New York school

Yesterday, during a poetry reading at Tibor de Nagy Gallery for Jane Freilicher, “Painter among Poets,” Lawrence Schwartzwald photographed Freilicher, now 88, gazing at the iconic image taken in 1952 by photographer Walter Silver of her and John Ashbery at Tibor de Nagy. (Photographs should not be reproduced without consent of the photographer.)

[»»] Thomas Fink: David Shapiro’s ‘Possibilist’ Poetry
[»»] David Shapiro (in conversation with John Tranter, 1984)
[»»] David Shapiro: Six poems (from A Burning Interior, 2000)
     [»»] The Weak Poet
     [»»] Light Bulb

A completely gorgeous performance of his poem "The Circus," by Kenneth Koch. He'd already written a poem called "The Circus" years earlier, and now this is a poem about thinking about having written that poem - a memory of writing that poem, its circumstances, and then some digressing thoughts about circumstances. New York School epitomized.

Many thanks to Curtis Fox, who featured this poem--and this terrific recording--in a recent episode of the podcast, "Poetry off the Shelf."

I met Dan Saxon through Penn - through the Writers House; he graduated from Penn in 1960. His son Jon was my student years ago, and his daughter Jerilyn and her husband Brian are members of the Writers House Board. Dan has shown interest in what we do at the Writers House for years - attends all our New York events and has been to the House itself many times. It was perhaps during our second or third meeting that Dan mentioned he'd had a connection to the avant-garde poetry scene of the early '60s in New York. Finally, a few weeks ago, I arranged for Dan to come to my office, which doubles as a recording studio, and we talked for an hour or so. A new PennSound podcast is a somewhat edited portion of that longer conversation.

For my survey of modern & contemporary American poetry (English 88) I once (1999) made a recording of a really basic mini-lecture on three fundamental types of New York School poems: anti-narrative, non-narrative, pastiche. The whole thing is plausible enough, although obviously there are more "types" and much more to say about pastiche. Recently we converted a RealAudio file of this recording and produced a new mp3, which I've linked to "chapter 8" of the course. So here is that old talk as an mp3.