New York School notes

often light, violent, or observational Wik cosmopolitan and world-traveled Wik an immediate and spontaneous manner Wik vivid imagery Wik John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler, Barbara Guest, Ted Berrigan, Bernadette Mayer, Alice Notley, Kenward Elmslie, Ron Padgett, Lewis Warsh, and Joseph Ceravolo. Wik

Koch, O'Hara, Schuyler and Ashbery were quite different as poets, but they admired each other and had much in common personally:[1]

Except for Schuyler, all overlapped at Harvard University, Except for Koch, all were homosexual, Except for Ashbery, all did military service, Except for Koch, all reviewed art, Except for Ashbery, who soon moved to Paris, all lived in New York during their formative years as poets.

All four were inspired by French Surrealists - Wik David Lehman, in his book on the New York poets, wrote, "They favored wit, humor and the advanced irony of the blague (that is, the insolent prank or jest) Wik ////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/06/04/specials/koch-ny.html:

New York School of Poets- whose best-known members are John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch and the late Frank O'HaraNo more pretending to be illiterate; unashamed, these writers bluntly confess to being influenced by the great tradition of classical European modernism- by Mallarme, Proust, Breton, Henri Michaux and Raymond Roussel. led them instead into the cultural ambience of the great American abstract painters: shattered syntax and fragmented language, with surrealistic links between unrelated things

Here, broken hunks and bits of pictures and scenes mix with snatches of someone's voice and float like disembodied sense impressions stammering in a kind of substanceless ether. the montage just fades in and out, pictures merely build and then vanish, blink out. a world of surreal wit, a kind of word-playground Though he is sometimes insufferably silly, Koch is also a witThe most noticeable fact about Koch's work is that it is never, absolutely never, about real pain. O'Hara's writing, for example, is about suffering; though the sound is modern, his theme is usually romantic standard equipment: sensual liberty punched through with unhappy love. O'Hara claims to want to be the bard of hedonism, unashamed sensual pleasure, urbanity and egoism; in his art criticism, he repeatedly lavishes praise on the happy few who he thinks are "unrepressed, unneurotic, unabashed." But Ashbery is both the most difficult and the best poet in the New York School, even after it's been explained that the difficulty does not in itself make the work good. [Ashberry] has raised obscurantism to the level of an important artistic principle; he has pushed an utterly personal and arcane brand of romanticism to its most radical extreme. The New York School is playful, it is true, and to that degree it can be rightly called unserious. But play- as we know- need not be unserious.

http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/06/04/specials/koch-ny.html ///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// http://www.randomhouse.com/boldtype/0998/lehman/excerpt.html:

The poets of the New York School were as heterodox, as belligerent toward the literary establishment and as loyal to each other, as their Parisian predecessors had been. The poets took their lead from the Abstract Expressionists (also known as the Action Painters and as the New York School of painting) in several key respects. From Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, they learned that it

was okay for a poem to chronicle the history of its own making--that the mind of the poet, rather than the world, could be the true subject of the poem--and that it was possible for a poem to be (or to perform) a statement without making a statement. Like painting, writing was properly understood to be an activity, a presenttense process, and the residue of that activity could not help referring to itself. Like abstract paintings, their poems originated not in a Platonic conception of their final form but in an engagement with the medium of expression itself. In place of the high seriousness that engulfed the Abstract Expressionists, they opted for aesthetic pleasure. They were ironists, not ecclesiasts. They favored wit, humor, and the advanced irony of the blague (that is, the insolent jest or prank) in ways more suggestive of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg than of the New York School painters after whom they were named. The poets liked hoaxes and spoofs, parodies and strange juxtapositions, pseudotranslations and collages. On the ground that the rules of all verse forms are at base arbitrary, they created ad hoc forms (requiring, say, an anagram or the name of a river in every line) and unconventional selfassignments ("translate a poem from a language you do not understand; do not use a glossary or dictionary"). The logic of a dream or a word game was as valid as that of empirical science as a means of arriving at poetic knowledge. Freely experimental and fiercely intellectual, the poets were at the same time resolutely antiacademic and antiestablishment even as they began to win acceptance in establishment circles. Some of their more radical productions neither looked like nor sounded like poems. Since acceptance or rejection of these works was an indication neither of success or failure, the poets looked to each other as ultimate arbiters. The aim was the liberation of the imagination, and any and all means to this end were valid. The poets were unusually responsive to modern music and to poetry in other languages as well as to modern art.
Excerpted from The Last Avant-Garde by David Lehman. Copyright 1998 by David Lehman.

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http://jacketmagazine.com/05/tlag-intro.html:

Masculine the poets were, but they deviated boldly from the prevailing idea of masculinity. In their aestheticism, the New York poets presented an alternative to the aggressive heterosexualism of an era whose celebrations of manhood were themselves signs of a high anxiety. Not the least attractive thing about the poets of the New York School is the freedom from guilt that their celebration of the imagination entailed.

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