease of an answer from out of the infinite west, Richard Brautigan came a week ago and read spacey little one-liners that laughed in the now-vulnerable face of "serious" poetry everywhere. American literature at its most libertine spoke, ruthlessly mocking the discipline and care of poetry along with the paralyzing limitations that have admittedly been placed upon it. The line between space and sloppiness, like the one between innovativeness and perversity, grew tenuous. With Brautigan, things were looking grim for those of us who were counting on salvation in looseness and space...
...long time. I walked into the Advocate sanctum after the meeting had ended and everyone had departed, traces of the carnage of Saturday night's Brautigan reception still heavy in the air. Fled for awhile at least that old vision; born at last I think a new one...