Chapter 22

1. Chapter 22 The New York School ●Meditative Poetry ●The Black Mountain Poets

2. Ⅰ.The New York School • The so-called New York School became well known with the publication of Donald Allen's 1960 anthology. The school then included Frank O'Hara, Kenneth Koch (1925- ), John Ashbery, and James Schuyler (1923- ). Common Features: • 1. They were all vehemently up against the dominant New Critical values such as the impersonal presentation of images, and tried to assert their individual poetic voice. • 2. They introduced the popular and the low features of life into their writings like popular songs, comic strip figures, and Hollywood movies. • 3. They exhibited a huge sense of humor, offering room as their poems did for elements like the vulgar and the sentimental. • 4. They experimented with Surrealism, for a while.

3. 1. Literary Status: An American writer and art critic. As a poet, he was a key member of the New York School of poetry. Frank O'Hara (1926-1966)

4. 2. Life and Career • Frank O'Hara was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1926 and grew up in Massachusetts. He served in the Navy and later studied at Harvard and the University of Michigan, then moved to New York. He was on staff at that Museum of Modern Art from 1952 until his death in 1966(he was run over by a dune buggy on Fire Island). He was very active in the art scene, most notably with the abstract expressionist painters. He also worked as a playwright and critic and soon became the epicenter of a circle of poets known as the New York School.

5. 3. Ideas • O’Hara believed that poetry should be a spur of the moment, personal spontaneity where abstract was ruled out in favor of the artist’s personal style or voice. • O'Hara's poetry shows the influence of Abstract Expressionism, Surrealism, Russian poetry, and poets associated with French Symbolism. • O'Hara's early poems like Second Avenue were mostly surrealistic, and as such were often painfully obscure though there is a good deal of wit there. Later he was noted for the "I do this I do that" type of poems which he was pretty much the first to write. In these poems O'Hara tells in a flat tone the little things he did on just one or any of the days in his life. The details pile up not always connected; names of people appear often known to none but the author himself.

6. 4. Works Books in lifetime • A City Winter and Other Poems. Two Drawings by Larry Rivers. (1951 ) • Oranges: 12 pastorals. (1953; 1969) • Meditations in an Emergency. (1957; 1967) • Second Avenue (1960) • Odes. Prints by Michael Goldberg. (New York: Tiber Press, 1960) • Lunch Poems. (1964) • Love Poems(Tentative Title). (1965)

7. 5. The Day Lady Died • The Day Lady Diedis interesting because it is one of the most dramatic of O'Hara's "I do this I do that" poems. • The first four of the five stanzas of the poem describe the poet's mundane world and humdrum life. "The mounting panic" of boredom is just around the corner. The day threatens to be just another of so many dull days. • The poet buys a copy of New York Post and sees the face of the famous blues singer and the obituary about her death. Life stops being commonplace. There is something to mourn over and feel about now. The emotional impact of the death on the poet is so intense that he stops being careless and nonchalant and begins to feel serious. Life is worthwhile living, and people are worth caring for. The day Lady died may have well passed as just another meaningless day, but the death of the lady makes him think and makes the day an extraordinary one.

8. Ⅱ. Meditative Poetry John Ashbery (1927- ) • John Ashbery was for quite some time regarded —and correctly — as one member of the New York School. But as he moved into the more mature phase of his career, his poetry reveals, more and more, the salient features of a meditative mind. It is therefore more appropriate to see him as a meditative poet.

9. 1. Life and Career • Ashbery was born in Rochester, New York, and raised on a farm near Lake Ontario; his brother died when they were children. Ashbery was educated at Deerfield Academy where he read such poets as W. H. Auden and Dylan Thomas, and began writing poetry. His first ambition was to be a painter. From the age of eleven until fifteen he took weekly classes at the art museum in Rochester. Ashbery graduated in 1949 with an A.B., cum laude, from Harvard College. Ashbery went on to study briefly at New York University, and received an M.A. from Columbia in 1951. Ashbery accepting the 2010 Best of Brooklyn award.

10. 2. Writings • Turandot and Other Poems (1953) • Some Trees (1956), winner of the Yale Younger Poets Prize • The Tennis Court Oath (1962) Rivers and Mountains (1966) • The Double Dream of Spring (1970) Three Poems (1972) • The Vermont Notebook (1975) • Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975), awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award Houseboat Days (1977) • As We Know (1979) Shadow Train (1981) • A Wave (1984), awarded the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and the Bollingen Prize by Yale University • April Galleons (1987) The Ice Storm (1987) • Flow Chart (1991) Hotel Lautréamont (1992) • And the Stars Were Shining (1994)

11. Can You Hear, Bird? (1995) • The Mooring of Starting Out: The First Five Books of Poetry (Ecco) collection of the poet's work from 1956 to 1972; a New York Times "notable book of the year" (1998) • Wakefulness (1998) • Girls on the Run (1999) • Your Name Here (2000) • 100 Multiple-Choice Questions (2000) • Other Traditions, 6 long essays on 6 other poets (2000) • As Umbrellas Follow Rain (2001) • Chinese Whispers (2002) • Selected Prose 1953-2003 (2005) • Where Shall I Wander (2005) (finalist for the National Book Award) • A Worldly Country (2007) • Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems (2007) (winner of the 2008 International Griffin Poetry Prize) • Martory, Pierre The Landscapist Ashbery (Tr.) (2008) • Planisphere (2009)

12. 3. Writing Features • John Ashbery is probably the most obscure of contemporary American poets. His language very often offers little difficulty, it is the undercurrent of meaning that his verbal structure embodies. • For Ashbery reality is full of paradoxes and oxymorons, elusive, ever-changing, ever moving to a new beginning, complex with multiple facets, contingent, and for ever surprising with its unexpectedness. It may have no inherent order or meaning. What the imagination has to do is to be engaged in a continual endeavor to observe and record whatever comes its way so as to hope to catch a glimpse of the whole truth of reality.

13. To him the job of the poet is to address "the imaginative problem of embodying poetic time." It involves the mind juggling with abstractions, foraying in any direction that may catch its fancy, breaking boundaries of coherence and reason, making utterances seemingly wide apart in sense so that they fail to make sense to impatient readers. • His poetry, long or short, often bewilderingly long, is normally a record of a consciousness flowing, observing whatever attracts its momentary notice, and commenting profusely along the way, using its own images and language (privy often to itself only) so that it appears discursive, disjunctive, indeterminate, mysterious, an amalgam of the rational with the irrational. • Ashbery is obsessed thematically with getting to know reality, and formally with indirection in his mode of expression.

14. 4. The most famous poem: Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror • Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirrorbodies forth Ashbery’s view of reality and his poetics best. • A. Long as it is —it is a 6-strophe work, the poem is all about one thing: reality, getting to know it, and representing it in an art form, painting or poetry for example. • B. Theme : reality is not authentically knowable and representable; we only distort it in trying.

15. C. Content • In the first strophe (Ⅰ.1-99), the poet sees a painting, the self-portrait by the Italian Mannerist painter Parmigianino (Girolamo Francesco Mazzola, 1503-1540) on a convex piece of poplar wood. • The poet feels uncomfortable with this kind of artistic representation. First, it is not authentic because it is twice removed from reality:the mirror reflection of the person painted and the painting's reflection of the mirror reflection. In addition, the painting is inadequate to the expression of the soul of the person painted. Everything is framed, fixed, "life englobed," no longer alive and changing. Ultimately, the poet feels that the self-portrait offers no authentic representation.

16. The 2nd strophe (Ⅱ.100-150) states that we as part of reality change with reality as external factors and our memories of these factors influence our thinking and our perception so that our mind itself is not in control. In addition, reality is a symphony of diverse elements , there is no need to settle for just one mode of representation. We should assert our individuality and be tolerant toward that of others. Nothing is "extraneous." Realism is no good now and neither is Mannerism because reality keeps changing and proves too difficult for any style to represent it authentically. All this implies that the poet feels that there has to be a new vision of art in relation to reality.

17. The 3rd strophe (Ⅱ.151-206) states that theories of art tend to codify the mind and kill our dream for perfect art. Though necessary as a guide, these theories are "weak" because they subsume and rigidify everything and become a routine for us to accept without even noticing or thinking of change. Ideal art should get beyond the limitations of all forms and theories. There are no such theories or forms now good enough to meet our needs. What these really do is to frame the mind and so kill changing reality and our dream for perfect artistic representation.

18. The 4th strophe (Ⅱ.207-250) introduces the idea of otherness. Everything, including the self-portrait and the angel, constantly changes to become something else. The poet goes even further to declare that, even as the painter works, he undergoes a change and so does his room. We feel startled by the change because we are not aware of it, not prepared for it, and we have nothing better to do or have no choice for ourselves, implying that our normal state of mind is languid or helpless.

19. The 5th strophe (Ⅱ.251-310) paves the way for the exposition of the poet's own stance on reality and art. Authentic reality waits for our authentic representation. What the poet implies is that he may have been writing to question the way art has been representing reality, and has thus amazed the public, but he means well and would like to see that this kind of questioning will become general and natural, and not bizarre as his own way of thinking has been criticized.

20. Strophe 6 (Ⅱ.311-552) explains the poet's view of the relationship between reality and art. The poet feels that he has seen the light and is determined to tell about it although he knows that he is a little ahead of time. In his opinion, change is ongoing and continuous. Reality, the artist, and his art all keep changing. The poet repeats that Realism is no good; neither is the self-portrait's Mannerism. The search for the ideal art is hopeless. Thus the poet's view is that reality is not authentically representable.     So "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" is trying to say that from the beginning of time, art has been all inevitably distorting reality. Although Ashbery has his point, he has told only one side of the truth. Thus in the final analysis his is probably also a half-truth, in itself another kind of distortion. This may be where Ashbery's aesthetic crisis ultimately lies.

21. A. R. Ammons (1926- ) 1. Ammons is well read in Wordsworth, Emerson, Whitman,and Indian and Chinese philosophy, and writes often in the Romantic tradition. Highly aware of the natural world with its multiple significance, but he tries also to see and comprehend the larger silhouette of a design, a mystery probably unknown to man, and feels that his art should try to present his vision as accurately as possible.

22. 2. Poetic style • Ammons often writes in two-line or three-line stanzas. Some of Ammons's poems are very short, one or two lines only, while others (for example, the book-length poems Sphere and Tape for the Turn of the Year) are hundreds of lines long, and were composed on adding machine tape or other continuous strips of paper. • Many readers and critics have noted Ammons's idiosyncratic approach to punctuation. The colon is an Ammons "signature"; he uses it "as an all-purpose punctuation mark.” • One thing that we notice about Ammons' poetry is the walk motif recurrent in some of his works.

23. 3. One of Ammons' best poems: Corsons Inlet (1965) • One of Ammons' best poems that well reveal the poet's thematic and formal concerns. • The poem demonstrates how nature and the poetic mind interact with one another. The mind sinks into nature, carries on a dialogue with it, and intuits the absolute inherent in it. To the mind that suffers the restrictions and limitations of human perception, nature is liberating. Nature and art merge in a subtle, exquisite way. • The liberating effect of nature is well reflected in the formal aspect of "Corsons Inlet." Here the poem runs in its free verse, with its run-on lines and its natural varying line lengths. It is William Carlos Williams both in subject and form and in mode of perception.

24. Ⅲ.The Black Mountain Poets • The Black Mountain poets, sometimes called projectivist poets, were a group of mid 20th century American avant-garde or postmodern poets centered on Black Mountain College, include, among others, Charles Olson, Denise Levertov (1923- ), Robert Duncan (1919- ), and Robert Creeley (1926- ). • The leading figure of this school of poetry was Charles Olson. • As these people were either associated with Black Mountain College, or with Black Mountain Review (edited by Robert Creeley), they have become known as the "Black Mountain Poets”.

25. 1. Life and Career Olson grew up in Worcester, Massachusetts and spent summers in Gloucester, Massachusetts, which was to become the focus of his writing. Olson studied literature and American studies at Wesleyan University and Harvard University. In 1941, Olson moved to New York became the publicity director for American Civil Liberties Union. One year later, he moved to Washington, D.C.. In 1944, Olson went to work for the Foreign Languages Division of the Democratic National Committee. He also participated in the Franklin Delano Roosevelt campaign, organizing a large campaign rally called "Everyone for Roosevelt". After Roosevelt's death, upset over both the ascendancy of Harry Truman and the increasing censorship of his news releases, Olson left politics and dedicated himself to writing. Charles Olson (1910-1970)

26. 2. Ideas and Writing Features • Olson took the bold "advance-guard action" and developed a poetics that encouraged poets to depart from the "closed" form. • Olson defines "the NON-Projective" verse as "closed" verse in his famous essay, and by "closed" he means everything which appeared in English and American literature before "the work of Pound and Williams," or anything in the traditional form. • Olson declares that poetry is energy transferred from where the poet got it all the way to the reader through the poem; the poem must be, at all points, a high-energy construct and an energy discharge. • He places emphasis on the syllable. He calls it "king and pin of versification" which he feels should be allowed to replace rime and meter in the fore of the mind "to lead the harmony [of the poem] on."

27. Concerning form and content, Olson affirms Robert Creeley's idea that the principle presiding over the composition of a projective poem is that form is never more than an extension of content, and that right form is the only and exclusively possible extension of content under hand. • Olson's utterances are often so original that they fail to invoke immediate associations of recognition on the part of the readers, thus forcing them to stand on shaky ground and conjecture. • A show of multi-culturalism here and there that seasons the writing with a taste of exotic obscurity. • Olson was self-indulgent in his ways of expression, full of private references and allusions, throwing in, for instance, bits of information such as names of people or places known probably only to himself. • His thought system can be so unique that it holds no obscurity only to himself.

28. 3. Works • Call Me Ishmael (1945 ) • Archaeologist of Morning • The Collected Poems of Charles Olson (Berkeley, 1987) • The Maximus Poems • The Distances Poems • Collected Prose, eds. Donald Allen & Benjamin Friedlander (Berkeley, 1997) • Human Universe and Other Essays, ed. Donald Allen (Berkeley, 1965) • Charles Olson and Robert Creeley: The Complete Correspondence, ed. George F. Butterick and Richard Blevins, 10 vols. (Black Sparrow Books, 1980–96) • Selected Letters, ed. Ralph Maud (Berkeley, 2001)

29. 4. One of his Poem: The Kingfishers • the first of The Distances Poems (1950) • The poem consists of three sections, with section one subdivided into four parts. • The first part of section one surprises the readers. The truth that it states, that everything changes, paves the way for the sudden, equally surprising utterance, from one of the people at the party: no one cares about the kingfishers and their feathers any more; the birds' feathers were once wealth and exported. Part two of section one picks up from here and goes on to tell us that it is not the loss of interest in the birds that bothers us so much. It is what they symbolized for the people. • Part three of section one introduces the cause of the loss: the destruction of the ancient peaceful life of the Indians by the conquering colonizers and the encroachment on the primitive values with their way of life. The last part possibly implicate that a race has been almost extinct.

30. In its formal aspect "The Kingfishers" is heavily Poundian and Williamsian. Pound's heavy allusiveness and his cross-culturalism are embedded in the texture of the poem, and the imprint of Williams' rhythm, diction, and prose interpolations can be clearly seen. • Reading early Olson poems like "The Kingfishers" is in a way similar to reading Pound and Eliot. Hunting for sources constitutes a good deal of the reading effort.

31. Creeley, Levertov, and Duncan Robert Creeley (1926-2005 ) • 1.Robert Creeley was born in West Acton, Massachusetts. He attended Harvard and left it without a degree, received his B. A. from Black Mountain College, and an M. A. at the University of New Mexico. He published widely in the 1950s, became famous in the sixties, and has been teaching at some universities. Creeley began his career as a staunch member of the Black Mountain group.

32. 2. Volumes of Poems • Poems 1950-1960 (1962) • Words (1967) • The Charm: Early and Uncollected Poems (1967), • Pieces (1969) • A Day Book (1972) • Thirty Things (1974) • Away (1976) • Later (1979) • The Collected Poems 1945-1975 (1982) • Mirrors (1983) • The Memory Gardens (1986) • Windows (1990)

33. 3. Themes and Style • Creeley's usual subject is love and marriage and the intricacies of relationships and human ties between individuals of the two sexes. But his theme is wider. • Creeley's style is interesting. It has been described as "minimal," in the sense that he prefers to be short and simple. This has proved to be his strength especially when reinforced by his subtle handling of metaphors. Creeley is suggestive. His poetry connotes superbly at its best.

34. 4. I Know a Man • As I sd to my     friend, because I am     always talking, —John, I •      sd, which was not his     name, the darkness sur-     rounds us, what •      can we do against     it, or else, shall we &     why not, buy a goddamn big car, •      drive, he sd, for     christ's sake, look     out where yr going.

35. It reveals the larger and deeper nature of life than meets the eye: the darkness is enveloping us, and there is not much we can do about it. This represents the speaker's tragic vision of life. Then we will come to realize that the two friends are different in intellect and mindset and that they represent between them the two broad segments of humanity: the physical and practical on the one hand, and the philosophical and the idealistic on the other. One is awake and aware, and the other, representative of the majority, lives in a stupor.

36. Denise Levertov (1923-1997) 1.Denise Levertov is regarded as one of the most respected poets of her generation. She was born and raised in England, and published her first book of poetry there — The Double Image (1946) in traditional English rimes and meters. Later she married an American writer and came to the United States in 1948. Over the years she taught at a number of universities including Vassar, M.I.T., and Stanford.

37. 2. Style • Apparently the earlier shorter lyrics of the older poet have left their mark on her work. • That there is beauty in life has been a major thematic concern of her literary creations. • She had a strong sense of mission as a poet. There is almost a religious intensity to her work. • Levertov's poetry shows a clear social purpose. She was all along interested in humanitarian politics. Her enthusiasms ranged over a variety of subjects from concern with women's experience as a person, in marriage, and their sexual appetite to painful reflections on grave issues. • A lot of her poetry focuses on subjects of a more personal and more immediate nature. • Levertov's perception of the difference between man and woman is another interesting thing to note about her. It is not quite feminist in nature but comes close to it.

38. Here and Now (1957) The Jacob's Ladder (1958) Overland to Islands (1958) With Eyes at the Back of Our Heads (1959) O Taste and See (1964) The Sorrow Dance (1966) Relearning the Alphabet (1970) To Stay Alive (1971) Footprints (1975) The Freeing of the Dust (1975) Life in the Forest (1978) Candles in Babylon (1982) Oblique Prayers (1984) Breathing the Water (1987) A Door in the Hive (1989) Evening Train (1992). 3. Volumes of Poetry

39. Robert Duncan (1919-1988) 1.Robert Duncan was an American poet and a student of H.D. and the Western esoteric tradition who spent most of his career in and around San Francisco. Though associated with any number of literary traditions and schools, Duncan is often identified with the poets of the New American Poetry and Black Mountain College. Duncan's mature work emerged in the 1950s in the literary context of Beat culture. Duncan was a key figure in the San Francisco Renaissance.

40. 2. Ideas on Poetry • Duncan believes that no single poem is ever complete in its meaning and that each poem awakens the possibility of a new beginning. • Duncan is a love poet. There are quite a number of explicit sexual images in his poems. He holds that poetry is the soul of life, it is the means by which love is given and received, and life is love in its most perfect form. Love is holy. It involves loss and recovery.

41. Another thing about Duncan is his acquaintance with a great number of writers and styles and his readiness to use and merge these skillfully in his own work. • His own style changes and ranges from the obvious to the most subtle. • In addition, he was drawn to and immersed in the study of myths and ancient cultures, and took a great interest in mysticism, the magical, and the occult. • In terms of style, Duncan was, as we noted a moment earlier, ever open to the diverse influences over him.

42. 3. Works • Heavenly City Earthly City (1947) • The Opening of the Field (1960), contains some of his best work like A Poem Beginning with a Line by Pindar • Passages (1966) • Roots and Branches (1964) • Bending the Bow (1968) • Ground Work: Before the War (1983) • Ground Work Ⅱ: In the Dark (1987). His best poems include: • Often I am Permitted to a Meadow • Roots and Branches • A Poem Beginning with a Line by Pindar and some others from his collection, Passages

43. 4. A Poem Beginning with a Line by Pindar • Most of the basic features of Duncan's work are present here. His genuine interest in the enduring power of myth, his concerns as a poet, and his vision of poetry as a vehicle of improving the lot of the people constitute the recurring leitmotif of the work. The underlying myth used here is the Greek story of Cupid and Psyche. The essential part of the story is Psyche's thirst for knowledge that brings her through a series of ordeals in her search for her lost love. • The job of the poet is, as indicated in the poem, to pick up where his predecessors have left off and continue their work. • The theme of the poem is clear that love, love that resides in the heart, addresses human problems. If all the presidents had been as loving and caring as Lincoln, the nation might have been free of the suffering, the strife, and the multitude of problems that have existed, and still do, relating to the human situation. Thus Psyche's search, identical with the poet's own and running parallel to it, becomes its apt metaphor.

44. Thank You!