The New York School Poets and the Neo-Avant-Garde

Between Radical Art and Radical Chic

Mark Silverberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317022657
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

New York City was the site of a remarkable cultural and artistic renaissance during the 1950s and '60s. In the first monograph to treat all five major poets of the New York School-John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, Kenneth Koch, Frank O'Hara, and James Schuyler-Mark Silverberg examines this rich period of cross-fertilization between the arts. Silverberg uses the term 'neo-avant-garde' to describe New York School Poetry, Pop Art, Conceptual Art, Happenings, and other movements intended to revive and revise the achievements of the historical avant-garde, while remaining keenly aware of the new problems facing avant-gardists in the age of late capitalism. Silverberg highlights the family resemblances among the New York School poets, identifying the aesthetic concerns and ideological assumptions they shared with one another and with artists from the visual and performing arts. A unique feature of the book is Silverberg's annotated catalogue of collaborative works by the five poets and other artists. To comprehend the coherence of the New York School, Silverberg demonstrates, one must understand their shared commitment to a reconceptualized idea of the avant-garde specific to the United States in the 1950s and '60s, when the adversary culture of the Beats was being appropriated and repackaged as popular culture. Silverberg's detailed analysis of the strategies the New York School poets used to confront the problem of appropriation tells us much about the politics of taste and gender during the period, and suggests new ways of understanding succeeding generations of artists and poets.

Chapter 1
The New York School and the Problem of the Avant-Garde

Is There a New York School of Poetry?

The relevance, and in fact the very existence, of a “New York School” of poetry has been a matter of much debate. The name was coined in 1961, in what has been read as a commercially motivated move, by editor and gallery director John Bernard Myers.

David Lehman suggests that Myers “came up with the New York School moniker . . . hoping to cash in on the cachet of the world-conquering Abstract Expressionists” (Last 20). In fact, Myers’s motivation probably ran in the opposite direction. As he notes in the introduction to his 1969 anthology The Poets of the New York School,

‘Every artist should have his poet,’ Virgil Thomson once told me . . . And it is strictly true that for an artist to have a Baudelaire, a Jarry, a Max Jacob, a Valéry or an Eluard to sing his praises or to explicate his pictures there can be no finer form of publicity. After all, a painting or a sculpture is, in the end, a saleable commodity, and the myths which accrue—generated by poets—form precious barnacles about these works, guaranteeing a rise in their market value. No such market can attach itself to a poem. (9)

While Myers hoped that the poets would help advertise the painters his gallery represented, increasing their circulation in what Paul Mann calls the “discursive economy” of the art world, he doesn’t acknowledge that the painters could likewise serve as publicists for the poets, though in a different way. The mystique and success of Abstraction Expressionism (also known as New York School Painting) could lend both allure and authority to a group of poets whose work, like that of the painters earlier in their careers, had almost no audience at all. Abstract Expressionism was, after all, one of the most successful and important twentieth-century art movements, the movement that, in Serge Guilbaut’s convincing analysis, helped “steal” modern art from Europe, transferring its world capital from Paris to New York. It is significant, however, that by the time Myers came up with the label, the painters’ ascendancy had peaked and, by the 1960s, was in decline as cool, ironic forms of Pop Art displaced the hot, passionate forms of gestural abstraction. Thus, I will argue, the New York School poets had a much more conflicted relationship with Abstract Expressionism than is sometimes recognized. Their poetry both applied the painters’ lessons (as discussed by critics such as Libby, Moramarco, and Leslie Wolf) and worked to move beyond some of the more problematic qualities of Abstract Expressionism (particularly their macho, self-aggrandizing seriousness)—problems that were coming into clearer focus by the 1960s.

Myers’s choice of label, in any case, is certainly more than just descriptive. Given the associations attached to “the New York School,” it is not surprising that when the tag became applied to the poets it was seen sometimes as a gimmick, sometimes as a joke.1 From the beginning, members, supporters, and critics of the New York School poets have frequently debated the appropriateness, relevance, and use of the label. Lehman notes, “The ‘New York School of Poets’ was always, on the face of it, an incongruous label. Here was a group of poets who were born elsewhere, went to college elsewhere, and contrived—all except Frank O’Hara—to abandon New York City for long stretches in Europe” (Last 19). John Ashbery lived not in New York but in Paris when his first books were published and his reputation, along with the reputation of the New York School, was formed. Ashbery himself has always been doubtful of the label, and in several interviews rejects it as a critical convenience, “a way of lumping us all together just because we happened to be living in New York for various practical reasons,” when to his mind “the differences are greater than the similarities among our work” (Poulin 252). Kenneth Koch has similar reservations: “. . . there was no school of New York poets, in the sense that the French and other European countries have schools of poetry; that is, there was no manifesto, there were no rules, there were no meetings. There was a group of friends—John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara and me at the beginning and later James Schuyler” (Tranter “Interview” 177).2 In their mock-manifesto “How to Proceed in the Arts,” O’Hara and Rivers give us another reason to be suspicious of the “school” mentality: “If you are interested in schools, choose a school that is interested in you. . . . good or bad schools are insurance companies. Enter their offices and you are certain of a position” (AC 93). Even Myers hedges his bets. The introduction to his anthology includes this disclaimer: “Notice: I have not called these writers ‘The New York School of Poets,’ [he calls them The Poets of the New York School] but have deliberately refrained from so defining them because, properly speaking, they do not constitute a ‘school of poets’ in the old-fashioned sense” (7).

All of these comments raise the difficult problem of classification. Here we have a group of poets who never claimed to be a group and, in fact, often disclaimed any collective association. And yet there are striking similarities in the poets’ works and, perhaps more importantly, in their attitudes towards their work and towards art in general. While the poetry of Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, and Barbara Guest may look quite dissimilar at first (particularly when the very different deployments of subjectivity and personal presence in the three are contrasted), there are, in fact, underlying similarities of a much more fundamental sort. These are similarities that go beyond form and content and find their root in attitudes towards aesthetics, the institution of art, and the relationship between art and life in general.

This study will argue that the label the “New York School” does have significance beyond its promotional value, and that it describes not only congruencies in geographical position but also more important and deep-rooted similarities in attitudes, values, and preoccupations. While it may be difficult to find a single feature common to all their poetry, it is not at all difficult to locate a wide range of Wittgensteinian “family resemblances”: “a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities of detail” (I 66). It is the purpose of this book to examine this web of similarities, focusing first on questions of aesthetic orientation and then following those theoretical strands to readings of aesthetic detail.

Geoff Ward seems closest to an answer to the New York School problem when, in his review of Barbara Guest’s If So, Tell Me in Jacket magazine, he calls the categorization “a provisional exercise in cognitive mapping rather than a fixed, historical or regional reality.” Ward is right in seeing the grouping as conceptual, but this is quite different from seeing it as imaginary, as Harold Bloom or David Perkins seem to suggest in claiming that the poets should be studied only as individuals rather than as a group. I argue that the poets’ family resemblances form a crucial point of origin, both for each individual’s work and for their collaborations and intertextual conversations. By reconstructing the complex background from which these poets emerged and investigating their overlapping interests and resemblances (with each other and with the New York art world of the time in which they were fully immersed as critics, curators, and collaborators), we can draw a more complete picture in several ways. First, we gain better insight into the progression of each poet’s oeuvre. Only by having a sense of where these poets started can we accurately measure the distance their work travels. As well, these points of origin highlight the way that a reading of one poet can illuminate our readings of his or her colleagues. Their resemblances allow us to establish a point from which to measure divergence and difference. They also form a base from which to view the way each individual tackles a common dilemma—since the problems these poets set for themselves (such as the challenge of creating a poetry of enaction rather than representation, or of encoding a performative rather than a unique and continuous self) are an important subset of their resemblances.

But perhaps most importantly, putting the poets together is a way of acknowledging the crucial social dimension of their art. In their many collaborations among themselves and with other artists, and in their interdisciplinary desires to draw from the other arts, the New York School poets constantly foreground the fact that artistic production can be (and indeed, increasingly in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has been) a collective as well as an individual project. For the critic, this focus on collectivity can provide a healthy antidote to an individualist agenda with its often combative focus on strong poets and strong readers. A perspective on modern and contemporary poetry—from Imagism and Vorticism to Black Mountain and Language Poetry—that is attentive to dynamics of movements, schools, and communities (Michael Davidson’s work from The San Francisco Renaissance to Guys Like Us is exemplary on this account) opens up questions of social function (the group’s interactions among themselves and with others, and their role in educating their readers and canonizing themselves) that are often left aside in formalist or individualist studies.3

Indeed, this focus on the collective can be used to counter a once “powerful” “misreading” of John Ashbery—that of Harold Bloom, who argues that the poet is “so unique a figure that only confusion is engendered by associating him with Koch, O’Hara, Schuyler and their friends and disciples” (“Charity” 169). Bloom is not the only critic who would separate Ashbery completely from his colleagues and thus from one of his points of origin. David Perkins uses this idea to structure Ashbery’s placement in his widely read A History of Modern Poetry. Perkins argues that Ashbery shouldn’t be considered with the New York School because although he was “initially associated with this group, his achievement completely transcends this early identification” (529). In fact, Ashbery’s poetry does not transcend, but extends the New York School project. Ashbery’s collaborations and conversations with other New York artists are undeniable points of origin. The attitudes, ideas, procedures, and images of early New York School poetry are elements which Ashbery helped initiate and which continue to inform all his later work. And this network of New York resemblances is as relevant and important to his work as, for example, his engagement with romantic and modern precursors which Bloom uses as the measure of his importance. If we agree with some of the leading critics of the day that Ashbery is among the most significant postmodern American poets, we need to give much more serious consideration to his New York origins and connections than Bloom or Perkins allow.

Finally, when the poets are put back in their place and time, their work can be appreciated in relation to the cross-disciplinary artistic renaissance occurring in New York City in the early 1960s. This renaissance, which might appropriately take as its queer paterfamilias long-time New York resident Marcel Duchamp, included experimental composers and musicians such as John Cage, Morton Feldman, and David Tutor; painters, sculptors, and mixed media artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Allen Kaprow, Niki de Saint Phalle, and Jean Tinguely; and avant-garde dancers and choreographers such as Merce Cunningham, Yvonne Rainer, Steve Paxton, and Trisha Brown (the latter three being founding members of the Judson Dance Theater). With these artists the poets shared many aesthetic beliefs and enthusiasms. All were interested in working in the “gap” between art and life (as Robert Rauschenberg put it) by highlighting process, spontaneity, and performance. Each was absorbed in the problem of producing an art in motion rather than a static, stable, classical art. New forms and events arising at this time—Cage’s aleatory music or Fluxus Happenings; Tinguley’s self-destroying sculpture or Saint Phalle’s shooting paintings, Cunningham’s chance choreography or Paxton’s contact improvisation; and O’Hara’s “I do this, I do that” form or Koch’s conceptual poetry—are all attempted solutions to the problem of fixity. In the pursuit of motion, change, and the texture of lived experience, these artists often shared similar techniques and procedures, such as the application of chance in composition and the use of “found” objects, texts, and sounds in place of traditional materials. As well, all of these artists shared, in differing ways, a comic, ironic—sometimes “cool,” sometimes camp-inflected—attitude that questioned the high seriousness of art and artists. Here, Duchamp’s example of the 1919 “corrected readymade” L.H.O.O.Q., which attached a beard and moustache to a photograph of the high art icon, Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, serves as an apt precursor. (Pronounced phonetically in French, Duchamp’s title becomes “Elle a chaud au cul”: “She has a hot ass.”) And, as I will discuss next, all shared the task of moving beyond what they began to see as an increasingly commercialized “avant-garde” and finding new ways of creating “advanced” art.

The New York School and the Avant-Garde

Because of the particular historical moment and the unique place in which the New York School poets began publishing, they were among the first American poets to decide that successful work would have to move beyond the oppositional ideas of the “avant-garde” as they understood it. But before we can appreciate the importance of this transition, it is necessary to pause and take stock of the idea and history of the avant-garde as it was understood and instituted in postwar America.

At its broadest level and in common usage, the “avant-garde” defines artists or works which are deemed revolutionary, radical, “in advance” of their time. As Jürgen Habermas puts it, “the avant-garde understands itself as invading unknown territory, exposing itself to the dangers of sudden, shocking encounters, conquering an as yet unoccupied future” (99). The problem with this definition, of course, is its lack of critical focus. How do we know what counts as avant-garde and why it counts? Attempting to answer this question, studies from Renato Poggioli’s 1962 Theoria dell’ arte d’ avanguardia (translated in 1968 as The Theory of the Avant-Garde), to Peter Bürger’s 1984 Theory of the Avant-Garde, to Richard Murphy’s 1999 Theorizing the Avant-Garde have offered more or less all-encompassing theories of the avant-garde. In this study, I present not another totalized theory, but rather a survey of speculations about the avant-garde. Of particular concern here is the way the discursive engine of “the avant-garde” was understood and used in postwar America, since this is the ground from which New York School poetry grew. Just as commentators now see that there were many “modernisms,” so work by critics like Richard Murphy and Rainer Rumold on German Expressionism or Marjorie Perloff and Krzysztof Ziarek on Russian Futurism are helping us see that there are also many “avant-gardes.”4 Thus, while comprehensive theories like Bürger’s are extremely provocative and useful points of departure for understanding this heterogeneous phenomenon, it seems unlikely that any single theory of the avant-garde will ever account for all its diverse (and often contradictory) manifestations (from the mathematical logic of analytical Cubist abstraction, to riotous Dada performance, to the playful indifference of the readymade—to take but a few points of departure). Furthermore, and perhaps more importantly, we need to view these theories with some caution given the fact that definitions of the avant-garde are never neutral, as Paul Mann argues: “For members of a given movement definition is partly a matter of publicity or propaganda, of self-justification or defense: all such definitions are essentially strategic . . .” (8). The same is ultimately true, Mann suggests, of supposedly objective, extrinsic studies like Bürger’s or Murphy’s, which equally play a part in “legislating avant-garde discourse and hence avant-garde activity” (8)—as Bürger’s patronage of Surrealism or Murphy’s of Expressionism accurately reveal. This study proposes to use both those more general, sometimes avowedly biased accounts of the avant-garde by contemporary practitioners and proponents which circulated in the late 1950s and early 60s (when the New York School poets were developing their aesthetic) and the later, more academic, putatively impartial accounts in order to understand both what the avant-garde meant to the poets and what it might mean to their readers today.

In beginning to develop a fuller understanding of the avant-garde, we will turn, as several critics have before, to the origin of the concept. In his important early study, Renato Poggioli (who was, interestingly, one of Frank O’Hara’s favored professors at Harvard) notes that the earliest uses of the term “avant-garde” in relation to art were primarily political. Of French origin, the term was used (as early as 1825) by followers of the proto-socialists Saint-Simon and Fourier to suggest how art could be “an instrument for social action and reform, a means of revolutionary propaganda and agitation” (Poggioli 9). Like the “advance” troops of an army, revolutionary artists could prepare the way (psychologically, emotionally, intellectually) for political changes to come. In this early discourse there were two avant-gardes, the political and the artistic, which worked hand in hand to achieve a political end. However, by the 1880s, with the birth of the first modern literary “little magazines,” a separation of the two avant-gardes had taken place. A growing number of artistic coteries appropriated the political discourse (and with it the symbolic force of political dissent) to signal their own “radical” aesthetic departures from bourgeois artistic forms and practices (Poggioli 11–12; Lyon 5). In these early artistic manifestoes, the militaristi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Credits
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction: “A Lot of Guys Who KnowAll About Bricks”
• 1 The New York School and theProblem of the Avant-Garde
• 2 The Neo-Avant-Garde Manifesto
• 3 The Poetics of Process
• 4 The Politics of Taste:Comedy, Camp, and the Neo-Avant-Garde
• Conclusion: Beyond Radical Art
• Appendix: New York School Collaborations
• Bibliography
• Index