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

Remembering Ted Berrigan

When I was a young poet living in the East Village in New York City in 1976, I took a writing workshop with Ted Berrigan. Ted taught at the legendary Poetry Project at Saint Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery, then the center of the New York School of poets. His class was extremely popular. There were 35 to 40 students in the workshop. Ted held forth on various subjects during the class—he was a great raconteur, spinning amazing stories about the writers and artists he’d known over the years.

Poet Ted Berrigan

Ted said many memorable things about poetry to the students. I vividly recall him telling us, “If you really want to know how good a writer you are, all you have to do is look in the mirror.” That seemed like an extremely odd thing to say for several reasons. Not the least of those was that Ted himself was not the most personable human being. He grew long his dark scraggly hair and beard, was overweight, wore his sleeves sloppily rolled-up, and had thick glasses. And yet … he had a distinct appearance unlike anyone else I’ve ever known.
 
The following year, 1977, I was part of a group of three younger writers who interviewed Ted Berrigan for City magazine. Ted invited us to speak with him in the railroad flat in the tenement where he lived at 101 St. Mark’s Place in the East Village. When the three of us conducting the interview arrived, Ted was there with his wife, the poet Alice Notley, and their two children. Toys littered the floor and the paint was peeling off the walls. But the apartment was decorated with stunning artworks by painters Ted was friends with, including Alex Katz, Joe Brainard, and Larry Rivers. Such a contrast!

portrait of Ted Berrigan by Alex Katz

Ted wrote in his poetry about using the drug methedrine, so I should not have been surprised that all we had to do for the interview was turn on the tape recorder, ask a short question, and Ted would talk nonstop for 15 minutes at a time.

 
He said some unforgettable things in that interview, including his analysis of speed in poetry. Ted categorized poets by whether they were “fast” or “slow” poets. In the “fast” group he included writers like Frank O’Hara. O’Hara was known for quickly jotting down stream-of-consciousness observations and thoughts during busy social interactions, so his poems have a rapid pace built into them. Among the “slow” poets, Ted listed Robert Creeley, a writer who often included short lines and a lot of blank space in his work.
 
Another memorable moment in the interview was when we asked Ted about his connection to the New York School. He revealed that the label “the New York School” was originally a joke, a goof on the School of Paris. Ted described the New York School in poetry as having no program or spokespersons, unlike, say, the Black Mountain School, where the writer Charles Olson deliberately shaped the aesthetic.
 
Ted also talked in the interview about the literary criticism then popular in university English departments, with its approach that “any poem could be ‘cracked.’” That was a description Ted quoted from his wife, Alice Notley. Ted went on to categorize that academic idea of a poem as, “If you went at it [a poem] hard enough you could literally take it apart and get it.” He dismissed that methodology as being just “funny,” a scornful attitude very typical of the avant-garde writers in New York City at the time.
 
City magazine editor Ron Kostar then questioned Ted Berrigan about the structure of his own poems. Ron challenged Ted by saying his poems were made up of fragments. Ted responded by saying that he and the writers he felt closest to got the idea of poems as collages of fragments from writers like Charles Olson and Ezra Pound. He maintained that what he and his literary colleagues were doing with fragments was not that different from the work of more traditional or narrative writers:
 

… we don’t think of it as fragmented, though it’s certainly made up of fragments … But in the piecing together there’s a definite line that runs through the poem, the same as the kind of line that runs through the most academic of academic poems. It’s just that it’s placed in a different location. It doesn’t run right down the center, but it moves in arabesques…

 
I love his description of the thread of a poem as moving in an arabesque, but I’m not sure I agree that all avant-garde poems have a thread running through them. Some are just random fragments.
 
Ted went on to offer a fascinating account of how he personally composed a poem:
 

… if the kind of poem I’m writing is a poem about an experience [or] … emotion that falls upon me, and I understand something all at once, I like the poem to give that to you. If it’s something that took longer, and was a more complex experience, I like the poem to give you enough to take you into that …

 
Another moment that stands out in the interview was when Ted said, “There are only half a dozen ways to begin a poem, and half a dozen ways to end a poem. Most poems take place in the middle …” I agree, and I’d even say that there are fewer than half a dozen ways to end a poem. (Please see my blogs on types of closure in poetry.)
 
I won’t easily forget Ted’s hilarious description of how he completely made up an interview with the composer John Cage. Ted published the interview, thinking that readers would understand that this was a work of fiction. It turned out this was not understood, and astonishingly, Ted’s piece won a prize as the best interview of the year. The judges, who included Susan Sontag and Robert Brustein, were very surprised to learn that Ted had created this made-up interview as a sort of Dadaist act. John Cage, it turned out, was highly amused by the whole incident.
 
Ted Berrigan died in 1983 at the age of 48, after a life of burning his candle at both ends. Many former students gratefully remember his classes, his humor, and his one-of-a-kind insightful ramblings on the art of poetry.

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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

Learning from Writers You Don't Like

I taught for a number of years in the low-residency MFA in writing program at the University of Alaska, Anchorage. One of the assignments was thatt the students had to write responses to books by authors they’re not familiar with. I sometimes find that if a student does not connect immediately with an author’s work, the student dismisses that writer offhand. “I just couldn’t relate to this author’s preachy style.” “I found this writer’s diction very stilted and old-fashioned. “I couldn’t see the point of this author’s work.” By painting with such a broad brush, those students could be missing out on an important experience for a writer.

I think we actually have vital things to learn from writers whose work we don’t like. Why bother? Because sometimes the authors we don’t like have exactly the quality, theme, or tone that our work is lacking. Even if we don’t want to write like authors we find uninteresting or distasteful, we may learn from then how to tweak our work so it contains features that we don’t often include in our own writing. I’m not saying we should surrender to the enemy. But I am saying that we should learn why our enemy’s army has better boots.

Here’s an example. When I was in grad school in a writing program, I was studying with the poet Joel Oppenheimer. He assigned us to write a sonnet. At the time, I felt that sonnets were just the most outdated, boring thing a person could possibly write. I didn’t even want to read any more sonnets, except ones that were exploded, unrhymed, free-verse versions of the form, such as Ted Berrigan’s The Sonnets, with its collaged, Buddhist moments.

I absolutely refused to write a sonnet in Joel Oppenheimer’s class, and that occasioned a heart-to-heart talk from my instructor, which was maybe what I was really after, without knowing it. I could have learned a lot from writing a sonnet in Joel’s class, but I was too stubborn then to realize it. At the time, I was rebelling against traditional verse, to the point where my poems were prosy, disconnected, and self-consciously loose. Sonnets, on the other hand, have tightness, conflict (between the premise stated in the octave and the conclusion in the sestet), and require careful word choice. Writing a sonnet was exactly what the doctor ordered to correct some of the imbalances in my writing. Not that I needed to become a formal poet, but I would have done well to develop certain skills that were lacking in my work. By studying the poets whose writing is opposite from ours, we can often learn to make useful adjustments to our own work. That doesn't mean we're going to prefer writing we don't like—I wouldn't wish that on anyone! But it does mean that we can learn from any writer.

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

Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer