POETRY IN REVIEW

Abstract

1 8 6 Y P O E T R Y I N R E V I E W R I C H A R D D E M I N G In 1961, the year that John Bernard Myers, owner of the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, bestowed upon a particular band of writers the label ‘‘the New York School of poets,’’ Frank O’Hara – who in five years would su√er the group’s first and most untimely death – published ‘‘For the Chinese New Year & for Bill Berkson.’’ In that poem, O’Hara writes, ‘‘It’s a strange curse my ‘generation’ has we’re all / like the flowers in the Agassiz Museum perpetually ardent.’’ In the fifty years since O’Hara wrote those lines the force of the simile has recontexualized as four of the five figures of that first, defining generation of the New York School are gone: O’Hara was killed in an accident in 1966, James Schuyler died of a stroke in 1991, Kenneth Koch succumbed to leukemia in 2002, and Barbara Guest su√ered a series of strokes in 2006. Only John Ashbery is still alive, and he has become arguably the most celeT i b o r d e N a g y G a l l e r y P a i n t e r s a n d P o e t s : C e l e b r a t i n g S i x t y Ye a r s , by Douglas Crase and Jenni Quilter (Tibor de Nagy Gallery, 94 pp., $40) O t h e r F l o w e r s : U n c o l l e c t e d P o e m s , by James Schuyler, edited by James Meetze and Simon Pettet (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 240 pp., $18 paper) H o w L o n g , by Ron Padgett (Co√ee House Press, 91 pp., $16 paper) 1 8 7 R brated, most influential poet of our time. Still, what is somewhat prophetic about O’Hara’s lines describing his peers as flowers in a museum is the fact that the New York School increases in influence and importance with every passing year. Each year there are more and more articles, essays, dissertations, and monographs devoted to O’Hara and Ashbery specifically, and to this group of writers as a whole. The School has become an institution. But what is the curse that O’Hara mentions? Is it because the flowers are not wild or transient but are representations made of delicate and precise glass and on display, kept vivid artificially, at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology that makes being like them a curse? Given that Koch, O’Hara, and Ashbery all were undergraduates at Harvard, there is a specific and prevailing nostalgia encoded in O’Hara’s metaphor, as if the poem suggests that their passion and joie de vivre reified at the moment of inception. The possibility of being always already imbued with nostalgia would be a horror. As di√erent as each of the poets was, as dissimilar as their work is in terms of form, content, and poetics, they all prized a certain immediacy and wrote (or in Ashbery’s case, still write) poems that seek to maintain a vivid, complex sanguinity, an intensity open to the flow of daily life, poems that do manifest, at their best, a kind of ardor. Yet that ardor, like any ardor, is often fraught, complicated – is never assured. In that sense, the curse O’Hara’s generation wrestled with is the possibility that in work striving for spontaneity, the emotional life, by being on display, becomes in reality an exquisite representation , ever fragile, and ever pointing to some other thing. Ut pictura poesis. The joy that is so often seen as the defining characteristic of the poets of the New York School needs to be measured against their sadness or even anxiety that the time for immediacy and its corresponding necessary intimacy is always just past. To miss that gap between the ideal and the art is to miss that...