When the Rents Were Low

One of the few things New York School poets agree on is that the New York School never really existed. “You can join the New York School for $5 if you want” was how Ted Berrigan often put it. Part of the lasting appeal of this loose group of poets is their disinterest in assessing their own legacy. Frank O’Hara wrote that he preferred the movies, and Eileen Myles quotes Joe Brainard on his deathbed: “Well, one good thing about dying, you don’t have to go to any more poetry readings.” All of this makes them a challenge to write an academic book about. How to analyze a poetics of irreverence and improvisation—of life experienced in a perpetual present—without stifling precisely these qualities?

In Conversations with New York School Poets, the editors Rona Cran and Yasmine Shamma find a solution by presenting stripped-back interview transcripts with twenty-five poets, blissfully free of footnotes or commentary. Reading these conversations feels like attending a party at which each new guest talks over the one before, disputing and undermining, gossiping and bringing into doubt the fundamental purpose of their coming together. It’s to the editors’ credit that they make a feature of the many instances in which the poets interviewed say how much they dislike the book’s prospective (but ultimately rejected) title, We Are the New York School:

Among those of us without better things to do, it’s generally accepted that the first generation of the New York School originated in 1949 when Frank O’Hara met John Ashbery at a party at a bookstore—not in New York but at Harvard. It concluded after another party, when O’Hara was killed by a dune buggy on Fire Island in 1966. That generation included Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler, and Barbara Guest, though her membership is another source of dispute. In 1970 An Anthology of New York Poets brought together twenty-seven New York School poets—with Bernadette Mayer as the only woman. Guest’s exclusion was criticized at the time but now looks even harder to justify. The two editors of that anthology, Ron Padgett and David Shapiro, are both interviewed here, and each takes the opportunity to throw the other under the bus. Shapiro says:

I remember Ron didn’t want to have Barbara inside….
Years later Ron said that I could blame it on him. [Laughs] I do! There was no way that I believed it was fair, and I said to him, “You know, Ron, they say certain people are selected for certain anthologies maybe because they went to high school with the person. And in your case, you really have gone to high school with the people you’ve selected.”

“Yes, this was definitely a controversial moment,” Padgett says.

One day we would say let’s put her in, the next day we’d say no, let’s not. The reason for putting her in was that she was associated with some of the older poets socially and somewhat aesthetically. The reason for not putting her in was that neither David nor I felt much enthusiasm for her work. That was our honest feeling. We didn’t think the work was terrible, we just didn’t feel that it was strong enough. It wasn’t our cup of tea. For years I thought I was the person who was really against putting her in, but about a year or so ago David corrected me and said, “No, I was the one who didn’t want to put her in.”

By the mid-1960s the first generation of the New York School—dominated by, as John Godfrey calls them, “the four horsemen,” O’Hara, Schuyler, Koch, and Ashbery—was famous enough, in Lower East Side terms, that it had almost become the establishment. In 1964 O’Hara published Lunch Poems, the book that came to define the group’s chatty, name-dropping aesthetic. In “Adieu to Norman, Bon Jour to Joan and Jean-Paul,” he begins, “It is 12:10 in New York and I am wondering/if I will finish this in time to meet Norman for lunch.” These poems were supposedly all dashed off during his lunch hour while he worked at MoMA—though it’s notable that almost six years passed between his first discussions about the book and its eventual publication. Ashbery was living in Paris for the first half of the decade while building a reputation in the US as both a poet and an art critic. By 1965 his decision to move back to New York was big enough news that Andy Warhol threw him a welcome-home party. At the same time, Koch was on his way to becoming a tenured literature professor at Columbia. He was popular among the students for his playful and spontaneous approach—standing on his desk to shout lines from Whitman or asking students with no knowledge of German to translate Rilke from the original without consulting a dictionary.

It’s perhaps not too surprising that the New York School poets made some enemies along the way. There’s a recording of Koch reading “To My Audience” at the Poetry Project in St. Mark’s Church in January 1968. He is only a few lines in—“how shall I address my audience/of new york green frock bats”—when there’s a yell and two gunshots. Striding down the church’s center aisle was a radical surrealist by the name of Allen Van Newkirk. He was, depending on various contradictory accounts, six foot three or seven feet tall, wild-haired, wearing a trench coat and holding a handgun. His collaborators had chosen him for the job because he “looked like the classic image of the bomb throwing anarchist,” the perfect person to blow up this comfortable world of apolitical in-jokes. Some remember him screaming “Death to bourgeois poetry!” as he fired at the stage. The gun was loaded with blanks, though the audience didn’t know it at the time. Koch was shaken up but still managed to find the humor in it. “That was a benefit shooting,” he said, a reference to the fact that St. Mark’s Church often held events to raise money for political groups like the Black Panthers or to fund repairs to the building. What could be more New York School than laughing off your own assassination and then continuing to read the poem?

According to Alice Notley’s interview in the book, the second generation of the New York School mostly consisted of fans of the first. After moving to the city, they became friends with their heroes. They were also drawn to St. Mark’s Church, where the Poetry Project shared the building with a wide range of interests. “We had the Mother Fuckers Breakfast program (served by an anarchist group from the pantry of the Church), the Black Panther’s soup kitchen, the Trotskyites, the Feliciano Defense Committee under the Young Lords,” Anne Waldman says. There was an open mic on Mondays, and featured poets read on Wednesdays. Different groups could drop in to use the mimeograph machine and print their own magazines. “Wine and Coca Cola and pizza and kids would be there and it was just like a party!” Maureen Owen says. Owen founded and edited Telephone magazine, publishing nineteen issues between 1969 and 1983:

Collating the issue took about two, maybe three hours…. After the cover was on and all copies were stapled everybody just took issues, you know, like ten copies or whatever they thought they could distribute around. I would take the rest to bookstores around the Lower East Side like the Eighth Street Bookstore. But it was so immediate, you know, printed, collated, published, and out on the street.

In the late 1960s the second generation became polarized around two almost rival couples in neighboring apartments. There was Waldman and Lewis Warsh and their “24-hour-a-day salon” at 33 St. Marks Place while, two blocks away, Notley and Berrigan were doing much the same thing at 101. Thirty years later and living in Paris, Notley published a poem, “101,” that begins, “It’s possible that I still live there”:

This apartment wasn’t me really it was everyone else it was the
outer world
How did it all fit in it was all-nighters parties near-fistfights
breakdowns
Endless conversation and controversy dinner parties on a bed
An eternal heart-to-heart “It smells like McSorley’s in here”

“One important thing to remember, and very hard to explain, is that none of us had jobs to go to in the morning,” Warsh says.

We were all involved in writing poetry, and thinking about poetry, 24/7. There were two typewriters in the apartment at 33 St. Marks and at some point we all wrote collaborative works—whoever was there.

It helped that the rents were low. Padgett recalls that he paid about sixty dollars a month, most of which was covered by working “a half day in an elementary school in my neighborhood, getting kids to write poetry.” Unlike the first generation, with their Harvard educations and prestigious careers, the second generation came from more mixed backgrounds and tended to scrape by with odd jobs. “I mean, it’s like La Bohème over and over again every day to get money, to survive,” Bob Rosenthal says.

All of us—Ted and Alice on St. Marks Place…he would go down to hustle money, so that every day was a get-by, selling books and whatnot. It was a struggle. But it worked. We were all raising kids, making oatmeal, making yogurt in little yogurt-makers, and cooking wheat berries.

Again and again, Ted Berrigan emerges from these interviews as a central but contradictory figure of the second generation, a simultaneous democratizer and shit stirrer, welcoming some poets while shutting others out. This unpredictability was put to good use in his poetry. In 1978 he published Train Ride, a long poem—forty-three pages written during a single train journey from New York to Providence—that takes O’Hara’s improvisatory spirit and adds a manic intensity all his own:

An opportunist!!
        Should get married!
Should do big oil paintings!!
        Get Serious!!
Talk more!! Talk less!!
           Tell the truth!!
        Know the truth!!
            Be perfect!!
        God damn it!!
————
        & the Train continues in the night….
        black outside
        high inside.

According to his peers, there seemed to be a half-dozen different Ted Berrigans:

At some point one of these feuds escalated. Recollections vary, but it may have been partly about a scarf that Warsh loaned to someone—“I forget to whom, either to Alice or Ted”—and never got back. And it may have been about Berrigan asking for, and being refused, an extra fifty-dollar advance from Warsh, who was also his publisher. And it may have been about “Motto of the Whores and Poets Guild,” a short, accusatory poem by Notley and Berrigan that reads in full: “You’ll do good if you play it like you’re not getting paid./But you’ll do it better if the motherfuckers pay you.” Mayer, the director of the Poetry Project at the time, read the poem as criticism of her tenure, and according to Harris Schiff, she “went insane about it…totally took it personally” and then removed the poem from an issue of the organization’s magazine. “She censored The World.”

One thing that’s certain is that running the Poetry Project during these years was an impossible job. It was a constant battle to raise money, maintain a crumbling building, and corral the various interlocking and sometimes warring poets. Through the 1970s and 1980s new programmers and directors came in and, in most cases, burned out. “We managed to get through it, but at the end of two and a half years I had come to the conclusion that poets are among the most petty people I’d ever known,” says Padgett, the director from 1978 to 1980. He was in charge during a period when much of the church was unusable owing to fire damage:

I thought, “God, these are sad people.” I came in one day in the spring of 1980 and said, “Maureen, I have to tell you something. I’m quitting.” And she said, “You can’t! You can’t quit!” And I thought, oh, what a nice compliment. And I said to her, “Why not?” and she said, “Because I’m quitting too! I was going to tell you today.”

The scene faded as rents increased. “After Ted died [in 1983], all sorts of things happen,” says Rosenthal. “Eileen becomes famous. People start to drift away…. This whole gang was already breaking up a little bit.” Clark Coolidge remembers asking Larry Fagin about the third generation of New York School poets: “‘Why don’t these guys write more? Why don’t they have more meetings?’ And he said, ‘You don’t understand, they all have day jobs. They can’t do that like we did. They can’t hang out like we did.’”

The biographical note for Jordan Davis—who, born in 1970, is perhaps a fifth-generation New York School poet—states that he “lives in Brooklyn and works in the financial industry.” The poem that appears at the end of his interview, “Not Nothing Never No,” takes the witty New York tone and undercuts it with a note of genuine desperation. The poem ends with these lines:

                                This
peculiar unpleasant space called poetry,
for sooth, no worse than a nightclub
and no better than a house on fire.
Ah, said the American, that cannot be helped.
Ah, said the American, we must be ruled
by the wealthy inept. It is our heritage
and birthright—all citizens
are entitled to feel contempt
for their leaders, and by extension,
for themselves. You too, sexy.

Davis has also been important in maintaining the group’s history. He talks about how much of its early life exists only in speech, in anecdotes and gossip. “There’s a distinction in rabbinical studies between the Torah and the Oral Torah,” he says, “and with the New York School, it’s like 85 to 95% Oral Torah.” That’s part of what makes this book of conversations feel significant, but it also highlights the project’s fragility. When these poets die, they take their histories with them. The interviewer’s correspondence with Warsh in this book is cut short by his death in November 2020. Gary Lenhart—“a major source of Oral Torah”—also died during the compilation of the book. Notley, who is the first interviewee here, died the month the book was published.

In her interview Notley says, “We’ve all gone on to become completely separate, even though we’re all friends, or enemy friends. But we’re inside each other’s lives.” Despite the disputes and grievances that run through these pages there is a sense that what survives of these poets, apart from their poetry, is the generative and spiky sociability that brought them together in the first place: