By David Lehman
Anchor Books
379 pages

Review by Tisha Nemeth-Loomis

“The avant-garde has been made up with people who are bored by other people’s ideas. You do not have to have the Russian Revolution…or the Civil Rights Movement in order to get irritated by other people’s ideas. All you have to do is be one individual who is tired of looking at something that looks like something else.” – Frank O’Hara

With the relentless stream of words we use within our daily interactions and conversations, one might assume we’d understand our own language and be comfortable within its boundaries. But for those of us who’ve felt acutely that words fail us, David Lehman acts as guide through the winding portals of literary dissemination during the 1950s in Greenwich Village. His examination of the creative of interplay between writers John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch and James Schuyler created a literary “tradition of the new” genre, its forms of expressionism manipulated literature in ways not previously explored. Within their lifetimes, the anomalous processes of these four writers pieced together a distinct milieu which built the platform of the New York School of Poets.

Resistance to be classified led these writers to new writing techniques: rejecting modes of past ways of writing, understanding, feeling and seeing propelled their desire to make language accurately fit their real emotions, and fueled efforts to express their truest feelings in ways that defied current modes of written expression. And while critics pejoratively viewed their writing as counterfeit versions of reality, the writers launched tireless collaborations making poems that absorbed the lessons of Abstract Expressionism through their exhaustive list of satirical plays, stories, one line poems, parodies and mock interviews, where wit, irony and image delineated the form. Their sense of immediacy and un-sanitized truth-telling within their poetry is as fresh today as the endless string of metaphors used in their poems over fifty years ago.

“In New York, the art world is a painters’ world,” noted Schuyler; it was there he and Ashbery, O’Hara and Koch kept company with Abstract Expressionist painters, and accumulated writing inspiration through group meetings at the Cedar Tavern (situated at University Place and Eight Street), known as “the painters’ bar” where Jackson Pollock incited fights, smashed glass, and then played with its fragments making designs with his blood on the tables. Famed abstract artist Willem de Kooning would interrupt these brawls with his “I have to change to stay the same” conversations, which, like the drinks, flowed liberally. The poets were keen to recreate these sensory experiences, flexing language into an anti-form to reflect the artists’ environment of vicissitude. Their penchant for marathon writing projects (where verbal acrobatics were excessive), along with good natured competitiveness among the four soon developed into a coterie of fiercely loyal and enduring friendships. Lehman notes that they’d led life “as if it were a poem, always in motion, in a continual process of revision.”

These four poets learned from artists like de Kooning that the poem, like the painting, should chronicle history, if only if it’s in the making within the mind of the artist and not the public; that it was feasible for poems to make or perform statements without making a statement. This translated into serious social rejection that occurred on various levels, including the destruction of modern perceptions of writers as traditional centers of communication. Ashbery suggested repeatedly throughout his poems that communication is as unreliable as our thoughts and emotions and it cannot be trusted. His poems effectively dismantled traditional theories in which poets are wordsmiths, to deliver poems into a form that the general masses could accept and relate to. For Ashbery, themes of perception, understanding, and its creation were hopeless projects, as misunderstandings were inevitable, and how does the poet reconcile this? The destruction of understanding resulted in written strategies through which Ashbery developed the finer techniques of “smokescreens and false scents” in his poems, to direct readers away from himself as much as possible. His poems occasionally would engage the world within it, but neither approves or embraces it. Always “approaching though never reaching the non-existent subject, the mystery that will never be revealed,” Ashbery’s work is marked by escape of personality, maintaining what Lehman described as “The right to exist and the right to ignore it.” Ashbery utilized abandonment of self within microcosms of detail, and mourned the inability to solve literary dilemmas, e.g. sounds that are impossible to translate into writing, such as “the hollow scam and murmur produced by a multitude of skaters.” These reflections turn up as recurrent themes in his poems: “Still the loveliest feelings / Must soon find words, and these, yes / Displace them…And only in the light of lost words / Can we imagine our rewards.”

Small, transient pleasures of discovery emerge and re-emerge as the New York Poets committed themselves to examining everyday actions and experiences, creating poems that renewed themselves like the daily conversations, personal routines and private thoughts they were based on. Poetry now had a mission: Delivering an immediate relation to experience revolving around discipline based on non-conformism. Common activities such as drinking a cup of coffee, talking on the phone, or going to parties were poem-worthy materials for Frank O’Hara. A prolific writer, functioning alcoholic and curator at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, he lived and did everything to excess. Barbara Guest observed that he “expressed our emotions for us, lived dangerously…was vastly knowledgeable about life and people and was willing to give it away. He burned with a temperature.” O’Hara was capable writing poems at a moment’s notice, and frequently fired out occasion-themed poems while watching a commercial on television, talking with friends, or listening to records. His poetry was based on transactional experiences, marked by his peripatetic style that delivered poems like announcements, “My heart is in my / pocket, it is Poems by Pierre Reverdy,” and “Do not frighten me more than you / have to! I must live forever.” His poetry offers a sense of written acrobatics, a crash course in the sometimes absurd, life-affirming illustrations where details and disruptions of the day are crafted to art. His literary style included a deceptively simple wordplay in his self-styled “I do this I do that” poetry. O’Hara was the type of criminally happy poet, always writing on the threshold of discovery which conveyed his capacity for amazement.

Kenneth Koch, a Cincinnati native, perfected in his poems the comic mentality and championed the “continuing celebration of the playful sublimes,” according to John Hollander. Known by his friends as “Dr. Fun,” Koch revolutionized the teaching of children’s poetry and maximized the boundaries of what was possible by writing vibrant puns lined with jest. He viewed the possibilities of mistranslation as a viable method of interpretation. Frequently Koch employed experimental twists with accidents and chance, and he taught his students to utilize errors in their poems, where the end always justified the means. He also deliberately constructed bad verse and picked words out of dictionaries randomly to generate sentences, which was his version of a convincing “formula-lessness.” Koch’s quiet rebellion escaped through his poems’ hysteria and gaming word play, geared to cut down the literary icons’ models of writing – here, all ways of generating poetry were acceptable, nothing was sacred.

Of the less prolific writers, James Schuyler was an example of surprising anomalies. Howard Moss noted how “Schuyler manages to be absolutely truthful and an obsessed romantic at the same time.” With poems sparing in figurative language, he sought “to see things as they are too fierce and yet / not too much,” with poems that articulate complex emotions and forgetfulness. This generally isolated most readers from experiencing more of his work, as he’d employ hard-to-swallow, semi-confessional sentences, “I’ll soon forget it: what have I not forgot? / Or one day will forget: this garden, the breeze / its stillness, even / the words.” Recalling a memory and then imagining a future where it will not be remembered provided him comfort, but delivers hard lessons of life’s brevity. This level of introspectiveness may not sell out to the masses, but it bleeds some of the British 19th century’s romantic/death sensibilities into 20th century’s modern arena.

The New York Poets succeeded in battling old ideas, neither accepting nor rejecting public recognition, but remaining independent from it; accomplishing a new music to poetry infused with vitality in an age of staunch formalism. Within their own universe of mixed styles and form, they rejected traditionalist regimes of didacticism through their sense of otherness, and never lost sight of writing for the primary pleasure of the act itself. Their imaginative play on experience engendered an aloof radicalism where their cultural resistance yielded its own artistic genre. The avant-garde, according to Fairfield Porter, are “those people with the most energy.” These lessons continue firing their influences in writing today, energizing our own desires to see, feel and write beyond the literary walls of the obvious.

 (:divend:)