James Schuyler: Collected Poems (1993)•
Lifesaving Poems: James Schuyler (1923-1991)James Schuyler: Collected Poems (1996)
[Finally Books - Hospice Bookshop, Birkenhead - 27/11/24]:
James Schuyler. Collected Poems. 1993. The Noonday Press. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996.
[Kenneth] Koch, [Frank] O'Hara, [James] Schuyler, and [John] Ashbery were quite different as poets, but they admired each other and had much in common personally:I was a little surprised to come across a mint, seemingly brand-new copy of James Schuyler's Collected Poems in a vintage shop the other day. The name seemed familiar. I knew I should know who he was, but you know how it is: so many poets, so little time ...All four were inspired by French Surrealists such as Raymond Roussel, Pierre Reverdy, and Guillaume Apollinaire. 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) ...
- Except for Schuyler, all overlapped at Harvard University,
- Except for Ashbery, all did military service,
- Except for Koch, all reviewed art,
- Except for Ashbery, all lived in New York during their formative years as poets.
- Wikipedia: New York School
And then it dawned on me! A Nest of Ninnies - that ridiculous "novel" by John Ashbery & - yes - James Schuyler. I'd even read it: in the middle of my Ashbery phase, some twenty-odd years ago, it must be.
(Actually A Nest of Ninnies might have made a better title for that damp squib of a Merchant-Ivory film Slaves of New York - based on Tama Janowitz's 1986 short story collection - which I've pictured above).
New York School poets and painters:l-r: Kenneth Koch, Larry Rivers (with sign), John Ashbery, Jane Freilicher, Lelia Telberg, & Nell Blaine
The Wikipedia entry on the New York School of Poets goes on to observe that:
critics argued that their work was a reaction to the Confessionalist movement in Contemporary Poetry. Their poetic subject matter was often light, violent, or observational, while their writing style was often described as cosmopolitan and world-traveled.While it's certainly true that the New York School was once seen as a a kind of official opposition to what might be called the Boston School of Confessionalists, grouped around the charismatic figure of Robert Lowell (and featuring such luminaries as Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton) - not to mention the let-it-all-hang-out Beats (Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Jack Kerouac, Lawrence Ferlinghetti et al.), such crude categorisations seem less and less helpful over time.
[They] wrote in an immediate and spontaneous manner reminiscent of stream of consciousness writing, often using vivid imagery. They drew on inspiration from Surrealism and the contemporary avant-garde art movements, in particular the action painting of their friends in the New York City art world circle such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning.
It is, for instance, easier to see the continuities than the dissonances between such bravura performances as Lowell's Life Studies (1959), Ginsberg's Kaddish (1961), and O'Hara's Lunch Poems (1964) when you look back at them now. They're all brilliant, conversational, open-style books - but each has a tragic edge to it.
Frank O'Hara, the heart and soul of the New York School, had less than two years to live when this, his masterpiece, was published. His untimely death in a car accident on the beach at Fire Island has been commemorated in a haunting series of paintings, The Killing Zone, by former Abstract Impressionist Alfred Leslie:
Everybody knows such O'Hara poems as "The Day Lady Died" and "Lana Turner has collapsed!". They're the entry point to modern poetry for many readers:
Poem [Lana Turner has collapsed!]
Lana Turner has collapsed!
I was trotting along and suddenly
it started raining and snowing
and you said it was hailing
but hailing hits you on the head
hard so it was really snowing and
raining and I was in such a hurry
to meet you but the traffic
was acting exactly like the sky
and suddenly I see a headline
LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED!
there is no snow in Hollywood
there is no rain in California
I have been to lots of parties
and acted perfectly disgraceful
but I never actually collapsed
oh Lana Turner we love you get up
Alfred Leslie: The Killing Cycle: The Accident (1969-70)
Alfred Leslie: The Killing Cycle: The Telephone Call (1971-72)
Alfred Leslie: The Killing Cycle: The Loading Pier (1975)Strangely enough, that was not the case for me. For a long time I resisted what I (wrongly) saw as the facile charm of O'Hara's work, and instead struggled earnestly to work out just what it was John Ashbery might be getting at with his long, intricate rivers of verbiage.
Then inspiration struck. I had a copy of his Selected Poems, and one day - I think as I was reading "Scheherazade" for the umpteenth time - I realised that it seemed to operate more on the level of word music than conventional syntax. Yes, it certainly made grammatical sense, but it never really said anything - directly, that is. The mood it conveyed was strong and unmistakable, though.
Unsupported by reason’s enigmaAs a poet, Ashbery seems to me to have more in common with the Tennyson of "The Lotos-eaters" than with Modernists such as Pound or Eliot. You can love his poetry without understanding it. It's not that he lacks ideas (in my reading, at least) - just that the ideas are generally subordinate to the symphonic swell of the language. Sometimes it sounds like Bartók, sometimes Sibelius - even, occasionally, Tchaikovsky.
Water collects in squared stone catch basins.
The land is dry. Under it moves
The water. Fish live in the wells. The leaves
A concerned green, are scrawled on the light. Bad
Bindweed and rank ragweed somehow forget to flourish here.
An inexhaustible wardrobe has been placed at the disposal
Of each new occurrence. It can be itself now.
Day is almost reluctant to decline
And slowing down opens out new avenues
That don’t infringe on space but are living here with us.
Other dreams came and left while the bank
Of colored verbs and adjectives was shrinking from the light
To nurse in shade their want of a method
But most of all she loved the particles
That transform objects of the same category
Into particular ones, each distinct
Within and apart from its own class.
In all this springing up was no hint
Of a tide, only a pleasant wavering of the air
In which all things seemed present, whether
Just past or soon to come. It was all invitation.
So much the flowers outlined along the night
Alleys when few were visible, yet
Their story sounded louder than the hum
Of bug and stick noises that brought up the rear,
Trundling it along into a new fact of day.
These were meant to be read as any
Salutation before getting down to business,
But they stuck to their guns, and so much
Was their obstinacy in keeping with the rest
(Like long flashes of white birds that refuse to die
When day does) that none knew the warp
Which presented this major movement as a firm
Digression, a plain that slowly becomes a mountain.
...
As for the New York School in general, the very helpful article about them on the Poetry Foundation website specifies that:
The New York School of poets is often organized into two generations: the first was centered around a core group of five poets: John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, James Schuyler, Kenneth Koch, and Frank O’Hara. The second generation included poets Alice Notley and her husband, Ted Berrigan; Bill Berkson; and Ron Padgett.You'll notice that the six poets I've provided notes for at the bottom of this post include four from the first generation, and only one from the second (together with writer / artist Joe Brainard).
There's no real reason for this beyond the coincidence that these are the only ones I happen to own books by. Joe Brainard is a particular favourite of mine. There's certainly no implication that this "second generation" should be thought of as in any way inferior or less interesting than the original tight five: on the contrary, in fact.
It does, admittedly, seem to have been a rather male-dominated group. Barbara Guest (1920-2006) is certainly a writer who deserves closer scrutiny, though. Her "urbane, cosmopolitan, and refined” poetry includes such hilarious pieces as "Eating Chocolate Ice Cream: Reading Mayakovsky", whose bland translationese is a little reminiscent of Ginsberg's "America":
How early it is! It is eight o’clock in the morning.For further thoughts on these amusing, urbane, yet at times distinctly chaotic klatch of poets, see my separate notes on each author below:
Well, the pigeons were up earlier
Did you eat all your egg?
Now we shall go for a long walk.
Now? There is too much winter.
I am going to admire the snow on your coat.
Time for hot soup, already?
You have worked for three solid hours.
I have written forty-eight, no forty-nine,
no fifty-one poems.
How many states are there?
I cannot remember what is uniting America.
It is then time for your nap.
What a lovely, pleasant dream I just had.
But I like waking up better.
I do admire reality like snow on my coat.
Would you take cream or lemon in your tea?
No sugar?
And no cigarettes.
Daytime is good, but evening is better.
I do like our evening discussions.
Yesterday we talked about Kant.
Today let’s think about Hegel.
In another week we shall have reached Marx.
Goody.
Life is a joy if one has industrious hands.
Supper? Stew and well-cooked. Delicious.
Well, perhaps just one more glass of milk.
Nine o’clock! Bath time!
Soap and a clean rough towel.
Bedtime!
The Red Army is marching tonight.
They shall march through my dreams
in their new shiny leather boots,
their freshly laundered shirts.
All those ugly stains of caviar and champagne
and kisses
have been rubbed away.
They are going to the barracks.
They are answering hundreds of pink
and yellow and blue and white telephones.
How happy and contented and well-fed they look
lounging on their fur divans,
chanting, “Russia how kind you are to us.
How kind you are to everybody.
We want to live forever.”
Before I wake up they will throw away
their pistols, and magically
factories will spring up where once
there was rifle fire, a roulette factory,
where once a body fell from an open window.
Hurry dear dream
I am waiting for you
under the eiderdown.
And tomorrow will be more real, perhaps,
than yesterday.
•
Locus Solus: The New York School of Poetsl-r: back: Patsy Southgate, Bill Berkson, John Ashbery; front: Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch.
The New York School of Poets
Poets:
- John Ashbery (1927-2017)
- Ted Berrigan (1934-1983)
- Joe Brainard (1942-1994)
- Kenneth Koch (1925-2002)
- Frank O'Hara (1926-1966)
- James Schuyler (1923-1991)
- Anthologies & Secondary Literature
Books I own are marked in bold:
And Ut Pictura Poesis Is Her Name
You can’t say it that way any more.
Bothered about beauty you have to
Come out into the open, into a clearing,
And rest. Certainly whatever funny happens to you
Is OK. To demand more than this would be strange
Of you, you who have so many lovers,
People who look up to you and are willing
To do things for you, but you think
It’s not right, that if they really knew you ...
So much for self-analysis. Now,
About what to put in your poem-painting:
Flowers are always nice, particularly delphinium.
Names of boys you once knew and their sleds,
Skyrockets are good — do they still exist?
There are a lot of other things of the same quality
As those I’ve mentioned. Now one must
Find a few important words, and a lot of low-keyed,
Dull-sounding ones. She approached me
About buying her desk. Suddenly the street was
Bananas and the clangor of Japanese instruments.
Humdrum testaments were scattered around. His head
Locked into mine. We were a seesaw. Something
Ought to be written about how this affects
You when you write poetry:
The extreme austerity of an almost empty mind
Colliding with the lush, Rousseau-like foliage of its desire to communicate
Something between breaths, if only for the sake
Of others and their desire to understand you and desert you
For other centers of communication, so that understanding
May begin, and in doing so be undone.
- from Houseboat Days (1977)
•
What can one say about John Ashbery? He's long since been canonised as one of the major figures in twentieth-century American poetry. But why? What is it people see in him? I know what I see in him, a rather gloomy, introverted individual, with a Shakespearean gift for language, whose affinities lie more with outsider artists such as Henry Darger than with the expert self-promoters of mid-century modernism.
The Poetry Foundation entry on him quotes him as saying:
I don’t find any direct statements in life. My poetry imitates or reproduces the way knowledge or awareness come to me, which is by fits and starts and by indirection. I don’t think poetry arranged in neat patterns would reflect that situation. My poetry is disjunct, but then so is life.If you can hear the invisible music that underlies this "stream of perceptions of which human consciousness is composed," then you'll appreciate his poetry.
To love it, though, I think you have to feel yourself in sympathy with the rather aimless - yet fearsomely bright - personality on display in his work. You have to be (probably) a fellow melancholic. The more forthright among you will probably end up preferring Frank O'Hara.
•
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Poetry:
- Turandot and Other Poems [chapbook] (1953)
- Some Trees (1956)
- The Tennis Court Oath (1962)
- Rivers and Mountains (1966)
- The Double Dream of Spring (1970)
- Penguin Modern Poets 19 (1971)
- Penguin Modern Poets 19: John Ashbery / Lee Harwood / Tom Raworth. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971.
- Three Poems (1972)
- [with Joe Brainard] The Vermont Notebook [prose poems] (1975)
- Self-portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975)
- Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror: Poems. 1975. New York: Penguin, 1976.
- Houseboat Days (1977)
- As We Know (1979)
- Shadow Train (1981)
- A Wave (1984)
- Selected Poems (1986)
- Selected Poems. 1986. London: Paladin, 1987.
- April Galleons (1987)
- The Ice Storm [prose poem] (1987)
- Flow Chart (1991)
- Flow Chart. New York: The Noonday Press / Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1991.
- Hotel Lautréamont (1992)
- Three Books (1993)
- Three Books: Houseboat Days, Shadow Train, A Wave. 1977, 1981, & 1984. New York: Penguin, 1993.
- And the Stars Were Shining (1994)
- Can You Hear, Bird? (1995)
- The Mooring of Starting Out: The First Five Books of Poetry (1997)
- The Mooring of Starting Out: The First Five Books of Poetry. ['The Tennis Court Oath' (1962); 'Some Trees' (1956); 'Rivers and Mountains' (1966); 'The Double Dream of Spring' (1970); 'Three Poems' (1972)]. Hopewell, New Jersey: The Ecco Press, 1997.
- Wakefulness (1998)
- Girls on the Run (1999)
- Girls on the Run: A Poem. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999.
- Your Name Here (2000)
- your name here: Poems. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000.
- As Umbrellas Follow Rain (2001)
- Chinese Whispers (2002)
- Where Shall I Wander (2005)
- Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems (2007)
- Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems. 2007. New York: Ecco, 2008.
- A Worldly Country (2007)
- Collected Poems: 1956–1987. Ed. Mark Ford (Library of America, 2008)
- Collected Poems: 1956-1987. Ed. Mark Ford. The Library of America, 187. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 2008.
- Collected Poems 1956–87. Ed. Mark Ford. Manchester: Carcanet, 2010.
- Planisphere (2009)
- Quick Question (2012)
- Breezeway (2015)
- Commotion of the Birds (2016)
- Collected Poems: 1991-2000. Ed. Mark Ford (Library of America, 2017)
- Collected Poems: 1991-2000. Ed. Mark Ford. The Library of America, 301. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 2017.
- They Knew What They Wanted: Collages and Poems (2018)
- Parallel Movement of the Hands: Five Unfinished Longer Works (2021)
- Three Plays (1978)
- [with James Schuyler] A Nest of Ninnies (1969)
- [with James Schuyler] A Nest of Ninnies. 1969. Manchester: Carcanet, 1987.
- 100 Multiple-Choice Questions (1970)
- Reported Sightings: Art Chronicles, 1957–1987. Ed. David Bergman (1989)
- Other Traditions (2001)
- Selected Prose 1953–2003 (2005)
- Jean-Jacques Mayoux: Melville (1960)
- Pierre Martory: The Landscapist (2008)
- Arthur Rimbaud: Illuminations (2011)
- Collected French Translations: Poetry. Ed. Rosanne Wasserman & Eugene Richie (2014)
- Collected French Translations: Poetry. Ed. Rosanne Wasserman & Eugene Richie. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014.
- Collected French Translations: Prose. Ed. Rosanne Wasserman & Eugene Richie (2014)
- Collected French Translations: Prose. Ed. Rosanne Wasserman & Eugene Richie. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014.
- Roffman, Karin. The Songs We Know Best: John Ashbery’s Early Life. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017.
Plays:
Prose:
Translations:
Secondary:
The Sonnets: L
I like to beat people up
absence of passion, principles, love. She murmurs
What just popped into my eye was a fiend’s umbrella
and if you should come and pinch me now
as I go out for coffee
... as I was saying winter of 18 lumps
Days produce life locations to banish 7 up
Nomads, my babies, where are you? Life’s
My dream which is gunfire in my poem
Orange cavities of dreams stir inside “The Poems”
Whatever is going to happen is already happening
Some people prefer “the interior monologue”
I like to beat people up.
- from The Sonnets (2000)
•
Ted Berrigan is (for me, at least) a harder nut to crack. His early affinities were with Thomas Wolfe and Jack Kerouac, and he considered himself, in many ways, a "late Beat."
His interest in Expressionism as an aesthetic doctrine reveals itself in quotes such as this:
One of my principal desires is to make my poems be like my life … I can’t see myself the way that you can see me, but I can see everything else around me. If I can make everything around me be the way that is, presumably I can create the shape of the self inside the poem, because there is a person inside almost all of the poems.He died young, at the age of 48, but left behind a formidable legacy of works - mostly included in chapbooks and ephemeral magazines.
Because Berrigan was in poor health during his last years, other poets were more likely to visit his apartment at 101 St. Mark’s Place than he was to visit them. He spent much of his time in bed, smoking Chesterfields and drinking Pepsis, surrounded by established and younger writers who listened to his elaborate disquisitions on poetry and poetics. Notley wrote that she and Berrigan “never had any money,” but if an individual were willing to make “a small loan,” he adopted that person as a student.So Going Around Cities (1980) - alongside the various editions of The Sonnets - was his principal calling-card during his lifetime. Since then a full Collected Poems and Collected Prose have been issued under the supervision his widow, poet Alice Notley.
•
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Poetry:
- The Sonnets (1964)
- [with Ron Padgett] Seventeen Plays (1964)
- Living With Chris (1965)
- Some Things (1966)
- The Sonnets (1967)
- [with Ron Padgett & Joe Brainard] Bean Spasms (1967)
- Many Happy Returns (1969)
- NOH (1969)
- Peace: Broadside (1969)
- In the Early Morning Rain (1971)
- [with Anne Waldman] Memorial Day (1971)
- [with Ron Padgett & Tom Clark] Back in Boston Again (1972)
- The Drunken Boat (1974)
- A Feeling For Leaving (1975)
- Red Wagon (1976)
- Clear The Range (1977)
- Nothing For You (1977)
- Train Ride (1978)
- [with Harris Schiff] Yo-Yo's With Money (1979)
- Carrying a Torch (1980)
- So Going Around Cities: New & Selected Poems 1958–1979 (1980)
- So Going Around Cities: New & Selected Poems 1958-1979. The Selected Works Series, 4. Berkeley: Blue Wind Press, 1980.
- In a Blue River (1981)
- The Sonnets (1982)
- A Certain Slant of Sunlight (1988)
- Selected Poems (1994)
- Great Stories of the Chair (1998)
- The Sonnets (2000)
- The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan. Ed. Alice Notley, Anselm Berrigan & Edmund Berrigan (2005)
- Get the Money!: Collected Prose (1961-1983) (2022)
Poetry:
from I Remember
I remember when polio was the worst thing in the world.
I remember pink dress shirts. And bola ties.
I remember when a kid told me that those sour clover-like leaves we used to eat (with little yellow flowers) tasted so sour because dogs peed on them. I remember that didn’t stop me from eating them.
I remember the first drawing I remember doing. It was of a bride with a very long train.
I remember my first cigarette. It was a Kent. Up on a hill. In Tulsa, Oklahoma. With Ron Padgett.
I remember the only time I ever saw my mother cry. I was eating apricot pie.
I remember when my father would say "Keep your hands out from under the covers" as he said goodnight. But he said it in a nice way.
I remember when I thought that if you did anything bad, policemen would put you in jail.
I remember a girl in school one day who, just out of the blue, went into a long spiel all about how difficult it was to wash her brother’s pants because he didn’t wear underwear.
I remember the first time I met Frank O’Hara. He was walking down Second Avenue. It was a cool early Spring evening but he was wearing only a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. And blue jeans. And moccasins. I remember that he seemed very sissy to me. Very theatrical. Decadent. I remember that I liked him instantly.
I remember liver.
I remember the chair I used to put my boogers behind.
I remember my parents’ bridge teacher. She was very fat and very butch (cropped hair) and she was a chain smoker. She prided herself on the fact that she didn’t have to carry matches around. She lit each new cigarette from the old one. She lived in a little house behind a restaurant and lived to be very old.
I remember Dorothy Collins.
I remember Dorothy Collins’ teeth.
I remember planning to tear page 48 out of every book I read from the Boston Public Library, but soon losing interest.
I remember my grade school art teacher, Mrs. Chick, who got so mad at a boy one day she dumped a bucket of water over his head.
I remember one very hot summer day I put ice cubes in my aquarium and all the fish died.
I remember once having to take a pee sample to the doctor and how yellow and warm it was in a jar.
I remember after people are gone thinking of things I should have said but didn’t.
...
- from The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard (2012)
•
Joe Brainard is (to me at least) an immensely attractive figure. I bought his Collected Writings on spec, mainly because of my love for Library of America books, only to discover that - in the world of Art History, at any rate - his "I remember" sequence was already legendary.
All of which was news to me when I started reading it - and found myself unable to stop. In a review of his posthumously published The Nancy Book (2008):
the New Yorker observed, “Brash but never bratty, fanciful without descending into preciousness, Brainard demonstrates a visual perfect-pitch equivalent to that of his miniaturist memoir-poem ‘I Remember.’”He was a true original. Once again, as with Ashbery, the merits of his writing don't really depend on the organising idea behind it - stream-of-consciousness poetics for Ashbery; start-stop sentences, each packed with its own eccentric details, for Brainard - so much as the charm of the personality revealed by it.
•
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Publications:
- I Remember (1970)
- Selected Writings (1971)
- Bolinas Journal (1971)
- Some Drawings of Some Notes to Myself (1971)
- I Remember More (1972)
- The Cigarette Book (1972)
- The Banana Book (1972)
- The Friendly Way (1972)
- More I Remember More (1973)
- I Remember Christmas (1973)
- New Work (1973)
- 12 Postcards (1975)
- I Remember [collected edition] (1975)
- 29 Mini-Essays (1978)
- 24 Pictures & Some Words (1980)
- Nothing to Write Home About (1981)
- I Remember [new edition] (1995)
- Ten Imaginary Still Lifes (1995)
- I Remember [new edition] (2001)
- The Nancy Book (2008)
- The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard (Library of America, 2012)
- The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard. Ed. Ron Padgett. Introduction by Paul Auster. A Special Publication of The Library of America. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 2013.
- [with Ron Padgett & Ted Berrigan] Some Things (1964)
- [with Kenward Elmslie] The Baby Book (1965)
- [with Ted Berrigan & Ron Padgett] Bean Spasms (1967)
- [with Kenward Elmslie] The 1967 Game Calendar (1967)
- [with Ron Padgett] 100,000 Fleeing Hilda (1967)
- [with Ted Berrigan] The Drunken Boat (n.d.)
- [with Kenward Elmslie] The Champ (1968)
- [with Kenward Elmslie] Album (1969)
- [with Bill Berkson] Recent Visitors (1971)
- [with Tom Clark] Neil Young (1971)
- [with Ron Padgett & Michael Brownstein] Sufferin' Succotash/Kiss My Ass (1971)
- [with Anne Waldman] Self-Portrait (1972)
- [with Kenward Elmslie] Shiny Ride (1972)
- [with Robert Creeley] The Class of '47 (1973)
- [with John Ashbery] The Vermont Notebook (1975)
- [with Bill Berkson] I Love You, de Kooning (late 1970s
- [with Bill Berkson, Ted Berrigan, Michael Brownstein, Kenward Elmslie, Larry Fagin, Barbara Guest, Kenneth Koch, Harry Mathews, Frank O'Hara, Ron Padgett, Peter Schjeldahl, James Schuyler, & Tony Towle] 1984 Comics (1983)
- [with Kenward Elmslie] Sung Sex (1989)
- [with Kenward Elmslie] Pay Dirt (1992)
- Love, Joe: The Selected Letters of Joe Brainard (2024)
Collaborations:
Letters:
To You
I love you as a sheriff searches for a walnut
That will solve a murder case unsolved for years
Because the murderer left it in the snow beside a window
Through which he saw her head, connecting with
Her shoulders by a neck, and laid a red
Roof in her heart. For this we live a thousand years;
For this we love, and we live because we love, we are not
Inside a bottle, thank goodness! I love you as a
Kid searches for a goat; I am crazier than shirttails
In the wind, when you’re near, a wind that blows from
The big blue sea, so shiny so deep and so unlike us;
I think I am bicycling across an Africa of green and white fields
Always, to be near you, even in my heart
When I’m awake, which swims, and also I believe that you
Are trustworthy as the sidewalk which leads me to
The place where I again think of you, a new
Harmony of thoughts! I love you as the sunlight leads the prow
Of a ship which sails
From Hartford to Miami, and I love you
Best at dawn, when even before I am awake the sun
Receives me in the questions which you always pose.
- from The Collected Poems of Kenneth Koch (2005)
•
Kenneth Koch might be seen as the Louis MacNeice of this particular bunch of MacSpaunday-style poets, the post-war equivalent of the pre-war Auden group. He's probably the most prolific of them all. Ashbery may have published more individual poetry collections, but Koch made up with it with many more works of drama, fiction, and non-fictional prose.
Koch was typed as “the funniest serious poet we have,” by critic David Lehman:
in an era seemingly dedicated to deep seriousness he refused to relinquish lightness or a sense of humor. According to Phoebe Pettingell ... Koch’s works “convey his perennial freshness in at least two senses of that word: novelty and cheekiness. He has a subtle grasp of the nuances of language as well as a gift for hilarious parody, and behind his casual, friendly manner there is formidable technique and learning.”Like Louis MacNeice, though, he had to live under Ashbery's - and, for that matter, O'Hara's - long shadow. And his refreshingly frank avowal of the potential seriousness of comic poetry was already apparent in their work (as it was in that of the early Auden):
Some readers think of a poem as a sort of ceremony — a funeral, a wedding — where anything comic is out of order. They expect certain feelings to be touched on in certain conventional ways. Dissociation, even obscurity, may be tolerated, but only as long as the tone remains solemn or sad enough. ... There may be a perfectly serious poem, a good poem … and some other person writes a parody of it and one line of the parody may have more truth than the whole original poem, or at least be freer to reach the intoxicating heights that sometimes seem where truth is from.There is a certain tendency to prolixity in some of his longer poems (published as a separate volume in his collected works). At shorter lengths, though, Koch is one of the most delightful of modern poets. As one critic remarked:
The joke is that those bards of the passing scene, Ashbery and Koch, continue to flourish. Indeed, today they appear to exemplify the tenets of postmodernism ...
•
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Poetry Collections:
- Poems (1953)
- Permanently (1961)
- Thank You and Other Poems (1962)
- Poems from 1952 and 1953 (1968)
- The Pleasures of Peace and Other Poems (1969)
- Penguin Modern Poets 24. Ed. John Ashbery (1974)
- Penguin Modern Poets 24: Kenward Elmslie / Kenneth Koch / James Schuyler. Guest Ed. John Ashbery. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974.
- The Art of Love (1975)
- The Burning Mystery of Anna in 1951 (1979)
- From the Air (1979)
- Days and Nights (1982)
- Selected Poems 1950–1985 (1985)
- On the Great Atlantic Rainway: Selected Poems 1950–1988 (1994)
- One Train (1994)
- Straits (1998)
- New Addresses (2000)
- A Possible World (2002)
- Sun Out (2002)
- The Collected Poems of Kenneth Koch (2005)
- The Collected Poems of Kenneth Koch. 2005. A Borzoi Book. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007.
- Selected Poems. Ed. Ron Padgett (2007)
- Ko: or, A Season on Earth (1960)
- When the Sun Tries to Go On (1969)
- The Duplications (1977)
- On the Edge: Impressions of Africa; On the Edge (1986)
- Seasons on Earth (1987)
- On the Edge: Collected Long Poems (2007)
- On the Edge: Collected Long Poems. 2007. A Borzoi Book. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009.
- The Red Robins (1975)
- Hotel Lambosa (1993)
- The Art of the Possible: Comics, Mainly without Pictures (2004)
- Collected Fiction (2005)
- Bertha, & other plays (1966)
- A Change of Hearts (1973)
- The Red Robins (1979)
- One Thousand Avant-Garde Plays (1988)
- The Gold Standard: A Book of Plays (1996)
- Wishes, Lies, and Dreams: Teaching Children to Write Poetry (1970)
- Rose Where Did YOu Get That Red?: Teaching Great Poetry to Children (1975)
- I Never Told Anybody: Teaching Poetry Writing in a Nursing Home (1977)
- The Art of Poetry (1996)
- The Art of Poetry: Poems, Parodies, Interviews, Essays, and other Work. Poets on Poetry. Ed. David Lehman. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1996.
- Wishes, Lies and Dreams: The Pleasures of Reading and Writing Poetry (1998)
- [with Alex Katz] Interlocking Lives (1970)
- [with Rory McEwen] From the Air (1979)
- [with Kate Farrell] Sleeping on the Wing: An Anthology of Modern Poetry with Essays on Reading and Writing (1981)
- [with Allen Ginsberg & Ron Padgett] Making It Up (1994)
Long Poems:
Fiction:
Plays:
Nonfiction:
Collaborations:
The Day Lady Died
It is 12:20 in New York a Friday
three days after Bastille day, yes
it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine
because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton
at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner
and I don’t know the people who will feed me
I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun
and have a hamburger and a malted and buy
an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets
in Ghana are doing these days
I go on to the bank
and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard)
doesn’t even look up my balance for once in her life
and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine
for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do
think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or
Brendan Behan’s new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres
of Genet, but I don’t, I stick with Verlaine
after practically going to sleep with quandariness
and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE
Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and
then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue
and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and
casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton
of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it
and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of
leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT
while she whispered a song along the keyboard
to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing
- from Lunch Poems (1964)
•
Frank O'Hara was a great man for friendship. Edward Gorey was his Harvard roommate; that's also where he first encountered John Ashbery, then on the editorial board of the Harvard Advocate, which published some of O'Hara's earliest poems and stories. He met Kenneth Koch and James Schuyler on visits to New York, along with a great many soon-to-be-famous painters such as Larry Rivers, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and Jackson Pollock.
He was the first in this group of young poets to write art criticism for Art News and other journals. His first job at MOMA, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, was as a clerk at the sales desk in the front lobby. Later be became an assistant curator, then associate curator of painting and sculpture in 1965, despite his lack of any formal training in Art History.
Legend has it that he used to walk out of the Museum during his lunch breaks and type out a few thoughts in a nearby stationery shop. The result was Lunch Poems, one of the all time best-sellers in the City Lights "Pocket Poets" series, alongside Lawrence Ferlinghetti's Pictures of the Gone World and Allen Ginsberg's Howl.
All this irresistible energy died on July 24th, 1966.
•
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Poetry:
- A City Winter and Other Poems. Two Drawings by Larry Rivers (1951
- Oranges: 12 pastorals (1953)
- Meditations in an Emergency (1957)
- Second Avenue (1960)
- Odes. Prints by Michael Goldberg (1960)
- Lunch Poems (1964)
- Lunch Poems. The Pocket Poets Series, 19. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1964.
- Love Poems (1965)
- In Memory of My Feelings: Commemorative Volume Illustrated by 30 U.S. artists. Ed. Bill Berkson (1967)
- The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara. Ed. Donald Allen. Introduction by John Ashbery (1971)
- The Collected Poems. Ed. Donald Allen. Introduction by John Ashbery. 1971. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.
- The Selected Poems of Frank O'Hara. Ed. Donald Allen (1974)
- Early Writing. Ed. Donald Allen (1977)
- Poems Retrieved. Ed. Donald Allen (1977)
- Poems Retrieved. Ed. Donald Allen. 1977. San Francisco: Grey Fox Press, 2001.
- Selected Poems. Ed. Mark Ford (2008)
- Selected Plays. Ed. Ron Padgett, Joan Simon, & Anne Waldman (1978)
- Amorous Nightmares of Delay: Selected Plays (1997)
- Jackson Pollock (1959)
- New Spanish Painting and Sculpture (1960)
- Robert Motherwell: With Selections from the Artist's Writings (1965)
- Nakian (1966)
- Art Chronicles, 1954–1966 (1975)
- Standing Still and Walking in New York. Ed. Donald Allen (1975)
- Gooch, Brad. City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O’Hara. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993.
Plays:
Prose:
Secondary:
A Stone Knife
December 26, 1969
Dear Kenward,
What a pearl
of a letter knife. It's just
the thing I needed, something
to rest my eyes on, and always
wanted, which is to say
it's that of which I
felt the lack but
didn't know of, of no
real use and yet
essential as a button
box, or maps, green
morning skies, islands and
canals in oatmeal, the steam
off oyster stew. Brown
agate, veined as a woods
by smoke that has to it
the watery twist of eel grass
in a quick, rust-discolored
cove. Undulating lines of
northern evening – a Munch
without the angst – a
hint of almost amber:
to the nose, a resinous
thought, to the eye, a
lacquered needle green
where no green is, a
present after-image.
Sleek as an ax, bare
and elegant as a tarn,
manly as a lingam,
November weather petrified,
it is just the thing
to do what with? To
open letters? No, it
is just the thing, an
object, dark, fierce
and beautiful in which
the surprise is that
the surprise, once
past, is always there:
which to enjoy is
not to consume. The un-
recapturable returns
in a brown world
made out of wood,
snow streaked, storm epi-
center still in stone.
- from Collected Poems (1995)
•
We end, then, where we began, with James Schuyler. My own way into his work comes largely via W. H. Auden, whose secretary he was for two years on the island of Ischia in Italy in the late 1940s, after leaving the US Navy. As his Wikipedia entry puts it:
Schuyler's move to Italy, as Auden's typist, was accompanied by his intention of writing. In 1981 he was said to have recalled "that he found Auden's elaborate formalism 'inhibiting'." This was likely an influence to his own "conversational style and proselike line".By contrast, the art world in New York, where he lived throughout the 1950s, offered a far more congenial environment:
I did learn an awful lot during those years, and then went on in the 60s writing occasional articles about specific artists and their specific strategies. Partly it was to make money, and partly because I wanted to write about painting, about art.This immersion in art assisted him greatly after his move out of the city, as he gradually began to publish the works which would eventually make him famous:
From 1961 to 1973 Schuyler lived with [artist and critic] Fairfield Porter and his family in Southampton, Long Island. Porter became an influence for Schuyler as well, and he dedicated his first major collection, Freely Espousing, to Anne and Fairfield Porter.He received the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his collection The Morning of the Poem. All his life he struggled with bipolar disorder, and underwent several years of psychoanalysis. He died comparatively young, at age sixty-seven, following a stroke.
As one critic observed:
Schuyler is noted for his ability to take things that are "normal" and bring out their greatness. He takes a look at things that many people may not see, or care to take note of, such as individual raindrops. He evaluates the ordinary and the way it works in relation to other things: "It's the water in the drinking glass the tulips are in./ It's a day like any other."
•
-
Poetry:
- Salute (1960)
- May 24 or So (1966)
- Freely Espousing (1969)
- The Crystal Lithium (1972)
- A Sun Cab (1972)
- Hymn to Life (1974)
- Penguin Modern Poets 24. Ed. John Ashbery (1974)
- Penguin Modern Poets 24: Kenward Elmslie / Kenneth Koch / James Schuyler. Guest Ed. John Ashbery. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974.
- The Fireproof Floors of Witley Court: English Songs and Dances (1976)
- Song (1976)
- The Home Book: Prose and Poems, 1951–1970. Ed. Trevor Winkfield (1977)
- The Morning of the Poem (1980)
- [with Helena Hughes] Collabs (1980)
- Early in '71 (1982)
- A Few Days (1985)
- For Joe Brainard (1988)
- Selected Poems (1988)
- Collected Poems (1993)
- Collected Poems. 1993. The Noonday Press. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996.
- Last Poems (1999)
- Other Flowers: Uncollected Poems. Ed. James Meetze & Simon Pettet (2010)
- Alfred and Guinevere (1958)
- [with John Ashbery] A Nest of Ninnies (1969)
- What's For Dinner? (1978)
- Presenting Jane (Cambridge, Mass: Poet's Theatre, 1952)
- Shopping and Waiting: A Dramatic Pause (NY: American Theatre for Poets, 1953)
- [with Kenward Elmslie] Unpacking the Black Trunk (NY: American Theatre for Poets, 1964)
- [with Kenward Elmslie] The Wednesday Club (NY: American Theatre for Poets, 1964)
- [with Darragh Park] Two Journals (1995)
- Diary of James Schuyler (1996)
- Just the Thing: Selected Letters of James Schuyler, 1951–1991. Ed. William Corbett (2004)
- The Letters of James Schuyler to Frank O'Hara. Ed. William Corbett (2006)
Fiction:
Plays:
Diaries & Letters:
- Allen, Donald, & George F. Butterick, ed. The Postmoderns: The New American Poetry Revised. New York: Grove Press, 1982.
- Allen, Donald, & Warren Tallman, ed. The Poetics of the New American Poetry. New York: Grove Press, 1973.
- Hall, Donald, ed. Contemporary American Poetry. The Penguin Poets. 1962. Second Edition (Revised and Expanded). 1972. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980.
- Hoover, Paul, ed. Postmodern American Poetry. A Norton Anthology. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1994.
- Kalstone, David. Five Temperaments: Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, James Merrill, Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.
- Moore, Geoffrey, ed. The Penguin Book of American Verse. The Penguin Poets. 1977. Rev. ed. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989.
- Weinberger, Eliot, ed. American Poetry since 1950: Innovators and Outsiders. An Anthology. New York: Marsilio Publishers, 1993.
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- category - American Poetry & Drama: Poetry
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