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

Spontaneity, Wit, Improvisation, and Automatic Writing: How to Write Better Than Your Conscious Mind

When a person is about to say something funny during a conversation, they start to speak without forming an idea of what words to use. A witty comment usually begins with only a vague impulse that the moment and the context are ripe for humor. This is an intuitive feeling, and it’s the act of launching into the conversation that helps the speaker to form the specific words that make people laugh.

Similarly, when a jazz musician is about to start a solo, I don’t think that person has a clear idea what they are going to play. It’s just a willingness to jump in and get into the groove the band has set in motion that provides the impulse for that riff.

Automatic writing is also like that. Writers in the surrealist movement in the early 1920s invented automatic writing—André Breton described the process this way in his “Manifesto of Surrealism” (1924):

Portraits of André Breton by Man Ray

Put yourself in as passive, or receptive, a state of mind as you can. Forget about your genius, your talents, and the talents of everyone else. Keep reminding yourself that literature is one of the saddest roads that leads to everything. Write quickly, without any preconceived subject, fast enough so that you will not remember what you’re writing and be tempted to reread what you have written.

In other words, write faster than you can edit with your rational mind, and the results will outpace anything you thought you could create.

The surrealist group practicing automatic writing in the 1920s

The human mind is far more brilliant than our conscious mind. One of the challenges of writing is to let go of our thoughts so that we can actually think with our deeper psyche. Not with the reptilian brain, but with the brain powered by what Federico García Lorca described as the duende, the mischievous sprite that rises from the raw energy of the Earth.

Of course, this dynamic often applies more to poetry than to prose. Fiction and nonfiction writers have to plan, outline, create structure. But poetry thrives on this sort of spontaneous fabrication, taking flight from a platform that is itself already airborne. Or, to paraphrase André Breton, “Trust in the inexhaustible fountain of whispers.”

I don’t mean to suggest that all spontaneous writing is great. Some of it can be downright foolish. But I would say that spontaneity is the source of much of the best and most unexpected writing.

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Zack’s new memoir, Hugging My Father’s Ghost

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

Are Poets’ Spoken Voices Part of Their Art?

I recently spoke to a poet who said a surprising thing to me: “I don’t like going to poetry readings. I prefer not to hear a poet’s voice, because once I hear it, I always hear it in my head when I read their poems.” That amazed me, because that’s exactly why I do like to go to poetry readings. I enjoy hearing the poet’s individual and idiosyncratic use of the spoken language.

Can you imagine the poetry of Allen Ginsberg, for example, without that whiny, growly, funny, syncopated, and deeply tender voice of his? Here’s an example of Ginsberg reading his famous tribute to Walt Whitman, “A Supermarket in California.”

Allen Ginsberg

Who can conceive of the poetry of Sekou Sundiata without his soulful baritone, completely as musical as Charlie Parker’s solos, especially since Sekou chose to record and not to publish most of his poems. Here’s Sekou reading his irrefutable and still all-too-relevant indictment of racial profiling, “Blink Your Eyes.”

Or Adrienne Rich’s ringing voice calling out the powerful in her precise syllables, as exact and exacting as her diction and imagery and politics. Here is Adrienne reading her poem, “Diving into the Wreck.”

Adrienne Rich

Let me play devil’s advocate for a minute. Do we know what Shakespeare’s voice sounded like? Or Lorca’s? Not knowing their voices allows us the freedom to interpret their poems when they are spoken, just as a ballad singer can interpret “Fly Me to the Moon” her own way. Each singer sings it differently. That’s a good thing.

But even if we know the sound of a poet’s voice, that doesn’t preclude a great reciter from recreating the poem for herself. Think of the Oscar-nominated actor Alfre Woodard reinterpreting the late, great Ntozake Shange’s “Somebody Almost Walked Off Wid All My Stuff” in for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf. Ntozake was a magnificent reader of her poetry, but that didn’t stop Alfre Woodard from reinventing the poem with her own voice, inflections, and choreography. 

Ntozake Shange

In the age we live in, where recordings can be preserved almost as easily as books, and maybe more permanently, a poet’s voice can be part of a writer’s legacy. And why shouldn’t it? In a way, that challenges writers to read their work more professionally and memorably. Isn't the sound of poetry what distinguishes it from the other literary arts? How sad that we don’t know the timbre of Lorca’s speech, since he lived in the age of recorded sound, but was assassinated before his voice could be preserved for all time. 

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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

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

Types of Closure, Part 3: Using Repetition to End a Poem

One tried and true way to create closure in a poem is to use repetition. Repeating a phrase, line, or series of lines establishes that the poem has come full circle and is now ending. Paradoxically, the fact that some words in the poem are the same indicates to the reader that these words are different from any others, since they announce the ending.

There are different ways that poets use repetition to create closure. One way is to use the rhythms and cadences of the repeated lines as a sort of chorus, the way a song often ends with a repeated refrain. The master of this sort of repetition is the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca. 

Federico García Lorca

In his classic “Sleepwalking Ballad” [“Romance sonambulo”], Lorca opens with these unforgettable lines:

Verde que te quiero verde.

Verde viento. Verdes ramas.

El barco sobre la mar

y el caballo en la montaña.

Green how I want you green.

Green wind. Green branches.

The ship out on the sea,

and the horse on the mountain.

(translation by William Bryant Logan)

The poem depicts a surrealistic world where strange and mysterious events take place, such as a young gypsy woman with green hair being suspended over water by an “icicle of the moon.” But in some ways, this poem is much like a traditional ballad. Lorca repeats the opening lines in various permutations in the poem, sometimes just duplicating the opening line, sometimes the first two lines. But at the end of the poem, he repeats all four of the opening lines, as if we are hearing the refrain of a ballad, and it’s clear that the repetition signals the end of the poem. By extension, that repetition indicates the fate of the gypsy bandit who is bleeding and pursued, and his doomed lover.

A different way of using repetition is to repeat a phrase at the end in a very different context and with a different emphasis. This sort of repetition establishes closure by contrast—we hear or read the same words as we did earlier in the poem, but now we understand their deeper meaning. It’s the sharper insight that makes for closure in the poem.

Lorca uses repetition in this way in his poem “Your Childhood in Menton.” Here he describes a lover who cannot answer the call of his passion because of social conventions. The poem begins and ends with the same line:

Sí, tu niñez ya fábula de fuentes.

Yes, your childhood now a fable of fountains.

In the epigraph, Lorca attributes the line to a poem by Jorge Guillén. The first time we hear these words, they sound innocent and carefree: they refer to youth and fables and running water. By the end of the poem, the line resonates very differently, since we know that the person addressed in this poem has betrayed his own desires in favor of norms he absorbed in childhood.

Another example of using repetition in a different context at the end is “Each Bird Walking,” by Tess Gallagher, one of my favorite poems. 

Tess Gallagher

Gallagher uses a fascinating series of flashbacks, quickly going backwards and forwards through different layers of time to tell a complex and moving story that the reader has to construct, like a detective solving a mystery.

The poem is about the end of an affair, an affair between the speaker and her lover, who is in a long-term relationship. To end the romance without bitterness, the speaker asks her lover to bestow on her the gift of an unforgettable memory. He chooses to tell her how he bathed his own mother by hand at the end of her life, as if he had been her mother instead of her son. Describing this incredibly intimate moment of cleansing, the lover quotes his mother as saying, “That’s good, that’s enough,” when the washing of her body is complete.

That's a banal enough phrase. But it becomes extremely powerful when it’s repeated only 10 lines later. Now the speaker is the one saying the phrase, since she is satisfied that her lover has given her access to a part of his soul that no one else has shared. The second time the poet quotes, “That’s good, that’s enough,” the phrase has a deep resonance, since we know it means not only that the speaker and her lover have exchanged an imprinted moment of intimacy, but that their relationship is now done.

Types of Closure in Poetry, Part 1, Part 2, Part 4

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