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intervention of predetermined form, including the experience that occurs
during and because of composition, on the same level as other subject mat–
ter. In Wallace Stevens one might say that this latter experience is the poem:
that the poem is experience mediated only by the further experience of
composition, the famous "act of the mind." This is why Stevens is con–
fusing for amateur philosophers, who think he is seriously formulating
abstractions, when he is in fact doing something more playful and far more
serious-showing us how abstractions operate in experience, how they trans–
mute, how they contradict one another, how they repeat and vary and inter–
act with other kinds of experience, how they feel. Pound speaks of a "per–
sona ." All right. Maybe he still felt the need to fictionalize his experience
as, say, Browning might in order to incorporate it into the artifice of the
poem . Nevertheless, the way that Pound and Williams incorporate personal
anecdotes, for example, even letters, is something new. The poem is
continuous with speech, with conversation, with thought, with experience,
and not a special category-except in one respect: there is an additional
variable, the process of the composition of the poem, which, however, is
itself continuous with experience.
*
*
*
It
was this essentially "Redskin" attitude toward experience in a new
and explicit form that blew the lid off the closed and stuffy art of the fifties,
and released a flood of energy in a whole generation of creative artists. The
improvisations of jazz , especially bebop, were the great example, explicitly
so in Kerouac's "Essentials of Spontaneous Prose ." There was Olson 's
1950 "Projective Verse" essay:
It
is now only a matter of the recognition of the conventions of compo–
sition by field for us
to
bring into being an open verse as formal as the
closed, with all its traditional advantages.
The first real explosion was abstract expressionism, which obliterated the
demarcation between the painting and the experience of composing it.
There was Frank O'Hara, whose poems are like casual notations of what
happens as he goes along in a casual diction and flattened metric that reads
quite differently from what one was used to thinking of as poetry . There was
John Cage and his ideas about open-ended, chance composition, which have
had enduring influence (the artist Robert Morris in 1970: "the artist has
stepped aside for more of the world to enter into the art"). There was Allen
Ginsberg's exploitation of his own personality in his poems . There were
