Hi, thanks for all coming out.
This sounds OK, right?
Yeah, just let me know if it gets weird.
I tend to bob and weave when I'm up here, so--
I'm going to do a bunch of different things.
And, perhaps in the spirit of the New York School,
this will be a little bit fragmented.
And we'll swerve around a bit before we actually
get to the point, which, for me, is actually
reading some of the poems by the primary figures in the New York
School, that core group of Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, Kenneth
Koch, and James Schuyler.
But I was just thinking, this quote
that Cybele had mentioned in this piece by Tony.
My take on the New York School was essentially that,
in the context of 1950s American culture and social life,
that the kind of playfulness and improvisational quality,
the sort of sense of immediacy in their poems,
the sense of dailiness, and the sense of humor,
the comedy of the poems represented
a kind of risk-taking that hadn't really
been seen on that scale in American poetry previously.
And much of the legacy of the New York
School over the last 50 years has been tremendously
important to American poetry.
One of the things that Tony says in his piece
is that, if you had asked many of the peers of those poets,
people such as Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop and Jarrell
and Berryman, how they felt about the New York School,
they wouldn't have said that they took it very seriously.
And yet, in some ways, the New York School poets
have become the dominant poets of that time.
In retrospect, they now seem like, in some ways,
to have eclipsed some of those people who, at that moment,
were the giants of American poetry.
I came to the New York School rather late.
They were not the poets who I was
taught while I was in the MFA program, to any big degree.
I mean, there were a few.
I had made contact with Schuyler's work
early on while I was here.
But I think also by inclination, it wasn't the kind of work
that I gravitated towards.
Tony and a number of other people in the program
were really influenced by that work.
And I sort of resisted it in odd ways.
I think partly because the playfulness and the humor
just didn't seem right for me, as a poet.
And I couldn't figure out what to do with it.
I liked it.
But I just couldn't figure out how
to take it into my own work.
And then, somehow, in, I think, the early 1990s,
I really connected with the work of the great Slovene
poet, Tomaz Salamun.
And Salamun, who's somewhat older
than I am, he's probably close to 70 now,
had been very influenced by the New York School,
oddly, among a set of influences,
O'Hara in particular.
And I think that was a little doorway for me to go through,
a sort of side entrance, actually.
A sort of indirect way, it was sort of
like a European highway, of sorts, back to America.
And since then, I've read them and taught them
rather consistently.
And they've changed my work in really significant ways.
And made a lot of things available,
a lot of values, poetic values, available to me that I think
were not previously available.
So I'm going to start with a couple of preludes,
actually, to this conversation.
By the way, if you guys want to interrupt,
this is not like a formal lecture.
And if you have a question while I'm talking,
feel free to raise your hand.
Because there will be a question and answer period immediately
following, but I'm perfectly happy,
if somebody has some urgent thing that they want to--
or something they want clarified, to entertain that.
So I'm going to play a recording of a poem
by Robert Creeley, who was not a New York School poet, who
was a member of what is commonly referred to as the Black
Mountain School.
There were all these schools proliferating at that time
in American poetry.
But the Black Mountain poets were
what I like to think of as allies of the New York School
and of the Beats.
And so that's a continuum.
Those three groups form a continuum,
I think, in American poetry, a kind of bohemian alternative,
in today's terminology, a kind of indie attitude
towards the mainstream.
But this poem by Creeley is called, "Heroes."
And it is a kind of ars poetica.
It's a poem about the art.
And one of the things that it raises
is, I think, a very traditional idea.
And an idea that's expressed in lots of different ways
by different poets, which is that the heroic in poetry
is called forth by the fact of death.
That death is the summoner, and that we respond in some way.
The risks that we take in poetry are
a response to our mortality.
Garcia Lorca's idea of the duende,
for instance, is another way of thinking about this.
Frost says that your job as a poet
is to put yourself in danger so that you can be saved,
sort of another version of it.
So this is a very old idea, and Creeley re-frames it a bit.
And this poem is called, "Heroes."
And it's on the handout.
There is a slight quote from the Latin of Virgil's "Aeneid"
in it.
The line is, "Hoc opus, hic labor est."
And that is a phrase that is taken
from "The Aeneid," at a point where
Aeneas has to go down to hell to find his father, Anchises.
And he is talking, as Creeley says, to the Cumaean Sibyl
and getting advice about this.
And what the Sibyl tells him is--
the full quote is this.
"The way down to hell is easy.
The doors of death stand open night and day.
But to retrace one's steps, to find
one's way back to where they breathe
air, that is the problem.
That is the hard task."
So that phrase in the Creeley poem
is translated as, "That is the problem.
That is the hard task."
And so, this calling back from death
to put yourself in danger, as Frost says in a poem,
but then to be called back into the living
and to save something out of that.
If not yourself, then a sense of the motion of one's soul,
I think, in time.
And I was very interested that this very
longstanding and traditional idea in poetry, in relationship
to the New York School poets-- because the New York School
poets do not seem initially to be doing that at all.
And this idea of Creeley's and of all these other people
is a deeply spiritual idea.
It implies a really deeply spiritual project.
And the New York School poets, initially to me,
and I think to lots of other people,
do not seem like that kind of a poet.
They do not seem spiritual.
They do not seem political.
They do not seem like risk-takers.
But I think they are.
And that's what I'd like to talk about tonight.
So I'm going to play the Creeley for you now.
[AUDIO PLAYBACK]
"Heroes"
In all those stories, the hero is beyond himself
into the next thing, be it those labors of Hercules or Aeneas,
going into death.
I thought the instant of the one humanness in Virgil's plan
of it was that it was, of course, human enough to die,
yet to come back, as he said, "Hoc opus, hic labor est."
That was the Cumaean Sibyl speaking.
This is Robert Creeley, and Virgil is dead
now two thousand years.
Yet Hercules and 'The Aeneid,' yet all that industrious wisdom
lives in the way the mountains and the desert are waiting
for the heroes.
And death also can still propose the old labors.
[END PLAYBACK]