Late News from Poland (on O'Hara, Koch, and the NY School) [by Angela Ball]

I had imagined discussing the big four New York School poets in an orderly fashion, one by one.  But since their work percolates from shared springs, it seems to me better to talk back and forth among them. 

As I have said, my class and I are collaborating on understanding the ongoing collaborations of the New York School poets.  Here is one example: wonderfully, Kenneth Koch found Frank O’Hara’s previously unknown “Talking to the Sun at Fire Island” after his death (and read it at O’Hara’s funeral).  That Kenneth Koch wrote of the circus is very apropos—so much of what he did (for one thing, the tremendous range of his teaching of poetry, including even children at the M.D. Anderson clinic, where he himself was being treated) was death defying.

Here’s graduate student and fiction writer Jennifer Brewington discussing him in her reading journal.  (We’re using the American Poets Project Selected Poems, edited by Ron Padgett.) 

Kenneth Koch is my favorite New York School poet so far, and I am very surprised. I thought it would be O’Hara. Though I’d never read him before, I wasn’t expecting to be so taken in by his work. It’s no wonder to me that O’Hara writes often about him in his poetry. He uses a lot of the same techniques that I’m now realizing are a part of the school. The naming of friends and places and events in poems puts all of them in conversation with one another in a way that feels inclusive. I noticed that before but did not realize it was a common technique among them. Still, there is something about Koch’s ability to turn a phrase, to contradict himself within the same line, to conjure just the right image that makes him stand out for me among all of these brilliant writers. In “Days and Nights,” he writes, “It came to me that all this time/ There had been no real poetry and that it needed to be/ invented” (96).  Going into this book, I felt like I knew something about poetry. I had almost the opposite feeling. Now, though, I feel he’s done just that. He’s invented poetry, or reimagined it, in a way that is haunting, daring, and incredibly effective.

The images in his poetry are so clever and lovely. My favorite poem in this collection is “Alive for an Instant.” The title itself draws me in and the first line keeps me present. “I have a bird in my head and a pig in my stomach/ and a flower in my genitals and a tiger in my genitals/ and a lion in my genitals and I am after you but I have a song in my heart” (45). How perfect is that! The repetition of genitals somehow perfectly captures how it feels to be both physically and chemically attracted to someone and how it feels to also love them.

Speaking of love, in class, graduate fiction writer Nick Benca talked about the build-up of feeling in Frank O’Hara’s “The Day Lady Died.”--about how, paradoxically, all the present-tense distractions of Frank’s loud bright day are advance embodiments of the memory—triggered by the newspaper face—of the intimate dark Five-Spot, where Lady whispered “along the keyboard” and “everyone and I stopped breathing.”  All along, the present has been preparing us to be ravished by the past. 

This poem, along with many of O’Hara’s, lacks a final period—indicating that experience stops for no one, that we must continue to be “present.”

Recently, graduate poet Annette Boehm alerted me to the presence in Poland of a group called the “O’Harists.” They are described by Joanna Niżyńska in an article entitled, “The Impossibility of Shrugging One’s Shoulders: O’Harists, O’Hara, and Post-1989 Polish poetry.” (Slavic Review, Vol. 66, No. 3, Fall, 2007, pp. 463-483.)

Niżyńska asserts that the O’Harists’ brief prominence beginning in 1989 was a side effect of the arrival of freedom—in response, certain poets felt the need to throw off solemnity and transcendent meanings, and concentrate on the present moment.  It all started with the July 1986 issue of a literary journal, a slim volume bound in blue (O’Hara’s favorite color!), its cover showing a ticket stub for admission to the Museum of Modern Art.  Inside were seventeen poems translated to Polish—enough, apparently to start a movement! 

But, Niżyńska tells us, “even those Polish poems that exhibit the characteristic linguistic traits of O’Hara’s poetic mode leave the reader with a sense of a literary project different from that of the charismatic New York Poet.”  Here are some lines from “Olyztyn.Shopping,” by Jacek Podsiadlo:

Two heads of cabbage.  Four refills for a “Zenith” pen.

The Cumming volume, Steinbeck’s “Tortilla Flat.”

“Encounters with Utopia” by Szacki and “New Ways

in Psychoanalysis” by Karen Horney.

A thick, ruled notepad.  Thirteen packs of cigarettes.

“Jacobs.”  Granulated, instant coffee.

Vodka “Polonaise.”  A ruler and a triangle

with a multiplication table and three-dimensional picture.

Twenty stamps.  A few magazines.

Done.  Time to go get some beer at Santos

by the station.  Drink two mugs.  Leave.

Sit on a bench.  Light a cigarette.

A commonly pretty girl passes pointing at me with her breasts.

…………………..

In the parking lot before the hotel Cormorant

Among the shiny limousines stands a small Fiat, red

From exhaustion, a tiny phallus of communism.

A different literary project indeed!  There is something pugnaciously casual about this shopping trip, something militantly trivial—triviality with an iron fist.

Because O’Hara was lifted from his context (transplanted without soil) to fill a temporary need, his influence didn’t “take” permanently.  (All the same, Niżyńska says, John Ashbery has many fans in Poland.) Who knows, perhaps the times are propitious again, perhaps already a poet in Poland, woken by the sun’s words, is making her own day.

Comments

[DL]

Excellent post. . .When I spent a week in Poland back in 2005, I found out how devoted to the NY School are the Americanists in universities there. The Warsaw-based lit mag "Literatura na Swiece" ran many pieces on Ashbery, O'Hara, Schuyler, Koch -- including my chapter on Schuyler, from "The Last Avant-Garde," translated into Polish. Thank you, Angela, for your coverage.

[emma trelles]

Great post. I especially admired your thoughtful yet natural responses to Koch's & O'Hara's poems.