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Zen Buddhism and Contemporary
North American Poetry
Perry D. Guevara
Hank Lazer, Ph.D.
Professor of English and Associate Provost
The re-emergence of Zen Buddhist poetry in contemporary
North American literature has been widespread and
prominent in the last two decades. This interest in and
adherence to Zen thought and practice has not been
seen since the Beat Generation, when poets brought
Buddhism to the forefront of their writings. However, today,
communities of poets, especially the postlanguage poets,
have combined the spirituality of Zen with the aesthetic
of poetry, resulting in innovative and experimental modes
of creative production. This study seeks to unravel this
recent overlap of the spiritual and the aesthetic in order
to identify current trends and possible future directions of
American poetry.
Poetry Today
Poetry has, has had, and always will have its critics, but critics today
have a specifi c and disturbing complaint: that poetry no longer has a place
in our pop culture, digital world. It is reserved for the academy and its overcaffeinated
scholars hunched over cluttered desks littered with dusty books.
The critics claim poetry has become too erudite and overly complicated for
the general population and, therefore, is obsolete. However, what these critics
have failed to realize is that poetry has merged and fused with contemporary
America. As long as the American people have interest in the genuine,
then poetry will persist. In an article published in the Boston Review, Hank
Lazer writes, “The critics have a point. Contemporary American poetry is
atomized, decentralized, and multi-faceted, and the range of poetries and
audiences is too varied to capture” (3).1 While the traditional notion of poetry
1 Lazer, Hank. “The Peopleʼs Poetry.” The Boston Review. 12 July 2006
<bostonreview.net/BR29/lazer.html>
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exists in the hands of the academy, current American poetry has taken new
and exciting turns. Lazer contends, “Perhaps, contrary to the laments, we
are now living through a particularly rich time in American poetry – an era
of radically democratized poetry” (3). Expression through poetry today is
divided across the continent among several subgroups of poets who are
manipulating language in a variety of unique ways. It is democratized into
communities of artists who are not only using the written and spoken word
in traditional forms and structures but are also pushing language to new
limits in ways that have never been seen or heard before.
Today, poetry is re-invented through hybridity, the act of combining
and fusing poetic language with other media of expression. For example,
poetry is no longer restricted to the page but is now born out of new
media such as fi lm, html, fl ash, performance, and sound. Different groups
everywhere are experimenting with and enjoying language in new and
varied ways by blending artistic and even some non-artistic techniques,
styles, and methods, resulting in new modes of hybrid composition. This
interest in hybridity has opened the door to unbridled experimentalism.
In a recent article, Mark Wallace suggests that hybridity characterizes the
work of current postlanguage poets including Lazer, Leslie Scalapino,
Lyn Hejinian, and even Charles Bernstein, one of the major fi gures of the
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E movement. He suggests that hybridity is “the great
emphasis in postlanguage work on mixing traditions, crossing boundaries,
and critiquing notions of form as pure or singular” (10).2 The hybrid
forms and styles of the postlanguage poets are constantly evolving as they
combine varied forms, styles, media, and modes of thought. Moreover, a
hybrid overlap of the spiritual and the aesthetic has been especially notable
in the writings produced by the postlanguage poets, many of them having
a particular and passionate interest in Zen Buddhism. This adherence to
Zen thought represented in poetry has not been prominent since the Beat
Generation when writers like Gary Snyder and Jack Kerouac brought
Buddhist perspectives to the forefront of their writings.
American Poets and Zen
It is a surprising phenomenon, really, the transpacifi c journey of Zen
Buddhism and its transplantation into American culture. During its stay in
America, Zen has had many faces; it has been serious, academic, spiritual,
2 Wallace, Mark. “Defi nitions in Process, Defi nitions as Process/Uneasy
Collaborations: Language and the Postlanguage Poetries.” Flashpoint Magazine.
15 June 2005 <http://www.fl ashpointmag.com/postlang.htm>
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artistic, and even trendy. However, the true mystery lies in why American
artists and poets have been so receptive to Zen, a mode of spirituality,
thought, and practice from the other side of the world. It seems unusual that
Zen thought and practice would be so widely accepted in an increasingly