In important, breaking literary news, the men’s magazine GQ (in its UK edition) has declared that “‘Hot guy books’ are the hot new accessory” and has included Frank O’Hara’s 1964 book Lunch Poems near the top of its list of the “hottest, most alluring book covers to carry this year.” As the author Josiah Gogarty puts it in his tongue-in-cheek piece, Lunch Poems is a book you could “read at lunch in Pret as the office workers come and go, and look like the most tasteful executive in town.”
This is not the first time Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems has been treated as a fashionable accessory in recent years — O’Hara-watchers will remember the odd moment a few years back when Jennifer Lawrence was spotted carrying a very expensive clutch that was actually designed to look like an oversized version of O’Hara’s pocket-sized paperback.
After discussing the recent trend of beautiful celebrities toting highbrow, literary books, Gogarty notes that “carrying around classic novels doesn’t just give models an aura of intellectual chic – regular civilians are now doing it too, as a kind of brainy thirst trap. An article in Bustle last September reported on men ditching selfies with puppies to pose with female-coded books by the likes of Sally Rooney and Ottessa Moshfegh, in the hopes of dredging up dating app matches. There have also been recent reports of men taking books to bars to try and attract girls. With this in mind, here is an entirely serious, entirely scientific ranking of the hottest, most alluring book covers to carry this year.”
Number 2 on this “entirely serious, entirely scientific ranking” of the hottest book covers to be spotted carrying around is the “City Lights Pocket Poet” series, with a special nod given to Lunch Poems
“City Lights Pocket Poets
This series has proper historical weight: it was started in 1955 by poet, bookseller and publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and its fourth release, Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems, was the subject of a landmark obscenity trial in the US in 1957. They also look great, particularly the navy-and-red edition of Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems – which you could indeed read at lunch in Pret as the office workers come and go, and look like the most tasteful executive in town.”
Somehow this all reminds me of a passage in O’Hara’s “Steps,” one of the most lovable poems in Lunch Poems:
“everyone’s taking their coat off so they can show a rib-cage to the rib-watchers”
O’Hara would likely have chuckled at the idea of Lunch Poems being called a “brainy thirst trap” and topping a list of the “hottest, most alluring” books for men to flaunt that they’re reading — after all, he was a poet whose half-serious take on technical matters of poetic craft was to say “that’s just common sense: if you’re going to buy a pair of pants you want them to be tight enough so everyone will want to go to bed with you.”
2023 was an anniversary year for this humble blog, since it has been 10 years since I decided to create a website devoted to the New York School of poets and artists and name it Locus Solus, after the legendary little magazine that briefly served as the movement’s house journal.
A few months ago, to mark the occasion of this anniversary, the Flow Chart Foundation (the wonderful organization devoted to the legacy of John Ashbery) and the critic Mandana Chaffa generously invited me to have a conversation about the blog, its mission and history, and the New York School more broadly, which was held virtually on Wednesday, June 15, 2023.
Here is a recording of the event. Thank you to everyone who has visited this space over the years, sent tips and books and sightings my way, and supported my work on this project!
Next Saturday, October 28, there will be a symposium and poetry reading in New York hosted by the Network for New York School Studies (a recently founded organization I wrote about previously here) in conjunction with the Brooklyn Rail. It will take place in Brooklyn from 12-8, is free of charge, and open to anyone interested in attending. I’m thrilled that I will be taking part in this exciting event, and I hope those of you in the area will come by. More information can be found here.
The organizers have given the gathering the title “These Little Oases” after a wonderful line in Frank O’Hara’s “Poem Read at Joan Mitchell’s”: “let’s advance and change everything, but leave these little oases in case the heart gets thirsty en route.”
As you can see from the image above, the symposium will feature poetry readings by a long list of poets associated with the New York School and its lineage, including Anne Waldman, John Yau, Anselm Berrigan, Edmund Berrigan, Jordan Davis, Kay Gabriel, Patricia Spears Jones and many others.
It will also feature a roundtable discussion with a four scholars who write about the New York School of poetry: Alexandra Gold, Libbie Rifkin, Nick Sturm, and myself. The roundtable’s focus will be “New York School Studies Now” and will be chaired by Mandana Chaffa, President of the Board at the Flow Chart Foundation, and founder and editor-in-chief of Nowruz Journal.
But wait, there’s more: the symposium will be preceded on the evening of Friday 27th October, 7-8.30pm, by a very special performance of Frank O’Hara’s short play Try! Try! at Torn Pagein Chelsea. To be more exact, there will actually be two performances of O’Hara’s play, one for each of the two distinct versions he wrote.
“Try! Try! Twice! stages two versions of the play back-to-back, accounting for the 1951 version, inspired by O’Hara’s friendships with Violet Lang and John Ashbery, and the 1953 rewrite, informed by his intimate relationship and artistic collaboration with painter and set designer Larry Rivers. This production presents both plays back to back with identical casts navigating the tonal shift from 1951’s surreal Sirk-ian melodrama to 1953’s screwball sex comedy, much like Rock Hudson would navigate from the world of a film like Magnificent Obsession to that of Pillow Talk.”
The play features Lee Ann Brown, Emmitt Joe George and Tony Torn, and is directed by Torn himself.
If anyone is interested, I wrote about in Frank O’Hara’s Try! Try! — and how the play, in both its versions, stages O’Hara’s anxieties about friendship and selfhood — in my book Beautiful Enemies.
I hope you will come join us in these little oases next weekend, which may come in handy if the heart gets thirsty en route — please spread the word and hope to see some of you there!
James Schuyler, one of the central poets of the New York School of poetry, was born 100 years ago this November. In honor of his centenary, there will be a wonderful three-day program celebrating Schuyler’s life and work on November 4-6, 2023, in New York.
Hosted by the Dia Art Foundation, the Poetry Project, and NYU, and co-organized by Matthew Bevis of Oxford University, Always More Roses: James Schuyler at 100 promises to be an exciting weekend that will consist of three parts.
First, “A Morning for the Poet,” on Saturday, 11/4, at NYU. This event will feature a great roster of critics, poets, and friends of Schuyler’s who will be giving short talks on a variety of topics. Speakers include Stephanie Burt, Rona Cran, Jeff Dolven, Tonya Foster, Peter Gizzi, Kamran Javadizadeh, Nathan Kernan, John Koethe, Simon Pettet, Emily Skillings, and Tracie Morris. I’m very excited that I’ve been invited to take part in this event as well, and will be speaking on Schuyler’s friendship with Frank O’Hara and the wonderful, oblique elegy he wrote for O’Hara, “Buried at Springs.” You can see the full slate of speakers and titles of their talks here.
Second, on Saturday night, 11/4, Dia Art Foundation in Chelsea — the same place where Schuyler gave his legendary, late-in-life, first-ever poetry reading in 1988 — will host “It Goes, It Goes: James Schuyler Centenary Celebration,” “an evening in praise of the beloved poet.” The event will feature readings by Wayne Koestenbaum, Chad Morgan, Eileen Myles, Funto Omojola, Teline Trần, and others to be announced.
Third, on Monday, 11/6, the Poetry Project at St. Marks will host a performance of Schuyler’s amazing long poem “Hymn to Life,” featuring a multi-generational, polyvocal group of Schuyler fans, friends, and protégés. As the Poetry Project puts it, “A true poet’s poet, lover’s poet, everybody’s poet, James Schuyler was a dear and committed friend and mentor to many in the Poetry Project’s community, and generations later remains a reason many of us are poets at all.” This in-person event will also be livestreamed via The Poetry Project’s YouTube.
Please join us in celebrating James Schuyler at 100. Hope to see some of you there in person in New York!
Happy Bloomsday! Over the past few years, to mark this special day, I’ve had a tradition of reflecting on Joyce’s powerful but little-discussed influence on the poetry of the New York School, as you can see in these posts about how Frank O’Hara, James Schuyler, and John Ashbery felt about Joyce’s magnum opus.
This year, I wanted to pay tribute to one of the most overt and important examples of Joyce’s special place in the New York School canon: the work of the late Bernadette Mayer (who passed away in November 2022), and especially her most explicitly Joycean project, Midwinter Day, in which she, like Joyce in Ulysses, undertakes a radical experiment in turning a single, ordinary day into an epic, book-length work of literature.
Mayer frequently acknowledged that Joyce, and Ulysses in particular, played a formative role in her development as a writer and artist. In a 2010 interview with Adam Fitzgerald, Mayer discussed her early adventures in self-education, which led her to tackle a series of great, long works, including Joyce’s novel, which she explains she liked best of all:
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“BM: I took a year off to read all the long books. The Cantos. The Waste Land. Paradise Lost. Ulysses. Better than school, I’ll just read all these books. I’m sure I was inspired by Bill [Berkson] to read the books by their size. Milton kind of left me cold. I felt like reading him was like an achievement that you wanted to get to the end.
AF: “No man ever wished it longer.”
BM: Right!
AF: What about Joyce?
BM: Well, of all of those books, I really enjoyed Ulysses the most. To read it just like that—I don’t think many other people have done, where you just read it from beginning to end—is pretty astonishing. You’re all of a sudden living in a different world. So I like that book. I remember I had gotten in trouble in Catholic school for reading A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. And they said, ‘If you didn’t have such good marks, we’d throw you out.'”
~~~~~
Not surprisingly, critics have often noted Joyce’s important role as a source for Mayer’s entire body of work — from her fascination with the mundane and daily, her exuberant formal experimentation, her devotion to creating extremely long, inclusive works (like Memory, Studying Hunger, and Midwinter Day) that seek to capture as much of the world and experience as possible, to her interest in tracking the movement of thought and consciousness.
In a letter Mayer wrote to Bill Berkson in 1977, about 2 years before she wrote Midwinter Day, she acknowledged (with some self-deprecation) her long-standing ambition to try her hand at doing her own take on Joyce’s quotidian epic: “I’m always getting ready to do my version of Ulysses. Now that is really presumption.”
Not long after this letter, Mayer seemed ready to take her shot. On December 22, 1978, she undertook an unusual experiment that she had been planning for weeks: she wrote an entire book-length poem during and about the events and thoughts she experienced on that particular day. The poem recounts an ordinary day in the life of a young woman, her husband, and two young children in the small town of Lenox, Massachusetts, where Mayer and the poet Lewis Warsh had recently moved from New York City. As the poet Alice Notley has noted, Midwinter Day is an “epic poem about a daily routine.”
But despite the parallels, Midwinter Day doesn’t merely pay homage to Joyce — it also comments on, critiques, and subverts its model. As Maggie Nelson has pointed out, Midwinter Day both echoes and “tampers with the modernist obsession with charting the path of human consciousness over the time span of a single day — an obsession epitomized not only by Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, but also by Joyce’s Ulysses. Joyce chose June 16th for Bloomsday; Mayer chose December 22 as her parameter — the shortest day of the year, and nearly the polar opposite of Joyce’s date on the Zodiac.” As Nelson argues, the poem “ends up staging quite a struggle with its (mostly male) literary forerunners.”
Mayer’s sharp ambivalence towards her male predecessors is threaded throughout the book, but it’s particularly evident near the start when she writes “Freud Pound & Joyce / Are fine-feathered youth’s fairweather friends / I take that back, better not to mention them / Or it’s the end.”
Even while she warns herself not to mention these domineering male forbears (right after mentioning them), Mayer does encourage us to see the connection to Joyce from the very start: as ypu can see in the images above, Midwinter Day’s first word (complete with an oversized capital S) directly alludes to the famous beginning of Ulysses. Where Joyce wrote “Stately, plump Buck Mulligan,” Mayer writes “Stately you came to town in my opening dream”).
Although the “you” addressed in this opening passage may be Mayer’s husband Lewis (as is the case throughout the book), it could also be an invocation of the muse, a nod to the conventions of the epic as a genre — in other words, the “you” who came to town could be Ulysses itself. This long poem might start with a nod to an inspiring but daunting source of inspiration that has arrived, in stately fashion, just in time for this “opening” section (indeed, “lately you’ve been showing up a lot” she acknowledges, just as she sets out on her own long-planned journey through a capacious day).
As I wrote in my discussion of Mayer in my book Attention Equals Life: with this typographical and verbal echo, Mayer “alerts us right away that she will be putting her own subversive stamp on this mini-genre [of works that encompass a single day]. If those landmark modernist works were radical attempts to shift the scale of the novel to the daily life of ‘ordinary’ people, Midwinter Day not only extends that project but also takes it in a notably different direction. First, the events of those novels seem momentous in contrast to the much more mundane ordinariness of Mayer’s day, in which nothing conventionally ‘dramatic’ happens at all (by far the biggest moment of conflict is a toddler’s tantrum in the town’s public library—a far cry from, say, the suicide of Septimus Warren Smith in Mrs. Dalloway [or the wild events of the Nighttown section of Ulysses]). Second, Mayer pointedly replaces the concerns of the Joycean everyday (largely male and urban) with the thoughts and actions of a woman caring for little children in a small town.”
“Furthermore, unlike those examples, Mayer’s poem is not a fictional representation of a single ‘day in the life.’ It was actually written on a single day, by a woman who was also a primary caregiver to two young children. In that sense, Midwinter Day ups the ante on its predecessors and their claims about the everyday: it becomes a performance piece and feat of endurance. It is also a feminist refusal to abide by strict divisions of labor and the engrained belief that the domestic and the intellectual are incompatible.” (For more, see the rest of my chapter in Attention Equals Life).
I think it’s safe to say that one of the most remarkable and increasingly influential poems of the later 20th century grew out of the author’s desire to do her own “version of Ulysses.” In so doing, Mayer also created one of the more distinctive, pointed, and revelatory of the seemingly infinite number of responses to Joyce’s towering monument of modernist fiction.
Several years ago, the poet Becca Klaver began staging a series of annual events and group marathon readings on December 22 to mark the day Midwinter Day was written on and about — and as Klaver notes, she too did so with Ulysses, and its yearly festival, in mind as a model: she refers to these readings as a “global anniversary party I instigated so that Midwinter Day might become a literary holiday like Bloomsday.”
It seems only fitting that this new Mayer tradition has already begun to take off — for many of us, Midwinter Day Day now stands alongside June 16th, Bloomsday, the date that marks one of its own crucial, inexhaustible predecessors.
I’m sure many readers of this blog share my enthusiasm for the work of the brilliant literary critic Parul Sehgal, who moved a couple years ago from being one of the New York Times‘s daily book reviewers to a perch at the New Yorker.
So perhaps some of you will be as delighted as I was to learn that Sehgal — who tends to write more about prose than poetry, though she has written great pieces on volumes of poetry as well — is a big James Schuyler fan, a fact which came up in this interview with the Oxonian Review last year. But not only that — she apparently has as deep an attachment to one of my favorite essays about one of my favorite poets as I do: in the interview, she discusses her devotion to Wayne Koestenbaum’s masterful essay on Schuyler, “Epitaph on 23rd St.,” which I adore as well:
Is there a particular essay you’ve returned to often over the course of your writing life?
“The critics I love have an almost a carnal awareness of language. Wayne Koestenbaum’s 1999 essay on James Schuyler makes me shiver every time. One great critic on another—double your pleasure. A piece of criticism that begins by asking why on earth anyone would write art criticism and talks about what it means to do this work for love and money. Koestenbaum breaks down the elements of Schuyler’s style so compactly—the unusual diction that call us to notice the surface of his sentences, and how he gives paint its own life (‘a wriggle of pigment perched, like a slipped wig, on a corner of pocked chunk’)—feats of description born not out of a love for the present moment but an awareness that the present might be all anyone of us are allowed. I’ll leave you with a line of Schuyler’s, a fine credo for any of us, critic or not: ‘Look now. It will never be more fascinating.'”
One great critic on another, indeed. Triple your pleasure — Sehgal on Koestenbaum on Schuyler! (For more, see Seghal’s review of a book of Kostenbaum’s of essays here and my previous post on Koestenbaum’s essays on the New York School).
In my book Attention Equals Life, I touch on the same aphorism of Schuyler’s, “Look now. It will never be more fascinating,” noting that “this directive – like Wittgenstein’s famous injunction ‘Don’t think, but look!’ – is as much an ethical principle as aesthetic advice.” I love knowing that Sehgal takes Schuyler’s credo as a motto for her own attentive, incisive writing as well as for the art of criticism itself.
Almost exactly 10 years ago, I decided to create a website devoted to the New York School of poets and artists and name it Locus Solus, after the legendary little magazine that briefly served as the movement’s house journal. Even at the time, I knew it was swimming a bit upstream to launch a blog just at the very moment that the blogging era seemed to be crashing to a close. But I did so because I’d long felt the need for a place to find commentary, news, reviews, and links related to a movement that I found endlessly fascinating and that others seemed to as well. As I noted on the fifth anniversary of Locus Solus, back in 2018, I didn’t have a clear picture of what this site might become or what kind of audience it might find – and had no idea that I might write about 350 posts over the next decade! — but was pleasantly surprised to discover that it was both fun and rewarding to do and that others seemed to find it useful and interesting too.
To mark the occasion of this anniversary, the Flow Chart Foundation (the wonderful organization devoted to the legacy of John Ashbery) and the critic Mandana Chaffa have generously invited me to have a conversation about the blog, its mission and history, and the New York School more broadly, which will be held virtually next Wednesday, 6/15. You can find more information about the event and how to register here. Please join us for the conversation!
Over the past five years, I’ve continued to chronicle the New York School’s ongoing influence on poetry and its legacy in contemporary culture, track the rich critical conversation it continues to provoke, and comment here and there on poems, books, podcasts, and performances. It’s almost impossible to keep up with all things New York School-related – from new art exhibits and books, sightings in the broader culture and surprising cameos in music and television, and the sad news about deaths and losses and the passing of a generation or two.
If you’re curious about the range of topics and types of things I’ve posted about here over the past decade, click on the “Categories” and “Archives” drop-down menus on the right side of the screen and browse around. (And to keep up with new stuff, some of which doesn’t make it on to this blog, be sure to follow the “Locus Solus” Facebook page and my own Twitter account, as well as this site, to get timely updates and information and links about the poets and artists of the New York School).
I have been consistently surprised and heartened by the broad and vibrant community of readers and writers that the New York School continues to inspire. It’s been wonderful to hear from so many fans, fellow scholars, poets, and interested readers, and I appreciate all the tips, suggestions, questions, and enthusiastic responses that have come my way — please keep them coming.
Thanks, as always, for reading and for visiting this site. As Ashbery writes at the end of “The System,” “The past is dust and ashes, and this incommensurably wide way leads to the pragmatic and kinetic future.” Onward!
Here is one of my semi-regular roundups of recent links and news related to the New York School of poets. (Previous roundups can be found here).
Bernadette Mayer, from Memory
First, I wanted to use this roundup to mark some of the sad news and sharp losses related to the New York School that I haven’t had the chance to post about here over the past few months. In December 2022 came the huge blow of Bernadette Mayer’s death at the age of 78. As someone who has written about, taught, and loved Mayer’s work for a long time, I have too much to say about her loss to fit in this space, but for now, I wanted to at least point to some of the manyobituaries and tributes to this central American poet. Also, a few weeks ago, the Poetry Project at St. Marks hosted a memorial to Mayer and just published a wonderful issue of the Poetry Project Newsletter devoted to her memory.
I also want to mark the death of the painter and filmmaker Alfred Leslie, who passed away in January at the age of 95. Leslie, who was famous for co-directing the landmark Beat film Pull My Daisy with Robert Frank, had a long and varied career which included close and collaborative friendships with O’Hara, Kenneth Koch, and other New York School poets. Indeed, one of O’Hara’s final works was the short experimental film “The Last Clean Shirt,” which he made with Leslie and which you can watch here (for more on the film, see Olivier Brossard’s great piece here). After O’Hara’s death, Leslie composed his famous/notorious “The Killing Cycle,” a series of paintings chronicling the tragic accident that ended O’Hara’s life. You can read the New York Times’s obituary for Leslie here.
Alfred Leslie, “The Killing Cycle (The Loading Pier)”
I also didn’t have the chance to record the passing of the renowned art critic and poet Peter Schjeldahl, who began his career as a young poet acolyte of the New York School and went on to write voluminously about art related to the movement. For some of the many obituaries and tributes, see here, here, and here. The New Yorker’s editor, David Remnick, paid tribute to the magazine’s long time art critic as well. Here is the contributor note that was included in An Anthology of New York Poets (1970):
There has also been a steady stream of interesting critical writing about the New York School since my last roundup (indeed, more than I can keep up with, to be honest). Most recently, there is Jess Cotton’s new critical biography of John Ashbery, which is just out from Reaktion Books as part of its “Critical Lives” series. In the publisher’s words, “Jess Cotton provides a legible and accessible roadmap to Ashbery’s work that draws connections between his poetry, New York artists, and mid-century politics. Cotton paints an image of a more approachable and socially engaged Ashbery that will appeal to anyone interested in American poetry, queer lives, and twentieth-century American history.”
The scholarly journal Women’s Studies recently published a great special issue devoted to the work of Eileen Myles. Edited by Rosa Campbell, Joel Duncan, and Jack Parlett, the issue features a conversation between Myles and Maggie Nelson, alongside critical essays by scholars including Duncan, Nick Sturm, Stephanie Anderson, and Matthew Holman. You can read the issue’s introduction here.
There is also a new scholarly book devoted to the avant-garde composer Morton Feldman, a central figure in the New York School (music division), and good friend of Frank O’Hara and other poets. The book, by musicologist Ryan Dohoney, is titled Morton Feldman: Friendship and Mourning in the New York Avant-Garde. (If you’re familiar with my first book, you won’t be surprised to hear that the focus denoted by the subtitle is close to my heart). The book was reviewed by scholar Greg Barnhisel here.
The poet and critic Douglas Crase recently published On Autumn Lake(Nightboat Books), a large volume which collects four decades of his wonderful essays. Crase calls the pieces in this collection “appreciations or predilections, though to be truthful they were more like affairs of the heart, affairs of attention and intellectual desire, rather than criticism.” The book brings together Crase’s brilliant reflections on the work of friends like James Schuyler and John Ashbery, along with pieces on Lorine Niedecker, Marianne Moore, and the New York School as a whole, among many other topics. Crase has long been a deep, incisive reader of Emerson and the American pragmatist tradition that flows from him, as can be seen in series of a lovely essays under the rubric of “How Emerson Avails.”
The scholar Alexandra J. Gold has just published a new scholarly study called The Collaborative Artist’s Book: Evolving Ideas in Contemporary Poetry and Artwith the University of Iowa Press. From the publisher: “The Collaborative Artist’s Book offers a rare glimpse into collaborations between poets and painters from 1945 to the present, and highlights how the artist’s book became a critical form for experimental American artists in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Alexandra Gold provides a broad overview of the artist’s book form and the many ongoing debates and challenges, from the disciplinary to the institutional, that these forms continue to pose.”
Back in January, Nick Sturm reviewed Anne Waldman’s new book, Bard, Kinetic, “a collage of published and unpublished essays, correspondence, interviews, and poems from the last 20 years,” for the Poetry Foundation. As Sturm observes, the book “offers a partial documentary record of the vast scope of her life and work” and “traces the arc of Waldman’s life from her childhood in Greenwich Village during its midcentury bohemian heyday up to the pandemic-distressed present. Rather than a memoir, however, this energetic assemblage creates its own fragmented chronology, looping through the whirlwind of contexts—literary, political, spiritual, familial—that constitute Waldman’s immense bardic self.”
Speaking of the ubiquitous Nick Sturm, he has just edited a terrific-looking cluster of essays for Post45: Contemporaries about “Little Magazines.” Focusing on the diverse and fascinating history of little magazines in the post-1945 period, this collection of essays includes (among many other things), Sturm’s introduction and pieces by Rona Cran on “New York City Poetics and the Idea of the Mimeograph Revolution” and Rosa Campbell on gender and the New York School, an essay which focuses on “The Poet’s Home Companion Handy Poem Writing Guide (For Authentic New York School Poems),” which “was written by Linda Schjeldahl and published in a one-shot mimeograph magazine called Poet’s Home Companion, edited by Carol Gallup.”
Harvard’s Woodberry Poetry Room recently published an interesting piece by Jeffrey Careyva, the doctoral student who is currently working on cataloging John Ashbery’s vast book collection for the Woodberry. “Cataloging John Ashbery’s book collection has been a massive undertaking. At least it has been for me, the English Department grad student who, book by book, leaves through the foxed pages that frame the background of Ashbery’s rich literary life. After processing over 2,500 books from his library in a mere nine months—roughly half of the collection, which was generously donated to the Poetry Room by David Kermani—Ashbery’s archived books have revealed some fascinating things about him, his peers, and maybe even about myself.”
In art news, the Tibor de Nagy gallery recently held an exhibit of Trevor Winkfield’s work called “The Solitary Radish.” The poet Peter Gizzi provided an essay to accompany the show, which you can read here. “I’ve always been attracted to the energy in Trevor Winkfield’s painting,” Gizzi writes. “His uncanny ability to create an always compelling rhythm of objects within a picture field is kinetic. To me, his work conveys the drama of rhythm, of music, of the pleasure of composition.”
Trevor Winkfield, Guardians of the Broom Closet (2018)
A few months before the Winkfield show, the Tibor de Nagy Gallery also hosted an exhibition of Joe Brainard’s work (“A Box of Hearts and Other Works”), which Deborah Solomon wrote about for the New York Times. Solomon called the show “fascinating and substantial,” and notes that “in the three decades since Brainard’s death, the interest in his work has only increased. Last year, the Metropolitan Museum of Art received a gift of 16 of his best works.”
Joe Brainard, Untitled (Cigarettes) (1969)
Solomon also offers a tantalizing and exciting hint for Brainardiacs: “I had heard on the grapevine that the Met was about to display its impressive Brainard holdings, but the plan has not gelled. So we will just have to wait. Or, to put it in Brainardspeak, I remember … thinking that a Brainard show at the Met would be incredible.” Indeed — fingers crossed!
As some of you may know, the literary scholars Susannah Hollister and Emily Setina are currently writing a much-needed biography of Kenneth Koch, which will be the first full-scale treatment of Koch’s life, his wide-ranging work as writer and teacher, his literary influences and relationships, and his connections to the New York School and to his closest friends.
Kenneth Koch is best known as a founding New York School poet and pioneer in the teaching of creative writing. His papers form one of the largest collections from a single author at the Library’s Berg Collection of English and American Literature. NEH Long-Term Fellow Susannah Hollister and scholar Emily Setina discuss their biography-in-progress of Koch and show select items from the Berg’s vast and varied holdings. Speaking with the Berg’s curator, Carolyn Vega, Hollister and Setina will describe how the archive has helped them discover the charismatic, prolific artist in the fullness of his life and reflect on how we can come to know writers through the records they leave.
For more information on the event and how to register, see here. If you are in New York on June 13, be sure to check it out!
As I mentioned back in December, the poetry scholar Kamran Javadizadeh recently launched a fun and edifying new podcast called “Close Readings.” As Javadizadeh describes it, each week he “talks to a different leading scholar of poetry about a single short poem that the guest has loved. You’ll have a chance to see the poem from the expert’s perspective—and also to think about some big questions: How do poems work? What can they make happen? How might they change our lives?”
You can find episodes of “Close Readings” on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Google Podcasts, and you can (and should!) also sign up to receive a newsletter from Kamran, in which he sends program notes, links, and summaries of each episode.
Over the past six months, the podcast has featured a long list of incisive, smart critics and scholars discussing a wide range of poets, including Stephanie Burt on Randall Jarrell, Evie Shockley on Ed Roberson, Dan Chiasson on Yeats, Maya C. Popa on Gerard Manley Hopkins, Virginia Jackson on Phillis Wheatley, Anthony Reed on June Jordan, Stephen Guy-Bray on George Herbert, and many more.
For those interested in the New York School of poets, the series has been a real feast — with episodes already devoted to four of the founding figures of the New York School’s first generation.
The very first episode, which I wrote about here, featured the scholar Brian Glavey discussing Frank O’Hara’s “Having a Coke With You.” This was followed by a wonderful conversation about James Schuyler’s much-loved poem “February” (a poem I’ve posted about myself, here) with the scholar Eric Lindstrom, which you can listen to here.
Then, last month, I had the delightful opportunity myself to go on the podcast to discuss one of my favorite John Ashbery poems, “Street Musicians,” the first poem in his 1977 book Houseboat Days. Kamran and I talk about Ashbery’s life and work in general, before turning to this haunting and beautiful poem of mid-career, which I read as an elegiac poem about what it’s like to outlive a friend or brother, and about Ashbery “feeling called to move on” — from his friend Frank O’Hara’s death, from his own youth, from living on the margins. (An excerpt from my first book about “Street Musicians” can be found here, too). You can listen to our discussion of this poem here, or on Spotify, etc), and you can also read Kamran’s comments about our conversation here.
Most recently, “Close Readings” featured a discussion of Kenneth Koch’s great late poem “One Train May Hide Another” with the critic and scholar Evan Kindley. As many New York School fans have probably heard, Evan is currently writing a highly-anticipated group biography of the New York School that will be published by Knopf:
It is a treat to listen to Kindley talk about Koch’s career, his relationship to the New York School group as a whole, and this late-career gem. You can listen to Evan and Kamran’s illuminating discussion of Koch’s funny, moving, and strangely wise poem here.
So if you haven’t had a chance yet, catch up on these New York School-related episodes and the rest of the amazing series of conversations. And be sure to check out and subscribe to this terrific podcast on on Apple Podcasts or Spotify!
Andrew Epstein
Locus Solus: The New York School of Poets 