The New York School, In Someone Else’s Words

Every poet wants to be a genius. But the New York School often wanted to be geniuses by not being poets—or by not being any one poet you could staple genius too. Dada and pop art in the visual arts introduced the idea of appropriation or copying as an artistic act or gesture; the genius of Duchamp wasn’t in painting skill, but in recognizing that a urinal could be art; Lichtenstein’s genius was in reproducing comic panels rather than originality. The artist becomes a nexus of appreciation and arrangement rather than the initiating spirit. Genius is in insisting that whatever one does is genius, a tautology that empties genius out and makes it all the more snooty and impregnable.

In this series of essays on the New York School at Splice Today, I’ve discussed Kenneth Koch’s offhand desecrations of William Carlos Williams’ “This Is Just To Say,” and Frank O’Hara’s offhand riff on the headline “Lana Turner has collapsed!” I’ve also mentioned John Ashbery’s “The Dong With the Luminous Nose,” a poem which appropriates and collages lines from other famous poems and presents them, ostentatiously, as Ashbery’s own. And there’s Ashbery poems like “Europe,” which is partially composed of words, phrases, and a whole paragraph from William Le Queux’s Beryl of the Biplane, a 1917 adventure/romance novel about a dashing female airplane pilot. 

I had come across
to the railway from the Great North 
Road, which I had followed up to London.

—is but one example of Le Queux’s transformation into Ashbery immortality.

The ultimate New York School example of this kind of deliberately anti-genius uncreative writing is probably Peter Gizzi’s “Ode: Salute to the New York School, 1950-1970.” The poem is a cento—originally a Latin form in which authors would create a poem entirely from the lines of other poems.

Gizzi’s cento, like the classical form, is a hundred lines, each taken in this case from works by New York School poets, famous and less so, in print or out. An index at the conclusion provides a list of sources, from Ashbery to Ted Berrigan, Ron Padgett, Clark Collidge, Aram Saroyan, Bernadette Mayer, Anne Waldman, and on and on.

The poem is arranged alphabetically, so after Gizzi chooses lines, their juxtaposition is purely mechanical. You can read the poem as a kind of curatorial appreciation of individual utterances, or as a deliberately random meaning-making confluence. 

I bit my lip as he scraped my semen off the floor
I’d give a bunch of bananas for a sniff of your behind, oh yes!

Those are two silly lines separately (by Tom Veitch and Tom Clark.) But put them together and they become a bizarre erotic dialogue, as Gizzi gets the two Toms to speak one to another of their forbidden desires for floors, bananas, lips and behinds, oh yes. The sexual frisson is fun because its stochastic, unexpected, transgressive; they didn’t know they were saying such things, nor to who, and yet now they’re entangled. 

Another example:

Fond memories of childhood, and the pleasant orange trolleys
For the first time in many years Kafka’s mother enters the room to kiss him good night

Kenneth Koch’s semi-confessional childhood reminiscence in the first line turns into a scene in Kafka’s early life in the second (by Ron Padgett). Personal memory gets shuffled off to someone else’s consciousness, so you have to ask whose head are we in: Koch’s? Padgett’s? Gizzi’s? Kafka’s? Whose trolley did we get on, and whose dream are we riding?

Gizzi, speaking for and as and through the New York School, is scattering single consciousness and genius into scandalous sexiness and indeterminate identity. The effect is (in part), camp, and that’s (in part) related to the queerness of many (though not all) of the New York school poet. The poem uses assertion of self as a disavowal of self, and the deliberate/accidental careening wink of innuendo replicates the dynamics of the closet, with its open secrets and discreetly/not discreetly signaling. Sexuality is fluid and opaque, not least because you don’t know who wrote which words, necessarily, and because who desires what and who changes from line to line.

The New York School’s embrace of collage, appropriation, and collaboration also remakes or rethinks the idea of poetic genius. Gizzi’s cento is an appreciation and celebration of the brilliance of his peers. But it treats that brilliance as a collective endeavor—one created en masse, and open to re-mixings and amendment. Gizzi’s a bibliographer honoring his forebearers, a peer working with his peers, and shamelessly stealing other people’s words and ideas.

Rather than seeing poetry as a lonely agonistic struggle against the dead weight of the past (per Harold Bloom), poetry here—and in much New York School writing— is a game that anyone can pick up, reshuffle, and claim as their own. Or as Gizzi concludes in lines from Ron Padgett and Barbara Guest, carefully selected and fertilized:

You select something small like a pimple and quick as a wink that’s all there is
You think of your art which has become important like a plow on the flat land

The trivial is there to find and pick up; the art is there to turn over. Grow your own thing, especially if your own thing is someone else’s genius.