Memoirous

Bright Invisible: Word Sketches from Great Spruce Head Island a PDF chapbook, This chapbook will appeal to readers of the New York School—particularly fans of James Schuyler and John Ashbery. Great Spruce Head Island has been a source of inspiration for generations of artists and writers. I was invited to GSHI to spend a week walking where Frank O’Hara, Ashbery, and Schuyler walked. Through essays, journal entries, persona letters where I channel James Schuyler, I attempt to experience the island through their eyes. CLICK on image to the right of the page to request *FREE PDF

On August 22, 1969 James Schuyler was reading Boswell’s Life of Johnson , London: Oxford University Press, 1922. 1969 was a particularly stable and fruitful year for Schuyler. As a writer he was making inroads with two publications. Free Espousing Schuler’s first commercially published book of poems came out with Doubleday under the imprint Paris Review Editions.   A Nest of Ninnies the back-and-forth book co-produced by Jimmy and John Asbery. Each wrote alternating chapters, passing the manuscript back and forth over oceans, despite Fullbrights and hospital stays, the loss of friends and friendships for 17 years. I don’t think either thought it would see the light of day. The story if like a long evening of storytelling between friends, friends with wit and intelligence who both know dialogue. A tale derived from anecdotal observations of middle-class suburbia. Published by Dutton it was reviewed by W. H. Auden in the NY Times Book Review—destined to become a minor class...

I’m still working on a hybrid manuscript I started this summer on Great Spruce Head Island on James Schuyler and his connection to the island and the Porter family. In re-reading Just the Thing: Selected Letters of James Schuyler 1951-1991 , I came upon a random footnote. First some context. James Schuyler was crazy. He didn’t start out that way. He was a curious, witty, conversational gay young man. He was a self-taught poet, once serving as a secretary to W. H. Auden at his vacation home on Ischia in Italy. Moving amongst heady circles he associated with renowned poets and artists. Until his breakdown, or series of breakdowns. This was in the days when psychological drugs were still in their infancy. If you were diagnosed as schizophrenic you were sentenced to a life of lithium and being zoned out. No wonder most creatives risked psychosis rather than being medicated. Mostly Schuyler kept his episodes in check. The stability of living with the Porters helped as well as t...

Hello Blog! On the verge of fall and I’m reliving last summer, lost in the manuscript I’m putting together from notes taken on Great Spruce Head Island. Who knew that 7 days would produce such a fount of writing?! And re-arranging. Memories. I have here at my fingertips photos saved to the Google Cloud and all I need to do is search the World Wide Web to pull up a Fairfield painting. It’s all here—yet not. Melancholy sets in as the weather cools, the late season garden fades, colors dropping onto the walkway. Worse is the wind scattering seeds, bending stalks and stems. I’m getting older. When, how does this happen? We say good bye. John Ashbery—I saw you this summer on the path, on the west porch in late afternoon when gold lasered through the leaves and lay slant on wooden planks. You were there in turpentine rags, oils, varnished into this mind. I return, to word sketches. Scenes of Great Spruce Head Island.

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...

POEM AT THE NEW YEAR by John Ashbery   Once, out on the water in the clear, early nineteenth-century twilight, you asked time to suspend its flight. If wishes could beget more than sobs, that would be my wish for you, my darling, my angel. But other principles prevail in this glum haven, don’t they? If that’s what it is. Then the wind fell of its own accord. We went out and saw that it had actually happened. The season stood motionless, alert. How still the drop was on the burr I know not. I come all packaged and serene, yet I keep losing things, I wonder about Australia. Is it anything like Canada? Do pigeons flutter? Is there a strangeness there, to complete the one in me? Or must I relearn my filing system? Can we trust others to indict us who see us only in the evening rush hour and never stop to think? O I was so bright about you, my song bird, once. Now, cattails immolated in the frozen swamp are about all I have time for. The days are so polari...

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...

A new week. A new day. But somehow I am having a hard time shrugging off last week and the election. I am trying to move forward. Winter is coming. When I was younger this might have been the time of year when each week brought something wonderful. Starting with my sister’s birthday in October, followed by Halloween, then my birthday, it was one party after another. Festivities leading up to Thanksgiving and Christmas took over school. I was in choir so we rehearsed for a Christmas program. Industrial arts/home ec was given over to a great selection of craft-making options. My brothers and sisters and I always made some top-notch presents that when we were clearing out Mom and Dad’s last home, an assisted living place we were still unearthing these prizes. That’s tells you either how much they loved junk or how much they loved us. A bit of both. Now—after the passing of my parents, and some of my friends and peers, I’m feeling a bit melancholy about the holidays. Not exactly...

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...