Baby Boomer Issue(s)

Maybe it was all the recent news stories about the very first baby boomers on the verge of retirement—and the warnings about the financial havoc this was bound to wreak upon Social Security and the national economy, which was already in pretty dire straits. Or the headlines, one after the other over the last few years, announcing that cultural icons ranging from Ginsberg's Howl to Motown Records to the peace sign—even the ever youthful Barbie—had hit the half-century mark. Maybe it was the ads for Barneys NY in a December 2008 New York Times Magazine, wishing the world a "Hippie Holiday"—complete with DayGlo-colored images of those fifty-year-old peace signs and a declaration that the store was "having a COUNTER-CULTURE moment" "remembering 1968 forty years on." Or the advance reviews in the Arts & Leisure section for the reopening of Hair on Broadway. Maybe it was because the daily reports on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were sounding vaguely like the reports on Vietnam more than thirty years ago (which is maybe why they are restaging Hair). Maybe it was the recent election of Barack Obama, which reminded at least some people of the election of JFK—not since then had they seen so much youthful exuberance and idealism so unabashed it even led to "an open apology to boomers everywhere" from Gen X'er Heather Havrilesky on salon.com, where she said "We're sorry for rolling our eyes at you all these years"—though she couldn't resist mentioning those of us who might be wearing socks with sandals or smelling like we'd "been on the bus with Wavy Gravy for the last three decades." Maybe it was just that, to paraphrase a boomer-era song, "something's in the air"—which is maybe just my own personal sense of "time's winged chariot" (disguised, perhaps, as Wavy Gravy's bus or a compact SUV) drawing nearer. But when Hilda Raz asked me once again to stand in as acting editor of Prairie Schooner while she enjoyed a semester of well-earned leave, and asked further if I might want to do some kind of special issue, I immediately said "Baby Boomers!" A bit self-serving, no doubt, since I'm a writer who was born in the midst of that boom, but I wanted to see what such a gathering might look like, and so I set out to see.

Perhaps no generation has been written about as much as the so-called baby boomers—those born between 1946 and 1964, give or take a year or so on either end. They—okay, we—have been scrutinized, analyzed, catered to and criticized, romanticized, ridiculed, and reviled. No one may ever call us "the greatest generation" but that we are "a generation" is commonly accepted as fact. Of course, the eighteen-year span of the post-war boom in babies should tell us this "generation" is a far less monolithic mass than the generic term suggests. By 1964, when the last of the boomers were just being born, the oldest of them were getting ready to head off into adulthood—jobs or college. Or for some, Vietnam. By 1981, when the last of the boomers were coming of age, the older boomers were realizing they had to trust people over thirty, because they were themselves. Those on either end of the boom grew up in vastly different decades. We experienced different political and social climates, watched different TV shows (some of the oldest boomers might actually remember the monumental occasion of their family first getting a TV), listened to different music, read different books. As Malcolm Jones points out in his article "Our Books, Ourselves" in a March 2007 issue of Newsweek, "Older boomers were more likely to own a copy of On the Road. The youngest were more likely to go with Bright Lights, Big City." The 60s and the 80s may have both been decades of excess but certainly of a very different kind.

But like it or not, we are lumped together as boomers, and there's so damn many of us, we're impossible to ignore. Take the description—more like a tongue-in-cheek manifesto—for Face-book Geezers, a group I was recently (alas) invited to join. The self-described "Alpha Geezer" invites his peers to "reminisce if you wish about 8 track tapes, carbon paper, and rotary dial phones," and then adds: "Pay no attention to all those kids thronging the Facebook lawn. We are boomers, and we are legion. We can take over this joint any time we want." Clearly, we are not going gently —or at least, quietly—into that good night everyone eventually faces. So as we ride off into the sunset toward that purple-haze nursing home where those of us who ended up as writers will rest on whatever laurels we may have garnered—looking backward and forward and trying to get the ever-changing presence of now into perspective, what do we have to say for—and about—ourselves?

As Dorothy Barresi says in her insightful essay on boomer poets (included in this issue) "When one is no longer at the center of popular culture, shaping it, one becomes, de facto, an analyst, an observer rejecting or making sense of change." Certainly evidence of that shift is in many of the poems and stories gathered here (though she had no knowledge of what would be included when she wrote those words). Many of the writers look back at their childhoods—idyllic or otherwise—their youthful idealisms and ambitions, the sudden or gradual changes of heart and mind they have gone through in their lives. They confront their failures, their losses, their own mortalities—sometimes wistfully, sometimes ironically, sometimes with sadness and/or anger and/or acceptance and/or . . . they sometimes indulge in what Barresi calls an "iconic nostalgia," a nostalgia she admits to indulging in herself in her early poems, though she now suspects "that the utility of that nostalgia is finally fading."

Utility may be the operative word there, but it strikes me that the nostalgia for boomer icons is alive and well—and ubiquitous— and not just among boomers themselves. On any given day, I walk into a classroom to find students wearing t-shirts emblazoned with the likenesses of Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Jerry Garcia, even James Dean—an icon who died so long ago even I can't recall him as a living actor. Those half-century-old peace signs hang from the ears and wrists and bedazzled flip-flops of girls young enough to be my daughters, who are also wearing the same peasant blouses and Indian print skirts I wore as an undergrad. What goes around comes around? Nothing new under the sun? Do any of them even know the origin of the symbol was the movement to ban the bomb? "What bomb?" I can imagine one of them asking— not because they're stupid but because THE bomb has morphed into bombs called smart and bombs called IEDs. There's no place left to duck and cover.

Of course, there are other t-shirts emblazoned with the logos of bands I wouldn't recognize if I ran head on into their tour bus, and I have made both historical references and musical analogies that left some of my students staring blankly (What's a My Lai? Dylan who?). I've made the disconcerting discovery that the phrase Keep on Truckin'—a motto of sixties-era laid-backness I myself once wore on a t-shirt—is now footnoted in a Norton anthology, where it is made to sound as quaint as the cat's pajamas—which it probably is. I describe in an iconically nostalgic poem based on that discovery my students, who are "pierced, tattooed / and dyed in ways we freaks would not have dreamed." They have dreams of their own. So, a cadre of talented young poets and writers—some of whom take up where boomer poets leave off, some of whom reject and even mock our aesthetics—will speak to those dreams, find their own icons, their own utility.

Boomer/Subject(s)/Matter(s):

Music. As Barresi says, "in baby boomer poetry, rock star status is still the highest conferred," and so a pantheon of rock stars—and other musicians—appear: Elvis, Janis, Hendrix, Dylan (for my students' sake, that would be Bob), the Supremes, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, Ray Charles. But also Robert Johnson and Bessie Smith, Gershwin and Peggy Lee, Miles Davis and Nina Simone, and more. Singing: "Stop in the Name of Love," "Mercy Mercy Me," "Summertime," "Round Midnight," "Whiter Shade of Pale," "My Generation" . . .

Where there's rock 'n' roll, there is, of course, the sex and drugs that complete the stock phrase. From a celebrated "monster doobie," to marijuana that is more or less medical, to the rigors of rehab and twelve-step confessions that lead to neither absolution or cure, the writers here explore it all (it turns out that you can remember the 60s, even if you were there). Descriptions of sex are often unapologetically blunt—from "orgasms that could peel wallpaper" to "My heart my soul my vulva" to laments for the lost "shows of frontal hair" and the limits of Viagra and the inevitability of "downcast boobs"—all of the above penned by women poets, who perhaps take the idea of "our bodies, ourselves" more viscerally than men.

Though we all may have learned that love was not all we needed, the love poem—in all its permutations—is alive and well with these writers. As are elegies for, and the occasional exorcism of, parents or old friends. Or their own former selves. Collaborations and confrontations. Ballades and Odes. Abba and Wicca. Vietnam and Virginia Tech. The personal and the political (whether or not they are one and the same still being debated). Both Dick Clark and the Cleavers make walk-on appearances, as do several presidents, for better or worse.

And writers. Lots of writers. Disparate forerunners we either embrace as influence or rebel against: Bishop and Berryman and Burroughs, Tom Clark and Dante, MacLeish, O'Hara, Stevens, Rilke and Rich, among others, are invoked by name, while allusions to Eliot, Stephens, Hayden, and more, echo—like sampled lyrics—in the lines of other poems.

It is, to a very large extent, the writers we discover at a critical juncture in our lives who influence what and how we write ourselves—or, perhaps, even if we write at all. For me, it was Paul Carroll's The Young American Poets that changed—literally, or perhaps, literarily—my life. I discovered it on a shelf in my not very well stocked high school library when I was, maybe, sixteen. I suspect that if the librarian herself, or certainly the principal, had read the anthology, it would have been promptly removed (the opening "FUCK" in Berrigan's "Tambourine Life" would have been enough to ensure that, even if it was "COMMUNISM" he was fucking). But no one else in the school ever did read that particular book because once I'd checked it out, I kept renewing it over and over and over again, and, I must confess, failed (unintentionally, I swear) to return it before I graduated. I didn't know what to make of poems that consisted of single letters arranged in various patterns on the page (Richard Kostelanetz), or poems composed of only two words (Aram Saroyan), of Diane Wakoski's poem with little stick figure drawings in the margins (not to mention the infamous photo of her with a gun aimed at—or so I thought—the reader), or Tom Clark's "Sonnet,"—a clinical description of a female orgasm that was arranged into fourteen lines but obeyed none of the other rules for sonnets—or poetry—I'd ever heard. Kathleen Fraser's "Poem In Which My Legs Are Accepted" was the first I'd ever read in which a woman openly discusses her own body—and sex. It was all a far cry from the Romantic poets we were reading in sophomore English, where Wordsworth's "Intimations of Immortality" made me (blame it on adolescent hormones or an early onset of that iconic nostalgia) weep openly in class. I wasn't sure I liked everything in Carroll's collection, but I was thrilled to know it existed, that there were young American poets out there doing strange and wonderful things with words.

As a curious but clueless undergrad, I was introduced to the Modernists and a few post–World War II poets in classes, and stumbled onto Donald Allen's New American Poetry: 1945–1960 (which was old news to some by that point). Then Berg and Mezey's Naked Poetry: Recent American Poetry in Open Forms. Later, The Morrow Anthology of Younger American Poets and No More Masks (and the very notion of "women poets" as such), and eventually, individual books by the writers included in these and other anthologies, which for poets I've talked to, were hugely influential, maybe because, depending on where one lived, finding a bookstore that carried much poetry beyond anthologies could be (as it still is) a challenge.

The fiction writers I asked about books they considered boomer influences were more likely to list novels or individual short-story collections: Salinger, Kerouac and Kesey, Hunter Thompson and Thomas Wolfe—writers commonly associated with boomers in the popular imagination—but also Kurt Vonnegut, Philip Roth and Robert Stone, Margaret Atwood and Marge Piercy, Beattie, Barth, and Barthelme, Coover and Carver and Gass.

Of course, there will always be "newer" and "younger" poets and writers, though the definition of what it means to be American is bound to keep changing over time. The post-boomer generations have their own lists of influences and icons, their own anthologies and issues. And sooner or later, they'll have their own nostalgias.

What I present here is one issue of a quarterly journal, put together on the fly between mid-January and mid-March of this year. I combed through the back files of previously accepted work, had fliers available at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference, solicited work from writers I knew or knew of. Some never responded to my queries; some did but had nothing available to send me at the time; others declined to be included for various reasons or put off sending until the issue was already in production. For a while I worried I wouldn't acquire enough good material to fill the issue. In the end, I had to reject some very good work because it was already overfilled. I make no claim that the gathering here is all-inclusive or definitive—that would take a year of issues, and even then we'd just be seeing the tip of the booming iceberg. I can say that I tried to collect a diverse group of writers representing a variety of styles and aesthetics, that I believe in all the writers and the writing included here, and think they speak to (and occasionally against) each other in interesting and exciting ways. And perhaps the conversation(s) begun here will start other conversations. Talkin' 'bout this generation. Oh, baby. Boom or bust.

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