So I think going to leave it here,
and we have overextended ourselves.
But if people have questions, I'll be happy to take them,
or not, as the case may be.
I'm really glad that you mentioned
the importance of Apollinaire to the New York School.
I don't think O'Hara would exist in the form he's
in without Apollinaire.
Do you see a specific poem or poems in O'Hara's poem,
like the one that you start with,
seems to come out of the poem, "Little blue car,
little red car."
Yeah, there's that poem about going to Deauville.
And also, I mean, "Zone," for all of these poets,
"Zone" is a very long poem by Apollinaire
which has been much translated by various people,
and influenced various people in very, very different ways.
I mean, Merwin in some ways, Ginsberg
is influenced in a completely different way.
Ginsberg has a great poem-- so the whole,
Apollinaire's Alcools is one of the great foundational
documents of the 20th century.
And it has a wonderful sort of spirit to it.
I mean, the other thing about all of these poets
is that-- the New York School poets, and Apollinaire
and many of these French writers, were urban poets.
They wanted to celebrate the urban.
And in a sense, American poetry of the mid-1950s, mainstream
poetry, is not a poetry that's capable of doing that,
or interested in doing it.
Much of it's still very much located
in a kind of English pastoral tradition,
or very influenced by that lyric pastoral tradition.
And so, again, part of the risk taking of the project
is simply saying, hey, this is urban life.
It's not ugly to us.
The cities were viewed as dangerous places,
increasingly so.
The people who lived in them, who slept in them,
were weird and strange.
So yeah, so definitely, Apollinaire, for sure.
It's a tiny point, but when Creeley read "Heroes,"
he added the word "all" in all those stories in "Heroes."
And I didn't know whether he just
did what we all sometimes do when we're reading a poem,
or whether it was a word he took out
and this is the final version.
I think that this--
I'm not sure where I got this.
I do remember, I got this from a website, a blog
that Tom Clark runs, and just kind of copied it.
But I think that he must have typed it in wrong, because it
is actually all those stories.
Yeah, that's the accurate thing.
Just a comment to sort of tie a circle here.
I love what you said, again, death
is the summoner of poetry.
I believe that's true.
And coming to the Koch poem, sort of two things
are outside the poem that informed
my sense of the poem, one, that he is dying as he writes this.
But the other is the way Delmore Schwartz
dies, because Delmore Schwartz does not die a pretty death.
He dies impoverished in a hotel room
and he's lying there for God knows
how long, a week or something, before anyone finds him.
It's a terrible death of a poet who was celebrated,
supposed to be the superstar [INAUDIBLE]..
Humboldt's Gift, the great novel,
was based on Delmore Schwartz.
So it's a tragic poetic life.
So those two things outside of the poem
really make me feel the last line.
"People say, yes everyone is dying,
but here read this happy book on the subject."
The American way, come on, it's no help, it's just death.
But then the move, "But here, read this happy book
on the subject, not Delmore."
It's just like it's Koch's way of seeing,
being present too, through the person of Delmore,
rather than saying, I must raise my own death,
Delmore becomes the figure through which his presence,
what is occurring happens.
That last line it's just beautiful.
Yeah, the sort of volta of when the turn takes place.
"Not Delmore, not that rueful man,"
I mean, it's just a great example of how
moving to a very different syntax and sentence phrasing
suddenly changes the tonal value.
And there's so much going on at subtonal levels
and in all of these poems.
But in this one in particular-- and yeah,
I liked what you said.
I mean, there was a sort of honesty--
one of the virtues of the New York School
is a sort of honesty, a sort of commitment not
to achieve transcendence through language
cheaply, but to look at something
and to see what it is in itself, and what it has to do with you.
And I, too, like what he does with Schwartz,
who was a really tragic figure.
But in a way, he treats them as a sort of--
he's almost like a slapstick figure.
There's something really sort of odd, and kind of wonderful,
I mean, you can feel the way in which Koch
is kind of relating him to Chaplin, and Buster Keaton.
And I love that, because the way that Schwartz
has been treated largely in--
Schwartz has been written about by a lot of people.
John Berryman has a series of poems, "In the Dream Songs"
that are about Schwartz.
They're very moving, but they're memorializing
this guy in some way.
And even Humboldt's Gift by Saul Bellow
there's a sort of grandness to this character.
And I like the way Koch goes back to this moment in memory,
and he really brings it forward.
You feel the image of this moment walking--
this sort of-- it's so silly in a way, the poem begins.
"Who was my teacher at Harvard.
Did not wear overcoat saying to me
as we walked across the yard, cold brittle autumn
is, you should be wearing overcoat.
I said, you are not wearing overcoat."
There's almost like a parent-child thing
going on there, I think.
This poem is from the last book that Koch wrote, which
I'm forgetting the title of.
Does anybody remember it?
The book before that is an incredible book.
It's one of the great books of the last 20 years,
and it is called New Addresses.
All the poems are odes.
Some of them are dedicated to decades of his life, to my 20s,
to my 30s.
Some of them are dedicated to concepts like, I don't know,
to ephemerality, or to the moral universe.
Some of them are addressing--
there's a great one called "To Marijuana,"
and he explains why he doesn't write when he's high on pot,
and what it does to him, this incredible image of him
throwing his glasses into a fireplace trying
to impress some woman.
So that book is just the book of a lifetime,
and I would urge you all to read it.
Yeah so, one more?
[INAUDIBLE] reading in two days, so this
is kind of a pre-reading.
You're cheating.
I am cheating.
That's not in my contract.
I actually can't do--
[LAUGHTER]
I know it's late.
Obviously, or maybe not, this New York School
has influenced your own writing, and also
the influence of the art of the period influenced
their writing.
Is that something also with your own writing?
As far as that art?
Yeah, in particular the work of Philip Guston.
Guston is a very interesting figure in the American art
world, because he started off as one of these action painters.
And he's one of the major figures
among the abstract expressionists, Klein,
de Kooning, Pollock, Guston, there's
somebody I'm leaving out.
Rauschenberg's actually just five years or 10 years later.
Rauschenberg is part of that Larry Rivers, Red Grooms
thing that is the transition into pop art
that is slightly reacting to the grandeur and heroism
of the abstract expressionists.
And all of these people, again, knew each other.
But Guston, his early paintings, they're beautiful,
I mean, really, really beautiful paintings.
To see them in person, they're incredibly textured,
they're just layered and sort of amazing ways.
They're the most subtle, I think,
of all of the action painters.
And then in the mid-60s, he just smashed it.
He smashed his style.
It's one of the rare examples of somebody
breaking their style totally.
And he started doing these very cartoony paintings
and drawings.
And they're filled with a lot of the stuff that
actually is in a lot of the New York School poems.
It's crapola, Philip Roth has this great phrase,
it's like the crapola of American life, that's
what we should be getting into literature.
And you feel like they're just nails that somebody
has hammered down into a board, boots that
are piled up in a big pile.
They're very strange and put together an odd way.
They're very-- in some ways, they're cartoony
but they're also realistic.
So when he started showing them in, I don't know, 1967, 68,
he had a big show in New York, and he actually left town.
He went to Venice because he knew
there was going to be this horrifying reaction to it.
And The New York Times, Hilton Kramer was then
the art critic for The New York Times,
the headline of that review was, "A Mandarin Pretending
to be a Stumble Bum."
And it was a vicious, incredibly--
and Guston says, painters would come up to me
and say, why are you doing this?
He said, I just could not do this thing anymore,
which I thought was false, in some ways, to my experience.
And so I had to do something really ugly.
And then in the act of doing it, he
finds some incredible beauty in it.
Those paintings, in particular, I've
been thinking in the last several years a lot
about Philip Guston, and writing a bit about him.
And I'm friends in Boston with a guy named William Corbett
who's--
Jimmy Schuyler's he edited Jimmy Schuyler's letters, actually.
But he Corbett was close friends with Guston,
and so I loved talking to him about him.
And there's a great book that came out
this past year called--
it's just a collection of Guston's interviews,
studio visits that were recorded.
And there's a great interview with Clark Coolidge,
the poet Clark Coolidge, who actually
put the whole thing together.
And that book is the most amazing book about process
that I've ever read.
It's incredible, some of the stuff that he says
is just boggling-- and especially
in relationship to this huge kind of change in his work.
But yeah, I mean, I live with a visual artist,
and I've always been friends with painters,
and so in some sense, yeah.
I mean, I really value that time in so many ways.
So much of that time in art--
Rauschenberg, just an incredible--
like the great Rauschenberg show at MoMA--
not MoMA, the Met about five or six years ago, it was boggling.
You just feel like, oh my God, somebody's inventing something.
Very few of us invent something new,
and you just feel like in a lot of those people that--
and so it has the energy of American-- a certain part
of American life too, that at that time.
So I think we can go.
Yeah, thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you so much, David.
That was a great, great treat.
I wish we could have you come back
and talk about the New York School every week.
I apologize for it being kind of hurried,
and I think one of these days, I'll
actually learn a lesson here.
All right everyone, come back on Thursday.
Yeah.
Thanks.