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WORK TITLE: A Poem for Record Keepers
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S): Allison Power
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://ali-e-power.com/
CITY: New York
STATE: NY
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
https://pen.org/ali-power
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Female.
EDUCATION:New York University, master’s degree.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Poet, editor, teacher, and psychotherapist. Rizzoli International Publications, New York, NY, editor, 2007-15; Pace University, NY, teacher of literature; Maggy, co-founder.
WRITINGS
Contributor to poetry to publications, including Bort Quarterly, LIT, Forklift, No Dear, Pen Poetry Series, Ohio, Pax Americana, Best American Poetry Blog, Post Road, Painted Bride Quarterly, and Washington Square.
SIDELIGHTS
Poet, editor, teacher, and psychotherapist Ali Power has published her poems in various outlets, including Bort Quarterly, LIT, Forklift, Ohio, Painted Bride Quarterly, and Washington Square. She is also editor of Rizzoli International Publications, co-founder of poetry journal Maggy, a teacher of literature at Pace University, and co-curator of the KGB Monday Night Poetry Reading Series. She is also studying social work in a master’s degree program at New York University. Power published the chapbook You Americans by Green Zone Editions in 2008.
New York School of Painters & Poets
In 2014, Power edited the book New York School of Painters & Poets: Neon Daylight, written by Jenni Quilter, which celebrates the Manhattan school for avant-garde artists and writers from post-war 1950s and 1960s. The term New York School first referred to 1940s expressionism of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, then brought in the younger generation of poets like Frank O’Hara, James Schuyler, and Kenneth Koch and painters like Joan Mitchell, Grace Hartigan, and Alex Katz. With a love of jazz, dance, theater, and painting, the artists became friends, critiqued each other’s work, and collaborated. The book “offers a well-written, well-researched, and genuinely engaged, appreciative look at the work, lives, and relationships of these artists,” according to Michael Dashkin in Library Journal.
The New York School encouraged collaboration across art forms. The image-heavy book reproduces the “verbal-visual” hybrid art they created, collecting and reprinting collaborations, paintings, drawings, poetry, letters, art reviews, photographs, dialogues, manifestos, and memories. Quilter puts the artists in context, also revealing their lives outside the studios in Manhattan and the Hamptons. Photos show people gathered at poetry readings, group vacations, parties, and apartments.
Writing in Vogue, Alex Frank explained that the book “captures their collaborations, like Joan Mitchell painting right on top of one of James Schuyler’s poems and Philip Guston’s enthusiastic line-drawing of Frank O’Hara.” Olivia Laing commented in the Guardian, “Gossipy, curious and assured, this atmosphere of friendly convergence inevitably nourished coproduction. Artists painted portraits of poets. Poets wrote profiles of painters.” Calling the book a sumptuous volume, a Publishers Weekly contributor noted: “Although often studied, the school is rarely given such intimate, collective attention.”
In an interview with Adam Fitzgerald online at Interview Magazine, Power explained her desire to write about the New York School: “Around 2008, I was a very young, enthusiastic, somewhat naïve editor, and had become confident in putting together large format, illustrated volumes. I wondered why there had never been a big book on the New York School.” She spoke with Larry Fagin and Bill Berkson, which lead to Quilter and then Carter Ratcliff, who wrote one of the forewords to the book. Like the New York School, the book became a collaboration. Power said that artists were generous providing archived material for the book.
A Poem for Record Keepers
In 2016, Power published the full-length poetry book, A Poem for Record Keepers, that contemplates love, friendship, and mundane life in America. Written in seven lines across seven groups, the book evokes a diary or datebook. This structure resembles a history of the poet’s activities, and statement of record, indicative of the author’s repetition of “Let’s hang out,” in social situations with friends or alone reading poems.
“Each of its forty-nine, seven-line sections has a kind of optional vertical density, but can also be skimmed lightly and semi-distractedly,” observed Oli Hazzard online at Poetry Foundation, adding that failed attempts at beginning a dialog drives the poems to outlandish ice-breakers. Power projects nonlinear thoughts in freeform spaces as she creates forward motion, a sense of stillness, and hope despite episodes of paranoia and darkness. A contributor to Publishers Weekly noted: “Power culls the messy crevices of the poet’s mind to put heavy-hitting snapshots of the self on display.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Library Journal March 1, 2015, Dashkin, Michael, review of New York School Painters & Poets: Neon in Daylight, p. 86.
Publishers Weekly, April 18, 2016, review of A Poem for Record Keepers, p. 92.
ONLINE
Ali Power Home Page, http://ali-e-power.com (March 1, 2017), author profile.
Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com (March 10, 2017), Olivia Laing, review of New York School Painters & Poets.
Interview Magazine, http://www.interviewmagazine.com/ (December 22, 2014), Adam Fitzgerald, author interview.
PEN America, https://pen.org/user/ali-power/ (March 1, 2017), author profile.
Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org (March 10, 2017), Oli Hazzard, review of A Poem for Record Keepers.
Vogue, http://www.vogue.com (March 10, 2017), Alex Frank, review of New York School Painters & Poets.*
ALI POWER
Ali Power is an editor at Rizzoli International Publications and teaches literature at Pace University. She is the editor of New York School Painters & Poets (Rizzoli, October 2014) and co-founder of Maggy Poetry Magazine. Power’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Bort Quarterly, LIT, Forklift, Ohio, Painted Bride Quarterly, Washington Square, and elsewhere. Her chapbook YOU AMERICANS was published by Green Zone Editions in 2008.
Ali Power is a poet and psychotherapist. She is the author of the book-length poem A Poem for Record Keepers (Argos Books, 2016) and the co-editor of the volume New York School Painters & Poets: Neon in Daylight (Rizzoli, 2014). Power’s poems have appeared in the Brooklyn Rail, LIT, PEN, and elsewhere. She curates SOLO, a reading series at Wendy's Subway in Bushwick, Brooklyn.
To reach Power: alielisepower@gmail.com
Ali Power on A Poem for Record Keepers
from A POEM FOR RECORD KEEPERS
V
"I am just coming / Just going in"
–Joseph Ceravolo
(29)
I need less and less attention.
As we pass through uneven tufts of pastoral pornography.
I am no longer so pale.
My paleness no longer grows.
Overnight.
It softens.
The seasons are still coming; the seasons keep coming one by one.
(30)
Later, on the reified Ikea odyssey.
Certain conditions sink deeper and deeper.
Under our very eyes.
There's no need that can't increase.
Examine both sides of this machine.
The rising ever-rising jerk.
The happiness of all, etc.
(31)
Spring song.
So many ugly hats.
Dismembered cloud transmissions.
From exiled fashion designers.
And long-deceased seamstresses.
At once swaths.
Of synthetic turf in viscous folds.
(32)
Dante died in transit.
Keats in Rome.
Pound, Venice; Montale, Milan.
Orgy of want.
Vestibule of don't want.
I'm trying to locate the shiny spot.
On your glass.
(33)
You want a location.
But you really mean a telescope.
I hand you the champagne from no occasion.
Should I keep going?
In certain rooms we can only look ahead.
Looking ahead is fun.
When you're delusional.
(34)
Shuttlecock is shortened to shuttle.
Shuffle the shuttle of the loom.
The cock part (made of feathers).
Breaks easily, is replaced with plastic.
I find the hardest part.
About talking.
Is the part about talking.
(35)
Sometimes we say things we don't mean.
Sometimes we say things we do mean but then say, "I didn't mean it."
Because what was said was mean.
And the truth hurts.
I find comfort in knowing when to use a comma.
It gives me a sense of certainty in this uncertain world.
This is my trousseau, my love.
On A Poem for Record Keepers
I started writing A Poem for Record Keepers in February 2013. I found myself writing these seven line poems. I wish I could say from where they came, but they just happened. I wrote a couple. Then I wrote a couple more imitating myself. I started each line with a capital letter and ended each line with a period (it was liberating!). I was keeping a record. I wrote down facts and things that happened and things I read and things I said and things friends and lovers said. These things accumulated.
Record Keepers begins in winter and ends in summer. This section (V) was written in the spring. For example, #31 ("Spring song. / So many ugly hats.") was written on the day of the Kentucky Derby. There are seven sections. Each section has seven poems. Each poem has seven lines. 7 x 7. I liked the seven-line poem—that it could stand alone but also that it could be built on top of other seven line poems and build something bigger. I liked and needed the containing structure of sevens (like days in a week?).
Record Keepers tells a story by recording. It's a story about what we remember and how we remember. It's a story about a poet writing things down. You could say it's a love story, and you wouldn't be wrong (how "I" becomes "we"). It's an American story in an American landscape—built on money and a history of hate, populated by the social constructions of race, gender, and terror. It's a story about suffering against this American landscape, against desensitization. These poems work to uncover causalities of suffering, to identify the ways in which I am and we are complicit in our own suffering, as individuals and as a society. These poems are trying to make invisible connections visible.
NEW YORK STATE OF MIND
By ADAM FITZGERALD
Published 12/22/14
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New York School of Painters & Poets: Neon Daylight, a new monograph published by Rizzoli and edited by Bill Berkson, Larry Fagin, and Allison Power, explores just that: the influences, work, and legacy of a collaborative collective of artists living in New York City after World War II. While most meditations on the New York School tend to focus on either literature or visual art, Berkson, Power, and Fagin present the two mediums in conversation.
Here, Power discusses the making of the monograph with her friend the poet Adam Fitzgerald.
ADAM FITZGERALD: Sitting before me is a hardbound copy of New York School Painters & Poets: Neon in Daylight just published by Rizzoli and edited by yourself. It's over 300 pages and must feature at least 500 different lush illustrations: paintings, photographs, manuscripts, letters, and other ephemera. Could you start by explaining the range of content within this book: what it includes and what it doesn't, and how you came to be involved in this massive project?
ALLISON POWER: Yes. There are over 500 illustrations—maybe even over 600, I stopped counting—of paintings, portraits, and drawings; mixed-media collaborations; magazine, mimeo, and book covers; film and home movie stills; and, of course, photographs, including a beautiful selection of black-and-white photos by Rudy Burckhardt and many never-before published snapshots culled from artists' personal archives. People were very generous, opening up their homes and archives to us.
To give you an idea of the range–on one spread you'll find the collaboration by Frank O'Hara and Joe Brainard, Cherries, across from a photo of Brainard and his apartment/studio in the East Village in the early '60s. On the next spread you'll find a suite of covers: C Magazine, edited by Ted Berrigan, and C Comics, edited by Joe Brainard. On the following pages are full-page reproductions of collaborations from an issue of C Comics.
In addition to visuals, we made a point to reprint over 50 original texts and excerpts, like a James Schuyler review of Alex Katz from ArtNews and a letter from Frank O'Hara to Jasper Johns giving him a reading list (my personal favorite), as well as collaborative poems, like "The Car" by Kenneth Koch and Jane Freilicher from the famous Locus Solus magazine and an excerpt from The Basketball Article by Bernadette Mayer and Anne Waldman.
What the book doesn't include: Well, it doesn't include material from before 1935 or after the mid-1980s. We had to cut the book off somewhere, and it seemed natural to end in the mid-'80s when the climate changed—people died, moved away, became associated with other "schools." Which isn't to say the so-called New York School ended then; there are of course "New York School" members still working and collaborating today.
So this volume primarily focuses on the '50s, '60s, and early '70s, although, we begin in 1936 with what I like to call the forefathers of the New York School—Bill and Elaine de Kooning, Rudy Burckhardt, and Edwin Denby—who really set the stage for who we know as the "first generation."
FITZGERALD: Incredible. How did you come to be involved with the project?
POWER: Well, I'm a poet, and, as you know, Adam, I've been actively obsessed with the poets and painters associated with the New York School since college. When I moved to New York, my obsession went full-throttle, inspired by going to readings at the Poetry Project and meeting second generation poets like Paul Violi—my dear mentor—Bernadette Mayer, Charles North, Tony Towle, and, of course, Larry Fagin and Bill Berkson, the advisory editors to this book. Around 2008, I was a very young, enthusiastic, somewhat naïve editor, and had become confident in putting together large format, illustrated volumes. I wondered why there had never been a big book on the New York School. I knew of the books focusing on specific members—like Ferguson's In Memory of My Feelings and Lehman's The Last Avant Garde. But no one had done the big, comprehensive book. Now I know why!
I began speaking to Larry [Fagin] and Bill [Berkson], who quickly looped in Carter Ratcliff, who wrote one of the forewords to this book. We began putting a book proposal together. Around that time, Bill and Larry had become acquainted with Jenni Quilter, who had written an essay for the Tibor de Nagy catalogue Painters & Poets. Once we got Jenni on board, the team was complete.
FITZGERALD: What struck me first about New York School Painters & Poets is the immensity of its scope, much larger than I could have ever imagined, even knowing many of these poets, and at least of a few of the painters, well. Were you at all surprised—or daunted—by the extent of the resources you could have drawn upon? Serious collaboration between artists often proves to be the exception but, for these artists, it seems like it was the rule.
POWER: It was totally overwhelming. There was a time when I thought we'd never finish—we postponed the book twice. This book was a collaboration; while it took longer to complete with multiple parties involved, it allowed for that immense scope, to use your words. Bill and Larry's knowledge of this material is endless and Jenni's research was tireless.
At the project's onset, the decision was made to focus on the collaborations, which are really at the heart and spirit of this community and its story. It was a way of life—a "Modus Vivendi", as Ratcliff calls it. More often than not, they were collaborating because it was an excuse to hang out, or they were already hanging out and became inspired to make something together. As individuals, each were prolific, and sometimes not even in New York—as you know, Ashbery was in Paris for much of the [late '50s and early '60s]. But what makes the community so [special] is the collaborative spirit they cultivated. Jenni includes this great quote by Koch in her text; he said, "We inspired each other, we envied each other, we emulated each other . . . we were almost entirely dependent on each other for support. Each had to be better than the others but if one flopped we all did." It's the kind of book I wish I had access to all these years, especially when I was younger and discovering the connections.
FITZGERALD: Why was it so important to enlarge the context by beginning with forefathers, and continuing beyond the most famous figures and collaborators, such as O'Hara and Rivers, through the '70s, with emerging figures like Alice Notley and Eileen Myles? Also, could you explain more your decision to end circa 1975?
POWER: Well, Edwin Denby, Rudy Burckhardt, and de Kooning really set the proverbial stage for the first and second generations and remained steady figures in the New York School circles. They begin the story, driven by friendship. They were active and on the scene alongside their younger counterparts. These guys were revered, admired, and respected by Koch, O'Hara, Padgett, Waldman, etc. They also collaborated together. Think of Burckhardt's film MOUNTING TENSION starring Ashbery, Freilicher, and Rivers. The story of the New York School painters and poets begins with Denby & Burckhardt, not with Ashbery, O'Hara, Koch, & Schuyler, who arrived onto a scene that was already in motion. I'm talking about the Artist's sessions at Studio 35 and panels at the Club and Waldorf Cafeteria. Not to mention the term "New York School" was of course used to name the group of painters (de Kooning, Pollock, Rothko, etc.) long before John Bernard Myers re-appropriated the term to describe his poets and painters. So we wanted to make sure the groundwork was laid out. I think this was especially important to Jenni—and I think it was the right way to start the book.
To continue well into the 1980s and beyond would have been stretching the story. Things began to change in the '70s and were changing even more so in the '80s. People moved away, had families, procured serious jobs—they were no longer hanging out until early morning making stuff together. Brainard stopped making art. Bill Berkson moved to Bolinas and then San Francisco. Anne Waldman founded Naropa. Barbara Guest moved to California. Central figures like Burckhardt and Berrigan passed away. The social scene changed. Of course there were and still are "New York School" members working and working together, but it wasn't and isn't the same. It became different. There was a dispersion. So when someone talks about third or forth generation New York School, it's a stretch. And it was important that we acknowledge a cut-off, even if amorphous. We don't argue that there's any exact date. I like to think of those who might be called third or fourth generation not as members but as relatives or cousins. The New York School is a family after all. There are those who share the aesthetic, New York School attributes or features, but there are also other influences, and those influences metamorphosize and are then passed down.
NEW YORK SCHOOL PAINTERS & POETS: NEON DAYLIGHT IS NOW AVAILABLE FROM RIZZOLI. ADAM FITZGERALD IS THE AUTHOR OF THE LATE PARADE (NORTON/LIVERIGHT) AND THE EDITOR OF MAGGY. WITH DOROTHEA LASKY, HE CODIRECTS THE ASHBERY HOME SCHOOL IN HUDSON, NEW YORK. HE TEACHES AT NYU AND RUTGERS AND LIVES IN THE EAST VILLAGE.
A Poem for Record Keepers
Publishers Weekly.
263.16 (Apr. 18, 2016): p92.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
A Poem for Record Keepers
Ali Power. Argos (SPD, dist.), $15 trade paper (80p) ISBN 9781938247255
In a debut that belies its slim size, Power culls the messy crevices of the poet's mind to put heavyhitting snapshots of
the self on display: "We are irregular patches of dust./ Phosphorescent swarms of ellipses in the afternoon." Power
systematizes her process, arranging numbered poems of seven lines each in groups of seven across seven sections. The
structure suggests the diary or datebook, and the poems manifest with the nonlinearity of thoughts scrawled in such
freeform spaces. In Section IV, each poem ends with the phrase, "Let's hang out," blurring the line between everyday
selves that do "hang out" with friends and the selves that sit in silence, reading poems. Power's greatest skills are her
juxtaposition and balance. She has a keen sense for when to write of simplicity, with aloofness about the world
"There is pinecone./ There is trampoline./ There is olive oil"and when to hit readers with her deeper philosophies. "A
heart isn't something you just have," she writes. These invitations and addresses to the reader make her work
particularly evocative. Simple questions linger on: "You contain, you know./ Do you know?" Some poets dwell in
worlds of imagination and grandeur, but Power's words reside in more intimate places, where the colloquial lights
sparks within the mundane. (June)
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"A Poem for Record Keepers." Publishers Weekly, 18 Apr. 2016, p. 92. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA450361270&it=r&asid=2b510953324ffb85482c2b6da01363fa.
Accessed 2 Feb. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A450361270
Quilter, Jenni. New York School Painters & Poets: Neon in Daylight
Michael Dashkin
Library Journal. 140.4 (Mar. 1, 2015): p86.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2015 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
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* Quilter, Jenni. New York School Painters & Poets: Neon in Daylight. Rizzoli. 2014. 320p. ed. by Allison Power & others, illus. notes. ISBN 9780847837861. $75. FINE ARTS
The New York School, a loose network of avant-garde artists and writers most active in the 1950s-1960s, was so diverse it stretches the meaning of "school" to the breaking point, assuming different meanings at different times, sometimes emphasizing the visual artists, sometimes the writers. Poet Bill Berkson, in his foreword to this wonderful book, writes, "surface energy (was) the one attribute shared across the board ... impulse and reckless assemblage that keeps the surface lively, bubbling." Author Quilter (expository writing, New York Univ.) offers a well-written, well-researched, and genuinely engaged, appreciative look at the work, lives, and relationships of these artists. They were one another's best audiences, pursuing a style of collaboration that grew directly from their friendships. They created "verbal-visual" hybrid art characterized by a light touch, irony, and an inclination toward the ephemeral, phrased in an intimate, almost insider language. More than just painting and poetry, their efforts included photography, theater, music, dance, film, publishing, editing, and curatorial activity. The book is filled with snapshots of the artists and writers at work, socializing, giving readings, etc., and includes excellent illustrations of paintings and drawings. VERDICT Highly recommended for art students, scholars, and general readers.--Michael Dashkin, New York
Dashkin, Michael
New York School Painters & Poets: Neon in Daylight by Jenni Quilter – review
The art of collaboration – how a group of artists and writers worked generously and playfully in mid-20th-century Manhattan
John Bernard Myers and Tibor de Nagy.
John Bernard Myers and Tibor de Nagy. Courtesy of the Tibor de Nagy Gallery
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Olivia Laing
Friday 19 December 2014 06.34 EST Last modified on Thursday 2 February 2017 11.28 EST
The New York School refers to a sociable coterie of painters and poets at work and play in downtown Manhattan around the midpoint of the 20th century. Used first to describe the abstract expressionists of the 1940s (Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston and so on), the term subsequently became identified with a younger generation of more figuratively inclined colleagues, among them Jasper Johns, Fairfield Porter, Grace Hartigan, Alex Katz and Robert Rauschenberg, as well as poet friends such as John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, Barbara Guest and Kenneth Koch. In the 1960s, the term expanded again to encompass a third generation springing up around the St Marks Poetry Project, including though by no means limited to Ron Padgett, Anne Waldman, Ted Berrigan, Bill Berkson and Joe Brainard.
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What the New York School poets and painters held in common, besides shared zip codes, was a convivial interest in each other’s company, conversation and intentions, the last of which might retrospectively be described as taking European modernism, especially abstraction, and reinventing it in a decidedly American lingo and palette.
Gossipy, curious and assured, this atmosphere of friendly convergence inevitably nourished coproduction. Artists painted portraits of poets. Poets wrote profiles of painters. Poems were jointly or communally authored (often on napkins at the legendary Cedar Tavern, while the painters swigged beers and exchanged blows, their rowdy voices leaking into the verses like static, adding to the intimate cacophony and sense of slippage). Small magazines sprang up to publish these outpourings. Some – Folder, say, or Locus Solus – were works of art in themselves, while Fuck You: a magazine of the arts, possessed a scruffiness in keeping with its disreputable title.
Norman Bluhm and Frank O'Hara's Meet Me In The Park, 1960.
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Norman Bluhm and Frank O’Hara’s Meet Me in the Park, 1960. Illustration: courtesy of the estates of Norman Bluhm and Frank O'Hara
Perhaps the most interesting of these collaborative ventures are the hybrid works, fusing the previously singular domains of word and paint by way of what Norman Bluhm described as “a conversation” between disciplines. Among these fertile pairings are Joan Mitchell’s luminous pastels with James Schuyler’s dreamy lines and Guston’s cartoonish scrawl with Clark Coolidge’s stark imagism. Bearing in mind that this mood of generosity and playfulness underpinned even solo pieces, it’s canny of Jenni Quilter to make collaboration the focus of her magnificently lavish, colourful and beautifully designed compendium, which captures the essential spirit of the New York School: its valuing of what people make together as well as what they produce alone.
The book’s subtitle, “Neon in Daylight”, is lifted from O’Hara’s “A Step Away from Them”, one of the most famous Lunch Poems in his 1964 collection. O’Hara is undoubtedly the linchpin here, his distinctive grin, hooked nose and widow’s peak surfacing repeatedly from photographs, sculptures and paintings, as befits the man Larry Rivers described as “the central switchboard” of the scene (in return, O’Hara dubbed Rivers “a demented telephone”).
From the moment of his arrival in the city in August 1951, O’Hara was deeply rooted in New York’s art world. His first job was on the information desk of the Museum of Modern Art and, apart from a brief break, he remained at this august institution until the end of his short life, rising to the position of associate curator in the department of painting and sculpture. He organised some of the most important exhibitions of the period, acting as a passionate advocate for the work he loved – much of it made by members of his own circle.
This makes him sound parochial, which he wasn’t, and partisan, which he certainly was. One of the most noticeable things about this prodigiously talented man is the sheer intensity of his involvement in other people’s lives. He was forever cajoling, provoking and pummelling those around him into producing work. As Rivers put it in his eulogy for O’Hara, who was killed by a beach taxi on Fire Island at the age of 40: “There were at least 60 people in New York who thought Frank O’Hara was their best friend … At one time or another he was everyone’s greatest and most loyal audience.” “The frightening amount of energy he invested in our art and our lives often made me feel like a miser,” Katz added, while the poet and dance critic Edwin Denby described him as “everybody’s catalyst”.
In the midst of all this, he managed, apparently effortlessly, to produce about 700 poems of his own that remain as original and lovely as anything of his century. O’Hara’s work has a deceptive casualness about it. Lunch Poems catches him in the act of loitering in the city, speaking himself onto the page while drinking chocolate malteds and buying magazines. His writing, as Koch has elsewhere observed, is stuffed with quotidian objects, among them “jujubes, aspirin tablets, Good Teeth buttons, and water pistols, most of which had not appeared in poetry before”.
This desire to extend boundaries, to let the air out of pompous and sentimental notions about what constitutes art or authenticity, is a common, shared impulse here. Many of the works celebrated are self-consciously airy, deliberately light, designed for audiences of amused friends. Take a jaunty collaborative painting by George Schneeman and Padgett from the 1970s of a man riding a giant cockerel, embellished with the words “Shit on You”. Exquisitely coloured (Schneeman emerges from these pages a tonal virtuoso) and gleefully crude, it risks, as Quilter points out, “being dismissed as scatological absurdity”, and with that risk keeps ajar the door of possibility.
Fairfield Porter paints John Ashbery's portrait.
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Fairfield Porter paints John Ashbery’s portrait. Photograph: courtesy of the Flow Chart Foundation
Even the weightier works maintain an atmosphere of zero gravity. One ofthe masterpieces is Porter’s extraordinary 1957-58 portrait of the poets Ashbery and Schuyler, perched on a floral sofa against an indeterminate creamy background. Porter, that strange, abrupt, observant man, had a knack for keeping the objects in his paintings separate. Schuyler and Ashbery maintain a courteous, unsettled distance from one another. Though they’re both unequivocally present in the light-filled room, they aren’t in anything like the sweaty contact of normality. Schuyler appears to be floating an inch or two above the cushions, his legs sticking into the air like those of a blow-up doll, a world away from the man whose tense and unhappy form is superimposed over his left foot.
This radical disjunction between things, this art of objects and the spaces between them, is key to the New York School aesthetic. It’s there in John’s assemblages and Rivers’s insistently inchoate paintings, with their marshy palettes. Disjunction is at the heart of O’Hara and Ashbery’s surreal wordplay, their shearing away of the humble zips and buttons of language. It’s central, likewise, to Katz’s hyper-real, dissociated portraits, his flat slabs of pastel colour brushed with light, and to Brainard’s joyful collages and cutups.
Brainard, whose congeniality and lack of arrogance made him both a natural collaborator and less well known than his work deserves, appears here as an unmistakable star. His intricate creations often riff around found objects or popular art, especially comics; witty, vivid and oddly modest, they possess a near-painful delicacy and coherence. A black-and-white photograph from 1975 shows him islanded in his loft on Greene Street, the floor almost completely covered by drawings. A writer as well as artist, whose quasi-autobiography I Remember (recently reissued by Notting Hill Editions) is one of the most engaging books 20th-century poetics produced, he died of Aids-related pneumonia at the age of 52. By that time he’d already retreated from art-making, though not from the collaborative friendships he’d maintained since boyhood.
If there’s a single quibble, it’s the absence of an index, which makes navigating the scenes of intimacy in search of a single name laborious. But no one could describe tacking back and forth between these letters, essays and paintings as anything but an act of pleasure. Though the sleek production suggests a coffee-table volume, the material inside has lost none of its spontaneity, its mess and zip. “Collaborative art makes art, in general, seem more possible,” Quilter observes in her conclusion, and it is possibility that crackles from these pages: a sense of abundance and invitation that is all too often stripped from art.
• Olivia Laing is the author of The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking (Canongate, £9.99). To order New York School Painters & Poets go to rizzoliusa.com.
* New York School Painters & Poets: Neon in Daylight
Jenni Quilter. Rizzoli, $75 (320p) ISBN 978-0-8478-3786-1
Assembling text, visual art, and their interstices, this sumptuous volume documents the collaborative playfield where the New York School poets and painters thrived. With occasional critical text to guide readers along, the majority of this image-heavy treat goes to ephemera and rarely seen work. Frank O'Hara's poem "Why I am Not a Painter," for instance, mirrors Mike Goldberg's painting Sardines, which is referenced in the verse. Elsewhere, poet Ted Berrigan interviews artist John Cage, abstract expressionist painter Joan Mitchell creates a drawing with a James Schuyler poem on it, and Jasper Johns's In Memory of My Feelings—Frank O'Hara is paired with a letter in which the poet recommends new books to the painter. The art and poems are kept company by photographs of their creators, collaborating and partying, as well as literary magazine covers, notebook entries, postcards, and similar miscellanea. The New York School, although nebulously defined, is characterized by this collaborative spirit across art forms. Quilter renders this tendency as a lively practice rather than a historical fact, while loosening the edges enough to track the scene into the 1980s. Although often studied, the school is rarely given such intimate, collective attention, and even figures as familiar as Willem de Kooning and John Ashbery become dynamic and surprising once more in this volume's smart handling. (Nov.)
An Exclusive Look into Rizzoli’s Book on the New York School Movement
Alex Frank's picture
THURSDAY 2, 2017 11:12 AM
by ALEX FRANK
New York is a town of many artistic golden eras—the Warhol scene, seventies punk, the Nuyorican movement, eighties hip-hop. And while it often takes an inexplicable combination of location, history, and just plain chance to create a perfect storm of creative community, few feel as rarified as the confidently named New York School movement that cropped up in the fifties and centered around a group of post-war poets and painters who influenced, and in many instances even collaborated on, each other’s work. “For decades, art and poetry have inhabited separate planets. But there was a time. . . . when poets and painters lived in the same world—or, rather, shared a stretch of Manhattan that reached from the Lower East Side to Chelsea,” writes Carter Ratcliff in a foreword to a new Rizzoli tome, New York School Painters & Poets: Neon in Daylight, dedicated to the vibrant scene.
The movement, which included poets like Frank O’Hara, James Schuyler, Joe Brainard, and Kenneth Koch and painters like Joan Mitchell, Grace Hartigan, Alex Katz, and Larry Rivers, coalesced around a love for jazz, avant-garde dance and theater, and a shared hope to bring a modern and American sense of motion and vibrancy not just to their art, but to their lives. Rizzoli’s new book, written by Jenni Quilter, captures their collaborations, like Joan Mitchell painting right on top of one of James Schuyler’s poems and Philip Guston’s enthusiastic line-drawing of Frank O’Hara and his characteristically broken nose. But it also catalogues how their lives intersected at houses in Manhattan and the Hamptons, and includes intimate photos of small poetry readings, group vacations and late-night parties in small apartments, giving readers a small window into the kind of special things that happen when the right people happen to overlap in New York.
‘The beetle runs into the future’
BY OLI HAZZARD
[...]
Ali Power’s A Poem for Record Keepers (Argos Books, 2016) is a long poem made up of short fragments, a journal or daybook with all dates and times removed, and one of the loneliest books I’ve ever read. Each of its forty-nine, seven-line sections has a kind of optional vertical density, but can also be skimmed lightly and semi-distractedly, since, to quote Edwin Denby (a figure these poems bring to mind) “Actual events are obscure / Though the observers appear clear.” The unusual, striking formal feature of the work is that each line is end-stopped. This starts out as rhythmically disruptive, and has odd effects on the inner ear as the lines are processed—each is given the chance to resonate, deeply or awkwardly or comically—but what’s really interesting is how frustrating, and eventually exhausting, this becomes. I find myself longing for the fluidity of a run-on line, for the stretching feeling of extended syntax, for something to break out of the pattern, to escape the terrible solitude of the enclosure. (I also start to feel the absence of the other, unanswering half of these semi-sonnets.) The lines act like they don’t know each other, even when they form part of a potentially continuous sentence; it’s like they’re sharing a commuter train. The cumulative pressure of each failed attempt to begin a dialogue drives the poem to ever more outlandish ice-breakers—in fact, it feels like a poem made up only of ice-breakers, or only of hurried sign-offs, and there’s never quite enough in each to fill the time you want to fill. It sometimes reminds me of reading the backs of cereal boxes, sometimes of Beckett. I’ll finish this last blog with one of these sections, which for me encapsulates some of the feelings and textures of this year. It’s bleak, hallucinatory, paranoid and sardonic, and at the last suddenly and precariously tender:
Was it curiosity or boredom that brought us here?
I ask because it’s summer.
And we’re always reorganizing our dreams.
A glistening ecosystem of Dairy Queens.
Taut cones.
Not all women age so gracefully.
Hurry home.