NYSP :: IOU is a series devoted to exploring a single question: how has the New York School of Poetry (NYSP)—its aesthetics and shenanigans—influenced contemporary poetics in general and certain poets in particular?
Elinor Nauen
This month, we are chatting with poet Elinor Nauen, who landed in New York City in November 1976 on the advice of another poet, Joel Oppenheimer. They had met through a chance encounter in Maine, where Nauen was then living. “Joel told me I should move to New York and be a poet. So, I did! There wasn't any thought. There wasn't any planning. I had a hundred dollars and a car. What else did I need?” Almost 50 years later, she still lives in the same East Village apartment she found soon after her arrival.
DB: Can you talk about those first few months in New York City?
EN: The first thing that happened a week after I arrived was that I attended a reading at the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church. The occasion was to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the death of Frank O'Hara. And the only reason I went was because the one name I recognized on the poster was Allen Ginsberg. Soon after, I started signing up for poetry workshops at the Project. My first one was led by the poet Jim Brodey, who would play Debussy or Chopin, then we'd write poems and read poems. It was there I met my lifelong friend and fellow poet Maggie Dubris.
Allen Ginsberg reading - the Frank O'Hara Memorial Reading at the Poetry Project, November 1976
DB: How did your own sense of poetry, and your own poems, evolve from there?
EN: In an essay I wrote for a 2012 conference at the National Poetry Foundation, University of Maine, on “Poetry and Poetics of the 1980s,” I said this:
“We weren’t—or felt we weren’t—under scrutiny. So here was a freedom that fueled a lot of poetry. We weren’t distracted by career possibilities. We didn’t imagine a career in poetry—even those with great ambitions didn’t see how that might work out. There was definitely the feeling that you had to choose between poetry and a ‘straight’ life.”
A good example of that was in 1977, when Maggie, her roommate Rachel, and I began calling ourselves the Consumptive Poets League. We decided to do a group reading, so I put an announcement in the Village Voice and added, “KOFF Magazine will be available,” which I made up on the spot. When I told Maggie and Rachel that we had to do a magazine, they were like, oh, okay, we'll do a magazine!
I often tell young poets to start a reading series and invite somebody you want to read with and who you want to hear your work. Then do a magazine and publish people you like, along with your own work, so they get to know you. Very quickly, that's exactly what we did.
DB: It sounds like what you learned right away was not so much an aesthetic as an attitude!
EN: In a way, yes, not an aesthetic but: anything goes, everything goes. if I had any aesthetics about poetry, it was that I really liked having a posse, having a party. And to feel like this is fun and exciting and worthwhile. If you start out with an assumption about how a poem is going to work, you're doomed to fail. You can start out with that assumption, but you have to pretty much leave open the very plausible chance that it's going to write itself quite differently. Whoever writes a poem and gets to the end and goes, yep, that's exactly the last line I was expecting, they’re just reciting Tennyson or something.
DB: You have mentioned that the poetry scene then was tilted, with more men than women poets at the time. Was that an issue?
EN: Not really. At that time, nobody particularly cared if they went to college and had a career. So, the women of my generation found this really sweet spot of doing whatever we wanted, and nobody was paying much attention to us. It had that drawback of, you know, if you wanted a career, but it also gave us the freedom, as O’Hara wrote, to go on your nerve, and on your whim! As women poets, we could resist, hang out with friends, and take chances.
DB: What about influence? I’m sensing that everyone was influencing everyone else.
EN: I feel like there's 50 answers to that question, because each one was important. Everyone and everything served as an influence. We all were collaborating, listening to, and competing with each other. In the early 80s, the atmosphere of poetry in our scene was at least as important as any particular poem—that we were all poets, doing poetry all the time. My poem, "Hooray to Poetry" speaks to this. If we had a theory, it was that everyone was a poet, or could be and should be, and that art was produced by the many, not the individual. It's the "immature poets imitate; mature poets steal” kind of thing. Once you make it yours, it becomes yours.
I feel like I've collaborated with people who don't even know who I am. By writing 600 stanzas of ottava rima in my book, So Late into the Night, I've collaborated with Byron. Maybe that's what influence is, whether you use the word or not. It is figuring out how to continue.
Hooray for Poetry
Poetry is a great big party
for all your friends.
As you know them all by name
you put them in the poem.
Hi Maggie Hi Rachel Hey Greg Hi Ei Hi.
The New York poets should play musical
lives with the rest of the world.
Then everyone would have a penpal.
Poetry is golden oldies
let’s go to the hop
have dinner & take a walk with you
steamy August, with thighs & eyes to match
Poetry is a home movie
of your mouth & fingers & heart
Poetry is talking till 4 a.m.
hanging up having accomplished a great deal
going to the movies
sitting in the front row
turning round to see who you know that’s there
hanging out at the bar
talking about everyone
who isn’t there or who is & balling
all the rest
running into people on the street
telling them to tell someone else to call you
wearing a terrific reedy shirt from 14th street.
Poetry is a great big party.
I think we should invite as many people
as know my name.
- Elinor Nauen [1981]
Elinor Nauen’s books include The Alphabet’s Dilemma, Now That I Know Where I’m Going, Snowbound (a dos-à- dos book with Stephen Willis), My Marriage A to Z, So Late into the Night, CARS & Other Poems, American Guys and, as editor, Ladies, Start Your Engines: Women writers on cars & the road and Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend: Women writers on baseball. Her work has appeared in New American Writing, FICTION, Exquisite Corpse, The World, KOFF, Elysian Fields Quarterly, Aethlon, Up Late: American Poetry Since 1970, National Endowment for the Humanities Magazine, American Book Review, and other magazines and anthologies. She edits Julebord with Maureen Owen and for 12 years co-hosted, with Martha King, the reading series Prose Pros. Elinor hails from Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and for many years has lived in New York’s East Village with her husband, the novelist Johnny Stanton, and their cat Lefty, who recently advised her in a dream that when they are out in public she should refer to him as Mr. Money.
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