Memoirous

June 30, 1974 for Jane and Joe Hazan Let me tell you that this weekend Sunday morning in the country fills my soul with tranquil joy: the dunes beyond the pond beyond the humps of bayberry – my favorite shrub (today, at least) – are silent as a mountain range: such a subtle profile against a sky that goes from dawn to blue. The roses stir, the grapevine at one end of the deck shakes and turns its youngest leaves so they show pale and flower-like. A redwing blackbird pecks at the grass; another perches on a bush. Another way, a millionaire’s white chateau turns its flank to catch the risen sun. No other houses, except this charming one, alive with paintings, plants and quiet. I haven’t said a word. I like to be alone with friends. To get up to this morning view and eat poached eggs and extra toast with Tiptree Goosberry Preserve (green) -and coffee, milk, no sugar. Jane said she heard the freeze-dried kind is healthier when we went shopping yesterday and she and John bought crude blu...

The Autobiography of Charles Darwin and Selected Letters , edited by Francis Darwin, New York: Dover Publications, 1958. (First published in 1892.) Schuyler had a New Year’s Day tradition of going to the Hazan’s (Jane Freilicher)—in fact one of his last Diary entries talks about getting dressed to go over to their soiree. On January 1, 1968 he wrote about starting Darwin’s autobiography. This notation eventually turned into the poem, “Empathy and New Year”. Here is a snippet: Got coffee and started reading Darwin: so modest, so innocent, so pleased at the surprise that he should grow up to be him. How grand to begin a new year with a new writer you really love. It is the intimate simplicity that I love about Schuyler’s poems. I am given a glimpse into the interior of someone living generations past and dwelling in a landscape foreign to me. It is the mundane details that give me a landing place, a space to inhabit. I feel solidly anchored in New York City la...

at Great Spruce Head Island Just last Friday I was thinking: We won’t have John Ashbery with us too much longer. Then came the news . . . https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/03/arts/john-ashbery-dead-prize-winning-poet.html I cannot describe how this feels. I can count now on one hand the number of poets that might be described as belonging to the New York School or even the Second Generation that are still with us. John Ashbery’s passing closes a circle. All this as I’m reading and re-reading James Schuyler’s diary, letters—many citations and addressed to John Ashbery. This summer I spent a week at Great Spruce Head Island and visited the tennis courts where he played, walked the path from the boat house to the big house that he must have trod, swam the coves he most likely swam in—during a vital and sunny part of his life. As I Googled him last Friday and stared into images of a very old Ashbery I was reminded of that young man who drove with Jane Freilicher to Mexico, w...

A few posts ago I announced that I have been awarded a residency on Great Spruce Head Island, once the vacation home of Fairfield Porter who hosted numerous characters from the New York School of painters and poets, namely James Schuyler who had a room reserved at both the Maine and Southampton home of the Porters. Fairfield Porter was an artist that only seemed to grow in importance after his death—like so many artists and writers. While alive the kind of art he pursued had no purchase, no level footing amongst Abstract Expressionism. Jackson Pollack was an acquaintance and neighbor of Fairfield Porter on Long Island (as was Willem de Kooning)—yet the two were worlds apart. Firstly, he was viewed as a hobbyist. This was mostly due to the fact that he owned an island. He came from a wealthy family and in truth didn’t have to work or earn money. Yet he lived relatively modestly. Among the Bohemian crowd he circulated with, he was a bit of a dad, okay, a bisexual experiment...

As readers of this blog will know—I have an obsession with Frank O’Hara and the poets of The New York School. I don’t know why and I don’t spend much time wondering about it either. But what I was thinking about today, this first day of September, one of the most fabulous summers on record, was that the NY School, Frank et al always seem to represent a lightness, a summer-ish-ness (though my boy James Schuyler also has many great fall and winter poems— see “ Korean Mums ” for example). Maybe it is because many of their poems are about friends and being with friends and that easy camaraderie that existed among the poets and painters that inhabited the NY School (which readers of this blog will know was not actually a school). From there I began to muse about the common muse, one that at least three of the major posts of the NY School claimed to have inspired them. The poets muse was a painter: Jane Freilicher. Jane played muse to Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, and James Schuyl...