The Poetry of the World

On the furthest extreme of the poetic spectrum lies poetry of the world, presided over by the spirit of Elizabeth Bishop. This is a downbeat, or outcast, poetry that at first reading seems anti-poetical. It may seem too prosaic, too caught up with mere incidentals, to count for anything lasting. The hesitant delivery is the opposite of oracular, and the subject at first seems lost or merely descriptive. Nevertheless, the best of this poetry cuts through multiple perspectives, questions the very notion of personal identity, and understands suffering from an ethical perspective.

Older poets writing in this manner are Richard Hugo, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Phil Levine. Contemporary voices such as Ellen Bryant Voigt and Yusef Komunyakaa have been influenced by their almost naturalistic vision, and they are drawn to violence and its far-reaching shadow.

Yusef Komunyakaa (1947- )
Louisiana-raised Yusef Komunyakaa, born James Willie Brown, Jr., served in Vietnam directly after graduation from secondary school, winning a Bronze Star. He was a reporter for the military newspaper Southern Cross, and has written vivid poems set in the war. Often, as in "Camouflaging the Chimera" (1988), there is an element of suspense, danger, and ambush. Komunyakaa has spoken of the need for poetry to afford a "series of surprises." Like the poet Michael S. Harper, he often uses jazz methods, and he has written of the poetry's need for free improvisation and openness to other voices, as in a musicians' "jam session." He has co-edited The Jazz Poetry Anthology (1991, 1996) and published a volume of essays entitled Blue Notes (2000), while he first gained recognition with Neon Vernacular (1993).

One of Komunyakaa's enduring themes concerns identity. His poem "Facing It" (1988), set at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., begins with a riff that merges his own face with memories and reflected faces:

My black face fades,
hiding inside the black granite.
I said I wouldn't,
dammit: No tears.
I'm stone. I'm flesh.
My clouded reflection eyes me
like a bird of prey, the profile of night
slanted against morning. I turn
this way--the stone lets me go.
I turn that way--I'm inside
the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
again, depending on the light
to make a difference.
I go down the 58,022 names,
half-expecting to find
my own in letters like smoke.
I touch the name Andrew Johnson;
I see the booby trap's white flash.
Names shimmer on a woman's blouse
but when she walks away
the names stay on the wall.
Brushstrokes flash, a red bird's
wings cutting across my stare.
The sky. A plane in the sky.
A white vet's image floats
closer to me, then his pale eyes
look through mine. I'm a window.
He's lost his right arm
inside the stone. In the black mirror
a woman's trying to erase names:
No, she's brushing a boy's hair.

Cyber-Poetry

At the extreme end of the poetic spectrum, cyber-poetry is a new worldly poetry. For many young American adults, the book is secondary to the computer monitor, and reading a spoken human language comes after exposure to binary codes.

Computer-based literature has taken shape since the early 1990s; with the advent of the World Wide Web, some experimental poetry has shifted its focus to a paperless, virtual, global realm.

Recurring motifs in cyber-poetry include self-reflexive critiques of technologically driven work; computer icons, graphics, and hypertext links festoon vast webs of relationships, while dimensional layers -- animation, sonics, hyperlinked texts -- proliferate in multiple directions, sometimes created by multiple and unknown authors.

Outlets for this work come and go; they have included the CD-ROM poetry magazines The Little Magazine, Cyberpoetry, Java Poetry, New River, Parallel, and many others. Writing From the New Coast: Technique (1993), an influential gathering of poetic statements accompanied by a collection of poems edited by Juliana Spahr and Peter Gizzi, helped catalyze experimental poetry in the electronic age. It celebrates irreducible multiplicity and the primacy of historical context, attacking the very notions of identity and universality as repressive bourgeois constructs.

Jorie Graham and other experimental poets of self have arrived at similar viewpoints, coming from opposite directions. Ultimate or contingent, poems exist at the intersection of word and world.

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 865