THE NEW poetics and new poetry moved ahead and left behind tired repetitious ideas of poetry being eternally based on familiar sounds, beats, tempo or timing taught to students and accepted by the average layman. Such poetry, in fact, had long been the child of Bardic songs and Chamber music melodies, and is now almost completely absorbed by Folk and Pop music, Reggae, Rap, etc. But the new poetry had long entered new territory in form and content, involving simultaneous time zones, memory, and imaginative projections, all held together in the present by narrative description, mood, and, above all, individual tone of voice.
Billy Collins, a leading contemporary American poet of bestseller collections, wrote in the introduction of an anthology of new poetry he edited in 2006: “Tone may be the most elusive aspect of written language.”
In this sense, the new poetics and new poetry achieves a similar parallel intensity, playful inventiveness, along with explorations of unknown tone and rhythms, created by leading Jazz artists like Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Wayne Shorter, Stan Getz, Dave Brubeck, Gerry Mulligan, Charles Lloyd, Antonio Carlos Jobim, Gato Barbieri, Chick Corea, Ron Carter, or Jazz groups like ‘Weather Report’, ‘Return To Forever’, and ‘Compost’.

Whitman, Pound & imagery
The first evidence of such a change began with Ezra Pound’s early 20th Century interest in Ancient Chinese imagistic poetry and his use of translation as a new creative style of interpretative writing. This is what first drove home the linguistic power of poetic description.
Added to this was Pound’s early rebellious reluctance to accept Whitman as a fellow American mentor; a position he eventually outgrew and admitted in his quite Whitmanesque 1912 collection of exciting poetry, ‘LUSTRA’. The evidence of this exists in one of the collection’s terse poems titled, ‘A Pact’, which reads thus:
‘I make a pact with you, Walt Whitman -/ I have detested you long enough/ …I am old enough now to make friends./ It was you that broke the new wood,/ Now it is time for carving./ We have one sap and one root-/ Let there be commerce between us.’

Beat Generation poets
The possibility of a new universal cultural happiness created by an elusive conversational poetic form of exuberance emerged in North America in the mid-1950s. This relaxed yet insightful poetry of the ‘Beat Generation’ was like a breath of fresh air in the stodgy world of introverted ‘college’ poetry that had been taught as a tradition by college and university literature courses.
In 1955, Allen Ginsburg’s poem, ‘A SUPERMARKET IN CALIFORNIA’, paid dues to Whitman again, the great observant all-embracing wise poet. But what was startlingly new and contemporary was the shift to content not previously considered serious topics. But it was; since the new poetry continued emphasizing the real and necessary everyday life of the world, and its often long loping lines ignored straightjacket metres, giving birth to a fresh conception of poetics.
Poetry was now identified with in the world of ordinary everyday existence and commerce, due to the poet’s sensitivity to such experiences. Ginsburg’s poem begins:
‘What thoughts I have of you tonight Walt Whitman, for I walked down the side streets under the trees with a headache self conscious looking at the full moon./ In my hungry fatigue and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit supermarket dreaming of your enumerations!/ What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands/ Wives in the avocadoes, babies in the tomatoes!’
Another outstanding poet of the ‘Beat Generation’ was Frank O’Hara, also a serious and respected critic of abstract and Pop painting, films, and modern Jazz. O’Hara held a job as curator at the Museum of Modern Art, and, like Ginsburg and all the beat generation poets, socialized closely with innovative Black-American musicians, prose writers, and poets of the beatnik scene.
O’Hara’s ironic poetic voice captured both the zesty speech of a ‘cool’ multi-racial, observant crowd, along with the pleasures of a modern lifestyle. Lines like these occur in his poem, ‘BLOCKS’:
‘Oh boy, their childhood was like so many oatmeal cookies./ I need you, you need me, yum, yum. Anon it became suddenly/ …Vivo! The dextrose/ those children consumed, lavished, smoked in their knobby/Candy bars. Such pimples! Such hardons!’
O’Hara’s most memorable legacy to future poets is probably his delight in seeing himself as part of a scene around him, and showing us the pleasures of society and passing time. In his poem, ‘A STEP AWAY FROM THEM’, he begins:
‘It’s my lunch hour, so I go/ for a walk among the hum-colored cabs. First down the sidewalk/ where laborers feed their dirty/ glistening torsos sandwiches/ and Coca-Cola with yellow helmets on.’
And a touching poem, ‘THE DAY LADY DIED’, recounting the day he discovered the New York Post with Billie Holliday’s face (the legendary Afro-American Jazz vocalist) announcing her death, begins:

‘It is 12.20 in New York a Friday
three days after Bastille day, yes
it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine
because I will get off the 4.19 in Easthampton
at 7.15 and then go straight to dinner
and I don’t know the people who will feed me.
I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun
And have a hamburger and malted…’
One of O’Hara’s many unusual and lively poems was based on then British Guiana’s Essequibo River in the late 1950s. How he came to write it, or if he ever went there, I have no idea. His death by car accident at the age of 40 in 1966 was a hard, emotional blow for the cultured world, but his many amazing collections of poems live on, fresh as ever.