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TROUBADOURS GATHER THE VILLAGE (AND OTHER POETIC MOVEMENTS)

Poetry movements and communities have served as the most provocative, creative, vital, engaging and oft-underground elements of regional and national literary movements for many centuries. The simple joy of gathering for a single or group reading, listening to verse, hearing the background stories and discussing the words has brought together and empowered poets from ancient Athens to the streets of San Francisco, and all points in between. They have also provided social and political discourse while feeding creative explosions that, in nearly all cases, involved the arts and music as well.

Despite the popular view of most poets as solitary, hermetic people, communities are vital to most working poets — which is why, on any given week, open-mic and guest poetry readings in the low thousands take place in the United States alone. When studying the history of poetry or individual poets, we are invariably enticed to make connections between two poetic periods, or a poet and his/her influences. When we do that, chances are we will set foot inside a poetic movement or community.

Throughout history, there have been many hundreds of major and minor poetic movements and communities. Major community-based movements, such as the Ancient Greek poetry schools, Provencal literature, Sicilian court poets, Elizabethan and Romantic poets, American Transcendentalists, Paris expatriate (Surrealist) and Beat poets, changed the course of poetry during and after their respective eras.

While not as universally known, the tributary movements have been equally rife with great poetry, provocative thought and contribution to the body of poetics. For example, in just the past 50 years in the U.S., poetry has been fed by the Beats (Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, Anne Waldman), San Francisco Renaissance (Kenneth Rexroth, Robert Duncan, Madeline Gleason), Confessionalists (Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell), New York School (Ed Sanders), Black Mountain Poets (Mary Caroline Richards), and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E avant garde poets (Bob Perelman, Rae Armantrout). All of these responded or reacted to the three major movements of the 20th century’s first half, Imagism (Ezra Pound, h.d.), Objectivism (Lorine Niedecker, Charles Reznikoff and the American contribution to France’s Surrealism (Marianne Moore). This pattern has been the rule, not the exception, in the wide-rooted, long-branched family tree of community-based poetry.

By taking a closer look at ten great community-based movements in Western poetry, we can glean greater insight into how these communities formed, what their biggest contributors brought to world poetry and literature, and how the movements influenced nearby cultures.

Ancient Greek Poetry (7th to 4th centuries B.C.)
The high point of ancient Greek poetry lasted three centuries, making it one of the very few multi-generational poetic movements and communities. Ancient Greece was also unique in its contribution because it comprised the first large group of people to commit their poetry to writing; prior civilizations preferred the oral tradition, though some written poems date back to 25th century BC Sumeria.

Greece’s poetic movement was part of the greatest cultural and intellectual community in world history. Poets often were dramatists who wrote for choirs, or courtly muses who entertained regional kings. Literally hundreds of dramas were performed, all of them featuring exquisite lyric poetry spotted among the three-act structures. They developed nearly all of the classic forms that have underpinned literature, drama, music and poetry since, including the ode, epic, lyric, tragedy and comedy. Among the great poets who passed developing forms to their succeeding generations were Homer, Hesiod, Sappho, Pindar, Aeschylus, Anacreon and Euripides.

Ancient Greece’s cultural explosion ended when it was conquered by Alexander the Great and, later, Rome. The Romans borrowed from Greek works to develop their own dramatic, literary and poetic movements. As Greek works became disseminated around the western world, they created the basis for modern literature.

Provencal Literature (11th to 13th centuries)
Like a giant iron cloud, the Middle Ages and its purveyors, the popes of the Holy Roman Empire, clamped down and extinguished creative and artistic expression. However, as the 11th century reached its midpoint, a group of troubadour musicians in southern France began to sing and write striking lyrics. They were influenced by the Arabic civilization and its leading denizens, Omar Khayyam and later Rumi, along with Latin and Greek heritages and some Christian precepts. Three concepts stood above all others: the spiritualization of passion; imagery; and secret love. With a gift for rhythm, meter and form, the musicians and poets created a masterful style by the 13th century.

The Provencal troubadours began as court singer-poets, among them William X, Duke of Aquitaine, Eleanor Aquitaine and King Richard I of England. They practiced the art, but its undisputed masters were Bertrand de Born, Arnaud Daniel, Guillame de Machant, Christine di Pisan and Marie de France. During their heyday, these and other poets routinely traveled to communities to deliver poems, news, songs and dramatic sketches in their masterful lyrical styles. Among the deeply influenced were Dante, Petrarch, and Chaucer. Forms such as the sestina, rondeau, triolet, canso and ballata originated with the Provencal poets.

The Inquisition doomed the Provencal movement in the 13th century, though a few poets continued to produce into the mid-14th century. Most troubadours fled to Spain and Italy, where two new movements flourished — including the Sicilian School.

Sicilian School (mid-13th to early 14th centuries)
Emboldened by the passionate poetics of the Provencal troubadours, a small group of Sicilian poets in the court of Frederick II turned verses of heart-felt love into the first spiritual heartbeat of the Renaissance — and the ancestral work that would explode in England during the Elizabethan and Shakespearean eras.

Twelfth century Sicily featured three distinct languages and cultural influences—Arabic, Byzantine Greek and Latin. The small society was well-read in both ancient Greek and Latin, and women were viewed more kindly and tenderly than in other medieval cultures. When Sicilian poets interacted with the Provencal troubadours, they found the perfect verse form for their utterances of the heart—lyric poetry.

Beginning with Cielo of Alcamo, the court poets developed a series of lyrical styles that used standard vernacular to make art of poetry. They were aided by Frederick II, who required poets to stick to one subject — courtly love. Between 1230 and 1266, they wrote hundreds of love poems. Poets worked with a beautiful derivative of canso, the canzone, which became the most popular verse form until Giacomo de Lentini further developed it into the sonnet. Besides writing sonnets, de Lentini continuously invented new words in what became a new language — Italian. Among the best known poets were de Lentini, Pier delle Vigne, Renaldo d’Aquino, Giacomo Pugliese and Mazzeo Ricco.
The Sicilian poets made several changes to Provencal structure, including the discontinuation of repetitive and interchangeable lines. They also wrote poetry to be read, not accompanied by music, and created a 14-line sonnet structure, broken into an octet and sestet, that stands to this day.

As the 14th century dawned, the Sicilian poets’ canzones, balladas and sonnets came to the attention of Dante and Petrarch, who spread them throughout Bologna, Florence and other emerging literary centers while writing countless poems themselves. By the time the Renaissance arrived, nearly 100 poets were plying their trade throughout the culturally awakening country—and scholars from England, France, Spain and Germany were watching.

Elizabethan and Shakespearean Eras
By the time the Italian Renaissance waned, its greatest poetic exports—the ballad and sonnet—found their way to England through Sir Thomas Wyatt. He introduced the forms to a countryside attuned to lyrical and narrative poetry by the great Geoffrey Chaucer, whose experiences with latter Provencal poets influenced the style credited with modernizing English literature.

Sonnets swept through late 16th and early 17th century England, primarily through the works of Wyatt, Sir Philip Sydney, Edmund Spenser and William Shakespeare. Spenser and Shakespeare took the Petrarchan form that Wyatt introduced to the literary landscape and added their individual touches, forming the three principal sonnet styles — Petrarchan, Spenserian and Shakespearean. The other fixed verse influence — Provencal and French forms — added to the poetic mix, creating a vast community of poets who recited their works in various forums. This included the theater, where their verse often preceded Shakespeare and Marlowe dramas — a practice followed nearly four centuries later by many of San Francisco’s 1960s rock musicians, who preceded their concerts with readings from Beat poets.

The socially open Elizabethan era enabled poets to write about humanistic as well as religious subjects. The dramatic rise in academic study and literacy during the late 16th century created large audiences for the new poetry, which also was introduced into the educational system. In many ways, the Elizabethan era better resembled the expressionism of the Ancient Greeks than the Sicilian and Italian Renaissance schools from which it derived its base poetry.

Metaphysical Poets
A century after the Elizabethan Era’s height, a more subtle, provocative lyric poetry movement crept through an English literary countryside seeking greater depth in its verse. The metaphysical poets defined and compared their subjects through nature, philosophy, love and musings about the hereafter — a great departure from the primarily religious poetry that had immediately followed the wane of the Elizabethan Era. They shared an interest in metaphysical subjects and practiced similar means of investigating them.

Beginning with John Dryden, the metaphysical movement was a loosely-woven string of poetic works that continued through the often bellicose 18th century, and concluded when William Blake bridged the gap between metaphysical and romantic poetry. The poets sought to minimize their place within the poem and to look beyond the obvious — a style that greatly informed American transcendentalism and the Romantics who followed. Among the greatest adherents were Samuel Cowley, John Donne, George Herbert, Andrew Marvell, Abraham Cowley, Henry Vaughan, George Chapman, Edward Herbert and Katherine Philips.

Romantic Poets
The third of England’s “big three” movements completed a three-century period during which the British Isles took the western poetic mantle from Italy and molded forms, styles and poems that fill school classrooms to this day. The Romantic period, or Romanticism, is regarded as one of the greatest and most illustrious movements in literary history, which is all the more amazing considering that it primarily consisted of just seven poets and lasted approximately 25 years — from Blake’s rise in the late 1790s to Byron’s death in 1824.

In between, the group of poets lived as mighty flames of poetic production that, unfortunately, extinguished well before their time. The core group included Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and a magnificent trio of friends—Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats. While history did not treat him so kindly, Byron considered Robert Southey a key member of the movement. Keats, who wrote “Ode to a Nightingale” and “Ode to a Grecian Urn,” only lived to be 26. Shelley died at 30, while Byron succumbed at 36. They wrote together, traveled together—even renting a house at the base of Rome’s Spanish Steps—and commiserated with foreign writers, most notably the older Johann Wolfgang Goethe, whose genius and versatility they all idolized.

Ironically, the poets had distinctly different religious and lifestyle persuasions. Blake was a Christian who followed the teachings of Emmanuel Swedenbourg (who also influenced Goethe). Wordsworth was a naturalist, Byron urbane, Keats a free spirit, Shelley an atheist and Coleridge a card-carrying member of the Church of England.

The romantics made nature even more central to their work than the metaphysical poets, treating it as an elusive metaphor in their work. They sought a freer, more personal expression of passion, pathos and personal feelings, and challenged their readers to open their minds and imaginations. Through their voluminous output, the romantics’ message was clear: life is centered in the heart, and the relationship we build with nature and others through our hearts defines our lives. They anticipated and planted the seeds for free verse, transcendentalism, the Beat movement and countless other artistic, musical and poetic expressions.

The Romantic movement would have likely extended further into the 19th century, but the premature deaths of the younger poets, followed in 1832 by the death of their elderly German admirer, Goethe, brought the period to an end.

American Transcendentalists (1836-1860)
Of all the great communities and movements, the American Transcendentalists might be the first to have an intentional, chronicled starting date: September 8, 1836, when a group of prominent New England intellectuals led by poet-philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson met at the Transcendental Club in Boston. They gathered to discuss Emerson’s essay “Nature” and “The American Soul,” the latter of which stated, “We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds ... A nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men."

The Transcendentalists moved from that mission statement, inspired by Emerson’s love of Hinduism, Swedenbourg’s mystical Christianity and Immanuel Kant’s transcendental philosophy. They created a shadow society that espoused utopian values, spiritual exploration and full development of the arts. They revolted against a culture they thought was becoming too puritanical, and an educational system they thought overly intellectual. Like the Romantics, heart-centered, personal expression was their aim—and so was the development of socialized community. They even had a commune, Brook Farm. These sentiments informed their gatherings, discussions, public meetings, essays and poetry. Unlike the Romantics, who often clashed because of their personal differences, the Transcendentalists sought commonalities, no doubt influenced by Emerson’s adherence to Hinduism.

A number of great authors, poets, artists, social leaders and intellectuals called themselves Transcendentalists. They included Emerson, Bronson Alcott, Louisa May Alcott, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Orestes Brownson, William Ellery Channing, Sophia Peabody and her husband, Nathaniel Hawthorne.

The Beat Movement (1948-1963)
It only lasted 15 years — and was known by the masses only in the last six—but the combination of disenfranchisement, wanderlust and creative expression that inflicted a handful of New York and San Francisco students and young intellectuals resulted in the most influential movement of the past 100 years — the Beat movement.

The Beats formed from a wide variety of characters and interests, but were linked by a common thread—a desire to live life as they defined it. The mixture of academia, be-bop jazz, the liberating free verse of William Carlos Williams and the influence of budding author Jack Kerouac (who coined the term “Beat Generation” in 1948 at a meeting with Allen Ginsberg, Herbert Huncke and William S. Burroughs), inspired a young Ginsberg to change everything he’d learned about poetry. He wrote throughout the early 1950s in a narrative free verse, joined by the young Gregory Corso and Peter Orlovsky, and the older Burroughs, who, like Kerouac, opted for fiction—though Kerouac wrote beautiful poetry that continues to resurface to this day.

By the mid-1950s, the Beats’ mixture of free-expression jazz and socially informed free verse poetry became the anthem for a generation of Greenwich Village youth seeking greater spiritual meaning through visceral experiences and the laying down—or trampling—of their parents’ strict, war-fed mores.

In 1956, the scene exploded into the public eye when Ginsberg published Howl, followed a year later by Kerouac’s On The Road, which he’d been shopping to publishers since 1949. Ironically, the explosion was triggered not in New York, the center of early Beat poetry, but across the continent at San Francisco’s Six Gallery. On October 9, 1955, a group of Beat poets from both continents gathered for what became the 20th century’s most famous single reading—but it was Ginsberg’s reading of Howl that left his peers gasping in amazement and ignited a subculture.

By the time of the Six Gallery reading, San Francisco hosted a burgeoning Beat community that included poets Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, Philip LaMantia and three older influences, Kenneth Rexroth, Lew Welch and Philip Whalen. In 1947, Rexroth had launched the San Francisco Renaissance, a loose poetic movement including he, Whalen, Kenneth Patchen and William Everson. It directly fed the San Francisco Beats, as did the Black Mountain Poets that included Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov. Another huge contributor was former New York poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who owned and operated City Lights Bookstore, which in the 1950s sold books that were under censorship bans by the Justice Department. He published Howl, thus starting a legacy that would make him the greatest publisher and distributor of Beat literature.

Beat poets and their works fostered a new era of appreciation and study of poetry. The emerging Baby Boomer generation took off and ran with it, building the fame of the Beats far beyond what any of them imagined. The Beats also greatly East Village poet-musicians such as Ed Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg (who formed the Fugs), and a group of artistic, musically inclined youth who hung out in San Francisco’s North Beach and Haight Ashbury districts. That group went on to launch psychedelic rock and the cultural revolution of the late 1960s. The growing fame also brought to surface many fine Beat poets who worked under the shadow of their more renowned peers, such as Diane Di Prima, Joanne Kyger, LeRoi Jones and Huncke.

The Next Great Movement? A Surprise
Will there be more poetic ages, more movements? I sure hope so. There’s a good bit of semi-anarchic, poetic energy in San Francisco again, thanks to the indefatigable Michelle Tee, a socially conscious poet who has set up more than her fair share of gatherings. San Diego has a cool poetry club and coffeehouse scene going; check YouTube every Friday morning, and you’ll see some of the latest. New York’s Chelsea and Tribeca sections are the new Village and Lower East Side, with a slew of great young poets emerging; a block from the Empire State Building lies one of the most vibrant organizations going today, the Asian-American Writers Workshop. There’s a definite pulse. I’d like to see what will happen in Tucson in five years’ time, with a new poetry center (University of Arizona), a visiting American Book Award winner (Jimmy Santiago Baca), a National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize nominee now living in the Sonoran Desert (Harvey Stanbrough), a great independent bookstore (Antigone), a writing organization kind to poets (Society of Southwestern Authors), a radio show dedicated to recited poetry (Ron Cipriani’s show on KXCI), and one of the most flammable social issues in the country on its doorstep—the battle over immigration and the welfare of migrant workers who cross the searing desert. Maybe something will come from Tucson. Maybe not.

But the biggest movement in poetry today has been the same for more than a decade now: the hip-hop movement. It has revolutionized street poetry, performance and open-mic poetry, songwriting and the voice of the inner city. It also took over cable’s first rock video station, MTV. It gave the music industry a shot of survival during those tenuous years in the late ‘90s and early part of this decade when CD sales were dying and iTunes wasn’t yet figured out. The poetry is angry, barbed with feeling, and so catchy with its primal, in-your-gut beat that it’s guaranteed to move you—like it or not. The artists’ names rattle off the tongues of pre-teens, teens and young adults as immediately as the astronauts and baseball stars of my youth: Mos Def. 50 Cent. Dr. Dre. G Dep. Eminem. Jay-Z. Lauren Hill. Mary J. Blige.

Add it up, and hip-hop goes down as one of the greatest poetic movements in history. It changed the face of popular culture, gave millions of disenfranchised people a collective voice, created a community of shared interests, and informed the rest of the world about a level of truth you won’t find on TV or at presidential news conferences. All of which was done with tremendous energy, the name of the game. Been to a hip-hop concert? You don’t sit down. You don’t stop moving, either.

While naysayers focus on the explicit nature of the lyrics—and some hip-hop tunes are definite calls for violence and hatred—the majority tell a story we don’t want to hear. Consequently, hip-hop lyrics now wind up in high school poetry classes as did folk and acid rock lyrics when I was a teenager in the ‘70s. My study of David Bowie’s “Panic in Detroit” is now a high school sophomore’s review of Eminem’s “Bonnie and Clyde.” There are educational and rebuilding initiatives involving hip-hop artists, and programs on Black Entertainment Television dedicated to converting the hip-hop community into continuous positive action.

The living proof of hip-hop’s power? Barack Obama. Without the coalescing force of hip-hop, the positive impact it has made on inner cities and the disenfranchised, and the level of awareness it has engendered on the rest of us just by listening to the poetry in the music, Obama’s launching pad would have been much, much smaller. He may never admit it, but he knows it.
That’s the power of a poetry movement.