New York School (poetry)

Introduction

The New York School of poets was born in the United States in the late 1950’s. Its central members—Frank O’Hara (1926-1966), Kenneth Koch (1925-2002), James Schuyler (1923-1991), and John Ashbery (born 1927)—shared common experiences and interests, which provided their mutual affinity with the momentum necessary to make their writings seem like a movement. O’Hara, Koch, and Schuyler had served in World War II. Schuyler had lived with and worked as a typist for W. H. Auden, on whose poetry Ashbery wrote his senior thesis while an undergraduate at Harvard, where he met O’Hara and Koch. All of them were enamored of the French Surrealists. O’Hara and Ashbery were knowledgeable devotees of the New York art scene and moved in its circles, guaranteeing the influence on their poetry (and drama and criticism) of the ideas and methods at work in the paintings of New York expressionists such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning.

Indeed, it was from the New York School of painters that gallery director John Bernard Myers took the New York School name and applied it to the poets in 1961 in an overt act of public-relations strategy. However, it was probably inevitable that such a moniker would adhere to the poets. One reason that the poets who make up the New York School, as well as critics, have regarded the New York label as spurious is that, for its founding members, only some of them had grown up in or near the city and some of them lived there only intermittently. About its role as a state of mind common to the poets, however, there has been little dispute. The city, with its intricate network of universities, publishing houses, public-reading forums, and bohemian cachet served as the physical and metaphorical fulcrum of their activity. Its energetic cosmopolitan rhythms and heightened artistic atmosphere, redolent as they were of endless activity and stimulating innovation, enlivened their work and linked even the movement’s most stylistically disparate participants.

Despite its beginnings in the underground avant-garde, the New York School saw its more persistent and prolific members embraced by the mainstream literary community. None was embraced more than Ashbery. Nineteen years after winning the Yale Younger Poets Prize in 1956, his bookSelf-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975) won the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and a Pulitzer Prize. From 2001 to 2003, he served as the poet laureate of New York State. Schuyler became the second New York School alumnus to win the Pulitzer Prize, in 1981, for his book The Morning of the Poem (1980). Koch, who after Ashbery was probably the best-known member of the New York School, did not receive a major award until he won the Shelley Memorial Award in 1994, followed by the Bollingen Prize in 1995 for One Train (1994). He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and enjoyed a long career as a popular university instructor. From 1953 to 1958, he was a lecturer at Rutgers University. In 1959, he was hired as an assistant professor by Columbia University, and he became one of its most popular teachers during his nearly forty-year tenure.

Some observers trace the gradual unraveling of the New York School of poets to 1966, the year that O’Hara was killed by a dune buggy on Fire Island. Certainly O’Hara’s death struck the movement a blow, but by then, the movement he had helped launch had taken on a life of its own. With the publication in 1970 of An Anthology of New York Poets, edited by Ron Padgett and David Shapiro, the New York School had grown to include too many poets for one volume to encompass. In the decade that followed, the members of the school “graduated” into various careers that in many cases led them well beyond the city.

The central figures among the New York School of poets wrote in a variety of other genres. O’Hara, Ashbery, Koch, and Schuyler wrote plays. O’Hara published four volumes of art criticism. Ashbery translated the work of French poets. Koch wrote a well-received series of books intended to interest students in writing poetry. Schuyler was a novelist. The school’s less famous members were equally diverse. Barbara Guest (1920-2006) wrote plays. Kenward Elmslie (born 1929) wrote for the musical theater. Edwin Denby (1903-1983) was best known as a ballet critic. Aram Saroyan (born 1943), the master of the one-word poem, developed into a writer of prose. Ed Sanders (born 1939) became famous as the leader of the Fugs, a psychedelic folk band. Taken as a whole, the poets of the New York School considered no literary genre to be unsuitable for the exercising of their talents.

An Anthology of New York Poets

An Anthology of New York Poets, a six-hundred-page volume that has come to be regarded as the Bible of the New York School of poets, contains 374 poems written by twenty-seven poets over a period of two decades. Judging from the preface by editors Padgett and Shapiro, the process of deciding which poets and which of their poems to include must have resembled, admittedly on a lower metaphysical scale, the selecting of canonical texts. There was a sense that the book would come to represent not only the best work of the individual poets but also the movement as a whole. Some of the poets (Ashbery and Koch in particular) would publish works that superseded the poems included in this anthology. However, for the majority of the poets involved, even those who continued to write prolifically, inclusion in this anthology would represent their only moment on the national stage.

Padgett and Shapiro seem to have been guided in their selection in part by a desire to represent the movement’s diversity. There are one-word (even one-letter) poems by Saroyan and traditional sonnets by Denby, playfully transparent poems by O’Hara, explication-defying fragments by Clark Coolidge, plainspoken journal-like poems by Ted Berrigan, and buoyantly lyrical fantasias by Elmslie, “found” poetry by John Giorno, prose poetry by Schuyler, haiku-like elegance by Bernadette Mayer, and frank profanity by Sanders.

The diversity was no ruse. The poets did, however, share common elements, the most obvious of which might be the sense that they were not bound by any of the rules that had accumulated during the previous five hundred years of Western poetry. A poet of the New York School could observe convention, play with it, pillage it for parts, or ignore it altogether. The same freedom applied to subject matter. From baseball and sunglasses (Tom Clark) to highbrow allusions (Shapiro), nothing was off limits.

In a sense, the poetry represented the fulfillment of Walt Whitman’s all-encompassing vision. Unlike Whitman’s poems, however, the bulk of this anthology’s verse has not aged well. Much that no doubt seemed liberating, spontaneous, and fresh in the 1950’s and 1960’s now seems puerile, insular, and slapdash, the writing of poets so afraid that all work and no play would make them dull boys that they opted instead for all play and no work.

The World Anthology

The World was one of the periodicals most responsible for publishing the works of the younger, lesser-known poets of the New York School. Deliberately amateurish in appearance—its pages were typewritten, mimeographed, and stapled together—its very look invited an experimental informality unwelcome in the more prestigious journals in which older New York School poets had begun to appear.

The World Anthology (1969) was edited by Anne Waldman, a poet who, with Allen Ginsberg, John Cage, and Diane di Prima, would found the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, five years later. Many of the poets whose work the anthology contains—including Michael Brownstein, Joseph Ceravolo, Dick Gallup, and Peter Schjeldahl—would also have work published a year later in An Anthology of New York Poets. As a result, The World Anthology seems in retrospect like a first draft, an insufficiently edited template from whose mistakes Padgett and Shapiro would learn in preparing their collection.

One of the more obvious differences between the two books is Waldman’s enjoyment of “list poems.” Although there is nothing remarkable about the fifteen verbs that make up Larry Fagin’s “Fifteen Things I Do Every Day,” Ted Berrigan’s marginally more elaborate “Ten Things I Do Every Day” (its verbs contain direct objects) hints at the mysteries beneath the mundane. To Waldman’s credit, she included Berrigan’s “The Avant-Garde Literary Award,” a deadpan parody of the type of insufficiently developed experiments that take up many of the pages that follow.

Nevertheless, The World Anthology is noteworthy for introducing the work of Jim Carroll, a New York poet who, despite being passed over by Padgett and Shapiro, would go on to considerable acclaim as a poet, a memoir writer, and a rock-and-roll singer. Of the five Carroll selections, “From the Basketball Diaries” was a conflation of journal entry and prose poem unique among the works of his peers.

The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara

In the poems of O’Hara, one observes the deceptively casual discussion of unconventional subject matter that, more than any other single characteristic, set the tone for the New York School of poetry. As might be expected, the solidification of O’Hara’s body of work after his death in 1966 has allowed critical analysis to accumulate to the point that, in quantity if not in quality, it now competes with the poetry itself for the attention of the novice reader of O’Hara. The dividing line between those who see his poetry as profound and those who see it as trivial has become increasingly sharp. Reasons for this division can be found in any number of O’Hara’s poems. However, those reasons are brought into particularly clear focus by two poems: “The Day Lady Died” and “Why I Am Not a Painter.” The subject of the first exemplifies O’Hara’s willingness to write about pop culture, the latter his willingness to write about the act of writing.

O’Hara wrote “The Day Lady Died” in 1959, when the cultural allusions suitable to poetry were those that had stood the test of time. T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) and Ezra Pound’s Cantos (1925-1972), which together dominated the poetry world, freely cited ancient rituals, foreign languages, mythology, and religion. O’Hara’s devoting a poem to the death of the jazz singer Billie Holiday (whose nickname was Lady Day) risked sounding of insolence, an insolence intensified by O’Hara’s not referring to Holiday’s death until just before the poem’s end, after having dragged the listener through twenty-four lines of daily minutiae.

This shaggy-dog approach is, admittedly, clever. The speaker experiences Holiday’s death as a shock, and O’Hara’s circuitousness re-creates the effect. On the other hand, the poem is both manipulative and misleading. The title leads readers to expect the poem to be about the singer’s death and therefore a kind of eulogy. It turns out to be about the speaker and his feelings, making the reader, and maybe Holiday, the butt of a joke.

“Why I Am Not a Painter” plays a similar game, but it does so at the poet’s own expense. In the poem, O’Hara visits a painter at work on a painting called Sardines. By the time the painting is finished, the artist has eliminated the sardines, making the painting a representation of its subject’s absence. Later, the poet becomes so obsessed with writing a poem about the color orange that he overshoots, and the poet ends up with pages worth of prose from which all references to orange have vanished. He divides it into twelve poems and calls it Oranges (1953). Eventually, the reader realizes that “Why I Am Not a Painter,” like Sardines and Oranges, contains nothing about its titular subject. Besides being a good joke, it puts forth the very interesting idea that no work of art is finished until all traces of whatever inspired it have disappeared.

A Wave

In “The Ecclesiast,” a poem from Rivers and Mountains (1966), Ashbery wrote, “The monkish and the frivolous alike were to be trapped in death’s capacious claw/ But listen while I tell you about the wallpaper—” These lines adequately summarize his verse.

Ashbery published A Wave in 1984, nearly one decade after his reputation as an important contemporary poet had been established by his winning a Pulitzer Prize for Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. A Wave did not win a Pulitzer, but it did win a Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and the Bollingen Prize, indicating the return of Ashbery’s work to a favor after what some critics considered a period of creative stasis. Creative stasis is, in a sense, both the subject—in A Wave and elsewhere—of his poetry and its form.

“Stasis” may seem like a peculiar term to describe poetry that with its long, flowing lines, surrealistic swirls, and polysyllabic vocabulary, appears to undulate. However, like the “wallpaper” in “The Ecclesiast,” all that actually undulates in Ashbery’s verse is a recurring pattern of designs that only appears to move when examined up close. Viewed from a distance, it becomes a static facade. The wall that it covers, the room of which the wall is a part, and the people in the room (the “monkish” and the “frivolous”) do not interest Ashbery, and therefore go unconsidered.

Ashbery was also an art critic, so it is not surprising that the illusion of motion conveyed by static surfaces should appeal to his aesthetic sense. What is surprising, and disappointing, is that a poet as obviously gifted as Ashbery should be content to pass off art criticism as art. There are, in most of his poems, lines that live and portend an imminent insight. More often than not, however, they are negated by the lines that follow, leaving the residue of depths unexplored at the poem’s end.

Some critics have remarked that the sentences and sometimes the very lines in a typical Ashbery poem could be rearranged at random and still have the same effect, and in longer poems such as “A Wave,” the 684-line title poem, the accusation is especially hard to deny. Like the world in T. S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” (1925), it begins with a bang (“To pass through pain and not know it,/ A car door slamming in the night”) and ends with a whimper (“But all was strange”). In a poem so long, reversing the whimper and the bang would have made little difference.

The same cannot be said of “At North Farm,” the first piece in A Wave. The Godot-like “someone [who] is traveling furiously toward you” at the beginning of the poem never arrives, but the suspense of his arriving in the first stanza intensifies the “mixed feelings” of his failure to arrive in the second. Restricting himself to the length (although not the meter or the rhyme scheme) of a sonnet, Ashbery has little room to meander. It is an all too rare example of an Ashbery poem in which everything matters.

The Collected Poems of Kenneth Koch

“There are certainly big differences in our poetry,” Ashbery once said, comparing his work to that of Koch, “but we had somehow the same attitude: that you could fool around in poetry, which was not the case with most of our contemporaries.” By “our contemporaries,” Ashbery meant the poets of the 1950’s, those who had grown up in the shadow of half a century’s worth of manifestly serious—even ominous—poetry. Amid such company, the possibility of “fooling around in poetry” must have looked very appealing.

Few poets made fooling around look more appealing than Koch did, as is evident from The Collected Poems of Kenneth Koch. “Sleet machines!” he exclaimed in “The Chase,” one of his earliest poems. “I approach you like a moth dizzy with materials,/ Disk! disk! public peaces of entertainment!” The wordplay in the lines of his poems seldom subsided for long, and when it did, it did so only to cast Koch’s next mirthful eruption, which was never far away, into sharper relief. The “elephant man” in another early poem, “The Circus,” “speaks giddily, to every one of the circus people he passes,/ He does not know what he is saying, he does not care.…”

Like the dizzy moth and the insouciant elephant man, Koch had so much fun in his poems that often the idea that readers not in on his jokes might not be having fun seems not to have occurred to him. His signposts in “You Were Wearing,” a brief surrealist romp through Western civilization, are easy enough to recognize (Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Abraham Lincoln, and Dick Tracy), but as with many poets of the New York School, his verse often seems tailored to entertain the poets of the New York School. To read it is to feel like an eavesdropper at a very lively party.

It is therefore perhaps not surprising that, of his many pieces, the one most widely anthologized is “Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams,” a parody of another, even more widely anthologized poem, Williams’s “This Is Just to Say.” Unlike the bulk of Koch’s work, “Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams” has as its subject something well known to the public and therefore presents readers with no epistemological obstacles. It is also a parody in form as well as in content. Capitalizing on the most common objection to Williams’s poem—that surely a twenty-eight-word apology about having eaten someone else’s plums does not rise to the level of poetry—Koch multiplies its length and writes not one parody but four. Each is funny on its own (“I chopped down the house that you had been saving to live in next summer,” “I gave away the money that you had been saving to live on for the next ten years”), but together, and arranged so that the humor builds and the funniest of the four parodies ends the poem with a bang, Koch’s “variations” become not only funny but also immune to the charge that they are too brief to be taken seriously.

Bibliography

Herd, David. John Ashbery and American Poetry. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001. Less a biography of Ashbery than an analysis of what he as a poet has in common with a quality of intellect and thought traceable to the eighteenth century. Herd attempts to understand the irony that Ashbery is simultaneously one of the West’s most celebrated poets and one of its least understood.

Kane, Daniel. All Poets Welcome: The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960’s. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. An evocatively detailed description of the anything-goes atmosphere that prevailed in New York City’s lower East Side when the “second generation” of the New York School of poets were beginning to make their mark both in print and on stage. Includes a compact disc of audio clips of the poetry readings.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. What Is Poetry: Conversations with the American Avant-Garde. New York: Teachers & Writers Collaborative, 2003. Includes biographical information about and revealing interviews with John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and Bernadette Mayer (as well as experimentally inclined poets not associated with the New York School), each of whom Kane sees as belonging to a uniquely American “avant-garde tradition.”

Koch, Kenneth, and Ron Padgett. Wishes, Lies, and Dreams: Teaching Children to Write Poetry. New York: HarperCollins, 1999. Arguably the most influential of the several books that Koch wrote or cowrote on making the writing of verse look possible and appealing to students. Contains many examples of the student writing that Koch’s imaginative approach inspired.

Lehman, David. The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets. New York: Knopf, 1999. An account of the friendship of John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara, and James Schuyler and the development of that friendship into a font of energetic energy. Lehman captures the careening spirit of the two-decade period in which a seminal moment engendered a movement. He also illustrates the poets’ vital ties to the broader New York art culture (specifically the visual arts) and the great extent to which those connections served as conduits for mutual inspiration.

Padgett, Ron, and David Shapiro, eds. An Anthology of New York Poets. New York: Random House, 1970. This anthology begins with a nine-page preface by Padgett that captures what the twenty-seven poets contained in the book thought of the New York School label (not much) and their place in the history, and the future, of American letters. The preface also reprints Frank O’Hara’s semiserious “Personism: A Manifesto.”

Perloff, Marjorie. Frank O’Hara: Poet Among Painters. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. O’Hara’s style, personality, and ancillary artistic passions exercised a greater influence on the poets of the New York School than those of any other individual. Making use of numerous previously unavailable writings, Perloff paints the most vivid and intimate portrait to date of O’Hara as a polymath of the avant-garde. Includes detailed analysis of several of O’Hara’s best-known poems.

Ward, Geoffrey. Statutes of Liberty: The New York School of Poets. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001. A pioneering work in the understanding of the New York School, focusing primarily on John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, and James Schuyler.