The New York Poets: An Anthology

Description

"The New York School of Painters" was a label for the work of abstract expressionists such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell and Franz Kline. Part joke, part assertion of New World supremacy over the School of Paris, it proved effective in promoting the innovations of post-war New York artists to national and international audiences. The term "The New York School of Poets" was first used in 1961. The poets were all deeply embroiled in the art world as curators (O'Hara worked for over a decade at the Museum of Modern Art), editors and critics (Ashbery, Schuyler and Koch). They worked closely with Fairfield Porter, Larry Rivers, Helen Frankenthaler, Nell Blaine, Jane Freilicher and Grace Hartigan, among many others. "New York poets," Schuyler commented in 1959, "except I suppose the colour blind, are affected most by the floods of paint in whose crashing surf we all scramble." The poets themselves kept their distance from the rhetoric that corralled them together. "We were," Ashbery said in his Paris Review interview of 1983, "a bunch of poets who happened to know each other; we would get together and read our poems to each other and sometimes we would write collaborations." Unlike the Surrealists or the Language Movement poets, they never set out in any programmatic way to revolutionize society or consciousness: the only programme their work might be said to fulfil is the resolute determination to be unprogrammatic. Only O'Hara is, properly speaking, a New York poet, finding the city entirely adequate. "One need never leave the confines of New York," he wrote in a prose poem, "to get all the greenery one wishes - I can't even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there's a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life." The others explore a wider geography, though New York remains their multum in parvo. The poetry they were writing ran counter to the New Critical orthodoxies of the day: they formed each other's only initial audiences. They took to collaborating: in 1952 Ashbery and Schuyler embarked on A Nest of Ninnies, a comedy of manners composed mainly in alternate sentences; Ashbery and Koch wrote poems together, including a sestina whose every line includes the name of a flower, a tree, a fruit, a game, a famous old lady, and the word bathtub. Koch and O'Hara particularly relished poetic jousts, and composed their first long poems ("When the Sun Tries to Go On" and "Second Avenue") in a kind of competitive dialogue with each other. The long poem was for the New York poets, as for Keats, "the Polar Star of Poetry". In his introduction to O'Hara's "Collected Poems" Ashbery describes O'Hara's evolution of "big, airy structures unlike anything previous in American poetry and indeed unlike poetry, more like the inspired ramblings of a mind open to the point of distraction." Certainly the long poems of Ashbery, O 'Hara, Koch and Schuyler offer an extraordinary fusion of excess and insouciance, of artifice and the aleatory, but in this, it might be argued, they continue within the parameters established by American poetry's primary epic of inclusion, Whitman's "Song of Myself".

MARK FORD was born in 1962. His publications include two collections of poetry, Landlocked (Chatto, 1992, 1998) and Soft Sift (Faber, 2001); a critical biography of Raymond Roussel; a substantial interview with John Ashbery (Between the Lines, 2003) and a selection of the poems of Frank O'Hara for Carcanet ('Why I Am Not a Painter' and other poems). He contributes to the Times Literary Supplement and the London Review of Books. He teaches at University College London. TREVOR WINKFIELD was born in Leeds in 1944. He exhibits his paintings at Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York, and has recently published a collaboration with the poet Kenward Elmslie, Snippets. He is the editor and translator of Raymond Roussel's How I Wrote Certain of My Books and Other Writings (Exact Change).