WEBVTT

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Hi, thanks for all coming out.

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This sounds OK, right?

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Yeah, just let me
know if it gets weird.

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I tend to bob and weave
when I'm up here, so--

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I'm going to do a bunch
of different things.

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And, perhaps in the spirit
of the New York School,

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this will be a little
bit fragmented.

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And we'll swerve around
a bit before we actually

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get to the point, which,
for me, is actually

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reading some of the poems by the
primary figures in the New York

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School, that core group of Frank
O'Hara, John Ashbery, Kenneth

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Koch, and James Schuyler.

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But I was just
thinking, this quote

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that Cybele had mentioned
in this piece by Tony.

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My take on the New York
School was essentially that,

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in the context of 1950s American
culture and social life,

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that the kind of playfulness
and improvisational quality,

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the sort of sense of
immediacy in their poems,

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the sense of dailiness,
and the sense of humor,

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the comedy of the
poems represented

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a kind of risk-taking
that hadn't really

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been seen on that scale in
American poetry previously.

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And much of the
legacy of the New York

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School over the last 50
years has been tremendously

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important to American poetry.

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One of the things that
Tony says in his piece

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is that, if you had asked many
of the peers of those poets,

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people such as Robert Lowell
and Elizabeth Bishop and Jarrell

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and Berryman, how they felt
about the New York School,

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they wouldn't have said that
they took it very seriously.

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And yet, in some ways,
the New York School poets

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have become the dominant
poets of that time.

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In retrospect, they now
seem like, in some ways,

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to have eclipsed some of those
people who, at that moment,

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were the giants of
American poetry.

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I came to the New York
School rather late.

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They were not the
poets who I was

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taught while I was in the MFA
program, to any big degree.

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I mean, there were a few.

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I had made contact
with Schuyler's work

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early on while I was here.

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But I think also by inclination,
it wasn't the kind of work

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that I gravitated towards.

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Tony and a number of other
people in the program

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were really influenced
by that work.

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And I sort of resisted
it in odd ways.

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I think partly because the
playfulness and the humor

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just didn't seem right
for me, as a poet.

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And I couldn't figure
out what to do with it.

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I liked it.

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But I just couldn't
figure out how

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to take it into my own work.

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And then, somehow, in, I
think, the early 1990s,

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I really connected with the
work of the great Slovene

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poet, Tomaz Salamun.

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And Salamun, who's
somewhat older

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than I am, he's probably
close to 70 now,

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had been very influenced
by the New York School,

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oddly, among a
set of influences,

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O'Hara in particular.

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And I think that was a little
doorway for me to go through,

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a sort of side
entrance, actually.

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A sort of indirect
way, it was sort of

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like a European highway,
of sorts, back to America.

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And since then, I've
read them and taught them

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rather consistently.

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And they've changed my work
in really significant ways.

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And made a lot of
things available,

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a lot of values, poetic values,
available to me that I think

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were not previously available.

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So I'm going to start
with a couple of preludes,

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actually, to this conversation.

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By the way, if you
guys want to interrupt,

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this is not like
a formal lecture.

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And if you have a question
while I'm talking,

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feel free to raise your hand.

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Because there will be a question
and answer period immediately

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following, but I'm
perfectly happy,

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if somebody has some urgent
thing that they want to--

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or something they want
clarified, to entertain that.

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So I'm going to play
a recording of a poem

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by Robert Creeley, who was not
a New York School poet, who

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was a member of what is commonly
referred to as the Black

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Mountain School.

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There were all these schools
proliferating at that time

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in American poetry.

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But the Black
Mountain poets were

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what I like to think of as
allies of the New York School

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and of the Beats.

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And so that's a continuum.

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Those three groups
form a continuum,

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I think, in American poetry, a
kind of bohemian alternative,

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in today's terminology,
a kind of indie attitude

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towards the mainstream.

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But this poem by Creeley
is called, "Heroes."

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And it is a kind of ars poetica.

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It's a poem about the art.

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And one of the
things that it raises

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is, I think, a very
traditional idea.

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And an idea that's expressed
in lots of different ways

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by different poets, which
is that the heroic in poetry

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is called forth by
the fact of death.

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That death is the summoner, and
that we respond in some way.

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The risks that we
take in poetry are

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a response to our mortality.

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Garcia Lorca's
idea of the duende,

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for instance, is another
way of thinking about this.

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Frost says that
your job as a poet

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is to put yourself in danger
so that you can be saved,

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sort of another version of it.

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So this is a very old idea,
and Creeley re-frames it a bit.

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And this poem is
called, "Heroes."

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And it's on the handout.

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There is a slight quote from
the Latin of Virgil's "Aeneid"

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in it.

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The line is, "Hoc
opus, hic labor est."

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And that is a
phrase that is taken

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from "The Aeneid,"
at a point where

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Aeneas has to go down to hell
to find his father, Anchises.

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And he is talking, as Creeley
says, to the Cumaean Sibyl

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and getting advice about this.

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And what the Sibyl
tells him is--

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the full quote is this.

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"The way down to hell is easy.

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The doors of death stand
open night and day.

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But to retrace
one's steps, to find

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one's way back to
where they breathe

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air, that is the problem.

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That is the hard task."

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So that phrase in
the Creeley poem

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is translated as,
"That is the problem.

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That is the hard task."

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And so, this calling
back from death

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to put yourself in danger,
as Frost says in a poem,

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but then to be called
back into the living

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and to save something
out of that.

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If not yourself, then a sense
of the motion of one's soul,

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I think, in time.

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And I was very
interested that this very

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longstanding and traditional
idea in poetry, in relationship

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to the New York School poets--
because the New York School

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poets do not seem initially
to be doing that at all.

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And this idea of Creeley's
and of all these other people

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is a deeply spiritual idea.

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It implies a really
deeply spiritual project.

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And the New York School
poets, initially to me,

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and I think to lots
of other people,

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do not seem like
that kind of a poet.

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They do not seem spiritual.

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They do not seem political.

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They do not seem
like risk-takers.

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But I think they are.

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And that's what I'd like
to talk about tonight.

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So I'm going to play
the Creeley for you now.

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[AUDIO PLAYBACK]

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"Heroes"

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In all those stories, the
hero is beyond himself

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into the next thing, be it those
labors of Hercules or Aeneas,

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going into death.

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I thought the instant of the
one humanness in Virgil's plan

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of it was that it was, of
course, human enough to die,

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yet to come back, as he said,
"Hoc opus, hic labor est."

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That was the Cumaean
Sibyl speaking.

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This is Robert Creeley,
and Virgil is dead

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now two thousand years.

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Yet Hercules and 'The Aeneid,'
yet all that industrious wisdom

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lives in the way the mountains
and the desert are waiting

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for the heroes.

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And death also can still
propose the old labors.

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[END PLAYBACK]