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

Interview with Poet Kip Zegers

For this blog, I interviewed the poet Kip Zegers, whose new book, A Room in the House of Time, was recently published by Dos Madres Press. I first got to know Kip when he was the coordinator of the Park Slope Food Coop in the late 1970s. Later we helped start a writing group together, the Slow Motion Poetry Collective. I’ve always found Kip’s thoughts eye-opening. 

Kip Zegers

Q. What craft issues do you feel you are still learning about as a poet? How do poets continue to polish their craft once they find a style that feels natural and authentic?

 
Kip Zegers: My sense is that techniques are what we figure out in order to write the next poem. After we have read a fair amount, and written, there are ways of going forward that we figure out to solve a problem. Some of these come from reading, others rise from the moment that drove us to work. One morning I was writing in my journal, and was holding a book in my other hand as I worked. Then I looked at what I was doing. I thought, Why am I holding Frank O’Hara in my otherwise empty hand? On that day, it was obvious that I had a question to answer and the style of that poem was new to me, as part of a brand new question. The poem turned out to be the final poem in A Room in the House of Time, and the book ends with O’Hara saying, “from here you find your own way home.” 

Q. You write movingly about your childhood and your family in A Room in the House of Time. It seems there were many silences in your family, going back generations. How do you use words to write about an absence of words, and how did that feel as a writer and family member to touch some of those previously unspoken stories? 

KZ: I began, in the 1970s, with family and neighborhood. There is a way that our lives spiral up and we see, climbing, or aging, the same material from a new angle. A line from a poem in this book imagines my parents, somewhere out of  time, having once more been the material for poetry. After my father says, “‘Is he finished with us, at last?’ She answers, ‘Still so wordy, such a talker,’ and now I see them sleeping, at rest.” These lines could not have come forth 10, 20, or 30 years ago. The poem seems to have let the parents go, and those last lines were a great pleasure to discover. But it turns out I was not finished, and now I have a new poem imagining my father in heaven. So to write about quiet folks, write about what they did, then find that there are after all a few quotes that come back to you, and finally, invent what you need to find out about. I learned that last from Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior. 

As to how it feels to write of this, I think of a line from George Oppen, whenever the mind rises even a little it is flooded with happiness. (I don’t know where those words are to be found; I live with them as true.) 

Q. Many of these poems evoke an older generation that has passed away. What can writers learn about their families and themselves by talking about elders who are already beyond hearing the author’s words?

KZ: If we are  not writing what we already know, if we are working with valid material, we may learn a long-elusive truth. And Emerson says in his essay “The Poet,” “Genius is the activity which repairs the decay of things.” I like that he is not talking about “a genius,” he is talking about such repair as part of an action, the action is genius. My first published poem, 1975, was about my uncle Aaron, family dentist who would not use Novocain, it was about trauma. I was stepping out of being the victim, and there was my own poem standing with Marge Piercy and Lucien Stryk in a magazine called New American and Canadian Poetry. One learns to be among the dead, to see the real shadows they cast, and be alive. I learned that I had an uncle who was both deeply flawed and a good man. 

Q. Some of the poems in your book deal with the current of emotions under the surface of the everyday, such as the poem “Daily.” Since there is a quality of sameness about everyday life, how do you as a poet make daily life resonate? How do you choose which details to highlight?

KZ: My own notion is that one does not choose details, one distrusts the abstract and goes on one’s nerve, as Frank O’Hara advised. “Daily” imagines a day in the life of my wife, who is a doctor/researcher at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. I was here on the porch while she was getting started for the day, something made me listen to the sounds from two rooms away, and I just began. Somewhere along the way I thought of praise, of the house and its things helping: “Home she finds / rice and chicken waiting, warming / as best they can.” Then I thought, all that is here is alive. My memory of this is that once I got the notion of praise, I had the details, they rose up, but lines like “as best they can,” or “when she leaves the garage closes its one eye / and waits,” are both false as realism and true to what I feel about her presence in our place. In this case, and often, choosing was not the issue: paying attention is what matters, and the poem became a gift to work with. However, I believe that if I invented the details the poem would have been false. 

Q. Some of the most moving poems in your collection relate to your career as a teacher of high school English and creative writing at Hunter College High School in New York City, where you were on the faculty for 33 years. How did your teaching deepen and provide material for your own writing? 

KZ: I have always been interested in daily life, in the ordinary, for if we want folks to love poetry, it helps if poetry loves them. The hard part is to get past copying, or as William Carlos Williams put it, “Plagiarizing nature,” to seeing, to perceiving.

What I care about in the work of Thoreau is the unity in his life, the staying home because home is the true place, and his endless desire to know. You can learn in a place where you belong. 

Once I’d been teaching for a while, I made a poem about that work, that grew into work about life in that building, and both in New York City. I have a full length book, The Pond in Room 318, that explores this work. The poems of school went from portraits, to poems of place, to poems of deeper questions. As I did my teaching. I like to think that the poems and my teaching grew up together. They went from Wow, these kids, to These kids in New York, to Look what we are doing here! There is a piece in this book titled “Up,” which remembers a girl creating out of math anxiety, and the words of a boy writing about his weird family and his weird life as a middling student. What still moves me is the words, “these / of those who stood inside the difficult / and spoke.” “alchemists for real / making precious from the raw.” I was lucky to have a job to grow in; it might be that one's own growth makes new possibility for the kids. I was fortunate in meeting kids who stood up inside the difficult.  But maybe not. 

My bedrock is best expressed by George Oppen in his long poem, “Route” part 2: “There is a force of clarity, it is / Of what is not autonomous in us,” the idea that we are each part of all, that part of us and part of things (here of certain kids) connect. I did not really know the secret lives of kids, I did know our connection.

Much of who we are is autonomous, our fears and neuroses, but part of us is also warm and alive and connects. I like best the phrase of the philosopher Jacques Maritain, we have an “Illuminating intelligence,” a kind of intuition that makes it possible to connect to the things of our world. 

Kip Zegers is from Chicago, educated in Catholic schools, and later at John Carroll University, Northwestern University, Union Theological Seminary (he dropped out to be a conscientious  objector), and Hunter College (teacher training). Zegers has published numerous chapbooks and full-length poetry books, the last three from Dos Madres Press: The Poet of Schools, The Pond in Room 318, and A Room in the House of Time.

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

Other posts on 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, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout, Part 6

One thing that’s vital in sustaining your career as a writer is to keep a balance between your engagement with the world, and your distance from it. Virginia Woolf famously argued that “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction…” By that I think Woolf meant that a writer needs solitude and time to create, two things that are extremely difficult without money and space. 

                                           Virginia Woolf

Solitude and time are often hard to come by in a world filled with jobs, debts, searching for jobs, crowded housing, children, aging parents, problematic relationships, health challenges, and so many other important things to pay attention to. Giving yourself and getting the time to work on your writing is sometimes a matter of complex negotiation with your boss, or your loved ones, or yourself—sometimes the most difficult person to work out a deal with. We risk being accused of selfishness if we demand time for our writing, at the expense of any of our other commitments. There is no easy way to cross this narrow log over the rushing stream. You just have to keep your footing and look straight ahead at the opposite bank.

But distance from the world is not the only thing important to a writer. Immersion in the world is equally important for an author. The things that may be pulling you away from your writing today will be the material for your work in a few years, whether it’s the ones you love, or used to love, or would like to love if only they’d realize how much they need you. It could also be a political cause, your students, or the neighbor you shop for occasionally—all the ways you are knotted to the world are important, both on their own and for your soul as a writer. As Ezra Pound says in ABC of Reading, “More writers fail from lack of character than from lack of intelligence.” And he should know, right? Pound was notorious for being a great stylist with a feeble sense of humanity. Any engagement with the world that builds your character and your soul can ultimately be good for your writing, even if it takes away from your writing time in the short run. 

It is possible to go too far into the room of one’s own, to become so involved in one’s own thoughts and struggles that engagement from the world is weakened. Writers are seekers, aren’t we? Seekers of truth and beauty. But not all seekers are writers, not by a long shot. We’ve all known writers and/or seekers, talented and sensitive souls, whose knots to the world become unraveled because they have gone too deeply into their own thoughts, and their own internal worlds. It’s a real danger, particularly for writers who are among the most visionary and daring, since their minds crave that solitary and unique undersea world of the imagination. It’s best to dive into that world for limited times, to come up for air occasionally, and not resurface too quickly. There is such a thing as getting the bends from a literary standpoint, or having your lifeline cut, and humans can’t live long in the domain of chameleon squids and bioluminescent fish.

That balance between immersion in the world and distance looks different for each person. The Japanese poet Yosano Akiko raised eleven children and helped found a school for girls, but she was still able to write more than 20,000 tanka poems and eleven books of prose, not to mention translate the classic Tale of Genji into contemporary Japanese. For Yosano Akiko, deep immersion in the world was what she needed to harvest the material for her writing. 

                        Yosano Akiko (holding baby) and her family

The poet Frank O’Hara was known for writing his poems in crowded cafes, surrounded by chattering friends. 

                                             Frank O'Hara (left) and friends

For a writer such as the French novelist Marcel Proust, the opposite was true. Proust had only a passing involvement with other people, though he avidly attended Paris salons and entertained guests at the Ritz Hotel, where he lived. He seemed unconnected to people and superficial to many, even to the perceptive. This seemed to be so true of Proust that when he submitted the first volume of his novel, Swann’s Way, the great novelist André Gide rejected the book out of hand for the publisher la Nouvelle Revue Française. Gide just assumed that the Marcel Proust he knew socially could never write a serious book. 

                                         Marcel Proust

Ultimately, Proust lived primarily for his writing, even to the point of befriending people because he thought they would make good characters for his novel In Search of Lost Time, which he spent his whole life writing. The human being Proust may have been closest to was his housekeeper.

From what I’ve heard about him, the Alaskan writer John Haines was most at home as a writer when he lived in a cabin on a homestead far from any city or town. 

                                 John Haines outside his cabin in Alaska

On the other hand, Haines also found time to marry five different women, so he did achieve a counterpoint of his own sort between solitude and engagement.

The balance looks different for each writer, but you have to find that balance for yourself, the one that allows you to be at home both on land and in the kelp forests. Emulate the sea otter, which swims like a fish but breathes the sweet sea air.

Other recent posts about writing topics:

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

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
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

Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer

Putting Together a Book Manuscript, Part 3: The Longer Work

Writing a full-length book of any genre is not like writing a chapter of a book of prose, or like writing a short story or poem. You can’t polish off a first draft of an entire book in one sitting. You’ve got to pace yourself.

You don’t actually know when you start to write a full-length book how long it will take. Most likely it will take years. To embark on and finish a project that lengthy you have to be patient with yourself. You’re not going to do your best work every day, or even every week. Maybe not even once a month, depending on your work habits.

Some books spill out of a writer like the Trevi Fountain, others an author has to gather one morsel at a time, like an ant carrying bits of ripe leaves to its nest. The novelist John Fowles once said in an interview that he wrote the entire first draft of The French Lieutenant’s Woman in three weeks. That's very unusual. Marcel Proust spent his entire adult life writing one many-volume novel, In Search of Lost Time, also translated into English as Remembrance of Things Past. That's equally unusual.

However long it takes to write your book, keep at it, accumulate that manuscript one page at a time. Build towards the complete vision you have of the finished book.

If you start to get bored with your project, that’s a sign you’re heading down a dead end. You can’t get your reader interested in a part of your book that you don’t enjoy writing, or that doesn’t satisfy or fulfill some deep impulse in you. Go back to where you started to get bored, cut the part that doesn’t interest you, and find a more exciting direction. Do something unexpected, off-balance, kooky, kinky—as long as it fits with the rest of the project.

Writing about something that interests you may seem like a simple proposition, but there are times when that question can create an earthquake in your life, bursting all the pipes.

I once went to hear the New York School painter Larry Rivers speak. Larry Rivers was a friend of several writers, especially the poet Frank O’Hara. In fact, Rivers drew the cover illustration for The Selected Poems of Frank O’Hara, a sketch of the poet naked. That night I went to hear him, someone in the audience asked Larry Rivers a dumb question, probably one he’d heard a hundred times before: “Why do you paint?” But Larry Rivers’ answer deeply impressed me: “Because there’s something I want to see.”  So simple, but so precise. Yes, we write because there’s something we want to see in a book, there’s something we wish we could read. Write the book you want to read.

Other recent posts on writing topics:
Putting Together a Book Manuscript, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
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

Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer