Freer Verse

YOUNG AMERICAN POETS. Edited by Paul Carroll. 507 pages. Follett. $6.95.

Like Walt Whitman's noiseless, patient spider, young American poets continue to unspool their thoughts and feelings, seeking anchorages for mind and heart--mostly heart. There are 54 of them represented in this anthology and many are anything but noiseless.

During a recent reading in the Manhattan studio of Pop Artist Robert Rauschenberg, their poems competed with the sound of a speeding locomotive, hissing helium, the splat of a punctured balloon, random clickety-clacks and the unprogrammed clucks of three caged chickens who presumably work for Rauschenberg. And during a performance of Michael Benedikt's poems from his collection The Body, there was the sound of oscillating necks as the audience tried to keep up with the nudie films that were projected on opposing walls. But to savor Benedikt's laconic wit, the peace and quiet of the printed page are still necessary:

. . . May I please have this dance?

No.

May I please have that dance?

No.

Aren't you going to wear anything to the dance?

Yes.

Do you know how to dance?

No.

May I in that case have your company during the dance

they decide to play exactly at midnight, whatever it is?

I have fallen in love with your eyes, lips, hands

and hair.

No . . .

That isn't exactly Ode on a Grecian Urn; neither is Benedikt picking his way through seven types of ambiguity. For all their seeming frivolity, these lines exhibit a directness that has been increasingly admired ever since the mid-'50s when Allen Ginsberg and the beats accelerated the popularity of the simple, charged statement.

Schools Are Out. Most of the poems in the anthology share these qualities, if little else. The variety of styles and voices reflects Poet-Editor Paul Carroll's belief that designating schools of poetry is a rather arbitrary and listless business. "What I've tried to show," says Carroll, "is that there are no schools; there is only one poet at one time reading his poem." He has included many good examples of lyric and pastoral verse, in addition to the intensely personal expressions of Weltschmerz and separation that are still much favored by young poets. But unlike much of the so-called academic poetry, these poems rarely intimidate with pretentiousness or with allusions to obscure mythologies. Missing, too, is the musty odor of coterie and connoisseurship.

The best of these poems are searingly democratic and deeply committed to some new form of humanism that has yet to reveal a clear pattern in the wreckage of the old. The worn coin of alienation is still legal tender, though it appears to be passing into more active hands. Says Robert Haas, a 27-year-old San Franciscan whose poems gracefully bridge the concerns of traditional techniques with the growing influence of forthrightness and social consciousness: "It became clear to me that alienation was a state approaching to sanity, a way of being human in a monstrously inhuman world, and that feeling human was a useful form of political subversion."

Design Poetry. In Skinny Poem, Lou Lipsitz reflects the anxiety and desperate compassion of many of today's youth:

Skinny

poem,

all

your

ribs

showing

even

without

deep

breath

thin

legs

rotted

with

disease.

Live

here!

on

this

page,

barely

making

it,

like

the

mass

of

mankind.

Bill Knott, 28, who writes under the name Saint Geraud, makes his point even more apocalyptically in To American Poets:

There's no time left to write poems.

If you will write rallying cries, yes, do so,

otherwise write poems then throw yourselves on the river to drift away.

Li Po's peachblossom, even if it departs this world, can't help us.

Pound's or Williams' theories on prosody don't meet the cries of dying children

(whose death I think is no caesura).

Soon there will be no ideas but in things,

in nibble, in skulls held under the oceans' magnifying-glass,

in screams driven into one lightning-void. . .

Only you can resurrect the present. People

need your voice to come among them like nakedness,

to fuse them into one marching language in which the

word "peace" will be said for the last time.

"Ah who shall soothe these feverish children/ Who justify these restless explorations?" wrote Whitman, who has been dead long enough to find a place in the hagiography of hip. As of now, few young poets feel the need to justify their work with critical commentary. George Amabile's response is typical: "I can't think of anything that wouldn't sound pompous or absurd." Such an attitude may not prove healthy for poetics, but it is good for poetry.

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