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withdrew my emotional investments in loving old New York. ‘Except,’ he adds, ‘you can’t.’ Schuyler wrote many wonderfully delicate, often painfully enervated descriptions of Manhattan scenes and incidents, but the majority of his lyrics set about recording the shifting weather and landscape of his pastoral refuges in Long Island and Maine, while his three longest poems are set in Washington DC (‘Hymn to Life’) and in upstate New York (‘The Morning of the Poem’ and ‘A Few Days’). New York City was, however, crucial to the evolution of their friendships and the place in which most of the poems in this book were written. None were native New Yorkers: Ashbery grew up on a farm near Sodus, in western New York State, Koch in Cincinnati, O’Hara in Grafton, Massachusetts, and Schuyler in Washington DC and East Aurora, a small town near Buffalo. Ashbery and Koch first met in 1947 at Harvard, where both were on the board of the Advocate. O’Hara also attended Harvard, on the GI Bill after a two-year stint in the US navy, but only met Ashbery shortly before the latter moved to New York (where Koch had already settled) on graduating in 1949. Schuyler, the oldest of the four, had also been in the navy, from which he went AWOL in 1944; at the hearing that followed his homosexuality was revealed, which led to his being discharged as ‘undesirable’. He spent the years between 1947 and 1949 in Europe, mainly in Italy, where he worked for several months as W.H. Auden’s secretary. Two years after his return to New York, at a party after the opening of Larry Rivers’s first show at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, he was introduced to both O’Hara and Ashbery, and the following year met Kenneth Koch. The four musketeers were complete. Highly conscious that the kind of poetry they were writing ran radically counter to the New Critical orthodoxies of the day, they formed each other’s only initial audiences. ‘We inspired each other,’ Koch later recalled, ‘we envied each other, we emulated each other, we were very critical of each other, we admired 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.’ They also took to collaborating: in 1952 Ashbery and Schuyler embarked on A Nest of Ninnies, a wittily sophisticated comedy of manners composed mainly in alternate sentences, which was eventually published in 1969; Ashbery and Koch wrote a number of poems together, including a sestina whose every line includes the name of a flower, a tree, a fruit, a game, a famous old lady, a reference to a piece of office furniture and the word bathtub. (This poem, ‘Crone Rhapsody’, appeared xii THE NEW YORK POETS
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in a special issue devoted to collaborations of the magazine, Locus Solus, edited by Ashbery, Koch, Schuyler and the novelist Harry Mathews, which ran for five issues in the early 1960s.) Koch and O’Hara particularly relished poetic jousts, and composed their first long poems (When the Sun Tries to Go On and ‘Second Avenue’) in a kind of competitive dialogue, each goading the other to fresh flights of fancy. For both, poetry could happen any time, any place: A little hard-as-a-hat poem to the day we offer ‘Sky / woof woof! / harp’ This is repeated ten times Each word is one line so the whole poem is thirty lines It’s a poem composed in a moment On the sidewalk about fifteen blocks from the Alice in Wonderland Monument… ‘A Time Zone’ The irreverence of the New York School writers is one of their most appealing qualities. In their reaction against the serious, ironic, ostentatiously well made lyric that dominated the post-war poetry scene, they turned to the work of an eclectic range of literary iconoclasts, eccentrics and experimenters. Had the woman who, after reading an article on their work in the New York Times, wrote to Kenneth Koch asking how to enrol in the New York School’s poetry programme, been sent back a registration form and a reading list, the latter might have included the works of Antonin Artaud, Djuna Barnes, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, E.F. Benson, Mary Butts, John Cage, René Char, John Clare, Ronald Firbank, Jean Garrigue, Paul Goodman, Henry Green, Alfred Jarry, Max Jacob, V.R. Lang, Lautréamont, the invented Australian poet Ern Malley, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Pierre Reverdy, Marcelin Pleynet, F.T. Prince, Laura Riding, Arthur Rimbaud, Raymond Roussel, David Schubert, Gertrude Stein, Thomas Traherne, John Wheelwright, John Wieners – as well as more mainstream figures such as Auden (but only his early work), Elizabeth Bishop, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Kafka, Proust and Pasternak. The poets they especially scorned were those East Coast formalists who, in James Schuyler’s words, ‘wishfully descend tum-ti-tumming from Yeats out of Graves with a big kiss for Mother England’. Kenneth Koch’s ‘Fresh Air’ of 1955 memorably captures their impatience with the academic conservatism of the 1950s poetic establishment: INTRODUCTION xiii

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withdrew my emotional investments in loving old New York.

‘Except,’ he adds, ‘you can’t.’ Schuyler wrote many wonderfully delicate, often painfully enervated descriptions of Manhattan scenes and incidents, but the majority of his lyrics set about recording the shifting weather and landscape of his pastoral refuges in Long Island and Maine, while his three longest poems are set in Washington DC (‘Hymn to Life’) and in upstate New York (‘The Morning of the Poem’ and ‘A Few Days’).

New York City was, however, crucial to the evolution of their friendships and the place in which most of the poems in this book were written. None were native New Yorkers: Ashbery grew up on a farm near Sodus, in western New York State, Koch in Cincinnati, O’Hara in Grafton, Massachusetts, and Schuyler in Washington DC and East Aurora, a small town near Buffalo. Ashbery and Koch first met in 1947 at Harvard, where both were on the board of the Advocate. O’Hara also attended Harvard, on the GI Bill after a two-year stint in the US navy, but only met Ashbery shortly before the latter moved to New York (where Koch had already settled) on graduating in 1949. Schuyler, the oldest of the four, had also been in the navy, from which he went AWOL in 1944; at the hearing that followed his homosexuality was revealed, which led to his being discharged as ‘undesirable’. He spent the years between 1947 and 1949 in Europe, mainly in Italy, where he worked for several months as W.H. Auden’s secretary. Two years after his return to New York, at a party after the opening of Larry Rivers’s first show at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, he was introduced to both O’Hara and Ashbery, and the following year met Kenneth Koch. The four musketeers were complete.

Highly conscious that the kind of poetry they were writing ran radically counter to the New Critical orthodoxies of the day, they formed each other’s only initial audiences. ‘We inspired each other,’ Koch later recalled, ‘we envied each other, we emulated each other, we were very critical of each other, we admired 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.’ They also took to collaborating: in 1952 Ashbery and Schuyler embarked on A Nest of Ninnies, a wittily sophisticated comedy of manners composed mainly in alternate sentences, which was eventually published in 1969; Ashbery and Koch wrote a number of poems together, including a sestina whose every line includes the name of a flower, a tree, a fruit, a game, a famous old lady, a reference to a piece of office furniture and the word bathtub. (This poem, ‘Crone Rhapsody’, appeared xii

THE NEW YORK POETS

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