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

How Long Does It Take to Finish a Piece of Writing?

It could take a few minutes to finish a work of literature, and it could take a few decades. It depends in part on your method of composition, and the texture of the text you’re weaving. (Both text and texture come from the Latin verb texere, to weave.) It also depends on how prepared you are to embark on the project you’ve selected.

One method of composition that the writer finishes rapidly is automatic writing, a technique invented by André Breton and the French surrealists.

 

Members of the surrealist group in Paris. André Breton is third from the left.

In automatic writing, the author dreams onto the page, allowing the subconscious to dictate to the hand. The writer deliberately attempts to write faster than s/he can think, letting the deepest parts of the mind create a spontaneous cascade of images:

And as a

Little girl

Caught in a bellows of sparkles

You jump rope

Long enough so that the one green butterfly that haunts the peaks of Asia

Can appear at the top of the invisible stairway

I caress everything that was you

In everything that’s yet to be you

André Breton, “I dream I see you endlessly superimposed upon yourself,” from The Air of the Water, in Earthlight, translated by Bill Zavatsky and Zack Rogow

In this poem, Breton creates a dreamlike collage of his beloved at various moments in her life, layering each sequence on the next. To generate an image such as “You jump rope/Long enough so that the one green butterfly that haunts the peaks of Asia/Can appear at the top of the invisible stairway,” no amount of editing or rewriting is of use. Only the first-take, last-take method of writing, where the author doesn’t stanch the mind’s spring of creativity, is effective. Scholars have gone over Breton’s drafts and found that he edited very little. Ben Jonson famously said of the legend that Shakespeare never blotted a line of his scripts, “Would he had blotted a thousand!” Maybe Breton should have edited his writings more. But when the spontaneous method of composition works, it produces a unique and loose weave of language, an amazing texture that a more laborious method usually can’t reproduce. This is the few-minutes version of finishing a poem.

But there are other types of writing that require a much more time-consuming process. James Joyce reportedly took 17 years to write Finnegans Wake, and there is a story that he was still making edits until the publisher’s messenger snatched the overdue manuscript out of his hands. Elizabeth Bishop’s book The Complete Poems: 1927–1979 is all of 287 pages, meaning she only produced an average of one page of poetry every two months. 

Elizabeth Bishop

Certain types of writing just can’t be done quickly, because the texture of language requires a very tight weave that can only be accomplished with many drafts, and much revision:

The big fish tubs are completely lined

with layers of beautiful herring scales

and the wheelbarrows are similarly plastered

with creamy iridescent coats of mail,

with small iridescent flies crawling on them.

Elizabeth Bishop, “At the Fishhouses”

Bishop’s exquisite description of the Favrile surfaces of the wheelbarrows does not seem like a momentary inspiration, but rather a meticulous accumulation of precise details combined with le mot juste, a carefully chosen phrase such as “plastered” or “coats of mail.” That’s the kind of writing that takes many drafts.

Another reason that a work of literature may need a long time to complete is that we often come up with ideas before we have the skill and knowledge to realize them. More than once, I’ve had the experience of rereading a poem I published decades before, and seeing that I had had a genuine impulse behind the poem, but I hadn’t gotten it right. The diction or the imagery or the ending weren’t quite what the original idea was pleading for. With more years of experience, I was able to revise a poem that I thought was complete, but really needed one or two more drafts.

So, how long does it take to finish a piece of writing? That’s a bit like asking how long it takes to fall in love. It might happen with a moment’s encounter, or it might be decades in the making.

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

Writers and Collaboration, Part 3: Writers Working Together—Breton’s Earthlight

In the first two blogs in this series, I’ve talked about collaborations where an artist, such as an illustrator or composer, interprets the work of a writer. I’ve also discussed projects where a writer repurposes text already written, for instance, turning a poem into a children’s picture book.

In this post I’m going to talk about two or more writers working together to create a new work. One area where I’ve done this quite a bit is literary translation.

The first book that I translated was a collaboration with writer/translator Bill Zavatsky. 

It’s a funny story how this collaboration began. In the late 1970s, I was a young poet just starting out, living in New York City. Bill Zavatsky was a relatively established writer—two books of Bill’s poems were in print and he was the publisher of two literary magazines, Sun, and Roy Rogers. The latter was a wild child of Sun for special projects such as the memorable 100-page issue devoted entirely to one-line poems.

I was a totally unknown writer (mostly I still am!), living in a fifth-floor walkup in the East Village with a bathtub in the kitchen. At the time, I was going out with another poet, a woman named Susan, who was taking a creative writing workshop with Bill Zavatsky at the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church. I was translating early poems by the French surrealist, André Breton, because I loved them, and because I wanted to hear what Breton’s unbridled stream of consciousness sounded like in American English.

Susan knew that Bill had an interest in Breton and she urged me to send a few of my translations to Bill for publication in his magazine, Sun. I did. Months went by. I heard nothing.

Then in the summer of 1977, Susan and I crashed a publication party at the Gotham Book Mart on West 47^th Street, ironically in the heart of the diamond district where Hassidic jewelers sold stones for engagement rings. I think the book being launched that day was John Ashbery’s poetry collection Houseboat Days. I knew almost no one at the party (certainly not John Ashbery!) There were a few familiar faces, as anonymous as mine, but Susan spotted Bill Zavatsky in the crowd. I was too shy to talk to him—after all, Bill actually was chatting with John Ashbery. Susan literally pushed me to approach Bill about my Breton translations.

I did talk with Bill, and to my amazement, the reason he hadn’t gotten back to me about my translations was not because he hated them, but because he had been extremely busy. Bill suggested that since he was also translating poems from the same period in Breton’s work, we should collaborate on translating a book of Breton’s poetry.

A lesson here for less established poets—you may have more to bring to a collaboration than you think. Although Bill was a widely published poet, editor, and translator, he had not studied French for as many years as I had or spent as much time in France. I did have something to bring to the mix. We also had a similar vision of creating a version of Breton informed by the language of the Beat Generation and the New York School writers who had been influenced by the surrealists. (Read Breton’s poem “Free Union” and then Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” and you’ll see what I mean.)

Bill and I set about to translate roughly two hundred pages of Breton’s collection Earthlight (Clair de terre), including many of the surrealist’s best poems. For me, the collaboration was an apprenticeship. Bill was the older and more experienced poet and he brought a wealth of knowledge about the practice of translation that I learned a great deal from. He was also more widely read. 

Bill Zavatsky

But for Bill, I think it was useful to have someone on the team who had a firm grounding in French grammar, vocabulary, and culture, and could say, “Breton is probably referring to the town of Pont-à-Mousson because most of the manhole covers in Paris are made in that town and are stamped with that name.”

Collaborations between writers are not symmetrical. If every writer brought the same set of skills, we wouldn’t need to collaborate. Different writers bring different knowledge to the mix. On the other hand, there has to be some common ground for the writers to compromise and enjoy one another’s work.

Bill and I worked on the translation of Breton’s Earthlight off and on for seventeen years. Through many vicissitudes, we always kept our vision for the book in sight. When Earthlight finally appeared in print for the first time in 1994, it won the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Award, which at that time was the annual prize for the best translation into English.

I’m excited to announce that our translation of Earthlight by André Breton has just been re-released by Black Widow Press. The new edition not only includes the French text en face for the first time, it has an updated introduction and notes that Bill contributed, incorporating the latest scholarship from France on Breton and his sources.

I’m delighted to see the book finally published as Bill and I had first imagined it forty years ago. This edition is bilingual with extensive notes to provide background on Breton’s encyclopedic interest in the occult, politics, botany, zoology, art, and history, and the way they infused his wild and passionate poetry.

My collaboration with Bill Zavatsky not only led to the publication of Earthlight, it was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

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

Why It's So Difficult to Write about Dreams

Many great works of literature have been inspired by dreams, or dream-like visions. Two of my favorites are Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem “Kubla Khan: or, A Vision in a Dream: A Fragment” and Gabriela Mistral’s “The Flower of Air,” (“La Flor de aire”) just to name a couple. There are great poems and works of prose that recount dreams, but in general, for me, most pieces of creative writing based closely on actual dreams fail to recreate the magic that the vision had for the writer. Why?

Self-portrait collage by André Breton

I’ll give you an example. A couple of nights ago I went to sleep with the thought on my mind that I wanted to write something about dreams. I had a long and often interrupted dream that I kept returning to, a dream that concerned writing. There was a phrase that I and the other characters in the dream kept repeating: “Kicking the wall so hard, the paint falls.” I remember someone, maybe me, actually kicking a door in the dream, and chips of red paint breaking off of it. This phrase and action were supposed to summarize in a nutshell all the great teachings of an important literary figure, someone who was my mentor in the dream.

Well, I don’t think you’ll be surprised that when I woke up, that phrase turned out not to be as profound or as earth shattering as it seemed in my dream. In fact, it doesn’t make an awful lot of sense. It has something to do with anger—the kicking—and anger as a force for change, or at least for damaging the status quo.

The difficulty in conveying the depth and urgency of a dream to a reader is that the dream seems to supply its own highly charged message and saturated color. When the dreamer recounts the action and tries to depict that aura for a reader, it rarely has quite the same profundity or significance. It’s like having a conversation where one person has the light behind them, and sees the other person in all dimensions and in full color, while the other person is looking into the light, and sees only a vague outline of the person they are talking to. The dreamer sees the dream clearly, with all its perspective and vibrancy, while the reader only sees a silhouette and is irritated at having to try to make out all the obscure details.

There are times when dreams can be the basis of good literature, but this sometimes works best when the writer is aware that dreams are notoriously unreliable in their claims of depth. I’m thinking, for instance, of the surrealist André Breton’s prose poems entitled “Five Dreams” from his book Earthlight, which I co-translated with Bill Zavatsky. Even though Breton was one of the first writers to offer a blow-by-blow description of his dreams as literature, he seemed to know intuitively that dreams were by nature best recounted with a grain of salt. Here’s an excerpt from the fourth of his “Five Dreams”:

“A part of my morning had been spent conjugating a new tense of the verb to be—because a new tense of the verb to be had just been invented. In the course of the afternoon I had written an article that, as far as I can remember, I found shallow but fairly brilliant. A little later I went back to work on a novel I was writing. This last enterprise had led me to do some research in my library. This soon led to the discovery of a work in octavo, composed of several volumes, that I didn’t know I owned. I opened one of them at random. The book claimed to be a philosophical treatise, but in one section, instead of Logic or Ethics, the heading read: Enigmatic. The text completely escapes me, I have only the memory of illustrations invariably rep­resenting an eccle­siastical or mythological character in the middle of an immense waxed room that looked like the Apollo Gallery [in the Versailles Palace].”

Breton is recounting a dream that almost has the quality of a revelation: he discovers a new tense of the verb to be and a mysterious lost treatise on philosophy. But he still is not willing to make any claim of profundity for his revelations—he finds his own article “shallow but fairly brilliant.” And the new volume of philosophy is called, fittingly, Enigmatic, and offers not universal pronouncements but only strange illustrations. The truths we come upon in dreams may be lightning bolts, Breton seems to be saying, but appreciate the irony and humor in the reality that the more they claim to be extremely profound, the more they give us mostly puzzles.
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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

André Breton and the Surrealist Movement

André Breton’s life is practically an intellectual and artistic history of his time, since he knew and interacted with so many of the major figures of his era: Picasso, Dalí, Rivera, Kahlo, Trotsky, Aragon, Eluard, Man Ray, Ernst, Duchamp, Magritte, Sartre, Camus—the list is almost endless. Breton’s life is in many ways a microcosm of his entire generation, just as Emma Goldman’s Living My Life is a capsule of the generation before him, or George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia totals up the political lessons of an entire historical period.

André Breton

Thinking about the historical currents that collided to produce Surrealism in the mid-1920s, I can’t help comparing them to the events of the 1960s, a period so formative for my generation. At both times there was a bloody and unpopular war that was supported by most of the leaders of the parties of the Right and the Left, leaving the younger generation to create their own alternative culture.

World War I was far more immediate to Breton’s peers than Vietnam was to most of mine: Breton was an army doctor during the war and saw the wounded and dying in military hospitals firsthand. The war was fought on his country’s soil, and there were many more casualties. Surrealist automatic writing began when Breton started to transcribe the mutterings of shell-shocked victims of trench warfare.

For the cohort that came of age during World War I, there was the same sense that the hippies had that all of “the establishment” had sold out the younger generation, and that the entire culture that had allowed this endless massacre to occur was tainted. That’s why the absurdity, fantasy, and passion of Surrealism had such an incredible pull for me and my friends in college. Reading Breton in our twenties in the early 1970s, it seemed to us that he had already lived through our time and had found the words and hallucinatory imagery to describe the indescribable reality that we woke up to every day. Breton had, in a sense, done the sixties better than they had done themselves. In his love poem, “In the beautiful half-light of 1934” he wrote:

But the earth was filled with reflections deeper than those in water

As if metal had finally shaken off its shell

And you lying on the frightening ocean of precious gems

Were turning

Naked

In a huge sun of fireworks

I saw you slowly evolving from the radiolarians

            (from Earthlight, translated by Bill Zavatsky and Zack Rogow)

If this isn’t “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” taken to the umpteenth power, then I’m Lyndon Johnson. This prefiguring of our experience was more than metaphorical. Toward the end of this life, Breton actually became one of the first French intellectuals to protest his own country’s involvement in the Vietnam War in 1947.

Breton’s lifelong quest for an independent, progressive path reflects one of the great stories of the twentieth century. Like so many intellectuals of his generation, he tried to create a revolutionary alternative to the stratified society that had caused the tidal wave of blood called the First World War. The Surrealist movement was torn apart, though, partly by disagreements over whether the Soviet Union’s Communist state provided an acceptable model for the new society these young intellectuals envisioned. There was an unbridgeable gap between those who felt that support for Stalinism was the only viable alternative to the growing threat of Nazi Germany, and those like Breton who saw the dictatorship of the Communist Party as just as much of a threat to the psychic freedom that Surrealism celebrated. Breton came to mistrust the Soviet Union and its backers through his attempts to work closely with the French Communist Party, and even through a brief stint as a member, when for some unknown reason he was assigned to a cell of utility employees from a gasworks, itself a Surrealist moment. As Breton aged and saw the search for a new society overwhelmed by yet another world war, he turned increasingly to internationalism and to the rising power of women as solutions to social problems. This new political philosophy is the topic of his prose poem/memoir/meditation, Arcanum 17.

Breton later in life

To me, Breton’s major contribution as a poet is that he used the “convulsive beauty” of his imagery to smash the Petrarchan obsession with the poetry of unrequited love. Breton is the great voice of the romance of physical love, and the physicality of romantic love:

I caress everything that was you

In everything that’s yet to be you

I hear the melodious hissing

Of your limitless limbs

            (“I dream I see you endlessly superimposed upon yourself”

            from Earthlight, translated by Bill Zavatsky and Zack Rogow)

It’s very easy to get caught up in the political twists and turns that the Surrealist movement took in the course of its history and to forget its artistic contributions. While Breton tried very hard to play a role as the leader of an independent revolutionary group, he was actually a klutz politically. Inflexible by nature (he was often called the Pope of Surrealism), Breton had no notion of how to compromise or form coalitions. He was so intransigent with even his own followers that he ended up expelling almost all of them from Surrealism in ugly inquisitions that often ended with the victim being jeered out of the room by former friends. This was the penalty for violating the oddly strict norms of freewheeling Surrealism. Members of the Surrealist group were required to attend their café meetings every evening; they could not publish fiction (the poet Aragon was harassed into burning a fifteen-hundred page novel manuscript by his comrades); nor could they make their living as journalists.

Could it be that Breton imposed such stringent commandments on his fellow Surrealists because he intuited that the movement had the potential to become just another artistic style, rather than a force to transform the world? In fact. Surrealism has become the language of commercial music videos in our own day. For all its advocacy of love and freedom. the Surrealist movement was actually a cult. It was a cult, though, whose members were among the most creative artists of the twentieth century.

The more one learns about Breton’s Robespierrist grip on the Surrealist movement, the more one comes to dislike Breton for the pain he caused those he expelled. I believe that Breton deserves credit, though, for being highly principled, for opposing fascism and Stalinism as soon as he saw their natures. And Breton’s extreme anti‑clericalism is refreshing in this decade when everyone seems to be rediscovering the wonders of teaching their kids Bible stories they never believed. But ultimately. to judge Andre Breton on his accomplishments in politics is like judging Bill Clinton on what he has contributed to the art of the saxophone, or to gauge Winston Churchill’s impact on history by his influence on landscape painting. Breton’s legacy is his writings, and he was one of the most radiant and funny and inspiring writers of the 20th century.

Andre Breton’s story is, after all, an extraordinary one. His life began in the provinces as the son of an obscure police clerk and a rigid, self‑righteous mother. Sent to medical school, he still managed to develop an interest in poetry. By age twenty-eight, André Breton had made himself the leader of the most influential art movement in the world.

That story is remarkable enough. But the second half of the plot is, in a way, even more unusual. Having risen to the head of an avant‑garde movement that prided itself on flinging aside all the conventions of traditional art, Breton never caged himself by performing the same dry experiments over and over. With each new work he created new forms. Within a few years of inventing automatic writing, Surrealism’s technique for unearthing the Unconscious, Breton largely abandoned it except as a source for the shattering images that he used in his poems. He finally tapped that source of imagery to write some of the most remarkable love poetry ever constructed. Throughout his life. Breton’s political views continued to develop organically, always in pursuit of his goal that daily life needed to be “re-impassioned.” He was the leading spokesperson of his generation for a visionary transformation of society that would steer the imagination right down the main street of daily life. “The imaginary,” wrote Breton, “is what tends to become real.”

Zack Rogow is the co-translator with Bill Zavatsky of André Breton's collection of poetry Earthlight, and the translator of Breton's book Arcanum 17.

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

AWP highlights for Friday, March 8, 2013

Here are my very personal and individual picks for this day at the conference of the Associated Writers and Writing Programs (AWP).

10:30 a.m. to 11:45 a.m.

Room 108, Plaza Level

F138. Role and Impact of International Anthologies. (Kaveh Bassiri, Kevin Prufer, Nathalie Handal, Geoffrey Brock, Pierre Joris) I’m interested in international literature, and this panel features important anthologists.

Room 200, Level 2

F142. Essaying the Essay. (David Lazar, Phillip Lopate, David Shields, Lia Purpura, Reda Bensmaïa) Good panel, good readers, good topic.

Room 201, Level 2

F143. Books in the Age of Reader-centric Publishing. (Buzz Poole, Lisa Pearson, Richard Nash, Matvei Yankelevich, Elizabeth Koch) This topic is the elephant in the room that no one wants to talk about—what’s happening to literary publishing in the age of the ebook.

Room 302/304, Level 3

F152. Why There Are Words Literary Reading Series Showcases Boston Writers. (Peg Alford Pursell, Christopher Castellani, Tracy Winn, Pablo Medina, Joan Wickersham) This is a wonderful San Francisco Bay Area series, transported to Boston by its able curator, Peg Alford Pursell. The theme is that each reader only reads for seven minutes, which psychologists claim is the time of a listener’s maximum attention to one voice.

Room 305, Level 3

F154. Things We Know We Love: The Poems and Influence of Nâzim Hikmet. (Randy Blasing, Mutlu Konuk Blasing, David Wojahn, Dorianne Laux, Zack Rogow, Sidney Wade) Nazim Hikmet is one of the great poets of the last century, and this is an important moment to make his poetry known to the wider audience it deserves.

Room 306, Level 3

F155. Page Meets Stage. (Taylor Mali, Martín Espada, Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Reginald Gibson) More good readers from this renowned series based in Manhattan.

12:30 to 1:20 p.m.

Book signing with Eva Saulitis at the Red Hen Press booth. Eva Saulitis published both a book of poems, Many Ways to Say It; and a book of nonfiction about her work as a whale biologist, Into Great Silence, all in the last few months. She will also be signing Saturday at Red Hen from 11:30 to 12:30.

Noon to 1:15 p.m.

Room 202, Level 2

F173. How to Build a Successful Kickstarter Campaign for Your Publishing Project. (Meaghan O’Connell, Benjamin Samuel, Mat Honan, Joshua Mandelbaum, Laurie Ochoa) Useful! Useful is good.

Room 210, Level 2

F180. The Urge Toward Memoir. (Elisabeth Schmitz, Jill Kneerim, Michael Thomas, Jeanette Winterson, Lily King) Good group of panelists, interesting topic—novelists writing memoirs.

Room 303, Level 3

F182. How to Catch a Pair of Flying Hands: A Reading by Deaf Writers. (Raymond Luczak, Kristen Harmon, Allison Polk, Kristen Ringman) A worthwhile topic I’ve never seen before at AWP. Good title, too.

1:30 to 2:45 p.m.

Room 204, Level 2

F204. What Poets Learn When They Translate. (Zack Rogow, Idra Novey, Chana Bloch, Bill Zavatsky) Shameless self-promotion.

Room 302/304, Level 3

F210. A Centenary Celebration of Muriel Rukeyser, Sponsored by Paris Press. (Jan Freeman, Galway Kinnell, Sharon Olds, Olga Broumas, Michael S. Harper) Who scheduled my panel at the same time as this event? Muriel Rukeyser, well worth honoring.

Hynes Ballroom, Level 3

F220. Cave Canem Prize Winners, Then and Now. (Alison Meyers, Major Jackson, Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, Tracy K. Smith, Iain Haley Pollock) Cave Canem is such a wonderful literary institution, this has to be good.

Room 107, Plaza Level

F226. A Tribute To Remy Charlip, 1929-2012. (Joshua Kryah, Erika Bradfield, Brian Selznick, Dan Hurlin) My son spent weeks when he would not go to sleep until I read him Remy Charlip’s Mother, Mother, I Feel Sick: Send for the Doctor, Quick, Quick, Quick. Remy was a terrific children’s writer and a terrific person.

4:30 to 5:45 p.m.

Veterans Memorial Auditorium, Level 2

F250. Alison Bechdel & Jeanette Winterson: A Reading and Conversation, Sponsored by Emerson College MFA. (Alison Bechdel, Jeanette Winterson, Elisabeth Schmitz) Jeanette Winterson, live, in person!

Room 202, Level 2

F263. Blue-collar College Students and the Creative Writing Degree. (Jerry Wemple, Lawrence Coates, Claire Lawrence) Class is a topic so rarely broached in discussions of creative writing programs.

7:00 to 9:00 p.m.

Offsite event: Hanging Loose Press authors reading. Community Church of Boston, 565 Boylston St., across from Copley Square Park. Great group of Hanging Loose readers featuring Robert Hershon and Bill Zavatsky, among others. Hanging Loose is one of my favorites of the small presses, and has some of the funniest and most moving authors.

8:30 to 10:00 p.m.

Veterans Memorial Auditorium, Level 2

F284. Amy Bloom & Richard Russo: A Reading and Conversation. (Leah Hager Cohen, Amy Bloom, Richard Russo) I’m a fan of Amy Bloom and I’ve never heard her read in person, so this is high on my list.

AWP LINKS:

AWP Boston 2013: What's New
Suggestions on How to Network at AWP
Highlights for Thursday, March 7, 2013
Highlights for Saturday, March 9, 2013

Zack Rogow will be reading at an offsite event at AWP on Wednesday, March 6 at 7:00 p.m. as part of the launch of Cornelius Eady's new chapbook/CD in the community room of Cambridge Cohousing, 175 Richdale Avenue in Cambridge MA. He'll also be speaking on two panels at AWP on Friday, March 8: Things We Know We Love: The Poems and Influence of Nazim Hikmet, from 10:30 to 11:45 a.m., room 305, Level 3; and  What Poets Learn When They Translate, from 1:30 to 2:45 p.m., room 204, level 2. He'll be signing copies of his latest book of poems, My Mother and the Ceiling Dancers, on Saturday, March 9, from noon to 1:15 at the Kattywompus Press table, booth 1111.

Other recent posts about writing topics: 

How to Get Published: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10
Putting Together a Book Manuscript, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7

Working with a Writing Mentor: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5
Why Write Poetry? Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4
Using Poetic Forms, Part 1: Introduction; Part 2: The Sonnet; Part 3, The Sestina;
Part 4, The Ghazal; Part 5, The Tanka
How to Deliver Your Message: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4