(L-R) Reed Bye, Harry Smith, Jack Collom & Steve Taylor
on Flagstaff Mountain, 1988 (Photo by Allen Ginsberg)

 

The question of poetry & place will probably always fascinate me. One of the reasons that I prefer the term Projectivist to the more location-specific Black Mountain is because there were key members of that 1950s literary community, including Denise Levertov & Larry Eigner, who spent virtually no time at the North Carolina enclave. The New Western poets were never identical with San Francisco, and anyway had their own internal tendencies (maybe a better phrase would be distinct flavors) betwixt the Buddhist wing and the cowboy one. And the Missouri Linebreaks are hardly the first instance of a New York School aesthetic showing up well to the west of the Hudson River. In the 1970s, in particular, Actualism took this same aesthetic west, albeit having learned it not at St. Marks, but in the Iowa Writers Workshop during its brief flirtation with diversity when Ted Berrigan & Anselm Hollo were both in residence. And then, of course, for the past quarter century, there has been that St. Marks of the Rockies, the fabled Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. If you look at the actual existing faculty at Naropa, tho, only Anne Waldman qualifies as a New York School poet in the narrow & historically specific sense. But Waldman has always had one foot also in the Beat lineage, something which working alongside Allen Ginsberg for two decades no doubt accentuated. Anselm Hollo himself is a member of the faculty, but it makes more sense – I think – to consider Anselm an influence on the New York School than of it. On his home page at Naropa, Anselm describes himself as a

lifelong associate of the Beat, Black Mountain, New York (I and II), and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E schools of U.S. American Poetry (and a founding member of the more esoteric "schools" of Actualism and Continualism)

Jack Collom has always been his own phenomenon, his influences a unique mix of Beat, New Western, NY School & his own working class experiences, with a little ornithology sprinkled in. Bobbie Louise Hawkins is just as hard to characterize. Andrew Schelling comes more out of the Buddhist side of the New Western aesthetic, just as Keith Abbott has roots in Actualism, tho he was already doing what he does before it showed up in his home town of Albany, California.

One Naropa faculty member who has always struck me as being thoroughly New York School in his aesthetic, although so far as I know he’s never lived in any of its boroughs for an extended period, is Reed Bye. I thought at first that it just may be because he’s always been published by the small and independent presses I associate with the New York School – books from Angel Hair, Rocky Ledge (the imprint he & Waldman used during their ten-year marriage in the 1980s), Z Press, magazine appearances in Shiny, Sal Mimeo & Naropa’s own Bombay Gin. And now his selected poems, his first truly big book, Join the Planets, comes from Lewis Warsh’s United Artists. But reading Join the Planets, I can see it there, also, in virtually all of the poems. Here’s an early poem, “Indiana”:

A blue garbage truck goes by
and it’s already hot.
A guy with an unlit cigarette out his mouth
hacks down the motel walk.
Soon we’ll be driving,
Tom will be driving, me
off and on reading
Two Years Before the Mast.

In the coffee shop now
just me the cook and waitress,
nothing sexual but
the Declaration of Independence
placemat.
What an excellent
taut nippled document –
governments are instituted
to secure individual rights for their peoples.
When they fuck up, they’re out.

And here is a recent one, “The Outflakes,” the first poem in the volume’s last section:

In the poem “The Outflakes”
you surprise yourself
later
now it’s just
flipped out from the page
in some ink
lodged in threads of a rag

You surprise
yourself later – that’s
the best we can do
with “The Outflakes”
a poem
writ mostly on fumes

We don’t know
everything yet –
”not,” “however,” etc.
but let’s not get carried away

In threads of a rag
on a hook in the ink
and anything else
that gets stuck to a mat

In what’s good in a book
when freed by a sneeze
from a tube that’s as blue
as its goo inside as red –
a surprise to yourself
it could be
the end of illusion

A tough bubble
of stuff
”The Outflakes,”
a text made
from weasel-like
filings

Like a breath of some cool
fresh air on some gruel
in the view
from the top of a granary

When a break spools it through
from a grotto of dew
where beavers
beat gravel to quicksand

Like a sneeze
from a tube
a hook in the mat
that pulls from the eye
a specular thread
”The Outflakes”
rife with errata

Mirabile dictu!
a wonder to say
it sneezed out into
”The Outflakes”

Both poems are lovely, a pleasure to read, each a work in which, as Bye has written of a piece by an earlier poet,

the energy of its content is found inside its language forms, and experienced most fully with attention given over to the moving feel of those forms.

Both poems show several tell-tale signs of NY School influence: the personal, casual tone; identifying people by first name alone; the presence of slang; the use of the second-person to frame an internal dialog; an inherent optimism; the off-hand way in which the poem itself is discussed; the whole concept of writing about a sneeze. Not one of these features requires actually living in Manhattan or on the far shores of Brooklyn or Staten Island. Yet it’s remarkable just how many of these are always already familiar to us, from O’Hara and Koch in the first generation, and from about ten different poets in the second.

It has been noted before that many of New York School, so-called, especially in its first two generations, were themselves not big city kids, or at least not Manhattan kids, before they got to the Big Apple. Even Kenneth Koch was born in Cincinnati & only Frank O’Hara had an East Coast childhood. Indeed, besides the fact that several attended Harvard, the most common element in their backgrounds appears to have been service in the U.S. Navy. Several members of the next generation were all in high school in Tulsa when the Pied Piper, in the form of GI Ted Berrigan, blew into town.

I have no idea where Bye grew up, tho I do that he served in the merchant marines before getting his Ph.D. at the University of Colorado. According to Waldman, his entry into the Naropa scene, like that of Collom, was that of a local poet whose aesthetic was immediately sympathetic to & supportive of such New York émigrés as herself & Ginsberg. You can find two readings of his in PENNsound’s archives of the Left Hand Reading Series.

Now there are more things going on in both of these poems than the list of NY School features above suggests. For example, in “The Outflakes,” there is a terrific deployment of internal rhyme (cool, gruel, view, spools, through, dew, all in the space of six lines). In “Indiana,” a political poem of the first order, the whole idea of these two travelers in the middle of the U.S. landmass being guided at least spiritually by Richard Henry Dana & his own account of the merchant marine offers a very different sense of America than that of the Declaration of Independence laminated as a diner placemat.

So I read this wonderful, long overdue book as a case of the New York School with New York itself erased, or at least absent & unaccounted for. Which in turn makes me want to ask what is New York about the New York school? And if you were describe or define this poetry without reference to the city, the way, say, Projectivism does for Black Mountain, how would you go about it?