Reminder: Final Paper Due Monday

You're more than welcome to hand your papers in tomorrow, but the final deadline is Monday at 5PM. Please leave your essays in my box in the English Dept. mailroom (McMicken 241) in the appropriate folder for your class, making sure that they're stapled, and that, in accordance with MLA guidelines, your name appears on each page. Late papers will lose a full letter grade for each day until they're handed in, and papers which fail to meet the length requirements will automaticaly receive an F.

For tomorrow, please read Charles Bernstein's brief essay, "Against National Poetry Month as Such," as well as the epilogue in David Lehman's The Last Avant Garde, and come prepared for an overview discussion of our work this quarter. We'll revisit some of the key ideas of the New York School's poetics, make comparisons between authors, and talk about whose work you really loved and really hated. I'll also give recommendations for further reading. We've had a great quarter, with some wonderfully engaged conversations about the texts, and I'm hoping we'll have one last chat which will frame everything we've done over the last ten weeks.

Reminder: Waldman Quiz on Monday

Don't forget that our final quiz of the quarter will be on Monday. As we discussed in class, it will solely cover Anne Waldman (seen at right with Lewis Warsh in the late 60s) — specifically, the poems you read for Friday and will read for Monday. This is one way in which you can pull up grades that are lower than you might have wanted, and it's never too late to bump up your class participation grade by taking part in our discussions next week.

Of course, the best way to ensure a final grade you'll be happy with is to turn in a stellar final essay. Once more, I'll encourage you to take advantage of any opportunity to talk to me about your paper in advance, whether by e-mail or during my office hours: bounce ideas off of me, run your thesis statement by me, ask about the evidence you're using.

On Friday, we will have a full class, with a brief reading assignment (from Charles Bernstein), which might be useful in framing our work this quarter. I'll post that a little later this week.

Anne Waldman Readings

On Friday, we'll wrap up our time with Bernadette Mayer, and begin looking at the work of Anne Waldman as well (depending on which poems you're interested in discussing, we can split the class half and half, or work exclusively with one of the poets). Though Waldman often gets lumped in with the Beat Generation poets (largely due to her co-founding the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University with Allen Ginsberg), Waldman's roots are clearly in the New York School — aside from running the St. Mark's Poetry Project for a number of years, she co-edited the influential journal and press Angel Hair with her then-husband Lewis Warsh. As with Bernadette Mayer, there aren't a great many recordings of her earlier work available on her PennSound author page, but it's worth listening to a few tracks, just to get a feel for her vocal style, especially given the emphasis placed on a litany-based performativity in her later works (starting with "Fast Speaking Woman"), which result in raucous live performances.

All readings are in Helping the Dreamer: New & Selected Poems 1966-1988:


Friday, March 6th:

• After "Les Fleurs" (2)
• College Under Water (3)
• The De Carlo Lots (5)
• How the Sestina (Yawn) Works (12)
• My Kind of Man (14)
• Diaries (15)
• Paul Eluard (16)

Monday, March 9th:

• Paris Day (27)
• Snow (29)
• *Giant Night* (30)
• Fast Speaking Woman (36)
• & do what I know best (72)
• Distance Traveled (73)
• For J.A. as Dusk Deepens Canyon (74)
• Divorce Work (78)
• Mirror Meditation (92)

Wednesday, March 11th:

• True Story of Being at the Pool (98)
• Number Song (106)
• Baby's Pantoum (109)
• Baby & the Gypsy (113)
• A Phonecall from Frank O'Hara (150)
• The Lie (157)
• Triolet (180)
• The Stick (199)
• Out There (201)
• Sonnet: O Husband! (209)

Reminder: Quiz Today, plus Book Link

Don't forget that we'll be having a quiz on Bernadette Mayer's work today, as well as a quiz on Anne Waldman next week. As I said in Monday's class, we'll have two last quizes this week and next, so that folks who weren't happy with their performance on them so far have a chance to pull their grades up a little bit. As usual, you can expect a few general questions about the work you've read so far (largely drawn from our class discussion on Monday) and will analyze one poem.

Also, Ben passed along this link to a limited preview of A Bernadette Mayer Reader on Google Books. If you're taking my Contemporary American Poetry course next quarter, I'd recommend hanging on to this book, as we'll be reading Mayer's latest, Poetry State Forest.

Week 9: Bernadette Mayer

On Monday, we'll begin our unit on Bernadette Mayer, who, as we mentioned in the last class, serves as a bridge of sorts between the Second Generation New York School aesthetics, and Language poetry (or, to some, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, after the influential journal, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E). In her early work, especially, you'll see a far greater experimental and conceptual component than many of the folks we've read recently (and skip through some of the poems that aren't assigned to see even more esoteric works). Be sure to take a look at PennSound's Bernadette Mayer author page as well: though there aren't many recordings to go with these poems, there are a few, and Charles Bernstein's Close Listening interview with Mayer is particularly interesting. I'll post some links and other materials next week.

Monday, March 2nd:

from Poetry and early poems:

• Corn (6)
• Index (8)
• Thick (13)
• Poem (14)
• Swan Silvertones (17)
• America (19)
• It Moves Across (24)
• Sonnet: "name address date" (26)
• The Way to Keep Going in Antarctica (32)

from The Golden Book of Words

• Lookin Like Areas of Kansas (49)
• Essay (51)
• Carlton Fisk is My Ideal (53)
• What Babies Really Do (57)
• Instability (Weather) (60)

Wednesday, March 4th:

from Studying Hunger (42)

from Midwinter Day (63)

from Mutual Aid

• A Woman I Mix Men Up . . . (81)

from Sonnets

• Sonnet: "Love is a babe . . ." (87)
• Sonnet: "It would be nice . . ." (88)
• Sonnet: "I am supposed to think . . ." (90)
• Sonnet: "You jerk you didn't call me . . ." (93)
• Incidents Report Sonnet (97)
• Incidents Report Sonnet #2 (98)
• Incidents Report Sonnet #5 (99)
• Sonnet: "Beauty of songs . . ." (103)
• Incandescent War Poem Sonnet (104)

Friday, March 6th:

New Poems:

• The Incorporation of Sophia's Cereal (118)
• Ode on (120)
• I Wish You Were Up Late, Gerard (130)
• Sonnet: "a tiny little poem . . ." (134)
• Failure in Infinitives (139)
• Marie Makes Fun of Me at the Shore (147)

(on Friday, we'll also start with the work of Anne Waldman, readings to be posted next week)

Update: Final Essay Questions

Here are six potential paper topics for your final essays, which are due in class on the last day of the quarter (3/13). Your essays should be 5-7 pages in length (though feel free to go longer), double-spaced, printed in a serif font (Times New Roman, most likely) and stapled. Papers should also be written in MLA format, complete with a "works cited" page (I'll provide links for those of you who aren't familiar with MLA conventions); those which do not follow the format will be docked points. Please, please, please be sure to back up your ideas with sufficient evidence from the texts (and please cite this evidence properly). Also note that "5-7 pages" means that, at minimum, your essay makes it all the way to the bottom of the 5th page, and ideally onto a 6th page (and that doesn't count your "works cited" page). Works which do not meet the minimum length requirements will automatically receive an F.


Within the next day or so, I'll probably add one or two more topics, so if none of these strikes your fancy keep an eye out for (or suggest) an alternate topic.

---

1. Analyze the marriage of Ted Berrigan and Alice Notley as it’s represented through their poetry. How many different facets of their life together—both positive and negative—do they share with readers? What commonalities emerge, and in what ways do they differ in how they depict their union? How does Notley, as widow, continue this dialogue after Berrigan’s death? Be sure to include copious evidence from multiple works by both poets.


2. The “Experiments List” (as compiled by Bernadette Mayer and Charles Bernstein) is a powerful testament to the infinite number of formulas, structures and forms by which one can express herself through poetry. Making sure not to overlap with the Mayer/Bernstein list, and drawing upon the work of some of the more experimental poets we’ve read (i.e. Ashbery, Koch, Berrigan, Notley, Mayer), make your own list of five experiments (each approximately one page long), explaining how to construct the poem (or what rules or constrictions govern it), citing examples from our readings, and discussing the overall effect of each concept. Finish with some sort of general conclusions about this approach to poetry.


3. While the New York School’s first generation was largely a male affair (with the possible exception of Barbara Guest, who was loosely affiliated), its second generation—while also including innovative male poets such as Ted Berrigan, Ron Padgett and Lewis Warsh—was largely driven by a number of powerful female voices, centered around the trio of Alice Notley, Bernadette Mayer and Anne Waldman. Explore the multifarious ways in which these three expressed a uniquely feminine perspective in their poetry, focusing on their societal role as women, as well as wives (Notley was married to Berrigan, and Waldman, then Mayer were married to Warsh) and mothers. Please aim for complex analysis, finding similarities and differences within and between each poet’s work, supported by evidence from the texts.


4. Trace the influence of a first generation member of the New York School upon a second generation member, discussing at least three techniques or characteristics passed down from the former to the latter, and providing several examples for each of these facets from the poems of each author. In what ways does the second generation poet alter or further develop the aesthetics of the first generation poet, and in what ways is he radically different from his predecessor?


5. Consider the role of humor within the poetics of the New York School, focusing on the work of several poets (O’Hara, Koch and Berrigan all jump to mind immediately). What other emotions does humor interact with in these poems? How integral is a sense of humor to each poet’s distinct style, and in what ways does it serve to further some of the central aims of the New York School (the emphasis on the personal voice, on common language, on iconoclastic and anti-academic philosophies, etc.)?


6. Ron Padgett is another important second generation member of the New York School, as a poet, translator, memoirist (of Ted Berrigan and Joe Brainard), publisher (Full Court Press), pedagogue (through the Teachers and Writers Collaborative) and, finally, as director of the St. Mark's Poetry Project in the 1970s. Read either Padgett's New and Selected Poems (1995) or Great Balls of Fire (1969, reissued 1990), and drawing upon a half dozen or so characteristic poems (or more, if necessary), make an argument for how Padgett's work fits within the New York School aesthetic, making comparisons to works by other poets we've read (I'd recommend limiting your scope to Ted Berrigan, his great friend and collaborator, and Kenneth Koch, his former teacher at Columbia).

MLA Guidelines: A Brief Primer

The short and sweet version of MLA goes as follows: in-text parenthetical citations which indicate page number, and author/text (if necessary), with a "Works Cited" list at the end. No footnotes, no endnotes, no bibliography. Whenever you borrow ideas from another source, that source should be given credit by citing it. Failure to do so is plagiarism. We'll spend a few minutes discussing the basics of MLA today in class, but I wanted to give you a few resources for when you write your papers:

• Here's a link to the OWL (Online Writing Lab) at Purdue University, which offers an extensive explanation of MLA style guidelines.

• The MLA Style Manual page on Wikipedia offers general guidelines as well.

Please consult with these sites, and be sure that both your in-text citations and "Works Cited" list are properly formatted. Also please use the formal MLA header, and put your name and page number in the header on each page.

Alice Notley Links

Aside from Notley's PennSound and Electronic Poetry Center author pages, here are a few links to articles, interviews and other Alice Notley resources:

• "A State of Disobedience," Joel Brouwer's New York Times review of Notley's In the Pines also serves as a critical appraisal of her life and poetics

• "Her Field is Her Consciousness," Marie Ponsot's profile of Notley in The Nation

• "Constellation: Alice Notley": various critical and creative responses to Notley's work

• Griffin Prize 2002 page for Notley (she won this prestigous award for Disobedience)

• Brian Kim Stefans interviews Notley in Jacket
  

Alice Notley Readings

I'll post more background info on Alice Notley in the near future, but for now, here's the reading schedule for our unit on her, including the poems that were already announced for tomorrow (though I expect we'll spend much of Friday's class discussing Ted Berrigan's final poems). This photo, by the way, is of the three editors of The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan: Notley with the two sons she had with Berrigan, Anselm and Edmund, who're both poets as well. I've always found it kind of sad that there are no photos of Berrigan and Notley together (on the web, at least . . . the Berrigan tribute anthology, Nice to See You [which was edited by Anne Waldman] has a handful of photos from throughout their relationship . . . perhaps I should scan some).

When MP3s are available, I've provided links below, and you can hear many more recordings on Notley's PennSound author page, including what she identified as her second reading ever, dating from the winter of 1971 in Bolinas, CA.


Friday, February 20th:

• Cold Poem (3) MP3
• I Hope I'm Not Here Next Year (4)
• Dear Dark Continent (8)
• Incidentals in the Day World (9)
• Your Dailiness (19)
• But He Says I Misunderstood (25)

Monday, February 23rd:

• from Songs for the Unborn Second Baby (26)
• "Alice Ordered Me to be Made" (33)
• 30th Birthday (42)
• January (44)
• Sonnet (60)
• Poem (63)
• When I Was Alive (64)
• Untitled (68)
• Bus Stop (70)
• Jack Would Speak Through the Imperfect Medium of Alice (71) MP3
  
• Postcards (135)
• Margaret and Dusty (141) MP3
• The Ten Best Issues of Comic Books (148) MP3
  

Wednesday, February 25th:

• Waltzing Matilda (116)
• So Much (149)
• Poem (150)
• At Night the States (153) MP3
• As Good As Anything (234)
• Choosing Styles — 1972 (237)
• I Must Have Called and So He Comes (239)
• The Trouble With You Girls (240)

Friday, February 27th:

• Hematite Heirloom Lives On (Maybe December 1980) (242)
• Mid-80's (244)
• Sept 17/Aug 29, '88 (248)
• 1992 (251)
• Lady Poverty (253)
• Love (302)
• Radical Feminist (317)
• Oath (322)
• Ballad (320) MP3
  

Berrigan's Poetics in One Sentence (courtesy of Charles Bernstein)

Berrigan’s work […] can most usefully be read not as a document of a life in writing but, inversely, as an appropriation of a life by writing

— Charles Bernstein, "Writing Against the Body"

Tristan Tzara's Instructions for Dadaist Cut-Up Poetry

To make a Dadaist poem:

• Take a newspaper.
• Take a pair of scissors.
• Choose an article as long as you are planning to make your poem.
• Cut out the article.
• Then cut out each of the words that make up this article and put them in a bag.
• Shake it gently.
• Then take out the scraps one after the other in the order in which they left the bag.
• Copy conscientiously.
• The poem will be like you.
• And here you are a writer, infinitely original and endowed with a sensibility that is charming though beyond the understanding of the vulgar.

— Tristan Tzara

Week 7: Ted Berrigan and the start of Alice Notley

Here's Ted Berrigan outside Lower East Side institution, Gem Spa — a newsstand centrally-located within a few blocks from the Berrigan/Notley apartment at 101 St. Mark's place, Anne Waldman and Lewis Warsh's apartment at 33 St. Mark's Place (a social hub for the mid-to-late 60s poetry scene), and St. Mark's Church on the Bowery, where the Poetry Project has existed for more than forty years. The egg cream was purportedly invented there, and every morning around sunrise, Berrigan would head down there for a chocolate egg cream, a Pepsi and The New York Times. Factor in a died of greasy hamburgers and doughnuts (and, oh yeah, a steady diet of amphetamines) and it's no wonder he died young.

Hopefully, having spent half the quarter getting acquainted with Ashbery, O'Hara and Koch, you'll be better able to pick up some of the social interaction between the various poets we're studying. More than anybody else, you'll see this in Berrigan's poetry — lines borrowed from other poets, forms borrowed from other poets, name-dropping of other poets, communication with other poets, and collaboration with other poets. Keep an eye out for these moments: they're key to Berrigan's poetics.

Here are the readings for next week, including a few poems by Berrigan's wife, Alice Notley, which will start our 3 1/2 classes looking at her work. All page numbers are in The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan, except for (of course) the Notley poems on the 20th, which are in Grave of Light:


Monday, February 16th:

• Words for Love (115)
• Personal Poem #2 (116)
• Personal Poem #7 (117)
• Peronal Poem (117)
• For You (119)
• Tambourine Life (121)
• Living with Chris (151)
• Things to do in New York City (163) MP3
• 10 Things I Do Every Day (164)
• Rusty Nails (183)
• The Great Genius (220)
• It's Important (225)
• In Bed (230)
• People Who Died (236)
• Telegram (237) MP3
  
• Laments (337)

Wednesday, February 18th:

• 3 Pages (351) MP3
• Sunday Morning (354)
• Something Amazing Just Happened (355)
• Today in Ann Arbor (357) MP3
  
• Things to Do on Speed (361)
• What I'd Like for Christmas, 1970 (369)
• Today's News (371)
  
• Things to Do in Providence (376)
• Frank O'Hara (381) MP3
• Crystal (382) MP3
• Chinese Nightengale (383)
• I Used to Be But Now I Am (385)
• "I Remember" (419)
• Whitman in Black (420) MP3
• People of the Future (429)
• Hearts (432)
• Night Letter (432)
  
• Going to Chicago (468)
• Three Poems: Going to Canada (483)
• Reading Frank O'Hara (510)

Friday, February 20th:

Ted Berrigan:

• In the 51st State (513)
• Red Shift (515) MP3
• Last Poem (521)
• Small Role Felicity (522)
• DNA (535)
• Poem (568)
• A Certain Slant of Sunlight (569)
• Creature (594)
• Dresses for Alice (608)
• A City Winter (614)
• This Will Be Her Shining Hour (645)

Alice Notley:

• Cold Poem (3) MP3
• I Hope I'm Not Here Next Year (4)
• Dear Dark Continent (8)
• Incidentals in the Day World (9)
• Your Dailiness (19)
• But He Says I Misunderstood (25)

Friday, February 13th: Beginning Ted Berrigan

Now that the midterm's behind us, we can move on from the First Generation New York School trio of Ashbery, O'Hara and Koch into the Second Generation of poets who rose in their wake in the mid-1960s, namely Ted Berrigan, Alice Notley, Bernadette Mayer and Anne Waldman (among many, many others), and we'll be starting with Berrigan — without a doubt the largest persona on the scene.

For Friday, I'd like you to read his debut collection, The Sonnets, in its entirety. It's a collection of short poems (most sticking to the traditional sonnet length of 14 lines) which work together as a cohesive whole, with lines borrowed from poem to poem, and entire poems reconfigured to make other poems. The Sonnets begins on pg. 27 of The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan and you can maximize your reading experience by listening along to Berrigan's reading of the series at the New Langton Arts Center in San Francisco in 1981 on PennSound (click here to visit our Ted Berrigan page — you'll find individual streaming files for each poem, or you can listen to it as one complete MP3). I'd also wholeheartedly recommend you read along with Alice Notley's incredibly useful notes, which begin in the back of the book on pg. 665), and take a few minutes to read the thoughtful introduction she's written for the collection (which starts on pg. 1).

The long-overdue Berrigan Collected wasn't just a labor of love, but a family affair to boot — Notley is, of course, Berrigan's widow, and the couple's two sons, Anselm and Edmund (who are also poets) assisted in the editing. We'll be reading a fair amount of the volume, as Berrigan's work is often self-reflexive, with poems separated by books, years or even decades borrowing from one another, so the only way you'll be able to appreciate this effect is by gaining familiarity with his body of work. I'm putting the finishing touches on the reading assignments for the remaining days (I have to try to segue into Alice Notley for the following Friday, and so am trimming a few poems from the list), but I'll have that for you soon.

Poem List for Midterm

Though I'm loathe to provide a list like this, I understand that (too) many of you might be wholly unable to take the midterm without being able to gather copies of these poems. This is by no means a complete list of poems which might turn up on the midterm — for the essay questions especially, there might be additional poems you might want to bring into the discussion — but it will give you some general idea of where to focus your attentions.


John Ashbery:

The Instruction Manual
These Lacustrine Cities
Into the Dusk-Charged Air
To a Waterfowl
Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape
The Other Tradition
What is Poetry
My Erotic Double
At North Farm
37 Haiku


Frank O'Hara:

Autobiographia Literaria
Poem ("The eager note on my door said 'Call me,")
To the Harbormaster
At the Old Place
Homosexuality
To the Film Industry in Crisis
A Step Away From Them
The Day Lady Died
You Are Gorgeous and I'm Coming
Personal Poem
Having a Coke with You
Ave Maria
Lines for the Fortune Cookies


Kenneth Koch:

To You
In Love with You
The Circus
Collected Poems
Fresh Air
Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams
The Circus
The Magic of Numbers
In Bed
One Train May Hide Another
Passing Time in Skansen
To Life
To My Old Addresses

Corso Documentary Screening Tonight

Though Gregory Corso was not a member of the New York School, he was a contemporary and friend of many of its members, and pursued similar aims in his poetry. Over the past several weeks, there's been an exhibition at DAAP honoring the late Beat poet, which will conclude tonight with a screening of the not-yet-released documentary, Corso: the Last Beat. If you're interested in going, you can see the trailer below, and get more information on tonight's event by following this link.


"Corso - The Last Beat" Preview from Damien LeVeck on Vimeo.

Reminder: Koch Quiz Tomorrow

I forgot to mention this at the end of yesterday's class, but as we'd discussed on Monday, there will be a quiz on Kenneth Koch at the start of tomorrow's class. The poem you'll be analyzing is "We Sailed the Indian Ocean for a Dime," and if you don't have a copy of the book, then I'd strongly suggest that you make a photocopy of it from someone who does, or bring in a printout, if possible. The poem won't be printed on the quiz, but I will project it via the document viewer.

Regarding the Book Issue

Since Monday's class was more or less brought to a halt due to only about a third of you having a copy of The Collected Poems of Kenneth Koch (and therefore, I'm lead to presume, only about a third of you actually having done the reading), I wanted to address the issue of books.

Admittedly, this course might require a few more books than other sections of Topics in Literature that are being offered this quarter, and thought most of the books are rather reasonably priced, a few (the Ashbery and Koch in particular) might be a little more expensive than most, provided that you buy them new, and not through a site like Amazon where you'll get a significant discount (as well as free shipping). That having been said, if you check the booklist, you'll find many links to sites where you can find cheap used copies of the required texts for this course. Had you checked out ABE Books, for example, in advance of this week's classes, you'd have found 26 copies of The Collected Poems of Kenneth Koch on sale for less than $10. If you search for similar deals for the rest of the books we'll be reading this quarter, I'm sure you'll find similar values. One bookseller alone has more than forty copies of The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan available for approximately $13 (more than 20 copies at $9.95 with $3.50 shipping, and more than 20 copies at $12.95 with free shipping).

If you want to share copies of the books, that's fine, but you might run into some problems during the midterm, since you can't pass it back and forth. Perhaps you can photocopy the required reading so each of you can have a copy. If you're getting the poems off of the internet, there are certain things you should be wary of (such as omissions, typos, inconsistent formatting in regards to line and stanza breaks, or just plain incorrect versions of the poems), but if they're coming from a reputable source, at the very least print them out so you can annotate them and bring them to class. Of course, you're not likely to be able to find all of the required readings, and those gaps might prove costly if the poem you missed happens to come up on a quiz. Also, please don't forget that libraries still exist, and you can make use of WorldCat to look up what local libraries carry the books you need.

Beyond taking part in our class discussions or making use of the blog, the most rudimentary form of class participation is actually having the texts and doing the reading. If you're not doing that bare minimum, then your chances of doing well in this class are severely diminished. I was disappointed with how Monday's class went — thought still grateful to those students who did the reading and were able to talk about it — and sincerely hope that we won't have any more classes with energy and participation as low as that for the rest of the quarter.

DJ Spooky and John Ashbery

This just in, via Five Branch Tree (and before that, the Poetry Foundation): DJ Spooky (who takes his name from a character in William S. Burroughs' Nova Trilogy) reads Ashbery's poem, "Paradoxes and Oxymorons" in this short clip:

Kenneth Koch Audio and Video

There's not a whole lot of Kenneth Koch audio available on the web (though seeking out recordings from his estate to expand his PennSound author page is a project I'd like to pursue at some point in the future). For now, if you visit his page, you'll find a single reading from a little over a decade ago. Practically the entire reading is dedicated to micro-dramas from his One Thousand Avant-Garde Plays, or songs from the plays, but he does read a lengthy excerpt from "My Olivetti Speaks" (an Olivetti is a brand of typewriter, by the way; c.f. Ron Padgett's "Olivetti Lettera"), and his reading of "One Train May Hide Another" is breathtaking:

• from My Olivetti Speaks (10:14)
• One Train (5:57)

On UbuWeb, there's a single poem taken from the Giorno Poetry Systems album, Biting off the Tongue of a Corpse, and a hilarious, spontaneously composed collaboration with Allen Ginsberg from the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church on the Bowery:

• Spring (1:33)
• Popeye and William Blake Fight to the Death (with Allen Ginsberg) (7:52)

Again, here's a link to the Poetry Foundation's podcast, "The Poetry Assassination of Kenneth Koch":

• The Poetry Assassination of Kenneth Koch (10:15)

If you follow the link below, you can download a reading Koch did at the Naropa Institute in 1981. and a lecture from 1979 in which he discusses his writing life and his friendships with Ashbery and O'Hara:

• Kenneth Koch reading, June 1981
• Kenneth Koch lecture, June 1979

Finally, here's a short and very new video in which David Lehman and Mitch Sisskind discuss Kenneth Koch as a teacher:

Starting Kenneth Koch Properly

We'll soon be leaving Frank O'Hara behind and move on to the third core member of the New York School's First Generation, Cincinnati-born-and-raised Kenneth Koch. Koch actually completed a year of classes at UC before enlisting to serve during World War II, having completed high school a year early. He'd eventually matriculate to Harvard (where he'd meet Ashbery and O'Hara) then Columbia, where he earned his doctorate. After a brief stint teaching at the New School, Koch returned to Columbia, where he'd teach for more than forty years, until his death in 2002.

If Frank O'Hara was the social center of New York's poets (as Allen Ginsberg acknowledged in his tribute to the late poet, "City Midnight Junk Strains"), and Ashbery took the greatest risks, challenging his peers to match his daring experiments, Koch clearly put the "school" in the New York School. As an innovative professor, whose poetry classes served as the foundation of the contemporary poetry workshop, he taught a great number of the Second Generation poets, and through his own poetry, as well as a number of books on poetry pedagogy, he provided numerous models and formulas for unlocking one's creative potential.

I'd like you to start off by reading David Lehman's chapter, "Kenneth Koch: the Pleasures of Peace" in The Last Avant-Garde (203), and for a different perspective on the poet, check out Melanie Rehak's profile from the Nation, "Dr. Fun." Another wonderful resource is the Poetry Foundation's podcast, "The Poetry Assassination of Kenneth Koch," which describes a particularly interesting episode from the poet's life. If you're looking for a little more background information, here are a few more links:

• a 1993 interview with David Kennedy
• Jacket's Koch Tribute from 2001, which editor John Tranter assembled after Koch's leukemia diagnosis. Fortunately, Koch was able to read and enjoy the issue before his death
• David Lehman's obituary from the Columbia College magazine

In terms of the schedule, I'd like to take advantage of the extra day you've had to keep ahead of things. At the end of next week, we can reevaluate where we stand in terms of Koch and the whole first generation, before the midterm exam.

Friday, January 30th:

from Thank You and Other Poems (1962)

• To You (80)
• In Love With You (85)
• The Circus (97)
• The History of Jazz (102)
• Collected Poems (105)
• Fresh Air (122)
• You Were Wearing (133)
• Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams (135) (See William Carlos Williams' "This is Just to Say")
  
• Taking a Walk with You (143)

Monday, February 2nd:

from The New American Poetry: 1945-1960

• Mending Sump (click here) (see Robert Frost's "Mending Wall")
  

from The Pleasures of Peace (1969)

• Sleeping with Women (165)
• We Sailed the Indian Ocean for a Dime (174)
• A Poem of the Forty-Eight States (183)
  
• The Pleasures of Peace (228)

from The Art of Love (1975)

• The Circus (241)
• The Magic of Numbers (245)

from The Burning Mystery of Anna in 1951 (1979)

• Our Hearts (301)
• Fate (307)
• The Boiling Water (330)

Wednesday, February 4th:

from Days and Nights (1982)

• In Bed (371)
• Girl and Baby Florist Sidewalk Pram Nineteen Seventy Something (389)
  
• Days and Nights (400)

from One Train (1994)

• One Train May Hide Another (441)
• Passing Time in Skansen (443)
• Energy in Sweden (444)
• Poems by Ships at Sea (476)

from Straits (1998)

• The Human Sacrament (511)
• Vouz Êtes Plus Beaux que Vous ne Pensiez (522)
• My Olivetti Speaks (534)

Friday, February 6th:

from New Addresses (2000)

• To Life (592)
• To the Ohio (593)
• To Carelessness (599)
• To World War Two (601)
• To Jewishness (611)
• To My Old Addresses (628)
• To the Past (650)
• To Various Persons Talked to All at Once (653)
• To Old Age (656)

from A Possible World (2002)

• Zones (677)
• The Moor Not Taken (720)
• Thor Not Taken (721)
  

Schedule Update

l-r: James Schuyler, John Ashbery & Kenneth Koch (1956)

I hope you all enjoyed our snow day, and that you're all safe and warm with power and without dented automobiles. I've been divided as to how we should proceed, but I think the best course of action is to hold over Frank O'Hara for another day, even as we start to move into our unit on Kenneth Koch, so please come prepared to discuss his work — I think that a good starting point will be extending our discussion of "Ode to Joy" into an examination of "A Step Away From Them" and "The Day Lady Died," and we can discuss any other poems you're interested in as well. Because I think that fruitful discussion is more important than taking a quiz at this point, I'm canceling the O'Hara quiz, and we'll have a quiz on Kenneth Koch's work next week. To get a jump on Koch, however, please start on this first batch of poems for tomorrow's class:

from Thank You and Other Poems (1962)

• To You (80)
• In Love With You (85)
• The Circus (97)
• The History of Jazz (102)
• Collected Poems (105)
• Fresh Air (122)
• You Were Wearing (133)
• Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams (135)
• Taking a Walk with You (143)

We'll have to see if and how we'll adjust the schedule to make up for this missing class. If necessary, we can cut the class that was supposed to follow the midterm, during which we'd look at a few poems by James Schuyler and a small sample of Second Generation poets we won't be covering this quarter. It also might be possible that we'll need to cut one of the poets from the end of the quarter (I'm leaning towards Anne Waldman at this moment), and if so, we'll still spend a day looking at a few poems from her, and you'll be able to write about her for your final essay, so if you've already bought the book, it won't go to waste (however, please note that I haven't yet made the decision to cut anyone).

Weather (Non-)Update

It looks like we'll have to wait until the morning to see whether UC will be open or closed, and I'll defer to the powers that be's judgment in that regard (though looking at the forecast, I can't imagine them thinking it'll be safe to have thousands of students commuting on icy roads and unplowed side-streets). Stay tuned to local TV, or wait for that e-mail from Greg Hand, and I'll either see you tomorrow, or on Friday.

A number of you have e-mailed about the fate of the quiz, and I'd imagine that if we have class, there will be a substantial number of students who won't be there, so I'm going to postpone the quiz until Friday, and it will cover both O'Hara and Koch. The Koch readings will be coming shortly, and I'll try to track down that article about Koch potentially forging "A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island" as well.

Two More O'Hara Readings

Sorry for the delay in posting this — we've been having internet issues on and off all weekend (any other Time Warner customers dealing with this?). Here are two additional readings by Frank O'Hara. The first was recorded September 25, 1964 at SUNY Buffalo, and to my knowledge, is the best known existing reading by the late poet.

1. Mary Desti's Ass (starts in the middle) (1:24): MP3
2. Ave Maria (1:27): MP3
3. Naphtha (1:38): MP3
4. Metaphysical Poem (0:58): MP3
5. Poem ("Lana Turner has collapsed!") (0:42): MP3
6. Poem en Forme de Saw (2:08): MP3
7. Two Tragic Poems (1:42): MP3
8. Fantasy (1:33): MP3
9. Blue Territory (1:56): MP3
10. Lawrence (0:55): MP3
11. Ode to Michael Goldberg('s Birth and Other Births) (10:22): MP3
12. Political Poem on a Last Line of Pasternak (1:23): MP3
13. Poem ("Hoopla! Ya! Ya! Ya!") (0:50): MP3
14. Poem V (F) W (1:08): MP3
15. Old Copies of Life Magazine (0:59): MP3
16. Louise (1:10): MP3
17. Poem ("I don't know if I get what D.H. Lawrence is driving at") (1:40): MP3


Here's a second short recording, taken from the PBS special Poetry: USA (from which several of the videos previously posted came from), in which O'Hara reads and discusses his work:

• complete recording (14:41): MP3

O'Hara Audio and Video

Because recordings of Frank O'Hara are fairly scarce, I'm consolidating links to a number of different recordings under this one thread.

First, there's Frank O'Hara.org's Audio Page, where you can listen to the poet read a number of his poems, along with other readers' interpretations, and a few discussions of his life and work.

UbuWeb's Frank O'Hara Page showcases a handful of recordings taken from various albums that were all part of Giorno Poetry Systems Dial-a-Poem series (a dozen records released between the early 70s and mid 80s which served as mixtapes, of sorts, for America's poetic avant-garde).

Here's a rare video of O'Hara reading "Having a Coke with You," from the WNET program USA: Poetry. The footage was shot in March 1966, and aired in September of the same year, a few months after O'Hara's tragic death.



You can see two more videos from the program on the Frank O'Hara.org Video Page.

Finally, the AMC series Mad Men gave O'Hara's popularity a little boost recently, when they featured the poet, and his collection, Meditations in an Emergency in an episode. Here's a YouTube fan video featuring a reading of the poem "Mayakovsky" taken from the show, and below, the doctored version of the book's cover the show's set design department came up with (right) along with the original version (left):





Before the week's out, I'll try to track down and post recordings of O'Hara's early 60's reading at SUNY Buffalo, which, to my knowledge, is the only full reading on tape.

Wednesday, January 21: Beginning Frank O'Hara

After spending a few minutes discussing John Ashbery's "Litany," we'll start our four-class investigation of the life and work of Frank O'Hara — who served as the social hub of the New York School's first and second generations, and was also the group's first (and perhaps most tragic) loss, when he died senselessly in the summer of 1966.

Despite a shortened writing life, O'Hara still managed a prodigious literary output, and if you think that The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara is big enough, be grateful that I didn't assign its companion volume, Poems Retrieved, which consists of all poems that hadn't yet been discovered when Donald Allen was putting together the Collected. As you'll quickly sense from reading O'Hara, his work has a immediate and occasional quality to it — his best-known single volume, Lunch Poems, is just that: poems he composed while taking a walk through New York's streets on his lunch hour, whether they were scribbled on an envelope or paper napkin, or typed out on a demonstration typewriter outside of a department store. As a result, a lot of O'Hara poems were found in drawers, coat pockets, letters to friends, etc. and no one can guess how many were lost over the years.

Over the next four classes, we'll be reading the best of what's survived. Since we have a long holiday weekend, I'll be front-loading our discussion with a few background readings. Also, since O'Hara recordings are somewhat scarce, I'll be posting them all in a separate thread. All readings are in The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara, except for the Lehman. It's also worth noting that a great many O'Hara poems have the simple title, "Poem," and so it's customary to refer to each work by the title as well as its first line:


Wednesday, January 21st

• David Lehman, "Frank O'Hara: you just go on your nerve" (164)
  
• Donald M. Allen, "Editor's Note" (v)
• John Ashbery, "Introduction" (vii)
• "A Short Chronology" (xiii)

• Autobiographia Literaria (11)
• Poem ("The eager note on my door said 'Call me,") (14)
• Today (15)
• Memorial Day 1950 (17)
• Night Thoughts in Greenwich Village (38)
• The Critic (48)
• Poetry (49)
• A Terrestrial Cuckoo (62)

Friday, January 23rd

• "Personism: A Manifesto" (498)
• "Statement for The New American Poetry" (500)

• A City Winter (75)
• An Abortion (80)
• Chez Jane (102)
• Blocks (108)
• 3rd Avenue El (130)
• On Rachmaninoff's Birthday (159)
• On Rachmaninoff's Birthday (189)
• On Rachmaninoff's Birthday (190)
• Meditations in an Emergency (197)
• To the Harbormaster (217)
• At the Old Place (223)

Monday, January 26th

• Homosexuality (181)
• To the Film Industry in Crisis (232)
• Sleeping on the Wing (235)
• Cambridge (239)
• In Memory of My Feelings (252)
• A Step Away From Them (256)
• Why I Am Not a Painter (261)
• Ode to Joy (281)
• Poem ("I live above a dyke bar and I'm happy.") (286)
• A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island (306)
• [The Sad Thing About Life Is] (323)
• The Day Lady Died (325)
• Rhapsody (325)
  
• You Are Gorgeous and I'm Coming (331)

Wednesday, January 28th

• Poem ("Hate is only one of many responses") (333)
• Personal Poem (335)
• Naphtha (337)
• Poem ("Krushchev is coming on the right day!") (340)
• Poem ("Light clarity avocado salad in the morning") (350)
• Having a Coke with You (360)
• Ave Maria (371)
• Cornkind (387)
  
• On a Birthday of Kenneth's (396)
• Mary Desti's Ass (401)
• Poem ("Lana Turner has collapsed!") (449)
• Lines for the Fortune Cookies (465)

Having Issues With Posting Your Comment?

If you've having trouble posting your comment on "Litany" or "The Skaters," make sure you're accessing the blog directly (i.e. not through the Blackboard site). Last quarter, some students reported that Blogger wouldn't display the jumble of letters they'd have to post to verify their comment. If you're still having issues, please let me know, and thanks to those who've already commented.

New, Helpful Ashbery Recordings on PennSound

When I got home yesterday, I had an e-mail from one of the PennSound workstudies, Rebekah, who let me know that she'd just posted a few new recordings from John Ashbery, including two with might be of particular interest to you. You can access all of them by following this link to PennSound's front page, where you can follow the individual links in the write-up.

First, I'd recommend listening to the first few minutes of the 1999 BBC Radio 3 program. It begins with a short profile of the poet, and talks a little bit about his development. This is followed by a great reading, but for now, the profile's more than enough.

Second, if you'd like to get a lesson on how to analyze an Ashbery poem straight from the source, check out the 1966 interview on WKCR Radio, in which the host makes the poet go line-by-line through "These Lacustrine Cities," explaining his word choices, intentions, etc. You can tell that it's kind of a painful experience for Ashbery, but he dutifully takes the poem apart for listeners, and it might be helpful for you to listen. Between the reading and the explanation, it's about 15 minutes or so.

Don't forget we have a quiz tomorrow, so be prepared to answer questions on the New York School in general (keep the Lehman readings from the 2nd class in mind), on the use of forms in Ashbery (think of the poems whose forms we've talked about in class, or the forms of which I've mentioned on this blog). I'm almost 100% certain that you'll also have a short poem to analyze as well.

Friday, January 16th: Long-Form Ashbery

***As we discussed in class today, students with last names beginning with A through K will read and report on "The Skaters," while those in the L through Z group will work on "Litany. Please post your response to this thread by 10:00AM Friday***

As we wrap up our time with John Ashbery, I'd like to take a little time to look at two epic poems from his earlier poetic output: "The Skaters" and "Litany." On Wednesday, we'll divide the class in two groups, who'll each take a look at one of these poems, and who'll lead our brief in-class discussion of each (maybe ten minutes). Focus on your experience of the poem, its effects upon you, your reading process, what connections you make, etc. To facilitate that process, I'd like you to make a short post on this thread (a couple sentences, maybe more)

"The Skaters," from 1966's Rivers and Mountains, begins on page 147 in the Collected, and you can read a few useful passages about it in Lehman's book, on pages 114-116 and 120-121. Upon first reading it, Kenneth Koch likened it to T.S. Eliot's modernist classic, "The Waste Land," and indeed, the poem aims for many of the same effects: collage, juxtaposition, the alienation of contemporary life, etc. There's no recording of "The Skaters" available, but perhaps that's for the best. I'd recommend reading it (or at least part of it) out loud, to simulate the live reading effect Ashbery finds ideal.


There is, on the other hand, a recording available of "Litany," which begins on page 553 in the Collected. This is very helpful, since it's humanly impossible to read the poem as Ashbery intended it without the help of someone else. As the gloss at the start of the poem tells us, its two columns are meant to be read simultaneously and independently of one another. In 1980, Ashbery and Ann Lauterbach (shown above in split-screen) recorded the poem in its entirety, each reading one column, and with their voices split into separate stereo channels. Until Ashbery provided us with a useable copy of the recording, this strange treasure was more or less unavailable, and even Lauterbach had burned out her cassette from using it in her classes.

You can (and should) listen to the poem by following the links below. I'm also providing links for a short essay by Lauterbach about the recording process, and the write-up I did for PennSound Daily when we launched the recording:

• "Litany" part 1 (15:49): MP3
• "Litany" part 2 (54:40): MP3
• "Litany" part 3 (14:08): MP3

• "What We Know As We Know It: Reading 'Litany' with J.A."

• PennSound Daily entry on "Litany"
• PennSound Daily entry on Lauterbach's essay
  

On Wednesday, after the Martin Luther King Day holiday, we'll start our unit on Frank O'Hara.

Wednesday, January 14th: Towards the End of Ashbery

Though some of this material may still be painful . . . or confusing . . . today's class conversation was a lively and detailed close-reading of Ashbery's "What is Poetry," and I hope it'll serve as both an example of how to work your way through a poem, detail by detail, and as a succinct statement of Ashbery's poetics.

Please read these poems for Wednesday's class, and come with questions and particular pieces you'd like to discuss. I trimmed this list down a little, and a number of these poems are exceedingly brief works. I'm hoping that maybe we can analyze a few of these poems on Wednesday, and in addition to our discussion of "Litany" and "The Skaters" on Friday, we should have time to look at a few additional pieces: "Soonest Mended," perhaps "Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape" and whatever else you'd like to talk about.



from As We Know (1979)

Many Wagons Ago (660)
As We Know (661)
My Erotic Double (667)
A Box and Its Contents (675) MP3
The Cathedral Is (676) MP3
I Had Thought Things Were Going Along Well (676)
Out Over the Bay the Rattle of Firecrackers (676)
We Were on the Terrace Drinking Gin and Tonics (676)
A Love Poem (680)


from Shadow Train (1981)

Qualm (704)
Untilted (713)
Written in the Dark (716)


from A Wave (1984)

At North Farm (733) MP3
The Songs We Know Best (734) MP3
37 Haiku (762)
Cups with Broken Handles (774)


from April Galleons (1987)

A Snowball in Hell (814)


Note: "The Songs We Know Best" has rather strange and charming origins. As you read in the New Yorker profile, Ashbery's a big music fan, and it's an integral part of his writing process, however his tastes run almost exclusively towards classical music. "The Songs We Know Best," however, was inspired by a chance encounter — in a New York City taxi cab — with Peaches and Herb's 1978 chart-topper "Reunited," whose vocal melody was so infectious that Ashbery adopted it for this poem. If you're not familiar with the song, listen along for a verse or two, and then read along in your books:

Two Links for Monday: Lehman, Baseball

I'll post Wednesday's reading assignments later on today, but for now, here's a pair of quick links you might want to check out:

• First, Denise sent me this video of Last Avant-Garde author, David Lehman, reading a poem he's composed for President-Elect Obama: click here to view

• Second, now that the World Series is over, and I won't jinx my beloved hometown Phillies by doing so, I wanted to share this brief interview with Tampa Bay Rays outfielder Fernando Perez. Apparently, John Ashbery's the thing to read if you're trying to clear your mind during the playoffs (or maybe not, considering that they lost): click here to read
  

Another Approach to Analyzing Poetry

I was flipping through Daniel Kane's What is Poetry: Conversations with the American Avant-Garde, a book of interviews with, among other big names of 20th century poetry, some of the folks we'll be studying this quarter (Ashbery, Koch, Mayer) and came across this exchange with Ann Lauterbach which might be helpful:

DK: Is there a method or series of steps that you might recommend teachers to take in presenting "On (Open)" [a poem of Lauterbach's they'd been discussing] to high school students not so familiar with poetry?

AL: A poem is not a puzzle to be solved. A poem is an experience, an event, in and of language. It should be approached as such:

• What kind of event happened to you when you read this poem?
• Did you get a feeling?
• Did you have an idea?
• Did you get reminded of something?
• Did you go elsewhere, away from the familiar world into another, stranger, one?
• Did you look up words and find out new meanings, as you would ask directions in a strange city?
• Why do you think the poet made this word choice, and not another?
• Why do you think the line is broken here, at this word, and not at another?
• How is a line break in a poem different from a comma or a period in a prose sentence?

I think this is an excellent way in which to approach the poems you'll be reading this quarter. Print this list, cut it out and keep it in the back of your book, consulting it often. Ask yourself these questions, and keep track of your responses. As we discussed in class yesterday, these works — and especially more abstract ones like Ashbery's — are going not going to have clear answers, and you're going to have to rely on your own reactions, your own associations, your particular readings. Find the punctive elements in each poem which get through to you, and please share them as part of our class discussions.

On Monday, I'd like to start by talking about "What is Poetry," taking apart its images and messages, in an attempt to find some sort of answer to the question its title poses. From there, we can move on to a few other poems. Hang in there: the more exposure you get to Ashbery's work, the more the shock of the new will wear off, and the easier it will be to work through each poem. Moreover, once you've cut your teeth on Ashbery, the remaining poets will seem relatively straightforward by comparison.

Monday, January 12th: John Ashbery Day 2

We last left John Ashbery with a selection of poems from his 1966 collection, Rivers and Mountains, a book we'll return to on our final day with the poet, when we look at his long-form poem, "The Skaters," which is a centerpiece of that volume.

1966 is a transitional year for the New York School. Frank O'Hara, who formed the social center of the group, died in July of that year, leaving a palpable void, and Paul Blackburn started the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church in the Bowery — two events which would help give rise to a second generation of poets like Ted Berrigan, Anne Waldman, Lewis Warsh, Bernadette Mayer and Ron Padgett.

For Monday, you'll be reading from a trio of books Ashbery published in the 1970s, a decade in which he moved from poetic upstart to an established literary figure. As before, recordings are available for a number of the poems, so be sure to listen along as you read.

from The Double Dream of Spring (1970)

• Soonest Mended (184) MP3
• It Was Raining in the Capital (187) MP3
• Decoy (195)
• Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape (206) MP3 (beginning cut off)
• Parergon (212) MP3

from Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975)

• As One Put Drunk into the Packet-Boat (427)
• Forties Flick (429) MP3
• Scheherazade (432) MP3
• Mixed Feelings (455) MP3
• The One Things That Can Save America (457)

from Houseboat Days (1977)

• The Other Tradition (491) MP3
• Pyrography (495) MP3 (ends prematurely)
• Crazy Weather (503)
• Wet Casements (508) MP3
• Daffy Duck in Hollywood (510) MP3 (beginning cut off)
• Lost and Found and Lost Again (514)
• And Ut Pictura Poesis Is Her Name (519) MP3
• What is Poetry (520) MP3

Notes:

• Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape: This is one of the better-known examples of the sestina, a form which repeats the end words in its first stanza throughout a number of patterns

• Pyrography: see also Larry Rivers' portrait of Ashbery which has the same name, and incorporates the opening lines of the poem


• Daffy Duck in Hollywood: though the poem takes its name from this Looney Tunes short:

it probably betrays the influence of this Daffy Duck cartoon as well:

The New York School of Painters (a.k.a. Abstract Expressionism)

As we discussed in yesterday's class, the New York School of poets got their name as a marketing stunt attempting to align them with the New York School of painters, their friends and compatriots, who were as much on the cutting edge of contemporary painting as the poets were on the cutting edge of contemporary literature. Ashbery, OHara, Koch and Schuyler hung out with these painters at the Cedar Bar, curated shows of their work at MoMA, wrote about their paintings, and collaborated with them on visual projects and plays.

Below, you'll find a small selection of works by a few New York School painters. What I want you to keep in mind here is that these aren't figurative works, they're not intended to be a paintings of something, but rather paintings in and of themselves: works which explore the potential of painting as an activity. In a similar fashion, the poems you'll be reading over the next ten weeks aren't often concerned with putting across a particular message or revealing a particular truth, as much as they're exploring the different things a writer can do with language.

(click on individual photos for larger images)

Jackson Pollock



Number 1, 1948




Untitled (Green Silver), 1949



Franz Kline

Chief, 1950




Painting Number 2, 1954



Willem de Kooning



Pink Angels, 1945



Woman I, 1950-52



Larry Rivers



Washington Crossing the Delaware, 1953




Pyrography: John Ashbery working, 1984 (you'll read Ashbery's poem of the same name next week)



Grace Hartigan



Untitled




Salute: the Canal to the Sky, 1960

Analyzing Poetry: the Five-Step Approach

Most students are far more comfortable reading and discussing prose than poetry, though that's usually a product of their lack of familiarity with the latter. We'll be dealing exclusively with poetry this quarter, and some pretty challenging poetry to boot, so it's best to start developing your analytic abilities now.

This is a quick and simple five-step plan that should be fairly helpful as you work your way through the readings. While the poetry of the New York School has very different aims from traditional poetry, and not all of these characteristics will fit, it's a good start:

1. What is happening in the poem?

• Literally: What is the poem’s action?
• Figuratively: What metaphors drive the poem’s message?

2. Comment on the poem’s music: What do you hear in this poem?

• the poet’s voice, the language used
• use of rhyme and near rhyme
• the poem’s rhythms, its cadence, its momentum
• use of alliteration and assonance
• performative enjambments (line breaks)

(All of these elements add emphasis to certain words, images and ideas. Why?)


3. Are there any memorable images? What do you see in this poem?


4. What general themes does the poet touch upon?


5. Ultimately, what is the poet/poem trying to say?


If you're interested in a far more comprehensive introduction to poetry, definitely check out Edward Hirsch's multi-part essay "How to Read a Poem (and Fall in Love with Poetry)," available through the Poetry Foundation website.

Also, here's a link to a poetics glossary to help you sort out any unfamiliar terms you might come across, and a primer on poetic forms and techniques, which will be particularly useful, as poets like Ashbery, Koch, Berrigan and Mayer will get a lot of use out of forms like the sonnet, the sestina and the pantoum.

Here are a few poems we can read and listen to in class, and take a shot at analyzing:

Ted Berrigan: Whitman in Black

For my sins I live in the city of New York
Whitman’s city lived in in Melville’s senses, urban inferno
Where love can stay for only a minute
Then has to go, to get some work done
Here the detective and the small-time criminal are one
& tho the cases get solved the machine continues to run
Big Town will wear you down
But it’s only here you can turn around 360 degrees
And everything is clear from here at the center
To every point along the circle of horizon
Here you can see for miles & miles & miles
Be born again daily, die nightly for a change of style
Here clearly here; see with affection; bleakly cultivate compassion
Whitman’s walk unchanged after its fashion.

(Whitman in Black: MP3)



Frank O'Hara: Poem

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

(Poem: MP3)

Friday, January 9th: Introducing John Ashbery

Seventy-one years old and still going strong, John Ashbery is the sole living member of the New York School's first generation, and an elder statesman of American poetics. It's been more than fifty years since his debut collection, Some Trees (1956) — which W.H. Auden selected as that year's winner of the Yale Younger Poets Prize (narrowly edging out his friend, Frank O'Hara's manuscript) — and thirty-four years since Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975), which won the triple-crown of American literary honors (the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award), yet Ashbery's poetic development continues unabated.

We'll be focusing almost exclusively on poems from the first three decades of Ashbery's writing life, as contained in the recently-published collection, Collected Poems 1956-1987. Recordings of most of these works are available on PennSound's John Ashbery author page, and I cannot suggest strongly enough that you listen along with these MP3s as you read. I'll provide streaming links to one recording for each poem, however you're likely to find multiple versions of some of his best known poems in our archives, so please make use of those variations as you reread. On our last day addressing Ashbery, we'll read a few of his more recent poems.

Because it's not likely that everyone will be able to get their hands on The Last Avant-Garde in time for our section on Ashbery, I'm posting an excellent profile of the poet which originally appeared in The New Yorker in 2005:

• Larissa MacFarquhar, "Present Waking Life: Becoming John Ashbery" (PDF)

Please read that essay for Friday, along with the following poems in Collected Poems:

from Some Trees (1956)

Two Scenes (3) MP3
Popular Songs (3) MP3
The Instruction Manual (5) MP3
Glazunoviana (10) MP3
The Picture of Little J.A. in a Prospect of Flowers (13)
Sonnet ("Each servant stamps the reader with a look") (18) MP3
And You Know (29) MP3

from The Tennis Court Oath (1962)

The Tennis Court Oath (43) MP3
"They Dream Only of America" (44) MP3
Thoughts of a Young Girl (45) MP3
"How Much Longer Will I Be Able to Inhabit the Diving Sepulcher . . ." (56) MP3
A White Paper (63)
Our Youth (71) MP3

from Rivers and Mountains (1966)

These Lacustrine Cities (125) MP3
Rivers and Mountains (126) MP3
Into the Dusk-Charged Air (131) MP3
The Ecclesiast (135) MP3
To a Waterfowl (922) MP3


Most of these recordings were taken from Ashbery's September 16, 1963 reading at the Living Theatre in New York City, which served as a triumphant homecoming for the poet after five year of living in Paris. You can listen to the rest of the reading here, and read the PennSound Daily entry discussing that historic recording here. Also, be sure to take a few minutes to listen to Kenneth Koch's introductory comments (linked below):

• Kenneth Koch introduces John Ashbery: MP3