Jordan Davis

 

Once upon a time, when Small Press Traffic was primarily a poetry-centered book store on 24^th Street in San Francisco’s Noe Valley, it divided its shelves into three categories: men, women, and fiction. The first issue of Vincent Katz’ new mag, Vanitas, reminded me of this by the way it too spatially segregated its poets, women before Jim Dine’s art portfolio, men after, rather like the communal sleeping quarters in a Shaker community. I wondered if this gender organization didn’t maybe even dive deeper, the women ordered from “femme” to “butch,” the men likewise, starting with Ann Lauterbach in the first section, ending with Clayton Eshleman in the latter. That may be reading too much into the tea leaves, so to speak, but a project as intentional as Vanitas makes you ask questions like this, almost as a side product. If nothing else, the conscious division of poets by gender will ensure something akin to parity (49 pages of women, 45 of men, as it turns out), tho all of the critical essays, save for Nada Gordon’s poetic exposition on “Decency,” are by guys. Hopefully, we won’t see a repetition of the boys = theory, girls =poetry division that has bedeviled other theory-friendly literary formations. These are just some of the questions that Vanitas raises, precisely because it is trying to do so very much.

Of the manifestos up at the journal’s front, the one that gets the closest reading from me is, no surprise, Jordan Davis’ brave “Peeling Oranges on Top of the Skyscrapers: Towards a Name-Blind History of Poetry since 1960,” focusing, in this issue on the New York School. It’s an attempt to accomplish several things at once:

1. an actual history of the New York School, at least through the first three generations
2. an attempt to write literary history without resorting much to names (most of the names he mentions – Kane, Gooch, Lehman, LeSueur – aren’t those of major practitioners but of writers of histories, biographies & memoirs)
3. a glance at some of the social forces at play in the creation of literary formations, especially during this period (which, contrary to his subtitle, really is 1950-1985 or thereabouts)

If Davis doesn’t always succeed, or succeed completely, it’s not for want of effort & lots of good-will & hard thought. In a sense, what he has done is throw down the gauntlet to other poets of his generation to come along & either correct his basic model or offer a better one of their own.

One problem with Davis’ “no-name” history is that in his attempt to get away from what – personism? – by going out of his way to avoid naming names, Davis elides the reality that individuals do make differences. Just imagine the world post-September 11 if Al Gore had been awarded the presidency he won in 2000.¹ In Davis’ case, one suspects that at least part of his motive was not to hurt the feelings of anyone who got left out of some formal definitions:

Generation One: “a central group of four to seven New York School poets, several of whom studied at Harvard”

Generation Two: “a core group of four to seven poets, several of whom studied at Columbia; around central figures of the core group there gathered several dozen more poets”

Generation Three: “a core group of four to ten poets, some of whom studied at the University of Chicago, but whose main institutional affiliation was the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church”

Generation Four: “one, more or less: Joel Lewis (and he chose to remain in New Jersey)”

There is quite a bit more to each of these definitions (save, really, for the Joel Lewis Generation, which may be at least partly a joke, but which does get confusing later on when Davis refers, more than once, to the “fourth wave” and how it did or did not follow in the footsteps of the third), oh, but you can hear the shouting already – Waddya mean, Joe Ceravolo isn’t one of the four core poets in Gen 2? etc. – and that University of Chicago banner is a huge red (or at least maroon) flag that is certain to cause some nostrils to flare.

But the name that really is missing here, more than any other, is that of Frank O’Hara. His Irish moniker pops up as a visible absence in the very second bullet of Davis’ formal definition of the New York School’s first generation, in fact: “these writers were at least as influenced by the literature of continental Europe as they were by English poetry.” That is, to put it mildly, unproven in the case of O’Hara & immediately raises the question of Davis’ already slightly skewed timing bracket, focusing as it does from 1960 onward.² I would argue that Davis is already involved in one of the most problematic elements of theorizing the New York School, because in the early 1960s John Ashbery was in France & physically removed to the day-to-day, face-to-face interactions so crucial to group formation in that literary period. So the theoretical question is this: just how central is John Ashbery to that first generation, or has his centrality been a thing that has grown later on in retrospect, in the minds, imaginations & influence of writers from succeeding generations, whether in Gens two, three, four & five, or elsewhere, say, among Ashbery’s quieter advocates who wouldn’t think of hanging out with the unwashed masses at the Church?

This is not unlike the question of Oppen’s role among the Objectivists. Treated by a lot of them prior to World War 2 as a youngster who just might print their books, Oppen really doesn’t get accepted as an equal as an author until well into the 1960s, when his work proposes a radically different orientation for Objectivism than the model offered by Zukofsky in the Objectivist issue of Poetry. At least Oppen got into that issue – still using his middle initial, the way beginning writers often do – which is more than one can say for Lorine Niedecker.

None of this is to suggest that Ashbery isn’t a wonderful poet or that any of the first or second generation poets didn’t value his work and his friendship. But his role, socially, is worth thinking about. When I was a kid – more or less literally – first getting to know the various subdivisions of the New American Poetry, only David Melnick, a serious Ashbery aficionado, ever acted as if the New York School, gen one, was anything other than a term for what might better be called Frank & His Friends. The importance of the social, in fact, which is so evidently an O’Hara quality rather than an Ashbery one (or Schuyler or Barbara Guest, tho it is for Koch) is literally what empowers Ted Berrigan – the furthest thing you could get from the gay Harvard aesthetes – to use his own legendary social skills to create a second generation largely out of whole cloth. Even if you can’t imagine Frank & Ted holding, say, a cocktail party together, I think you have to acknowledge what Ted picks up, more than anything, from his first generation predecessors is the enormous consequences of introducing people to one another & being, in general, the social secretary for the club. Indeed, throughout literary history, you’ll find that this formula works in many different environments – it works for Pound & for Stein, for Olson & for Jack Spicer. O’Hara clearly had it – the PBS documentary by Richard Moore of O’Hara is virtually a love letter to it – but when Frank was hit by the dune buggy, the person who had that skill next is a working class ex-GI from Providence who had just come to town with his buddies, high school kids literally, from Tulsa. How European is that?

But when Frank is gone, Frank is gone. Ashbery is back, but certainly not about to fill that void. Jimmy is too disorganized, Barbara too shy & Kenneth too far uptown, where he certainly is social, especially if you are female undergraduate. Here, Davis is on safe ground – I don’t know anyone who doesn’t concede the centrality of Ted Berrigan to the second generation NY School. And Ron Padgett is similarly inescapable, one of Ted’s Tulsa kids who studies uptown & turns out to have a French thing at least equal to that of Ashbery. But I think that the minute you get beyond Ted & Ron & just maybe Lewis Warsh, everyone else is open to some kind of discussion. Isn’t Anne Waldman too much of a Beat? Didn’t Schjeldahl give up poetry for art criticism? Didn’t Berkson move west a long time ago, followed not long after by the Gallups? Didn’t Lorenzo move to Houston, Tom Veitch disappear into his cartoons, Harris Schiff head off somewhere to the Southwest? Isn’t David Shapiro just too serious, really an uptown pheenom, just as Ceravolo is forever the Jersey boy? What about Bernadette? What about Larry Fagin? What about all the other uptown folks, such as John Yau? Is there anybody beside David Lehman who thinks David Lehman belongs on this list? This, I would wager, is where Davis made his decision that he would have to try this sans names or else not at all. Davis is, I think, largely correct with his other bullet points for the second generation: they were nearly as influenced by the Beats as by the NY School, gen one, especially with regards to life style; they made extraordinary use of cheap printing methods that were just then becoming widely available, and made the Poetry Project an internationally important institution; some women had some leadership roles; and lots of them moved to the Lower East Side, at least for a time.

But rather than avoiding all the messy (& frankly unpleasant, almost regardless of which decisions you make) discussions that show up the minute you begin raising names, Davis’ solution here, what really needs to happen, long term, is to have that discussion, frankly & in depth. It’s really a book project, not an eight-page magazine essay, but to even begin to confront the contributions & facets of that generation critically & theoretically, that is almost what has to be done. Not to begin then asking, how come the second generation New York School thrived, but not any other tendency within the New American Poetry? – theoretically one of the most compelling questions of that literary generation.

Precisely because Davis loses focus discussing the second generation, the problems with his conceptualizing of the third are even worse. Again I would argue, the importance of the social cannot be underestimated here and again I would argue that a description of the Third Generation has to include, if not actually focus upon, a second generation name that is even more absent from Davis’ paper than O’Hara’s – Larry Fagin. Fagin’s role as a teacher at the Church, not to mention his work as publisher, curator, mentor & friend, is as profound for the creation of the 3^rd Gen NY School, I would suggest, as any recruiting Ted Berrigan did at the University of Chicago³.

But the poets of the Third Generation are all now in their 50s, just as a fourth – if it really exists or ever did – are turning 40 or thereabouts. I think the whole question of this most formidable of all group formations is very interesting to think about, to spatialize as a metaphor something akin to what happens to ripples in a pond after a large stone is tossed in. If that first stone was, as I would argue, Frank O’Hara, then by the time of the 3^rd generation, the ripples have not only reached the shore, but begun to bounce back, so that we have outward ripples now intersecting those coming back in, making it impossible really to discern who really is, or is not, 4^th generation, let alone 5^th or 6^th, which is about what we would be at right now.

It may sound like I’m arguing with Jordan Davis, but I’m not, really. He deserves a huge public hug for taking on this hopeless project in the first place, because it’s important, and because it takes considerable courage to venture in where so many are bound to feel differently from whatever the hell you say.

He touches on langpo largely in passing, and does so in a way that is sweet & amusing, and really not wrong in his assertion that it is the natural inheritor of certain aspects of Projectivism, or at least one of them. The New Western tendency I focused on a couple of weeks back there is another way that card could be (and was) played, as is the New York version of Projectivism, following Blackburn, Kelly, Eshleman, Wakoski & their more experimentalist friends Mac Low, Antin & Rothenberg. And there is feminism & identity poetics in general that one would have to take on in this larger history – the best piece I’ve ever read on that subject, decades ago at this point, was by Jan Clausen. And Actualism, and (cough) New Formalism. And what about all the little regional post-Beat scenes, from the folks around John Sinclair in Detroit (& maybe later in New Orleans), & around D.A. Levy in Cleveland, to little clusters just about everywhere? Where do you put the likes of Bob Hass, Jorie Graham, Brenda Hillman? What about Vispo? What about flarf? Oh I’m sure that I’m forgetting somebody, and that is the danger, isn’t it, Jordan?

Θ Φ Θ

 

Vincent Katz wrote Clay Banes yesterday about how to get Vanitas:

Send a check for $15 made out to Vincent Katz and we'll get a mag out to you right away. Also send your mailing address. Two-issue subscription is $25.
Best,
Vincent Katz
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Vincent Katz
211 West 19 Street, #5
New York, NY 10011 USA

If Varitas is even half as good as the first issue tries to be, this is an excellent investment – it’ll put your kids through college.

 

¹ One less war, thousands of fewer deaths, a government focused on projects to help the American people & a Supreme Court that might soon border on the rational, even with Thomas & Scalia still there. The response to Katrina would have been faster & far more powerful with someone other than a horse show administrator in charge. I believe we still would have gone into Afghanistan, but we would have put resources into that country so that we weren’t simply turning it back over to the old tribal warlords as Bush has done.

² A date chosen, I suspect, so that the history doesn’t have to rehearse the New American Poetry in great detail.

³ Which would also require us to figure out how it is so many of the students of Berrigan at Iowa & Chicago who did not head off to New York City tended to group around Darrell Gray’s idea of Actualism, and had such a different fate in terms of their writing, than did the 3^rd generation NY school. Not to mention explaining how students of Berrigan’s at Yale (Kit Robinson, Steve Benson, Alan Bernheimer) and students who were at least all at Iowa City when Ted was there (Barrett Watten, Ray Di Palma, Bob Perelman, even Bob Grenier & Curtis Faville) ended up out west involved in some very different writing.