Only open for a brief twenty three years, Black Mountain College in North Carolina not only became a symbol for progressive education but also brought together some of the most powerful poets in modern poetry. The school, which was one of the only ones in the nation that was open to experimenting with education, attracted many projective thinkers including Charles Olson and Robert Creeley. Together both Olson and Creeley had a major impact on the creation of the Black Mountain poetry movement and influenced what are now known as “Black Mountain poets”. What started this movement above all were the philosophies on form the poets shared and Olson’s essay the “Projective Verse”. This essay was published after Olson’s publication of his poem “The Kingfishers” which had proposed post modernism as an essential new mode of poetic expression with matters constructed on world events. While the “Projective Verse” justified the unique style of “The Kingfishers”, it also created a strong alliance between Olson and Creeley who would turn Olson’s essay into a new style of poetry that would be forever acknowledged as Black Mountain Poetry or the projective poetry movement.
In July of 1951 Olson wrote to Cid Corman just before leaving Yucatan, “If you don’t know Kingfishers, you don’t have a starter!” (Glover 63). Written in 1949, “The Kingfishers” was one of Olson’s earliest and most accomplished poems. A position poem, it was influenced heavily by Ezra Pound whom Olson had a deep friendship and alliance with. The ideogrammic form, in which he had been taught by Pound, allowed him to present his thoughts and tensions through many elements and enabled the poem to be presented as more of an action through his movement of thoughts in a free formed...
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...ers drifted to New York. While the school did not exist anymore, the projective poetry movement would also be given the name “Black Mountain poetry” because of the style many of the poets leaving the school engaged in their writings.
Focusing and delivering the vision in which they had pictured from the beginning of their friendship, Olson and Creeley continued their correspondence, reading and critiquing each other’s work through letters. Olson completed his largest work The Maximus Poems in 1969 just a month before his death. Creeley continued to write novels, short stories, and poems until his death in 2005. Together, their ideas and beliefs inspired many in poetics who believed in a new, traditional form of poetry that was based on a freely created verse that took shape during the process of composing; a style that would forever be known as projective poetry.
When I read poetry, I often tend to look first at its meaning and second at how it is written, or its form. The mistake I make when I do this is in assuming that the two are separate, when, in fact, often the meaning of poetry is supported or even defined by its form. I will discuss two poems that embody this close connection between meaning and form in their central use of imagery and repetition. One is a tribute to Janis Joplin, written in 1983 by Alice Fulton, entitled “You Can’t Rhumboogie in a Ball and Chain.” The second is a section from Walt Whitman’s 1,336-line masterpiece, “Song of Myself,” first published in 1855. The imagery in each poem differs in purpose and effect, and the rhythms, though created through repetition in both poems, are quite different as well. As I reach the end of each poem, however, I am left with a powerful human presence lingering in the words. In Fulton’s poem, that presence is the live-hard-and-die-young Janis Joplin; in Whitman’s poem, the presence created is an aspect of the poet himself.
American Bards: Walt Whitman and Other Unlikely Candidates for National Poet. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2010. Print.
Ogden Nash is a great American author, best known for his “pithy and funny light verse” (“Ogden Biography” 1). New York Times refers to him as America’s “best-known producer of humorous poetry” due to his buffoonery verse style. Born in the August of 1902 in Rye, New York as a child he moved often due to his father’s exporting-importing company (1). After completing high school at St. George’s School he attended Harvard University unfortunately quitting a year later. Reflecting on better times, Nash taught at his previous high school but left less than a year later, with little success in establishing another job (2) (“Ogden Nash” 1-2). Nash tried many different careers throughout the next decade finally finding success as a poetic advisor at Doubleday publishing house. Advertising gave him the opportunity to explore various styles of writing where he eventually came up with his own unique style. During this period he moved to Baltimore, the place he ultimately considered his home, married Francis Leonard and promoted from the market department to the editorial department at Doubleday (“Ogden Nash” 1-3).
As a graduate student at Stanford, Momaday absorbed the influence of an eclectic group of poets including Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens, Paul Valery, Charles Baudelaire, and Frederick Goddard Tuckerman, the subject of Momaday's PhD dissertation. What these poets had in common, at least in the eyes of Momaday and Winters, was the practice of establishing a conceptual theme, but then giving it meaning with concrete, sensory images.
In today’s modern view, poetry has become more than just paragraphs that rhyme at the end of each sentence. If the reader has an open mind and the ability to read in between the lines, they discover more than they have bargained for. Some poems might have stories of suffering or abuse, while others contain happy times and great joy. Regardless of what the poems contains, all poems display an expression. That very moment when the writer begins his mental journey with that pen and paper is where all feelings are let out. As poetry is continues to be written, the reader begins to see patterns within each poem. On the other hand, poems have nothing at all in common with one another. A good example of this is in two poems by a famous writer by the name of Langston Hughes. A well-known writer that still gets credit today for pomes like “ Theme for English B” and “Let American be American Again.”
American poetry, unlike other nations’ poetry, is still in the nascent stage because of the absence of a history in comparison to other nations’ poetry humming with matured voices. Nevertheless, in the past century, American poetry has received the recognition it deserves from the creative poetic compositions of Walt Whitman, who has been called “the father of American poetry.” His dynamic style and uncommon content is well exhibited in his famous poem “Song of Myself,” giving a direction to the American writers of posterity. In addition, his distinct use of the line and breath has had a huge impression on the compositions of a number of poets, especially on the works of the present-day poet Allen Ginsberg, whose debatable poem “Howl” reverberates with the traits of Whitman’s poetry. Nevertheless, while the form and content of “Howl” may have been impressed by “Song of Myself,” Ginsberg’s poem expresses a change from Whitman’s use of the line, his first-person recital, and his vision of America. As Whitman’s seamless lines are open-ended, speaking the voice of a universal speaker presenting a positive outlook of America, Ginsberg’s poem, on the contrary, uses long lines that end inward to present the uneasiness and madness that feature the vision of America that Ginsberg exhibits through the voice of a prophetic speaker.
The poetry of Phillis Wheatley is crafted in such a manner that she is able to create a specific aim for each poem, and achieve that aim by manipulating her position as the speaker. As a slave, she was cautious to cross any lines with her proclamations, but was able to get her point across by humbling her own position. In religious or elegiac matters, however, she seemed to consider herself to be an authority. Two of her poems, the panegyric “To MAECENAS” and the elegy “On the Death of a young Lady of Five Years of Age,” display Wheatley’s general consistency in form, but also her intelligence, versatility, and ability to adapt her position in order to achieve her goals.
“Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words.” –Edgar Allan Poe. Poetry is one of the world’s greatest wonders. It is a way to tell a story, raise awareness of a social or political issue, an expression of emotions, an outlet, and last but not least it is an art. Famous poet Langston Hughes uses his poetry as a musical art form to raise awareness of social injustices towards African-Americans during the time of the Harlem Renaissance. Although many poets share similarities with one another, Hughes creatively crafted his poetry in a way that was only unique to him during the 1920’s. He implemented different techniques and styles in his poetry that not only helped him excel during the 1920’s, but has also kept him relative in modern times. Famous poems of his such as a “Dream Deferred,” and “I, Too, Sing America” are still being studied and discussed today. Due to the cultural and historical events occurring during the 1920’s Langston Hughes was able to implement unique writing characteristics such as such as irregular use of form, cultural and historical referenced themes and musical influences such as Jazz and the blues that is demonstrative of his writing style. Langston Hughes use of distinct characteristics such as irregular use of form, cultural and historical referenced themes and musical influences such as Jazz and the blues helped highlight the plights of African-Americans during the Harlem Renaissance Era.
"For the first time since the plantation days artists began to touch new material, to understand new tools and to accept eagerly the challenge of Black poetry, Black song and Black scholarship."1
Strand, Mark and Evan Boland. The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms. New
In the early 20th century, many writers such as T.S. Eliot (Thomas Stearns Eliot) and Langston Hughes wrote what scholars of today consider, modern poetry. Writers in that time period had their own ideas of what modern poetry should be and many of them claimed that they wrote modern work. According to T.S. Eliot’s essay, “From Tradition”, modern poetry must consist of a “tradition[al] matter of much wider significance . . . if [one] want[s] it [he] must obtain it by great labour . . . no poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists’ (550). In another term, tradition only comes within the artist or the art itself; therefore, it should be universally monumental to the past. And, Langston Hughes argues that African-Americans should embrace and appreciate their own artistic virtues; he wishes to break away from the Euro-centric tradition and in hopes of creating a new blueprint for the African-American-Negro.
The first poem by Ackerman is about two lovers who find their own special place to make love: under water. The writer describes the captured moment over four stanzas of the undersea world, describing physical attributes and actions with marine life. The woman in the poem is described as “his sea-geisha / in an orange kimono / of belts and vests, / her lacquered hair waving” (Lines 24-27) and the man with “his sandy hair / and sea-blue eyes, his kelp thin waist / and chest ribbed wider / than a sandbar / where muscles domed / clear and taunt as shells” (Lines 34-40) Ackerman’s poem has a feeling of tranquility and patience, capturing the moment and enhancing it to its fullest extent. She portrays sex as a beautiful act, saying “he pum...
Mason, Jr., Julian D. The Poems of Phillis Wheatley. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1989.
Langston Hughes was deemed the "Poet Laureate of the Negro Race," a fitting title which the man who fueled the Harlem Renaissance deserved. But what if looking at Hughes within the narrow confines of the perspective that he was a "black poet" does not fully give him credit or fully explain his works? What if one actually stereotypes Hughes and his works by these over-general definitions that cause readers to look at his poetry expecting to see "blackness?" Any person's unique experiences in life and the sense of personal identity this forms most definitely affects the way he or she views the world. This molded view of the world can, in turn, be communicated by the person through artistic expression. Taking this logic into account, to more fully comprehend the message and force of Hughes' poetry one must look, not just to his work, but also at the experiences in his life that constructed his ideas about society and his own identity. In looking at Hughes' biography, one studies his struggle to form a self-identity that reflected both his African American and mainstream white cultural influence; consequently, this mixing of black and white identity that occurred throughout Hughes' life is reflected in his poem "The Weary Blues."
Dickinson begins the first line of her poem by writing in iambic tetrameter. In the second line she switches to iambic trimeter and proceeds to alternate between the two. This rhyme scheme proves to be particularly effective in complimenting the subject of the poem-- the ocean. When a reader looks at the poem it is easy to see the lines lengthening then shortening, almost in the same fashion that the tide of the ocean flows and ebbs.