[New-Poetry] Influential Poets, The Five

[Bob Grumman]

How about Eddie Guest?  More people write his kind of doggerel than write any other kind of poetry.

Eliot and Pound were mainly responsible for jump-cut poetry, and a lot of people do that.  And how do you measure Eliot, Pound and WIlliams's influence on O'Hara?

Interesting that Ginsberg is overlooked.  He expanded the vocabulary, which I consider important.

My bottom line is that it's too difficult a topic to answer.  To treat properly, it seems to me one has to isolate kinds of influence, then find out the real sources, and distinguish the different kinds of influences manifesting themselves--for instance, in number of those influenced, in size of cultural significance of the work of those influenced, etc.

--Bob G.
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: JforJames at aol.com 
  To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu 
  Sent: Tuesday, January 02, 2007 2:27 PM
  Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Influential Poets, The Five


  In a message dated 1/2/2007 1:54:11 PM Eastern Standard Time, skip at louisiana.edu writes:
    And how does one substitute Plath for Pound unless one thinks only of
    contemporary quantity? (But even then . . .)

  If we're talking 'influential', then I'd drop Eliot from the list in favor
  of Frank O'Hara. Influence I measure numerically and there are legions
  more writing in the New York School style than in the Eliotesque.

  Pound was all over the place...what Pound has had the most influence,
  Pound of imagism, Pound of personae, Pound of the Cantos?..the latter
  being itself all-over-the-place...and can such a 'poetic sequence' really be 
  a model other than one of marvelous, quixotic ambition?

  Almost everyone has read and admires Emily Dickinson...but does anyone
  really claim to be in the line of Dickinson? She's sui generis
  to spawn a followers...what we get from her is something Raven may
  have been claiming: License. The right to be wrong about everything that 
  is ordinarily taught as 'the right way', including punctuation and grammar. 
  I hasten to add that I don't endorse a fear of reading far & wide. The fear 
  of influence through reading is an admission of profound weakness...one's
  pen is not a blown leaf. Recently back from Germany, I encountered
  a quote about Albrecht Durer in which it was said that when Durer
  referred to his art he spoke of 'his hand'. So it's the kind of thing that
  won't be easily tethered to someone else's puppet strings.

  I think Wiman's got the list about right, if influence is the measure, and one
  must pick only five.

  Finnegan


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