Poetics of Emergence

Benjamin Lee’s new book offers a radical reworking of the history of post war American poetry. Taking Donald Allen’s classic 1960 anthology, The New American Poetry 1945-60 as a starting point, this book offers studies of Frank O’Hara, Diane Di Prima, Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Allen Ginsberg in the context of Raymond Williams’ ‘Structures of Feeling’, Jonathan Flatley’s theory of Affective Mapping and the work of Walter Benjamin.
Feeling and Affect are used to show that these writers are doing much more than reacting to the zeitgeist of rationality and order set up by New Criticism. Instead these texts in their hipsterism, their plays with chance and collage and the deliberate breaking of boundaries set up a circular writing/reading rhythm encompassing aesthetics, politics, performance and response. There are no clear beginning and endings; instead the ‘this and thatness’ of Frank O’Hara, the happenings that Baraka sets up after living in Cuba, the beat readings and teachings of Di Prima and Ginsberg establish another poetic universe. Contemporary events stream in and out of this work, a markedly alternative poetics to both Modernism and its child, New Criticism.
Lee uses the figure of Baudelaire’s dandy in his metaphoric exploration of Di Prima’s work; one could also read Mallarmé or Wilde as an undercurrent in O’Hara’s loosely knit evocations of the gay outsider; European ‘decadence’ as parent(grandparent?} to the post war poet.
My only criticism of Lee’s work is the lack of a European context to the enabling liberations that the language of the street brought into the American poetic. One link would be the Situationist movement of Guy Debord whose stress on happening, chance, the links between the languages of art and political protest are articulated in The Society of the Spectacle.
This exciting text builds on Lee’s 2010 article in New Literary History and presents a convincing argument for a discursive history of post war American poetry that uses open form and affect as ways into understanding the composition of Benjamin’s “that sun that is rising in the sky of history”.

Poetics of Emergence: Affect and History in Postwar Experimental Poetry by Benjamin Lee is an examination of the influences of Post WWII poetry. Lee teaches courses in modern and contemporary poetry, literary theory, and African American literature. His research focuses on twentieth-century American poetry and poetics, with a special emphasis on vernacular and avant-garde approaches.

I started reviewing poetry a few years ago without having much education in literature. My degrees were in history and political science, and that experience has helped me with this book. I have tried reading poetics in the past, and it has left me puzzled and confused. Lee's book, which also started as his dissertation, looked like it would be a challenge. I found it, however, to be very readable.

Lee examines the period after WWII, which many Americans view as a golden age. On the surface, it was an age of prosperity and the "Leave it to Beaver"/Andy Griffin wholesomeness and wide open consumerism. The period was much more than that. It was a time of considerable uncertainty. There was the Cold War, MAD, McCarthyism, Jim Crow, sexism, and homophobia.

With the era set, Lee looks at four poets from the time: One gay, one openly gay and a communist, a woman, and an African American. The poets are Frank O'Hara (many know his Lunch Poems). Allen Ginsberg, who needs no introduction. Diane DiPrima, a Beat legend who was friends with the above poets and the mother of a child with Baraka. She taught at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics as well as working with Timothy Oleary. Amiri Baraka, a poet, and commentator of black culture and music.

On the surface, the poets seem to cover a full portion of the different factions outside the mainstream. O'Hara was the closest to the mainstream and the only white-collar poet in the group, although he was a leading figure in the New York School. Baraka and DiPrimo worked the underground scene together and apart. Ginsberg was the loose cannon. They, despite being so different, fell into the same or almost the same clique. They were all friends.

Lee manages to capture the movement inside history and present it to the reader in a very understandable way. Being familiar with the period and the individual poets helped me quite a bit. Even if I was unfamiliar with both the period and the people, Lee provides enough background to make it understandable and informative. Poetics has always remained out of my grasp, but Poetics of Emergence is not only understandable but informative and entertaining.