Tag Archives: new york school

Circuit Dice Coffee Dramaturge

Wikipedia Poem, 875

atropos

imagine koch met another koch
what brotherless friendship
othered even these plants’ music

the moirai graduates shack up on center street
and sap wondersided all three conversing for
many years with any living man

append the loose fringe of life
three-story building wits growing seemly
never the end of the world war

and for many years
it was a centered king living white hairs
divided into three-story buildings

and for many years
it was a quarrel
overrule eating anyone

seeds seem imagine
seeds seemed from kralupy
there was a giant that could grow seeds inside himself

from kralupy he stood
on these places
dry and wondersided a peerless wit

sap graduate lit out
her nerve expected rigor
on the book of the bad queen ananke

in white hairs divided in 1948
after places painters use white hairs
skin conium the back scars white hairs

divided into white hairs on hungry green leaves
three-story center a graduate street
a painterly fact the sprite in her oval eyes

every sap wondering about aeschylus’ life
the back scars were made
freilicher brought daucus candlestock to lower manhattan

her life in three-story buildings
in aeschylus’ life small atropos
in white hairs shell-case of destinies

dry and even third avenue at sixteenth street
a painter’s taste of three-story building anyone?
seems imaginable so much beautiful writing

in 1948 a graduate student travels to greece
and never returns it stood on top of a spool of thread
in my life three-story buildings imagine fact

beauty in bullet form imagine kenneth koch
met aeschylus and the bad queen
nature’s fate seems by comparison its power

fact: the case of places
dry and very small
atropos in our life

he powers
the center
of hope

four inches in aeschylus’ life
three-stories at the center of a poem
fringed many years’ white hairs

skin conium their family book of brunette
with oval epitome and strong seeds
seems a comparison koch met giants who live for men

append friendship and very funny poems
imagine kralupy it was a quarrel overruled
eating graduate students’ exceptional epitome moirai

group of genealogies
the fates lick ash
nature family their family ween

ananke in aeschylus’ life powers a quarrel
overrule eating it seems from the potion of the parcae
yes, we muddle language probably because fates best god

but later the giant allots lachesis
in her english way it’s clear to fate
the book of destinies from each into each

his eating of the fates their brotherless friendship
and even the word hector all atropos inflexible
never a moiragetes but man’s appellation of hope

four inches long
seeds seeds seeds
dry and euripides’ poison hemlock

conium that centers fact
the end of places
in this dry medical form

Fairmount School of Polyrhythms

Wikipedia Poem, No. 738

collapse-v2-sm

         the reflecto neveryone and 
the 
fairmount 
      school of polyrhythms i always meant to take 
    it boils in the 
biplane dopple overheadaches toward an old 
      white school of the always approaches 
     toward teterboro 
the 
reflecto 
neveryone and blinks 
all 
overhead 
reflecto 
       never that meant 
         fail 
   fail 
fail fail fail 
fail 
      fail fail fail 
      fail 
      fail fail fail 
fail fail fail fail 
       fail fail 
fail fail fail 
fail fail fail fail 
        fail 
   fail fail fail fail fail fail 
       fail fail fail fail 
fail fail fail 
fail fail 
fail fail fail fail fail 
fail 
        fail fail 
       fail fail 
    fail fail 
fail

‘What’ by James Schuyler

Schuyler

What’s in those pills?
After lunch and I can
hardly keep my eyes
open. Oh, for someone to
talk small talk with.
Even a dog would do.

Why are they hammering
iron outside? And what
is that generator whose
fierce hum comes in
the window? What is a
poem, anyway.

The daffodils, the heather
and the freesias all
speak to me. I speak
back, like St Francis
and the wolf of Gubbio.

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Source: Schuyler, James. Collected Poems. New York: The Nooday Press, 1998. Print.

John Ashbery, 1927-2017

ash

“Fear of Death” by John Ashbery

What is it now with me
And is it as I have become?
Is there no state free from the boundry lines
Of before and after? The window is open today

And the air pours in with piano notes
In its skirts, as though to say, “Look, John,
I’ve brought these and these”—that is,
A few Beethovens, some, Brahmses,

A few choice Poulenc notes. . . . Yes,
It is being free again, the air, it has to keep coming back
Because that’s all it’s good for.
I want to stay with it out of fear

That keeps me from walking up certain steps,
Knocking at certain doors, fear of growing old
Alone, and of finding no one at the evening end
Of the path except another myself

Nodding a curt greeting: “Well, you’ve been awhile
But now we’re back together, which is what counts.”
Air in My path, you could shorten this,
But the breeze has dropped, and silence is the last word.

“be frank (if you can’t be frank, be john and kenneth).”

be frank

From “The Last Avant-Garde” by David Lehman:

[Frank] O’Hara’s ironically self-deprecating tone was much imitated. “I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love,” he wrote. He kiddingly called his own poems “the by-product of exhibitionism” and wrote constantly about his daily life. It was O’Hara who initiated the policy of dropping names in his poems, a habit that became a New York School trademark. O’Hara peppered his work with references to his painter friends — [Jane] Freilicher, [Larry] Rivers, Mike Goldberg, Joan Mitchell, Norman Bluhm, Grace Hartigan, Al Leslie — with perfect indifference to whether readers would recognize their names. That indifference argued a certain confidence in the poet’s ability to make the details of his autobiography-in-progress so irresistible that the reader feels flattered to be regarded as the poet’s intimate. O’Hara s celebration of friendship in poetry represented an ideal that second-generation New York School poets, such as Bill Berkson, Ted Berrigan, Joe Brainard, Ron Padgett, and Anne Waldman, emulated in the 1960s. Everyone wanted to be, as [Ted] Berrigan put it, “perfectly frank.” James Schuyler has a marvelous rift in a letter to Berkson urging him to “be frank (if you can’t be frank, be john and kenneth). Say,” Schuyler continues, “maybe our friends’ names would make good verbs: to kenneth: emit a loud red noise; to ashbery- cast a sidewise salacious glance while holding a champagne glass by the stem; to kenward: glide from the room and not make waves; to brainard, give a broad and silent chuckle; to maehiz, shower with conversational spit drops–but I said friends, didn’t I–cancel the last. To berkson and to schuyler I leave to you.”

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Source: Lehman, David. The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets. New York: Doubleday, 1998, print, p. 73.

“To Psychoanalysis” by Kenneth Koch

I took the Lexington Avenue subway
To arrive at you in your glory days
Of the Nineteen Fifties when we believed
That you could solve any problem
And I had nothing but disdain
For “self-analysis” “group analysis” “Jungian analysis”
“Adlerian analysis” the Karen Horney kind
All—other than you, pure Freudian type—
Despicable and never to be mine!
I would lie down according to your
Dictates but not go to sleep.
I would free-associate. I would say whatever
Came into my head. Great
Troops of animals floated through
And certain characters like Picasso and Einstein
Whatever came into my head or my heart
Through reading or thinking or talking
Came forward once again in you. I took voyages
Down deep unconscious rivers, fell through fields,
Cleft rocks, went on through hurricanes and volcanoes.
Ruined cities were as nothing to me
In my fantastic advancing. I recovered epochs,
Gold of former ages that melted in my hands
And became toothpaste or hazy vanished citadels. I dreamed
Exclusively for you. I was told not to make important decisions.
This was perfect. I never wanted to. On the Har-Tru surface of my emotions
Your ideas sank in so I could play again.
But something was happening. You gave me an ideal
Of conversation—entirely about me
But including almost everything else in the world.
But this wasn’t poetry it was something else.
After two years of spending time in you
Years in which I gave my best thoughts to you
And always felt you infiltrating and invigorating my feelings
Two years at five days a week, I had to give you up.
It wasn’t my idea. “I think you are nearly through,”
Dr. Loewenstein said. “You seem much better.” But, Light!
Comedy! Tragedy! Energy! Science! Balance! Breath!
I didn’t want to leave you. I cried. I sat up.
I stood up. I lay back down. I sat. I said
But I still get sore throats and have hay fever.
“And some day you are going to die. We can’t cure everything.”
Psychoanalysis! I stood up like someone covered with light
As with paint, and said Thank you.
It was only one moment in a life, my leaving you.
But once I walked out, I could never think of anything seriously
For fifteen years without also thinking of you. Now what have we become?
You look the same, but now you are a past You.
That’s Fifties clothing you’re wearing. You have some Fifties ideas
Left—about sex, for example. What shall we do? Go walking?
We’re liable to have a slightly frumpy look,
But probably no one will notice—another something I didn’t know then.

paculum-spec2-sm

Source:

Koch, Kenneth. The Collected Poems of Kenneth Koch. New York: Knopf, 2007. Print, p. 609.

Wikipedia Poem, No. 318

wiki318-sm

For John, James and Frank

michael 1985
request box 10
mccann chris 1988

request box 1 folder 7
writings of ninnies
request of series

to schuyler
and curio-position
included in boxes 1957-1990

series
request box 2 folder 13
final pages

corbett william 1981
request of books and content
poem ned

request box 20
my cat
found art

types of mildreds
fir modeling
pictorials in boxes art foundation

herald helps references contact
patient paint of modern art 1980
request box 1 folder 6

crystal liters
scope and review
found typescript

little clark 1957-1968
request box 4 folder 1
bill 1966 request box 10