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Where are young poets in America, they are trembling in publishing houses and universities, Above all they are trembling in universities, they are bathing the library steps with their spit, They are gargling out innocuous (to whom?) poems about maple trees and their children, Sometimes they brave a subject like the Villa d’Este or a lighthouse in Rhode Island, Oh what worms they are! They wish to perfect their form… Here on the railroad train, one more time, is the Strangler, He is going to get that one there, who is on his way to a poetry reading. Agh! Biff! A body falls to the moving floor. The verbal equivalents of Koch’s strangler were the techniques derived from European Surrealism that all four employed, particularly in their early work, as a means of sabotaging contemporary poetic conventions. ‘Yippee!’ O’Hara exclaims in ‘Blocks’: she is shooting in the harbor! he is jumping up to the maelstrom! she is leaning over the giant’s cart of tears which like a lava cone let fall to fly from the cross-eyed tantrum-tousled ninth grader’s splayed fist is freezing on the cement! Koch is as fond as O’Hara of this kind of imagistic exuberance, but Ashbery, even at his most disruptive in his second volume, The Tennis Court Oath (1962), tends towards a more enigmatic, subliminally charged poetics of displacement and fragmentation: They dream only of America To be lost among the thirteen million pillars of grass: “This honey is delicious Though it burns the throat.” And hiding from darkness in barns They can be grownups now xiv THE NEW YORK POETS
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And the murderer’s ash tray is more easily— The lake a lilac cube. While O’Hara’s energetic syntax crams together disparate elements into an exhilarating synaesthetic ‘maelstrom’, the different kinds of idiom spliced together in Ashbery’s lines create a mirage-like sense of the elusiveness of reality. Both poems might be used to illustrate, however, the ways in which la grande permission of the French Surrealists could be appropriated, ploughed under, and melded with the diverse, impure poetry of America. As much as for Romantics such as Keats, the long poem was for the New York poets ‘the Polar Star of Poetry’. In his introduction to O’Hara’s Collected Poems Ashbery describes O’Hara’s evolution of ‘big, airy structures unlike anything previous in American poetry and indeed unlike poetry, more like the inspired ramblings of a mind open to the point of distraction.’ Certainly the long poems of Ashbery, O’Hara, Koch and Schuyler offer an extraordinary blend of excess and insouciance, of artifice and the aleatory, but in this, it might be argued, they continue within the parameters established by American poetry’s primary epic of inclusion, Whitman’s ‘Song of Myself’: as in Whitman, the profoundly felt and the casually noticed, the bizarre, the erotic, the random, the tragic and the banal jostle together to evoke a densely layered, composite sense of time passing, of the individual, history, nature, and society continually colliding and breaking apart. The long poems I have chosen for this volume – O’Hara’s ‘In Memory of My Feelings’, Ashbery’s ‘Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror’, Koch’s ‘To Marina’, and Schuyler’s ‘Hymn to Life’ – are among their shorter explorations of the genre, but will, I hope, induce readers to seek out the likes of Ashbery’s Flow Chart, Schuyler’s ‘The Morning of the Poem’, Koch’s The Duplications, and O’Hara’s last long series of ‘inspired ramblings’, ‘Biotherm (For Bill Berkson)’. ‘Grace’, O’Hara writes in ‘In Memory of My Feelings’, punning on the name of his friend Grace Hartigan, ‘to be born and live as variously as possible.’ The phrase is engraved on his headstone in Green River Cemetery on Long Island. His shockingly painful death inspired one of Schuyler’s finest poems, ‘Buried at Springs’, an elegy which slides effortlessly from an evocative description of the day to a powerfully restrained articulation of suffering and loss: a day like a gull passing with a slow flapping of wings in a kind of lope, without INTRODUCTION xv

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Where are young poets in America, they are trembling in publishing houses and universities, Above all they are trembling in universities, they are bathing the library steps with their spit, They are gargling out innocuous (to whom?) poems about maple trees and their children, Sometimes they brave a subject like the Villa d’Este or a lighthouse in

Rhode Island, Oh what worms they are! They wish to perfect their form…

Here on the railroad train, one more time, is the Strangler, He is going to get that one there, who is on his way to a poetry reading. Agh! Biff! A body falls to the moving floor.

The verbal equivalents of Koch’s strangler were the techniques derived from European Surrealism that all four employed, particularly in their early work, as a means of sabotaging contemporary poetic conventions. ‘Yippee!’ O’Hara exclaims in ‘Blocks’:

she is shooting in the harbor! he is jumping up to the maelstrom! she is leaning over the giant’s cart of tears which like a lava cone let fall to fly from the cross-eyed tantrum-tousled ninth grader’s splayed fist is freezing on the cement!

Koch is as fond as O’Hara of this kind of imagistic exuberance, but Ashbery, even at his most disruptive in his second volume, The Tennis Court Oath (1962), tends towards a more enigmatic, subliminally charged poetics of displacement and fragmentation:

They dream only of America To be lost among the thirteen million pillars of grass: “This honey is delicious Though it burns the throat.”

And hiding from darkness in barns They can be grownups now xiv

THE NEW YORK POETS

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