"From reading a previous answer, you know that I consider all those aspects to be part of American cultural myth and thus they figure into good American poetry, whether the poet is aware of what he is doing or not"
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Wakoski asserts that the vitality of American poetry rises from the deep reservoir of American cultural myth, whether or not the poet consciously draws from it. Myth here is not a synonym for lie but a shorthand for the stories, archetypes, and emblems that a culture rehearses until they shape perception: the frontier and the open road, self-invention and the outlaw, the promise and betrayal of the American Dream, innocence intertwined with violence, the glitter of Hollywood and the starkness of the prairie. These narratives begin to speak through images, cadences, and stances long before intention arrives.
Good poems register that pressure. A highway at night, a jukebox in a diner, a desert horizon, a skyscraper’s neon, a motorcycle’s growl, the cataloging exuberance that runs from Whitman through Ginsberg, the wary inwardness that recasts the frontier as an interior territory: such details carry cultural voltage. Even a poem that thinks it is private or purely experimental can find itself echoing national myths in the rhythms it chooses, the freedoms it claims, or the kinds of selves it stages on the page.
Wakoski’s own work offers a case study. She braids classical figures with American artifacts, turning motorcycles, coins, film stills, and California light into emblems in a personal mythology. The machine becomes a symbol of freedom and treachery, a quintessentially American pivot, and that symbolic charge does not require a poet to declare it; it is already in the cultural bloodstream.
Her point resists both chauvinism and naivete. One can critique the myths, complicate them, or reveal their exclusions and costs, yet the engagement persists. The most resonant American poems converse with these stories, enlarging or subverting them, grounding private feeling in shared imagination. Awareness helps a poet shape that energy, but the energy is there regardless. The culture thinks through its poets, and the poets, knowingly or not, think with the culture’s myths.
Good poems register that pressure. A highway at night, a jukebox in a diner, a desert horizon, a skyscraper’s neon, a motorcycle’s growl, the cataloging exuberance that runs from Whitman through Ginsberg, the wary inwardness that recasts the frontier as an interior territory: such details carry cultural voltage. Even a poem that thinks it is private or purely experimental can find itself echoing national myths in the rhythms it chooses, the freedoms it claims, or the kinds of selves it stages on the page.
Wakoski’s own work offers a case study. She braids classical figures with American artifacts, turning motorcycles, coins, film stills, and California light into emblems in a personal mythology. The machine becomes a symbol of freedom and treachery, a quintessentially American pivot, and that symbolic charge does not require a poet to declare it; it is already in the cultural bloodstream.
Her point resists both chauvinism and naivete. One can critique the myths, complicate them, or reveal their exclusions and costs, yet the engagement persists. The most resonant American poems converse with these stories, enlarging or subverting them, grounding private feeling in shared imagination. Awareness helps a poet shape that energy, but the energy is there regardless. The culture thinks through its poets, and the poets, knowingly or not, think with the culture’s myths.
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| Topic | Poetry |
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