The Poets of New Jersey
~ From Colonial to Contemporary ~

Edited by Emanuel di Pasquale, Frank Finale, and Sander Zulauf

Introduction

by X. J. Kennedy

Image and Actuality

Henry Miller once pictured himself standing on the New York waterfront gazing over to the relatively dark shore across the Hudson and saying of New Jersey, “How could anything great ever come from there?” This dismissal recalls the disparaging view of New Jersey you customarily hear from people who think the state nothing but a polluted stretch of turnpike between Manhattan and Philadelphia.

Nor has the shape of New Jersey on the map, like that of a big-nosed little old lady wearing a flat hat, helped the state's image. A poet named Jack Anderson once printed a poem (naturally, in a New York magazine) called “The Invention of New Jersey,” summing up the territory in a vision of swamps, refineries, plastic geegaws, and neon hot-dog signs, where on a weekend a man has nothing to do but aimlessly drive around and have sex with his sour-faced date. Like Miller, such commentators ignore far more than they know.

New Jersey, let's admit, is a mishmash that never got unified.

By its geographical situation it has always been a crossroads, a place for people to commute from, for Revolutionary armies to pass through. This makes any general idea of it difficult to grasp. Its proximity to Manhattan has proved both an advantage and, for its culture, an inhibiting force. Why found a world-class art museum in New Jersey with the Metropolitan and the MOMA so close by? Regional theater has had stiff competition from Broadway, Off-Broadway, and Off-Off-Broadway, although among other companies Amiri Baraka's Spirit House Theater, the Paper Mill and George Street Playhouses, the Crossroads and McCarter Theatres, and the New Jersey Shakespeare Festival have managed to achieve distinction. Still, unlike France, New Jersey has no Paris; unlike Illinois, no Chicago; unlike Georgia, no Atlanta—no focal point for art and commerce and literature. Once, in my Dover boyhood, Newark aspired to being such a center, with the corner of Broad and Market for its bustling Etoile or Loop and its influential Newark Evening News circulating statewide. But urban blight and riots caused the city to dwindle in importance. Nowadays it is the site of one of three big metropolitan airports, a jumping-off-place for travelers heading overseas.

Has New Jersey a common language? I daresay a native of Jersey City and a South Jersey tomato farmer can understand each other, but just barely. Is there a common culture? Ask a Passaic slum-dweller how much kinship he feels to the owner of a Princeton estate, where, it is rumored, the servants are direct descendants of the family's original slaves. New Jersey is a land of stark contrasts and furious contradictions. From the garbage-heaped swamps of the Meadowlands you can see the Empire State Building. Between the orchards of Essex County and the fuel tanks of Bayonne, between picturesque Cape May or the Delaware Water Gap and the trafficked corridors of the Garden State Parkway (the New Jersey Piedmont has the densest population in the USA), between the Appalachians to the north and the flat farmlands to the south, between the mean streets of Atlantic City and the glitzy casinos they hide behind, there isn't much vital relationship.

And yet out of this stopping-place, this fervent and fruitful confusion, out of Edison's Menlo Park laboratory and the Wright Aeronautics factory, have come forces to transform the world. Not all of these changes have been technological. From Hoboken, Frank Sinatra remade the nature of pop singing and from Asbury Park, Bruce Springsteen has worked an ongoing transformation in pop music. From Camden, Walt Whitman spread his influence and indeed began modern American poetry; from Newark, Stephen Crane showed that it could be written with concision; and from Paterson, William Carlos Williams proved that its speech could be taken “out of the mouths of Polish mothers.” Allen Ginsberg, for whom Williams served as baby doctor, carried on this literary revolution. Without New Jersey, the world today would be darker and quieter; and contemporary American poetry, inconceivable.

In their historical anthology of New Jersey poets, Emanuel di Pasquale, Frank Finale, and Sander Zulauf set out bravely to widen blinkered perspectives. The achievements of Whitman, Crane, and Williams ought to be enough to wise up a legion of Henry Millers, or literary turnpike travelers. Yet this anthology goes far deeper, as the most cursory browse through it will show. The blue roads and byways of New Jersey are heavily populated by poets whom any state might wish to claim for its laureates. Some of the poets here included are natives like Williams, who stayed put in Rutherford for practically all his life; some are transplants like Whitman, who though he grew up on Long Island and learned to orate his long lines by howling them to its crashing waves, did after all live in Camden for his last twenty years, there retooling his Leaves of Grass into its final version. Other poets merely passed through for a short time and moved on, as did Marianne Moore. But the editors have reason to feel that these transients, too, left their mark and deserve to be represented. As a result, the reader is in for some surprises: What?—that naturalized Irishman Paul Muldoon a New Jersey poet? But until Princeton secedes from the Garden State, let us count him in. Some of these poems have New Jersey written all over them—like “The Puritan's Ballad” of Elinor Wylie, in which we are startled to find romantic use of a familiar New Jersey name (“My love came up from Barnegat”), Robert Pinsky's “Jersey Rain,” Thomas Reiter's “Going into the Barrens,” Stephen Dunn's “The Metaphysicians of South Jersey,” and more. Other poems do not advertise their New Jersey connections and arguably might have been written anywhere. The editors don't fall into the trap of confining these poets to New Jersey landscapes. They rightly include “Supermarket in California,” considering it one of Allen Ginsberg's best poems.

Like more than half of all Americans, I am now relocated and deracinated, and so find it a wondrous lift to read this exciting, immensely various anthology and feel again some New Jersey connections. Not that you have to be from New Jersey, or still living there, to discover in this book a splendid and eye-opening read. Throw away your preconceptions and plunge in. Let yourself soar beyond that Manhattan-to-Philadelphia corridor.

— X. J. Kennedy

X. J. Kennedy (b. 1929) is a native of Dover, New Jersey. He has published seven collections of poetry (including The Lords of Misrule (2002), Nude Descending a Staircase (1961), Cross Ties (1985), and Dark Horses (1992), 18 children's books, and several textbooks, including An Introduction to Poetry with Dana Gioia, now in its eleventh edition. His honors include the 2004 Poets Prize and the Shelley Memorial Award.