SAN FRANCISCO AND NEW YORK, THE SACRED BAY AND THE SACRED RIVER: REGENERATION ADN RENEWAL IN POSTMODERN AMERICAN POETRY
Panel Chairs:
Eusebio De Lorenzo Gómez (Universidad Complutense de Madrid)
Eduardo Valls Oyarzun (Universidad Complutense de Madrid)
evallsoyarzun@filol.ucm.es
San Francisco land's end and ocean's beginning The land the
sea's edge also The river within us the sea about us The
place where the story ended the place where the story
began The first frontier the last frontier Beginning of end
and end of beginning End of land and land of Beginning (...)
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, from Great American Waterfront Poem , 1976
Twentieth Century American Poetry has been defined by a chasm between the European tradition --epitomized by T. S. Eliot's formalism-- and the American voice initiated by Walt Whitman's expansive communion with the land.
Eliot's The Waste Land presented a barren, dry territory, which generated an intellectual landscape of desolation. In the aftermath of World War II, such a landscape became inescapable for poets of subsequent generations, who reacted against it by seeking Walt Whitman's poetic trace in the local voice and radical experimentation of other modernists such as William Carlos Williams and Gertrude Stein. Since the 1950s, different generations of poets have integrated tradition and experimentation in San Francisco and New York, coastal cities which have acted as paramount repositories of new, fertile energy.
Shielded by the Bay and the Pacific Ocean, San Francisco has always been in the front line of counter-cultural artistic movements. From the San Francisco Renaissance to the current Bay Area branch of the Language Poets, San Francisco has created poetry of radical experimentation, oral impact, and idiomatic language. Invoking the voice of Walt Whitman, San Francisco poets like Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder, or Michael McClure adhered their energy in the 1950s to the creative subversion of Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, who had started their aesthetic quest in New York. Correspondingly, Manhattan --guarded by the Hudson River-- stimulated poetic movements which defended subversion and non-conformity. In the 1950s, without ever relinquishing the search for a truthful American voice, New York City opened the field to expressionism in painting and experimentation in poetry, as shown in the legacy of the so-called New York School of Poets: John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, and Frank O'Hara.
This synergy between poetry and urban landscape is not limited to the post-war decades. The contemporary Language Poets --most of them nurtured by San Francisco or New York-- have in turn created an energetic poetry of liberation. Following Gertrude Stein, these poets (Rae Armantrout, Charles Bernstein, Lyn Hejinian, Ron Silliman, Barrett Watten, among many others) seek to release language from the hegemonic vision that its meaning resides in the world outside words. In keeping with their Postmodern stance, the Language Poets also question received literary categories, like the reader/writer relationship, the agency of the poet in the text, and the mechanics of reading. Like previous generations, their poetic attitudes open new grounds to investigate what visions are liberated and aided by poetry.
The present workshop invites contributors to explore how San Francisco and New York have shaped the creative imagination of Contemporary American Poets. An island and a peninsula, both cities have been sites of multicultural renewal for generations of poets, who have advocated poetry as an emancipation spanning the modern and the contemporary. Contributions should consider the works of contemporary poets, from the San Francisco Renaissance to the Language writers.
Suggested topics:
-Connections between authors and cities.
-San Francisco and New York as coasts of symbolic renewal.
-Links between landscapes and texts.
-The dialogue between past and present poetic traditions.
-The use of textual subversion as a political stance.
-Experimentation as a form of renewal.
-The validity of the avant-garde as a form of counterculture.
-Experimental techniques to create the poetic text.
-The constitution of "schools" of poetry in San Francisco and New York.