[Janice D. Soderling]

I've been reading a 1954 essay by Marius Bewley titled "Some Aspects of Modern American Poetry". It first appeared in "The Complex Fate" (Chatto and Windus Ltd.) though I'm reading it in Modern Poetry: Essays in Criticism, editor John Hollander.

Go West Young Man

—James Laughlin

Yessir they're all named
either Ken or Stan or Don
every one of them and

those aren't just nick-
names either no they're
really christened like

that just Ken or Stan or
Don and you shake hands
with anybody you run into

no matter who the hell
it is and say "glad to
know you Ken glad to

know you Don" and then
two minutes later (you
may not have said ten

words to the guy) you
shake hands again and
say "glad to have met

you Stan glad to" and
they haven't heard much
about Marx and the class

struggle because they
haven't had to and by
god it makes a country

that is fit to live in
and by god I'm glad to
know you Don I'm glad!

Fifty years ago this poem was considered a good representative of American poetry. In my opinion it firmly holds its own "as a poem" even today, though it did make my mind go whizzing in two directions at once: weirdly, one part raced to the Tea Party and Congressional shutdowns, and another part plonked down in conceptual poetry http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poet...ne/poem/237062 .

Marius Bewley had this to say about American poetry of fifty years ago:

"What the vast horde of American poets mean by American experience is, of course, something that cannot safely be generalized about for more than one poet at a time, but all the poets have this—and perhaps only this—in common: each is aware that his own experience is American, and the sense of it gives him confidence and a feeling that what he has to say is important . (…) Like a great deal of American writing, it is pure and emphatic assertion. Whether it has logic or not, it has a good deal of will in its make-up, and one is really surprised at the strength of the conviction behind it."

***

How would you characterize contemporary American poetry? And since Marius Bewly is—or so I believe—an Englishman, what characterizes contemporary poetry in the UK?