All of Life: An Interview with Joe Dunthorne
“Writing poetry is pretty constant for me. It sometimes feels like a semiconscious biological process. Like burping.”
In the Review’s June 25 issue, Joe Dunthorne writes about a recent oral history of the New York School poets and poses himself a challenge: “How to analyze a poetics of irreverence and improvisation—of life experienced in a perpetual present—without stifling precisely these qualities?” His essay suggests that the poetry in the scene, by writers ranging from Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery to Alice Notley and Eileen Myles, emerged in part from their social and family lives. The vivacity of their work drew from the eclecticism of their world, or, as Dunthorne quotes Notley, “We’re inside each other’s lives.” “Despite the disputes and grievances that run through these pages,” he continues, “there is a sense that what survives of these poets, apart from their poetry, is the generative and spiky sociability that brought them together in the first place.”
Dunthorne is an eclectic writer in his own right. He is the author of three novels, including his debut, Submarine (2008), which was adapted into a film by Richard Ayoade; a collection of poetry, O Positive (2019); and a family memoir, Children of Radium (2025), which was reviewed in our pages by Francine Prose. His criticism, essays, poems, and stories have appeared in, among many other places, The Paris Review, The Guardian, The Atlantic, and the London Review of Books.
I wrote to Dunthorne this month to ask him about the sociability of art, writing while broke, and the first New York School poet: William Wordsworth.
Aleander Santos: What was your first encounter with the New York School poets? What did you think of them, then and now? Do you think a scene like the School could exist today?
Joe Dunthorne: I was lucky enough to be taught by Daniel Kane at the University of East Anglia when I was an undergraduate. At that time, he’d just published All Poets Welcome: The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960s,and he introduced us not just to the poetry but to the whole social world of it. They were instantly alluring, this witty, catty, playful coterie who seemed to toss out brilliant poems while talking on the phone or riding the Staten Island Ferry. They made it look not just easy but fun. I loved the irreverence and the silliness of their work, and it opened up possibilities in my own writing. In particular, I remember reading Frank O’Hara’s anti-poetic manifesto, Personism, and thinking: these are my people. I still feel the same today. For me, the New York School is a bottomless source of permission. It’s an open invitation. What I appreciate even more as I get older is the importance of their sociability, how they rubbed up against each other, sparked off each other, argued, had affairs, borrowed money, raised children, but ultimately were all deeply committed to one another. That feels profound. And all the while the poems were just falling off them.
As for the question of whether that kind of scene could exist today, I have to hope that it could! Just not in New York or London. I’d like to think that somewhere a city has the right blend of affordability, sociability, and opportunity to create the conditions for what Lewis Warsh called the “24-hour-a-day salon.”
Many of the writers of the first generation were well off, with Harvard educations and prestigious careers. But people in the second generation often came from harder backgrounds. How do you think these different situations influenced their poetry? Is it possible to make sincere art while also thinking about making money?
One answer to that question is to quote “Motto of the Whores and Poets Guild,” the very short poem that the second-generation poets Alice Notley and Ted Berrigan wrote together: “You’ll do good if you play it like you’re not getting paid./But you’ll do it better if the motherfuckers pay you.” One reading of that poem is, yes, great poetry will emerge, regardless of how much money is available, but having money buys the poets the time to do their best work. I think that’s true. But I also think that money and the lack of it can be a productive subject in its own right. Ted Berrigan has a wonderful riff in Train Ride:
I like Credit Cards
Alas, I can’t pay the bills,
but I always spend with the Credit Card
in a terrific way!!
*
I take people to terrific
Restaurants!
*
I go to England!
*
I buy somebody their
return ticket, because they’re
broke.
*
I buy a couple of terrific
shirts,
& a pair of pants
*
I like to give people
money
*
I hate to be given money. It’s embarrassing!
I do like
to get money in the mail.
& I like to get paid lots of money
for doing something like reading, talking, or
publishing
*
How come I can’t get paid
just for writing?
*
I do like to get presents
spontaneously given,
or just for me.
*
But it’s socially awkward that
some people for almost no reason
have money, & some don’t.On the question about the right conditions in which to make “sincere art,” part of what I love about the New York School is that they would never worry about that! It reminds me of a line from Personism where O’Hara talks about the moment his lofty ideas get so lofty that he can’t think about them anymore, “and that’s when refreshment arrives.” For me, the New York School is all about instinct and receptiveness. It encourages a freedom to bring all of life into the poetry, whether you’re swanning around Manhattan with your fancy art friends or you’ve never been to New York. It can all go in.
You write both poetry and fiction. For these genres, what’s your writing process like? How do you start?
Writing poetry is pretty constant for me. It sometimes feels like a semiconscious biological process. Like burping. I’ve never written a diary, but I at least have my poems, which act as a record of my life. I love that I can write them anywhere. On a bus or train or while waiting for a doctor’s appointment or on my phone at night, lit up beneath the duvet. I write my absolute worst work when I sit down and think: now it’s time to write a poem about this important life event! Conversely, my best work usually emerges from a complete lack of expectation. All of which feels quite New York School.
Fiction, however, is another thing entirely. I cannot stumble my way into writing a novel. It has to be somewhat regimented and bureaucratic. I often make a graph to track my daily progress. It’s not romantic. I do still try and bring freedom and playfulness into my process but, in the end, I know that I will have to just put in the hours, the years, of redrafting and restructuring. One of the hardest things is that, for me, novels do not get easier with practice. The more I know about writing one, the harder it is to proceed.
This New York School essay was fairly research heavy. How does writing nonfiction that requires research differ from writing fiction or poetry? Do you feel like you edit or revise differently in each mode?
To me, nonfiction feels more curatorial. It’s about collecting and sifting through information and then putting the right pieces in the right order. With this piece in particular I was inspired by a recent nonfiction book by Rachel Cockerell called Melting Point. It’s a history of a Jewish Zionist project in Texas that’s told entirely through quotations from primary sources. Cockerell absents herself from the narrative—although of course she is there as a curator, an arranger. With this New York School poets essay, I didn’t go quite as far as she does, but I wanted to include as much quotation as I could, to try and make the piece feel a bit like a house party at which you overhear all these different and often contradictory opinions. It helps that the interviews in the book that occasioned the review, Conversations with New York School Poets, are so fun. New York School poets don’t know how to be boring!
What are some works by the New York School poets that you think are most worth reading? Teaching?
There are so many! Here are a few favorites, a mix of New York School founders and contemporary poets who are New York School–inflected.
Shorter ones:
“[Sonnet] You jerk you didn’t call me up,” by Bernadette Mayer
“The Problem of Anxiety,” by John Ashbery
“For the Record I Really Wish I Talked Less but I Literally Cannot Help It,” by Sasha Debevec-McKenney
Longer ones:
“The Circus,” by Kenneth Koch
Train Ride, by Ted Berrigan
“The Ex-Girlfriends Are Back from the Wilderness,” by Hera Lindsay Bird
Finally, here’s a New York School poem written in London in 1808. I see this as Wordsworth preemptively channeling Frank O’Hara. My hot take: Wordsworth was wasted on the countryside:
“St. Paul’s,” by William Wordsworth
What are you reading now?
In poetry, I just read and loved Dean Browne’s poetry collection After Party, which finds a really happy balance between New York School chattiness and a more structured Irish tradition. Try this one.
In fiction, I just finished Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa (translated by Polly Barton), which felt like an electric shock of a book. It’s very alive and sexy and strange. I recommend.
After that, I wanted to read something a bit different, so I went with Neuromancer by William Gibson, which is just a joy. The dystopian cyberpunk future, as imagined in 1984, is as awe-inspiring as ever. (In many ways, it is a much preferable dystopia to the one we are currently living in.) Gibson is also just a brilliant stylist.
That line about poetry as a semiconscious biological process — like burping — and then the honesty about novels not getting easier with practice. Also that quote from Notley & Berrigan: "You’ll do good if you play it like you’re not getting paid. But you’ll do it better if the motherfuckers pay you." Perfect.
Hola , Buena Entrevista. Un Saludo.