Fables of Representation: Essays

Fables of Representation: Poetry of the New York School

Fables of Representation Poetry of the New York School Since discovering Ron Padgett’s Great Balls of Fire in a Chicago classroom in 1971, I have been drawn to the poets of the New York School. From its Joe Brainard cover design to the sonnet “Nothing in That Drawer,” which consists entirely of the title line, the book promised something quite different from the Thomas Kinsella, Theodore Roethke, and Sylvia Plath poems that I had been reading in the Chicago Public Library. Great Balls of Fire contained a parody of the Stephen Crane poem “A Man Saw a Ball of Gold”; a parody of the Duchamp artwork In Advance of the Broken Arm (“After the Broken Arm”); one of the shortest poems I’d ever read (entitled “December,” its full text was “I will sleep / in my little cup”); the almost illegible poem “Y . . . r D . . . k,” consisting entirely of words that had been partly erased; and “Some Bombs,” which contained lines like “I ray you stop me pour the garter outdoors” and “On Intends Creek.” Later I discovered the impulse behind some of this compelling madness. It lay in dada, surrealism, and the work of the Arst generation of the New York School, especially Kenneth Koch and John Ashbery. The apparent silliness of some of the poems was astonishing to me; it was also a great relief. At the same time, my greater admiration remained with work such as “Wonderful Things” and “Strawberries in Mexico” that joined humor and everyday observation with the lyric mode: Anne, who are dead and whom I loved in a rather asinine fashion I think of you often 76 From American Poetry Review, July–August 2002. In the midst of the steadiness and gravity demanded by elegy, Ron Padgett places the tonally interruptive word “asinine,” which does, after all, depict love’s irregularities. The word extends the poem’s tonal range and lyric attitude, making possible the further playfulness of “Seriously I have this mental (smuh!) illness / which causes me to do things / on and away.” Anyone who doubts the sincerity of “Wonderful Things” needs only to read its ending movement, “a tuba that is a meadowful of bluebells / is a wonderful thing / and that’s what I want to do / tell you wonderful things” (81). I begin with the early work of Ron Padgett because it reBects the breadth of New York School practice. On one pole is the radical denaturing of the sentence as seen in “Some Bombs” and the work that undoubtedly inBuenced it, Kenneth Koch’s When the Sun Tries to Go On (a line of exploration that includes Clark Coolidge’s early identiAcation with the New York School, John Ashbery’s The Tennis Court Oath, and contributes to the foundation of language poetry). On the other extreme is the personal lyric associated with Frank O’Hara’s “I do this I do that” poems, a mode inBuenced by the directness of William Carlos Williams’s domestic chronicles such as “This Is Just to Say” and “The Eyeglasses,” and Apollinaire’s poetic narratives of walking the streets of Paris, “The Musician of Saint Merry” and “Phantom of the Clouds,” with their technique of offering the dates and times of events being observed: “It was the day before July 14 / About four in the afternoon / I went out to see the acrobats ” (Apollinaire 1971, 161). A third major style to develop out of the New York School is the “abstract lyric,” to be found primarily in the work of Ashbery, Barbara Guest (especially Fair Realism and books to follow), Marjorie Welish, Ann Lauterbach, and numerous other poets of the 1980s and 1990s. Blending philosophical “distance” with lyric immediacy, the abstract lyric was Arst practiced by Wallace Stevens as the “American Sublime .” Given postmodern direction by Ashbery, it is a mode in which thought remains in balance with song. Stevens’s “Anecdote of the Jar” is a good example of abstract lyric, as is Auden’s periphrastic “In Praise of Limestone.” Although the two poems differ rhetorically, both announce themselves as discourses on a given subject. In the case of the Stevens poem, it is the change 77 wrought on nature by a man-made object; more importantly it deals with the impact of an artistic decision of placement and, axiomatically, the possibilities of substitution. What impact would a jar have on the “slovenly wilderness” that “sprawled around”? In the...