The Best American Poetry

The New York School Diaspora (Part Seventeen): Hannah Dow [by Angela Ball]

Another Summer Without Classical Music

I haven’t lived in Southern California
very long but every summer that I do
it occurs to me
only after the summer has ended
that I should go see “Mozart
Under the Stars” or some other
classical music concert at the Hollywood Bowl
because I should get out more
I should get more culture
at least that is what my lover tells me
and it occurs to me that culture
is not a bowl of spaghetti
or anything that can be twirled on a fork
and wiped up with a hunk of bread
then abandoned for days in the fridge
like most of the new plans I make—
cancelled, because—as the actor
in my poetry workshop used to say:
we have a new realization every one to two seconds
and I’ll believe just about anything
if it sounds interesting enough
which is why the only ghost I believe in
is that of a 1930s Hollywood actress
who jumped from the sign’s H
and is sometimes seen wandering
below and maybe I believe this
because H is the letter I would choose
or because I don’t believe the explanation
given for her death (learning
that her role in her first film
had been cut to four minutes)
because Thirteen Women is a film about manipulating
women into killing themselves or one another
and I believe this too-easy coincidence
this culture I cannot digest
is proof that men have always wanted women
to hate one another and ourselves
so we will love them more

--Hannah Dow

Hannah Dow is the author of ROSARIUM (Acre Books, 2018). Her poems have recently appeared in Shenandoah, Image, and The Southern Review, among others. She received the Cream City Review Summer Prize in Poetry, selected by Aimee Nezhukumatathil, and has received awards and scholarships from the Sewanee Writers' Conference and Bread Loaf Orion. Hannah is the editor-in-chief of Tinderbox Poetry Journal and an Assistant Professor of English at Missouri Southern State University.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Seventeen): Hannah Dow [by Angela Ball]

In its casual self-criticism, Hannah Dow’s “Another Summer Without Classical Music” has something in common with James Schuyler’s rueful attitude toward the self; in its fascination with Hollywood, something in common with Frank O’Hara. Dow engages with “Hollywood” culture via the 1932 horror film Thirteen Women and its cast member, brand-new film actress Peg Entwistle, who jumped from the famous sign’s letter “H,” possibly in response to her supporting role being edited down to a bit part. Entwistle divorces herself from “Hollywood” both actually and symbolically in the most graphic way possible. Entanglement between art and life is at the heart of this deft poem.

The tissue-thin plot of the hour-long Thirteen Women involves a “half-caste” mesmerist played by Myrna Loy who plots revenge on the alumnae of a fancy finishing school who excluded her from their sorority. She has the unwitting participation of her associate, a “swami” who has promised to send horoscopes to all the women of the group. Loy’s character forges replacement horoscopes predicting death and mayhem. The film begins with a statement (endorsed by two prominent professors of psychology) that the human mind is vulnerable to suggestion. Indeed, the scenario consists of one instance after another of suggestion inciting action and/or accident to produce death, each marked by a ‘special effect’ that resembles an exploding star as drawn by a novice artist. In a sense, Entwistle’s suicide functions to extend or complete the movie as it simultaneously culminates her life. On one level, her death is pathetic. But on another, it is tragic. Her suicide note pleads cowardice. There was certainly plenty to fear in Hollywood—not from “half-caste women” but from men--priapic studio execs, rapacious agents, and actors skilled in date rape (a concept yet unknown). The penalty for non-participation was often exclusion. Suicide pre-emptively excludes the world, and its invocation marks an increase in the poem’s complexity:

     as the actor

     in my poetry workshop used to say:

     we have a new realization every one to two seconds

     and I’ll believe just about anything

     if it sounds interesting enough

     which is why the only ghost I believe in

     is that of a 1930s Hollywood actress

     who jumped from the sign’s H

     and is sometimes seen wandering below . . .

Hannah Dow’s engaging and disturbing “Another Summer Without Classical Music” is a poem about the difficulty of making sense of culture, Hollywood or otherwise, and of finding a coherent place within it—more particularly, the continuing difficulty for women who want to “digest” culture rather than be digested by it. In other words, a problem of agency. The explanation proposed at the end of the poem,

     . . . Thirteen Women is a film about manipulating

     women into killing themselves or one another

     and I believe this too-easy coincidence 

     this culture I cannot digest

     is proof that men have always wanted women

     to hate one another and ourselves

     so we will love them more

is provisional at best, asserted as belief by a speaker who earlier says, “I’ll believe just about anything / if it sounds interesting enough.” The poem’s missing period indicates that the speaker’s stabs at belief, along with our own, will continue, as unquiet as the ghost who frequents the sign, shadowed by its thirteen fifty-foot high letters.

--Angela Ball

The New York School Diaspora (Part Sixteen): Elaine Equi [by Angela Ball]

FOR YEARS, I SUFFERED FROM A STRANGE MELODY

I couldn’t knit thistles into sweaters for swans,
nor spin straw into gold records.

I didn’t have a gingersnap or bluebird to my name.

The oven overheard me tell my story and called it
rumpled, stilted, and half-baked.

Then a dirty stinky fog came and sat down next to me.

But the moment I kissed its slobbering mist,
it turned into a handsome prince who dropped
the glass slipper he’d been carrying onto the floor

where it shattered into a million princes,
each more handsome than the last,

and everyone shouted, “L’chaim!”

--Elaine Equi

Elaine Equi’s most recent book is The Intangibles from Coffee House Press. Her other books include Voice-Over, which won the San Francisco State Poetry Award; Ripple Effect: New & Selected Poems, which was a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Award and on the short list for The Griffin Poetry Prize; and Sentences and Rain. Widely published and anthologized, her work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Brooklyn Rail, Court Green, The Nation, The New Yorker, Poetry, and in many editions of the Best American Poetry. She teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at The New School.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Sixteen): Elaine Equi [by Angela Ball]

Its title, "For Years, I Suffered From a Strange Melody," suggests the piece was prompted by a spoonerism— a goofy felicity. The poem goes on to conquer all frustrations in its path with deliberate and delicious mistakes. One of its ancestors may be a cartoon show called Fractured Fairy Tales (1959-64), also based on the notion that the way to fix things—make them more fun—is to break them.

The speaker starts out feeling bereft, unable to “spin straw into gold records.” No “gingersnaps,” no “bluebirds” (of happiness or anything else). But the mysterious conjunction of confection and flight is a fine thing in itself; as is the oven talking smack: a slumgullion of anagram and idiom.

In this liquid atmosphere, tales survive as waking dreams that shelter the childlike: “Then a dirty stinky fog came and sat down next to me.” Words like “stinky” and “slobbering” are notably absent from traditional fairytales, with their low threshold for effluvia. At the speaker’s spontaneous kiss, the “slobbering mist” becomes the “handsome prince” of “Cinderella” fame, who drops the glass slipper of the foot test, and it becomes mother of many princes, “each more handsome than the last.” Elaine Equi’s “For Years, I Suffered from a Strange Melody” is word alchemy: a fertile muddle in which pieces become princes; and breakage, celebration; a climactic union in which “everyone” arrives from nowhere to deliver a final, life-affirming shout.

--Angela Ball

The New York School Diaspora (Part Fifteen): Ron Padgett [by Angela Ball]

Over There

I have always assumed that my body would provide
reliable transportation to carry me through the day
and no I will not extend that metaphor
and if you know what that means
you’ll know what I mean.

John Ashbery once said
“I never get up before the crack of noon.”
Pope Francis said
“I am Argentinian. You know
how an Argentinian commits suicide?
He climbs up on top of his ego and jumps off.”
“That’s all, Bruno,”
Fairfield Porter said to his dog.
Does it help to know that Bruno was a golden retriever?
And that Fairfield was invisible?

--Ron Padgett

Ron Padgett’s How Long was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in poetry and his Collected Poems won the LA Times Prize for the best poetry book of 2014 and the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. His translations include Zone: Selected Poems of Guillaume Apollinaire and Blaise Cendrars’ Complete Poems. Seven of his poems were used in Jim Jarmusch’s film, Paterson. Padgett’s most recent collection is Big Cabin (Coffee House Press). Forthcoming is Dot (Coffee House Press). New York City has been his home base since 1960.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Fifteen): Ron Padgett [by Angela Ball]

Carved from silence, Ron Padgett’s “Over There,” refuses to “extend” its opening metaphor. Yet it is expansive. As in Frank O’Hara’s poems, all people known in fact or reputation, living or dead, are free to enter, to be heard. “I never get up before the crack of noon,” says John Ashbery, at once sardonic and cheerful, invoking both “crack of dawn” and “crack of doom.” The pope, God’s arm on earth, imagines his own suicide in a joke—though in it, his ego remains, a vertical ghost.

As in Kenneth Koch’s late poem, “Proverb,” “Les morts vont vite.” Though we may prefer to regard mortality as “over there,” world vanishes for all: poet, pope, dog, even painter—maestro of the visible (of course, he names his dog a color, a color the dog isn’t). Reading Fairfield Porter’s succinct send-off to Bruno, we hear Mel Blanc’s Porky Pig sputter “Th-that’s all, folks”—the phrase Blanc chose as epitaph.

The office Fairfield Porter performs for his dog, Ron Padgett’s “Over There” performs for us. In surrounding mortality with play, he looses its darkness. Art’s scarifying knowledge confers power. Yes, it helps.

--Angela Ball

The New York School Diaspora (Part Fourteen): Jessica Guzman [by Angela Ball]

ODE AT THE HOSPITAL

My father’s moustache aced geometry.
My father’s moustache makes cowboys blush
with its hard line. My father’s moustache
has two spots, one light in one dark,
like a black-eyed pea, or a tube t.v.
shutting off. My father’s moustache talks
like Ricky Ricardo, tells fortunes, chants
Our Fathers in its sleep—it dreams blue seas.
My father’s moustache survived chemotherapy.
My father’s moustache goes by Antonio
if you’re family. If not, try a cup of water
under your bed—it cures everything.

--Jessica Guzman

I had been writing poems about my father’s illness when I read an essay in which Stanley Plumly describes odes as rendering their subjects into art objects. Something similar to but not quite ekphrasis. My father had a commanding moustache, and I imagined it on display in a museum next to a little plaque. ‘Ode at the Hospital’ began with that image before anaphora morphed it into something more intimate and dynamic.

--Jessica Guzman

Jessica Guzman is the author of Adelante (Switchback Books, 2020), selected by Patricia Smith as winner of the 2019 Gatewood Prize. Her poems have appeared in Shenandoah, jubilat, The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, and elsewhere. She teaches at Widener University and lives in Philadelphia.

The New York School Diaspora, Part Fourteen: Jessica Guzman [by Angela Ball]

“My Father’s Moustache” is an expression of disdain from 1930’s Brooklyn, a raucous song by Woody Herman & His Herd (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ft8X0wXZOhY) , and a likely name for 60’s/70’s soda shops and used-clothing emporiums. It had, by then, an aura of gentle nostalgia—the “my father” referenced a sprightly older gentleman likely a member of a barbershop quartet. In Jessica Guzman’s “Ode At The Hospital,” these associations ground active description, as the moustache “aced geometry” and “makes cowboys blush.” When the ‘stache shows its spots, “one light in one dark, / like a black-eyed pea, or a tube t.v. / shutting off,” it takes on quasi-religious powers, chanting “Our Fathers in its sleep.” With “My father’s moustache survived chemotherapy” it draws us up short with the reality of illness and invokes the protective exclusivity of family, a magic circle. This is, after all “My father’s mustache,” not yours. Like its subject, Guzman’s poem refuses despair, ending with mock advice tinged with mysterious truth: “try a cup of water / under your bed—it cures everything.” In its terse twelve lines, the poem plays life’s essences against one another—virility and age, cultural and personal memory, humor and sadness, exile and belonging, personality and the loss thereof, the body and the loss thereof.  Set in God’s hostel, Jessica Guzman’s “Ode At The Hospital” makes permanent not just its potent moustache, but the particularity of praise.

--Angela Ball

The New York School Diaspora (Part Thirteen): James Cummins [by Angela Ball]

Ode to Sycamores

Not helplessness;
But a sort of timelessness,
The understanding
That will can only take you so far.
You leave behind lust
That caused you to deceive each other
With whispers of mutuality
When need was only singular;
Now the cores of your beings
Aren't reaching for something
But for each other.

You begin to say, oh, god,
Which are the words we use
To express our humility
In these moments, our compassion;
Perhaps her lips are on your neck,
Perhaps your lips are on her neck—
The idea there are necks at all
In this lifting up, or that you thought
There were two of them
When you began,
Is astonishing, and delightful,
And one of the myriad lovely things
About you the brain—
Not only not slowing down,
But speeding up, along for the ride
Now, like a dog in a car window—
Has noted in passing.

And the scent of ambrosia—
You thought it would be
Some kind of clear fine
Wine that made the brain
A metaphor for the body—
So you are surprised
At its muskiness, its wetness,
Like a stand of sycamores in spring;
And you are gods now,
But gods under the moon,
Not someone’s idea of the moon.

--James Cummins

When my wife, Maureen, and I first got married, we made love one night alongside the Iowa River. It was romantic in conception, a little less so in execution. Between us and the lovely full moon were a lot of mosquitoes; and the "rich black fertile Iowa soil" turned out to be rather unyielding, though I took the bottom to gallantly cushion my willing-to-go-along-with-this-up-to-a-point bride. (And, okay, from preference.) But the poem itself didn't take shape for decades until one time I was driving along on a sunny day while our apricot standard poodle, Bella, who, after Maureen and our two daughters, I loved more than any sentient being in the universe, was enjoying the sun and the wind with her head resting out the back window. She turned and looked at me with such happiness that the two moments fused as one, like Vardaman's mother and the fish. I then found an old notebook with some early attempts and finished the poem.
--James Cummins

Jim Cummins was raised in a canebrake by an old mama lion. No, he's just a midwestern boy through-and-through, who's become a cray-cray old man who never leaves his house except to get booster shots. Recently, he purchased a lot of stock in Ivermectin.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Thirteen): James Cummins [by Angela Ball]

A standard-issue ode devotes itself single-mindedly to its announced subject. Not this one. We find ourselves inside a poem of “compassion”: passion compounded; a concentration lacking the expansiveness we associate with the ode; the result, perhaps, of long togetherness, a shared “you,” broken to emphasize its unity: “Perhaps her lips are on your neck, / Perhaps your lips are on her neck”; broken again in order to praise: “one of the myriad lovely things / About you your brain— / Not only not slowing down, / But speeding up, along for the ride / Now, like a dog in a car window—. . .”

Suddenly, near the close, the sycamores rise from the poem’s concentration as a surprising simile for “the scent of ambrosia,” a bodily redolence, not cerebral or soul-like. Sycamores’ chief beauty may be that they are open in how they accommodate to growth, their bark visibly breaking. James Cummins’s “Ode to Sycamores” opens at its close, addressing what might be the widest problem of postmodernism, as analyzed by Walker Percy’s “The Loss of the Creature” and Roland Barthes’s “Operation Margarine”: the replacement of originals with simulacra, the real with easy nostalgia:

“But you are gods now / But gods under the moon, / Not someone’s idea of the moon.”

--Angela Ball

The New York School Diaspora (Part Twelve): John Gallaher [by Angela Ball]

Garden of Mirrors (Architecture 23)

I look up from lunch and see a guy dozing back in his chair
and I imagine my dead father that way, perpetual sleeping passenger,
his head full of roads. “And who cares,” he says in his dream,
“that since you’ll never wake, that you’re not inscribing memories?”
Describing a hallucination means you’re describing it
to someone, so who’s to say this isn’t part of the hallucination?
My odometer hit 123456 today and I had a minor celebration
and took a picture. They say as much about the idea of time
as they do the idea of reality, most recently in the mechanism
through which birds see the earth’s magnetic field. It’s a kind
of blue. I like that. Everyone you know is suddenly an art student.
Or how families have a recurring theme, generation to generation.
Measure the shoulders. Measure a taste for parsley. Hand tremors.
As in the Enquists vs the Gormans. The Enquists want the baby,
the child, as he’s three now, spring 1968, to be adopted out
through their side of the family to the Gallahers, and the Gormans
want to keep it in Portland, maybe cut a deal
over where it is and when. The Enquists sign the papers, though,
and the child is off on a Continental jet with a golden tail
to Kansas. (The painting keeps folding that we’re working on,
fretting along the edges of the frame.) A few weeks later,
the Gormans are still not taking it well. For them, it was
a kidnapping, and one, the mother, goes off somewhere,
and the father, the Enquist, goes looking for her
with some friends. One, driving, July 8, falls asleep,
and they cross the median, down the hillside, into the trees.
You fall asleep over this life, and you wake
in a doll playground in a doll town surrounded by a doll
forest. You’re planning some sort of festival.
The Enquists and the Gormans understand each other,
as a desert understands rain. As now, 50 years later,
they’ve all gone but for the mother and the child,
and he finds her one day in late fall, and she asks him
if his eyes are still a beautiful steel blue.

--John Gallaher                                       first published in LIPS, as "Golden (23)"

Though I’ve always known he died in a car wreck, I didn’t know until recently that my birth-father died in his sleep. Likewise, I’ve always known I was adopted (at age three), but the circumstances, as well as my birth-mother’s name, were a mystery, until I found her recently. I’ve been trying, since my book, In a Landscape (BOA 2014), to find a way to write as I’m thinking, to try to write the thinking itself, the imagination, but in a non-fiction landscape. From Lyn Hejinian, I think of it as thought transference, or articulating the inarticulate. Ashbery talks about this as well, describing it as a project reflecting how the mind works, the play of thought. I like these ideas, keeping in mind O’Hara’s directness (“I did this I did that”) and Miles Davis playing what the day presents. I’m not sure if any of this makes much sense to anyone but me, which is why I hesitate to put too fine a point on it.
--John Gallaher

The New York School Diaspora (Part Twelve): John Gallaher [by Angela Ball]

John Gallaher’s tribute to origins, “Garden of Mirrors (Architecture 23)” shares the breathless energy of Frank O’Hara’s elegy, “The Day Lady Died,” and its trajectory from the circumstantial to the transcendent. “It is 12:20 in New York a Friday” . . . “I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun / and have a hamburger and a malted. . ,” while the poet-speaker of “Garden of Mirrors” looks “up from lunch. . .” and imagines his dead father, “perpetual passenger, his head full of roads.” O’Hara records his lunch-hour movements; Gallaher celebrates his car’s 123456th mile. O’Hara’s bank teller’s name, “Miss Stillwagon,” is part of his day’s momentousness, along with “NEW WORLD WRITING,” “Verlaine,” “Bonnard,” “Strega,” and “Gauloises.” (Lady, not pinned to her daylight name, enters the poem via photograph.) Gallaher describes the navigation of birds, their precise jazz of vision, “a kind of blue”; linking it to a family’s serial mirroring: a set of shoulders, “a taste for parsley.” Then we hear, in third person, the story of his divided parentage, related as Enquists vs. Gormans—recalling Faulkner’s Snopes and Compsons, discordant tribes. Suddenly, the poem mirrors itself, registers the strain exacted by the telling, the difficulty of keeping the story within bounds: “(The painting keeps folding that we’re working on, / fretting along the edges of the frame.)” The father goes looking for the mother “with some friends.” He drives, then sleeps, and all disappear “down the hillside, into the trees,” dispatched in two phrases with the killing loveliness of a Hemingway title. At poem’s end the son has found the mother, “in late fall,” is with her in the way that Frank is with Lady Day at the 5-Spot: “while she whispered a song along the keyboard/to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing”(no end-stop). Art pre-empts time. John Gallaher’s “Garden of Mirrors (Architecture 23)” collapses fifty years as the mother asks her son “if his eyes are still a beautiful steel blue.”
--Angela Ball

(The New York School Diaspora will be on sabbatical till Tuesday, 31 August, when it will return as a biweekly feature.)

The New York School Diaspora (Part Eleven): Paul Hoover [by Angela Ball]

Written (after Szymborska)

The written stone rests
in the unwritten river;
unwritten rain is falling
over the written town.

Nothing written today,
but tomorrow you’ll be written
as you sit in your room not writing.

Lo, it is written.
Pollen writes on the stamen.
The man writes a child
in the body of the woman.
Your eyes write the view
into the window,
but it doesn’t stay forever.
It returns with you into the unwritten.

All that means is written.
Lo, a tiger of a word
has escaped its cage.

Our quiet words
wait beneath the stair
for a reason to speak,
an edge or fold or cause
to remark. Oh, we say,
no way and no how.

This is how the world begins,
dark branches written
against a white sky.

The written stone rests
in the written river;
written rain falls
over the written town.

--Paul Hoover

Written (after Szymborska)

In teaching the work of Wisława Szymborska, the Nobel Prize winning Polish poet, I came across her lines about “a written deer running through a written forest.”  The phrase is magical and generative, reminding us of the central issue of writing, the encounter of the real and the imaginary.  Speaking the word “deer” brings them to mind, as we have individually experienced deer.  This form of magic was known by ancient Greeks as ekphrasis.  I’m drawn to the poetry of Wallace Stevens, because, in bringing us closer to the real, we discover the Real.  

--Paul Hoover

Paul Hoover's book, O, and Green:  New and Selected Poems will be published in August by MadHat Press / Plume Editions.  It includes selections from all his books since 2001.  With Maria Baranda he edited and translated The Complete Poems of San Juan de la Cruz, published by Milkweed Editions earlier this year.  He also edited, and in part translated, The New World Written:  Selected Poems of Maria Baranda (Yale University Press, 2021).  He is editor of the annual literary magazine, New American Writing, and two editions of Postmodern American Poetry:  A Norton Anthology (1994 / 2013).  His collection of literary essays, Fables of Representation, is available from University of Michigan Press.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Eleven): Paul Hoover [by Angela Ball]

For me, an important question is whether a poem’s language seems to originate from outside the poet or from within. The first case allows for selection and collage, for serious play. Paul Hoover’s “Written” (after Szymborska) belongs in this camp, finding voice from a line of Wislawa Szymborska’s poem, “The Joy of Writing.” What results is a poem with these striking lines: “The man writes a child / in the body of the woman.” The article used for both participants, “the,” is impersonal. The preposition, “in,” with its stern accuracy, has the same coolness. These choices tell us we are in the realm of the primordial:

     This is how the world begins,
     dark branches written
     against a white sky.

The poem’s repetition of “written” hones the word, sharpens its force and the force of all words: “Lo [look!], a tiger of a word / has escaped its cage.”

The poem’s “written stone” is cousin to the stone in W.B. Yeats’s famous poem, “Easter, 1916,” where it lies unchanged “in the midst of all,” holding the “terrible beauty” of those martyred for Ireland in the Easter rising. Amid violent change, an abiding coolness. This is the temperature of Paul Hoover’s “Written,” in which words are marks, and primal remarks express surprise or disbelief: “Oh, we say, / no way and no how.” Why is the poem’s river “unwritten” at the beginning and “written” at the end? The answer is this poem, tiger of language and the permanence of meaning.

--Angela Ball

The New York School Diaspora (Part Ten): Star Black [by Angela Ball]

Feather-Flown

There was a laughing photograph that laughed
at the photographer who laughed back until the creases
of the laugh twinned and became perfectly aligned.
Then, glassine slipped between them,

absorbing both, and became an alamode mist
of a ̀ la monde that floats above lazarettos and hobos,
lawn bowlers and braided vines, as a missing photograph
of the inestimable, in an inestimable amount of time.

Come back, photograph. It is too rare
that anyone laughs. Come down to the scribble
of smiles, the earth-stained chameleons and epitaphs.

Come down to the blousy cries of those
who need more muffs. Come down to the cold and
curious who think too much: to the fingertip, the touch.

--Star Black

A photograph missed, meaning seen by the photographer but
not taken by the camera because there was no time to set up,
focus and snap the shutter, lingers in the mind as an afterimage
but only briefly. The universe has moved on, like a velvet tank
on a crowded plain, and the untaken photograph becomes
missed and irretrievable in more ways than one.
--Star Black

An Army brat who lived in many places for many years, Star Black arrived in New York City in 1977 as a photographer for United Press International. She went freelance in 1980, photographing for The New York Times, the Museum of Modern Art and other clients while studying poetry at Brooklyn College with John Ashbery and earning an MFA degree in 1984. She is the author of four books of sonnets, Waterworn, Balefire, Ghostwood and Velleity's Shade; a collection of double sestinas, Double Time; and a book of collaged free verse, October for Idas. Her latest book, The Popular Vote, a collection of poems that addresses the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election, was published by Saturnalia Books in 2019. Her collages have been exhibited at Poets House and The Center for Book Arts. She co-founded the KGB Bar Monday Night Poetry Series in the East Village in 1997, which continues today, and has taught poetry at The New School and at Stony Brook University’s MFA and BFA programs.

Star Black in the 90s. Photo by John Hill.

"Surround-Sound" by Star Black

 

The New York School Diaspora (Part Ten): Star Black [by Angela Ball]

“Feather-Flown,” Star Black’s meditation on photography, nuance, and vital laughter, begins like an ancient story: “There was a laughing photograph that laughed,” and is one: the story of creator, creation, and a third thing—fugitive, seldom articulated—their union.

The poet/photographer summons this amalgam of self, light, and fixative; this brilliant (and funny) “alamode mist,” —reprising it not just for herself, but for the “cold and / curious who think too much,” like, for example, Anton Chekhov’s “Man in a Shell,” who isolates himself from experience in fear of the silly, the exuberant.

The poem’s summons to the photograph, or rather to its genius, accelerates. Can it hear, where it hovers, freed of the miseries, amusements, and natural strivings of “lazarettos and hobos, / lawn bowlers and braided vines” that are the world’s emulsion? “Come back,” it calls. And, three times, “Come down.” Does the spell work? Or is the spell its own fulfillment?

As final imprimatur, Star Black’s “Feather-Flown” invokes the immediacy of touch both ethereal and actual--the way, in photographs, vision finds materiality; its stanzas our contact sheet, positive print, “missing photo of the inestimable.”

--Angela Ball

The New York School Diaspora (Part Nine): David Kirby [by Angela Ball]

I Wish I Were a Cannibal

because if I were a cannibal I could cook you and put you on a plate
and eat you up but I’d be a magic cannibal so you’d come back tomorrow
and I’d prepare you in a new way and eat you up all over again
or, wait, not a magic cannibal but a cannibal who lives on a magic island
where people who are crazy about each other just keep devouring
the other person every day and then do it again and again and again.
Today I think I’d like to roll you gently in flour, then dip you in
an egg wash and some bread crumbs and slide you into a skillet
in which I have heated butter and olive oil and cook you for three
minutes on one side and two on the other and put a slice of cheese
on you and stick you in the oven just long enough to melt the cheese.
I’d like to make a carrot soufflé out of you. Or a sandwich. But not
just any sandwich: one of those jumbo hot dogs the Chileans call
a completo and for good reason because it’s slathered in tomato
and pickle and guacamole and mayonnaise and sauerkraut and whatever
else you want to put on it. A completo has to have a lot of toppings
or else it’s not completo. Or a Primanti Bros. sandwich from
the famed Pittsburgh deli of that name that consists of capicola
and provolone topped with french fries and cole slaw and tomato
slices on sourdough. Or wait, I know, the Monte Cristo, which is
truly the Cadillac of sandwiches in that you make it by putting
turkey and ham on Dijon-coated white bread which you coat
with a well-beaten egg and cook until brown on both sides and then
sprinkle with powdered sugar and serve with red currant jelly
alongside for dipping, although you’d be delicious dipped in anything.
I’m certainly not going to turn you into a strawberry pretzel salad!
It’s not even a salad, though also delicious. I’d like to smother you,
by which I mean not put a pillow over your face but first make a roux
out of flour and vegetable oil the way they do in Cajun country
and add onion and celery and garlic and chicken broth and then immerse
you and cook you on the lowest heat possible until you emerge tender.
Tender . . . listen to me! How could you possibly be more tender
than you are now! Or sweeter. Notice that I haven’t mentioned dessert.
Why would I? You’re sweeter than ten desserts—a hundred!
If I eat you and dessert both, I couldn’t eat anything for the next three
days except insulin lollipops. I wish you were a shot of whiskey
so I could toss you down my throat or a bottle of beer so I could chug
you on a hot day or a glass of Montepulciano d’Abruzzo so I could
sip you slowly in the presence of one of the yummy dishes I have
described above even though that means I’d be consuming you twice,
which, come to think of it, is not the worst idea I’ve had lately.
I wish you were a cigar so I could stick one end of you in my mouth
and light the other. I wish I were a cigar as well so we could both
go up in smoke. Let’s send smoke signals to everyone on the mainland.
We’ll tell all the other lovers to join us. Bring your toques, lovers!
Or should it just be us? Romantic dinner for two or Bruegel-esque
banquet with dogs and children and big thick-bodied Dutch peasant
types larking about to the tune of a drum and pipe band. And dice,
of course. Peasants love to gamble. Who doesn’t? Why, the first time
I saw you, you were doubling down at the blackjack table, and I myself
am hardly averse to a hand of baccarat or chemin de fer. Did you hear
that? Dinner bell! I think I’ll marinate you for two hours or maybe
overnight in umm lemon and ahh garlic and ooh thyme and

 

David Kirby's collection The House on Boulevard St.: New and Selected Poems was a finalist for the National Book Award. He is the author of Little Richard: The Birth of Rock ‘n’ Roll, which the Times Literary Supplement of London called “a hymn of praise to the emancipatory power of nonsense” and was named one of Booklist’s Top 10 Black History Non-Fiction Books of 2010. His latest books are a poetry collection, Help Me, Information, and a textbook modestly entitled The Knowledge: Where Poems Come From and How to Write Them. He teaches English at Florida State University.

“I Wish I Were a Cannibal” is forthcoming in Help Me, Information, which will be out from LSU Press this summer.

You might call this a love poem, but that'd be selling it short. I've actually told students they can print out a copy on Valentine's Day and give it to their baby doll and say they wrote it, if they like, because it works just fine as a poem from one person to another. But I had a bigger picture in mind. I hope every reader had a mom who said something along the lines of "you're so sweet, I could just eat you up," which is really my starting place. After that I pile on the calories and the trans fats, but then alcohol shows up, as do cigars, dancing, art, dogs, card games -- the whole world's in this poem. Let's put the whole world in our poems. And then eat it.
--David Kirby

The New York School Diaspora (Part Nine): David Kirby [by Angela Ball]

David Kirby, poet of constant surprise, returns consumption to the frank lust of Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, as visualized in Tony Richardson’s movie and its lovers’ meal where each voracious bite implies a sex act. Kirby doesn’t devour his love with kisses, but “with tomato and pickle and guacamole and mayonnaise and sauerkraut and whatever else,” marinates her “for two hours or maybe / overnight in umm lemon and ahh garlic and ooh thyme. . .” A taboo isn’t violated, as in the wonderful title of the satirical novel by Malcolm Bradbury, Eating People is Wrong. It simply doesn’t exist.

This impulse recalls the original poets of the New York school in their wish to abolish intermediaries between poem and reader, that shows itself in Frank O’Hara’s desire to place the poem between people rather than pages, “lucky Pierre style”; in John Ashbery’s gift to us of his mind transposed to language; in Kenneth Koch’s “new addresses” to War and other abstractions—their effect on us is direct, so why not their representation? James Schuyler gives us his coffee cup, his Korean mums, not as representatives of something else, but as themselves: life’s components. When he sips his coffee, it’s as if a still-life artist were eating the fruits and hams being painted, as of course they did, outside the frame of art. Why do we need the frame?

David Kirby’s “I Wish I Were a Cannibal” doesn’t. It consummates metaphor, makes tenor and vehicle one. How great to be free, eating love as avidly as Mark Strand’s avatar dog eats poetry. And aren’t they, after all, the same, unending as this poem with its connecting “and.”
--Angela Ball

The New York School Diaspora (Part Eight) The News from Great Britain: Martin Stannard [by Angela Ball]

THAT THING

We once had one in our house
with handles on both sides. But
I forget its name. Sometimes

I even forget my own. The self is
an overlaying of multiple identities,
comprised not just of what is

remembered and forgotten, but
of how one is located in the wider
questions of belonging, memory

and solidarity. At least, that is what
was on my mind as I lit a bonfire
in the kitchen, which is where

I was located. It’s a mystery as to
what that lump is but the chances
are it’s nothing to be concerned

about. There are better reasons
to lay awake at night worrying
yourself sick. I am from here,

I thought, and recognise the pots
and pans, and how if one polishes
them enough they shine like brilliant

household suns. I think I may go
and live in a shed when all this is
over. In the last twenty years

average house prices have grown
about seven times faster than
average income. That’s on my mind

as I write this, and watch the fire
brigade go about their business
with consummate professionalism

and gusto. It occurred to me also
that Galileo said “Nature’s great
book is written in mathematical

symbols”, although I think he said it
in Italian and it’s not really relevant.
It’s interesting what crosses one’s

mind as the events of the day occur,
watched by miserable youths and
unquiet presences who, with nothing

to do but act as reminders of what
has been lost, refuse to stay home,
and instead nibble away at the edges

of what would otherwise be a perfectly
acceptable existence. Here comes
another little person trying to attract

my attention. Take my hat, please.
You’ll see it’s not been keeping much
warm at all. Those are shadows

taking shape before my very eyes,
and that’s a horror show over
there, and those little horror shows

gathered around them will, I guess,
be their children. How awful!
The boys and girls I have known,

the workmen and the labourers
on the estate, they are in the past
now, of course, but they are still

kind of present, although I don’t
know their names, and never
did. And when old Chivers choked

on a chicken leg everyone thought
it was a joke until it was too late.
That was a learning experience for

all of us, and is on my mind as
I write this. The burning issues of
the day are ablaze with themselves

but grow tiresome. To be a fireman is
apparently the career of choice among
an increasing number of university

graduates, and is a sign of the times.
Yes, thank you - I will have another
of those canapés. They’re delicious

even if they’re not home-made.
And thank you for reading this.
You’ve made my life better, briefly.

—Martin Stannard

from “Reading Moby-Dick and Various Other Matters”

Leafe Press, 2020

https://www.leafepresspoetry.com/2020/05/martin-stannard-reading-moby-dick-and.html

Martin Stannard lives in Nottingham, England, and his poetry and reviews have been published widely since the late 1970s. He has also had the honour (and pleasure) to read his work at the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s in New York City. He was the founding editor of joe soap’s canoe magazine from 1978-93 which, after Martin in 1980 discovered the work of Paul Violi (with whom he subsequently became a close friend), was the first magazine in the UK to regularly publish New York School poets including Ashbery, Koch, Violi, Charles North and Tony Towle. The magazine’s complete archive can be found as downloadable PDFs at www.martinstannard.com/jsc. In 1993 he arranged and accompanied Koch and Violi on a reading tour of the UK, after helping to organize an exhibition of Koch’s collaborations with artists at The Wolsey Gallery, Ipswich, Suffolk.

Martin’s recent publications include “The Review” (Knives Forks and Spoons Press, 2020) and “Reading Moby-Dick and Various Other Matters” (Leafe Press, 2020). More information can be found at www.martinstannard.com

Like most of my poems, “That Thing” is language-driven, insofar as it’s not about any thing in particular, but takes a line or phrase as somewhere to begin and heads off to a place I don’t know exists until I get there. The starting point here, as far as I recall, was an overheard phrase (“with handles on both sides”) describing some object or other. What follows is helped along by four or five other snippets culled from I can’t remember where, but most of what is said in the poem is from inside what I like to call my brain, joined together to make what I hope is a coherent (sort of) object. It occurs to me now that the last two lines could perhaps be stuck on the end of almost every poem I’ve ever written, albeit with an irony warning.

--Martin Stannard

The New York School Diaspora (Part Eight) The News from Great Britain: Martin Stannard [by Angela Ball]

Martin Stannard’s “That Thing” meditates on an emergency: a bonfire lit by the speaker. We get, amid flames, this stunning observation on pots and pans: “how if one polishes / them enough they shine like brilliant /household suns.” The lyric moment dissolves as the speaker holds forth on surrounding phenomena. A patrician anti-Whitman, he rejects multitudes; speaks with a pre-emptory directness not unlike Frank O’Hara’s in one of several poems called “Poem”: “I am thinking my own thoughts, who else’s?” Oblique subject-shifts disorient as we bowl along his association-stream to a party we have catered (mediocrely), to land in our role as readers, receiving thanks given with one hand and retracted with the other. There’s an obtuseness reminiscent of another O’Hara “Poem” in which the speaker arrives in the middle of the night to find his host lying “flat on a sheet of blood”: “There are few hosts who so thoroughly prepare to greet a guest / only casually invited and that several months ago.” With the hauteur and finesse of a Jack Benny, “That Thing’s” delightfully absurd persona, sheathed in aplomb, presents us with a world of incongruities, its source of absurdity not merely events, but our take on them. “The burning issues of / the day are ablaze with themselves / / but grow tiresome.”

--Angela Ball

The New York School Diaspora (Part Seven): George Green [by Angela Ball]

Gone With the Wind

When Rhett grabs Scarlet on their flight to Tara,
their isometric kiss implies coition
and romance will peak with his profession of love
made to a horny widow woman imperiled
on the bumpy road to burnt and pillaged mansions.
Some sparkling Aphrodites debuted that year:
Maureen O’Hara, Ingrid Bergman, Greer
Garson, Brenda Joyce, and Rita Hayworth,

but who would win the sizzling bombshell prize?
Miss Scarlet, hussified in her red dress.
Vivian hated Gable’s denture breath
and later claimed he really tried to rape her,
though no one paid attention to that story,
and she got the Oscar, she and Hattie McDaniel,
though Hattie had to sit off to the side.
“I know you girls would trade me for Clark Gable,”

said Hitler to a gaggle of German debs.
Gone with the Wind was the Fuhrer’s favorite film,
and lots of his future subjects read the book.
In the movie poster Atlanta is in flames,
under a giant Rhett apparently
having his way with a giant, yielding Scarlet.
The burning town is, yes, a metaphor,
for all their fiery amorous compulsions,

but it suggests, as well, a more Vedantic
perspective, a hyper-lapse depiction of war
speeding the ashes to ashes. Poor Scott Fitzgerald
failed to make Aunt Pitty-Pat amusing,
so Selznick canned his sorry ass, launching
his fatal binge, but Margaret Mitchell wouldn’t
read the script, and never put her nose in,
quipping that Groucho Marx should play Rhett Butler.

 

George Green’s book, Lord Byron’s Foot, won The New Criterion Poetry Prize, The Poet’s Prize, and an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has lived for forty years in Manhattan’s East Village, but longs for “The milder minstrelsies of rural scenes.”

In my “TCM” poems I try to locate the movies historically, or relate them to events in my everyday life. In the six years between 9/01/39 and 9/02/45 roughly eighty million people lost their lives. The marvelous culture that produced GWTW, The Wizard of Oz, Only Angels Have Wings, Goodbye Mr. Chips, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Wuthering Heights, and Stagecoach, could do nothing to forestall or mitigate the catastrophe. Let me add that I could triple this list of 1939 classics without any drop in quality. I am unashamedly obsessed with ancient actresses, and the roll call at the end of stanza one is my favorite part of the poem. My Hitler quote comes from Eva Braun’s home movies.

--George Green

 

The New York School Diaspora, Part Seven: George Green

George Green’s “Gone with the Wind,” an ekphrastic poem, is about a movie poster that opens to engage late 1930’s culture at large. We disappear into it, like a reader of Roussel into the scene on a Perrier label, to enjoy tragicomic carnage and lusts of all kinds. As Rhett and Scarlett’s monstrous forms loom above a tiny, torched Atlanta, a bevy of actresses have failed to nab the transcendent role of Scarlet; Hattie McDaniel persists, portraying a maid instead of being one; Faulkner bombs as script doctor and drowns in bourbon; Hitler schemes to re-write civilization; executives strive for primacy and poolside leisure. The poem’s elegant octets feature a peanut gallery of vulgar language (“horny widow woman,” “hussified,” “denture breath,” “sorry ass”) hilariously foiled by the precise and analytical “isometric kiss,” “coition,” “Vedantic perspective,” “hyper-lapse depiction.” The novelist who sparked it all gets the last laugh, invoking the antithesis of Gable (sexiness jerry-rigged by acting coach he married): that most-refreshing nemesis of vainglory, Groucho Marx.

--Angela Ball

The New York School Diaspora (Part Six): The News in Sports [by Angela Ball]

Mississippi State’s Football Coach Ponders the Fake People in the Stands

--for and after Mike Leach

I have to be honest. I haven’t really gotten
the cut-out people in the stands,
the cardboard torsos
pretending to be fans.

A Twilight Zone episode! All these fakes
frozen in time, enthusing all day
regardless of who scores, who
throws the ball away. I haven’t really gotten
the fake people in the stands.

It’s science fiction meets haunted stadium:
you’re watching the big game, and you can’t move,
let alone cheer or boo. If it’s cool,
and people enjoy it, great, but it’s a little
surreal, the fake people in the stands.

Do the person impersonators have a lottery
to see who gets the best seats? Some have way better ones,
those fake people in the stands.

I want to be one of the lucky cut-outs
on the 50-yard line. Not one of those suckers
up in the rafters. In these weird times,
even a fake person can get screwed, stuck
in the worst part of the stands.

The moral of the story is this: live clean, live smart,
and maybe someday
you’ll get good seats at the LSU game
and won’t care you’re made of cardboard,
a fake person in the stands.

--Angela Ball

“Mississippi State’s Football Coach Ponders the Fake People in the Stands” honors Mississippi State’s idiosyncratic and polymathic football coach, Mike Leach, who last fall made comments to the media about a game played at LSU and the “fake people” in the stands. His words, which seemed to capture the dysphoria of sports and life at that time, invited the poem into being.

Leach is a writer of note. Here is his biography as it appears on his publisher’s website:

“Mike Leach is a legendary college football coach and New York Times bestselling author of Swing Your Sword. He has appeared on 60 Minutes and has been featured in The New York Times Magazine, Sports Illustrated, ESPN The Magazine, and USA TODAY. He is the only college coach ever featured by NFL Films.”

The New York School Diaspora (Part Five): Nin Andrews [by Angela Ball]

Sometimes I feel so inspired
after Ulalume González de LeónI think I am flying. Yes, flying far away. So far away, in fact, that between you and me, I am at a loss for words. So this is what it’s like to be an artist, I think. Which brings me to the question: if I had to choose between being bliss and writing about it, which would I choose?

Oh Yellow Bird, I sigh as I gaze outside. Oh Yellow Sun, Yellow Mood flooding my office with longing, I want to surrender to you. I want to give up all my bad habits.

I am so filled with happiness, I do not write. I cannot. What should I do? I finally ask you, my dearest poet friend. You don’t answer. So I watch you. I do what you do.

Word by word, line by line, I change my mind. I change my mood, my laundry, my socks. I change the sun into wind, the wind into clouds and grief. I talk about my soul as if it were a shroud, my heart as if it were lost. Then I change it into a sparrow, an egg, a frying pan.

Yes, I lie. Today, I am a poet. I write lies.

Nin Andrews is the author of seven chapbooks and seven full-length collections of poetry. Her poems have appeared in many literary reviews and anthologies including Ploughshares, The Paris Review, The Best of the Prose Poem, and four volumes of Best American Poetry. She has translated the prose poems of Henri Michaux and edited an anthology of them titled Someone Wants to Steal My Name (Cleveland State University Press). Her most recent book, The Last Orgasm, was published by Etruscan Press in 2020.

In writing this poem, I was thinking how inspiration is the crack cocaine of writers—that there’s a high when the rush of ideas and images and words coalesces in the mind and begins to form a poem, an essay, a story. But there are also those days when the high is there, but one can lack the ability to translate it into words. I wanted to describe the distance that sometimes opens up between what I feel and what I can express, between what I say and what I mean, between what I describe and what I actually see. I was also thinking of the Mexican poet, Ulalume González de León, and how she often addresses that which cannot be put into words.
--Nin Andrews

The New York School Diaspora, Part Five: Nin Andrews

Nin Andrews’s poem, “Sometimes I feel so inspired,” like the poems of Frank O’Hara, engages the mutable and its quandaries, the seemingly competing needs to experience bliss and to write it. Here, as in O’Hara, there are friends to consult: “What should I do?” . . .”You don’t answer. So I watch you. I do what you do.” The vexed question, Be or Write: O’Hara evaded it. Or rather, surrendered to both, as Andrews does in this poem inspired by Ulalume González de León.

Like Mayakovsky, O’Hara and Andrews are clouds in human dress, implicated in the bliss of vapor’s changing shapes. O’Hara’s heart resides in his pocket, “it is Poems by Pierre Reverdy”; Andrews’ changes hers into beauty, nourishment, practicality: “a sparrow, an egg, a frying pan.” As O’Hara says, “The eagerness of objects to / be what we are afraid to do / cannot help but move us.”

“Sometimes I feel so inspired” is an encounter of sensibility with world. To read is like strapping oneself to an experienced parachutist. We land on the fact of poetry and its seminal prevarication.

--Angela Ball

The New York School Diaspora (Part Four): Barbara Hamby [by Angela Ball]

               Ode on My Prison

This morning I read about a couple arrested
       for selling hundreds of tickets to heaven
which they said were made from pure gold
       and all you have to do is hand yours over
to St. Peter and you are ushered into paradise. Tito Watts,
       the mastermind of this scheme, told the police
Jesus gave him the tickets in the parking lot
       behind the KFC and told him to sell them
so he could pay Stevie, an alien Tito met at a bar,
       to take him to a planet made of drugs.
"You should arrest Jesus," said Tito. "I'll wear a wire
       and set him up." His wife agreed they both
wanted to leave Earth, and I know how she feels,
       because most newspaper stories are such a bummer—
sexcapades, lying, the Russians—so Jesus, where
       is my golden ticket? Not that I'm all that keen
to go to heaven, but I would like to go to Vietnam
       and Cambodia, though I guess a travel agent
could set that up for me, and I'm always fantasizing
       about dropping in on Haydon’s immortal dinner
and eavesdropping on Keats and Wordsworth or spending
       a fortnight in London in 1601, seeing Shakespeare
as Hamlet's father’s ghost, taking in the general squalor
       and maybe picking up some manuscripts
from the printing house floor, tucking them in my farthingale,
       and then taking off to Chawton Cottage to stalk
Jane Austen for a while, though in that dress it’s going to be hard
       to go incognito, so maybe I should wear black jeans,
and you may be forgiven for thinking that I’ve touched down
       on that planet of drugs, but who needs them
really when your mind can spin out its own delirium,
       a dream here, a phantasmagoria there, and right now
I'm fixated on Tito wired to bust Jesus, and doesn't it seem
       sometimes as if we’re hanging around the KFC
waiting for something supernatural to appear, not Jesus,
       but maybe Walt Whitman walking to New Orleans
with his brother, a cloud of words crowding out Stevie
       and the other aliens as Walt fuels his own dream
of America where we’re looking after each other instead
       of grubbing for all the moolah we can stuff
up our backsides, though a friend of my sister’s says that Earth
       is an alien penal colony, and we’re all doing time
for crimes against the universe, so I guess Stevie’s a rogue
       guard in the Florida penitentiary, and sometimes
my body does seem like a prison of sprains and back pain,
       my mind like the trenches at Verdun—the mud,
the mustard gas—yet when the war is over, I'm still alive,
       seem to have all my limbs, every cup of tea
is ambrosia, and if that’s not enough, it’s May, jasmine
       and roses are blooming, my heart clambering
over the clouds as if on wings, and I can’t help but think
       of Solzhenitsyn looking back on his years in the gulag
saying, “Bless you, my prison, for having been in my life.”

I usually start writing with an image (golden tickets to heaven) and then let my mind roam free and make wild associations. I love it when a poem surprises me, and this one did. It was like riding a roller coaster. I wrote it during the summer of 2018 in Florence. I had had a busy spring semester in which I hadn't had time to do much writing, but I had been collecting lots of starts and notes. I think I ended up writing 45 pages that summer, which turned out to be over half of my new book Holoholo. I was on fire. I doubt I'll see the like of that again, but I can always hope.

--Barbara Hamby

Barbara Hamby is the author of seven books of poems, most recently Holoholo (2021), Bird Odyssey (2018) and On the Street of Divine Love: New and Selected Poems (2014), all published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, which also published Babel (2004) and All-Night Lingo Tango (2009). She was a 2010 Guggenheim fellow in Poetry and her book of short stories, Lester Higata’s 20^th Century, won the 2010 Iowa Short Fiction Award. She has also edited an anthology of poems, Seriously Funny (Georgia, 2009), with her husband David Kirby. She teaches at Florida State University.

The New York School Diaspora, Part Four: Barbara Hamby

“Ode On My Prison,” from Barbara Hamby’s peripatetic new book, Holoholo, recalls Frank O’Hara’s celebration of the immediate, “Having a Coke with You,” that begins, “is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne.” Hamby’s imagined travelogue spools from news that  a couple has been arrested for “selling tickets to Heaven.”

In O’Hara-esque fashion, Hamby honors her subject by departure in pursuit of the extravagant choices it suggests.  Instead of a ticket to Heaven or O’Hara’s “warm New York 4 o’clock light,” she opts for “Vietnam and Cambodia” “Haydon’s famous dinner,” “Walt Whitman walking to New Orleans,” a “cup of tea,” “May,” “jasmine and roses.” The result is both baroque and colloquial. Invoking Shakespeare’s turn as Hamlet’s father’s ghost, Hamby then riffs on the bard’s trope of mind as prison by making hers “like the trenches at Verdun” and her body “a prison of sprains and back pain.”  Provided in lieu of the abstractions we expect, these harsh specifics are pure comedy.

The poem rejects the monotony of heaven in favor of the chaos of dailiness. It accepts the premise of earth as prison, one that—like Solzhenitsyn’s—inspires permanent gratitude from its inmates.

--Angela Ball

The New York School Diaspora Part Three: Allison Campbell [by Angela Ball]

STENDHAL SYNDROME

Ever wanted to make love to a work of art—
die in the obscene smear of paint or a written passage
where the protagonist stands on a Sears Tower diving board
but then climbs down, ever mirrored a manikin and felt
you were falling into its apparel, the fabric swimming you,
sometimes listened to music with the back of your head
or took a moment in the bath to observe the water in opposition
with your hair, had a pop song puncture to nerve by amplifying
something hidden, finding a stranger knew your feelings exactly,
but more so, decided nature is wonderful, but alive, you needed
acrylic, oil, the page, a breathing note, or a warm drink in a white cafe
designed by someone rich from drawing children in animal suits?
It’s not that you cannot go on living without these things,
it’s that without them you have questioned the point.

Allison Campbell is the author of the prose poetry collection Encyclopédie of the Common & Encompassing. Her work has appeared in such places as Copper Nickel, The Cincinnati Review, Tampa Review, Witness, and Rattle. She lives in New Orleans.

In a museum built into the side of a mountain, I stood before Claude Monet’s Sunset on the Seine in Winter. Until this point, my experience of Impressionism was limited to dentist’s office reproductions and wall calendars. But in this museum, I stared at the orange-red dot-of- a-setting-sun and felt myself falling into the river. I began to cry. I did not know what I was experiencing, but later learned that the syndrome was named in 1989 by an Italian doctor who saw many patients whose physical and mental health were affected by the beauty of Florence. I wrote this poem pointing out overwhelming episodes, instances when I was acutely receptive to human-made beauty.
--Allison Campbell

The New York School Diaspora, Part Three: Allison Campbell

A member of the New York School seminar that participated in the USM Center for Writers’ 2014 Symposium on the New York School of Poetry and the South, Allison Campbell served as The Best American Poetry’s special correspondent, blogging about the event.

“The Stendhal Syndrome” is an affliction named after the 19th-century French author, whose description of his experience in Florence first documented the phenomenon. Of his initial visit to the Basilica of Santa Croce, where Niccolo Machiavelli, Michelangelo, and Galileo Galilei are buried, Stendhal wrote

I was in a sort of ecstasy, from the idea of being in Florence, close to the great men whose tombs I had seen. Absorbed in the contemplation of sublime beauty ... I reached the point where one encounters celestial sensations ... Everything spoke so vividly to my soul. Ah, if I could only forget. I had palpitations of the heart, what in Berlin they call 'nerves'. Life was drained from me. I walked with the fear of falling.

Allison Campbell’s invocation of art-generated rapture, its head-over-heels multi-part interrogative, suggests Kenneth Koch and his“Fresh Air”; in particular, this line: “Did you ever glance inside a bottle of sparkling pop?” It also recalls Frank O’Hara’s desire, expressed in “Personism: A Manifesto,” for a poem to exist not between two pages but “between two persons,” “Lucky-Pierre style,” and the melding of art, nature, and identity that Keats enacts in “Ode to a Nightingale”: “Now more than ever seems it rich to die.” We are most ourselves when in transport, when we’ve “had a pop song puncture to nerve by amplifying / something hidden.”

--Angela Ball

The New York School Diaspora: Part Two, Julia Johnson [by Angela Ball]

Failure

I’m standing at the stove cooking pancakes
when in walks a goat.
The goat is black and white and gives me
a look over the bridge of his nose that I recognize 
as a look of sadness.
And so I have a sad goat in my kitchen.
The tornado sirens have stopped.
He’s countertop height. 
The cast on my arm under the sleeve
of my sweater isn’t visible to the goat, and I’m  
glad for that. I flip the pancakes.
The goat shakes gently his beard, kicks
his left hoof, and stomps. I try to imagine
anything as smooth as a flipped pancake
as I wait for the other side to brown.

I was introduced to the work of Russell Edson, Charles Simic, James Tate and the French surrealist prose poets, including Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, and Guillaume Apollinaire early on in my writing life, in high school. Their influence is forever in my imagination, I think, as are the Surrealist painters. One day, I was standing in the kitchen in Kentucky cooking pancakes when I heard tornado warning sirens. This poem came out of that moment. 

--Julia Johnson

The New York School Diaspora, Part Two: Julia Johnson

My post here last week, “The New York School Diaspora, Part One,” asserted that the values of the New York School of Poetry survive to enliven much of the strongest American poetry. James Tate’s work, incorporating what appreciative critics have called “the surrealism of everyday life,” represents a branch of this diaspora.

Julia Johnson’s “Failure” shares with James Tate’s work (in such poems as “The Buddhists Have the Field” and “The Distant Orgasm”) the marriage of the pedestrian and the unexpected. It shares one of the key convictions of New York School poetry: life is chaotic, resists explanation.

The poem’s title, “Failure,” sits at an oblique angle to the poem. We are tempted to think of how tragedy is goat-song, and how failures of character result in tragedy. There’s the expression, diluted by time, “I am the goat.” Is the goat a stray sacrifice? Why does he stamp? From whence his sadness? Why does the speaker cook pancakes when there is a cast on her arm? Why glad that her cast is hidden? Is the now-absent tornado connected with the goat? With guilt? Question marks rotate playfully, as in an old illustration of bewilderment. The incident, as solid and self-contained as a flipped pancake, calls to us. The cooking continues.

--Angela Ball

The New York School Diaspora, Part One (Denise Duhamel) [by Angela Ball]

DEAR AMERICAN AMNESIA,

I know you are only trying to make

white people feel better—

and some of us might even appreciate it,

but maybe it’s good you sometimes let us remember

certain things, like the origin of gratuities.

Racist restaurant owners “hired” newly freed

slaves who they didn’t have to pay

and passed on the expense to diners

who had the choice of tipping

or not. Any American waitstaff or stripper  

today knows how temperamental

a customer can be—how grabby, how angry,

or sullen. How cheap. By 1938,

America established a minimum

wage, but not for hospitality

workers who were expected to live

off tips. (Translation: Ladies,

shake those tits.) The Great Depression

and Great Recession seem quaint and faraway

because you prefer we deep-six the fact

Wall Street hasn’t changed. But, Amnesia,

sometimes even you can’t repress

everything in us—consider our American paranoia

and guilt. Chomsky says zombies

are just the latest manifestation of our need

to be punished for what we’ve done

to the Indians and slaves. How easy it is

to make white Americans afraid. Afraid we’ll be

treated the way we’ve treated others. Jen Hofer asks,

through which holes does history break into our day?

Who built the White House?

Why are corporate cubicles shaped

like swastikas? Why are there so few

Asian leading men? When the 60’s           

revolution happened, women turned

to vintage clothing so fashion magazines had to

do something to control them, get them back.

Enter diet pills and the term cellulite. Rubens

celebrated those bumps in his 17^th century paintings,

but a 1968 issue of Vogue decried them  

as a disease the most focused of women could cure

through exercise, diet, and rubbing their legs

with special rolling pins. Now the wage gap   

is replaced by the thigh gap,

as we try to squelch

that persistent subcutaneous fat,

bubbling up like everything, Amnesia,

you’d rather we forget.

I wrote “Dear American Amnesia” after reading Rachel E. Greenspan’s article “’It's the Legacy of Slavery’: Here's the Troubling History Behind Tipping Practices in the U.S.” (Time, October 15, 2018).  I remembered all my waitressing jobs, the lousy shifts, the fussy customers, and my smiling incessantly even when I wanted to pour coffee over the head of a customer who grabbed me as I walked by his table. The poem started down that path but suddenly veered into bigger questions of who America values in society, who we pay well, who we pay poorly, and why.

--Denise Duhamel

Denise Duhamel’s most recent book of poetry is Second Story (Pittsburgh, 2021). Her other titles include Scald; Blowout; Ka-Ching!; Two and Two; Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems; The Star-Spangled Banner; and Kinky. She served as the guest editor for The Best American Poetry 2013. She is a Distinguished University Professor in the MFA program at Florida International University in Miami.

The New York School Diaspora Part One: Denise Duhamel

I have long believed that the poets of the New York School, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara, and James Schuyler, have exercised a lingering and salutary influence on American poetry. This conviction led to a 2014 Symposium at the University of Southern Mississippi, “ The New York School of Poetry and the South,” featuring Billy Collins, Denise Duhamel, Barbara Hamby, David Kirby, and David Lehman, and a special issue of Valley Voices, a literary journal based at Mississippi Valley State University. In this blog post and others to follow I will showcase what I term the New York School diaspora, a concept that I hope to make clear with poems by writers who honor the virtues of play, wit, the chaos of reality and the belief that, to paraphrase Frank O’Hara, life is too important to strangle with seriousness

“Dear American Amnesia,” part of Denise Duhamel’s topical and captivating new book of poems, Second Story, owes something to Kenneth Koch’s ground-breaking reformulation of the apostrophe: a poem addressed to an abstract entity or quality. Koch’s progenitor here is, of course, one of his first poetic saints, Percy Bysshe Shelly. Koch’s departure from his source resides in the degree of intimacy he assumes, an easy colloquialism both humorous and poignant. Koch perfects this technique in his 2000 volume, New Addresses, with poems like “To World War Two,” that begins with “Early on you introduced me to young women in bars,” progresses to “As machines make ice / we made dead enemy soldiers . . .” and ends, “You died of a bomb blast in Nagasaki, and there were parades.” Koch had never before written a poem about his WWII experiences, but the impersonally personal nature of his new address created an expansive context that made it possible. By addressing abstraction in “Dear American Amnesia,” Duhamel isolates the obliviousness of our dominant culture, defining it by what it chooses to ignore. 

Duhamel’s poem addresses the gap between the way things are and the way they ought to be: a gap obscured by miasmas of amnesia. Not only does this approach produce humor—“(Translation: Ladies, /shake those tits.)”—but frees the poem from the tediousness of assigning blame to particular people. We are both victims and enablers of such notions as “the thigh gap.” 

In pointing out some of the affinities of “Dear American Amnesia” with The New York School of Poets, I don’t mean to suggest that the poem is derivative. Duhamel’s letter poem joins what Wallace Stevens called “the long conversation between poets” bearing its own inimitable stamp.

--Angela Ball

A Blue Towel -- on James Schuyler [by Angela Ball]

In the radical simplicity of James Schuyler’s poetry, the world is constituted each morning in the form of what is here: a cup, an ashtray, a Korean Mum.  The job of the poem is to converse elementally, without judgment or hierarchies, but with a saintly respect for the small details that bring us to life.  Martin Heidegger, one of the philosophers most amenable to the New York School of Poets, made a plea against tracts exhorting large changes in society, but which in turn slight the present as "relatively impotent appearance,” "suggest[ing] that the fragile and transitory can safely be neglected." Schuyler’s style emulates that of artists Fairfield Porter and Jane Freilicher—both working against (Abstract Expressionist) fashion to represent the ordinary extraordinary of every day.  (I include here images of two of Frielicher’s beautiful paintings—to this day she is represented by the Tibor de Nagy Gallery—and Fairfield Porter’s portrait of John Ashbery and James Schuyler.)  In its intense interest in accepting the windows offered us, Schuyler’s poetic method implements in words Freilicher’s method of composing through gentle attention. Often in her work, the domestically pastoral (vases and paint jars of flowers)  consorts with the matter of the containing city. (Freilicher was once offered a fellowship to travel anywhere in the country to paint a scene: she choose to stay in her apartment to make a new window scene.)

Graduate poet Annette Boehm talks about Schuyler’s “unashamed reality”:

Part of this fascination with what is real is accepting that what is real can be different from what is generally acceptable or generally considered beautiful. Lehman [in The Last Avant Garde] quotes Schuyler’s recollection of an incident in the early 1950s: “We were walking along the beach at sunset, heading for a cocktail party. The sun was casting those extraordinary Technicolor effects on the sea and sky. John [Ashbery] turned to me and said, ‘I always feel so embarrassed by these gaudy displays of nature.’ I didn’t feel embarrassed at all” (260).

I think that Schuyler might enjoy hearing the journals from our class, the students’ daily observations of his work.  Here is literature student Anna Williams (we are using the FSG Selected Poems):

“March Here.” I like this poem for the way it positions the natural environment/weather with neon signs and tall towers. The wet of spring/March aligned with the wetness of “the hard-running river” and the “damp/from your bath.” I’m sure there’s a way to critique commodity culture in this. Also, the blurring of the lines between human and nonhuman worlds is critically rich. “December.” “Each December! I always think I hate “the over-commercialized event”/and then the bells ring, or tiny light bulbs wink above the entrance/to Bonwit Teller or Katherine going on five wants to look at all/the empty sample gift-wrapped boxes up Fifth Avenue in swank shops/and how can I help falling in love?” Yup. Commodities are dazzling and tempting. And to a certain extent I think that’s ok…I mean, it’s necessary to be aware of the implications of commodity culture, but we do have to live in this world. However if we enjoy something, I think it’s good to know what we are enjoying/where it came from/why. Significant that the wrapped boxes are “empty.”

“Thinness” was a great read. I’m loving Schuyler’s preoccupation with weather/seasons. “February expects others to be nicer/than it is itself: knowing this/about itself makes it a nice month/You have a pretty good character, February.”  Peace out, February. “your arms are so long/for such a short month.” See ya in 2015.

“Now and then.” I absolutely freaked when I started reading this poem. For my critical sensibilities, it is perfect. Seriously, I would read a stanza, freak, look away from the book in disbelief, and then start reading again like “no way no way no way how can this be so perfect?”

• and the dark tranquility of hemlocks encroaching on untilled fields

“You can’t make a living

plowing stones” subsistence

farming is well out of style: “You can’t call it living

without the margin”

coveted obsolescence!

“Horrible Cold Night/Remain at Home”/”Clear and Beautiful/Remain at Home”

Lots of great natural world imagery in this poem juxtaposed with industrial life. Love it. “Remain at Home” no matter the weather, because you need to recharge yourself for your boring job the next day! Just be apart of the system muuuaahhhahahahahahaha. I’m tired. I’ll bang this out critically better later, possibly in next class. It’ll be great fun.  – Anna Williams

And here is graduate fiction writer Jennifer Brown:

Like Koch, this first poem in his book is an odd one.

I like his poems so far. He is more philosophical than Koch or O’Hara, but more coherent than Ashbery. Less coherent than O’Hara and Koch, who are still my two favorite of the group, I think.

His weirder passages have more of a feeling of meaning than Ashbery’s weirder passages. They seem like they’re devised to elicit a certain feeling or create a certain image, and the words within the passages seem more connected to each other, and the passages more connected to the whole poem.

“…I am very sick really of all

the little concrete words such

as names of colors and effectively

used as in Art Reviews”

(Four Poems, 68-69)

It’s funny that he says this two lines after referring to plants as green. I like that the New York School poets will write passages into their poems that give insight into their own choices when writing poetry. This one helps me better appreciate and understand Schuyler’s choices of words, and it just makes me notice what a good job he can do evoking images without using the usual words associated with that image – a much better job than a description that uses those words would probably do.

I like how he names colors sarcastically or hyper-creatively sometimes. “A robin’s-egg blue robin’s-egg.”

“I do not believe in legends of food,

I believe in the food.

It is not what carrots are like,

It is the carrots.”

I like this passage. It seems Schuyler wants to move past conventional poetry, or what was conventional at the time, to get at something more real than what can be described or conveyed through metaphor. This would apply also to the above passage about colors. I’m not sure whether or not he gets there, but I can see a path toward it, or at least a longing for it, and the result is something worth reading whether it fully achieves what he wants or not. Thinking of it like that also helps me to understand Ashbery better. I still don’t like him as much as the other NYS poets, but his poetry seems less alien and meaningless when thought of that way. Maybe he and Schuyler were even working directly from one another’s ideas about what poetry should strive to achieve and had failed to achieve using conventional descriptions or through metaphors and other traditional poetic devices. - Jennifer Brown

Here is Annette Boehm, graduate poet, speaking of Schuyler in her own blog, Outside of a Cat:

-       Whether he is in the city or in the country, Schuyler always notices the weather, the season, the flora and fauna. Very few poems do not mention at least one or two of the above. Even music becomes plant-life for Schuyler. Take this passage from “Like Lorraine Ellison:”

-       And through the snares / sexily come saxes: through / solid shadow-green / of brushing leaves, clear /  as a blues, violet sage, / flowering saxes. I / send you all the love

-       “I never miss the garden section. / It describes heaven to perfection,” explains the speaker of “A Picnic Cantata,” and with all the very specific plant names, at times even taxonomy, and the detailed descriptions and observations of nature we find throughout Schuyler’s poetry, this could very well be him. The ever-changing view of trees, flowers, shrubs outside his window can capture his mind as much as any human interaction.

-       In the exuberant “Hymn to Life,” even the sun is alive, “Comes out from behind unbuttoned cloud underclothes — gray with use –” and while the plants become animal-like (“at the Reflecting Pool, the Japanese cherries / Bust out into their dog mouth pink”), animals become plant-like: “A cardinal / Passes like a flying tulip, a lights, and nails the green day / Down.”

-       Life cannot sit still, it constantly flows from one form to another, like water moving from solid to liquid to gas with great ease. It is as much in Hodge the cat’s ripped ear as it is in pear blossoms or the seizure he witnesses in the delicatessen. I love the ending of this (long) poem (including yet another personified month): “I like it when the morning sun lights up my room / Like a yellow jelly bean, an inner glow. May mutters, “Why / Ask questions?” or, “What are the questions you wish to ask?”  It seems to echo, again, in “Good morning,” which ends on this question: “Silver day / how shall I polish you?”

-       Lest you get the wrong impression, people also appear in Schuyler’s poems. We get to see through his eyes, for example, in “The Morning of the Poem,” a former lover: “he stood across / The street, in tweed, a snappy dresser, feet apart, head turned / In an Irish profile, holding an English attaché case, looking for / A cab to Madison Avenue, late, as usual, looking right out of a bandbox, / As usual.” And of course there are also his friends, his fellow poets and painters, — there’s a lot less name-dropping here than in, say, O’Hara, but the familiar names are all there. One person is omnipresent in these poems, the unnamed ‘you.’ Again in “The Morning of the Poem,” Schuyler explains that “When you read this poem you will have to decide / Which of the ‘yous’ are ‘you.’ I think you will have no trouble, as you rise from your chair and take up your / Brush again and scrub in some green, that particular green, whose name I can’t remember.” Like a painter knows his countless shades of green, even those that might be too faintly different from each other for the untrained eye to distinguish, Schuyler knows his friends will know how to read his ‘yous.’

-       Schuyler’s poems come as they are, in diverse body-shapes, skinny as rakes and only two, three words wide, or fat and full and covering numerous pages. Often, they are sweet notes, or bittersweet notes to a beloved or a friend. The poem “Steaming Ties” contains some very tender moments: “when I’m alone it’s hard / at times to know how unalone / I am, loved by you,” explains the speaker, and further on, he confides “ties are, even ties, / are silk and real. Your / voice to me is silk and rustles.”

-       While at times, Schuyler comes across as more contemplative and calm than his fellow New York poets, his sense of humor is intact, though at times wry and dark. There is also a child-like exuberance, like in this passage which, again, is from “The Morning of the Poem” (probably his best-known poem):

-       Rain! this morning I liked it  more than sun, if I were younger I would have / Run out naked in it, my hair full of Prell, chilled and loving it, cleansed, / Refreshed, at one with quince and apple trees.

-       It’s one of the moments where I really felt a kinship — the right kind of rain is wonderful and makes me feel the same way (though I don’t plan Prell into it). I like the passage for another reason, too, — apples and quinces. I like both, very much. The apples and quinces make a repeat appearance a few pages later in the same poem, this time linked to growing up and growing old: “the apple and quince trees / Looking so old, so unkempt: I remember planting them, they were just seedlings, or do I mean saplings?”

-      In “Letter to a Friend: Who Is Nancy Daum?” we’re told that “All things are real / no one a symbol” — very much a summary of Schuyler’s poetics of writing what is real and observing what is there. That’s not to say that there is nothing that could be read symbolically in his poems — there’s plenty. I also don’t claim that he takes no flights of fancy now and then — some of his images are fantastic and imaginative — but what I think it means is that it’s all rooted (like plant life) in the dirt and grit of the everyday.    - Annette Boehm.

Not to be ignored, “A blue towel” stands as title to a poem of lovers at the beach—no gap between it and the poem’s body: “went with us to the beach. / You drove the Green Bomb, / your panel truck.”  As in Freilicher’s paintings, the day is a collaboration between the natural and the manmade, a collaboration Schuyler finds supremely comfortable and comforting:  “We spread the towel / where we could lie and watch / the fierce and molten wonder / of the water.” In the poem’s choreography, the temporal and the eternal have a love dance: “waves” almost get “sneakers”; the men see “how a log was / almost hurled ashore then / taken back . . . .”  As the day and poem begin to end, flies play a prominent part:

. . . “These

insects are too much:

let’s go back.” The blue towel

and your trunks I hung out

on the line.  You took a

shower.  I made drinks.  Quiet

ecstasy and sweet content,

why are not all days like

you?  Happy with someone,

and that someone you, to-

gether on a blue towel

on sand beside the sea.

I think that “together” is intensified through separation, and that this poem invites us to share the conviction of simplicity—even to teach it to the angel, as Rilke does in his Ninth Duino Elegy (translated by Stephen Mitchell):

Show him how happy a Thing can be, how innocent and ours,
how even lamenting grief purely decides to take form,
serves as a Thing, or dies into a Thing–, and blissfully
escapes far beyond the violin.–And these Things,
which live by perishing, know you are praising them; transient,
they look to us for deliverance: us, the most transient of all.

Big thanks to The Best American Poetry for welcoming me here.  And thank you, Students, for making these entries with me.  Tracie Dawson, graduate fiction writer, took the photos of the class.  And Susan Elliott, graduate poet, has set up a Facebook page for the upcoming Moorman Symposium on New York School Poetry and the South—the event our class is leading up to: https://www.facebook.com/2014moormansymposium. Lastly, thanks are due the late Charles Moorman, Medievalist and Academic Vice-President of the University of Southern Mississippi, for establishing funds whereby senior professors can engage the public with art and scholarship.  Charlie was also a poet, with a great sense of humor. -- Angela Ball

Ashes Ashes All Fall Down [by Angela Ball]

John Ashbery has a double life: as “John,” the person; and “Ashbery” the poet.  His poetry, too, has such a life.  In J.D. McClatchy’s formulation, derived from “Trefoil,” a poem that describes “trees / of two minds,  half caught in their buzz and luster,” it is ”buzz” (the voice of the quotidian, the silly, the shop-worn phrase) and “luster” (the voice of beauty that arises from memory and is expressed in language, but is somehow independent of both—in short, art).  It is both dimensional, riverine and mountainous, and a “planosphere” unfolded on a table.

 “Memories of Imperialism,” from his twentieth book, Your Name Here,  is based on a silly, deliberate mistake—the conflation of two Deweys: the admiral and the librarian. But according to the logic we follow every day, the mistake makes sense: we are our names—we inhabit the blank provided.  Ashbery’s poem simply takes the system at its word, creating a beautifully comic, bewildered character who embodies the absurdity and sentimentality of history as we mostly experience it: “Dewey took Manila / and soon after invented the Dewey decimal system / that keeps libraries from collapsing / even unto this day.”  The poem brilliantly juxtaposes the “flatness” of a numerical system with the “roundness” of experience—the collapse described at the poem’s start seems both a matter of weight and a matter of abstract order.  (Another poem in the volume, “Full Tilt,” mentions “a terrible syllabus accident.”) And, poignantly, the poem evokes the predicament of outliving one’s moment.  The young take it in stride that old heroes are supplanted by new.  It’s another thing entirely to know oneself redundant: one may be called “Admiral” still, but no longer admired:

 

To this day schoolchildren wonder about his latter career

as a happy pedant, always nice with children, thoughtful

toward their parents.  He wore a gray ceramic suit

walking his dog, a “bouledogue,” he would point out.

People would peer at him from behind shutters, watchfully,

hoping no new calamities would break out, or indeed

that nothing more would happen, ever, that history had ended.

Yet it hadn’t, as the admiral himself

would have been the first to acknowledge.

 

Your Name Here is dedicated to Ashbery’s partner of many years, “Pierre Martory, 1920-1998.” It ends with the title poem.  Isolated, this phrase reveals its strangeness.  A signature is both personal and impersonal—the space, which could be filled by anyone, implies a comic togetherness rather than a tragic uniqueness--but it is you, in two-dimensional form.  It indicates the round of a life: volition, commitment.  I think that “commitment” (to fixed ideas of truth, for example) is a quality that Ashbery runs from, while many poets pursue it as prize.  Also, there is the weirdness (fatality) of a phrase that functions both as command and description, as if the filled space is already a fait accompli.  As if the name already occupies its line, so like the one that connects two dates.  The declaration is also an indisputable fact: each of us occupies a “here.”  But its evocation also implies an opposite: the culmination, for Ashbery, of a lifetime of leaving out of his poems the very things we expect to see—his non-contractual contract with the reader.

For our class in The New York School of Poets, the students have read the thick collection of Ashbery’s early work, The Mooring of Starting Out, and the Harvard lectures collected as Other Traditions, which they have found revelatory of Ashbery’s own poetic method.  Jennifer Brown, graduate fiction writer, says this in her reading journal:

 For the most part, I really enjoyed Other Traditions. For poets whose work I haven’t read, Clare, Beddoes, and co. were surprisingly interesting to read about. Some of them sounded like characters from a Tim Burton film. 

Ashbery’s description of Wheelwright had me imagining something like Ashbery’s own ellipses-filled “hair banana” variety of poems, but the example at the end reminded me much more of Ashbery’s relatively traditional work such as “The Painter.” Wheelwright’s influence on Ashbery is apparent in the way that his poems are difficult to understand in any straightforward sense, but they are full of imagery that unfolds itself effortlessly in the reader’s mind and words that generate a sort of grip over the reader’s attention. You may not understand them, but you feel them anyway. My initial thought was that Wheelwright was more successful at this than Ashbery, until I took into account that I had only read two or three carefully selected examples of Wheelwright where I’d read a large range of Ashbery over two or three hundred pages.   – Jennifer Brown

In his own journal, graduate fiction writer Nicholas Benca speaks of the frustrations and rewards of reading Ashbery:

I did attempt to “water-ski” over these poems when they were not narrative, but the desire to understand, to follow line-by-line what the poem is attempting to communicate was a more dominant force than just letting it wash over me. As stated earlier, there were definitely pleasurable moments, but it took a lot of work to find them when the poems were more abstract/lyric (even a line like “Sand the bowl did not let fall” was mysterious and tough to decipher at first glance). There were poems like “The Boy,” which fall into that category for me and were still pretty stunning experiences—this poem in particular seemed to capture an experience of being a child (male) in a world of grown –ups/parents—the fear and lack of control of  “seeming to have fallen/ From shelf to shelf of someone’s rage.” Another element of Ashbery’s poems that I seemed to consistently enjoy is the final lines. Although it is tough to disagree with Ashbery’s own assertion that he seems to retreat farther from the object of the poem (and Lehman’s agreement that Ashbery seems to step back/never arrive at the destination), it seemed to me like the way Ashbery ended a lot of his poems was the closest I got to a key to what I should be getting from the writing. Yeah, maybe it never arrived, but it at least informed me of the direction I was heading, and yeah, the poems seemed to shift at the end, take a turn in an unanticipated direction, and when that occurred, it seemed to be a revelation—they place where meaning might take off from, a secret that announces it presence but isn’t wholly revealed. For example, I thought that the end to the “Pied Piper” was well done and an interesting turn from what I had expected as well as the ending to “America.” Poems that walked the line between narrative and abstract were generally my favorites in this collection—“Illustration” “The Painter” and “Night” were all compelling and tapped into an emotion as well as an idea  - Nicholas Benca

 

To end what I sign today, I’ll quote the close of “Your Name Here.”  The novel referred to is a digressive ten-volume life story, by Romain Rolland, of a brilliant musician’s trials and final triumph.  Almost a library in itself, its strict-looking plan—its “syllabus”--belies its somewhat anarchic content.  Rolland named it a roman-flueve—a river novel—that meanders into other, unexpected lives before at last arriving at its hero’s final success:

 

Things got real quiet in the oubliette.

I was still reading Jean-Christophe. I’ll never finish the darn thing.

Now is the time for you to go out into the light

and congratulate whoever is left in our city.  People who survived

the eclipse.  But I was totally taken with you, always have been.

Light a candle in my wreath, I’ll be yours forever and will kiss you.

Giving Up Solemnity For Lent -- on Kenneth Koch [by Angela Ball]

Possibility is the enemy of the solemn.  Solemnity is a drying agent, a fixative.  It says that we should not only own the tradition we inherit, but wash and wax it and shampoo its carpet.  The New York School of poets saw and sees such veneration as beside the point.  Humor is in our blood, and we should let it circulate!

The kind of  transcendence (through mediation and/or drugs and/or study of Asian religious models) aspired to by Beats has been eschewed by the NYS.  One thinks of Wallace Stevens’ rejection of “the dividing blue.” Once we can live horizontally--on the surface of the earth instead of escaping it—multivalent connections grow.

 We may live in the city, but we should also resist it.  What is the city without the country?  Critics including Timothy Gray have pointed out that urban poets have traditionally used the pastoral as foil and as escape from their daily identities. Even socialites want to be milkmaids once in a way, as the businessman may wish to be a fishpond.

Each poem is, in a way, sui generis.  It shoulders its way into view, throwing off or evading all that is not-poem, attracting all that is.  All possible forms, all possible dictions are available to it, withal.

 Freedom of form provides its own change of scene.  Kenneth Koch emulating Byron’s terza rima (but in his own way—often hilariously rhyming banalities), Frank O’Hara writing quasi-Keatsean odes, John Ashbery creating a pastoral cartoon sestina—all have one thing in common: pleasure, both comic and sublime.  We laugh the tops of our heads off.

  (DOGS IN BED)  "In the dog bed / I cannot sleep" - Kenneth Koch, "In Bed"

I first read Kenneth Koch’s “You Were Wearing” in 1971.  It was included in Mark Strand’s wonderful anthology, The Contemporary American Poets: American Poetry Since 1940.  As others, including Billy Collins, have reported, it was a revelation to me.  It begins, as you will recall: “You were wearing your Edgar Allan Poe printed cotton blouse.” / In each divided up square of the blouse was a picture of Edgar Allan Poe.”  Though it didn’t occur to me at the time, Koch was a prophet of the Postmodern.  He understood the addition of meaning to surface, and the commodification of same, before it had truly gotten underway.  (I think that the names dropped in “You Were Wearing” also parody the Greek and Roman mythology pasted onto the solemn poems of the  university quarterlies and reviews of the day—intellectual currency.)  Indeed, the “printed cotton blouse” of the first line is fashion-speak—the talk that sells the clothes that make us. Both Roland Barthes (in Mythologies) and Walker Percy (in Message in a Bottle) portray the Postmodern distancing of experience—the gradual replacement of the genuine, whatever that is, with nostalgic facsimile, until we become souvenirs of ourselves.  As Koch’s poem goes on to follow its “you” and “I” through various activities, the products grow more three-dimensional.  They sit on the “Abraham Lincoln swing”: “You sat on the eyes, mouth, and beard part, and I sat on the knees.” Then, in a final burst of genius, the poem shows us a brand that has broken through to the world at large, comically threatening, crazily opposing the “George Washington, Father of His Country, shoes” with the sovereignty of insanity: “In the yard across the street we saw a snowman holding a garbage can lid smashed into a likeness of the mad English king, George the Third.”

Susan Elliot, graduate poet, has long been a fan of Wilfred Owen and other poets of WWI.

Of Kenneth Koch, her reading journal says this:

Reading “To World War Two” was an experience that indeed reminded me of the trench poets. Koch balances a delicate tension between the ever-presence of death and the possibility of hanging on long enough to have a life after the war is over. Koch writes, “I could write poetry / Fall in love / And have a daughter / And think / About these things / From a great distance / If I survived” (Selected Poems 158). Each of these possible future events gets its own line, giving each one significant weight and showing the reader how prominent these things are the in the mind of the author. The most powerful line in this sequence is, of course, the last one I quoted: “If I survived”. Each of the previous lines hinges on this one. 

And another graduate poet, Allison Campbell, speaks of the mixed emotions she finds in Koch:

 “Do not be defeated by the / Feeling that there is too much for you to know. That / Is a myth of the oppressor. You are / Capable of understanding life. And it is yours alone / And only this time.” -from “Some General Instructions”

The optimism Koch has in these lines, seems infused. But somehow infused in a negative sense. Like he is giving himself a shot in the arm as he writes it, to be able to keep writing it. Maybe I read him this way because I come when the “days of Allegory are over. The Days of Irony are here.” But I read so many of his poems as nostalgic, and therefore inherently melancholy, even when they are not being at all directly depressive.

Of course, with his two versions of “The Circus” it becomes easy to read him this way. But it’s more than those two poems. There is something of a covert, but consistent, tone in Koch, that is not quite as happy as it seems (or might like to be?). As if, he is writing from a place he wishes he were, rather than where he is -- even when his general instructions are to go, “You cannot come back until these lessons are learned”. He has learned them. He knows them and they are right and for some reason he is still sadden by them (or our chance at them?).

He is not as elusive as Ashbery and not as tangibly present as O’Hara. He seems to float between these extremes and at times his lines seem homeless.  - Allison Campbell

I think that Koch’s greatest formal innovation is his renovation of the apostrophe—a poem’s direct address to a power outside or beyond it, as in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Apostrophe to Silence.” In poems like “To ‘Yes’” Koch doesn’t remain apart, but enters the abstraction, to populate it with his own thoughts, which become ours. How does he do this?  Playfully, with many questions, and a complete lack of certainty.  Here is the end of his address to “Yes”:  “I love your development / From the answer to a simple query to a state of peace / That has the world by the throat.  Am I lying?  Yes. / Are you smiling?  Yes.  I’ll follow you, yes?  No reply.”

 -- Angela Ball