Succession, Jeremy Strong, and Frank O’Hara

One of the best TV series of recent years, Succession, will be airing its much-awaited finale on Sunday night. As many of the show’s obsessive fans know, poetry has played a subtle but key role in Succession: for mysterious but tantalizing reasons, the last episode of each season has been titled with a phrase drawn from John Berryman’s poem “Dream Song 29,” one of the most famous and harrowing of his Dream Songs (“There sat down, once, a thing on Henry’s heart”). Thus, season 1’s closing episode was titled “Nobody is Ever Missing” and the finale will be titled “With Eyes Open.”

However, to my chagrin, I haven’t been aware of any clear tie between the show and the New York School of poetry, until now. In a Vulture interview the other day, the actress Juliana Canfield, who plays Jess, the loyal, long-suffering assistant to billionaire scion Kendall Roy (played by Jeremy Strong), was asked about what it’s like to work with Strong, who has become notorious (especially after a much-discussed New Yorker profile was published in 2021) for his extreme devotion to method acting and immersion in his character. When asked about the fact that Strong has given her actual “assignments” to undertake as part of the process of deepening both their characters, Canfield responded:

“Jeremy is such a prepared actor. He has read every book; he understands every financial term. The scripts are beautifully written, but he can riff on anything and be very in character. Sometimes, it was like he was letting me know what he might be riffing on in a scene so I would be able to respond. When he goes, “Jess, wait, what are the things again?” I have three really fresh answers I knew to look up right before we started rolling.

One time in the Adirondacks, he wanted to send Naomi a bouquet of flowers and a book of Frank O’Hara’s poetry. We were standing there getting ready to film, and he was talking about flowers. “What kind of flowers should I get for Naomi? I think peonies. Is there a florist where I can get peonies down there? And you know that poem by Frank O’Hara. What collection is that in?” Then we started rolling, and I was looking up Frank O’Hara collections I could send to New York. I was really doing that on my phone! And I like Frank O’Hara, so I was like, “Maybe you should send her this one.” And he was like [does a Jeremy Strong impression], “Oh, good idea. Good idea.” Without him, I would have been daffier or more hapless. Because of that exchange of information we had as the camera started to roll, I felt like a really good assistant.”

So there you have it. Strong — who has spoken at length about his literary interests and passions — imagined that his character Kendall (not unlike Connell in Normal People or Don Draper in Mad Men) might send a Frank O’Hara book to his girlfriend as a gift. The anecdote also indicates that both he and Canfield are fans of O’Hara in particular, which was fun to see.

Whether it seems believable that a real-life Kendall Roy would even know of Frank O’Hara or think to send a copy of Meditations in an Emergency or Love Poems (Tentative Title) to his lover is another story, but I enjoyed having this little glimpse of how Frank O’Hara figured into Strong’s and Canfield’s process.

Enjoy the finale!

Geoffrey O’Brien on Joe Brainard (and John Yau’s new book)

Joe Brainard

In the current issue of The New York Review of Books, Geoffrey O’Brien has a great review of a new book by the poet and art critic John Yau, Joe Brainard: The Art of the Personal.

According to O’Brien, Yau explores Brainard’s wide-ranging work “brilliantly and with contagious enthusiasm” in a book filled with a “lavish array of reproductions”: “The profuse reproductions in this volume suggest the staggering variety of a body of work encompassing ‘assemblage, collage, drawing, printmaking (including etching and silkscreen), painting, stage sets, costume design, posters, book and magazine covers, cartoons, cutouts, and writing.'”

O’Brien’s piece gives a wonderful overview and assessment of Brainard’s career and his work as both a writer (not least his beloved, uncategorizable masterpiece I Remember) and as a visual artist of great artistry, humor, charm, and daring. Brainard, as he suggests, is a masterful artist of the everyday:

“He often made art with the humblest and most ephemeral found materials (cigarette butts or scraps of food packaging) and avoided working on a grand scale, remarking that he ‘didn’t enjoy looking at art that was bigger than it had to be.’ Miniature images and objects delighted him.” As O’Brien puts it in a nice turn of phrase, “the modesty with which he undermined the heroic stance itself had a heroic quality.”

For O’Brien, Yau’s book makes a convincing case that “Brainard is a major artist too often seen as minor or marginal—not by in advertent neglect, but because his work and his approach to art making were from the start inimical to the contemporary art world’s ways of measuring artistic success.”

Hopefully, the welcome attention paid to Brainard by Yau and other recent scholars and critics will help change this calculus and allow Brainard, master of the ordinary, the quotidian, and the minor, to be viewed as a major artist at last.

John Yau

Having a Coke with Brian Glavey and Kamran Javadizadeh

What could be more fun than listening to two brilliant scholars having a chat about one of your favorite poems? The first installment of an exciting new podcast series hosted by the poetry scholar Kamran Javadizadeh went live yesterday, and it’s a pleasure to listen to. Each episode of the series, called “Close Readings,” will feature a guest, usually a scholar of poetry or poet, reading and discussing a single poem with Javadizadeh. You can find episodes of “Close Readings” on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Google Podcasts.

The first episode features Brian Glavey, a professor at the University of South Carolina and author of The Wallflower Avant-Garde, discussing Frank O’Hara’s poem “Having a Coke With You,” the subject of a wonderful, widely-discussed essay that Glavey published in PMLA in 2020. After listening to an audio recording of O’Hara reading his poem, Glavey and Javadizadeh have a delightful conversation about the poem and its beauty and humor, its “relatability” and its philosophical complexity. (They also talk at length about the subject of the poem, and of O’Hara’s infectious ardor, the dancer Vincent Warren, who I wrote about here).

Keep an eye out for future installments of Javadizadeh’s new podcast series, and head over to wherever you listen to podcasts and check out this fun and fascinating discussion of O’Hara’s charming poem.

Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore Pays Tribute to Ted Berrigan

In a recent interview, the musician Thurston Moore, founder of the groundbreaking experimental rock band Sonic Youth, was asked “who he would choose to spend an hour with if he could, dead or alive,” and his answer was Ted Berrigan, who has long been one of his heroes. This is not surprising, since Moore, who is also a poet and book collector, has been a long-time aficionado and devotee of the New York School of poetry — a fascination which even led to his song “Frank O’Hara Hit,” which I wrote about here a few years back.

As reported in Far Out, here is what Moore had to say about Berrigan when speaking with the UK fashion brand Fred Perry:

“Toward the end of the Q&A, the folks at Fred Perry asked the Sonic Youth co-frontman who he would choose to spend an hour with if he could, dead or alive. ‘Ted Berrigan, the poet who was the guiding light of what is called third-generation New York School poetry,’ Moore assertively answered. ‘He lived in holy poverty on the lower east side of Manhattan throughout the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s and constructed poems informed on classic poetic tropes with an honest ear to the humanism of contemporary urban life, springboarding from Frank O’Hara and Allen Ginsberg to an ‘All Poets Welcome’ communitarian aesthetic that is still resonating in the world of working poets today. He passed away in the 80s [1983], and I never met him, though I would spy him strolling along 2nd Avenue with young poets in tow, catching his every word.'”

For more on Moore and the New York School of poetry, see here and here.

Ted Berrigan

Saluting That Various Field On James Schuyler’s Birthday

Happy birthday to the poet James Schuyler, born on this day in 1923. Here is “Salute,” his first published poem (!) and one of his signature pieces. “Past / is past. I salute / that various field.”

And here is a diary entry Schuyler wrote on his 64th birthday in 1984. “Not everything gets worse.” Happy birthday, Jim.

“The Ping Jockey School of Poetry”: A. R. Ammons, Frank O’Hara, and James Schuyler

The poet A. R. Ammons never fit comfortably into any of the well-defined groups and movements of post-1945 American poetry — he wasn’t part of the Beat movement, or Confessional poetry, or the Deep Image movement, or any other group. Nevertheless, he does have deep affinities with various strains of the broad postwar avant-garde tendency known as the “New American Poetry,” especially with the New York School and the Black Mountain poets. However, as I argued in my recent book Attention Equals Life, the tendency to view Ammons as either completely sui generis or as a neo-Romantic “nature poet” or practitioner of ecopoetics, has tended to obscure those links and similarities.

Late in life, in the 1993 poem “Ping Jockeys,” Ammons playfully declared his connection to the New York School of poets, based (in part) on a surprising coincidence he had just discovered. Reading an interview with James Schuyler, he learned that he and two of the central figures of the New York School, Schuyler and Frank O’Hara, shared an unlikely formative experience: during World War II, all three were trained in Key West to be sonar operators (or “ping jockeys,” in military slang) in the U. S. Navy. Upon learning this odd detail, Ammons writes “Gosh! Imagine! How did it happen? I am / virtually a New York School poet (maybe not // virtually a poet!).” “I have affinities,” he goes on, “old solid / ineradicable affinities” with Schuyler and O’Hara.

What are the odds that three different young men who went to the same sonar school to be radio operators in the Navy during WWII all went on to become major American poets?

Maybe it’s not a total coincidence. O’Hara’s superiors seemed to think he would be well-suited for the job of “radioman” because of his ear and his facility with music: “with my years of musical training I would have good pitch and be able to operate a machine which sends out sound waves and can determine what objects are around it by the pitch of the surrounding sound.” He thought it might prove useful for his own aesthetic development too: “The training should improve my pitch and teach me about the physics of sound and therefore music,” he wrote to his parents rather optimistically. Unfortunately, as Brad Gooch puts it in his biography of O’Hara, “sonar school was less like the New England Conservatory than he had hoped.”

Ammons too, though, suggests that perhaps there was something related to a future life in poetry in this unusual job: speaking of O’Hara, Schuyler, and himself, he writes “we were younglings / with special gifts of sound, striking sonarmen // discriminating pitch, doing theory, and learning how / to lay down depth-charge patterns on enemy hulks.”

So there you have it — proof of the existence of a little-known “Ping Jockey School of Poetry.” The poem also provides us with another sign that Ammons shares not just a surprising bit of personal history but also “old solid, / ineradicable affinities” with O’Hara, Schuyler, and John Ashbery (with whom he shared a deep mutual admiration), along with the rest of the New York School of poets.

Here’s Ammons’s poem in full:

PING JOCKEYS

Gosh! Imagine! How did it happen? I am
virtually a New York School poet (maybe not

virtually a poet!): I have affinities, old solid
ineradicable affinities: I just read Schuyler’s

interview and learned 48 years later that I was
there in Key West (in the Navy, I mean) just about

when Schuyler and O’Hara (both) were, and we
sailed at dawn every day out on the trainer boats

catching on to sub chasing; we were younglings
with special gifts of sound, striking sonarmen

discriminating pitch, doing theory, and learning how
to lay down depth-charge patterns on enemy hulks

(where was John, anyhow): oh, the Navy, the
sweet Navy, sound pinging out through the waters

of the Caribbean, later the Pacific, thrilling
the submarines deep down hustling to get away

or pop us off point-bank with a slim torpedo!

(Note: this poem was published in the Princeton University Library Chronicle in 1994, but remained uncollected until the recent publication of Ammons’s Complete Poems in 2017).

John Murillo and Nicole Sealey read and discuss an Anne Waldman poem

As part of the Paris Review‘s “Poets on Couches” series, John Murillo and Nicole Sealey recently discussed “How To Write,” a wonderful poem by Anne Waldman that was originally published in Paris Review in 1968. After Sealey reads the poem, the couple has a charming and enlightening conversation while sitting — you guessed it — on their couch, in which they discuss the poem’s form and themes and why they find it effective and moving. You can see the 10 minute video here:

And here is Anne Waldman’s “How To Write“:

How To Write

Perhaps I’m kidding myself about
the life I lead

Sometimes I feel I’m dying
like a lot of things I see around me

Then I turn on the TV and understand
that everything must still be moving

Music, for example, and I rush outside
around the corner to a concert

It’s so easy

Everything accessible from where I
happen to live at the moment

Things like rock concerts not too many trees on 2nd Avenue

Once, on the Sixth Avenue bus
I got a sudden sensation
I had been alive before

That I was a man at some other time
Traveling

You would think this strange if you were a woman

If I were a man right now I’d be getting out of the draft
but I think I’d want to be a poet too

Which simply means alive, awake and digging everything

Even that which makes me sick and want to die

I don’t really, you know

I just don’t want to be conscious sometimes
because when you’re conscious in the ordinary way
you have to think about yourself a lot

Dull thoughts like what am I doing?

Uptown in a large crowd I want to sit down and cry
because everything is simple and complicated
all at once

Everyone has this feeling

Even people downtown

It is very basic to the way we are
which is why I can say “we”

A lot of drugs can change you if you want
because you too are made of what drugs are made of

In fact you are just a bundle of drugs
when you come right down to it

I don’t want to go into it
but you’ll see what I mean when you catch on

That’s not meant to sound snotty
I’m open to whatever comes along

This is the feeling I get before I take a plane

Then everything’s the same afterward anyway

All into one space and here I am again
alive still, same worries on my mind

The thing is don’t worry!
You are doing what you have to what you can

You hear from your friends
They let you know what’s happening in California, Iowa
Vermont and other places about the globe

They take you out of your little room
just like the newspapers or the news
or the man you live with

and put you in a much larger room
one in which you are in constant motion around the clock

Paris Review (Winter 1968)

Happy “Midwinter Day” Day!

On December 22, 1978, Bernadette Mayer wrote her groundbreaking, book-length poem, Midwinter Day. In recent years, poets and readers and Mayer fans have gathered to mark the occasion by reading from the book. As Mayer herself told Fanny Howe in a 2019 interview:

“So now it’s become for a lot of people, I think, a replacement for Christmas. So they don’t celebrate Christmas, you just have a gala reading of Midwinter Day, it’s so great. I love it, I never realized that it would be popular in that particular way.”

This year, there was a wonderful, 4th annual, gala reading hosted online by Lee Ann Brown and Tender Buttons Press, which featured a full 4-hour reading of the book-length poem — starting off with a reading by Mayer herself, and including excerpts read by Eileen Myles, Anne Waldman, Vincent Katz, Brenda Coutlas, Eleni Sikelianos, and many, many others.

One of the most moving moments for me was hearing Mayer’s daughter Marie Warsh read the section Mayer wrote over four decades ago about an epic temper tantrum she herself threw in the Lenox Public Library as a toddler. (The segment read by Marie begins at about 1 hour and 45 minutes into the video and the whole marathon reading can be found here).

For more, see this post from the Allen Ginsberg Project posted yesterday, which has a great collection of information and links about Midwinter Day.

To help mark this important milestone, I’m (re)posting an extended excerpt about Mayer’s Midwinter Day from my recent book Attention Equals Life: The Pursuit of the Everyday in Contemporary Poetry and Culture (sans footnotes). The following is one section of a longer chapter entitled “Writing the Maternal Everyday: Bernadette Mayer and Her ‘Daughters,’” which discusses Mayer’s work in detail and its influence on younger contemporary women poets, including Rachel Zucker, Hoa Nguyen, Claudia Rankine, and Laynie Browne.

******

On December 22, 1978, the young American poet Bernadette Mayer 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.  She later described the resulting poem, which she titled Midwinter Day, as “a 120-page work in prose and poetry written on December 22, 1978, from notes, tapes, photographs, and memory.” 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 Alice Notley has noted, Midwinter Day is an “epic poem about a daily routine.”

Although it was not well-known at the time, Midwinter Day has increasingly come to be seen as a major long poem of the past several decades. While still hardly a household name, Mayer has lately become a beacon for younger American women writers who are still trying to negotiate what is often referred to as “the juggle”–the irresolvable balancing act of work and family that contemporary women endlessly struggle with. Many young poets today feel that Mayer managed to find a way to reconcile these competing roles successfully, long before the “mommy wars” of our day.  Her books of the 1970s exuberantly demonstrate that one can be a poet and a mother at the same time and still survive, and even thrive.

Joshua Kotin on Amiri Baraka, Kenneth Koch, and a Mysterious April Fool’s Day Postcard

As part of a cluster of essays on “Interpretive Difficulty” published by Post45, the scholar Joshua Kotin recently published a fascinating piece about a mysterious postcard that Amiri Baraka sent to Kenneth Koch on April Fool’s Day 1965, with a racist image on the front and a hostile handwritten message on the back (“Better start saying your prayers, if you think you can spend your time playing chess while millions struggle!”). Attempting to puzzle out the interpretive conundrums the postcard presents, Kotin ponders whether it should be read as a joke or a threat. He delves into the circumstances which may have led Baraka to write the postcard, especially his radical break with the white bohemian poetry world and his New York School poetry friends like Koch and Frank O’Hara, which occurred following Malcolm X’s assassination in February 1965.

However, that’s not all — there is a plot twist to this story. Shortly after Kotin’s essay appeared, the scholar and poet Nick Sturm alerted Kotin to another possibility — that the postcard was actually written by Ted Berrigan, as a playful joke, based on the extreme similarity to Berrigan’s handwriting and his own penchant for April Fool’s jokes and pranks of this sort. But wait — there’s more: Berrigan’s widow, Alice Notley, disagreed and didn’t think her husband had written the card. You’ll have to read the essay’s postscript to see how Kotin navigates these murky yet fascinating interpretive waters.

Roundup of Recent “New York School of Poetry” News and Links (11/15/21)

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).

• In exciting news for fans of the late John Ashbery, the first posthumous collection of Ashbery’s work was published this summer by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. With a preface by Ben Lerner and a in-depth and insightful introduction by editor Emily Skillings, Parallel Movements of the Hands: Five Unfinished Longer Works “gathers unpublished, book-length projects and long poems written between 1993 and 2007, along with one (as yet) undated work, to showcase Ashbery’s diverse and multifaceted artistic obsessions and sources.” The book has received thoughtful and interesting reviews, which often delve into the “unfinished” nature of these works, by Ange Mlinko (TLS) and Rowland Bagnall (LARB), Alberto Morillo (Poetry Foundation) and others. You can also find video of a panel discussion and reading from the book here, which featured Skillings along with Farnoosh Fathi, Adam Fitzgerald, Michael Silverblatt, Dara Wier, and John Yau, and another here, which featured Skillings along with Kamran Javadizadeh and Rosanne Wasserman, moderated by Mandana Chaffa.

• John Ashbery’s very own typewriter has found a home in the Woodberry Poetry Room at Harvard University (which is, of course, the poet’s alma mater). In order to welcome one of his treasured possessions, the Woodberry invited registered visitors to write their own poems on the poet’s own Royal KMM during designated “Lunch Poem” sessions from 1:00-3:00pm on Wednesdays this fall. (Note that this program has proven to be overwhelmingly popular, and the sessions are now booked for the rest of the fall 2021 semester. The Woodberry will announce more opportunities or Winter-Spring 2022 shortly).

• And who wouldn’t want to have “Adventures with John Ashbery’s Typewriter”? A special event will be held today (Wednesday, November 17) in honor of the arrival of Ashbery’s typewriter — a workshop (in person and live-streamed on Zoom) hosted by Ashbery biographer Karin Roffman and Emily Skillings. “The dynamic duo will discuss the poet’s writing process and present several ‘exercises in not making sense,’ as well as some writing/collaging experiments that Ashbery concocted for his students.” More info on how to register here.

• The scholar and poet Walt Hunter wrote about John Ashbery’s work for Modernism/Modernity’s Print Plus forum on “Process.” Hunter’s piece is about “poetry that tries to make sense of sharing time together as it passes,” and for that he turns to Ashbery, noting that “a kind of realism works underneath Ashbery’s poems that gets less credit than his gentle, elegiac postmodernism.  The poem cannot restore the time of its individual pieces, but it can give us the repeated experience of that time by offering sample after sample, present after present.”

• The writer Ada Calhoun, who previously wrote a book about the cultural history of St. Marks Place in New York, has a new book coming in June 2022, which will be of interest to readers here – entitled Also a Poet: Frank O’Hara, My Father, and Me, the book is a memoir about Calhoun’s father, the celebrated art critic (and erstwhile New York School poet) Peter Schjeldahl, and their shared love for the work of Frank O’Hara.

• Charles North published En Face, a lovely new limited-edition collaboration with the painter Trevor Winkfield (the third collaboration the two have done together).  The book features 8 poems by North alongside 6 of Winkfield’s images.  Winkfield said that “Rather than illustrate Charles’s poems, I wanted my images to act as their accompaniment, my hope being not to overwhelm the words, but literally to stand beside them, en face, as poems and their translations often do.”

• The exciting surge of critical attention to Bernadette Mayer continues — Post45 published a terrific cluster of essays devoted to Bernadette Mayer in their Contemporaries series.  Edited by Kristin Grogan and David B. Hobbs, the gathering includes pieces on many different aspects of Mayer’s work by Amy De’Ath, Kay Gabriel and Jo Barchi, Diane Hamilton, Tausif Noor, Gillian White, and others.

• The Whitney Museum and the Philadelphia Museum of Art teamed up to present a major retrospective exhibition of the work of the 91 year old Jasper Johns.  The show has received a great deal of attention and praise – including this review by Peter Schjeldahl in the New Yorker (“Jasper Johns Remains Contemporary Art’s Philosopher King”).

Jasper Johns, Skin with O’Hara Poem (1956). Photo by Ben Davis.

• Another major exhibit provoking the highest of praise is the big retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art devoted to the work of Joan Mitchell, a central figure in the New York School circle.  For some of the recent commentary on the show and Mitchell’s distinctive genius, see Tausif Noor in the New York Times, Jed Perl in the New York Review of Books, and Bridget Quinn in Hyperallergic.

“Ah Joan! there / you are / surrounded by paintings” — Frank O’Hara

• SF MoMA has been posting lots of interesting materials and articles related to the Joan Mitchell exhibit on Facebook, including this gem — Frank O’Hara’s inscription in Mitchell’s copy of Lunch Poems, on display in the exhibit (“for Joan, for saving Abstract Expressionism everything”).

• As the Mitchell show demonstrates, the previously undersung Abstract Expressionist women painters continue to generate excitement and attention, on the heels of the success of Mary Gabriel’s group portrait, Ninth Street Women.  The art historian Alexander Nemerov recently published a biography of Helen Frankenthaler (Fierce Poise: Helen Frankenthaler and 1950s New York), which Adam Gopnik reviewed for the New Yorker back in April. Other reviews can be found here, here, and here.

Helen Frankenthaler

• The Tibor de Nagy gallery in New York is currently showing “Larry Rivers: Works on Paper from the 1950s and 1960s” (from October 23 to November 27), the artist’s 15th solo exhibition at the Tibor de Nagy and the first at the gallery’s new location at 11 Rivington Street. An interesting piece about Rivers’ work during this crucial period, including his relationship with Frank O’Hara, by David Joel, Executive Director of the Larry Rivers Foundation, can be found here.

Larry Rivers. Double French Money, 1962-63. mixed media12 x 12 inches

• The Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation in New York is presenting another show of interest — “True Fictions: Jane Freilicher and Thomas Nozkowski: True Fictions,” curated by Eric Brown. The exhibit will run from November 5 to February 26, 2022 and a catalogue featuring essays by Brown and Barry Schwabsky will accompany the exhibition.

• Todd Haynes’s highly anticipated and excellent documentary The Velvet Underground — which focuses extensively on the Warhol scene and the experimental film, music, and art world of the New York avant-garde of the 1960s — was released on Apple TV+ to acclaim and a long stream of reviews. For more on the Velvet Underground and Lou Reed and New York School poetry, see here and here.

• Alice Notley recently gave a sold-out reading at the Poetry Project in New York, and a recording of the reading can be seen here.

• And speaking of recent Notley readings — the very sad news this week that the beloved poet and painter Etel Adnan has passed away at the age of 96 reminded me of this wonderful Zoom reading (hosted by the Woodberry Poetry Room) that I attended last fall at the height of the pandemic, which brought together Adnan with Alice Notley for a very memorable and moving event: