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What is American about American poetry? What is American about American culture? There are roughly 200,000,000 Americans who have evolved the past 300 years or more on the land we call the United States of America. (For the sake of discussion Canada and Mexico who also share the American continent are not considered. Strictly speaking we should be identifying what is USA about USA poetry.) Issues of personal identity and place fuse with human sensitivities and give rise not only to personal voices in poetry but become voices we identify with our nation. Robert Frost we say is an American Poet. Carl Sandburg and Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman. Not because they wave red, white and blue flags, but because they speak in a language, use a creative idiom we identify with America:
"I hard a fly buzz when I died" "...that child who went forth every day, and who now goes, and will always go forth every day."
"I long for weight and strength "Feathers and people in the crotch of a treetop" These poem fragments are cut from American cloth, spoken by poets with ears sensitive to their surroundings in language sounds and meanings, as other strong poets are to their cultures. What are those characteristics? Looking at and hearing the examples above: oxymora, oddity, strangeness, humor, bold or subtle lying, exact sound, a pretense of literalness, dreaminess, languor, delicacy, toughness or a pretense of toughness, nostalgic desire, strong sometimes hidden sexual desire, strange juxtapositions: lyrical/flat, crude/elegant language, to name just a few qualities appear often in American poetry. I consider myself an American poet. In fact more as I age. The weight of deceased American poets and the marvelous voices of poets who write now drives deeper into the soul the older one becomes. Happily. As universal as the adolescent might feel as he or she begins the long process of discovery of self and poetry, the national culture one lives in defines that person as much as that person defines experience. It is a process which begins at birth in the acquisition of language and interaction with that culture. One could be born in a country other than America today and gain an understanding of American culture and be able to write an American sounding poetry because of the ubiquitous power of the American driven media. However, the foreign culture that this poet experiences in daily life would mix with that American sound to create something hybrid, distinct—as in the case of Brodsky, Walcott, Auden, Milosz, and Graham. I suppose one could argue that poets who lean toward America and write in American English continue the process of creating an American poetry, by nature non-static, fluid, ever-changing, a poetry of self-discovery in a new land by those looking for a place to make their own. Poetry is part of that pursuit of mapping. Looking to the future, poetry by Americans might well be written in the languages of its immigrants, opening our ears and eyes to the riches which have been suppressed in the push to develop a nation united by one language. So far, however, American English has been flexible enough to accommodate most Americans.
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