POSING AS POETRY

...He is also a brilliant parodist, as, for example, in his send-up of Ezra Pound: For who hath eaten phooey Returneth not unto paradise Dem mudder f—ers doan unnerstan me Said the Princess Toy Ling A.D...

...He is using his art-world references to keep the riff-raff out, just as Pound does with his literary ones...

...Ashbery, who spent much of the 1950s and '60s in Paris, is hailed by some literary critics as the most important American poet since Wallace Stevens...

...writing these poems Imagine...

...It's hard to say, because in his later poems—like "Baltimore," from his recent book, Wakefulness—Ashbery moves so far from any recognizable subject that no one can say what he's doing: Two were alive...

...Well, in my case, it's getting down on paper Not thoughts, exactly, but ideas, maybe: Ideas about thoughts...

...Is Ashbery rejecting this older understanding of poetry because it's stale or because it's difficult to achieve...

...In short, Allen was someone who could help O'Hara a great deal...

...Richmond Latti-more or Brendan Behan's new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres of Genet, but I don't, I stick with Verlaine after practically going to sleep with quan-dariness...

...But even when Koch is working in the chit-chatty idiom of O'Hara, he is never pompous...

...Not even Lehman can find anything in James Schuyler to mistake for humor...

...One came round the comer / clipclopping...

...Throw paint at a canvas, and you get color, shape, and texture...

...Isn't that what avant-gardes do...

...POSING AS POETRY The Career of the New York Poets By Christopher Caldwell With The Last Avant-Garde, the literary critic and poet David Lehman has published an encomium to Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler...

...But smashing that guild system was not what the New York School poets were about...

...In John Ashbery, the school produced a poet whose work moves away from self-revelation...

...or less considered themselves heirs to William Carlos Williams's use of the American vernacular in poetry...

...It has no color, and piles of words don't automatically resolve themselves into forms...

...Ashbery, O'Hara, and Schuyler were gay and art critics...

...It turns out that not all persons are created equal in Personist poetry...

...They are just there in whatever form I can find them...

...The New York School poets left us a new style of being a poet...

...Language, however, is not paint...

...Thoughts is too grand a word...

...They may be meaningless in themselves, but they are at least amenable to a sympathetic viewer's provision of his own meanings...

...And its second purpose is to erect class barriers to show the reader why O'Hara's poetry differs from the scribblings of a lovelorn high-school student in Shaker Heights: She doesn't read Jean Genet...

...The problem is that such postmodern-sounding abstractions shoot too low...

...Look at it talking to you...

...or But I don't set much stock in things Beyond the weather and the certainties of living and dying: The rest is optional...

...All four poets sought, in different ways, to show that the same was true for poetry, "that the mind of the poet, rather than the world, could be the true subject of the poem," as Lehman puts it, "and that it was possible for a poem to be (or to perform) a statement without making a statement...

...That's not the same thing as leaving a new style of poetry...

...Lehman describes the New York poets as "aesthetes in revolt against a moralist's universe...

...They were far more moralists than they were aesthetes, and they were dogmatic in their hatreds...

...Blow smoke rings if you can...

...Painting could be about nothing other than painting...

...Time for a cigarette...

...1922 Dey doan unnerstan nuttin but smut That was the year the doves fell at Livorgno Koch is the only one of the group who is comfortable working in metered verse, although such efforts—his ottava-rima cycles Ko and The Duplications, at any rate—are drenched in irony and silliness...

...While poems about painting— Koch's "The Artist," Ashbery's "The Painter," O'Hara's "Why I Am Not a Painter," and Schuyler's collaboration with the painter Fairfield Porter—made up only a tiny fraction of their output, the consciously elaborated link with painting proved a successful shtick, just as Myers had thought it would be...

...Marjorie Perloff, who began her career with a 1977 book on Frank O'Hara, now marvels at how reticent she and other critics were to acknowledge this gayness: "'Late Victorian camp,' 'Paterian pop,' 'mental chatter and drift'—twenty years later we recognize these as code terms for 'queer.'" If the critics mistook a dialect for a voice, it must be said that the poets did as well...

...The strange deadness of such work is an indication that poetry is poorly suited to painterly abstraction...

...Ashbery has a snobby puns-manship that Lehman mistakes for humor...

...They considered the high-modernist tradition of Pound and Eliot a suffocating one...

...But how good the tobacco smoke tastes...

...The problem is the opposite one: The poetry is not adventurous enough...

...1845...

...But he was urging no such thing...

...Take O'Hara's "Having a Coke with You": I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world / except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it's in the Frick...

...Lehman, however, confuses Koch with the whole school...

...The Day Lady Died" is a combination of self-congratulation and piss-on-a-tree territoriality...

...First are the un-"poeticized" autobiographical fragments that O'Hara called his "I do this I do that" poems...

...He meant it to echo (and, not incidentally, to promote) the New York School of abstract-expressionist painters, all of them drinking pals of the poets...

...Three were the saddest snow ever seen in Prairie City...

...The poem is at last between two persons instead of two pages...

...Quite the contrary, it is for their unmeaning that the critics loved them...

...Or blow me: I could do with a little carnal relief...

...Frank O'Hara's reflection in his "Autobi-ographia Literaria" stands as their credo: And here I am, the center of all beauty...

...But then the New York School of poets were never celebrated for their meaning...

...You look out a window Or pretend to fidget...

...Ashbery, O'Hara, and Koch met at Harvard...

...Why are pleasures bad for you...

...The old guard against which this "last avant-garde" arose were the high modernists like Pound and Eliot and their handmaidens, the new critics...

...All language has is meaning and sound...

...Even as they railed against American materialism, they were being marketed like toothpaste...

...Today, it is clear that it was often simply the inside language of Manhattan gays...

...that Horace handled in two words, carpe and diem...

...Mary McCarthy, who ridiculed the poets who hung out at the San Remo bar, was heartily despised...

...But when, one wants to ask, was the last time an American poet suffered for writing about homosexuality...

...If O'Hara is taking poetry out of the academy, it's only to move it to the Hamptons...

...And O'Hara's "Metaphysical Poem" calls to mind the rock lyrics that appeared on the inside flap of those 1970s double phonograph albums whose primary purpose was to aid in cleaning marijuana: When do you want to go I'm not sure I want to go there where do you want to go any place Even John Ashbery, when he surfaces into comprehensibility, utters thoughts that, however much critics may have macerated them, are basically notes stuck to the refrigerator door: What is writing...

...Ashbery, Koch, and Schuyler lived for long periods in Europe...

...O'Hara is not opening up poetry to those excluded by the High Modernist establishmentari-ans...

...In "The Day Lady Died," for example, O'Hara composes an elegy of sorts for Billie Holiday: in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard, although I do think of Hesiod, trans...

...The four major poets of the "New York School" set out in the 1950s to change American verse, working from the principle that, because they found themselves so endlessly fascinating, their thoughts must reflect deep, universal meanings...

...The art-gallery impresario John Bernard Myers dubbed them the "New York School" in the early 1950s...

...That is much too generous...

...I don't think my experiences are clarified or made beautiful for myself or anyone else," O'Hara added...

...In fact, one of the distinctive features of the New York School is lack of humor...

...When Lehman says humor, he means camp...

...His long poems may not be great, but they make delightful running gags, the best of which is his Art of Love...

...Koch is a Columbia University professor who injected a slapstick vein into modern poetry and pioneered poetry workshops for schoolchildren and senior citizens...

...For Lehman, "part of the poem's charm lies in its mix of populist and elitist elements: a hamburger and a malted and 'a little Verlaine,' a trip to the bank to cash a check, the purchase of exotic cigarettes and liqueurs...

...There are two broad genres of New York School poetry...

...O'Hara has a kind of insistent, browbeating hedonism that Lehman mistakes for humor...

...It puts the poem squarely between the poet and the person...

...Modern American poetry was founded by a homosexual, and since Walt Whitman's time, homosexuality has been only slightly less central to American poetry than to American hairdressing...

...If you throw language at a page, the meaning disappears altogether, and you're left, if you're lucky, with euphony or onomatopoeia...

...You miss it, it misses you" is a description not of poetry but of bad poetry...

...All more Christopher Caldwell is senior writer of THE WEEKLY STANDARD...

...O'Hara's self-involvement is large enough that it can reduce everything to matters of his taste, as in "Personal Poem": we go eat some fish and some ale it's cool but crowded we don't like Lionel Trilling we decide, we like Don Allen we don't like Henry James so much we like Herman Melville Lehman thinks a bit of biographical detail makes the poem more explicable: Diana Trilling, wife of the critic, had written a long article in Partisan Review lacerating the New York School and the Beat poets as intellectual frauds...

...It's easy to share Lehman's fascination with the New York of the 1950s, "a time when the life of the artist had a certain seedy glamour, rents were cheap, the subway safe, and the art market had not yet become the plaything of the very rich...

...There was a voice, particularly in O'Hara, that sounded very distinctive at the time...

...But it's hard to share Lehman's claim that the poets who inhabited that world constituted an avant-garde in any poetic sense...

...These poets are hokey...

...Its first purpose is to celebrate Frank O'Hara (not Billie Holiday, who isn't mentioned until the very end of the poem) as the center of all beauty...

...You have it but you don't have it...

...Schuyler, who died in 1991, was a depressive alcoholic, in and out of mental hospitals for much of his adult life until winning a Pulitzer prize in 1980...

...Lehman calls the New York School poems "brave in their homosexual details...

...In The Last Avant-Garde, Lehman credits the New York School with a great deal of humor, and the work of Kenneth Koch provides some support...

...So were the Trillings and Robert Lowell...

...While I was writing it I was realizing that if I wanted to I could use the telephone instead of writing the poem and so Personism was born...

...Sometimes the hatred was generalized, as in O'Hara's attack on the "pious attitudes of those true spiritual bigots whose faces are turned toward eternity and who therefore can see nothing...

...The burden of showy erudition evolved into a kind of guild-style protectionism for establishment poets...

...The New York School's enemies, said Schuyler, were "the campus dry-heads who wistfully descend tum-ti-tumming from Yeats out of Graves with a big kiss for Mother England...

...O'Hara was an influential art curator killed at age forty in a bizarre dune-buggy accident on Fire Island in 1966...

...Schuyler's "A Few Days" is dedicated to a proposition— Tomorrow is another day, but no better than today if you only realize it...

...In a typical effort, James Schuyler writes: Is a wet dream too much to ask for...

...James Schuyler, who worked for a few months with W. H. Auden, conceived a deep resentment for the British poet and urged Koch, who was reviewing an Auden volume, "to lay the book out like a split cod...

...And yet one still reads such tracts of homosexual self-pity as Brad Gooch's biography of O'Hara, City Poet, in which the school's entire achievement is summed up as an achievement in gay rights...

...The Harvard poetry doyenne Helen Vendler marvels at the way "The Old Place" (O'Hara's poem named after a gay bar) "flouts the whole male world and its relentless demand for ideologies, causes, and systems of significance...

...You miss each other...

...But in truth the New York School poets were relentless in their own demand for ideologies and causes...

...Strip the New York School poets of their biographies—of that part of their work the sophisticates congratulate themselves on catch-ing—and all you're left with is a long-winded, Will Rogersy wryness, a pat-ting-oneself-on-the-back-while-stat-ing-the-obvious...

...Let's love today, the what we have now, this day, not today or tomorrow or yesterday, but this passing moment, that will not come again...

...Allen flacked various poets—most notably O'Hara and Allen Ginsberg— who were too slack, unlyrical, and fluffy for Louis Simpson and Donald Hall's influential New Poets of Britain and America (1957), which showcased Thom Gunn, James Merrill, Anthony Hecht, and Philip Larkin...

...Practically every poet who has ever written has believed that a connection—even a transcendent con-nection—between the poet and the reader is a large part of what poetry is about...

...You miss it, it misses you...

...The stultifying demand of poetic erudition by these poets and critics was harmful to the extent that it cowed poets into believing they had to have read Propertius and the personal papers of John Quincy Adams before they could put pen to paper...

...But those have been around in English poetry since the beginning—think of "Lhude sing Cuckoo"—and every English poet before Ashbery, O'Hara, Koch, and Schuyler knew that it wasn't enough by itself to make a poem...

...The technique is made almost explicit in his "Paradoxes and Oxymorons": This poem is concerned with language on a very plain level...

...And yet, it would be wrong to dismiss New York School poems as slapdash diaries...

...What Lehman doesn't mention, in this context at least, is that Don Allen was the editor of the anthology New American Poetry, 1945-1960 (1960...

...But it was often more personalized, too...

...Ashbery seeks to create the shape or the trajectory of a poetic thought without giving the poem a subject— to see if poetry can have form without content...

...They admired the French surrealists and most Soviet poets...

...A taste-maker in modern painting from his perch as curator at the Museum of Modern Art, O'Hara seemed to be urging a spontaneous, democratic culture in which anyone could play...

...Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning were then arguing through their spattered, daubed, and dripped paintings that the painter shouldn't imitate nature but declare that he himself is nature...

...The central document of this tendency was the 1959 manifesto of "Personism" in which O'Hara wrote, I went to work and wrote a poem for this person...

...This "battle of the anthologies," as it has come to be known, gave the poets of the New York School a new lease on life...

...In "When the Sun Tries to Go On," for example, he composed the purest nonsense-poem in the language...