Like most of the tens of people who are interested in avant-garde poetry, I write poetry. In this final entry in my series on the New York school poets, here’s why I initially found the New York school alienating and irritating, and how I eventually found them—still alienating and irritating, but also an inspiration for my own writing.
I first really started reading modern/contemporary poetry in college at Oberlin, where I got a degree in Creative Writing. The curriculum wasn’t really focused on avant-garde writers or techniques, but John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara were sufficiently canonical that they showed up in the anthologies.
At the time, I was frustrated with the bland confessional default and the earnestness of a lot of contemporary poetry. The New York school writers were in some sense a welcome relief—but they also felt hermetic and insular and academic. Was the only alternative a retreat to incomprehensible gibberish? Why couldn’t poetry be funny and weird and silly, but also make something like sense? Down with Sharon Olds and John Ashbery! Three cheers for Ogden Nash!
The Shrimp
A shrimp who sought his lady shrimp
Could catch no glimpse
Not even a glimp.
At times, translucence
Is rather a nuisance.
Annoyed that Ashbery and O’Hara were not more Nash-like, I wrote some New York school poetry parodies/satires, in which I spewed out algorithmic garble in a bitterness of spirit. You think your poetry makes no sense? How about this!
Row Your Cab
From the fish-market I unhinge
the tepid horizon and the gums.
By rote Emmanuel thrusts
his tongue against the glass.
Tenebrous falls the pitcher
collecting every spire.
Rebus in the grass
meaning becomes deny.
Let us gather tepid
in the bluest thicket.
Too rote for masturbation
too stylized for Harvard.
Broken bracken crumbles
into the white tenebrous.
I’ll make you a rebus
if you’ll make a conniption.
Drafting is so tepid
monks annotate their navels.
At last Constance rote
a palimpsest on the bureau.
Let us be tenebrous
as the day is achy.
The doctor ate a rebus
with horseradish and garlic.
Severed from its nodule
tepid was insufficient.
You expelled by rote
the beer and mashed potatoes.
Tenebrous went out walking
and took along her blender.
A rebus in the hand
is unwieldy as a duck.
(My poem “Row Your Cab” first appeared in the magazine Touch The Donkey.)
I wrote this some 30 years ago, and I still like it. In retrospect, it doesn’t work as a parody of New York school poetry because it just reads like a poem influenced by the New York school. Kenneth Koch would write a line like “monks annotate their navels” and I think Ron Padgett might well laugh at “You expelled by rote/the beer and mashed potatoes.” The poem’s unwieldy duckness isn’t a mockery of Ashbery; it’s just a cheery waddle through the world Ashbery made.
I still love Ogden Nash despite my college advisor’s quiet confusion (“Is this really what you should be reading right now?”)—and I still don’t like Sharon Olds. But over time I came to realize that the New York school were more like the former than I’d first thought. When they don’t make sense, it’s often not because they’re engaged in complex philosophy, and not because they’re obscure on purpose. They’re being silly, like Nash playing with nonsense words like “glimp”—or Bernadette Mayer throwing pasta at the wall in her poem “What Babies Really Do.”
Light like the life I’m in
Who said that did you say that did I
Eating doesnt go with prose
or poetry, spaghetti maybe
Or like me repeating rebus and tenebrous over and over just because I think they sound funny (apart and together).
I didn’t ever figure out how to understand the New York school. I realized that it wasn’t meant to be understood. The New York school poets were giving each other permission to write poems about glimps you can’t quite glimpse, or unhinged fish markets—it’s light verse where you turn the lights out and stumble over the words let out of the spaghetti. You don’t have to be earnest or make sense. You can just fall over and see where you end up.
I understand why many people (like fellow Splice Today writer Crispin Sartwell) find the New York school off-putting. But to me, the style, or anti-style, is congenial, and liberating, because it refuses to try to be great, earnest or beautiful. I like great, earnest and beautiful poems too, but sometimes it’s a relief to be more like Ogden Nash, and go for the frisson of nonsense and the egregious pfft.
End Pun
I need a colonoscopy
but
(My poem “End Pun” first appeared in dadakuku.com)