The Second Generation of New York School Poets

The New York School of Poetry leaped into the North American literary scene in the 1950s and early 1960s. Some of the leading writers of that school were Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler. 

Writers from the first generation of New York School Poets (left to right:)
Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler

Ted Berrigan, a successor to those poets, pointed out that the New York School didn’t have a program or a manifesto, unlike other literary movements, such as Dadaism or Surrealism. What united the New York School poets was what they loved: spontaneity, urban and pop culture, and jagged juxtapositions of conversational and formal speech that often made a reader grin:

I had just finished the last chapter of my biography of the

Buddha, The Yoghurt and the Revolution, and I was GLAD to eat.

It was raining

your letter never arrived

    I opened it, though… 

 

—Frank O’Hara, “The Lunch Hour FYI”

That lighthearted, casual irreverence of the New York School contrasted sharply with the stuffy, often rhymed poetry that was common in wainscoted university English departments in the 1950s and early 1960s in the U.S.A.

In one sense, the trajectory of the New York School of poets was similar to many avant-gardes in the arts. 

It’s often not the founders of an artistic movement who make the best use of their own innovations, but the second generation or the fellow travelers who add emotional depth to a new style. Think of the Surrealist movement in France. The Surrealist Manifestos advocated for automatic writing, a method of purely spontaneous composition that didn’t allow for planning or editing. That Surrealist doctrine unearthed the dazzling imagery of the unconscious, but it didn’t leave much space for in-depth feeling. It wasn’t the creators of the Surrealist style who actually made the most of their aesthetic, but the poets who blended the hallucinatory images of automatic writing with deep emotion: Pablo Neruda, Robert Desnos, Federico García Lorca, and Joyce Mansour, for example. 

The New York School of Poetry followed a similar path. The first generation (Ashbery, O’Hara, etc.) showed that conversational language, humor, and collage could create fun and poignant effects. But toeing the Modernist party line often kept those poets from expressing emotion in a way that transcended fragmentary collage or glib, prosy diction.

The next wave of writers of the New York School went in two opposite directions. One group went even further toward fragmentation (the “Language poets” and their circle) and/or prosy diction (the East Village poets in the orbit of The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bouwerie). 

Personally, I’m more interested in a different group of poets who spun off from the New York School, the ones who took a more narrative turn. Those writers were influenced by the informal tone of the New York School and their embrace of pop culture, but they heightened the story or journal-like elements in that style. That group developed partly out of what Frank O’Hara called his “I do this, I do that” poems, works like his masterpiece, “The Day Lady Died,” that were almost a poetic diary. The more narrative group of second generation poets was also pulled in the direction of stand-up comedy—like poetry, stand-up involves a solo performer in front of an audience talking about personal topics, and stand-up evolved in New York. 

Those more narrative heirs of the New York School included Bill Zavatsky, Edward Field, Robert Hershon, and Alan Feldman (though he ultimately left the Big Apple for New England). To my mind, that second generation also includes women writers like Joan Larkin and Enid Dame, whose legacy can also be traced through feminist poetry. I’m using the term New York School loosely here, gathering under that wide roof a variety of writers in New York in the 1970s and 80s who were influenced by the first generation of the New York School.

Writers from the second generation of New York School Poets (left to right:)
Bill Zavatsky, Edward Field, Robert Hershon, Alan Feldman, Joan Larkin, Enid Dame

The second generation of New York School writers recounted experiences from daily life, but clayed them into a story or a theme, with compressed or imaginative diction that added the poet’s touch. Here’s an example:

 

Edward Field

The Statue of Liberty

All the ships are sailing away without me.

Day after day I hear their horns announcing

To the wage earners at their desks

That it is too late to get aboard.

They steam out of the harbor

With the statue of a French woman waving them good-by

Who used to be excellent to welcome people with

But is better lately for departures.

The French gave her to us as a reminder

Of their slogan and our creed

Which hasn’t done much good

Because we have turned a perfectly good wilderness

Into a place nice to visit but not to live in.

Forever a prisoner in the harbor

On her star-shaped island of gray stones

She has turned moldy-looking and shapeless

And her bronze drapery stands oddly in the wind.

From this prison-like island

I watch the ships sailing away without me

Disappearing one by one, day after day,

Into the unamerican distance,

And in my belly is one sentence: Set Freedom Free,

As the years fasten me into place and attitude,

Hand upraised and face into the wind

That no longer brings tears to my eyes. 

Amazingly, Edward Field published this prophetic poem in 1963 (in his collection Stand up, Friend, with Me). It’s a New York School poem not only because of its setting, but because it sandwiches popular culture, quotidian life, and a sophisticated viewpoint. The speaker expresses the thought that the ideals of American and French freedom have faded in the current era. I love the idea that the Statue of Liberty is a French woman. I also admire the ending, where the speaker is no longer even able to shed tears for the foregone loss of nature and freedom in his homeland. Edward Field uses the word “unamerican,” a reference to the House Un-American Activities Committee of the U.S. Congress, which was then conducting a witch-hunt into left-wing movements (sound familiar?). But the poet disarms the word “unamerican” by depriving it of its capital letters and by satirically using it to describe anywhere outside the United States. The “star-shaped island” suggests the stars in the U.S. flag, but also Hollywood stars, who became icons of another kind of liberty. With all those touches, Edward Field gave this poem heart and complexity. 

One thing I appreciate about Edward Field’s “The Statue of Liberty” is that it shows how the second generation of New York School poets transformed the first generation’s aesthetic. Many of the second generation of New York School poets deepened the movement by adding to its breezy, direct diction by applying multiple layers of narrative, meaning, and emotion.

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Zack’s new book of poetry, The Kama Sutra for Senior Citizens and Other Poems on Aging. Order in the USA    Order in the UK

Zack’s most recent translation: The Water Drinkers and Other Sketches of Paris in the Romantic Era by Henry Murger

Other posts of interest:

How to Get Published

Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout

Putting Together a Book Manuscript

Working with a Writing Mentor

How to Deliver Your Message

Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?

Why Write Poetry?

Poetic Forms: Introduction, the Sonnet, the Sestina, the Ghazal, the Tanka, the Villanelle

Praise and Lament

How to Be an American Writer

Writers and Collaboration

Types of Closure in Poetry

Great Writing Stirs the Whole Body

My literary mentor was June Jordan, the most dynamic reader of poetry I’ve ever heard. June was a poet, essayist, opera librettist, and political activist. Listening to June recite her work was a physical experience—I laughed, I fought back tears, I literally got goose bumps of excitement.

June Jordan (1936–2002)

I think the Greek philosopher Aristotle was referring to a similar feeling in his Poetics when he talked about catharsis, the sensation that the audience experiences in watching a tragedy in the theater. The word catharsis comes from the ancient Greek verb kathairein, meaning to purge or to purify or to cleanse. When we experience deep tragedy on stage or in a movie, our entire body feels wrung out, cleansed—but in an uplifting way.

Interestingly, the word catarrh in English, meaning a cold with phlegm, derives from exactly the same Greek verb. I still remember when I read the tragic ending of Ernest Hemingway’s antiwar novel A Farewell to Arms as a teenager, I spontaneously burst into tears, and I had to blow my nose many times. It was a direct physical sensation.

Great literature can also evoke laughter, which is very much a physical sensation. There is certainly something cathartic about humor, the way it releases what’s bottled up in us. Maybe laughter is the way that we let go of grief. I remember as a young man attending my grandfather’s funeral. After the ceremony at the gravesite, the family drove in several cars to my uncle and aunt’s house for a reception. This is going to be the saddest event of my life, I thought. What actually happened is that family members told one funny story after another about my grandfather—in between the tears. The humor helped us all to feel close again to my grandfather and to recover from the loss. The same is true in literature—laughter is a way for the body to release the grief locked in our bones and tissues.

You could say that the reader also feels erotic literature in the body. That’s certainly another type of physical response to writing. Reading Pablo Neruda’s poem “Barcarole,” is an erotic experience for me, for example. But just because a poem is arousing doesn’t necessarily make it great writing.

This points up an interesting aspect of all writing that affects the body—feeling literature in the body is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for great writing. It also has to be well crafted and use language in a way that artfully transfers meaning. But there’s no mistaking the best literature, because we feel it in our whole body.


Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies
Zack’s most recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry

The Unwritten Pact between a Writer and a Reader

Most books of fiction or poetry involve an unwritten pact between the writer and the reader. That pact takes the form of an understanding that the reader develops based on the tone and topic of the book; the title and early chapters or poems; and the cover, genre, and publicity for the book. Based on all those, the reader develops certain expectations.

For example, the tone of a book could seem romantic, such as a book that has the word “love” in its title: Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair by Pablo Neruda, for instance. Or, if a book is classified as a mystery, such as Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, we are prepared for a certain amount of blood, since there will probably be a violent murder. As likely as not, more than one.

Readers often choose a book because they are in the mood for a romance, or a thriller, a mystery, or a historical novel, so if the author varies greatly from the initial expectations, the reader can feel cheated, bored, shocked, or betrayed. Readers have their threshold for how much they want of violence, sex, philosophy, romance, etc. One of the surest ways for a writer to lose a reader before the end of a book is to violate the unwritten pact that s/he has made with the reader.

When I was listening to the audiobook of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, I was prepared for there to be some gore. What’s a mystery without a body? But the type of sadistic rape/murders in this book took me by surprise. I thought this was going to be more of an English-style mystery with quirky characters and a detective with a loveably eccentric personality who turns out to be uniquely suited to solve the crime. But the farther I got into the plot, the more I realized this book was about a team of sadistic rapist-murderers who commit the most violent and sick acts, not once, not twice, but over and over. I did something I never do when I’m reading a book—I gave up only twenty pages from the end, because I couldn’t stomach one more drop of blood. Essentially I felt betrayed by the author. I had been lured into a world that seemed relatively in balance except for a random crime, but that world turned out to include a cascade of horrible and almost unstoppable atrocities.

It may be an author’s Weltanschauung that the world is endlessly violent and cruel, and who am I to second-guess anyone’s worldview? But it did feel to me as if the author of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo had violated a pact with me as a reader. Yes, the author has an obligation to make a statement, and also to surprise the reader. But in my opinion that surprise cannot go so far that the reader feels cheated out of the type of experience they were led to believe the book would provide. I think we as authors have to be sensitive to a reader’s expectations, not to coddle the reader, but we do have to deliver what we promised.

_________________________________

Zack’s new book of poetry, The Kama Sutra for Senior Citizens and Other Poems on Aging. Order in the USA    Order in the UK

Zack’s most recent translation: The Water Drinkers and Other Sketches of Paris in the Romantic Era by Henry Murger

Other posts of interest:

How to Get Published

Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout

Putting Together a Book Manuscript

Working with a Writing Mentor

How to Deliver Your Message

Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?

Why Write Poetry?

Poetic Forms: Introduction, the Sonnet, the Sestina, the Ghazal, the Tanka, the Villanelle

Praise and Lament

How to Be an American Writer

Writers and Collaboration

Types of Closure in Poetry

In Memory of Marcelijus Martinaitis (1936–2013)

In 2013 the world lost a great poet: Marcelijus Martinaitis. His writing contained a rare concoction of laugh-out-loud humor, and agonizing poignancy. There are few poets who can hold those two opposites together long enough and close enough to capture them in a poem. It makes perfect sense that Martinaitis is a translator into Lithuanian of Chilean Nobel Laureate Pablo Neruda, another poet who could fuse those opposites.

Marcelijus Martinaitis

Martinaitis authored at least fifteen collections of poetry. He also played a leading role in Lithuania’s movement for independence from the Soviet bloc, including getting elected to the Supreme Soviet to advocate for his nation’s freedom. His poems about his Lithuanian version of Everyman, Kukitis, were recited and sung during the Sajudis movement that finally gained independence for Lithuania in 1991, after 46 years of Soviet occupation. Those poems were published in the book The Ballads of Kukitis, issued by Arc Publications, and beautifully translated by writer and poet Laima Vince. And Lithuanian is no stroll in the park to translate—it’s an old-school language with more cases and declensions than ancient Greek.

It was after the fall of the pro-Soviet regime in Lithuania that Martinaitis’ subtlety as a poet emerged even more strongly. In his book K.B. The Suspect, with Laima Vince doing the translation honors again, and published by White Pine Press, Martinaitis explores the complex terrain of a country liberated from occupation but still reeling from decades of secret police repression. The Vilnius that the character of K.B. inhabits is a city where ghosts of former dukes coexist with hoboes who sort through dumpsters at night, scavengers whom Martinaitis called “the trash angels.”

Here’s a poem from K.B. The Suspect:

K.B.: About the Hidden Mirror

by Marcelijus Martinaitis

I was permitted inside the room of the hidden mirror.

Time flew backwards at an alarming rate,

and afterwards forwards.

I saw reflected in the mirror images

a few days old, months old, years old.

They materialized before me

then crumbled into dust and decay.

I myself materialized again and again

in ways I hadn’t been for a long time.

Time was falling apart.

I could watch how I was disappearing:

an infant, a teenager, a young man,

a soldier in uniform, a lover in a car

huddled against a woman,

walking a dog, surrounded by well-wishers,

and almost the way I am now, like the day before yesterday—

none of it coherent,

an endless chain of losing myself.

Finally,

I met with the present—

I reunited with my true reflection,

the one that can’t see itself.

(translation copyright © 2004 by Laima Vince)

I love that final irony at the end! The speaker of the poem can view right before him every moment of his life from the beginning, but the one moment he can’t pierce is the present. Irony is the dark bread of life in Eastern Europe, so it’s no accident that some of the masters of that mode have sprouted there, from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to Milan Kundera to Wislawa Szymborska.

Other recent posts about writing topics: 
How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka
How to Be an American Writer