[New-Poetry] Influential Poets, The Five

[Bob Grumman]

  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: JforJames at aol.com 
  To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu 
  Sent: Tuesday, January 02, 2007 5:54 PM
  Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Influential Poets, The Five


  In a message dated 1/2/2007 2:57:49 PM Eastern Standard Time, bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net writes:
    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.

  Bob, I'm not getting too worked up over this because there is no right answer 
  in this little name game...

  Nor I.

  I'm thinking Wiman's is putting Ginsberg under the Whitman influenced line...where he sort of fits, 
  if you file down his more ecstatic and sexually graphic and politically-engaged rough edges. Certainly Ginsberg spoke a lot about Whitman as a forerunner.

  He belongs there BUT was responsible, as I said, for enlarging the language for poetry.  I say that's as important as opening poetry to new subject matter.


  There should perhaps be true formalist on the list...like a Frost or a Wilbur.

  Sure, as long as you make sure no one gets on it who influenced poetries that haven't made the Norton.  But for me the claim that Frost or Wilbur have had some kind of influence is like the claim that Andrew Wyeth has influenced a lot of painters.


  I don't know who Eddie 
  G is, I'm afraid. But I think the you have assume Wiman's talking about influence on poets who are
  writing at a little higher level than doggerel.

  I was merely responding to the idea of numbers of followers as indication of influence.  But you get out of it with subjectivity.  I could say, similarly, that Whitman had no influence except on writers of the free verse equivalent of doggerel.

  The jump cut may have been an influence of that ubiquitous, early modernist poet named 
  Cinema.

  Finnegan 

  Maybe.  I truly don't know.  But Ashbery is called by many out best poet, and he made his reputation with it., and hasn't been the only one.  Before Wasteland, no jump-cut poetry.  After it, lots.  Before Frost, rhymed metric poetry.  After him, lots.

  --Bob G.
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