My favorite post-war Americans might be strict formalists like Wilbur and Hecht, Tiffany Elsa Man Watch my appreciation of them- and of semiformalists like Lowell and Bishop - would be weaker, I think, if I did not recognize that there were things done by ragbag technicians, or even dedicated anti-technicians, which nevertheless achieved the most concentrated possible version of an effect. Michael Donaghy was quite right to say that Ginsberg's Howl was the result of hard reworking. But the work went into making the lines sound as if they had never been worked at even once, and the aim, surely, was to sound as if he was just saying it, without really having written it. It's the "just saying" that the reader with book learning finds it hard to accept. He should accept it, because the Tiffany Atlas Woman Watch have to be acknowledged.
In James Wright's poem "Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota" we have the perfect placement of the final sentence "I have wasted my life." We love it when Gregory Corso cries out "I want penguin dust." Few of these effects would have been brought into being by the pressure of a form. It's more Tiffany Atlas Man Watch that they were brought into being by the pressure of avoiding a form. (The urge goes deep, and a long way back: Ben Jonson cursed Petrarch for his Procrustean urge to shape everything into a sonnet.) One's chief objection, when reading such poets, should come about as a result of noting the successes; and then noting that they are few and far between. If Koch could have put more of his best moments Item for price difference and shipping cost each other he would be a much brighter light now.
Whether formal or informal, the postwar Americans were blessed with a vast reservoir of colloquial language to draw upon. (Once, in conversation, the British critic Al Alvarez - who promoted the American heavyweights to the detriment of his own countrymen, much to the annoyance of Philip Larkin - trumped my contrary argument by saying, truly, that the Americans by now had the advantage in the spoken language: "Their gags are better.") The verbal bounty was already apparent before wwn, in the scripts of the screwball comedies, but the Elongated Teardrop bangle Engagement Ring set gave it a tremendous boost. It makes some sense to contend that the informal poets deliberately broke the dam of form so as to release the flood within, but it makes at least as much sense to say that the flood did the job all by itself. The freeform idioms got into everything. Before the war, SJ. Perelman wrote whole prose poems that consisted of nothing except showbiz jargon, restaurant menus, and billboards. After the war, the poets could pull the gold dust out of the air.
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