Several bloggers (Jordan Davies, Jonathan Mayhew, Henry Gould) take exception to my association of the New York School v.1.0 with Auden & with that association having conditioned their reception by certain institutions, particularly the trade publishing houses. Hey, guys, that’s not an attack on the NYS, and far more of a comment on reception than on writing. Where I sometimes think that Cal Lowell at his very best had the potential to write like Frank O’Hara on Quaaludes*, Auden, as they say, had serious chops. & thank you, Kasey, for coming to the defense of my “salvageable insight.”

 

Also, to be accurate, I can’t & don’t take credit for “school of quietude” – that phrase was coined by Edgar Allen Poe. In the 1840s, Poe was caught up in the very same debate over whether American literature was British writing writ small or something altogether different when Henry Theodore Tuckerman rejected “The Tell-Tale Heart” with the admonition that Poe should “condescend to furnish more quiet articles.” That adjective did not sit so well with Poe.**

 

Because it was originally received as a break with the previous New American traditions, langpo’s own interest in & indebtedness to various aspects of the New American Poetry of the 1950s and ‘60s has not always been acknowledged. That thought runs through my head as I’m sitting here reading a wonderful book that reminds me of nothing so much as Pomo Lunch Poems, Kit Robinson’s 9:45, his seventeenth volume just now out from Post Apollo Press of Sausalito.

 

Not to suggest that these poems were written during, say, lunch hours, nor even – although I suppose it is a possibility – at 9:45, but rather that these works carry within themselves an attitude & psychic quickness that I associate with Frank O’Hara at his best.

 

These are all short poems & all have a double dynamic. First there is a relationship – at minimum in their titles – to number, numbers & numbering.*** Second, these texts operate off of a three-line stanza. What I mean by “operate off” is that the tercet  is the standard logical unit throughout, but that 13 of these 31 poems – is that numeric palindrome an accident? – have a final stanza that is either one or two lines long, because that is what the logic of the poem demanded. The form is so cleanly & powerfully defined that I have no hesitation whatsoever at describing the poem “1.5” as a three line poem in two lines:

 

Take a risk

with one and a half sticks

 

Here, in its entirety, is “$1250”:

 

Whether you gave her

first and last

and a deposit

 

Or whether the last
was the deposit
that is the question

 

This is a poem that looks simple enough, but which is doing a couple of things at once. In addition to bringing together two radically different realms – Hamlet & the rent – the poem functions by never using the key noun (rent) anywhere in the text. Each by itself is humorous, although the social situation they depict borders on tragic. Part of what makes this poem work is the degree of discipline in Robinson’s line: the breaks & italics are each exactly where they need to be.

 

Not all of the poems are as tightly woven as that. This doesn’t make them loose, but rather frees them to range over broad mindscapes in remarkably compact spaces. One favorite is “27,” the significance of whose title is entirely opaque to me:

 

The heart itself

contains genetic instructions

to like certain things

 

Pros like Jay don’t need tips

you don’t refuse to breathe, do you?

I leaned against the door and breathed

 

A word of it

and waited for my heart

which was now full of new information

 

The echoes of the last three lines of Frank O’Hara’s most famous poem, “The Day Lady Died” –

 

leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT

while she whispered a song along the keyboard

to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing

 

– are unmistakable. And, if one thinks about, O’Hara is a patron saint of the vocabulary of number in poetry. Consider that same poem’s first five lines:

 

It is 12:20 in New York a Friday

three days after Bastille Day, yes

it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine

because I will get of the 4:19 in Easthampton

at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner

 

None of this “explains” Robinson+, though it may illuminate both his project & its influences. In fact, I think of Robinson as someone whose sensibility is closer to v. 2.0 of the New York School than it might be to O’Hara. None of the first generation really had the light touch for the small stanza written entirely without waste, but it’s something you see repeatedly in Padgett, Berkson, Schjeldahl, Shapiro, Ceravolo & Fagin.++ This same touch shows up from time to time in some interesting spots among the langpos – Ray DiPalma, for example, as well as Alan Davies, Fanny Howe, Alan Bernheimer & John Mason. And you can see it elsewhere, also, among this same age cohort – Merrill Gilfillan, Curtis Faville, some of the Actualists – but nobody is more adept at it than Kit Robinson.

                                                                                 

I’m not quite sure how to characterize this capability – this sort of stanza is one of those things that I’ve learned I’m not terribly good at – but I suspect that almost any of the above would tell you that this aptitude for concision & balance is a thing that can only be achieved through a subjective sense very close to “feel.” Whenever I’ve tried it – you can find a few examples hiding in The Alphabet – I’ve felt clumsy and ham-handed. So I appreciate it all the more when I find it, in Robinson as in the poem I quoted last Tuesday by Fanny Howe. It’s a gift.

 

 

 

 

 

* The two poets in the Boston Brahmin group who could really write were Berryman & Plath. Sexton is interesting for the same reasons that Jerry Springer or reality TV are “interesting.” The poet in that tendency who deserves to be rediscovered, though, is George Starbuck.

 

** The “positive” correlate for School of Quietude, Henry, is “decorous” or perhaps “understated” or “plain-spoken.”

 

*** Whereas  the school of quietude approach to this same project would, no doubt, have been numb and numberer.

 

+ Who, for example, is Jay & what is “27?” The theme of the heart could lend itself to an almost infinite variety of interpretations.

 

++ The closest approximation you will find among those poets born in the 1920s turns out to be Creeley, but Creeley’s sense of the stanza is seldom as finished or polished in affect as this.