There's a great phrase by the beat poet, Philip Whalen,
to describe what they were trying to do
and what he was trying to do in relationships.
He called it continuous nerve music.
And there's this sort of sense that there's
this ongoing stream, which has a sort of shape to it.
And if you can kind of practice with it,
you can begin in the same way that people
who are jazz musicians, for instance--
and who may do a lot of practice on their own
before a performance in terms of playing
lots of different parts of music-- but then once the music
starts, that all the elements of the practice
sort of start coming together.
So you have this sort of sense of people basically using
material that, maybe at one point,
would have been in notebooks.
It's very notational a lot of the time for New York School
poets, there's this sort of sense
of things that have been noticed quickly in the way
that you get them in notebooks.
But here, they're being kind of collaged together.
They're just being brought together,
partly by the force of the personality of the person, OK?
The sensibility of that person is enough, they believe,
to hold it all together, OK?
And what you start getting is, you also
get these, like, slight--
it's very talky.
It's very kind of--
it's glib, in a way.
It's light, OK?
There's a kind of sociability to it, a sense of friendliness.
But there's also something that's
being registered at certain moments that's
a little darker--
and not disturbed in a deep way, just kind of unsure.
And so those lines--
"But it is good to be several floors up
in the dead of the night, wondering whether you
are any good or not.
And the only decision you can make is that you did it."
And there's something a little dark.
The shading there-- it's a very, very slight thing.
But I think that's sort of-- there's a little bit of doubt
in the whole enterprise, right?
It just kind of erupts.
And it's not his job, as a poet, to make something out of that.
It's not his job, for instance, to confront it.
It's just his job to sort of notate it as part of a living--
and not to exaggerate it, not to make it
something melodramatic, something that it isn't
actually in everyday life.
Because the way we experience life seems
more accurate in these poems.
These poems seem more accurate to the way we actually
experience life in consciousness-- which, again,
was, like, one of the big projects of a certain part
of American poetry in the 1950s.
There's something that I--
in this stanza that begins, "As well as
a number of other things."
And then he goes on to talk about Allen and Peter.
Allen is Allen Ginsberg.
Peter is Peter Orlovsky.
Joe is Joe LeSueur. Kenneth is Kenneth Koch.
I've forgotten who Norman is.
It's very easy for us now, at this point in time,
to read that and just to kind of take it for granted.
But that was not something that had
been done in American poetry previous to this point, OK?
The idea that you would bring your friends up
in this very casual way in the middle of this poem--
it's kind of an aside.
What it has to do with the poem as a whole--
if you were a new critic looking at this poem in the 1950s,
you might say, this doesn't have anything
to do with the actual theme of the poem.
It doesn't seem overtly to have anything to do with that stuff.
And it's sort of-- there's something really radical about,
in the context of American society in the 1950s, which
is a society that's increasingly organized for mass production,
increasingly anonymous, in a sense, the idea of blending in.
It's an extremely paranoid, politically paranoid time.
This is the time of the communist witch hunts, which
one feels that people who are at all different or think
differently are being searched out in order to be eliminated.
And there's a sort of sense that you should sort of
be absorbed into the larger goals of society
rather than an individual.
And yet, this is sort of insisting on the individual.
It's insisting on friendship, on intimacy.
There's something incredibly intimate about him just
tossing off this aside and thinking,
you will be interested in that.
You'll be interested in his friends.
My friends are interesting.
They are really interesting people if you got to know them.
You'd like them.
And you get these sort of conflicting tonalities
that-- they just kind of flicker there, as they do,
I think, in consciousness.
"I wish I were reeling around Paris instead
of reeling around New York.
I wish I weren't reeling at all.
It is spring.
The ice has melted.
The Ricard is being poured.
We are all happy and young and toothless.
It is the same as old age."
There's a sort of a sense of contrarian contradictoriness
a little bit.
And there's a sort of sense of the only thing
to do is simply continue.
Is that simple?
Yes, it is simple.
There's some strange-- it's all very light.
But at the same time, there's a kind of resistance building up.
And you feel, I think, again, those sort
of anxieties that are just below the surface of the personality.
They're not being made into a big deal in the palm.
It's not the job of the poet to solve the problem, OK?
It's not a problem that needs to be solved.
It's just part-- that anxiety, which is there
in a sort of subtonal way, is something that we all
experience in everyday life.
And to make it into something that's a problem to be solved
is false in this aesthetic.
And in some way, that's the risk.
There is something heroic in making your friends
the subject of the poem.
There is something heroic in making
your very personal sphere a kind of place
that the reader can kind of enter into with pleasure.
The assumption is a heroic assumption, I think.
And when you look at the poem at the ending of the poem,
you see that there's no resolution to it.
I mean, I love--
there's a kind of cataloging of things
that he has a kind of affection for or an interest in.
And then you get this sort of penultimate line--
"René Char, Pierre Reverdy, Samuel Beckett--
it is possible, isn't it?"
So it's kind of invoking, in some sense, his influences.
And he says, "I love Reverdy for saying yes, though I
don't believe it."
And this is actually a sort of spiritual sadness,
I think, at the end of the poem.
And it's about this undertow that you
can hear in the passage that Don Draper recites.
There is something-- to be an individual;
to be idiosyncratic in this culture; to be gay;
to be an artist; to be interested in the arts.
There's something lonely that's being
registered in all of this, and a sort of adamancy
that it has value.
My life has value.
Because it's my life.
And there's something, for me, profoundly moving, I think,
about all of that.
I don't think we have a lot of time
to talk about "The Day Lady Died."
I just would say that if you look at it,
it begins in sort of classic manner.
"It is 12:20 in New York, a Friday."
Again, you're just having this sort of annotation of time.
What's being mentioned consistently
in almost every line in the first stanza
is time, has to do with time.
And the train times, in a way, are sort of-- they
are markers of a commuter life.
And the people who are commuting are
people who are commuting from the suburbs,
and business people-- men, mostly.
And in a way, O'Hara's immediately
kind of situating us in that world--
it's all implicit.
You know, it's all in the way that you would experience it
in everyday life.
It's not being made into a big deal.
The whole project of the poem, which
is an elegy for Billie Holiday.
I assume that most of you know it
is to memorialize Billie Holiday,
but also to make a claim for her art in relation--
so if you read the poem, what you notice
is that all of the art, most of the art that's being mentioned,
is European.
It's high art.
A lot of it's high modernism.
It's an art that O'Hara has an affection for.
And in a way, there's a kind of implicit claim
that's being made for Billie Holiday singing--
a jazz singer, the only truly American art form--
jazz-- invented by African Americans.
So in one way, this is a deeply political poem
about this particular time.
And it's a poem that builds up pressure in interesting ways.
Because it resists talking about Billie Holiday directly.
You don't hear about her, despite the title.
The title should tell you that this is
an elegy for Billie Holiday--
Lady Day was Billie Holiday's nickname.
So the title is a play on that--
"The Day Lady Died."
You don't hear about her until the very last stanza--
at which point, the poem kind of turns back in time and space.
It goes back in memory.
And it moves into this club.
And all of the sort of pressure that's
been building-- because you have this expectation
that he's going to start talking about Billie
Holiday at some point.
And he doesn't.
Again, he's very much insisting on this sort of idea of,
I do this, I do that.
And that's all the poem has to be about.
All that pressure has been building up.
And it all kind of flows into that final image
of her singing in the room--
"while she whispered a song along the keyboard
to Mal Waldron.
And everyone and I stopped breathing."
And this is one of those moments where
the beautiful is being redefined totally and for all time.
I think if O'Hara were here, he'd
be rolling on the floor laughing about a lot of this.
Because I don't think that was exactly
their conscious intention.
But again, there is a kind of bravery, it seems to me.
And this does seem not only to be
a deeply personal poem, a deeply felt poem,
but also a poem that has a kind of social mission attached
to it in some sort of strange, oblique way.
And it doesn't often enough, I think,
kind of get recognized as such.
I want to move on to Schuyler.
Because I think Schuyler is about something
slightly different than O'Hara.
The painters-- the action painters, de Kooning, Pollock,
and Kline, and Guston--
had a lot to teach the poets about compositional methods
in the moment--
how things could be joined together.
And I think de Kooning in particular
was an important figure for all of these people.
So there's this little thing which I just
want to read quickly.
And then I'll play a recording of Schuyler reading "February."
But this is Edwin Denby talking about Willem de Kooning
and his painting in the 1930s, and then what he
was doing from that point on.
He said, "I often heard him say that he
was beating his brains out about connecting
a figure and a background.
The basic connection he meant seemed, to me, emotion
from inside them, that they interchanged and continued
throughout"-- so that sort of sense
of the motion of the background, and the motion of the figure
coming from inside them and then exchanging places.
"He insisted on it during those years, stroke by stroke,
and gained a virtuoso's eye and hand.
But he wanted everything in the picture out of equilibrium,
except spontaneously--
all of it.
That, to him, was one objective professional standard.
That was form the way the standard masterpieces had form,
a miraculous force and weight of presence moving from all
over the canvas at once."
So I'm very interested, in Schuyler's work,
how things are brought together in a moment, kind
of somewhat fragmented.
And what one feels is sort of the images vibrating off
of each other and that sort of sense
that things are out of equilibrium.
There's something sort of slightly off scale, off kilter,
about Schuyler's poems from this particular time period--
actually, almost all of them.
They're quite beautiful, often.
But one can't quite figure out what makes them beautiful.
And in a sense, they're just a great example
of this sort of art of improvisation
and this art that really wants to locate itself
in attention, which is a spiritual act in some sense.
So this is Schuyler.
[AUDIO PLAYBACK]
- February.
A chimney breathing a little smoke;
the sun I can't see making a bit of pink I can't quite see
in the blue; the pink of five tulips at 5:00 PM on the day
before March 1; the green of the tulip stems and leaves like
something I can't remember finding a jack-in-the-pulpit
a long time ago and far away.
Why, it was December then, and the sun was on the sea
by the temples we'd gone to see.
One green wave moved in the violet sea
like the UN building on big evenings, green and wet
while the sky turns violet.
A few almond trees had a few flowers,
like a few snowflakes of the blue looking pink
in the light, a gray hush in which the boxy trucks roll up
Second Avenue into the sky.
They're just going over the hill, the green leaves
of the tulips on my desk like grass light on flesh
and a green copper steeple and streaks of cloud
beginning to glow.
I can't get over how it all works in together
like a woman who just came to her window
and stands there filling it, jogging her baby in her arms.
She's so far off.
Is it the light that makes the baby pink?
I can see the little fists and the rocking horse
motion of her breasts.
It's getting grayer and gold and chilly.
Two dog-sized lions face each other at the corners of a roof.
The yellow dust inside the tulips--
it's the shape of a tulip.
It's the water in the drinking glass the tulips are in.
It's a day like any other."
[END PLAYBACK]
So one of the things that I think is going on in this poem,
and that goes on throughout the New York School poets' work,
is this sort of sense that anything or anyone, if they
are observed in a non-judgemental way,
can be a subject for poetry, that there's
a certain kind of openness to anything
that comes into your view, or anything that you encounter
during the day.
If you are open to it, you can see, in some sense, the sublime
in it.
OK, and the other thing that's being registered, of course,
is that that thing is constantly vanishing.
It's not stable.
It moves away from you quickly.
All right, and so this poem is sort
of assembling a set of details that actually kind of record
that in a particular moment.
And it's a very layered.
And if you look at the beginning of it, the first quarter of it
or so, it's very peculiar.
There's a device that's being used.
It's something close to what's called the via negativa--
the negative way, which is the device you can use in a poem
where you say--
there's a famous example by Marina
[? Tsvetaeva ?] when she says, "I'm not homesick.
I'm not thinking about the Russian language--"
and its duh-nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh.
"I don't care if I ever am back in Moscow."
Again, I'm paraphrasing the poem terribly.
So you resist.
You introduce something through resistance,
through a kind of negative pressure.
But it's there.
Because you've actually had to mention it
in the act of resisting it.
So there's a tension.
So you get that in this poem.
"A chimney breathing a little smoke,
the sun I can't see making a bit of pink
I can't quite see in the blue."
There's something that he's trying to register that is so--
Schuyler's an enormously-- I didn't get Schuyler
myself for a long, long time.
You know, I think it's really only in the last five years
that I started understanding that the stuff is just
so nuanced.
And also, you can hear how, in a sense,
there's something really quiet about it.
You hear that in the reading.
Schuyler, I think, only read twice in his life.
That recording is from the late '80s just before he died.
But he was very nervous about reading, apparently.
And there's something, though, there's a kind of--
I mean, and you see this thing repeated.
"The pink of five tulips at 5:00 PM on the day
before March 1, the green of the tulip
stems and leaves like something I can't remember."
And then he remembers it--
"Finding a jack-in-the-pulpit a long time ago and far away."
And so it goes on like that.
And he's basically kind of laying out
through this sort of strange resistant device.
I mean, he's noticing an incredible number of things.
But he's basically saying, I don't notice this,
or I'm not sure what I'm seeing, if this is it exactly,
or it reminds me of this thing.
So he's constantly sort of distracted, too.
So [? distractibility ?] is actually
a value in some odd way in a lot of New York School poetry.
And then you get to a certain place in the poem
where you feel like something happens.
There's a very odd little bit of idiom, American idiom--
"I can't get over how it all works in together."
"How it all works together" would maybe be closer.
It's sort of clunky, and intentionally so, I think.
And then that's the moment where the figure comes in
of the woman--
so that idea of de Kooning's of, how do you attach a figure
to the background?
OK, and you can feel an enormous amount of energy.
And there's a spiritual energy in the amount of attention
he's giving to this background.
But there's also an energy in how
it's all being brought together in this sort of strange,
somewhat--
this de-centered sort of way.
Things don't flow.
There's something hinky about it.
It doesn't flow exactly.
So it's out of equilibrium in exactly the way
that Edwin Denby talks about de Kooning's paintings being.
And then you get this figure.
And there's something really plaintive in,
"She's so far off."
Again, it's that sort of sense of the aloneness of anybody's
life, but not melodramatic.
He doesn't stay with it.
He moves on.
And then I love the way the poem ends.
"It's the yellow dust inside the tulips.
It's the shape of a tulip.
It's the water in the drinking glass the tulips are in.
It's a day like any other."
It's almost nothing.
You can understand how-- again, mainstream American poets
would have looked at this-- this poem was written in, I think,
the late 1950s-- and just said, what is this?
Nothing.
It's not a poem.
This is so not a poem.
[AUDIENCE CHUCKLING]
OK, for most American poets at this time,
this would not have been considered a poem.
And the "it" is never really defined.
It's totally floating in exactly the way that de Kooning
oftentimes-- or Denby talks about de Kooning--
the image, he says, in a de Kooning painting
floats and expands.
And you feel that expanse.
I mean, I love the poem.
Because it has a sort of spiritual
expansiveness at the end.
And yet it's asserting something.
It's just saying it's completely ordinary, but special.
Not special-- special.