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19 April 2005:
Meanwhile, today I scribbled a few notes on the subject of groundbreaking poems, in response to the same thread I got talking about Cummings on at New-Poetry, but which just about no one is any longer interested in. People at these discussion groups seem only to want to express opinions, and--maybe once--defend them if someone else vigorously enough opposes them, then withdraw. Except for the bulldogs like me.
I've discussed groundbreaking much, so will probably be repeating thoughts here. Anyway, my notes were toward listing the groundbreaking occurences that have taken place in English (lyrical) poetry (of which I consider American poetry a branch) since Chaucer. They're not at all definition since (1) I'm a hobbyist in the field of literary history, not a scholar, and (2) am just throwing out throughts, however much I've thrown out the same thoughts previously. I hope to say more eventually.
sonnet form
haiku form
Sonnet as boxed thought-complex, haiku as maximally-dompressed image-cluster, each exactly the right size to fit into the normal human mind.
Any other forms of central consequence? One would be Saroyan's pwoermds--to the conventional haiku as the latter is to conventional short lyrics.
blank verse, Whitman's psalmic verse, free verse, starting lines all over the place (which was started by whom--Cummings?), gapped lines, gapped words (both due, I'm fairly sure, to Cummings)
Olson is given credit for some of this latter because he did it for auditory reasons, but motivation is irrelevant, Cummings did it before him. And Cummings used his ear as well as his eyes to arrange the elements of his texts on the page.
Zukofsky's use of mathematics in poetry, the first genuine mathematical poems, possibly Scott Helmes's, my long division poems (a lesser breakthrough).
Pope's cleanness of formalism, Wordsworth's autobiographical emphasis, Whitman's use of homely subject matter, and direct references to sex (but poeticized--or rhetoricalized), T.E. Hulme's (or whoever's) unpoetic subject matter unpoeticized or rhetoricalized, Williams's maximal plainness, Roethke's use of perceivedly anti-poetical as opposed to merely unpoetical material, O'Hara's breezy conversationalism, John M. Bennett's sub-demoticism.
Stein's asyntactic poetry, Roethke's serious nonsense, nursery rhyming
the jump-cut poetry of Pound/Eliot
surrealism.
visual poetry, Cummings's entirely textual variety and Kenneth Patchen's use of graphics in poetry--many later innovations in visual poetry by such as Karl Kempton, Richard Kostelanetz, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Emmett Williams, Robert Lax
Sound poetry, which I don't know enough about to say anthing about here
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