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

Picking the Right Work for a Literary Translation

One part of the art of the literary translator that is rarely talked about is the hunt for the right work to translate. For most translators, extensive research and digging goes into selecting poetry, fiction, nonfiction, or drama to translate. It’s not unusual for a translator to read forty poems by a particular writer just to find one that s/he wants to translate. A translator might also read multiple biographies of an author to discover which novel or play by that writer to translate.

But where do you begin? Finding the right work to translate is like being a detective on a case with few leads. You have to look at everything about a writer to see if anything is slightly out of place, searching for something that stands out. Sometimes you have to interview people who know the literature of a particular language, probing for ideas that might work for you.

I was researching the poet French surrealist André Breton when I came across this description almost six hundred pages into Mark Polizzotti’s definitive biography of the poet:

“Far more consequential was Breton’s meeting in 1954 with the twenty-six-year-old poet Joyce Mansour.…it was other aspects of her personality—the dark, frenzied eroticism that emerged in her poetry; her unconventional public behavior—that had most drawn Breton. Soon after she joined the Surrealist group, a legend sprang up that Joyce lived exclusively on oysters, hot water, and cigars…”

Mark Polizzotti, Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton, pp. 589­–590.

André Breton and Joyce Mansour, 1959

That reference intrigued me. A woman poet in a literary movement known mostly for male writers, and she came along decades after the surrealists had made their initial splash in the 1920s.

I starting looking for Joyce Mansour’s Oeuvres complètes, her complete works. It wasn’t an easy book to track down in the United States—the least expensive copy is currently selling for $463 used on amazon.com. Interlibrary loan is often a good way to obtain a hard-to-find book of this sort.

When I did find the book, I realized that there were many gems among Joyce Mansour’s poems. I looked quickly through the 600 pages in her complete works—not reading every page, just skimming at first, searching for a style and themes in her work that spoke to me.

Joyce Mansour (1928–1986)

Once I settled on several of her poems that I liked, I started to do rough drafts, looking for poems that would work in English. Sometimes that’s not the same as a writer’s best efforts. There are factors that make a piece of literature work in another language, and factors that have the opposite result. Writing that brilliantly uses local dialect, for example, may not be as effective in translation, since there is often no equivalent in the target language for that particular style of speech.

I was also conscious that some of Mansour’s work had already been translated into English, and I was prospecting for poems that had either not been translated, or where the translation stopped short of conveying the “dark, frenzied eroticism” that Polizzotti described.

In fact, what I found in Mansour’s poetry was somewhat different—eroticism, yes, but permeated with compassion, wisdom, and honesty about intimacy. It was those qualities in Mansour’s writing that I wanted to try to recreate in English. I was seeking poems by Mansour that touched me personally, and there certainly were several where I hoped that I could add something by translating them in my own way.

That is also part of the translator’s quest. What is it that you as a translator have to contribute that is unique to you? You want a project where the work of another writer matches up with your own sensibility in a way that gives you insight into how that author should sound in your own language. Ultimately, you are looking to become a vehicle to convey that writer’s personal style and subject matter to readers of your own language.

Here’s a poem by Joyce Mansour that I translated, to give you a flavor of her writing:

            Joyce Mansour

“Do you still know the sweet scent of plantain trees…”

Do you still know the sweet scent of plantain trees

Familiar things can seem so strange when someone leaves

Food can seem so sad

A bed so insipid

And cats

Do you remember the cats that screeched their claws

That yowled on the roof when your tongue ransacked me

And that arched their backs when you dug your nails into me

They vibrated when I yielded

I don’t know how to love anymore

Those painful bubbles of delirium have dried on my lips

I’ve thrown away my mask of leaves

A rose bush agonizes under the bed

I can’t wiggle my hips anymore in the midst of all this rubble

And the cats have fled the roof

translation © 2019 by Zack Rogow 

Another post on how to choose the right work for a translation project, focused on George Sand.

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