ABSTRACT
Much experimental poetry in the 1950s and 1960s, particularly in the United States, was devoted to some notion of improvisation. This was due in large measure to the energy, dexterity, and cultural cachet of bebop, which in the decades before rock ‘n’ roll managed to signify both youthful rebellion and high modernist difficulty. Asked to characterize the poetic theory of the era, Charles Olson once remarked: “Boy, there was no poetic. It was Charlie Parker. Literally, it was Charlie Parker” (Olson 1979: 71). Olson’s remark, while misleading on one level – his own work demonstrates the intensity and sophistication of postwar experimental poetics – also captures quite accurately the fascination bebop and post-bop exerted on any number of poets included in Donald Allen’s famous anthology, The New American Poetry. From the long lines and incantatory excess of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” to the precise syncopations of Robert Creeley’s lyric minimalism, jazz investments in improvisation, rhythmic experiment, and the deconstruction of traditional melody were everywhere apparent in Allen’s anthology, first published in 1960 and widely regarded as the most influential poetry anthology to appear since World War II. The anthology, in turn, provided a compelling reassessment of modernism while also changing the shape of poetry to come. It expressed and helped publicize what one might characterize, to borrow a phrase from Nathaniel Mackey, as an “unruly pivot” in twentieth-century experimental writing, a moment during which the insights of the historical avant-garde were gathered up, reformulated, and projected forward (Mackey 1993: 191–213).
