Having a Poem with You
Joe Dunthorne on the New York School Poets
In our June 25 issue, Joe Dunthorne opens his essay about a new oral history of the New York School poets with an ironic gambit: “One of the few things New York School poets agree on is that the New York School never really existed.” Of course, this sort of insouciance is one of the defining features of an indefinitive group that, across several generations, was otherwise mostly united around geography and the freedom that came from a moment in New York City’s history when rent could be, as Ron Padgett recalls, “about sixty dollars a month.” So, Dunthorne asks, “How to analyze a poetics of irreverence and improvisation—of life experienced in a perpetual present—without stifling precisely these qualities?”
Below, alongside Dunthorne’s essay, are five articles from our archives about New York School poets alongside four poems from our archives by New York School poets (alas, Frank O’Hara’s poetry never did appear in the pages of the Review).
When the Rents Were Low
Joe Dunthorne
One of the few things New York School poets agree on is that the New York School never really existed. “You can join the New York School for $5 if you want” was how Ted Berrigan often put it. Part of the lasting appeal of this loose group of poets is their disinterest in assessing their own legacy. Frank O’Hara wrote that he preferred the movies, and Eileen Myles quotes Joe Brainard on his deathbed: “Well, one good thing about dying, you don’t have to go to any more poetry readings.” All of this makes them a challenge to write an academic book about. How to analyze a poetics of irreverence and improvisation—of life experienced in a perpetual present—without stifling precisely these qualities?
Read the full article on the Review’s website here.
From the Archive: The New York School
Alert to Reality
Langdon Hammer
James Schuyler was a great nature poet. But that way of putting it is misleading because he usually observed nature from indoors, framed by a window, and the nature he was writing about was often a city view with skyscrapers, or an arrangement of tulips on a table, or the fanciful names in a flower catalog. And the word “nature” isn’t right because it refers to something large and abstract, whereas Schuyler was writing about “the day,” meaning the sheer offhand presence of the world, which is always particular and local.
Read the full article on the Review’s website here.
Payne Whitney Poems
James Schuyler
Arches
of buildings, this building,
frame a stream of windows
framed in white brick. This
building is fire proof; or else
it isn’t: the furnishings first
to go: no, the patients.…
Read the full poem here.
John Ashbery (1927–2017)
Lucy Sante
Ashbery’s was marked above all by a calm, discursive voice, going along at a walking pace, often seeming to have been caught in midstream, maybe half-heard from outside through the curtains. That voice could occasionally sound explicitly poetic or expressionistically fractured, but more often—and more consistently as time went by—it sounded conversational, demotic, mild, even-toned, deep-dish American. Its apparent placidity allowed for all sorts of things to appear bobbing happily in its current: recondite allusions, philosophical asides, foreign idioms, schoolyard jokes, forgotten cultural detritus of all sorts, even the occasional narrative or analysis or argument.
Read the full article on the Review’s website here.
Ignorance of the Law Is No Excuse
John Ashbery
We were warned about spiders, and the occasional famine. We drove downtown to see our neighbors. None of them were home. We nestled in yards the municipality had created, reminisced about other, different places — but were they? Hadn’t we known it all before?…
Read the full poem here.
Crossing the Invisible Line
Dan Chiasson
The solemnities of art are, in [Eileen] Myles, everywhere undermined: “I like to get really stoned/and revise everything I’ve ever done/Leaning/against the refrigerator,” she writes in “La Vita Nuova.” You’d score that a win for life, if it weren’t for the fact that we hear about it in lines of verse. The title alludes to Dante; “leaning”—with the unshowy pun on Myles’s first name—is among the most important words in American poetry, handed down to Myles from two of her New York heroes: Whitman (“I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass”) and especially Frank O’Hara in “The Day Lady Died” (“I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of leaning on the john door in the 5 Spot”). It is deeply characteristic of her that the most Dionysian moments are also her most vocational. Only a poet who agreed with Robert Frost that poems are “play for mortal stakes” would boast about getting stoned and heedlessly working on revisions.
Read the full article on the Review’s website here.
Lark
Eileen Myles
Anything could possibly become any thing else. It was the condition of this dream…
Read the full poem here.
The Mayakovsky of MacDougal Street
Geoffrey O’Brien
Allen Ginsberg said of O’Hara’s New York poems, “It’s like having Catullus change your view of the Forum in Rome,” and indeed one has to go back to fairly remote periods—ancient Rome, eighteenth-century London—to find poetry as meticulous in its gossip and as minute in its urban observation as O’Hara’s. He made himself the patron poet of a this-worldly magic emanating chiefly from the magic city of New York: a utopia of freely circulating desire articulated by sex, talk, drink, art, ballet, parties, movies, and lunch dates, with occasional necessary forays to the Hamptons and Paris.
Read the full article on the Review’s website here.
You’re Welcome
F.W. Dupree
Life does not present itself to Kenneth Koch as picture or symbol or collector’s item. It talks, sighs, grunts and sings; it is a drama, largely comic, in which there are parts for everyone and everything, and all the parts are speaking parts.
Read the full article on the Review’s website here.
Some General Instructions
Kenneth Koch
Do not bake bread in an oven that is not made of stone Or you risk having imperfect bread. Byron wrote, “The greatest pleasure in life is drinking hock And soda water the morning after, when one has A hangover,” or words to that effect.…
Read the full poem here.
How erudite, urbaine, and myopic ! While I embrace articles about my craft, rare as they may be these days, the navel- gazing,intellectual gyrations of urban poets never rise to the universal language of poets who immersed themselves in the depths of natural world themes though they had/ have the academic background of classics that NY- centric writers like to crow about.