New York School

6 Key excerpts on "New York School"

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  The Cambridge History of American Poetry

  • Alfred Bendixen, Stephen Burt(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  The New York School 857 When applied to New York School poems, labels such as “postmodern,” “avant-garde,” and “experimental” are, more often than not, ways of convey- ing the shock of encountering writing that treats mimesis – the imitation of reality – as only one tool, and certainly not a privileged one, within a poet’s utility kit. The sophistication of this position, and its many dizzying literary, philosophical, and political ramifications, helps explain why a small circle of friends, first brought to national attention by a countercultural anthology, has over the last half century proved to be such a spectacular success among tweedy academics and other establishment gatekeepers. Ashbery and Koch have won Bollingen Prizes; Ashbery and Schuyler have won Pulitzers; Ashbery and O’Hara have won National Book Awards; and Ashbery and Schuyler have been Fellows of the American Academy of Poets. Rafts of scholarly books and articles have appeared since 1975, and the rate of their arrival seems to be increasing, not tapering off. 22 Over the last decade there has been a sustained effort, too, to make as much of the poets’ writings as widely and easily avail- able as possible. 23 Since the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, humanists have been reevaluating the Cold War era, and, at least among poetry critics and readers of poetry, the New York School has retrospectively taken on unex- pected prominence. One could argue that the group’s reputation has also benefited to an unusual degree from the succession of trends in literary criticism over the last half cen- tury. During the 1950s and 1960s, the New York School’s radical rethinking and loosening of poetic form appealed to readers constitutionally averse to the dumbed-down New Criticism prevalent at the time in schools and uni- versities.

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

  Between Radical Art and Radical Chic

  • Mark Silverberg(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 1The 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

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  Modern American Poetry

  Points of Access

  • Kornelia Freitag, Brian Reed(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Universitätsverlag Winter

    (Publisher)

  115 Heinz Ickstadt (Berlin) Frank O'Hara and the New York School: Poetry and Painting in the 1950s 1. In times of artistic upheaval, when conventions are questioned, traditions re-examined, and literary or artistic institutions perceived as bastions of the Old, the forces of rebellion tend to cooperate and interact. Boundaries are crossed: those of established forms and between genres, but also those between the different artistic media. The agents of the New, then, also become the ferment of a small yet growing audience of the New, ignored or critically rejected by a general public still dominated in its aesthetic preferences by the various institutions of Literature and Art (by criticism, academia, publishing, or the museum). This was true of the modernist rebellion in the 1910s and 1920s in Europe as well as in the United States. William Carlos Williams's cooperation with the painter Charles Demuth and his exchanges with the artists of the Alfred Stieglitz circle in New York would be one example, Gertrude Stein's fascination with the Cubists in Paris and her creative dialogue with Picasso another. Dialogue between the arts also characterizes a second wave of avant-garde experimentation during the early fifties. By then, modernism itself had become an institution via the critical opinions of T.S. Eliot (the period's literary Pope) and the aesthetics of the New Criticism, which had become academic doctrine. A new generation of artistic rebels thus found itself in a situation comparable to that of its modernist forebears: When we all arrived in New York or emerged as poets in the mid 50s or late 50s, Frank O'Hara remembers, painters were the only ones who were interested in any kind of experimental poetry and the general literary scene was not. Oh, we were published in certain magazines 115 116 and so on, but nobody was really very enthusiastic except the painters (Allen 3).

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  Circling the Canon, Volume II

  The Selected Book Reviews of Marjorie Perloff,1995-2017

  • Marjorie Perloff, David Jonathan Bayot(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • UNM Press

    (Publisher)

  Whose New American Poetry? 15 The fourth group is that of the New York poets: John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and Frank O’Hara, who met at Harvard and migrated to Manhattan, where they in turn met Edward Field, Barbara Guest, and James Schuyler. This is of course the group allied with abstract expressionism. And finally, Allen isolates a fifth group of somewhat younger poets that “has no geographical definition.” Snyder and Whalen, allied to the Beats, are more properly placed here, as are Stuart Perkoff, Michael McClure, Ron Loewinsohn, Ray Bremser, David Meltzer, John Wieners, Edward Marshall, Gilbert Sorrentino, and LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka). Again, there are overlaps: Baraka was a close friend of O’Hara’s in New York and edited Yugen ; McClure was linked to the San Francisco Renaissance, and so on. As Allen says, his groups are “for the most part more historical than actual” and “can be justified finally only as a means to give the reader some sense of milieu.” Why should the publication of this relatively small anthology, comprised of forty-four then largely unknown poets, located primarily in New York, San Francisco, or, so to speak, “on the road,” become such a historical event? First, because in the early 1960s, there really was a dominant poetic discourse—a discourse, incidentally, that, from our vantage point in the nineties, was by no means that of the Modernism of the early century. In 1960, the age demanded that a poem be self-contained, coherent, and unified: that it present, indirectly to be sure, a paradox, oblique truth or special insight, utilizing the devices of irony, concrete imagery, symbolism, and structural economy. The paradigmatic poem was John Crowe Ransom’s “The Equilibrists,” or perhaps his “Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter.” The speaker was “dramatized”—a persona, whose relation to the poem’s author was “hidden”; the norm was show not tell , as Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren repeatedly pointed out in their Under-standing Poetry .

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  New York School

  • Irving Sandler(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  52

  Aside from fellow artists, the most enthusiastic supporters of the New York School were among the avant-gardes in the other arts: for example, Edgard Varèse, Stefan Wolpe, Virgil Thomson, John Cage, Morton Feldman, Lucia Dlugoszewski, and David Amram in music; Merce Cunningham, Merle Marsicano, Erik Hawkins, and Midi Garth in dance; in literature, Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler, Barbara Guest, and others who were so close to the artists that they came to be called the New York School of poets; Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, and Joel Oppenheimer, associated with Black Mountain College; and somewhat later in time, the Beat writers, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Gregory Corso.53

  It was natural for vanguard artists in every field to gravitate to the world of the New York School because the painters and sculptors were geographically concentrated and sufficiently organized to provide a potential audience. This they did, for they were open to fresh ideas in a way that the milieus for literature, music and dance of the time, dominated as they were by academic bores, were not. The art world also generated social and intellectual energies that made being in it exciting; poets, composers, and dancers often entered into artists’ perpetual dialogues, drawing sustenance for their own enterprises, and often contributing significantly to the artists’ thinking, particularly Cage, whose ideas will be discussed in full subsequently, and O’Hara, Ashbery, Guest, and Schuyler, all of whom wrote art criticism.

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  The New Wallace Stevens Studies

  • Bart Eeckhout, Gül Bilge Han(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  On Stevens’s side of the equa- tion, this neglect reinforces the distorted image of Stevens as a stuffy, backward-looking aesthete, devoted solely to abstraction and imagination, disdainful of the concrete, everyday realities so dear to the New York School, and perpetuates the notion that he has been of minimal import- ance to the avant-garde strain in American poetry. In what follows, I trace some of the reasons why Stevens’s influence on the New York School has been overlooked and misconceived and examine his importance not only to Ashbery but also to O’Hara, Schuyler, Guest, Koch, and members of the New York School’s second generation, like Ted Berrigan. Ultimately, this chapter will suggest that, for all their differences, Stevens and the New York School poets share a great deal: an obsession with painting and a passion for all things French; a delight in wordplay and the sensuous surfaces of language; an anti-foundational skepticism toward fixity in self, language, or idea; and, perhaps most of all, an embrace of the imagination and deep attraction to the surreal combined with a devotion to the ordinary and everyday. *** As I have suggested, most general assessments of the New York School stress that these young poets, like other New American poets, felt stifled by the poetic doctrines of Eliot and New Critical orthodoxy at mid-century Poetic Responses 163 and defiantly turned elsewhere, to alternative sources of inspiration – in their case, to the European avant-garde (Cubism, Dada, Surrealism, French, and Russian poetry); Abstract Expressionist painting; the vitality and absurdity of popular culture; and a lineage of American poets outside of the Eliotic canon, especially Whitman, Williams, Stevens, Stein, and Moore, along with early Auden. 4 While Stevens is mentioned in such tallies of influence, his importance is usually downplayed, except in the case of Ashbery.

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