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23 April 2005: The topic of groundbreaking poetry got very incompletely discussed recently at New-Poetry. It drew a few opinions, little else. It interests me, hence this return to it (which I just posted to New-Poetry).
What I want to find out is simply what is meant by "groundbreaking." One New-Poetry participant would seem to think it means any newness in poetry, and since all poems are new, it would cover any collection of poetry. I prefer a definition that is useful, though, so would define groundbreaking as "significantly MORE original than most poetry is."
David Graham said "groundbreaking" also means "influential." When I began to write this post, I thought that made no sense. What does influentiality have to do with groundbreaking? Sure, in common use, "groundbreaking" would imply "something to come." But it needn't. The ground will be broken whether anything is erected on the site or not.
But as I thought about it, I realized that the Academy, when it made its list of groundbreaking collections of poetry, almost surely did not mean "innovative" only. In fact, I suspect that it meant *only* "influential," considering how few of the books on it s list of groundbreakers was innovative in any significant way. In any case, it now seems to me reasonable to split innovative poetry into two kinds, influential and uninfluential, and to call the former "groundbreaking."
My definition of groundbreaking poetry to this point would therefore be, "poetry significantly MORE original than most poetry is, and influential. I leave out any evaluative concern with the value of any specimen of groundbreaking poetry as irrelevant. A lousy poem can be influential and even innovative. Some very bad, very innovative poems have been much more influential than some very good ones (sometimes even to good effect)."
Okay, so what is "significantly more original" and when can a collection of poetry be said to be influential? Those to me are the questions that have to be answered before we can begin to make any sound list of "groundbreaking collections of poetry."
I have my presentation on Cummings to work on, so don't feel I ought to spend more time on this right now. Needless to say, I have plenty to say about what's "significantly more original than most poetry." I have less to say about influentiality, but I would like to mention here that one factor generally overlooked is qualitative influence, which would have to do with the value of the poetry resulting from an influential collection. Bukowski, for instance, has been extremely quantitatively influential, but not terrifically influential qualitatively, as far as I can tell.
One last word: whatever we mean by groundbreaking poetry, I for one do not claim that ONLY groundbreaking poetry is of value. I hope no one will accuse me of that.
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