Word: poetes
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...writes Michael McClure, and furthermore, WHAP WHAP WHAP WHAP WHAP Most action poets profess to take religion seriously, "via crucis vicar son of a bitch render out with magnificat," cries Ebbe Borregaard, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the wittiest of them, writes of a "wiggy prophet . . . gentle as the lamb of God/made into mad cutlets." Many action poets describe "religious visions" induced by narcotics; conversely, one poet speaks of "getting a fix at the altar." Even more important than religion to most action poets is sex, but more important than either is excrement. Excrement is sacrament. They sprinkle it around like holy...
...Abominable Snowman. In the work of Allen Ginsberg, the only projective poet who gives evidence of important talent, excrement is of the poetic essence. After eight years on the bum, Ginsberg sat down at 29 and wrote Howl, a sort of abstract-expressionist Waste Land that established him overnight as "the Abominable Snowman of modern poetry." (Like that's the most, man.) Howl is an astounding screed, an interminable sewer of a poem that sucks in all the feculence, malignity and unmeaning slime of modern life and spews them with tremendous momentum into the reader's mind. Moloch...
...Seven. Among the couths there are seven poets of proven powers. Richard Wilbur, 40, is a first-rate technician and has a dashing way with a phrase-almost too dashing; sometimes the reader can't see the poem for the words. W. D. Snodgrass, 35, a less spectacular writer, is a clear, competent, solidly individual poet who may well become one of America's best. William Meredith, 42, is a master of compression who has written half a dozen superb short poems. Adrienne Cecile Rich, 32, the most accomplished young poet of her sex, has a feminine charm...
Roethke is a nature poet as well as a metaphysician, and the best of his poems celebrate the spiritual experience in a natural metaphor, as a sort of vegetation mystery. Cuttings is characteristic: This urge, wrestle, resurrection of dry sticks, Cut stems struggling to put down feet, What saint strained so much, Rose on such lopped limbs to a new life? I can hear, underground, that sucking and sobbing, In my veins, in my bones I feel it,- The small waters seeping upward, The tight grains parting at last...
...Robert Lowell, 44, who belongs to the same prominent Boston family that produced such poets as James Russell Lowell and Amy Lowell, is probably the most distinguished American poet who has made his reputation since World War II. In Lord Weary's Castle, which won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1947, he revealed a driving religious concern and a nervously aggressive masculine line. In his later poems (Life Studies), Lowell has limbered his forms and strengthened a strong and even peculiar personal tone that sounds a little like cubistic Browning. Like Browning, he seems to lack...