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Poem in Honor of Poets
Who Form Schools
Deliver Manifestoes
Name Generations
Chant Slogans
Praise Each Other
And Roar in Cellar Saloons
They also serve who only sit and write.
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Cuomo (born 1929 and apparently still around) published eight novels, a bunch of short stories, some poetry (haven't found any yet), and at least one book of nonfiction. When he published this angry ditty in the Nation he hadn't yet published his first novel; that was Jack Be Nimble of 1963. Given that his main characters - e.g. a small-time criminal caught up in a brutal prison riot - would seem to befit the anti-establishment aesthetic of the poetry he attacks in his poem, I'm guessing that by the time was publishing in novels, real '60s fiction, he had changed his mind or tempered his view. Or perhaps what was okay in fiction wasn't in verse. Or perhaps he's really merely expressing his preference for the introverted life of writers who write rather than affiliate and proclaim themselves.Nation May 2, 1959, p. 146.
Is '60 the moment when the end of the end of the Old Left had been reached and the New Left began to emerge? Is it the final ascendancy, in certain scenes at least, of poetic postmodernity? Surely the publication of Donald Allen's The New American Poetry that year suggests this, but then again--once again--we look back on "New" here and see continuity. The rhetoric of the Kennedy-Nixon contest made much less of a dent than everyone (at the time as well as since) claimed, so one wonders why were such great claims made? 
Had we come to expect "1960" to be truly ubiquitously modern in a way that the 1950s really were not--not quite? And what specifically does "modern" mean in the Kennedyesque talk then and now about the torch being passed to a new generation, etc.? The First Lady really meant "modernist" when Camelotians said "modern." What about the others across the new young cultural leadership? I've been surprised by how frequently the 
"Beat movement" was covered in 1960 in the mainstream press. I was expecting a fair measure but I've found tonnage. 1960 was the year when the figure of the beat was beginning to find acceptance, although still 80% of these stories are mocking, rebels-without-cause condescension. For anyone whose analysis made an impact nationally, do these antipolitical adolescents count as part of the "new young cultural leadership"? No, but rather than the two being opposites, they fall along a Continuum of the New American. Now that's a change for '60.
