1940s Poetic Movements

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1940s Poetic Movements

• The Black Mountain Poets are a school of poetry from the 1940's centered at Black Mountain College North Carolina which promoted open form and was spawned in an environment attempting to create the ideal community. Also call projectivist poets, they based the frame of their poetry on the line, referred to as an utterance or a breath. Poetry Guide Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov were a few of the Black Mountain Poets.

  Passage Over Water by Robert Duncan
  
  We have gone out in boats upon the sea at night,
  lost, and the vast waters close traps of fear about us.
  The boats are driven apart, and we are alone at last
  under the incalculable sky, listless, diseased with stars.
  
  Let the oars be idle, my love, and forget at this time
  our love like a knife between us
  defining the boundaries that we can never cross
  nor destroy as we drift into the heart of our dream,
  cutting the silence, slyly, the bitter rain in our mouths
  and the dark wound closed in behind us.
  
  Forget depth-bombs, death and promises we made,
  gardens laid waste, and, over the wastelands westward,
  the rooms where we had come together bombed.
  
  But even as we leave, your love turns back. I feel
  your absence like the ringing of bells silenced. And salt
  over your eyes and the scales of salt between us. Now,
  you pass with ease into the destructive world.
  There is a dry crash of cement. The light fails,
  falls into the ruins of cities upon the distant shore
  and within the indestructible night I am alone.

• Ciaro Poets were a group of poets based in North Africa during World War II. Kieth Douglas and Lawence Durrell were part of the group.

  Cairo Jag by Keith Douglas
  
  Shall I get drunk or cut myself a piece of cake,
  a pasty Syrian with a few words of English
  or the Turk who says she is a princess--she dances
  apparently by levitation? Or Marcelle, Parisienne
  always preoccupied with her dull dead lover:
  she has all the photographs and his letters
  tied in a bundle and stamped Decede in mauve ink.
  All this takes place in a stink of jasmine.
  
  But there are the streets dedicated to sleep
  stenches and the sour smells, the sour cries
  do not disturb their application to slumber
  all day, scattered on the pavement like rags
  afflicted with fatalism and hashish. The women
  offering their children brown-paper breasts
  dry and twisted, elongated like the skull,
  Holbein's signature. But his stained white town
  is something in accordance with mundane conventions-
  Marcelle drops her Gallic airs and tragedy
  suddenly shrieks in Arabic about the fare
  with the cabman, links herself so
  with the somnambulists and legless beggars:
  it is all one, all as you have heard.
  
  But by a day's travelling you reach a new world
  the vegetation is of iron
  dead tanks, gun barrels split like celery
  the metal brambles have no flowers or berries
  and there are all sorts of manure, you can imagine
  the dead themselves, their boots, clothes and possessions
  clinging to the ground, a man with no head
  has a packet of chocolate and a souvenir of Tripoli.

• New Apocalypse Poets were a group of 1940s poets who rejected the classicism of Auden. "Their work was wild, turbulent and surrealist." (Poet's Graveyard) Some of the poets were Dylan Thomas, James Findlay Hendry, George Barker, Henry Treece and G.S.Fraser. They were in direct opposition with the Movement poets.

  The Waiting Watchers by Henry Treece
  
  They shall come in the black weathers
  From the heart of the dead embers,
  Walking one and two over the hill.
  And they shall be with you, never farther
  Than your bedside.
  At their will
  The smell of putrefaction lingers
  And floor is carpeted with rotting hair;
  Or sheets are torn to shreds
  By the beaks of dead dry birds
  And the red blood clots in your cup.
  Put up your swords!
  What steel can cut the throat of next year's dream,
  What tongue is tunes to speak last night's quick scream?
  Go alone by darkness;
  Burn the clippings of your nail;
  Donate a thousand candles.
  But do as you will,
  When sun is blind and lamps are lit once more,
  Two and one, they shall be standing
  At your door.

• Objectivists was more a 20th century community of poets than a movement. This group of poets were inspired by Ezra Pound, WC Williams, and the Imagist Movement. Zukofsky who founded this group defined objectivism as sincerity and objectification. Some of the poets were Basil Bunting, Carl Rakosi, George Oppen, Charles Reznikoff, and Louis Zukofsky.

  From Odes: Chorus of Furies by Basil Bunting
  
  Let us come upon him first as if in a dream,
  anonymous triple presence,
  memory made substance and tally of heart's rot:
  then in the waking Now be demonstrable, seem
  sole aspect of being's essence,
  coffin to the living touch, self's Iscariot.
  Then he will loath the year's recurrent long caress
  without hope of divorce,
  envying idiocy's apathy or the stress
  of definite remorse.
  He will lapse into a half-life lest the taut force
  of the mind's eagerness
  recall those fiends or new apparitions endorse
  his excessive distress.
  He will shrink, his manhood leave him, slough self aware
  the last skin of the flayed: despair.
  He will nurse his terror carefully, uncertain
  even of death's solace,
  impotent to outpace
  dispersion of the soul, disruption of the brain.