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introduction by editor Emily Skillings, Parallel Movements of the Hands: Five Unfinished Longer Works “gathers unpublished, book-length projects and long poems written between 1993 and 2007, along with one (as yet) undated work, to showcase Ashbery’s diverse and multifaceted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:

Welcome to the “Network for New York School Studies”

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Some exciting news for anyone with an abiding interest in the New York School of poets and artists — a brand-new international scholarly organization called the Network for New York School Studies has recently been launched. Founded by scholars Rona Cran and Yasmine Shamma, the organization aims to be a meeting place and scholarly home for anyone interested in the New York School and its many offshoots.

The Network’s goal is to formalize “for the first time an intellectual and creative global union of academics, poets, and other cultural practitioners including curators, artists, and musicians. Through a series of interactive, accessible, intersectional public events, including symposia, workshops, and performances, and via our new website, the Network will enable novel interactions between academics, creative practitioners, cultural organizations, and members of the public, as well as facilitating the free exchange of ideas across national borders, disciplinary boundaries, and cultural sectors.”

I’m very pleased and honored to be one of the members of the Network’s Board of Advisors, alongide many of my friends, heroes, and fellow New York School aficionados, Maria Damon, Mark Ford, Robert Hampson, Daniel Kane, Maggie Nelson, Marjorie Perloff, Libbie Rifkin, Lytle Shaw, and Geoff Ward.

Next spring, the Network will host an initial event in Paris, which will include a symposium devoted to the work of Alice Notley. For more on that upcoming event, see here. Many more such events and gatherings will follow.

Also, last month the Network presented its inaugural reading with a star-studded lineup which featured readings by Anne Waldman, Maureen Owen, Alice Notley, Elinor Nauen, Patricia Spears Jones, and Eileen Myles. A video of the reading can be seen here.

Lastly, a few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of speaking with the organization’s founders, Rona Cran and Yasmine Shamma, about my own work, my long-ago personal introduction to the world of Kenneth Koch and his circle, recent exciting work in the field, and much else. You can find the interview here.

If you’d like to find out more about the Network for New York School Studies or about becoming a member, click here and here. Please join us!

Wallace Stevens and the New York School Poets

For a while now, I’ve been trying to make the case here and there that Wallace Stevens’s outsized influence on American avant-garde poetry — including on the poets of the New York School — has often been overlooked, to the detriment of both.

Now, I’ve had the chance to expand on this argument in an essay I contributed to a new collection entitled The New Wallace Stevens Studies, edited by Bart Eeckhout and Gül Bilge Han, which was recently published by Cambridge University Press.

In the piece, I argue that literary history has long downplayed or ignored Stevens’s crucial role in the history of experimental poetics, from Objectivism, to the various movements of the “New American Poetry,” to Language poetry, and beyond.  For reasons I discuss in the essay, Stevens has long been cast as a formalist favorite and latter-day Romantic or neo-Symbolist poet, of marginal importance to avant-garde poets who follow him (though that impression has begun to change somewhat in recent years).

As I put it in the essay, “in the case of the New York School, the neglect of Stevens as an important precursor causes problems in both directions: it unnecessarily limits our sense of New York School poetry, while simultaneously hindering our understanding of Stevens and his legacy.  For one thing, it gives us a misleading picture of the aesthetic and philosophical complexity of New York School poetics, which can too easily be reduced to a chatty, pop-culture infused poetry of urban daily life.  On Stevens’s side of the equation, this neglect reinforces the distorted image of Stevens as stuffy, backward-looking aesthete, devoted solely to abstraction and imagination, disdainful of the concrete, everyday realities so dear to the New York School, and perpetuates the notion that he has been of minimal importance to the avant-garde strain in American poetry.

The essay discusses Stevens’s importance not only to John Ashbery (to whom he has of course often been connected), but also to Frank O’Hara, James Schuyler, Barbara Guest, Kenneth Koch, and members of the New York School’s second generation, like Ted Berrigan. Ultimately, I argue that “for all their differences, Stevens and the New York School poets share a great deal: an obsession with painting and a passion for all things French; a delight in wordplay and the sensuous surfaces of language; an anti-foundational skepticism towards fixity in self, language, or idea; and perhaps most of all, an embrace of the imagination and deep attraction to the surreal combined with a devotion to the ordinary and everyday.”

You can read my essay and find out more about The New Wallace Stevens Studies here.

Jim Jarmusch and the Art of Collage

“Untitled” (2017)

The filmmaker Jim Jarmusch – whose deep connections to the New York School poets has been discussed here before – has quietly been making collages for the past twenty years, but never exhibited them before and “was content to keep this practice to himself.”  As Max Lakin reports for the New York Times, Jarmusch “recently decided to organize and present this strain of his practice. The result is Jarmusch’s first monograph, Some Collages, and “Newsprint Collages,” a solo show of the original collages, his formal gallery debut,” which recently opened at James Fuentes. 

The New York Times piece gives an extended look at Jarmusch’s interest in collage and appropriation, identifying it as a through-line that runs across the gamut of his work:

“‘The interesting thing about them is they reveal to me that my process of creating things is very similar, whether I’m writing a script or shooting a film or making a piece of music or writing a poem or making a collage,’ Jarmusch said. ‘I gather the elements from which I will make the thing first. Like, shooting a film is just gathering the material from which you will edit the film, you know? The collages reduce it to the most minimal form of that procedure.'”

Jarmusch also traces his aesthetic roots back to his early exposure to the New York School of poets during his studies at Columbia University:

“Before he landed on filmmaking, Jarmusch intended to be a poet, studying under the New York School poet David Shapiro (who also made collages) and Kenneth Koch, and traces his animating principle to their strategies. ‘Koch once gave me a poem by Rilke, and said, bring me your translation in two days. I said, “But Kenneth, I don’t know any German.” And he just looked at me with a kind of twinkle in his eye and said, “Exactly.” And so the idea is take something, anything, and make a new thing out of it.’”

Altough many of the collages are playful, Jarmusch also acknowledges that “Some of them are a little scary or dark. Some of them, I hope, are funny. The New York School poets taught me if there’s nothing funny in any of your stuff, then wow, how unfortunate for you.”

You can find out more about Jarmusch’s book, Some Collages (a title that perhaps nods to Ashbery’s debut, Some Trees), here and read an interview with him about his collages in Dazed, here.

“Untitled” (2017)

Jenny Xie reads “My Heart” by Frank O’Hara

If you haven’t checked it out yet, Ours Poetica is a great video series, produced by the Poetry Foundation and the poet Paige Lewis, which posts a poem read by a poet, writer, or artist, three times a week.

This week the poet Jenny Xie reads Frank O’Hara’s wonderful short poem “My Heart.” O’Hara’s defiant declaration of non-conformity and artistic and personal independence has long been a favorite of mine. I even used a line from the poem — “I want to be / at least as alive as the vulgar” — in the title of one my first published essays (about O’Hara and the movies). And I remember how happy and surprised I was when it was included in the “Poetry in Motion” series, a program which creates posters of poems and places them in New York City subways. Looking up during my long commute and seeing that poem adorning the grimy walls of the L train was an unexpected delight. My wife even tracked down the poster and bought a copy for me many years ago, and it’s been hanging in my office ever since.

Before she reads the poem, Xie says “I return to this poem for its celebration of the freedom to be a stranger to oneself,” which is a lovely way of putting it. Here’s her reading of the poem:

Roundup of Recent “New York School of Poetry” News and Links (4/4/21)

I know it has been awfully quiet around here at Locus Solus over the past few months. A combination of pandemic craziness and being in the last stages of a long-term project has resulted in my needing to take a bit of a hiatus (or, as journalists like to call it, “book leave”) from posting about the New York School of poets here. (I continue to post regularly on the Locus Solus Facebook page and on Twitter so I do encourage you to follow me in those places for New York School-related content).

I hope to resume more frequent posting here in the near future, but in the meantime, I thought I’d do 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). So here are some of the many items of interest from the past few months:

• Sebastian Smee writes about Grace Hartigan and Frank O’Hara in the Washington Post. The piece focuses on the friendship between Hartigan and O’Hara (which I wrote a bit about here), and in particular, focuses on Hartigan’s painting “Frank O’Hara, 1926-1966,” which she painted after the poet’s tragic death. Smee notes that the painting “is definitely an event. Measuring 6.6-by-6.6 feet, it is full of compressed energies, rhyming forms and an overall sense of energetic entanglement.” 

Grace Hartigan, “Frank O’Hara, 1926-1966” (1966)

• Karin Roffman, the author of The Songs We Know Best: John Ashbery’s Early Life, recently created and annotated a delightful playlist of some of Ashbery’s favorite pieces of music for Evergreen Review, from John Cage’s “Music of Changes” to Schoenberg’s “String Quartet No. 3” to Bach’s “Goldberg Variations.”

• Exciting news for fans of Alice Notley — her first art book, Runes and Chords, is forthcoming this summer: “These sketches, drawn on an iPad and first serialized on Notley’s Twitter feed, are a fascinating window into an evolving practice, collages of flowers and poetry, the white space of digital creation and overlaid colors erupting from the page. They defy containment and category, much like their creator—each a second in a day, an afternoon or evening in Paris, a thought so transient it can only exist in the medium of social media.” Notley wrote about the origins the book and the process of making these works for the Poetry Foundation, and Nick Sturm delved into Notley’s visual art for Jacket2. 

• The world of the New York School and its affiliates has suffered some sharp losses over the past few months. First, Lewis Warsh, a beloved and important member of the New York School’s so-called Second Generation, recently passed away at the age of 76. For some of the many fine and moving tributes that have appeared since he passed away late last year, see here and here and here.

Lewis Warsh, Anne Waldman, and Joe Brainard (1968)

• The poet Dick Gallup, an important member of “the soi-disant Tulsa School” and close friend of Ted Berrigan, Joe Brainard, and Ron Padgett, passed away in January 2021. Nick Sturm wrote this wonderful tribute to Gallup’s life and poetry for The Brooklyn Rail.

• Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Beat poet, champion of free speech and artistic freedom, founder of City Lights Books, and editor who worked closely with Frank O’Hara on the publication of Lunch Poems, passed away at the age of 101. Here is the New York Times obituary of this iconic figure of the postwar avant-garde and the New American Poetry: “Lawerence Ferlinghetti, Poet Who Nurtured the Beats, Dies at 101.”

• An additional major loss was the death of Diane Di Prima, another figure associated with the Beats but with strong ties to O’Hara and poets of the New York School. Di Prima died in October 2020 at the age of 86 — you can find some of the many obituaries and tributes here, here, here, and here. Last year, a critical study of Di Prima’s work, Diane Di Prima: Visionary Poetics and Hidden Religions, by David Stephen Calonne was published as well.

• Poet and critic Ange Mlinko recently reviewed the Collected Poems of Harry Mathews for London Review of Books.

• Mary Maxwell also wrote about Mathews’s Collected poems for the Best American Poetry blog: “Taking Parisian boulevards as a starting point, perhaps the best way to present his poetic work is as a sort of extended flirtation taking place at an outdoor cafe, formal stricture functioning as mere frame, the way extenuating circumstances of vehicular traffic and passersby impinge upon conversation. His lines often throb with the intensity of being abroad…experiences lit by unfamiliar skies and therefore glowing with an enchanted alienness.”

• Christine Smallwood reviewed the new biography of Helen Frankenthaler for Harper’s.

• The scholar Brian Glavey has a new critical essay on James Schuyler in New Literary History (paywalled) called “Lyric Wilt, or, the Here and Now of Queer Impotentiality.” In the essay, Glavey considers “the tension between Schuyler’s commitment to the here and now and what [Jose] Muñoz calls ‘the there and then of queer futurity,’ suggesting that the key to understanding these seemingly contradictory commitments is to recognize his career-long investigation into the idea of potentiality.”

• Art historian Delia Solomons writes for MoMA about a sculpture by the artist Marisol (who I wrote about here) in relation to a poem by Frank O’Hara. Solomons “brings together Marisol’s sculpture Love and Frank O’Hara’s poem “Having a Coke with You” to explore their shared investigations of the personal in a capitalistic landscape, queer eroticism, global Cold War politics, and stoppered versus flowing communication.”

Marisol, “Love” (1962)

• The poet and physician Rafael Campo writes about Frank O’Hara’s “Poem (Lana Turner has collapsed!)” in the context of our pandemic moment for the Poetry Society of America. “Whenever I return to this beloved poem,” Campo writes, “as I have frequently during these fevered days, or teach it to medical students, I’m always struck by its immediacy, how insistently it locates us in the troubled physical body … Whether we hear a prayer of hope in the poem’s stunning last line, or a desperate plea that we endure, or even an arch impatience in our silly imperfections, in the end we can confess our inexplicable, undiagnosable, love—and, more than by any medicine I can prescribe, be saved by it.”

• The poet Shane McCrae published a piece titled “My War with John Ashbery” for the Library of America’s series of blog posts on “Infuences.” McCrae notes “I’m still afraid when I sit down to read him—I struggled to not sound like Ashbery for years; I still feel as if he might overwhelm me. And in the end, I only managed the trick of not sounding like him by trying a new trick. The trick, it turns out, wasn’t to not sound like Ashbery—if that had been what I kept trying to do, I never would have pulled the trick off—the trick was to sound like myself.”

• Tim Keane takes stock of Barbara Guest’s poetry in a piece for Hyperallergic, arguing that Guest “stands apart as a radical traditionalist, committed to poetry’s clairvoyant, mythical potentials.”

• For the Nation, Jeremy Lybarger reviewed a very welcome new edition of the letters of the poet John Wieners (edited by Michael Seth Stewart) whose work and friendship Frank O’Hara valued so highly (see “Les Luths,” where O’Hara writes “everybody here is running around after dull pleasantries and / wondering if The Hotel Wentley Poems is as great as I say it is” and my post from a few years ago about their relationship).

• Some Other Blues: New Perspectives on Amiri Baraka, a new collection of essays on Baraka’s work edited by Jean-Philippe Marcoux, was recently published by Ohio State University Press. The book features essays by many important Baraka scholars, including William J. Harris, Benjamin Lee, John Lowney, Fred Moten, Aldon Lynn Nielsen, Anthony Reed, Lauri Scheyer, Kathy Lou Schultz, James Smethurst, Laura Vrana, and Tyrone Williams.

• Rosanna Warren’s new biography of the French avant-garde poet Max Jacob, a major influence on the poets of the New York School, was reviewed in the New York Times and in the Washington Post, and excerpted in the Paris Review.

Ben Lerner’s Oblique Elegy For John Ashbery

Ben Lerner (John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation)

“I find the moments of beauty and possibility opening up in John Ashbery’s work inexhaustibly beautiful,” the fiction writer and poet Ben Lerner recently said in an interview.  This is certainly not surprising – Ashbery is a fixture in virtually all of Lerner’s writing and thinking.  After Ashbery passed away in 2017, Lerner wrote a brief, affecting tribute in the New Yorker about the poet and their relationship (“I’m dizzied by my luck at having overlapped with John Ashbery, one of the good things about being born when I was”).

Not only are Lerner’s first three books – volumes of poetry — clearly indebted to Ashbery’s work, but when he turned to fiction with his 2011 debut novel Leaving the Atocha Station, he borrowed the book’s title from an Ashbery poem.  The story centers on Lerner’s barely fictionalized alter-ego, Adam Gordon,  a young poet whose life bears a striking similarity to Lerner’s own, stumbling through a fellowship year in Madrid and ruminating at times on his favorite poet, John Ashbery.  On the novel’s very first page, the main character says that each day “I’d find my bag, which contained a bilingual edition of Lorca’s Collected Poems, my two notebooks, a pocket dictionary, John Ashbery’s Selected Poems, drugs, and leave for the Prado.”  Lerner even weaves into the novel parts of an essay on Ashbery that he had published in the scholarly journal Boundary 2.

Lerner’s most recent book, his celebrated third novel The Topeka School, continues to evince his deep ties to Ashbery and the New York School of poetry.  For this novel – a portrait of the artist as an even younger man – Lerner goes back to his high school years, to his experiences as a star debater and fledgling poet in Topeka, Kansas in the 1990s, in order to trace the “genealogy of his speech.”  By excavating his past, Lerner aims to explore the nature of the “school” that formed him and to map out the influences that shaped the adult Adam/Ben, who narrates the book’s final section in the present moment.

One of the key sources in that pre-history seems to be Ashbery, along with the movement he was so closely associated with.  Indeed, one of the novel’s sections, which recounts some disparate experiences all set in New York City (including a scene involving Ashbery himself) is called “The New York School.”  Furthermore, even though the book chronicles teenage Adam’s growing interest in poetry, refers to him studying poetry in college, and presents current-day Adam as a poet himself, Ashbery is one of the only poets mentioned by name.

Then there’s the novel’s title — as pieces in the New York Times and the Guardian have noted, it too seems to nod to the important role these poets played in Lerner’s own development: “Lerner wanted to be a lawyer until he discovered poetry in his midteens. The so-called New York School of John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara was especially formative (a debt acknowledged in the new book’s title ). The playful, suggestive incoherence of such writers offered a kind of antidote to the zero-sum hostility of debate.”

The title might also be a winking reference to “the soi-disant Tulsa School,” the tongue-in-cheek name Ashbery gave to a group of his own younger disciples, the remarkable group of writers and artists to emerge from Oklahoma in the early 1960s, which included Ron Padgett, Ted Berrigan, and Joe Brainard.  By titling his novel The Topeka School, Lerner may be hinting that Topeka is just as unlikely a site of origin for adventurous New York School-influenced art and literature, but also just as possible.

Throughout the novel, Lerner explores how our selves, our voices, and our view of the world are all fashioned out of disparate, clashing languages, vocabularies, and grammars – from the white, male, tough guy, rap-influenced teenage lingo of Topeka in the 1990s to the highbrow psychoanalytic patois of Adam’s intellectual parents, from the rapid-fire barrage used in competitive debate (known as “the spread”) to the non sequiturs and linguistic play of experimental poetry.  So it’s no accident that phrases from Ashbery’s poetry seep almost imperceptibly into the text, often unmarked and seamlessly blended into the consciousness which seems to be composing the novel we’re reading – that of the grown-up Adam/Ben, writing in Brooklyn in the Trump years.

For instance, in one passage where the narrative voice begins to break down into a jumble of fragments, lines from Ashbery’s long litany of rivers, “Into the Dusk-Charged Air,” enter the text unannounced (“Experts agree that the Yukon is choked with ice.  The Japurá is a pack of ice. The Loing is choked with fragments of ice. The Dnieper is still ice-bound”).  In another passage, set in a museum, Adam’s mother (or is it Adam ventriloquizing his mother?) mentions that she “kept catching glimpses” of an elusive painting “out of the corner of my eye,” adding the  phrase “whispers out of time” — which directly echoes the final words of Ashbery’s great long poem about an elusive painting, “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” (“in cold pockets / Of remembrance, whispers out of time”).  At another point, Adam’s father (or is it Adam ventriloquizing his father?) seems to quote the first line of Ashbery’s “At North Farm” when he says “I was traveling furiously toward him in the dark”;  he also refers to New York as “a logarithm of other cities,” just as Ashbery does in a striking moment in “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.”

But it’s not just bits and pieces of Ashbery’s language, nor his characteristic preoccupations with the nature of time, language, art, or consciousness, that pop up throughout the novel – Ashbery himself makes a brief, important cameo.  Adam’s father recalls a pivotal moment in his son’s college years: while spending a semester at Columbia University, Adam is devastated to find out via email that his girlfriend has broken up with him while studying abroad in Spain. “And later that night, [Adam] explained, he was supposed to attend a big poetry reading at the 92^nd Street Y; his professor, a poet named Stoke, or maybe Coke, was going to read, and so was John Ashbery, Adam’s hero.  There was some chance he might get invited to the dinner after; this was the kind of thing he’d dreamed about when he’d opted for New York.”

Although Adam’s father garbles the name, Adam’s teacher is obviously Kenneth Koch, the longtime Columbia professor.  Despite Adam’s excitement about seeing Ashbery read, everything goes wrong: just as Ashbery moves to the podium to introduce the evening’s program, Adam, seated in the front row and filled with despair about his breakup, has a panic attack and bolts from the room, but not before Ashbery spots him leaving and quips “That bad, eh?  Wait till you hear our poems?” while “everyone in the auditorium laughs.”

When I read this passage, I immediately thought: was this an actual event, a real poetry reading given by two famous poets, discoverable in the annals of history?  More importantly, was I there?  Like Adam (and presumably Lerner), I too happened to be living in New York and studying at Columbia in 1999, although I was nearly a decade older, a graduate student and instructor, rather than an undergraduate at the time.  At the same moment that Lerner apparently had Koch as a teacher, I too was working with Koch, though in my case I was helping him run a poetry series as his now-former assistant and all-around mentee.

One of the things that make Lerner’s novels so much fun is the way he deliberately creates a constant flickering between fact and fiction.  It’s impossible to read his books without pondering what is real and what is made up, what is autobiographical and what is not.  If you’re like me, you may even find yourself spending an inordinate amount of time googling things like the Menninger Foundation (the real-life version of the “Topeka school” Foundation where Lerner’s parents were psychologists), reading up on Harriet Lerner (the author’s famous psychologist mother and model for Jane in the book), or searching in vain for a photograph of the young Ben Lerner alongside Senator Bob Dole on the front page of an ancient edition of The Topeka Capital-Journal, to find out where the novel leaves off and real life begins.  This is of course the point of his work, which intensely probes what he calls “the unstable mixture of fact and fiction.”

So given my own obsessions and personal history, a passage about an Ashbery-Koch reading in New York in 1999 seems almost tailor-made to send me scurrying down various rabbit holes, trying to figure out whether it really happened as the book presents it.  The first thing I discovered is that, according to the detailed archives of the 92^nd Street Y, Ashbery and Koch do not seem to have given a joint reading there in 1999, or at any other point.  Of course it is possible that Lerner has just invented the reading, or shifted the location, or the year.  However, Ashbery and Koch did appear together at that venue in 1999, just not as the two featured readers, at a reading that took place at the same moment as the event in the book, “a few weeks before the end of the term, before the end of the millennium,” so perhaps Lerner has just changed the details slightly.

On December 6, 1999, Barbara Guest and Kenneth Koch read together at the 92^nd Street Y, and Ashbery himself also took part, though it’s not clear in what capacity; the archive only lists him as one of the performers.  (He may well have given an introduction for Koch, as the novel mentions: “His professor, Coke, is slated to read first; Ashbery will introduce him; then Coke will introduce Ashbery”).

My next thought was that surely I must have been there that night too!  It’s very unlikely that I would have missed the opportunity to see Koch and Guest and Ashbery read in New York in 1999, and I do recall seeing Ashbery and Koch read together on a number of occasions.  Maybe somewhere, deep in the coils of my brain, I might even be able to locate a memory of a young guy in the front row awkwardly getting up to leave in a rush as the evening was getting started, prompting a teasing remark from Ashbery, just as it happens to Adam/Ben in the novel.

But it was not to be: I dug out a datebook I kept during that year, and lo and behold, on the page for December 6, 1999, there’s a note about the coming event, along with the disappointing words, written (presumably later, with disappointment) in different color pen: “SOLD OUT.”

So, apparently I was not there, not present in the audience alongside the real Ben or the fictional Adam.  Nevertheless, I’d like to think that maybe — on some some forking path, or within some flickering, alternate, possible version of reality (like those one finds everywhere in Lerner’s fiction and Ashbery’s poetry) — in a way I was.

In any event, Lerner’s brilliant novel is many things – a moving family saga, an unusual Künstlerroman, a sharp prehistory of the Trump era and its toxic masculinity – but it is also a chance for Lerner to compose another moving elegy for one of his heroes, John Ashbery, an oblique tribute to Ashbery’s outsized role in the “genealogy of his” – and our – “speech, its theaters and extremes.”

Sea Wolf’s “Frank O’Hara,” a Tribute to the Poet of Indie Rock

 

Indie rock’s love affair with Frank O’Hara continues apace.  As I’ve noted before on this blog, O’Hara seems

to haunt the history and present of popular music, leading one observer to ask: ‘When did Frank O’Hara become the poet of indie rock?’ O’Hara inspired the stage name of Frankie Cosmos, and songs by Rilo Kiley and Sonic Youth‘s Thurston Moore — Lou Reed even recited his work to Patti Smith while reclining in a bathtub! … Jeff Tweedy (of Uncle Tupelo and Wilco fame) cited O’Hara as one of his favorites, too.

Now the indie band Sea Wolf is keeping this welcome tradition alive with their new song titled “Frank O’Hara.”

 

The gentle, wistful song imagines an encounter between the singer and the great New York poet on a subway platform, not unlike Allen Ginsberg strolling the aisles of “A Supermarket in California” with the ghost of Walt Whitman at his side:  “Frank O’Hara / Standing in the subway / Imagined you beside me.”

Just as Ginsberg does with Whitman and Lorca, this song explores the speaker’s deep queer kinship with O’Hara: “I was always with you / Though we’re not the same / I know what it was to / Grow up with the shame.”

Indeed, Alex Brown Church, the singer and songwriter behind Sea Wolf, has explained that the song “reflects on the day same-sex marriage was federally legalized in the United States.”  Church’s song poignantly wishes O’Hara himself could’ve been around to witness how the world changed on June 26, 2015:

Love won that day
Lifted all of us up
What would you have written?
Would words have even been enough?

… Frank O’Hara
Wish you could’ve been there
You and me and mother
And all your former lovers

There is something undeniably moving about a musician in 2020 writing a such a lovely song paying tribute to Frank O’Hara as a gay forbear — as a “lonely old courage-teacher” (to borrow Ginsberg’s phrase for Whitman) — and imagining how O’Hara might’ve responded to the new world ushered in by the decision to legalize same-sex marriage: a world that has changed, changed utterly, in which one can look around and finally say, as the song’s chorus does, “so this is love / this is love.”

Here are the song’s lyrics in full:

Frank O’Hara
Standing in the subway
Imagined you beside me
As if you could hide me
Love won that day
Lifted all of us up
What would you have written?
Would words have even been enough?

Drove through deserts
Garbage in the meadows
Saw ourselves in windows
Hidden in the shadows
No one really knew us
Not the way we wanted
So we had to listen
To the voices haunting us

So this is love
This is love
So this is love
This is love

Frank O’Hara
Wish you could’ve been there
You and me and mother
And all your former lovers
I was always with you
Though we’re not the same
I know what it was to
Grow up with the shame

So this is love
This is love
So this is love
This is love
So this is love
This is love
So this is love
This is love

Frank O’Hara
Standing in the subway
What would you have written?
Would words have even been enough?

“Art Cooking: Frank O’Hara” (with Sarah Urist Green, John Green, Paige Lewis, and Kaveh Akbar)

It’s probably not a surprise that the work of Frank O’Hara, the author of a book called Lunch Poems, is overflowing with images of food and drink — from the “glass of papaya juice” at the end of “A Step Away from Them” and the “just plain scrambled eggs” in “For Grace, After a Party” to the “liver sausage sandwich” (ew) in “Music.”

For the series called “Art Cooking,” part of her educational YouTube channel “The Art Assignment,” Sarah Urist Green has zeroed in precisely on this aspect O’Hara’s work, and produced a charming and informative video devoted to the life and work of Frank O’Hara, and its connections to the delights of eating and sharing food with friends.  For this episode, Green is joined by her husband, the novelist John Green, and two wonderful poets, who also happen to be friends and former graduate students of mine, Paige Lewis and Kaveh Akbar.

In the video, titled “Having a Coke with Frank O’Hara,” Sarah Urist Green interweaves a lively introduction to O’Hara’s life and work with the preparation of a delicious-looking avocado salad (inspired by O’Hara’s “Poem (“Light   clarity   avocado salad in the morning”), followed by some cheeseburgers and a chocolate malted (from “A Step Away From Them”).  Along the way, Paige and Kaveh both read from O’Hara’s work, and the gang shares a coke while O’Hara reads his perennial favorite — and Valentine’s Day classic — “Having a Coke With You.”

The whole thing is a lot of fun, and it may even make you want to try out Green’s avocado salad recipe, eat a good burger, and read some of O’Hara delightful poems.

(The video was made in conjunction with the terrific new YouTube series called Ours Poetica, which Paige created with John Green, and I was honored to play the tiny role of providing “O’Hara protips”).

The Weather on 2/9/62: A Footnote for Frank O’Hara’s “Poem (Lana Turner has collapsed)”

On this day (February 9) in 1962, Frank O’Hara was on his way to give a poetry reading at Wagner College, with the much more famous poet Robert Lowell (who O’Hara viewed as a stuffy, mandarin rival) when he saw a surprising, troubling, and rather absurd headline.  Apparently, the famous actress Lana Turner, already a tabloid fixture, had collapsed “from exhaustion” at her own 42nd birthday party.  (A few years ago, I posted the original newspaper clipping and headline — “Lana Faints; In Hospital” — that O’Hara probably saw that day).

On the Staten Ferry, O’Hara jotted down a now-famous poem, which he took out of his pocket and read to the audience later that evening — an insouciant gesture, one in keeping with his aesthetic of spontaneity and improvisation, and apparently a real crowd-pleaser.  But it seemed to irritate Lowell, perhaps intentionally so: when he took the stage, Lowell sniffed that he wasn’t going to read anything he had written on the way to the reading.

Here’s the poem, which records the day’s miserable wintry weather in some detail, and uses it as a contrast to the supposedly perfect sunny and warm world of Hollywood, which now seems threatened by Lana’s calamity :

Lana Turner has collapsed!
I was trotting along and suddenly
it started raining and snowing
and you said it was hailing
but hailing hits you on the head
hard so it was really snowing and
raining and I was in such a hurry
to meet you but the traffic
was acting exactly like the sky
and suddenly I see a headline
LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED!
there is no snow in Hollywood
there is no rain in California
I have been to lots of parties
and acted perfectly disgraceful
but I never actually collapsed
oh Lana Turner we love you get up

A few years ago, Carl Robert Anderson tweeted the following New York City weather report for that fateful winter day, February 9, 1962, and simply said “it checks out.”

It does indeed check out — right down to the mix of rain and snow and “ice pellets,” which suggests that the “you” in the poem, who said it was hailing, was kind of right, even if O’Hara insists it was only raining and snowing.

Just another reminder of the experimental realism that drives O’Hara’s poems, which meticulously record the minutiae of daily life, including the fluctuations of the weather.

(For more on this poem and the original headline, see Paul Stephens’s essay on O’Hara, celebrity culture, and “the poetics of celebsploitation”).

Happy Lana Turner poem day!