1956–57 were good years for literary revolution. That is when Meditations in an Emergency and Howl appeared on opposite coasts, two of the most important first books of poetry to be published in America since the war. O'Hara like a violin, Ginsberg like a waterfall, let loose the flood of deep associations. They created a torrential rhetoric that literally washed away the poetry of the "silent generation." Certain texts in Meditations in an Emergency are clearly imitations of the French …, [when, for example, the] packaging of [a] poem into five line stanzas is not so much evidence of formal intention, as a joke about literary form. The language slips and leaps and interrupts itself with the limberness of the surreal countervoice. The text has no real subject matter; it is what it means: an incoherence of rhythms and images that is oddly seductive. Although passages like this are not...