What we talk about when we talk about the New York School

The latter part of September (the days and months blurred together before finally moving!) I participated in an online panel titled:

What We Talk About When We Talk About the New York School: Online Symposium (September 2022): For pandemic-related and other reasons, lots of our members were unable to travel to Paris for our spring symposium. We held an online symposium in late September, in order to hear from some of the poets and scholars in question. The symposium featured poetry readings from Greg Masters and Matt Proctor, and talks from Wojciech Drag, Jane Hertenstein, Susannah Hollister and Emily Setina, Marcella Durand, and Molly Murray, as well as some free-flowing discussion and questions at the end. The programme of talks and readings is attached, and you can watch the event on our website or our Youtube channel.

Though I’m proud of my contribution, I feel as though I could look a less washed out. I did try—I wore make up—I thought about lighting and previewed myself on-camera. Despite all this, I can’t help but see and not hear how badly I did.

My piece dealt with the intersection of flash memoir with the NY School. Indeed, starting with Bernadette Mayer and her project Memories and her poetry experiment Midwinter Day where she chronicled one day in December in 1978. Beginning with awakening and jotting down her dream—indeed, in a footnote by Maggie Nelson in On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint, we have a quote from John Ashbery on his creative process: “I bever have any idea when I sit down to write what is going to happen or how  . . . I tend to start with a few words and phrases that occur to me and that I have copies down on bits of paper especially when falling asleep , or when I wake up in the morning.” Thus, dreams can be the lube for getting the writer moving—to the end of the book a quick dinner, kids to bath and bed, and then she and her husband Lewis Warsh staying up late writing. The experiment includes snippets of dialogue and a slew of mundane details. The stuff of everyday life.

It is this aspect of the NY School poets that I highlighted in my presentation. That James Schuyler and Frank O’Hara referenced/riffed on the quotidian. One may even venture that

The Red Wheelbarrow by William Carlos Williams and The Pulley by George Herbert cast overlooked, lowly tools and lift them up as objects of beauty—perhaps, even sacred.

Take a listen and stay around for the Q & A at the tail-end. Thank you to Rona Cron and Yasmine Shamma for coordinating and continuing to push forward the agenda of the NETWORK FOR NEW YORK SCHOOLSTUDIES and generously including me, a non-academic, in their panel and symposium, a seat at the table.