New York School poetry can sometimes be confusing or unclear because it deliberately avoids or floats around meaning—like Barbara Guest’s “Parachutes, My Love, Could Carry Us Higher,” which I wrote about earlier this month. Sometimes, though, meanings are obscure not because of ambiguity, but because the poems are essentially in-jokes. New York School writers were constantly including each other in their poems, acknowledging influence or sometimes just name-dropping. In place of a classical or modernist poetry of shared cultural allusion, New York School writers often substituted or contrasted cliquish gossip.
For example, in his 1980 “The Morning of the Poem,” James Schuyler remembers John Ashbery cattily running down James Joyce.
When I first knew John Ashbery he slipped me
One of his trick test questions (we were looking at a window full of knitted ribbon dresses): ‘I don’t think
James Joyce is any good: do you?’ Think, what I did think! I didn’t know you were allowed not to like James Joyce.
The book I suppose is a masterpiece: freedom of choice is better. Thank you, ‘Little J.A. in a Prospect of Flowers.’
The last phrase is likely impenetrable to people unfamiliar with the milieu. But the reference is to a famous early Ashbery poem, “Little J.A. In A Prospect of Flowers,” an elliptical poem about Ashbery’s childhood which references the Andrew Marvell poem “The Picture of Little T. C. in a Prospect of Flowers.”
The “freedom of choice” is then the freedom not just to think James Joyce is no good, but the freedom to pick different poets from the canon—or to turn your friends into a canon of their own. The passage encourages liberation from hagiography even as it sets up its own private prospect of heroes, including in this case knitted ribbon dresses. (Schuyler and Ashbery were both gay, and the juxtaposition of great male canonical artist with gossipy intimacy and feminine fashion is certainly intentional.)
Another New York School poem that picks up additional resonance thanks to its winking reference to an older modernist is Kenneth Koch’s “Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams,” published in 1962.
Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams
1
I chopped down the house that you had been saving to live in next summer.
I am sorry, but it was morning, and I had nothing to do
and its wooden beams were so inviting.
2
We laughed at the hollyhocks together
and then I sprayed them with lye.
Forgive me. I simply do not know what I am doing.
3
I gave away the money that you had been saving to live on for the next ten years.
The man who asked for it was shabby
and the firm March wind on the porch was so juicy and cold.
4
Last evening we went dancing and I broke your leg.
Forgive me. I was clumsy and
I wanted you here in the wards, where I am the doctor!
Koch is playing with William Carlos William’s famous 1934 poem, “This Is Just To Say.”
This Is Just To Say
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold
Williams’ poem is about a small, domestic conflict. The short, enjambed lines make the poem read like a note; Williams telling, or joking with, his wife about having raided the refrigerator when he shouldn’t have. It’s delicate, silly and insouciant.
Koch’s variations, in contrast, use longer, almost breathless lines which seem eager to race to violent ends—destroying homes, poisoning woods, giving away nest eggs. Echoes of Williams’ words—“juicy and cold” instead of “so sweet and so cold”; “Forgive me”—emphasize the brutality visited upon Koch’s addressee and the original poem. Koch takes delight in pulling out the plums and jumping up and down on top of them, squirting juice everywhere and defacing the canon, just as Ashbery, more quietly, was defacing Joyce (and perhaps Marvell).
The poem isn’t just a desecration, though—or, at least, the desecration is less random than it seems. Williams had numerous affairs during his life. He infamously confessed them to his wife, Florence, when he thought he was dying, and then ended up living as an invalid under her care for many more years.
Biographers and critics have alternately dismissed and reveled in the stories of Williams’ sex life since his death in 1963 (a couple of years after Koch’s poem was published). Rumors of the domestic drama no doubt circulated in the 1950s and early-60s, though, and Koch is cattily riffing on them, especially in the final stanza. Williams was a medical doctor, and so Koch’s final line “I wanted you here in the wards, where I am the doctor!” seems like an especially pointed wink. William Carlos Williams, plum eater, is also William Carlos Williams, seducer and adulterer.
Koch’s poem doesn’t just play with or parody Williams’; it rewrites it as a thinly-veiled metaphor about desire, infidelity, and the way that apology for sin can be a part of the sin, and of the pleasure. Reading Williams through Koch, those final lines, “they were delicious/so sweet and so cold,” are harsher than Koch’s own variations. Williams is enjoying not just the plums, but the fact that he wasn’t supposed to take them—which also reads as him enjoying adultery in part because he gets to tell his wife about it.
If Williams’ investment in his poem is uncomfortable or uncertain, then so is Koch’s attitude towards Williams, and towards his own variations. Koch is perhaps mocking or poking fun at Williams. But he also enjoys the way brutality and sexual innuendo are juicily basking just below the surface of that plum. That’s how gossip often works; you can take satisfaction in being morally superior to the sinner even as you lick your lips and taste the sin yourself. “This Is Just To Say,” and Koch’s variation, are about how doing wrong feels good, even when (especially when?) you apologize for it.
Part of what Koch is doing wrong is the same thing Ashbery and Schuyler are doing wrong when they sneer at James Joyce. Poetry is often thought of as a reverent art, in which allusions to the classics or the canon are supposed to cement your place among the serious. Koch, though, is demonstrating his serious poetry knowledge by airing dirty laundry while snickering about how dirty it is. It’s a goof and a bit. But, like many New York school poems, it’s also embracing the poetic pleasures of chopping down the building while spraying the old guard with lye.