By STEPHEN KOCH

he New York School of Poets- whose best-known members are John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch and the late Frank O'Hara- has emerged as the creative vanguard of poetry in the sixties. While the avant-garde of the fifties- the cadre of dirty-talking brain pommelers such as Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, William Burroughs, Michael McClure and the rest- continues to soar up from underground, riding on the express elevator of the mass media, the "scene" has been changing into something a little less hysterical and willful.

To be sure, some of the old style remains. Particularly for the group's younger disciples, the Lower East Side is still the turf where the avantist elite convenes, and among a few of the them beards and the affected, hoedown manner of the folksy fifties still prevails, though most such cornball affectations by now have slid into what might be called their mannerist phase, and remind one of Tolstoy having his "peasant" shirts made from pure silk by his Moscow tailor.

But for the older poets- Koch, Ashbery, and even most of their young followers- all is changed. Baths are de rigeur. No more pretending to be illiterate; unashamed, these writers bluntly confess to being influenced by the great tradition of classical European modernism- by Mallarme, Proust, Breton, Henri Michaux and Raymond Roussel. No more does one hear wailing Ginsbergian claims to visionary illumination. There will be no more obsessive talk about rebellion and an anguished relation to society. There is not so much spluttering of nasty words, not so much horny toying with the postures of freedom, not so much crudity and clumsiness and witlessness. The New York School does not have the grandstand manner; the artists in it do not write grandstand poems. Their performance is not for the gallery, and the teenyboppers are bored.

Yet these artists exert a very wide influence over a younger generation of poets- near ubiquitous influence over it, in fact. Almost every smudged page of every loosely stapled little photo-offset magazine currently emanates the New York School "sound," and it is not too much to say that even before the group has become generally known, they have influenced an entire generation of young American poets. For several years, Koch, who teaches English at Columbia, has proselytized a post-symbolist French-modern esthetic, using his poetry workshop at the New School as headquarters. As for Ashbery's influence- stop anywhere you happen to be in the underground and listen: that sound you hear is the sound of Ashbery's poetic voice being mimicked- a hushed, simultaneously incomprehensible and intelligent whisper with a weird pulsating rhythm that fluctuates like a wave between peaks of sharp clarity and watery troug hs of obscurity and languor.

But the diverse personal manners of these three innovators could never by themselves capture the allegiance of the truculent and ungrateful young. Only as esthetic, in this case the modernist esthetic, which the group has had the courage to practice, could do that. Modernism offers those interested in art release from the "poetic"; it rejects the use of overwrought language to polish up a set of solemn emotional trinkets; it shuts up the whiny, neurotic sound of current verse, and wipes away "poetry" in the discredited sense of that word.

The New York school is unique in modern American poetry because it is successfully extending the great modernist experiment of 20th-century art: it is committed to renovating the vocabulary and matrix of thinking, seeing and feeling, to expanding and refining the modern- by which we mean 1968, not 1938- perception of words and the world, using as its method the new. That, only that, has won the allegiance of the new poets.

Like some kind of flaring rash, that modernism has also isolated the New York School from the American literary world (which is by no means a modernist operation) and led them instead into the cultural ambience of the great American abstract painters: Pollack, de Kooning, Newman, Still, Rothko and Gottlieb. At the time of his death, O'Hara was an associate curator at the Museum of Modern Art. While editing the important quarterly, Art and Literature, Ashbery has made his living as an art critic. Whether they felt understood or at ease in the absolutely unliterary world of the painters it is difficult to say; but in it, at least their ideas about art did not make them stick out like something freakish, as in the ordinary literary world they certainly would have done.

Socially, Koch, Ashbery and O'Hara have made the art world their home, and it has formed their style. But they are also bound to the art world by esthetic affinities; the painters' leap into abstraction resembles the poets' experiments with shattered syntax and fragmented language, with surrealistic links between unrelated things, like the ones in this "incomprehensible" passage from Ashbery's "The Tennis Court Oath":

The spoon of your head
crossed by livid stems
The chestnuts' large clovers wiped
You see only the white page its
faint frame of red
You hear the viola's death sound
A woman sits in black and white
tile
Why, you are pale.

Here, broken hunks and bits of pictures and scenes mix with snatches of someone's voice and float like disembodied sense impressions stammering in a kind of substanceless ether. Once can't read such lines looking for a meaning in any usual sense of the word: the montage just fades in and out, pictures merely build and then vanish, blink out. Rather than "understand" the poem, one merely lets it "work" on the mind, a kind of verbal movie- but an abstract movie more like music.

The poems of Kenneth Koch's "Thank You and Other Poems" (Grove Press) create a world of surreal wit, a kind of word-playground, the component parts of which are always pleasant and tasty, filled with sunlight and color, with circuses, red shimmering fish, farmyards sprinkled with yellow straw and violets, with green oceans and chugging, rusty ships. (Koch's poems are drenched in the characteristic colors of Matisse, bright, unshaded, and primary.) All of his work is theatrical, and theater has led him to write some delicious little dadaistic farces collected in "Bertha and Other Plays."

Though he is sometimes insufferably silly, Koch is also a wit- perhaps the most polished wit writing in English, working in the discontinuous, unexpected rhythms of the Marx Brothers. The macabre is very strong in his work, but it is never even remotely depressing. On the contrary, Koch's convulsive catastrophes erupt in technicolor, but harmlessly:

We laughed at the hollyhocks together
and then I sprayed them with lye.
Forgive me. I simply do not know
what I am doing.

*

Last evening we went dancing and
I broke your leg.
Forgive me. I was clumsy, and
I wanted you here in the wards,
where I am the doctor!

The most noticeable fact about Koch's work is that it is never, absolutely never, about real pain. The breezy, echoing absence of any appeal to human suffering and its dignity makes his work unique in contemporary poetry, both in and out of the New York School. O'Hara's writing, for example, is about suffering; though the sound is modern, his theme is usually romantic standard equipment: sensual liberty punched through with unhappy love. In all his work ("Second Avenue," "Lunch Poems," and the recently reissued "Meditations in an Emergency") O'Hara claims to want to be the bard of hedonism, unashamed sensual pleasure, urbanity and egoism; in his art criticism, he repeatedly lavishes praise on the happy few who he thinks are "unrepressed, unneurotic, unabashed."

But when it comes to the poems, one finds not a sensory circus but plain melancholy, a kind of persistent tender violence and the repeated effort to jump over some kind of emotional abyss on the springs of his wit, his sudden flashes of optimism, his sentimentalism, and what is perhaps most impressive about his work, the extraordinary delicacy and sharpness of his response to sights and sounds and smells: to a night breeze, or to the feel of standing on a street corner in midtown Manhattan, or of sitting in the 5-Spot Café listening to Billy Holliday, in "The Day Lady Died."

But Ashbery is both the most difficult and the best poet in the New York School, even after it's been explained that the difficulty does not in itself make the work good. His "Clepsydra" and "The Skaters" (both long poems to be found in his most recent and best collection, "Rivers and Mountains") seem to me the most involving, ambitious and successful American poems of the past 15 years, meditations on the nature of poetry itself without equals since Wallace Stevens was turning out his last poems. But though Ashbery's work is both remarkable and radical, I am less sure that it will have a "wholesome" effect on writing or taste. He has raised obscurantism to the level of an important artistic principle; he has pushed an utterly personal and arcane brand of romanticism to its most radical extreme.

When the nature of his work becomes fully known (but can it be fully known?), Ashbery is certain to be extremely controversial, for he is a poet who both loves and hates the experience of communication. Ashbery does not so much write sentences as erase them. His art flowers into the esthetic of the blur, in which the smeared words are only half-articulated and half-known because the poet finds the slippery fade-out more meaningful than clarity- since experience is not, after all, fundamentally verbal.

Here is an example, the opening lines of his extraordinary "Clepsydra":

Hasn't the sky? Returned from
moving the other

Authority recently dropped, wrested
as much of

That severe sunshine as you need
now on the way

You go. The reason why it happened
only since

You woke up so letting the steam
disappear

From those clouds when the
landscape all around

Is hilly sites that will have to be
reckoned

Into the total for there to be more
air: that is,

More fitness read into the undeduced
result, than land.

This means never getting any closer
to the basic

Principle operating behind it than to
the distracted

Entity of a mirage. The half-meant,
half-perceived

Motions of fronds out of idle depths
that are

Summer. And expansion into little
draughts.

If these lines are meaningless, meaning nonetheless buzzes and flutters through them like insects flying through the evening air. Though that stumbling hum is frustrating, it seems to me to have the artistic importance of expanding the areas of human consciousness and perception over which language has a domain. No matter what final verdict is passed on them, these poets represent a real advance in the dull world of contemporary American poetry. The mere fact that they are interesting to read puts them almost in a class by themselves, and their commitment to modernism gives them a relation to the other important art of the century that is not very widely shared in a poetry scene that since 1945 has become more and more provincial each year.

The New York School is playful, it is true, and to that degree it can be rightly called unserious. But play- as we know- need not be unserious. It depends on what is being played, and where. Silly, giggly, arcane, impossible though it may seem, this playful art is the living poetry of our time because it is playing out the language in the clangorous void between meaning and silence.

Mr. Koch's essay, "On Artaud," will appear in the forthcoming "American Literary Anthology." He teaches at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, and is completing a novel.

Стівен КОХ

він Нью -Йорк Школа Поети - чиї найвідоміший члени Джон Ешбері, Кеннет Кох і покійний Френк О'Хара - стала творчою авангарді поезії в шістдесяті роки. У той час як авангард п'ятдесятих- кадрового брудних мовець pommelers мозку, таких як Аллен Гінзберг, Грегорі Корсо, Вільяма Берроуза, Майкл МакКлюр і решті - продовжує зростати з підпілля, їзда на швидкісному ліфті засобів масової інформації, " сцена" змінюється на щось трохи менше істеричною і умисне.

Треба відзначити, що деякі з старого стилю залишається. Особливо для молодих учнів групи, Нижній Іст- Сайд раніше є торф, де avantist еліта збирається, і серед деякі з них бородами і постраждалих, Hoedown чином з простонародних п'ятдесятих раніше переважає, хоча більшість таких cornball афектації по тепер є ковзнув в те, що можна було б назвати їх маньєризму фаза, і нагадують Толстой мають свої «селянин» сорочки, зроблені з чистого шовку по своїй московській кравця.

Але для старшого поетів -Кох, Ешбері, і навіть більшість їхніх молодих послідовників -все змінюється. Ванни хорошим тоном. Немає більше прикидаючись неписьменним; соромлячись, ці письменники прямо зізнатися, що під впливом великої традиції класичної європейської модернізм - на Малларме, Пруста, бретонська, Анрі Мішо і Раймонд Руссель. Немає більше ж можна почути плач Ginsbergian претензій до далекоглядний освітлення. Там не буде більш обсесивно розмови про повстання і болісним відношенню до суспільства. Існує не так багато бризкаючи слиною неприємних слів, що не стільки рогової грав з позами волі, які не стільки брутальності і недолугості і witlessness. Нью -Йорк Школа не має трибуни манеру; художники в ньому не пишуть трибуни вірші. Їх виступ не для галереї, і teenyboppers нудно.

Тим не менше, ці художники докласти дуже широкий вплив на молоде покоління поетів -рядом всюдисущого впливу на нього, насправді. Майже кожен нечітке сторінки кожного вільно зшитими мало фотоофсетним журналу в даний час випромінює "звук, " Нью -Йорк школа, і це не надто багато, щоб сказати, що ще до того, група стала відомо, вони вплинули на ціле покоління молодого американця поети. Протягом декількох років, Кох, який викладає англійську мову в Колумбії, вже волає пост- символіста Французька- сучасна естетику, використовуючи його поезії семінар в Новій школі в якості штаб -квартири. Що стосується Ешбері 'S вплив -стоп в будь-якому місці вам трапиться бути в метро і слухати: що звук, який ви почуєте звук поетичного голосу Ешбері в даний час перекривив - приглушеним, одночасно незрозуміла і розумний шепіт з дивним пульсуючим ритмом, яка коливається подібно хвилі між піки різкого ясності і водянисті жолобів безвісті і томління.

Але різноманітні особисті манери цих трьох новаторів ніколи не міг самостійно захопити вірність лютий і невдячним молодий. Тільки як естетичного, в цьому випадку модерністської естетичної, яких група була сміливість, щоб практикувати, могли б зробити це. Модернізм пропонує тих, хто цікавиться художньою звільнення з " поетичний "; він відкидає використання перевтомленого мовою відполірувати до набір урочистих емоційних дрібнички; він закриває вгору по запобігливий, невротичний звук поточної вірша, і витирає «Поезія» в дискредитували сенсі цього слова.

Нью -Йорк школа є унікальним у сучасній американській поезії, тому що він успішно розширюючи великий модерністський експеримент мистецтва 20 -го століття: він прагне до ремонтують лексику і матрицю мислення, бачачи і відчуваючи, розширенню і уточненню сучасний, з допомогою якого ми маємо на увазі 1968, що не 1938 - сприйняття слів і світу, використовуючи як методу новий. Це тільки те, що, завоювала відданість нових поетів.

Як свого роду спалювання висип, що модернізм також ізольовані нью- йоркської школи від американського літературного світу (що ні в якому разі модерністський операції) і привів їх замість в культурну атмосферу великих американських абстракціоністів: Поллак, де Кунінг, Ньюман, Проте, Ротко і Готліб. На момент його смерті, О'Хара був ад'юнкт- куратор Музею сучасного мистецтва. При редагуванні важливу щоквартально, мистецтва і літератури, Ешбері зробив собі на життя як художній критик. Будь вони відчували зрозумів або невимушено в абсолютно unliterary світі художників важко сказати; але в ньому, принаймні, їхні ідеї про мистецтві не зробити їх стирчать як щось химерної, як і в звичайному літературному світі вони, звичайно, зробили б.

Соціально, Кох, Ешбері та О'Хара зробили світ мистецтва своїм будинком, і вона сформувала свій стиль. Але вони також пов'язані з світом мистецтва естетичними спорідненості; Художників стрибок на абстракцію нагадує поетів експерименти з зруйнованої синтаксису і фрагментованою мовою, з сюрреалістичними зв'язків між непов'язаними речами, як ті, в цій «незрозумілою» уривок з Ешбері в " Клятва Тенісний корт":

Ложка з голови

перетинають люті стебла

Великі конюшини каштани " витер

Ви бачите тільки білу сторінку його

слабкий кадр червоний

Ви чуєте звук смерті на альті в

Жінка сидить в чорно- білому

плитка

Чому, ви бліді.

Тут, хмарно шматки і шматочки фотографій і сцен змішати з обривками чийсь голос і плавати, як безтілесні чуттєвих вражень незрозумілими в свого роду substanceless ефіру. Після того, як не може читати такі рядки шукають сенсу в будь-якому звичайному сенсі цього слова: монтаж просто зникає, і вийде, картинки просто побудувати, а потім зникають, блимати поза. Замість того, щоб " зрозуміти " вірш, одне лише дозволяє йому "працювати" на виду, свого роду словесної фільму -но абстрактного фільму більш, як музика.

Вірші Кеннет Коха "Спасибі й інші вірші" (Grove Press) створити світ ірреального дотепністю, свого роду слово -ігровий майданчик, складові частини яких завжди приємно і смачно, наповнений сонячним світлом і кольором, з цирках, червоний мерехтливий риба, скотарень, посипані жовтої соломи і фіалок, з зеленими океанами і бурчання, іржаві кораблі. (Вірші Коха просякнуті характерних кольорах Матісса, яскравий, незаштриховані, і основний.) Всі його роботи є театральним, і театр привело його написати деякі чудові маленькі dadaistic фарси, зібрані в " Берті та інші п'єси ".

Хоча він іноді нестерпно нерозумно, Кох також дотепність - мабуть, самий полірованої дотепність лист англійською мовою, працюють в розривних, несподіваних ритмів братів Маркс. Моторошний дуже сильна в своїй роботі, але це ніколи не навіть віддалено пригнічує. Навпаки, судомні катастрофи Коха спалахнути в техніцвета, але необразливо:

Ми сміялися над мальви разом

а потім я розпорошується їх лугом.

Прости мене. Я просто не знаю,

що я роблю.

*

Учора ввечері ми пішли танцювати і

Я зламав ногу.

Прости мене. Я був незграбний, і

Я хотів, щоб ти тут в палатах,

де я доктор!

Найбільш помітним факт про роботу Коха є те, що вона ніколи не буває, абсолютно ніколи, про реальну болю. Свіжий, вторячи відсутність апеляції до людських страждань і її гідності робить його робота унікальна в сучасній поезії, як в і з нью- йоркської школи. Написання О'хари, наприклад, про страждання; хоча звук сучасний, його тема, як правило, романтичний стандартне обладнання: чуттєва свобода ритися з нещасливого кохання. У всіх його роботи («Друга авеню", " Обід Вірші ", і нещодавно перевидані " медитації в надзвичайній ситуації") О'Хара стверджує, хочу бути співаком гедонізму, безсоромною чуттєвої насолоди, урбаністики та егоїзму; в його мистецтвознавства, він неодноразово марнує похвали на щасливому небагатьох, хто на його думку є " неподавленной, unneurotic, безсоромного. "

Але коли справа доходить до віршів, то можна виявити не сенсорний цирк, але простий меланхолію, свого роду постійної тендерної насильства і повторне зусилля, щоб перестрибнути через якийсь емоційної прірви на джерела своєю дотепністю, його раптові спалахи оптимізму, його сентименталізм, і те, що, мабуть, найбільш вражаючим про свою роботу, незвичайною ніжністю і гостроті його відповідь на пам'ятки і звуки і запахи: в нічний вітерець, або до почуття стоячи на розі вулиці в центрі Манхеттена, або сидіти в 5 - Spot Кафе слухати Біллі Холлідей, в " День леді Помер ".

Але Ешбері є і найбільш складним і кращий поет у нью- йоркської школи, навіть після того як вона пояснила, що труднощі саме по собі не зробити роботу добре. Його " ​​Clepsydra " і " Фігуристи " (обидва довгі вірші можна знайти в його самих останніх і найкращих колекцій ", річок і гір"), як мені здається найбільш участю, амбітні та успішні американські вірші останніх 15 років, медитації на сама природа поезії без рівняється з Уоллес Стівенс, виявлялося свої останні вірші. Але хоча робота Ешбері є як чудово і радикальний, я менш впевнений, що це буде мати " здорову" вплив на письмовому або присмаку. Він підняв мракобісся до рівня важливого художнього принципу; він штовхає абсолютно нічого і таємної марку романтизму до його найбільш радикальної крайності.

Коли характер його роботи стає повністю відомими (але це може бути повною мірою відомо?), Ешбері, безсумнівно, буде вкрай спірним, бо він поет, обидва любить і ненавидить досвід спілкування. Ешбері не так покарання записи як їх стерти. Його художні квіти в естетичній частини розмиття, в якому змащені слова тільки половина сформульованої і половина відомого тому поет знаходить слизький поступового зникнення більш значущим, ніж ясності - оскільки досвід не, зрештою, принципово словесні.

Ось приклад, перші рядки з його надзвичайною " Clepsydra ":

Чи не небо? повернувся з

переміщення інший

Влада останнім часом впала, вирвали

стільки

Це важка сонце, як вам потрібно

Тепер на шляху

Ви йдете. Причина, чому це сталося

тільки з

Ви прокинулися так дозволяючи пар

зникати

З цих хмар, коли

краєвид все навколо

Горбиста сайти, які повинні бути

вважатися

У загальній для там бути більш

повітря: тобто

Більш фітнес читати в undeduced

привести, ніж землі.

Це означає, ніколи не стає ближче

в основний

Принцип дії за ним, ніж до

відволікатися

Суб'єкт міраж. Наполовину мав на увазі,

наполовину сприймається

Рухи листя з дозвільної глибин

, які

Літо. І експансія в трохи

проекти.

Якщо ці лінії не мають сенсу, а це означає, проте гуде і тремтить через них, як комахи, що летять через вечірньому повітрі. Хоча, що каменем гул засмучує, мені здається, мати художній важливість розширення сфери людської свідомості і сприйняття, за яким мова має домен. Незалежно від того, що остаточний вердикт передається на них, ці поети не представляють реальну прогрес в тупий світ сучасної американської поезії. Той факт, що вони цікаво читати ставить їх практично в класі самі по собі, і їх прихильність модернізму дає їм ставлення до іншої важливої ​​мистецтва століття, що не дуже широко поширеним у поетичній сцені, що з 1945 року стала все більше і більше провінційний щороку.

Нью -Йорк Школа грайливий, це правда, і до такої міри, що можна по праву назвати несерйозним. Але грати, як ми знаємо, - не повинно бути несерйозним. Це залежить від того, що грав, і де. Нерозумно, хихикає, таємницею, неможливо, хоча це може здатися, це грайлива мистецтво жити поезія нашого часу, тому що він грає за мову в брязкітливий порожнечу між глуздом і тиші.

Есе пана Коха, " Про Арто, " з'явиться в майбутньому «американської літературної антології ". Він викладає в університеті штату Нью -Йорк, Стоні Брук, і завершує роман.

THE STORY of the New York School of poets is a study in friendship, artistic collaboration, and the bliss of being alive and young at a moment of maximum creative ferment. It is also the story of the last authentic avant-garde movement that we have had in American poetry. You can read Paul Hoover’s review of this book in Jacket # 6.

  WHEN JOHN ASHBERY, Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara, and James Schuyler (pronounced “SKY-luh”) first lived in New York, the Korean War was in progress and McCarthyism was the scourge of freethinking intellectuals. It was the era of Levittown* and the “silent generation” when the original Guys and Dolls was on Broadway, suburban flight was in progress, New York had three baseball teams and at least one of them played in the World Series every year.

* Levittown: community in Long Island, New York. Developed between 1946 and 1951 by the firm of Levitt and Sons, Inc., it was an early example of a completely preplanned and mass-produced housing complex. Containing thousands of low cost homes (with accompanying shopping centres, playgrounds, swimming pools, community halls, and schools), its name became a national symbol for suburbia during the post-World War II building boom. (Encyclopædia Britannica)

In an age of split-level conformism, the poets of the New York School put their trust in the idea of an artistic vanguard that could sanction their deviations from the norm. The liberating effect of their writing became increasingly evident in the passionate, experimental, taboo-breaking early 1960s, when the nation’s youngest president was in office, men discarded their hats, women started using the Pill, the acceleration in the speed of social change seemed to double overnight, and America finally left the nineteenth century behind. In his book The Banquet Years, Roger Shattuck characterized the avant-garde in Paris in the golden period before World War I as an “artistic underground” dedicated to “heterodoxy and opposition.”

The artists maintained “a belligerent attitude toward the world and a genuine sympathy for each other.” They lived and worked “in an atmosphere of perpetual collaboration.” The avant-garde “was a way of life, both dedicated and frivolous,” generating tremendous excitement. Guillaume Apollinaire, a poet, was the “impresario of the avant-garde,” the champion of Cubism and the man who gave Surrealism its name. Apollinaire’s “magnetic presence” and his “expansive, volatile nature flowed inexhaustibly on and left behind it poems and lyric texts which seemed to flower effortlessly out of his enthusiasms.”;

Substitute Frank O’Hara for Apollinaire and Abstract Expressionism for Cubism, and you get an eerie fit. The poets of the New York School were as heterodox, as belligerent toward the literary establishment and as loyal to each other, as their Parisian predecessors had been. The 1950s and early ’60s in New York were their banquet years. It is as though they translated the avant-garde idiom of “perpetual collaboration” from the argot of turn-of-the-century Paris to the rough-hewn vernacular of the American metropolis at mid-century.

  WHILE THE FOUR core members of the New York School did not set out to recruit disciples, never issuing public statements or devising a group program in the manner of the French Surrealists, they had a close sense of community and an awareness that their destinies as poets were intertwined. They shared much else besides, including the conviction that they were heading for greatness. Witnesses to what Robert Motherwell called “the greatest painting adventure of our time,” they strove for the same excitement in poetry, looking to the painters as the agents of artistic change. “New York poets, except I suppose the color blind, are affected most by the floods of paint in whose crashing surf we all scramble,” Schuyler wrote in 1959, summing up a decade and more of unprecedented artistic turbulence. “In New York the art world is a painters’ world; writers and musicians are in the boat but they don’t steer.”

left to right: James Schuyler John Ashbery Kenneth Koch August 1956

  The poets took their lead from the Abstract Expressionists (also known as the Action Painters and as the New York School of painting) in several key respects. From Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, they learned that it was okay for a poem to chronicle the history of its own making — that the mind of the poet, rather than the world, could be the true subject of the poem — and that it was possible for a poem to be (or to perform) a statement without making a statement. From the painters, too, they understood that acceptance was not necessarily a blessing, nor rejection a curse. “The literary establishment cared as much for our work as the Frick cared for Pollock and de Kooning,” O’Hara wrote defiantly, pushing the analogy between poets and painters. Like painting, writing was properly understood to be an activity, a present-tense process, and the residue of that activity could not help referring to itself. All poetry was the product of a collaboration with language. While mimesis, the imitation of nature, remained a goal of art, the abstract painters had redefined the concept by enlarging the meaning of nature; “I am nature,” Pollock said. This, too, was a liberty the poets could take. Like abstract paintings, their poems originated not in a Platonic conception of their final form but in an engagement with the medium of expression itself.

  STILL, THE POETS meant to honor the great example of Abstract Expressionism not only by absorbing its principles but also by veering from them as their own development required. In this exact regard, they paralleled their closest friends among the so-called Second Generation of New York School painters — Fairfield Porter, Jane Freilicher, Nell Blaine, and Larry Rivers among them — who strove to learn from Pollock, de Kooning, and the rest, without the slavish fidelity of epigones. The Second Generation painters veered by returning to figuration at the very moment when the critic Clement Greenberg, the ayatollah of Abstract Expressionism, declared that painting had to be abstract and “flat.” The poets veered in an equally fundamental way. In place of the high seriousness that engulfed the Abstract Expressionists, they opted for aesthetic pleasure. They were ironists, not ecelesiasts. They favored wit, humor, and the advanced irony of the blague (that is, the insolent jest or prank) in ways more suggestive of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg than of the New York School painters after whom they were named. About everything, including the ideals and pretensions of the avant-garde, the poets could be jubilantly irreverent, as when Frank O’Hara collaborated with Larry Rivers on “How to Proceed in the Arts,” their satirical “study of the creative act” (1961): “Youth wants to burn the museums. We are in them — now what? Better destroy the odors of the zoo. How can we paint the elephants and hippopotamuses? Embrace the Bourgeoisie. One hundred years of grinding our teeth have made us tired. How are we to fill the large empty canvas at the end of the large empty loft? You do have a loft, don’t you, man?”

  THE POETS liked hoaxes and spoofs, parodies and strange juxtapositions, pseudotranslations and collages. On the ground that the rules of all verse forms are at base arbitrary, they created ad hoc forms (requiring, say, an anagram or the name of a river in every line) and unconventional self-assignments (“translate a poem from a language you do not understand; do not use a glossary or dictionary”). They adapted the Cubist collage and the Surrealist “exquisite corpse” (a one-line poem composed by a group of poets, each of whom contributes a word without knowing what the others have written). Apollinaire’s café poems, “Les Fenêtres” and “Lundi rue Christine,” taught them that a poem could originate in snatches of overheard conversations. You could cull lines at random from books. Or you could scramble the lines in an already written poem to produce a disjunctive jolt. Many works would be improved if you simply deleted every second word. Poems didn’t have to make sense in a conventional way; they could discover their sense as they went along. The logic of a dream or a word game was as valid as that of empirical science as a means of arriving at poetic knowledge. Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery, New York November 1953   Freely experimental and fiercely intellectual, the poets were at the same time resolutely anti-academic and anti-establishment even as they began to win acceptance in establishment circles.

Some of their more radical productions neither looked like nor sounded like poems. Since acceptance or rejection of these works was an indication neither of success or failure, the poets looked to each other as ultimate arbiters. “John and Frank and I were almost like a mutual admiration society,” Schuyler said. But they also competed fiercely, each trying to outdo the other. “It’s wonderful,” Koch said many years later, “to have three good friends that you think are geniuses.” The poets were “like the members of a team, like the Yankees or the Minnesota Vikings,” Koch elaborated. “We inspired each other, we envied each other, we emulated each other, we were very critical of each other, we admired each other, we were almost entirely dependent on each other for support. Each had to be better than the others but if one flopped we all did.” They were prolific. In addition to their own work in several genres, they collaborated with painter pals on collages and lithographs and comic strips. Collaborating with each other, they produced poems, plays, a novel, and four issues of a literary magazine they called Locus Solus, the very model of an avant-garde journal, which they named after a prose masterpiece by Raymond Roussel, the ultimate avant-garde writer. The whole period was, in Koch’s phrase, “fizzy with collaboration.”

  ALL THIS ACTIVITY was predicated on the idea that poetry could be reinvented from top to toe. Everything was up for grabs. “It came to me that all this time / There had been no real poetry and that it needed to be invented,” Koch writes in “Days and Nights,” one of several of his poems that look back to the seminal 1950s. The approved American poetry of the time was crusty with convention. “There was no modern poetry in the sense that there was modern painting,” Ashbery asserted. The avant-garde writer had the advantage of beginning with a clean slate (or the illusion of one). The rejection of the acceptable poetry of the age made it possible to pursue a grander ambition: “to write poetry that is better than poetry,” in Koch’s words. It is not that Ashbery, Koch, O’Hara, and Schuyler were ignorant of poetic tradition. On the contrary, they were voracious readers. But they recognized that tradition is a vast passing-away and renewal, and they had enough respect for the past not to copy it lazily but to adapt, alter, and adjust the tradition through the application of their individual talents. They understood, too, that a poem no less than a picture could be “a hoard of destructions,” in Picasso’s phrase. And so they favored avant-garde methods of composition that inverted the received order of things. The aim was the liberation of the imagination, and any and all means to this end were valid. Detail: Frank O’Hara and James Schuyler, Southhampton, 1956. Photo copyright © John Button, 1956.   Forty years after Pound and Eliot made the first modernist revolution in poetry, the New York poets were the first to extend that new frontier.

They were intent on widening the framework of American poetry; they wanted to be read not in the narrow context of the Anglo-American poetry of mid-century but with reference to other arts, earlier periods, alternative traditions. The poets were unusually responsive to modern music and to poetry in other languages as well as to modern art. They favored a tradition of literary outsiders — what Ashbery has called “an other tradition” — and felt that, in Ashbery’s words, “modern poetry gave the poet the license to be strange.” They admired the deliberate “derangements” of Arthur Rimbaud, the artificial contrivances of Raymond Roussel, the peripatetic musings of Guillaume Apollinaire; they learned from the expatriate experiments of Gertrude Stein and Laura Riding as well as from such neglected homespun originals as David Schubert, Delmore Schwartz, and John Wheelwright. French poetry since Baudelaire and the Symbolists put it through the paces of the modernist revolution had a particularly salubrious effect on the New York poets. By adopting unconventional methods and models, they were able to reject the academic orthodoxies of the New Criticism, then the dominant mode of literary interpretation, which seemed to have a stranglehold on mid-century verse. Enlarging the sphere of the poetic, they revitalized poetry at a moment when it seemed that everything that could be done had been done. (It always seems that way.) They took Pound’s old dictum to heart: They made it new.

  THE NEW YORK SCHOOL of poets — though it wouldn’t be named that until 1961 — can be said to have begun operations on the June day in 1948 that Ashbery, completing his junior year at Harvard, wrote “The Painter” and mailed it to Koch, who had already graduated from Harvard and migrated to New York. “The Painter,” a sestina, was the first of many poems in which these poets aligned themselves with modern painters in their crises, their conflicts, and their sense of artistic aspiration and romantic possibility. John Ashbery in party mode, with Nell Blaine

A pretty good idea of the aesthetics of the New York School could be gleaned from such works as Koch’s “The Artist,” Ashbery’s “The Painter” and “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” and O’Hara’s “Memorial Day 1950” and “Why I Am Not a Painter,” all of which treat the visual arts as a kind of allegorical surrogate for poetry.

It seems both just and inevitable that Ashbery, O’Hara, Koch, and Schuyler gave their first public readings at the Club, the nondescript Eighth Street loft where the Abstract Expressionists gathered weekly to hash out aesthetic issues. The poet at the vital center of the New York School was O’Hara. The group did not gel, Ashbery observed, until O’Hara arrived in New York in 1951 “to kind of cobble everything together and tell us what we and they were doing.” O’Hara, who did much to promote the Abstract Expressionists in his curatorial position at the Museum of Modern Art, was also the nearest thing to an action painter in verse. Blessed with tremendous personal magnetism, O’Hara lived the life of a poet in New York, and chronicled it. The painters adored him; Philip Guston called him “our Apollinaire.” O’Hara’s death in a freak accident on Fire Island in July 1966 removed the group’s dominant personality. But by then the New York School had established a sphere of influence beyond its initial milieu. That influence has ramified over the years, and today the impulses and strategies of the school have less to do with the specific geography of New York than with a state of mind in which the capacity for wonderment is matched by the conviction that poems are linguistic engines rather than repositories of felt experience. In contrast to their painter namesakes, the New York School of poets did not quite conquer the world of poetry; the recognition they won came grudgingly and belatedly. Detail: Morton Feldman, Kenneth Koch, Le Roi Jones

Koch was the first to achieve a national reputation. His innovative techniques for teaching poetry to schoolchildren — as described in Wishes, Lies, and Dreams (1970) and Rose, Where Did You Get That Red? (1973) — made him the most famous poetry teacher in America. O’Hara’s posthumous apotheosis came in 1972, when his Collected Poems won the National Book Award in poetry. Ashbery, though a darling of the international avant-garde, was still a well-kept secret until 1976, the year his Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror was the dark horse that won the Triple Crown — the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Prize. Overnight Ashbery became an inescapable presence in American poetry, provoking seminars, debates, essays in criticism, a fair amount of attention in the national press, more prizes and honors, a great many imitators, and a slew of never-say-die critics bent on denigrating their favorite bête noir. Schuyler, the last of the four core members of the New York School to come to prominence, did so when his Morning of the Poem won the Pulitzer in 1980, due in part to the efforts of Ashbery, who was one of the judges that year. What makes the New York poets exemplary at this time is that they managed to be not only avant-garde writers but literary artists. They experimented not for experimentation’s sake but for the sake of writing great poems. Their idea of innovation was very different from a value placed on novelty. They wanted to be original in the sense recommended by Emerson: “Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?” While they could be silly, they were artful in their silliness; they used playful means to arrive at high aesthetic ends. They formed a movement not by design but by a kind of group momentum fostered by friendship and propelled by their growing confidence in the value of their works. Eventually it would be seen that the poems they wrote and the magazines they edited had casually performed the task of manifestos and pronouncements. Without searching for them, the poets attracted apostles, who understood that their works implied a collective point of view and a finely honed sense of taste embodying that point of view. It was not the most heralded movement of the 1950s; the Beats made more noise. But it will have the most lasting significance. Like the Beats, who were intent on bringing Hebraic chants, Eastern mysticism, and “bop prosody” into their writing, Ashbery, O’Hara, and company tapped sources beyond the strictly literary: movies, comic books, music, avant-garde drama, and, above all, modern art. Like the Beats, too, they were determined to be poetically incorrect; their work is full of provocative gestures and violations of decorum. Unlike the Beats, however, the poets of the New York School pursued an aesthetic agenda that was deliberately apolitical, even antipolitical. The rebellion they conducted had to do with poetry: how to write it, how to read it. Their idea, as Koch put it, was “to do something with language / That [had] never been done before.”

“THE LAST AVANT-GARDE” aspires to combine cultural history, biography, and literary analysis. In the first half of the book, I profile Ashbery, O’Hara, Koch, and Schuyler singly and as a group. I mean to show that this remarkable gang of four, though different from one another in ways that I will make clear, should be considered in the light of what they shared. Contemporary critics tend to treat Ashbery as an isolated case. Without wishing to diminish Ashbery’s great singularity, I believe that the spirit of collaboration and the sense of common cause linking these poets are too important to be minimized or ignored. I also want to communicate what Lionel Trilling called the “hum and buzz of cultural implication” in New York during the group’s glory years — the years between the Marshall Plan and the escalation of the war in Vietnam. What was it like to start out in the early 1950s? Though received wisdom has it that the decade was a dead zone, the period was in fact a major moment for the imagination, an exciting episode in the cultural history of New York City, and it wasn’t all that long ago, though it seems nostalgically far away: a time when the life of the artist had a certain seedy glamour, rents were cheap, the subway safe, and the art market had not yet become the plaything of the very rich. Hoping to convey the aura of the era, I will interrupt my narrative as needed to introduce the reader not only to painters, critics, and gallery directors but to other totemic figures who turn up because they populated the literary landscape (W. H. Auden, Robert Lowell, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg), because they helped define the intellectual currents of the time (Clement Greenberg, Lionel Trilling, Susan Sontag, Norman Mailer), or simply because Frank O’Hara wrote about them in his poems (Jackson Pollock, Miles Davis, Lana Turner, Billie Holiday, James Dean) as versions of the same American dream that inspired and consumed him.

The poets of the New York School were avant-garde at a time when that designation meant something. They are not the last avant-garde movement we will ever have. But at the moment the conditions surrounding art and literature are anything but favorable to the idea of an avant-garde. The problem has something to do with the decline of the public intellectual and the corresponding expansion of the purview of academe; the idea that something can be at once avant-garde and academic would seem a contradiction in terms. Gertrude Stein summarized a second problem in “Composition as Explanation,” a lecture she delivered at Oxford and Cambridge in 1926. “For a long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everyone accepts,” Stein wrote. “In the history of the refused in the arts and literature the rapidity of the change is always startling.” The interval between rejection and acceptance has steadily grown shorter since Stein wrote those words. The consequence is that the avant-garde’s incursions into the temple of art have become ritualized as the predictable gestures of postmodernism. Kafka’s succinct parable “Leopards in the Temple” seems to apply: “Leopards break into the temple and drink up the contents of the sacrificial pitchers; this is repeated again and again; finally it can be calculated in advance, and it becomes part of the ceremony.” If we are all postmodernists, we are none of us avant-garde, for postmodernism is the institutionalization of the avant-garde. In the second half of this book, I raise the question of whether the avant-garde as an abstract concept or a practical idea is finished. It is a question that leads to others, or requires the answer to others, before it can be settled. What does (or did) avant-garde mean, and how did it come to have that meaning.? What exactly are the requirements of an avant-garde art movement? What lessons do the movements of the past have to teach us? The argument against the viability of the avant-garde today rests on the assumption that there is no real resistance to the new, no stable norm from which the defiant artist may depart. While I find this to be a convincing argument, I would sooner help quicken a new avant-garde than pronounce the demise of an old one. In any event, my book means to stand or fall not on speculation regarding the future of the avant-garde but on the job that it does of presenting four major poets, defining their importance, examining the way their friendships entered their art, and depicting the milieu in which they lived and worked.

Detail: Frank O’Hara, Larry Rivers, and Grace Hartigan at the Five Spot, 1957, photo copyright © Burt Glinn, 1957

  I consider the death of O’Hara to signal the end of the first phase of the New York School as an avant-garde movement. It is possible, even probable, that the three surviving poets did their best work after O’Hara’s untimely demise. Still, I would argue, it was the work the poets produced between 1948 and 1966 — when the spirit of collaboration and friendly competition was at its most intense — that made their individual breakthroughs possible. In concentrating on Ashbery, Koch, O’Hara, and Schuyler, I know I must necessarily stint other admirable writers in their circle, such as Edwin Denby, Kenward Elmslie, Barbara Guest, and Harry Mathews. It is no slur on these writers to observe that they do not seem nearly as central to the New York School in the 1950s as the quartet I have chosen to emphasize. This was the “secret” conviction of the poets themselves. In 1959, when they were planning the magazine they came to call Locus Solus, James Schuyler wrote to John Ashbery, “Secretly, I don’t think K. [Koch] believes anybody except you, he, Frank & me has anything to offer.” Schuyler added, “While I am of this opinion too, of course, it seems rather limiting for a magazine.” When I lecture on the New York School, I am sometimes asked why relatively few women were involved in the movement. I reply that this is not true of its later manifestations. In the 1960s and ’70s, when St. Mark’s Church in the Bowery served as headquarters for a second generation of New York School poets, the leading exponents of the style included Anne Waldman, Bernadette Mayer, Maureen Owen, and Alice Notley no less than Ted Berrigan, Ron Padgett, Joe Brainard, Tony Towle, and Michael Brownstein. Women figure even more prominently on any list of contemporary poets for whom the New York School influence has been decisive. In this way, the demographies of the New York School have accurately reflected a larger sociological pattern. But the predominantly masculine identity of the New York School in its formative years does have a crucial, and crucially ironic, significance. Masculine the poets were, but they deviated boldly from the prevailing idea of masculinity. In their aestheticism, the New York poets presented an alternative to the aggressive heterosexualism of an era whose celebrations of manhood were themselves signs of a high anxiety. “That was the year everybody in the United States was worried about homosexuality,” John Cheever wrote in his journal in 1959. “They were worried about other things, too, but their other anxieties were published, discussed, and ventilated while their anxieties about homosexuality remained in the dark: remained unspoken. Is he? Was he? Did they? Am I? seemed to be at the back of everyone’s mind. A great emphasis, by way of defense, was put upon manliness, athletics, hunting, fishing, and conservative clothing, but the lonely wife wondered, glancingly, about her husband at his hunting camp, and the husband himself wondered with whom he shared a rude bed of pines. Was he? Did he? Had he? Did he want to? Had he ever? But what I really mean to say is that this is laughable. Guilty man may be, but only an absurdly repressed people would behave this way.” Not the least attractive thing about the poets of the New York School is the freedom from guilt that their celebration of the imagination entailed. And while I would not want to over-emphasize their homosexuality as an element of their aesthetic practice, it does seem to me that one question some of these poets are asking some of the time is whether the American pursuit of happiness may be consistent with a poetics of gaiety in both the traditional and modern senses of the word. “The regularity of my design / Forbids all wandering as the worst of sinning,” Lord Byron wrote at the beginning of Don Juan, the most digressive of English poems. My design in The Last Avant-Garde is not nearly as regular as Byron’s but favors some of the same narrative and rhetorical strategies, including digressive sidebars and the abrupt insertion of the first-person point of view. As a poet who came under Koch’s spell at Columbia and later became a colleague of Ashbery’s at Brooklyn College and at Newsweek, I have not hesitated to draw on my own experiences as they relate to the history, the methods, and the personalities of the New York School. I BEGAN writing The Last Avant-Garde in a studio I was renting at the Chelsea, the venerable bohemian hotel on Twenty-third Street in Manhattan, where James Schuyler resided during the last twelve years of his life. When I turned in the manuscript, I was living in a small apartment on MacDougal Street, just a few paces from the old San Remo café, long gone, where Schuyler, Ashbery, O’Hara, and Koch used to initiate evenings with drinks and an exchange of poems. The unmarked site of the Cedar Tavern, the fabled “painters’ bar,” where the poets bent elbows with Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning, was a short walk away on the corner of Eighth Street and University Place. (The current incarnation of the Cedar a few blocks north on University Place bears no relation to the dive of Abstract Expressionist legend.) In the course of researching this book, I frequented other locales dear to the hearts of the New York School of poets: the Museum of Modern Art, where O’Hara (and briefly Schuyler) worked; the New School for Social Research and Columbia University, where Koch quickened the enthusiasm of several generations of New York poets; and the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, now on Fifth Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street, which, at a previous location in the early 1950s, had sponsored the first publications of the New York poets and celebrated their collaborative forays with painters.

It is no secret that our own times are inimical to the imagination. Technology has put art to the rout. The concept of fame has been degraded, replaced by the notion of celebrity, and poetry is recognized as an expedient and sometimes eloquent way to hasten the aims of social justice on the one hand and of marketing strategies on the other. Poetry consists of irreproachable sentiment rendered in bite-sized pieces, doggerel for an inaugural. Or it is a rhymed injunction to the jury, or a rock singer’s wail. Or perhaps it is something in the air of a hip, dark underground café that can help sell blue jeans. How precious at such a time is true poetry, which resists the blandishments of the celebrity culture, is impatient with pretense and piety, and remembers that the gratuitousness of a work of art is its grace. If reality is indistinguishable from the consumerism and mass thinking that the mass media foster, there is an urgent need for a poetry that can press back against the pressures of reality, and I would argue that the example of the New York School may best show the way. We are so often told that poetry plays a marginal role in our culture that most of us accept this as a fact without ever considering that its position on the periphery may be what gives American poetry the freedom in which it has flourished. I am convinced not only of the high quality and enduring value of our best poetry but of its importance in helping us to understand some of the major aesthetic and cultural issues of our time. I believe this to be especially true of the New York School, and I hope that the sense of romantic possibility that charged the lives of these poets may prove as inspiring to my readers as it has been in my own life and work.   — David Lehman DAVID LEHMAN, author of Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man and several books of poetry, is the series editor of The Best American Poetry.

His essays, poems, and reviews have appeared in The New Yorker, Paris Review, The Times Literary Supplement, and many other publications. He is the recipient of many prizes and fellowships, including a Guggenheim and the Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. He lives in New York City. (photo of David Lehman copyright © Star Black, 1998)

Історія про нью- йоркської школи поетів є дослідження в дружбі, творчої співпраці і блаженстві бути живим і молодим в момент максимальної творчої закваски. Це також історія про останню справжньої авангардного руху, що ми мали в американській поезії.

Ви можете прочитати огляд Пола Гувера цієї книги в куртці # 6.

Коли Джон Ешбері, Кеннет Кох, Френк О'Хара, і Джеймс Шайлер (вимовляється як " SKY - Лух ") спочатку жив у Нью -Йорку, корейська війна триває, і маккартизму був бичем вільнодумних інтелектуалів. Це була епоха Levittown * і "мовчання покоління ", коли оригінальні Хлопці та ляльки був на Бродвеї, приміські політ був у стадії розробки, Нью -Йорк було три бейсбольних команд і принаймні один з них грав у World Series щороку.

* Левіттаун: громада в Лонг- Айленді, Нью -Йорк. Розроблено між 1946 і 1951 фірмою Левітт і сини, Inc, це було одним з перших прикладів абсолютно запланованого і серійних житлового комплексу. Містить тисячі низьких будинків витрат (з супутніми торгові центри, дитячі майданчики, басейни, громадські зали і школи), його ім'я стало національним символом для передмістя під час будівельного буму після Другої світової війни. (Великий енциклопедичний словник) В епоху на різних рівнях конформізму, поети нью- йоркської школи уповають на ідеї художнього авангарду, які можуть санкціонувати їх відхилення від норми. Звільнення ефект від їх написання ставало все більш очевидним в пристрасних, експериментальних, табу - ламаючи початку 1960 -х, коли молодим президентом в країні був в офісі, люди відмовляються їх капелюхи, жінки почали приймати оральні контрацептиви,, прискорення швидкості соціальних змін, здавалося подвоїти відразу, і Америка, нарешті, покинув дев'ятнадцяте століття позаду.

У своїй книзі Банкетний років Роджер Шаттак охарактеризував авангард в Парижі в золотий період до Першої світової війни в якості «художнього підпілля ", присвячена " інакомислення і опозицію".

Художники підтримується " войовничу ставлення до світу і справжнє співчуття один до одного. " Вони жили і працювали " в атмосфері вічного співробітництва. " Авангард " був спосіб життя, як відданий і легковажним, " генеруюча величезне хвилювання. Гійом Аполлінер, поет, був " імпресаріо авангарду, " чемпіоном кубізму і людина, яка дала Сюрреалізм свою назву. " Магнітне присутність " Аполлінера і його " експансивний, нестійкий характер текла невичерпно, і залишив його вірші і ліричні тексти, які, здавалося квітка легко з його захоплень. ";

Вийшовши на заміну Франк О'Хара для Аполлінера і абстрактного експресіонізму для кубізму, і ви отримаєте моторошне потрібне. Поети нью- йоркської школи були інославними, як воюючої до літературної створення і як лояльні один до одного, так як їх паризькі попередники були. У 1950- ті та на початку 60 -х в Нью -Йорку були їх банкетних років. Це як якщо б вони перевели авангардного ідіому «вічного співробітництва» від арго рубежі століть Парижі в необтесаним жаргоні американських мегаполісу в середині століття.

А чотири основних членів нью- йоркської школи не ставив перед собою на роботу учнів, ніколи не видачі публічні заяви або розробляється програма групи в манері французьких сюрреалістів, у них були тісні почуття спільності і усвідомлення того, що їхні долі як поети були переплетені. Вони поділилися чому іншому, в тому числі з переконання, що вони прямували до величі. Свідки, що Роберт Мотеруелл називається «найбільшим живопис пригоди нашого часу», вони прагнули до тієї ж хвилювання в поезії, дивлячись на художників, як агентами художнього зміни. " Нью -Йорк поети, за винятком Я вважаю, що дальтонік, найбільше страждають від повеней фарби в яких збій серфінгу ми всі сутичка ", пише Шайлер в 1959 році, підбиваючи підсумки десятиліття і більше безпрецедентного художнього турбулентності. " У Нью -Йорку світ мистецтва світ для малярних робіт; письменники і музиканти знаходяться в човні, але вони не триматися ".

зліва направо:

Джеймс Шайлер

Джон Ешбері

Кеннет Кох

Серпень 1956

Поети взяв свою перевагу в рахунку від абстрактних експресіоністів (також відомий як дія художників і як нью- йоркської школи живопису) в декількох ключових аспектах. Від Джексона Поллока і Віллема де Кунінга, вони дізналися, що це було добре для вірша до літопису історії його власних рішень - що розум поета, а не світу, може бути справжнім суб'єктом вірша - і що це було можливо для вірш бути (або для виконання) заяву, не роблячи заяву. З художників теж зрозуміли, що прийняття не обов'язково благословення, ні відмова прокляття. "Літературний створення дбав, як багато для нашої роботи як Фрік піклуються Поллок і де Кунінга, " О'Хара написав зухвало, штовхаючи аналогію між поетів і художників. Як живопису, лист був належним чином розуміється діяльність, в теперішньому часі процес, і залишок цієї діяльності не міг посилатися на себе. Всі поезія була продуктом співпраці з мови. У той час як мімікрія, наслідування природі, залишилася мета мистецтва, абстрактні художники вже переглянув концепцію шляхом збільшення сенс природи; «Я природа", сказав Поллок. Це теж був свобода поети могли взяти. Як абстрактних картин, їхні вірші виникла не в платонівської концепції їх остаточному вигляді, але в бою з середовищем самого вираження.

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