In the Process of Poetry: The New York School and the Avant-Grade by William Watkin (review)

Abstract

iSz Reviews actual history,legend, painting, and literature to celebrate with the Thatcherite Marlene the triumph of women. Subsequent acts reverse chronology, going backwards into Marlene's ascent, and with the challenginghistoricismof dramatic presentation, undermining her progressivistview of linear history. In this Buse ably compares Ben? jamin's anti-historicist theory of discontinuity, which rejected conservative history as a history of victors over victims. Both Churchill and Benjamin resist the foreclosure of history, insisting on the dynamism of the past as open to permanent retroactive interpretation of a radical kind. A more conventionalkind of study subjectingplaywrights to a particular theoretical reading, play by play, would lead to the grind of repetition and inevitable boredom. Buse's admirable pluralism gains so much from such lively variety in a thoroughly engaging and enlightening book. University of Reading Ronald Knowles In the Process of Poetry: The New York School and the Avant-Garde. By William Watkin. Cranbury, NJ: Bucknell University Press; London: Associated Uni? versity Presses. 2001. 314 pp. ?38. ISBN 0-8387-5476-8. 'The avant-garde', Frank O'Hara says, 'has been made up completely, and all through history,with people who are bored by other people's ideas' (Standing Still and Walking in New York, ed. by D. Allen, 2nd printing (San Francisco: Grey Fox Press, x983), p. 9)- Not much room for theory there, but William Watkin is not deterred. Among his topics lies a roll-call of modernist critical preoccupations: symbolism; surrealism; the subjective contemplation of objective reality; the preoccupation with two-dimensionality to escape the illusion of depth; the contempt for the bourgeoisie and for the speech patterns and diction of daily life; a suspicion of the cliches that comprised most of the language in which they had to write; a recognition that the avant-garde was a historical phenomenon, together with a determination to be avantgarde ; a tendency to regard poetry as the sole subject of poetry; a struggle not to be subsumed by bourgeois culture while trying to make some sort of accommodation with it, however set round with an ironical attitude to its own ironies; and the coalescence of art and life which leads from fixing the moment to an insistence upon art-as-process. It takes a good deal of energetic conviction to tryto generate a coherent account of such poetry out of these disparate elements. Watkin's is therefore a brave and sometimes brilliant book. His method is to con? struct a theory of the avant-garde through a detailed description of the work of the major figuresofthe New York school, Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler, Frank O'Hara, and John Ashbery. While he recognizes that other things bound them together apart from a shared preference for drinking in the Cedar and the Five Spot, he is careful to distinguishthem stylistically and intellectually one from another. Koch is the poet of surfaces, Schuyler the objectivist who would remove the distance between art and life, O'Hara the poet of connections for whom the poem is like a telephone through which he may communicate with his addressee, and Ashbery the poet of subjective process. Without homogenizing the idiosyncrasies with which each poet establishes his distinctive voice, Watkin nevertheless hammers out an evolving theory of the avant-garde. His purpose is to locate all four poets within a rigorously constructed theoretical frame, and to describe their poetry as entirely containable within it. Thus does Watkin deal with their apparently aimless variety, and the result is convincing and authoritative, giving critical substance to poetry which many readers have found insubstantial. For specialists in the field of modernist and postmodernist American poetry, this will prove an indispensablebook. MLRy 99.1, 2004 183 For others it may not. The New York school had forAmerican poetry a significance analogous to that of the Metaphysicals or the Romantics. Silly, sad, and solemn by turns, part of its pleasure lies in the facility with which it moves between the ridiculous and the sublime. It is also direct and honest; an uninitiated reader will find itimmediately engaging. Like any poetry itwill respond to theoretical analysis, but the tighter the theoretical framework, the more its spirit is threatened. Avant-garde poets eschew tradition...