Memoirous

Hey all you readers (both of you) I’ve been tapped to sit on a Zoom panel for this, the inaugural debut meeting of the Network for New York School Studies (NNYSS). Why? You might ask. Yeah, I know, me too  Well, it began in 2019 (actually much earlier, but for now let’s stick with 2019). There was a call for papers for the symposium in Paris and because, of course, I’d already written some stuff about my 2017 trip to Great Spruce Head Island and because I’d continued to do some research into topics aroused by that visit, I submitted a paper. It was accepted in Dec of 2019. My recollection—because, understandably a lifetime has passed since then—is that I confirmed at least I’d Skype in or something to deliver the paper via online, with, perhaps, the idea, I might also go to the symposium, which was definitely PUT ON HOLD when Corona virus was declared a major worldwide pandemic. Then lockdown, etc. So as I was browsing in my browser in February, I saw that the conference is back on...

An example of how to craft a simple, mundane flash, make a list Little-Known Facts about People BY  JOE BRAINARD           Did you know that Kenneth Koch's wife Janice used to be an airplane pilot? Once she had to make an emergency landing on a highway.           When Kenward Elmslie was a kid he wanted to be a tap dancer. Did you know that Kenward's grandfather was Joseph Pulitzer?          Kenward once told me that Jane Russell is a dyke.          Andy Warhol wanted to be a tap dancer when he was a kid too.          D. D. Ryan wanted to be a ballerina.                     Did you know that Pat Padgett was Ted Berrigan's girlfriend for years before she married Ron?          Ron Padgett and I were in the same 1st grade class together...

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...

I’ve discovered a great blog called Locus Solus: The New York School of Poets . Andrew Epstein, an Assoicate Professor in the English Department at Florida State University Tallahassee, Florida authors it. A lot of his research and writing centers upon the New York School of Poets. He has authored Beautiful Enemies: Friendship and Postwar American Poetry  (Oxford University Press), which focuses on Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, and Amiri Baraka, and a second book,  Attention Equals Life: The Pursuit of the Everyday in Contemporary Poetry and Culture , Oxford University Press (in July 2016). I should never be surprised at how wide the circle of friends and acquaintances were—the NY School reached into the emerging youth culture of the time and informed art on many levels. So, unsurprisingly, there is a connection between the NY School and the late Leonard Cohen. Cohen was 82, Frank O’Hara would have been 90, Keneth Koch 91, Jane Freilicher 92, and James Schu...

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...

February--and this has been the second worst month of 2014 for weather, the other being last month. But today is Friday--and for that I bring you a glimmer of sunshine: February by James Schuyler, from Selected Poems A chimney, breathing a little smoke. The sun, I can't see making a bit of pink I can't quite see in the blue. The pink of five tulips at five p.m. on the day before March first. The green of the tulip stems and leaves like something I can't remember, finding a jack-in-the-pulpit a long time ago and far away. Why it was December then and the sun was on the sea by the...

I’ve often dreamed of having a patron, someone to champion me and my work. There have been many famous mentorships between established artists or those prominent in the field and those struggling for recognition. Even within social networks (I’m not referring to Twitter here or Facebook) such as the New York School, the circle of poets and visual artists who met socially at taverns and each other’s apartments or summered on Fire Island together, there was mutual encouragement and camaraderie. But to be honest, I sort of fail big-time at networking. It’s like I just can’t step over a perceived hump. What might help is becoming inebriated or high, but that also isn’t in my personality make-up. So I stand there like a lug, the proverbial observer. Not a bad thing for a writer—just not helpful in promoting one’s work. So yes, I sit around fantasizing that one day my prince will come. To be discovered. Of course, and this goes back again to networking, you have to put yours...