Stevens and an Everyday New York School

In 1963, Ted Berrigan founded a poetry journal that would "print anything the editor likes" and "appear monthly" ("Untitled"). He called it C, a title taken from Wallace Stevens' poem "The Comedian as the Letter C." Berrigan had recently heard Kenneth Koch read this work in a class on Stevens that was "the best lecture I have ever seen or heard on a poet," as he reported in a letter to his wife (Dear Sandy 117). The resulting magazine is one example of how Stevens threaded first- and second-generation authors of the New York School into a weave of twentieth-century influence. Among the pages of C, contributions by John Ashbery, Edwin Denby, Koch, and Frank O'Hara mingled with work from Berrigan, Joe Brainard, Dick Gallup, and Ron Padgett under the banner of Stevens' comedic ghost.

Or, perhaps, his everyday ghost. Descriptions of Stevens' quotidian poetry read Crispin's voyage as an early template for the writer's pursuit of what he called that "inaccessible jewel . . . the normal" (L 521). James Longenbach, for example, argues that "The Comedian" shows Stevens' regard for "the 'ordinary' or the 'humdrum'" (94), while Liesl Olson explains that Stevens saw in this poem's idea of "'the normal, the central' . . . an answer to the lifelong dilemma of how to live" (121). In my own work, I use "The Comedian" to specify the category of Stevens' everyday poetics (Phillips 77-78, 71-111); it is the repetition of everyday life, I argue—the changing sameness of day after day—that allows the crucial reconciliation of individual imagination and worldly experience. Crispin in "The Comedian" strives to achieve this accord, whereas later poems by Stevens do achieve it, particularly in the repetitions of "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction," "The Auroras of Autumn," "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven," and many works in The Rock.

How, then, does this Stevensian mode relate to the poets of C? Can we regard the magazine as an indication that writers of the New York School adopted Stevens' everyday ambition, as well as its repetitive means? This essay takes Berrigan's homage as provocation to look more closely at the ways that some first-generation New York School writers took up Stevens' quest for the "normal." It aims to test what the varying debts to Stevens' everyday poetry, among some poets of this group, can tell us about Stevens' own everyday verse. Affinities, after all, emphasize aspects of the influencer as well as those influenced: this essay will explore how appropriations of Stevens' quotidian poetics, in the case of the New York School, substantiate the elegiac and social aspects of Stevens' ordinary repetitions.

There is no doubt that Stevens was an admired example for New York School poets, as some of the group's best critics have detailed.¹ When James Schuyler wrote an explanatory letter to Donald Allen in 1960, he cited Stevens and William Carlos Williams as the most important precursors for the "freedom" of his circle (Just the Thing 109). Enthusiasm for Stevens provided that nascent cadre with an early mark of distinction. Harold Brodkey remembers meeting O'Hara and Ashbery in college and hearing them assert "that Stevens was a more important poet to them than Eliot, who was a huge influence on half the professors at Harvard" (qtd. in Gooch 138). In addition, there is no doubt that New York School writers were fascinated with everyday life: their scorn for "Eliot's kind of exaltation and incantation and upper-level meaning," as Brodkey put it, produced a poetry that is open to banal materials, amenable to localized reference, and governed by contingent, digressive progress—from Ashbery's charts of commercialized consciousness and O'Hara's chatty records of New York life to Koch's legerdemain with found phrases and Schuyler's humble records of the scene at his window.² If we put together these aspects of New York School poetics, we might see Stevens' endorsement by this group as their recognition of his "lower-level" attention to ordinary experience.

Yet this is not necessarily the case: New York School writers' admiration of...