Objectivist Poets - Legacy

Legacy

The early critical reception of the Objectivists was generally hostile, particularly in reviews by Morris Schappes and Yvor Winters, as well as Harriet Monroe's already-mentioned unfavourable reaction to the Poetry special issue. However, they did have an immediate impact, especially on the work of their two Imagist mentors, Williams and Pound. Williams and Zukofsky were to maintain a lifelong personal and creative relationship which was to prove important for both men. For Zukofsky, the example of Williams helped to keep him focused on external realities and things. For Williams, Zukofsky served as a reminder of the importance of form. As Mark Scroggins writes, "from Zukofsky, Williams learned to shape his often amorphous verse into more sharply chiselled measures."

Pound, too, was influenced by the Objectivist sense of form, their focus on everyday vocabulary, and their interests in politics, economics and specifically American subject matter. The critic Hugh Kenner has argued that these influences helped shape the sections of The Cantos published during the 1930s, writing "Pound was reading them, and they him".

The poets of the Beat Generation, a group of American bohemian writers to emerge at the end of the 1940s that included Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder and Jack Kerouac, owed much to Pound and Williams, and were led, through them, to the Objectivists. In the 1950s and 1960s, Zukofsky was sought out by younger poets including Paul Blackburn, Jerome Rothenberg, Jonathan Williams, Denise Levertov, Gilbert Sorrentino and Allen Ginsberg. His work was also well-known to the Black Mountain poets, especially Robert Creeley and Cid Corman, whose Origin journal and press were to serve as valuable publishing outlets for the older poet.

Zukofsky's formal procedures, especially his interest in aleatory writing, were a key influence on Jackson Mac Low and John Cage, amongst others, and through them on the Language School, an avant garde group of poets who started publishing in the 1970s and who included Bruce Andrews, Charles Bernstein, Ron Silliman, Lyn Hejinian, Bob Perelman, Michael Palmer, Rae Armantrout, Carla Harryman, Barrett Watten, Clark Coolidge, Hannah Weiner, Susan Howe, Tina Darragh and Fanny Howe.

Oppen and Reznikoff influenced subsequent generations of poets, most notably, Theodore Enslin, Harvey Shapiro, Michael Heller, Norman Finkelstein, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, and Armand Schwerner to name a few. Their poetry continues the Objectivist obsession with language, ethics, and world and often addresses modern, urban, Jewish life, both secular and religious. DuPlessis, on first glance, seems an exception to this list. Her poetry seems not to immediately possess the so-called themes of an Objectivist aesthetic as practiced in the work of a Reznikoff, a Niedecker or an Oppen.

As a young woman and university student, DuPlessis began a lifelong correspondence with Oppen and was deeply influenced by Oppen's integrity, sincerity, and courage. Though establishing herself as a poet with tendencies and obsessions at some remove from an Objectivist ethos (or so it may be argued at a first reading) DuPlessis has played a crucial role in the dissemination and survival of Objectivist poetry and poetics well into the 21st century. The life of a man such as Oppen made a lasting impression on DuPlessis. DuPlessis gained Oppen's trust as well and she was given the opportunity of editing Oppen's Selected Letters, which were published posthumously.

Bunting's physical presence in Newcastle in the 1960s, together with his close relationships with a number of younger poets (including Tom Pickard, Thomas A. Clark, Richard Caddel and Barry MacSweeney), meant that he was a major father figure for the poets of the British Poetry Revival. This younger generation were also drawn to the works of the other Objectivists, and their writings began to be more widely known in Britain. For example, a letter from the Revival poet Andrew Crozier was the trigger that prompted Rakosi's return to poetry.

Amidst the continuous reappraisals, critical and otherwise, of the legacy and literary formation of the Objectivists, a well known mapping of the territory continues to be one put forth by poet Ron Silliman: "three-phase Objectivism". Though unclear, precisely, who coined the phrase, this rubric offers a useful way of dealing with the intercession of the Objectivist poets into our consciousness. Writes Silliman:

: .. the process requires you to position yourself within the terrain of a poetics. All any literary formation is, in one sense, is just such a process carried out consciously, collectively & in public.

To see that, one need only look at the three broad phases of Objectivism –

• § The 1930s, interactivity, optimism, joint publishing projects, critical statements, recruiting (Niedecker)

• § The 1940s & ‘50s, almost totally receding, with several Objectivists either not publishing and even not writing for long periods of time

• § 1960s onward, the emergence & success of these writers precisely as a literary formation