The New York School of Poets

The New

York School of Poets

“It’s wonderful to have three good friends you think are geniuses.”—Kenneth Koch

From poetry.org

The New York School of poetry began around 1960 in New York City and included poets such as John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, Kenneth Koch, and Frank O'Hara. Heavily influenced by surrealism and modernism, the poetry of the New York School was serious but also ironic, and incorporated an urban sensibility into much of the work. An excerpt from Ashbery’s poem, "My Philsophy of Life" demonstrates this attitude:

Just when I thought there wasn't room enoughfor another thought in my head, I had this great idea--call it a philosophy of life, if you will. Briefly,it involved living the way philosophers live,according to a set of principles. OK, but which ones?

Abstract expressionist art was also a major influence, and the New York School poets had strong artistic and personal relationships with artists such as Jackson Pollock and Willem DeKooning. Both O'Hara and James Schuyler worked at the Museum of Modern Art, and Guest, Ashbery, and Schuyler were critics for Art News. O'Hara also took inspiration from artists, entitling two poems "Joseph Cornell" and "On Seeing Larry Rivers.”

The New York School of Poets

From poetry.org

O'Hara's poem "Why I am Not a Painter" includes the lines "I am not a painter, I am a poet. / Why? I think I would rather be / a painter, but I am not.”

A second generation of New York School poets arose during the 1960s and included Ted Berrigan, Ron Padgett, Anne Waldman, and Joe Brainard. These poets were also influenced by art and their work contained much of the same humour and collaborative spirit. Their scene grew up around downtown New York and was associated with the Poetry Project at St Mark's Church, a poetry organization started in the mid 1960s.

The New York School continues to influence poets writing today. Recently published books such as Daniel Kane's All Poets Welcome: The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960s and David LehmanThe Last-Avant Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets are important histories of this poetic movement that still captures readers nearly fifty years later.


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“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 would sanction their devotions 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” (Lehman 1).


“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, and belligerent toward the literary establishment and as loyal to each other, as their predecessors had been. The 1950 and early ’60s in New York were their banquet years.”—David Lehman (2)


Guillaume Apollonaire

“Witnesses to what Robert Motherwell called the ‘the greatest painting adventure of our time,’ [the New York School of Poets] strove for the same excitement in poetry, looking to painters as the agents for artistic change.”—David Lehman (2)


“New York poets, except I suppose the color-blind, are effected most by the floods of paint in whose crashing surf we all scramble. . . . In New York, the art world is a painters’ world; writers and musicians are in the boat but they don’t steer.”—James Schuyler (Lehman 2).


Jackson Pollack, “Number 1”

The New York School of PoetsAbstract Expressionism

Jackson Pollack, “Number 8” (detail)


Jackson Pollack, “Convergence: 10”


Robert Motherwell, Razor’s Edge


Robert Motherwell, Untitled


DeKooning, Whose Name was Writ in Water


Willem DeKooning, Fire Island


“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” (Lehman 3).


“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 a 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,’ Jackson Pollock said. This, too, was a liberty the poets could take.”


It came to me that all this timeThere had been no real poetry and that it needed to be invented.--Kenneth Koch, “Days and Nights”

“[The New York School] understood too that a poem no less than a painting could be ‘a hoard of destructions,’ in Picasso’s phrase” (Lehman 6)

“[M]odern poetry gave the poet the license to be strange.”--John Ashbery


“Unlike the Beats, however, the poets of the New York School pursued an aesthetic agenda that was deliberately apolitical, even antipolitical” (Lehman 9).


“For a long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everyone accepts. In the history of the refused in the arts and literature the rapidity of the change is always startling.”—Gertrude Stein, “Composition as Explanation” (1926) (Lehman 11)


Leopards break into the temple and drink the sacrificial chalices dry. This happens again and again, repeatedly. Finally it can be counted on beforehand and becomes part of the ceremony.--Franz Kafka, Parables

O’Hara

Personism: A ManifestoFrank O'Hara

Everything is in the poems, but at the risk of sounding like the poor wealthy man's Allen Ginsberg I will write to you because I just heard that one of my fellow poets thinks that a poem of mine that can't be got at one reading is because I was confused too. Now, come on. I don't believe in god, so I don't have to make elaborately sounded structures. I hate Vachel Lindsay, always have; I don't even like rhythm, assonance, all that stuff. You just go on your nerve. If someone's chasing you down the street with a knife you just run, you don't turn around and shout, "Give it up! I was a track star for Mineola Prep.”


O’Hara

Personism: A ManifestoThat's for the writing poems part. As for their reception, suppose you're in love and somebody's mistreating (mal aime) you, you don't say, "Hey, you can't hurt me this way, I care!" you just let all the different bodies fall where they may, and they always do after a few months. But that's not why you fell in love in the first place, just to hang onto life, so you have to take your chances and try to avoid being logical. Pain always produces logic, which is very bad for you.

I'm not saying that I don't have practically the most lofty ideas of anyone writing today, but what difference does that make? They're just ideas. The only good thing about it is that when I get lofty enough I've stopped thinking and that's when refreshment arrives.


O’Hara

Personism: A ManifestoBut how then can you really care if anybody gets it, or gets what it means, or if it improves them. Improves them for what? For death? Why hurry them along? Too many poets act like a middle-aged mother trying to get her kids to eat too much cooked meat, and potatoes with drippings (tears). I don't give a damn whether they eat or not. Forced feeding leads to excessive thinness (effete). Nobody should experience anything they don't need to, if they don't need poetry bully for them. I like the movies too. And after all, only Whitman and Crane and Williams, of the American poets, are better than the movies. As for measure and other technical apparatus, that's just common sense: if you're going to buy a pair of pants you want them to be tight enough so everyone will want to go to bed with you. There's nothing metaphysical about it. Unless, of course, you flatter yourself into thinking that what you're experiencing is "yearning.”


O’Hara

Personism: A ManifestoAbstraction in poetry, which Allen [Ginsberg] recently commented on in It Is, is intriguing. I think it appears mostly in the minute particulars where decision is necessary. Abstraction (in poetry, not painting) involves personal removal by the poet. For instance, the decision involved in the choice between "the nostalgia of the infinite" and "the nostalgia for the infinite" defines an attitude towards degree of abstraction. The nostalgia of the infinite representing the greater degree of abstraction, removal, and negative capability (as in Keats and Mallarme).


O’Hara

Personism: A ManifestoPersonism, a movement which I recently founded and which nobody knows about, interests me a great deal, being so totally opposed to this kind of abstract removal that it is verging on a true abstraction for the first time, really, in the history of poetry. Personism is to Wallace Stevens what la poesi pure was to Beranger. Personism has nothing to do with philosophy, it's all art. It does not have to do with personality or intimacy, far from it! But to give you a vague idea, one of its minimal aspects is to address itself to one person (other than the poet himself), thus evoking overtones of love without destroying love's life-giving vulgarity, and sustaining the poet's feelings towards the poem while preventing love from distracting him into feeling about the person. That's part of Personism. It was founded by me after lunch with LeRoi Jones on August 27, 1959, a day in which I was in love with someone (not Roi, by the way, a blond). I went back to work and wrote a


O’Hara

Personism: A Manifestopoem for this person. While I was writing it I was realizing that if I wanted to I could use the telephone instead of writing the poem, and so Personism was born. It's a very exciting movement which will undoubtedly have lots of adherents. It puts the poem squarely between the poet and the person, Lucky Pierre style, and the poem is correspondingly gratified. The poem is at last between two persons instead of two pages. In all modesty, I confess that it may be the death of literature as we know it. While I have certain regrets, I am still glad I got there before Alain Robbe-Grillet did. Poetry being quicker and surer than prose, it is only just that poetry finish literature off. For a time people thought that Artaud was going to accomplish this, but actually, for all their magnificence, his polemical writings are not more outside literature than Bear Mountain is outside New York State. His relation is no more astounding than Dubuffet's to painting.


O’Hara

Personism: A ManifestoWhat can we expect from Personism? (This is getting good, isn't it?) Everything, but we won't get it. It is too new, too vital a movement to promise anything. But it, like Africa, is on the way. The recent propagandists for technique on the one hand, and for content on the other, had better watch out.

September 3, 1959


John Ashbery (1927-)


Ashbery

From a post on poets.org

I'm not an Ashbery fan and don't like his influence on contemporary poetry. LIke Derrida, he's pompous and repetitious. No music, no humanity. Logorrehea of flowing, endless, discursive prose, chopped up into lines. I take this poem to be about the indeterminancy of art and an aping of that indeterminancy. If you pick up a thousand-year-old Chinese poem, often the humanity comes through as if it were written yesterday. Can you imagine another society picking this up a few hundred years from now? They're going to have a good laugh on us.


Ashbery

From “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror”

Perhaps an angel looks like everythingWe have forgotten, I mean forgottenThings that don't seem familiar whenWe meet them again, lost beyond telling,Which were ours once.


Ashbery

Meaningful Love

What the bad news wasbecame apparent too latefor us to do anything good about it.

I was offered no urgent dreaming,didn't need a name or anything.Everything was taken care of.

In the medium-size city of my awarenessvoles are building colossi.The blue room is over there.

He put out no feelers.The day was all as one to him.Some days he never leaves his roomand those are the best days,by far.


Ashbery

Meaningful Love

There were morose gardens farther down the slope,anthills that looked like they belonged there.The sausages were undercooked,the wine too cold, the bread molten.Who said to bring sweaters?The climate's not that dependable.

The Atlantic crawled slowly to the leftpinning a message on the unbound golden hair of sleeping maidens,a ruse for next time,

where fire and water are rampant in the streets,the gate closed—no visitors todayor any evident heartbeat.


Ashbery

Meaningful Love

I got rid of the book of fairy tales,pawned my old car, bought a ticket to the funhouse,found myself back here at six o'clock, pondering "possible side effects.”

There was no harm in loving then,no certain good either. But love was loving servantsor bosses. No straight road issuing from it.Leaves around the door are penciled losses.Twenty years to fix it.Asters bloom one way or another.


James Schuyler (1923-1991)


SchuylerKorean Mums

Beside me in this gardenare huge and daisy-like(why not? are notoxeye daisies a chrysanthemum?),shrubby and thick-stalked,the leaves pointing upthe stems from whichthe flowers burst insunbursts. I lovethis garden in all its moods,even under its winter coatof salt hay, or now,in October, more thanhalf gone over: here


Schuyler

Korean Mums

a rose, there a clumpof aconite. This morningone of the dogs killeda barn owl. Bob sawit happen, tried tointervene. The airedalesnapped its neck and leftit lying. Now the birdlies buried by an appletree. Last eveningfrom the table we sawthe owl, huge in the dusk,circling the fieldon owl-silent wings.


Schuyler

Korean Mums

The first one ever seenhere: now it's gone,a dream you just remember.

The dogs are barking. Inthe studio music playsand Bob and Darragh paint.I sit scribbling in a littlenotebook at a garden table,too hot in a heavy shirtin the mid-October suninto which the Korean mumsall face. There is a dull book with me,an apple core, cigarettes,


Schuyler

Korean Mums

an ashtray. Behind methe rue I gave Bobflourishes. Light on leaves,so much to see, andall I really see is thatowl, its bulk troublingthe twilight. I'llsoon forget it: whatis there I have not forgot?Or one day will forget:this garden, the breezein stillness, eventhe words, Korean mums.


Schuyler

Faure's Second Piano Quartet

On a day like this the rain comesdown in fat and random drops amongthe ailanthus leaves---"the treeof Heaven"---the leaves that on moon-lit nights shimmer black and blade-shaped at this third-floor window.And there are bunches of small greenknobs, buds, crowded together. Therapid music fills in the spaces ofthe leaves. And the piano comes in,like an extra heartbeat, dangerousand lovely. Slower now, less likethe leaves, more like the rain which


Schuyler

Faure's Second Piano Quartet

almost isn't rain, more like thawed-out hail. All this beauty in themess of this small apartment onWest 20th in Chelsea, New York.Slowly the notes pour out, slowly,more slowly still, fat rain falls.


Frank O’Hara (1926-1966)


Frank O’Hara on Mad Men

The New York School of Poets “For Those Who Think Young,” 8:46 & 47:00

Frank O’Hara on Mad Men


O’Hara

Excerpt from Mayakovsky."Now I am quietly waiting forthe catastrophe of my personalityto seem beautiful again,and interesting, and modern. The country is grey andbrown and white in trees,snows and skies of laughteralways diminishing, less funnynot just darker, not just grey. It may be the coldest day ofthe year, what does he think ofthat? I mean, what do I? And if I do,perhaps I am myself again."


O’Hara

On Seeing Larry Rivers' Washington Crossingthe Delaware at the Museum of Modern Art Now that our hero has come back to usin his white pants and we know his nosetrembling like a flag under fire,we see the calm cold river is supportingour forces, the beautiful history. To be more revolutionary than a nunis our desire, to be secular and intimateas, when sighting a redcoat, you smileand pull the trigger. Anxietiesand animosities, flaming and feeding


O’Hara

On Seeing Larry Rivers' Washington Crossingthe Delaware at the Museum of Modern Arton theoretical considerations andthe jealous spiritualities of the abstractthe robot? they're smoke, billows abovethe physical event. They have burned up.See how free we are! as a nation of persons. Dear father of our country, so aliveyou must have lied incessantly to beimmediate, here are your bones crossedon my breast like a rusty flintlock,a pirate's flag, bravely specific


O’Hara

On Seeing Larry Rivers' Washington Crossingthe Delaware at the Museum of Modern Art and ever so light in the misty glareof a crossing by water in winter to a shoreother than that the bridge reaches for.Don't shoot until, the white of freedom glintingon your gun barrel, you see the general fear.


O’Hara


O’Hara

To the Film Industry in CrisisNot you, lean quarterlies and swarthy periodicalswith your studious incursions toward the pomposity of ants,nor you, experimental theatre in which Emotive Fruitionis wedding Poetic Insight perpetually, nor you,promenading Grand Opera, obvious as an ear (though youare close to my heart), but you, Motion Picture Industry,it's you I love!

In times of crisis, we must all decide again and again whom we love.And give credit where it's due: not to my starched nurse, who taught mehow to be bad and not bad rather than good (and has lately availedherself of this information), not to the Catholic Churchwhich is at best an oversolemn introduction to cosmic entertainment,not to the American Legion, which hates everybody, but to you,glorious Silver Screen, tragic Technicolor, amorous Cinemascope,stretching Vistavision and startling Stereophonic Sound, with allyour heavenly dimensions and reverberations and iconoclasms! ToRichard Barthelmess as the "tol'able" boy barefoot and in pants,


O’Hara

To the Film Industry in CrisisJeanette MacDonald of the flaming hair and lips and long, long neck,Sue Carroll as she sits for eternity on the damaged fender of a carand smiles, Ginger Rogers with her pageboy bob like a sausageon her shuffling shoulders, peach-melba-voiced Fred Astaire of the feet,Eric von Stroheim, the seducer of mountain-climbers' gasping spouses,the Tarzans, each and every one of you (I cannot bring myself to preferJohnny Weissmuller to Lex Barker, I cannot!), Mae West in a furry sled,her bordello radiance and bland remarks, Rudolph Valentino of the moon,its crushing passions, and moonlike, too, the gentle Norma Shearer,Miriam Hopkins dropping her champagne glass off Joel McCrea's yacht,and crying into the dappled sea, Clark Gable rescuing Gene Tierneyfrom Russia and Allan Jones rescuing Kitty Carlisle from Harpo Marx,


O’Hara

To the Film Industry in CrisisCornel Wilde coughing blood on the piano keys while Merle Oberon berates,Marilyn Monroe in her little spike heels reeling through Niagara Falls,Joseph Cotten puzzling and Orson Welles puzzled and Dolores del Rioeating orchids for lunch and breaking mirrors, Gloria Swanson reclining,and Jean Harlow reclining and wiggling, and Alice Faye recliningand wiggling and singing, Myrna Loy being calm and wise, William Powellin his stunning urbanity, Elizabeth Taylor blossoming, yes, to youand to all you others, the great, the near-great, the featured, the extraswho pass quickly and return in dreams saying your one or two lines,my love!

Long may you illumine space with your marvellous appearances, delaysand enunciations, and may the money of the world glitteringly cover youas you rest after a long day under the kleig lights with your facesin packs for our edification, the way the clouds come often at nightbut the heavens operate on the star system. It is a divine precedentyou perpetuate! Roll on, reels of celluloid, as the great earth rolls on!


O’Hara

Why I am Not a Painter

I am not a painter, I am a poet.Why? I think I would rather bea painter, but I am not. Well,for instance, Mike Goldbergis starting a painting. I drop in."Sit down and have a drink" hesays. I drink; we drink. I lookup. "You have SARDINES in it.""Yes, it needed something there.""Oh." I go and the days go byand I drop in again. The paintingis going on, and I go, and the daysgo by. I drop in. The painting isfinished. "Where's SARDINES?”


O’Hara

Why I am Not a PainterAll that's left is justletters, "It was too much," Mike says.But me? One day I am thinking ofa color: orange. I write a lineabout orange. Pretty soon it is awhole page of words, not lines.Then another page. There should beso much more, not of orange, ofwords, of how terrible orange isand life. Days go by. It is even inprose, I am a real poet. My poemis finished and I haven't mentionedorange yet. It's twelve poems, I callit ORANGES. And one day in a galleryI see Mike’s painting, called SARDINES.


O’Hara

The Day Lady Died

It is 12:20 in New York a Friday three days after Bastille day, yes it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner and I don’t know the people who will feed me

I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun and have a hamburger and a malted and buy an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets in Ghana are doing these days I go on to the bank and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard) doesn’t even look up my balance for once in her life and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine


O’Hara

The Day Lady Diedfor Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or Brendan Behan’s new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres of Genet, but I don’t, I stick with Verlaine after practically going to sleep with quandariness

and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it

and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT while she whispered a song along the keyboard to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing


Willem DeKooning, Fire Island


The Day Frank O’Hara Died, July 25th, 1966


The Day Frank O’Hara Died, July 25th, 1966

in an electric stormwhich is what you weremore lives than a cat

dancing you had a felinegrace, poised on the ballsof your feet readyto dive and

all of it, your poems,compressed into twenty years.How you charmed, fumedblew smoke from your nostrils

like a race horse thatjust won the racesteaming, eager to runonly you used words--James Schuyler, “To Frank O’Hara” (1974)

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