by: Sarah Cooke
At City Lights, poetic lineage is almost tangible. I certainly owe much of my evolution as a writer to the Beats. And on January 12, Jerome Rothenberg, Michael McClure, and Leslie Scalapino gave us a glimpse of the ways in which the lineage of the Romantic poets has shaped their work.
The gathering, called “An Evening of Romantic Poetry,” featured Rothenberg, McClure, and Scalapino reading works predominantly from Poems for the Millennium, co-edited by Rothenberg. There were readings of Shelley, Byron, and Keats, as well as the readers’ own work and various pieces by a number of writers whose work has been influenced by the Romantics. The event boasted a turnout of about 50 people, packed tightly into the bookstore’s second-level poetry room. And the readers were accompanied by the music of a busker playing Johnny Cash. When asked if the music distracted him, McClure responded, “I don’t give a f**k.” An authentic City Lights moment.
Rothenberg introduced the event by suggesting that there are a number of parallels between what has been happening in writing since the end of the 20th Century, and what the Romantic poets were exploring. This concept fascinated me. The Romantics were at the forefront of social thought, to be sure. At a time when much of Western culture was reeling from the Enlightenment, the Romantics emphasized the value of emotion, intuition, and spirituality. Empirical thought was being touted as the path to progress, but the Romantics, while not denying the importance of positivism, strove to remind us that there is something about the nature of human existence that can’t be measured quantitatively. Something that goes beyond – or possibly precedes – rational though. The experience of the human soul in the present moment is at least as much about consciousness, emotion, and intuition as it is about reason.
Contemporary writers seem to be exploring many of the same issues. Existence is something that must be felt to be understood. It seems that poets today are experimenting with new ways to directly represent experience through language. Eleni Sikelianos’s Book of Jon, for example, enters into an understanding of a relationship through numerous methods. It utilizes prose, poetry, lists, and dialogue in an attempt to get at the reality of the relationship is explores. Sikelianos understands that experience is multidimensional and cannot be fully represented in only one mode.
Brenda Coultas’s A Handmade Museum, with its utilization of poetry, interviews, and other forms explores urban existence from many different overlapping angles. Again, there is a recognition that life cannot be simplified to what is rational or quantifiable.
Certainly, the Beats promoted this view of existence, as well. Clearly, the Romantics played an important role in furthering the belief that the human experience entails something intangible. The Beats took that notion a step further, and contemporary writers continue to push our understanding of poetry’s ability to represent experience more directly.
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