Thursday, September 08, 2005
Talkin' Bout My Generation
Who are the poets in my generation? If I'm friends with poets in another generation, are they in my generation too? Or do I have to skip ahead to theirs? I don't really want to. And what about the poets in between my generation and the older one? Are they closer to my generation or the one ahead of us? Who, even now, is staying up late into the night, editing the anthology that will tell me how old I am?
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7 comments:
Your poetic generation hasn't generated a generation yet! You guys are not published enough and haven't made enough work yet, unless you want to be part of the Juvenilia Generation. When you and your peops are thirty or so and are all publishing books, you will see that your generation will include people ten years older and ten years younger. Generation=20 years. You feel me?
Juvenilia? Nonsense. Nobody has to be thirty.
Maybe the twenty year thing's right, but I don't know. Isn't it style/school/movement/whatever that decides more than decade.
Yeah, but W.S. Merwin and Richard Howard share a generation but not a style/school/movement. And there are a number of writers published in young magazines who are more than twenty years older than their poetic contemporaries. It seems to me that a generation is determined by when, and with whom, you write.
I'd like to ask why you want to conflate 'generation' and 'style/school/movement'? Isn't the point of those terms to look at what concerns might be similar for poets, according to different grouping criteria? For 'generation', the grouping is loosely age, though more completely defined, I think, by history. So the "Lost Generation" comes between the world wars--they couldn't have known what bookends would have defined their generation until both (ww2 as well as ww1) had passed.
That said, Rae Armantrout publishing poems in the Canary doesn't make her of the same generation as Mark Lamoureux: movements have generations, too.
It's complicated, though. I would say that, for instance, Mary Jo Bang shares a poetic generation when many poets in their thirties, even though she's a bit older, because she came up at the same time as them, wrote alongside them in communication with their work. But, Jorie Graham, due to the far-ranging influence of her work and her prominance in world literature, seems to have moved outside of her particular generation. In my mind, anyway, she ranks among much older poets. I think the troubling thing with the work "generation" is that it implies time and age, which don't necessarily factor into this discussion.
"when" and "work" should be "with" and "word"
Well, you're right that there's an arbitrary component to the word 'generation', but that arbitrariness is brought in simply with its use. If you don't find the concept useful, you (I mean a general 'you,' not you you) might want to avoid the word, or thinking of yourself within the confines of its terms. It is a strange way to think of things, and strangely attractive, often taken into consideration with ambivalence, a kind of 'how do I fit in to this concept-structure which seems completely contrived to me?'
Personally, I find it at least sometimes-useful to look at things generationally, as long as the word is used loosely enough that someone like MJB, as you point out, can be grouped with poets 20 years younger than her. Just me.
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