ENGL 513:001

The New York School

Prof. David Kaufmann      459 Robinson Hall

703/993-2766                Office Hrs: M 1:30-3:00 or by appt

dkaufman@gmu.edu

A personal anecdote: thirty years ago, when I was studying creative writing at a fancy eastern

school, I yearned to be Robert Lowell. He had cast his long shadow over American poetry since the 1940s and why wouldn’t I want to be like him? . A Boston Lowell! A manic depressive! A man with a thunderous cadence, an influential ability to dramatize himself and a fine belief in poetry’s public importance. Not only that, but the teacher of how many famous poets! The friend of how many more!

Sometime in 1977—in my darkest period of trying to cross Lowell with Rilke--I purchased a copy of Ashbery’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, which had won the trifecta of awards the previous year: the Pulitzer, the National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award. I didn’t care for it at all. Like most of my teachers, I found it willfully obscure, unserious, a little campy. In an idle moment—or a defensive one—I wrote a parody of Ashbery, lifting some lines, changing others, making fun of his cadence. I fell in love with it. I loved the odd music of my parody and suddenly (suddenly?) realized that Ashbery was on to something enormously interesting. And there you have it.

My little road to Damascus moment was actually a replay in miniature of an interesting turn in American poetry—the torch was passing from Boston to New York and “the New York School” was becoming both academically and critically acceptable. (Frank O’Hara’s posthumous Collected Poems had won the National Book Award in 1972, but O’Hara has never really made it amongst academics.) As it turned out, Ashbery has cast his shadow over American poetry as much as Lowell ever did and has done it for close to forty years now.

The New York School is a terrible name and was concocted by John Myers, a cheerleader for the first generation of the New York School of painters (Pollock et al) and for the second (Grace Hartigan, Jane Freilicher, et al). He felt that poetry should hitch a ride on the notoriety of painting and so dubbed Ashbery, O’Hara and their friends the New York School. It would have been more accurate to call them the Harvard school—Ashbery, O’Hara and Kenneth Koch all met in Cambridge in the late 1940s. The fourth musketeer—James Schuyler—did not and only lived in New York sporadically. Ashbery spent much of the Fifties and early Sixties in Paris, and Koch spent a good deal of the Fifties abroad as well. The ‘second generation” New York School poets really were in New York, even if they weren’t all New Yorkers by a long shot.

In this course, we will look at the work of Ashbery, O’Hara, Koch and Schuyler. We will try to situate them in their time, first in relation to “mainstream” poetry as it might have looked in the late 1940s and then in relation to “avant-garde poetry” of the 1950s. We will then go on to investigate the way different elements of NYS poetics were taken up by different poets of the “second generation.”

We are going to cover a lot of ground very fast and read an unconscionable number of poems. By the end of this semester, you should not only have developed an increasingly nuanced view of the history of post-War American poetry, but you will have also developed an increasingly sophisticated way of discussing it.

Texts: Allen ed., The New American Poetry Anthology; Ashbery, The Mooring of Starting Out; Berrigan, The Sonnets; Koch, Selected Poems, ed. Ron Padgett (Library of America); O’Hara, Collected Poems; Schuyler, Selected Poems. Other readings are online.

Recommended: There is both a lot and too little out there on these poets and this period. For background, I guess I have to recommend David Lehman, The Last Avant-Garde for its gossipy bios. I think you can safely ignore his ruminations on the avan-garde, for any number of reasons. Brad Gooch, City Poet: The Life of Frank O’Hara is obviously good on O’Hara, but also gives a nice glimpse of what it was like. Daniel Kane, All Poets Welcome (along with its great cd) is a fine history of the Poetry Project at St. Marks and thus of the “second generation.” The MLA bibliography will direct you to the secondary literature on the NYS, and you will find JSTOR an incredible boon. I also heartily recommend the online journal JACKET, which has dedicated a number of issues to these poets and their ilk. I also urge you to visit Pennsound, where you can hear these guys actually read and the Electronic Poetry Center, which has all sorts of cool stuff.

Class Schedule

Jan 28 Intro: A version of Modernism

O’Hara, Collected Poems, “Memorial Day, 1950”

Feb 4 The Way It Looked in the Forties

Lowell, “The Quaker Graveyard…,”; www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15277

Jarrell,”The Death….,” http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15309

Brooks and Warren, “Introduction to Understanding Poetry and selection on Marvell www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/understanding-poetry.html

Feb 11 Introducing the New York School

Allen NAP, selections from Guest, Ashbery, O’Hara, Koch and Schuyler

Feb 18 Black Mountain

Allen, NAP, selections from Olson, Creeley, Levertov and Duncan.

If you are unfamiliar with Pound, see Canto LXXXI

http://www.uncg.edu/eng/pound/canto.html

If you are unfamiliar with Williams, see “To Elsie” and “The Red Wheelbarrow”

http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/to-elsie.html

http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/wcw-red-wheel.html

Feb 25 Enter Ashbery and O’Hara

JA, MSO, Some Trees

If you are unfamiliar with Wallace Stevens, see

http://www.poemhunter.com/i/ebooks/pdf/wallace_stevens_2004_9.pdf

FOH, Collected Poems: “Les Etiquettes Jaunes,” “The Three-Penny Opera,” “A Note to John Ashbery,” “Poetry,” “Ann Arbor Variations,” “1951,” “Commercial Variations,” “Locarno,” “Easter,” (take a look at) “Second Avenue,” “Chez Jane,” “Ducal Days,” “To the Poem,” “Homosexuality,” “To a Poet,” “Meditations in an Emergency,” “To John Ashbery,” “Poem (Tempestuous Breaths!),”Poem (There I could not be a boy),” “On Seeing Larry Rivers’s….,” “To the Harbormaster,” “The Old Place,” “Mayakovsky,” “To the Film Industry in Crisis,” “Poem (Instant coffee and slightly sour cream),” “Four Little Elegies.”

If you are unfamiliar with Mayakovsky, see

http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/text/Mayakovsky.html

If you are unfamiliar with French Surrealists, see

http://www.jbeilharz.de/surrealism/surrealism.html

March 3 Enter the Beats

Allen, NAP, selections from Corso, Ginsberg, Weiners, LeRoi Jones

March 10 Spring Break

March 17 O’Hara’s Big Year (s) First Paper Due

FOH, Collected Poems

“In Memory of My Feelings,” “A Step Away from Them,” “Poem Read at Joan Mitchell’s,” “John Button Birthday,” “Poem (To be idiomatic in a vacuum),” “Ode to Michael Goldberg,” “Ode to Joseph Laseuer,” “Ode on Causality,” “A True Account of Talking to the Sun…,” “With Barbara Guest in Paris,” “The Unfinished,” “Gregory Corso,” “The Day Lady Died,” “Rhapsody,” “Song (Is it dirty?),” “At Joan’s,” “Adieu to Norman…,” “Joe’s Jacket,” “Poem (Khruschev is coming…),” “In Favor of One’s Time,” “Poem V(F)W,” “Avenue A,” “Having a Coke with You.” “For the Chinese New Year,” “Essay on Style,” “St Paul and All That,” “Memoir of Sergei O…,” “Poem (Lana Turner has collapsed),” “At the Bottom of the Dump…, ” “Should We Legalize Abortion,” “The Shoe Shine Boy,” “Fantasy,” “Historical Variations.”

If you are unfamiliar with Pierre Reverdy, see

http://www.fudomouth.net/rhizome/reverdy.htm

March 24 Collaging

JA, MSO, The Tennis Court Oath

FOH, Collected Poems, “Biotherm”

March 31 Reception: Berrigan and others

Berrigan, The Sonnets

Selections from Angel Hair Anthology

http://jacketmagazine.com/16/

April 7 Ashbery’s “Return”

MSO, “The Skaters,” in Rivers and Mountains

The Double Dream of Spring

April 14 Koch

Koch, Selected Poems

NO CLASS APRIL 21

April 28 The latest Bloomer: Schuyler

Schuyler, Selected Poems, readings tba

May 5 Wrap   Final Paper Due

Requirements:

A working GMU email account: I might need to reach you quickly or need to advise you about some quirk or change in the syllabus.

.Assignments: You will have two research/critical papers this term. We will discuss the topics in class, in order to tailor them to your interests and your needs. You will also be required to write an imitation of each of the four first generation poets and at least one of the second generation. The imitation should be no shorter than 20 lines and should include at least one paragraph at the end in which you explain why you have written what you have written.

Attendance: This is a graduate seminar so its health and success depend on active participation and regular attendance. Now, we all have real lives and multiple commitments, but if you anticipate missing more than two sessions, you should seriously consider NOT taking this course. If you cannot attend a session for whatever reason, please email me ahead of time.

Grading : The papers will constitute no less than 60 % of the grade. Class participation (which should be vigorous, if not impassioned) will count for the rest. Remember: You are responsible for your ignorance. If you have a question, ask it.  If you’re scared to ask it in class, email me. This is about education, not about competition.

Plagiarism: I shouldn’t have to talk about plagiarism, but it seems I must. If you present work as your own which was actually written by someone else (whether another student or a professional scholar), you are cheating. If you say something in a paper that you would not have said if you had not read Smith, even if you do not quote Smith word for word, then you need to footnote Smith (this includes sources from the Internet, by the way).  Be sure to familiarize youself with proper modes of documentation. (I prefer the Chicago Manual of Style, but feel free to use MLA style.) ANYONE WHO CITES, RELIES ON OR OTHERWISE REFERS TO THE WORK OF SOMEONE ELSE WITHOUT ACKNOWLEDGING THIS FACT IN A FOOTNOTE WILL BE REFERRED TO THE HONOR COMMITTEE.