Poetry, Architecture, and the New York School: Something Like a Liveable Space 3031415205, 9783031415203

Citation preview

MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY POETRY AND POETICS

Poetry, Architecture, and the New York School Something Like a Liveable Space

Mae Losasso

Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics

Series Editor

Ann Vickery Deakin University Burwood, Australia

Founded by Rachel Blau DuPlessis, continued by David Herd, and now headed by Ann Vickery, Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics promotes and pursues topicsin the burgeoning field of 20th and 21st century poetics. Critical and scholarly work on poetry and poetics of interestto the series includes: social location in its relationships to subjectivity, to the construction of authorship, to oeuvres,and to careers; poetic reception and dissemination (groups, movements, formations, institutions); the intersection ofpoetry and theory; questions about language, poetic authority, and the goals of writing; claims in poetics, impacts ofsocial life, and the dynamics of the poetic career as these are staged and debated by poets and inside poems. Since its inception, the series has been distinguished by its tilt toward experimental work  – intellectually, politically, aesthetically. It has consistently published work on Anglophone poetry in the broadest sense and has featured critical work studying literatures of the UK, of the US, of Canada, and Australia, as well as eclectic mixes of work from other social and poetic communities. As poetry and poetics form a crucial response to contemporary social and political conditions, under David Herd’s editorship the series will continue to broaden understanding of the field and its significance. Editorial Board Members Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Temple University Vincent Broqua, Université Paris 8 Olivier Brossard, Université Paris-Est Steve Collis, Simon Fraser University Jacob Edmond, University of Otago Stephen Fredman, Notre Dame University Fiona Green, University of Cambridge Abigail Lang, Université Paris Diderot Will Montgomery, Royal Holloway University of London Miriam Nichols, University of the Fraser Valley Redell Olsen, Royal Holloway University of London Sandeep Parmar, University of Liverpool Adam Piette, University of Sheffield Nisha Ramaya, Queen Mary University of London Brian Reed, University of Washington Carol Watts, University of Sussex

Mae Losasso

Poetry, Architecture, and the New York School Something Like a Liveable Space

Mae Losasso University of Warwick Oxford, UK

ISSN 2634-6052     ISSN 2634-6060 (electronic) Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics ISBN 978-3-031-41519-7    ISBN 978-3-031-41520-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41520-3 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Lenscap / Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

You know, for Kip

White upon white a cento 4 mae losasso (via jane Jacobs what kinds of city street are safe which city parks are best avoided which slums stay slums while others don’t domestic dreams which money can buy the fun filtered through the consumable while we wake to pitched roofs or piazzas certain acts & events of attention (& this holding station that doesn’t hold but opens out into anxieties textual gaps the leakage of toxic waste all the buts yet whethers etcetera articulate only incompleteness —Robert Hampson

vii

Acknowledgements

This book began as a doctoral thesis in the Department of English at Royal Holloway University of London (RHUL) under the supervision of Redell Olsen and Will Montgomery and generously funded by a College Scholarship in association with the Arts and Humanities Research Council. First thanks go to Redell, for always challenging my thinking, and to Will for his valuable insights and advice and for introducing me to the poetry of Barbara Guest. Thanks also to Ann Vickery, series editor at Palgrave Macmillan, for her help and guidance throughout. Special thanks go to my PhD examiners, Robert Hampson and David Herd, for being close and generous readers of my work and for tirelessly supporting my research. I am grateful to the Beinecke Library, Yale Manuscripts and Archives, the MoMA Archives, and the Berg Collection at the New  York Public Library, for allowing me to sift through New York School papers. Thanks also to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, where parts of this book were written during an internship, for access to the Library, Archive, and Photography Archive, and to the Biennale Library. I would also like to thank Rona Cran and Yasmine Shamma for supporting my research and for shaping the Network for New York School Studies—parts of this book would not have been possible without the wider support of the network and the symposia that sparked so many conversations and ideas and helped to shape this book’s conclusion. Special thanks to Maureen O’Hara Granville-Smith, for sharing your memories of Frank, for the beautiful copy of Lunch Poems, and for your support and generosity. Thanks to Textual Practice for facilitating peer reviews and publishing an earlier version of Chapter 5; that material is republished by permission ix

x 

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

of the publisher, Taylor & Francis. I am also grateful for the opportunity to present drafts of this book at the following conferences: New Work on the New York School at the University of Birmingham in 2018; Attending to Literature at the University of Nottingham in 2020; Robert Hampson and Amy Evans Bauer’s Contemporary Innovative Poetry Research Seminar at RHUL in 2021; What We Talk About When We Talk About The New York School at Université Gustave Eiffel in 2022; and Cities of Modernism at the University of York in 2022. Thanks also to Nicoletta Asciuto and Nan Zhang, for giving me the opportunity to open up my thinking on literature and cities at the University of York. This book would not be what it is without the research semester I was awarded at Yale University in 2018; thanks go to the Yale-RHUL Exchange Programme for supporting this opportunity. At Yale, my thanks to Jonathan Kramnick, Marta Figlerowicz, and Benjamin Glaser, whose classes indelibly changed the course of this book. Thanks also to Karin Roffman and Kurt Forster, for luminous conversations on John Ashbery and modern architecture. Heartfelt thanks to my Yale family, Becky Birrell, Sam Buchan-Watts, Emily Burns, Matthew Holman, Anna Jamieson, Francesca Kaes, Hannah Lyons, and Rosie Ram for the magnums, the road trips and for indulging my fascination with eggs. Special thanks to Matthew for reading drafts of this book, as well as for his constant support, encouragement, and friendship. Hugest of thanks to Peter Boxall, who has supported and encouraged me throughout my academic career and who has helped to shape my thinking on the study of literature; and to Hannah Jordan, for her unwavering confidence in me. For text and photographic permissions I owe thanks to Maureen O’Hara Granville-Smith, David Kermani, Jeffrey Lependorf, Tom Carey, Raymond Foye, Renee Gladman, Mark Hillringhouse, Jeffrey Shaw, Theo Botschuijver, Gilbert & George, Grimm Gallery, the Stedelijk Museum, and the Archigram Archives. Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following estates and copyright holders who granted permission to reprint material: Excerpts from “And Ut Pictura Poesis Is Her Name,” “Pyrography,” and “Daffy Duck in Hollywood,” from Houseboat Days by John Ashbery. Copyright © 1975, 1976, 1977, 2008 by John Ashbery. Reprinted by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc., on behalf of the author’s estate. Excerpts from “Definition of Blue,” “Soonest Mended,” and “The Bungalows” from The Double Dream of Spring by John Ashbery. Copyright © 1966, 1967, 1968, 1969, 1970, 1997, 2008 by John Ashbery. Reprinted

 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 

xi

by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc. on behalf of the author’s estate. All rights reserved. Excerpts from “The New Spirit” from Three Poems by John Ashbery. Copyright © 1970, 1971, 1972, 1997, 2008 by John Ashbery. Reprinted by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc., on behalf of the author’s estate. All rights reserved. Excerpts from “Aldo Rossi” from Reported Sightings by John Ashbery. Copyright © 1989 by John Ashbery. Reprinted by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc., on behalf of the author’s estate. All rights reserved. Excerpts from “Idaho,” “Europe,” “America,” and “Our Youth” from The Tennis Court Oath © 1962 by John Ashbery. Published by Wesleyan University Press and reprinted here by permission of Wesleyan University Press. Excerpts from “Location of Things,” “Quilts,” “Words,” “The Screen of Distance,” “The Nude,” and “The Blue Stairs” from The Collected Poems of Barbara Guest by Barbara Guest. Copyright © 2008 by the Estate of Barbara Guest. Published by Wesleyan University Press and reprinted here by permission of Wesleyan University Press. Excerpts from “Invisible Architecture,” “Shifting Persona,” “Mysteriously Defining the Mysterious: Byzantine Proposals of Poetry,” and “A Reason for Poetics” from Forces of Imagination: Writing on Writing by Barbara Guest. Copyright © 2008 by the Estate of Barbara Guest. Published by Kelsey Street Press and reprinted here by permission of Kelsey Street Press. Frank O’Hara, “Cornkind” from Lunch Poems. Copyright © 1964 by Frank O’Hara. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of City Lights Books, citylights.com. Frank O’Hara, “For Grace After A Party” from Meditations In An Emergency. Copyright © 1957. Used by permissions of Grove/ Atlantic, Inc. Frank O’Hara, “Nocturne,” “October,” “The Lay of the Romance of the Associations,” and “F.M.I. 6/25/61” from THE COLLECTED POEMS OF FRANK O’HARA by Frank O’Hara, copyright © 1971 by Maureen Granville-Smith, Administratrix of the Estate of Frank O’Hara, copyright renewed 1999 by Maureen O’Hara Granville-Smith and Donald Allen. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

xii 

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Excerpts from “Like Lorraine Ellison,” “Trip,” “Seeking,” “The Morning of the Poem,” “A Man in Blue,” “I sit down to type,” “Dining Out with Doug and Frank,” “A photograph,” and “A View” from Collected Poems by James Schuyler. Copyright © 1993 by the Estate of James Schuyler and reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Thanks, finally and most especially, go to my brother Kip, for the Samorost days; to my parents, for giving me my curiosity; and to Barney Horner, for being there in every conceivable way—I couldn’t have written this book without you.

Praise for Poetry, Architecture, and the New York School “Meticulously researched and elegantly written, this book is a profound contribution to scholarship on the New York School of poets. Architecture and poetry at midcentury, Mae Losasso shows us, were engaged in conversation, a “continuous dialectic” from which emerged stanzas (rooms) of astonishing beauty. The interpretive spaces created here offer truly original ways to read cities and enter poems.” —Daniel Kane, author of All Poets Welcome: The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960s “Let Mae Losasso lead you up Barbara Guest’s illusive blue stairs for a grand architectural tour of New York School poetry, from Frank O’Hara’s livable spaces to John Ashbery’s improvisatory architecture, through James Schuyler’s bracketing of utopian zones, and beyond, illuminating not only the buildings that populate their poems, but how these poets built a new architecture for poetry itself.” —Jeffrey Lependorf, Executive Director of The Flow Chart Foundation “Bringing together two disciplines all too often treated separately, Mae Losasso’s illuminating study demonstrates that the core poets of the New York School are united by their deep fascination with “the architectural paradigm.” Written with uncommon lucidity and flair, this book opens new ground by showing how these influential poets conceive of both “poetry and architecture as radically worldbuilding pursuits.” —Andrew Epstein, author of Beautiful Enemies: Friendship and Postwar American Poetry and Attention Equals Life: The Pursuit of the Everyday in Contemporary Poetry and Culture “Mae Losasso’s is a brilliant, finely-etched account of the New York School – the “architextual construction” of its poets’ words and cityscape. A superbly clear view of John Ashbery’s major work stands alongside illuminating commentary on all the key figures, including Barbara Guest, whose intervention is shown to have been critical, both to the School’s formation and its evolving influence world-wide.” —Geoff Ward, author of Statutes of Liberty: The New York School of Poets

“Poetry, Architecture and the New York School offers a clear and full contribution to New York School Studies, with much that moves the scholarly conversations in this field in new and exciting directions. It is beautifully written; its arguments and insights are offered with a compelling lightness of touch, and it is animated throughout by readings of the poetry that are winningly attuned to the sensuous possibilities of surfaces and space.” —Rona Cran, author of Collage in Twentieth-Century Art, Literature, and Culture: Joseph Cornell, William Burroughs, Frank O’Hara, and Bob Dylan

Contents

1 Introduction: Before the New York School  1 2 Space: Frank O’Hara’s Forward-Dawning Futurism 35 4 Structure: John Ashbery’s Improvisatory Architecture 93 4 Surface: Barbara Guest’s Tactile Cladding119 5 Aperture: James Schuyler’s Precarious Parentheses159 6 Conclusion: After the New York School197 Epilogue: Finding Compulsive Stairs229 Bibliography231 Index241

xv

Abbreviations

CPBG Guest, Barbara. The Collected Poems of Barbara Guest, edited by Hadley Haden Guest. Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2008. CPJS Schuyler, James. Collected Poems. New  York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993. CPOH O’Hara. Frank. The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara, edited by Donald Allen. Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1995. DDS Ashbery, John. The Double Dream of Spring. New  York: The Ecco Press, 1970. FOI Guest, Barbara. Forces of Imagination. Berkeley: Kelsey St. Press, 2003. HBD Ashbery, John. Houseboat Days. Westford: Penguin, 1979. SP Ashbery, John. Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. Manchester: Carcanet, 2007. TCO Ashbery, John. The Tennis Court Oath. Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1962.

xvii

List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Fig. 1.2

New York City, Manhattan, date unknown. Photo: Werner Friedli 7 The Pan Am Building (MetLife Building), New York City, 1963. Walter Gropius and Pietro Belluschi. Photo: Thomas J. O’Halloran8 Fig. 1.3 Phillip Johnson, Lincoln Center, New York 1962. Photo: the author10 Fig. 1.4 Frank O’Hara’s apartment, 90 University Place, New York City. Photo: the author 32 Fig. 2.1 Oscar Niemeyer and Le Corbusier, The United Nations Building, New York City, 1952. Photo: Bernd Dittrich 41 Fig. 2.2 Joseph Binder, New York World’s Fair Poster, 1939 43 Fig. 2.3 The Pepsi Cola sign seen from the UN Building, New York City. Photo: the author 46 Fig. 2.4 Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, The Seagram Building, New York City, 1958. Photo: Gottscho-Schleisner Collection 50 Fig. 2.5 Frank Lloyd Wright, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1959. Photo: the author 52 Fig. 2.6 Egg-and-dart detailing on the Guggenheim. Photo: the author 53 Fig. 2.7 Geodesic domes on the Guggenheim. Photo: the author 53 Fig. 2.8 Interior of the Guggenheim. Photo: the author 57 Fig. 2.9 IBM Pavilion at the New York World’s Fair 1964. Photo: Alfred E. Heller. Alfred E. Heller collection of world’s fair material, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, GEN MSS 734, Box 47 60 Fig. 2.10 Wallace Harrison, The Egg Performing Arts Theatre, Albany, NY, 1978. Photo: Leonard J. DeFrancisci 61

xix

xx 

List of Figures

Fig. 2.11 Henrik Thor-Larsen, Ovalia Egg Chair, 1968. Photo: San José Public Library Fig. 3.1 John Ashbery, ‘Europe’ from The Tennis Court Oath. Reproduced by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc., on behalf of the author’s estate. All rights reserved Fig. 3.2 Richard Rogers, Renzo Piano & Gianfranco Franchini, Centre Pompidou, Paris, 1977. Photo: Adora Goodenough, 2019 Fig. 3.3 Joseph Paxton, The Crystal Palace, 1851 Fig. 3.4 Peter Cook, Instant City in a Field: Part Elevation, Typical set-up © Archigram 1969. Image reproduced courtesy of the Archigram Archives Fig. 3.5 Aldo Rossi, Cimitero di San Cataldo, 1971. Photo: Camouflajj Fig. 3.6 Las Vegas, Clark County, Nevada. Photo: Charles O’Rear Fig. 3.7 Caesars Palace, Las Vegas. Photo: Thomas Duelling Fig. 3.8 Light patterns created by multicoloured casino displays in downtown Las Vegas. Photo: Charles O’Rear Fig. 4.1 Building Kenwin, Bryher at Kenwin in Switzerland, October 1977. Photo: Barbara Guest. Barbara Guest Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, MSS 1185, Box: 135, Folder: 1930 Fig. 4.2 Barbara Guest’s Studio. Photo: Mark Hillringhouse. Reproduced courtesy of Mark Hillringhouse Fig. 4.3 View from the Westbeth Centre, New York. Photo: the author Fig. 4.4 Joseph Hoffman, Palais Stoclet, Brussels, 1905–11. Photo: PtrQs Fig. 4.5 Amedeo Modigliani, Nude on a Blue Cushion, 1917. Oil on linen. Chester Dale Collection. Reproduced courtesy of the National Gallery of Art’s Open Access policy Fig. 5.1 Casement window. Photo: Jack E. Boucher Fig. 5.2 Raindrops on New York window. Photo: Diego Gennaro Fig. 5.3 Little Portion Friary, Mount Sinai, New York. Photo: Iracaz Fig. 6.1 Renee Gladman, ‘Fig. 29’ from Plans for Sentences. Reproduced courtesy of Renee Gladman

61 87 89 92 92 100 108 112 114

126 132 138 150 153 170 174 192 224

Prologue: Looking for Blue Stairs

Sitting outside a cafe on the banks of the Keizersgracht canal in Amsterdam, I make some last-minute notes on Barbara Guest’s poem, ‘The Blue Stairs’. My copy is covered in annotations—words circled and underlined, marginalia dancing across the blank spaces of the page. By now, my knowledge of these stairs is intimate, though incomplete—I have to see the ‘real’ ones, I think, before I can fully understand this poem. I leave the cafe and walk along the canal towards the Stedelijk Museum. On my way, I pass a small B&B called The Blue Stairs. In the coming months, I will write to this hotel, desperate in my search for Guest’s staircase. But I don’t know this yet. For now, I am keeping step with the opening lines of the poem: There is no fear in taking the first step or the second or the third          having a position          between several Popes In fact the top can be reached without disaster          precocious (CPBG 61)

xxi

xxii 

Prologue: Looking for Blue Stairs

Four years before her death in 2006, Barbara Guest reprinted her 1968 poem ‘The Blue Stairs’ in an anthology of poetry and criticism entitled Forces of Imagination. The poem appeared almost exactly as it had in the original collection, save for the addition of a tiny textual signpost: ‘Note: The Modern Museum in Amsterdam has blue stairs’ (FOI 50). Writing in 2008, Caroline Williamson noted that the poem ‘apparently refers to the elaborate main staircase of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam’.1 Williamson is one of many critics who have taken Guest at her word: I have heard scholars talk about the Stedelijk in university lectures, poetry podcasts, and academic articles on ‘The Blue Stairs’—which is why I have come to Amsterdam to see them for myself (Fig. 1): The code consists in noticing the particular shade of the staircase          occasionally giving way          to the emotions (CPBG 61)

Fig. 1  Mae Losasso, Triptych (Looking for Blue), 2019 1  Caroline Williamson, ‘Working methods: Painting, poetry and the difficulty of Barbara Guest’ in Jacket 36 (2008), http://jacketmagazine.com/36/guest-williamson.shtml. Accessed 04 April 2023.

  Prologue: Looking for Blue Stairs 

xxiii

I enter the Stedelijk through the new extension, added in 2012, which faces Museumplein park. There used to be another wing here, but that was torn down some years ago down to make space for this newer, shinier addition. Once inside, I cross the threshold from the extension into the original neo-renaissance building. The old space feels humble: over the years, it has sat here quietly and solidly, as architectural construction, demolition, and alteration has busied itself around it. Passing through the galleries, I don’t stop to see the art on the walls: all I can think is that soon, in a moment, I am finally going to see Barbara Guest’s blue stairs. I am finally going to take the first step: It has been chosen discriminately To graduate the dimensions ease them into sight           republic of space (CPBG 61).

When I reach the Stedelijk’s ‘elaborate main staircase’, I am struck by a single, overwhelming quality: whiteness. The stairs are built out of polished off-white stone, and all of the paintwork is crisp, pure white. I look for chips that might reveal a trace of blue: the one flake that I find, in the otherwise pristine architecture, reveals only foundational red brickwork under thick layers of white paint; a palimpsest of white upon white: Radiant deepness a thumb passed over it           disarming           as one who executes robbers Waving the gnats and the small giants aside           balancing (CPBG 61)

Few naturally occurring things in the world are blue: it is the colour of the sky, the colour of the imagination. These stairs, however, are not blue. I ask the museum staff if there is another, bluer set of stairs in the building;

xxiv 

Prologue: Looking for Blue Stairs

nobody knows of any. So I look again: I can’t quite believe that these stairs are not blue. I wait for the light to change, I photograph them from different angles. I follow Maggie Nelson’s advice from her blue book, Bluets, and ‘keep in mind the effects of all the various surfaces, volumes, light-­ sources, films, expanses, degrees of solidity, solubility, temperature, elasticity, on color. Think of an object’s capacity to emit, reflect, absorb, transmit, or scatter light’2—but the stairs remain  white. On my out, I glimpse a symmetrical set of archways—one at the foot, the other at the landing— their spandrels painted with a pattern of deep blue stripes (Fig. 2). Could these be a clue to Guest’s blue stairs? How to surprise a community by excellence somehow it occurred           living a public life (CPBG 62)

After I leave the museum, I continue my search in books, in archives, and in photographs. I find a painting by Sal Meijer, which shows the staircase in its original, nineteenth-century colour scheme: yellow, red, and green, with golden daylight filtering through the amber glass above—but not a tinge of blue. And then in 1938, 30 years before Guest wrote her poem, new curator Willem Sandberg painted the colourful staircase white within a single weekend. These stairs, it turns out, made museum history by virtue of their witness: the Stedelijk was one of the forerunners of the gallery as ‘White Cube’.3 Two images of the stairs from 1969 (one year after Guest first published her poem) show them in crisp, Sandberg-­ white—even the spandrels on the framing archways lack their blue stripe detail (Figs. 3 and 4). I write to Michiel Nijhoff, Head of Library and Archives at the Stedelijk, to ask if there has ever been a set of blue stairs in the museum’s history. He responds with the following:

 Maggie Nelson, Bluets (Seattle & New York: Wave Books, 2009), p. 20.  Margriet Schavemaker, The White Cube as a Lieu de Mémoire: The Future of History in the Contemporary Art Museum (Amsterdam: Reinwardt Academy - Amsterdam University of the Arts, 2016), p. 22. 2 3

  Prologue: Looking for Blue Stairs 

xxv

Fig. 2  Stedelijk stairs cobalt blue spandrels, Amsterdam. Photo: the author

[…] I have found no trace whatsoever of the stairs of the museum being blue at any time. I searched the archive on the terms blue AND stairs, staircase etc. but found no reference. The staircase is white on all the pictures I have of it in the [19]50s and sixties. There was also a staircase in the New Wing (Sandberg Wing) but that was blackish linoleum […]4

 Michiel Nijhoff, E-mail to Mae Losasso, 16 July 2019.

4

xxvi 

Prologue: Looking for Blue Stairs

Fig. 3  Gilbert & George, Living sculpture, 1969. Photo: Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. Reproduced courtesy of Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and Gilbert & George

The Sandberg Wing was built in 1954 under the auspices of the museum’s eponymous curator. A note on the Stedelijk website from 2011, however, states that, ‘In recent years, the old building has been renovated and all later additions removed’.5 I uncover an image of the main staircase 5  Stedelijk: News & Press: The Building, (2019, August 14), https://www.stedelijk.nl/ en/news/the-building. Accessed 18 April 2023.

  Prologue: Looking for Blue Stairs 

xxvii

Fig. 4  Ger Van Elk, Apparatus Scalas Dividens, 1969. Photo: Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. Reproduced courtesy of Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and Grimm Gallery

taken in 1973 (Fig. 5), in which the landings appear to be laid with the same blackish linoleum that Nijhoff describes—or could that be dark blue? The steps themselves are still white, but it is clear that the staircase underwent considerable renovation at some point after the mid-1970s, because two doorways can be also seen in the image, cut through the central landing. Looking back at my own photographs, only the ghosts of the these

xxviii 

Prologue: Looking for Blue Stairs

Fig. 5  Jeffrey Shaw and Theo Botschuijver, Staircase, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands, 1973. Photo: Jeffrey Shaw. Reproduced courtesy of Jeffrey Shaw and Theo Botschuijver

bricked up entrance ways are visible now, while the once blue-black floor has been completely re-laid with light, speckled grey granite: The original design was completed no one complained

  Prologue: Looking for Blue Stairs 

xxix

In a few years it was forgotten             floating It was framed like any other work of art not too ignobly             kicking the ladder away Now I shall tell you why it is beautiful Design: extraordinary colour: cobalt blue (CPBG 62)

Still, I am not quite satisfied by the 1973 photograph—because the stairs themselves remain unmistakably white and because the linoleum  landings could hardly be described as ‘cobalt blue’. Could it be, then, that Guest had made a mistake? Had she seen blue stairs somewhere else and misattributed them in her note decades later? Does ‘the Modern Museum, in Amsterdam’ even refer to the Stedelijk, as so many readers of Guest’s poem have assumed? I scour Amsterdam’s other museums—all to no avail. I write to the Blue Stairs B&B, the one that I had seen along the Keizersgracht: ‘I’m afraid we [have been] running our B&B for about three years’, they reply, ‘so we are not the blue stairs from the poem’.6 Months pass. I read about Chefchaouen, the city in Morocco painted blue to symbolise the sky. The thought of blue stairs has become intoxicating. On a trip to Rome I see the Vatican museum’s Simonetti Staircase, a structure bathed in the blue light of its glass cupola (Fig. 6). Situated literally ‘between several Popes’, the Simonetti stairs conform to all of Guest’s clues:           secret platforms   Heels twist it   into shape   It has a fantastic area   made for a tread   that will ascend

6

 Louise Coppens, E-mail to Mae Losasso, 17 July 2019.

xxx 

Prologue: Looking for Blue Stairs

Fig. 6  Giuseppe Momo, Simonetti Staircase, Vatican Museum, Rome, 1932. Photo: the author   Being humble   i.e. productive   Its purpose   is to take you upward   On an elevator   of human fingerprints   of the most delicate  fixity   Being practical   and knowing its denominator   To push   one foot ahead of the other   Being a composite   which sneers at marble              all orthodox movements (CPBG 62-63)

The Simonetti stairs are based on the Vatican’s fourteenth-century Bramante Staircase, a granite construction (‘a composite / which sneers at marble’) in a double helix shape (‘an elevator / of human fingerprints’), which remains hidden inside the walls of the Vatican (‘secret platforms’), among the Catholic Church’s most sacred sites (‘all orthodox

  Prologue: Looking for Blue Stairs 

xxxi

Fig. 7  Robert Hampson, The Blue Stairs, 2022. Reproduced courtesy of Robert Hampson

movements’). Of course, these are not Guest’s blue stairs—but that hardly matters anymore. Because I have stopped searching for a single set of ‘real’ stairs and started creating my own ‘composite’ out of fragments of whatever blue stairs I find (Fig. 7). And perhaps this was always Guest’s intention. Perhaps the stairs are, as the Dutch expression has it, zijn maar blawe bloempjes—‘nothing but blue flowers’, meaning ‘a pack of bald-­faced lies’ as Nelson explains.7 And perhaps the terms ‘code’, ‘secret’, ‘fantastic’, 7

 Nelson, Bluets, 45.

xxxii 

Prologue: Looking for Blue Stairs

‘surprise’, ‘false’, and ‘withdrawn’, scattered throughout, have encoded the poem’s best kept secret: that these textual stairs are no more than a ‘counterfeit / of height’: It has discovered in the creak of a footstep the humility of sound Spatially selective using this counterfeit of height To substantiate a method of progress Reading stairs as interpolation in the problem of gradualness             with a heavy and pure logic (CPBG 63)

Whether deliberately misleading, simply incorrect, or else forever displaced by the fabric of architectural change, Guest’s 2003 note has had the strange effect of simultaneously breaking and reinforcing the relationship between the poetic and the architectural. Like the artist Rachel Whiteread’s negative casts of architectural features (including stairs) the poem may have drawn on a once-existing structure, but the textual stairs maintain their own materiality now, independent of architecture’s practical realism. Guest’s stairs are meticulously constructed: they have ‘steps’ and ‘treads’ and ‘platforms’, they ‘ascend’, they have an ‘area’ and ‘dimensions’, they ‘creak’, they lead ‘upwards’ and into ‘dormer rooms’, and on the page they possess a distinctive visual structure; they are stepped like any other stairway. ‘Reading stairs’, as Guest writes, we do not simply imagine a set of real stairs, somewhere beyond the page; we take a step on the poetic ones before us. Because when we read poetry, we don’t just observe textual spaces and structures—we activate them: The master builder acknowledges this As do the artists in their dormer rooms

          eternal banishment

  Prologue: Looking for Blue Stairs 

Who are usually grateful to anyone who prevents them from taking a false step And having reached the summit would like to stay there even if the stairs are withdrawn (CPBG 63)

xxxiii

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Before the New York School

[…] I love architecture more than anything, Bernini and Palladio and Laurana, a certain church in Venice, Mauro Coducci, Buonarroti’s windows on the Farnese Palace. —James Schuyler, from ‘The Morning of the Poem’.

Even casual readers of James Schuyler’s work will recognise the poet’s self-­ professed love of architecture from the lines quoted above: see the way that ‘Tudor City / catches the sky or the glass side / of a building lit up at night in fog’ (CPJS 3); look there, ‘A chimney, breathing a little smoke’ (CPJS 4), or through that window, ‘a green-copper steeple’ (CPJS 4). See ‘the Chrysler Building / silver, soluble’ (CPJS 22), rising above New York’s ‘Junky buildings’ (CPJS 84), which pile up into Manhattan’s ‘awesome spiky postcard / view’ (CPJS 248). From the hinging of a casement window, opening onto a city view, to the narrow slope of a short-lined, single-­ stanza verse, to the slamming shut of a grammatical parenthesis, Schuyler’s love of architecture is everywhere present in his poems.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Losasso, Poetry, Architecture, and the New York School, Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41520-3_1

1

2 

M. LOSASSO

Yet, Schuyler was not alone in this pre-occupation: a love of architecture runs, like a vein in marble, throughout the work of his friends and collaborators, the poets known as the New  York School. Walking the streets of Manhattan, Frank O’Hara dashed off poems in praise of ‘the House of Seagram’, ‘515 Madison Avenue’, ‘the Empire State Building’, and ‘the U N [Building]’ and declared his ambition to create ‘works as big as cities’ (CPOH 335; 325; 326; 371; 497). Stranger and more opaque than the poems of Schuyler and O’Hara, John Ashbery’s writing developed its own ‘improvisatory architecture’, a composite of ‘brick arches’, ‘loggia[s]’, ‘pillars’, ‘cornice[s]’, and ‘pipes’ (TCO 41; 54; 13; 57; 90), which morph, dreamily, into ‘cloud-castles’, ‘paper cit[ies]’, and ‘houses […] on narrow stilts’ (DDS 13; 14; 27); while Barbara Guest’s poems— more abstracted, more theoretical, than those of her male contemporaries—are wrought from an ‘invisible architecture’ (FOI 18) and clad with rich word-tapestries that radically reimagine conventional spatial dichotomies: ‘A difficult poem intrudes like hardware’, Guest writes, ‘decorating a quiet building, a tic taking [sic.] / over the façade’ (CPBG 229). Throughout their poetry, critical writing and shared correspondence, each of these poets betrays a deep fascination with—or a love of, as Schuyler so frankly puts it—the architectural paradigm. As countless critics before me have noted, the name that unites this group of poets is more misnomer than moniker. Coined to describe a loosely delineated group of Abstract Expressionist painters, living and working in New York City around the middle of the twentieth century, the term ‘New York School’ was wryly appropriated by John Bernard Myers, director of the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, in 1961 to describe this even looser set of poets.1 ‘The idea’, as John Ashbery explained years later, ‘was that, since everybody was talking about the New  York School of painting, if [Myers] created a New York School of poets then they would automatically be considered important’.2 Myers, it turns out, was right—more than 60 years later, the nomenclature remains, in spite of the many gaps, slips, and incongruities that it entails. As Ashbery himself admits: ‘I am not sure exactly what the name designates’.3 Canonical studies of the New York School—most notably, Geoff Ward’s Statutes of Liberty (1993), David Lehman’s The Last Avant Garde (1998), 1  David Lehman, The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets (New York: Anchor Books, 1999), p. 20. 2  Ibid. 3  John Ashbery, ‘The New  York School of Poets’ in Selected Prose, ed. Eugene Richie (Manchester: Carcanet, 2004), p. 113.

1  INTRODUCTION: BEFORE THE NEW YORK SCHOOL 

3

William Watkins’s In the Process of Poetry (2003), and Mark Silverberg’s The New  York School Poets and the Neo-Avant-Garde (2010)—have tended to open by disavowing the group label, while defending its continued use. Yet rather than continue to pose the same question—something along the lines of ‘who or what were (or are) the New  York School?’—this book begins, instead, by asking: ‘Why the persistence of such a problematic designation?’ Since the publication of Marjorie Perloff’s Frank O’Hara, Poet Among Painters in 1977, the term ‘New York School’ has been useful for scholars who have situated these poets within the artistic milieu of mid-century New York.4 This connection, forever enshrined in Myers’ nom de plume, has been crucial in shaping the New York School and its orbiting cultures in the intervening years, yet it has also had the unfortunate effect of obscuring some of the other threads that hold this tenuous ‘school’ together. As Yasmine Shamma notes in Spatial Poetics (2018), ‘the critical tendency to situate New  York School poetry within a painterly tradition has helpfully provided a lineage offering chronology and placement’, but ‘the result is a body of criticism that moves away from the contours of the poems produced’.5 In her account of second-generation New York School Poets (namely, Ted Berrigan, Alice Notley, Ron Padgett, and Joe Brainard), Shamma shifts focus away from the traditional readings that have tended to situate the New York School (both first and second generations) in terms of social coteries and artistic milieus. By ‘addressing the Second Generation New York School as a group of poets personally, professionally, and pragmatically linked in their pursuit of various forms of space within poetry’, 4  Marjorie Perloff, Frank O’Hara, Poet Among Painters (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press), 1998. Since then, Lytle Shaw’s Frank O’Hara: The Poetics of Coterie (2006) has redefined the once-pejorative term ‘coterie’ in order to ‘open up a kind of thick description of O’Hara’s dialog with the social, literary, and artistic worlds of the 1950s and 1960s’. Lytle Shaw, Frank O’Hara: The Poetics of Coterie (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2006), p.  11. Maggie Nelson’s Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions (2007) addresses the gendered gaps that have accrued in New York School scholarship, and ‘though [her] study is primarily concerned with literature’, she notes at the outset that ‘it would be a tremendous oversight not to explore, however briefly, the accomplishments of female Abstract Expressionist painters of the period’. Maggie Nelson, Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2007), p. xix; while Mark Silverberg’s The New  York School Poets and the Neo-Avant-Garde (2010) tracks the work of these poets against New York’s evolving art scenes, from Abstract Expressionism, through Pop Art, Conceptual Art, Happenings, and other avant-garde movements. Mark Silverberg, The New York School Poets and the Neo-Avant-Garde: Between Radical Art and Radical Chic (Farnham, UK & Burlington, USA: Ashgate, 2010). 5  Yasmine Shamma, Spatial Poetics: Second-Generation New  York School Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), p. 23.

4 

M. LOSASSO

Shamma ‘allows the title [New York School] the freedom to be thematic as opposed to exclusively inclusive’.6 As this quotation reveals, the present book is not the first to consider the relationship between the New York School and urban space. Indeed, as Shamma indicates, her own project ‘joins others that note the influence of New York City’s spatial constraints (and liberties) on New  York School poetry’, including Hazel Smith’s Hyperscapes in the Poetry of Frank O’Hara (2004) and Timothy Gray’s Urban Pastoral (2010). Ward’s Statutes of Liberty and Robert Bennett’s Deconstructing Post-WWII New York City (2011) should also be added to Shamma’s examples, as well as several articles that have appeared in recent years.7 As each of these accounts invariably agree, ‘something of New York’s metropolitan energy and sass’ to borrow that phrase from Lehman’s The Last Avant-Garde, ‘made its way into their writing’.8 Poetry, Architecture, and the New  York School builds upon—and then diverges from—these earlier accounts, by explicitly locating the ‘something of New York’s metropolitan energy and sass’ not, as Lehman and others have, in the ‘artistic life of the city’, but in the architectural paradigm. Closest in its critical approach to Shamma’s work, this book also addresses the critical tendency to place ‘secondary emphasis on the poetic forms of New York School constructions’, by moving away from biography towards a more granular analysis of the poems on the page. Yet where Shamma focuses her reading through the ‘trifocal lens of formal criticism, ecocriticism and urban theory’, attending largely to the imprint of domestic space on the poems written by second-generation New York School poets, this book takes an explicitly cross-disciplinary approach, considering the ways in which the poems written by the first generation intersect with the theories and practices of architectural design, construction, and use.

 Ibid., p. 13.  See, for example: Keegan Cook Finberg, ‘Frank O’Hara rebuilds the Seagram Building: a radical poetry of event’ in Textual Practice (30: 1: 2016): pp. 113–142; Olivier Brossard, ‘“The/profile of a city/exploding”: Frank O‘Hara’s Aesthetics of Shock’ in Caliban: French Journal of English Studies, 25 (2009: L’art de la ville), pp. 215–228; Matthew Cooperman, ‘Envy and Architecture: On Barbara Guest’s Realisms’ in Jacket36 (Late 2008), http:// jacketmagazine.com/36/guest-cooperman.shtml. Accessed 11 April 2023; Davy Knittle, ‘Bodies-cities part 2: James Schuyler’s somatic urbanism’ in Jacket2 (January 9, 2018), https://jacket2.org/commentary/bodies-cities-part-2-james-schuylers-somatic-urbanism. Accessed 11 April 2023. 8  Lehman, The Last Avant-Garde, p. 20. 6 7

1  INTRODUCTION: BEFORE THE NEW YORK SCHOOL 

5

In maintaining the New York School label, then, I do not attempt to pinpoint a house style particular to these poets. Indeed, I do not even claim that the poets selected for this study—Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, and James Schuyler—comprise the definitive membership of the New York School. Traditionally, New York School anthologies and monographs have omitted Guest and included Kenneth Koch, yet this book opts for the reverse, given that Guest’s work is more architecturally sensitive, more theoretically challenging, and more in need of critical redress. Poetry, Architecture, and the New York School is also largely unconcerned with the biographies, personas, and personalities of these four poets: I leave that to the already extensive and invaluable body of scholarship to which this book is indebted.9 What I do argue, however, is that there exists an underlying and unwavering architectural sensibility, which, though framed and expressed differently in the work of each, nevertheless unites these poets as the New York School—or, at least, as one articulation of that overflowing label. That these writers have come to be defined, more or less, by a specific metropolitan space cannot be overlooked: for if the name has persisted, it is not only because it speaks to art historical and social contexts, but because it speaks to the architectural paradigm through one of the twentieth century’s most significant centres of urban and architectural progress, innovation—and also failure: New York City.

Manhattan, Mythical Island Since the turn of the twentieth century, Manhattan has been lodged in the popular imaginary as something of a mythic metropolitan space. As the architect—and self-styled ‘ghostwriter’ of the city—Rem Koolhaas writes: especially between 1890 and 1940 a new culture (the Machine Age?) selected Manhattan as laboratory: a mythical island where the invention and testing of a metropolitan lifestyle and its attendant architecture could be

9  See, for example: Brad Gooch, City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O’Hara (New York: Harper Perennial, 1993); Perloff, Frank O’Hara, Poet Among Painters, 1977; Lehman, The Last Avant-Garde, 1999; Daniel Kane, All Poets Welcome: The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960s (Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press, 2003); Shaw, Frank O’Hara: The Poetics of Coterie, 2006; Nelson, Other True Abstractions, 2007; Silverberg, The New York School Poets and the Neo-Avant-Garde, 2010.

6 

M. LOSASSO

pursued as a collective experiment in which the entire city became a factory or man-made experience, where the real and the natural ceased to exist.10

By 1945, New York was, perhaps without rival, ‘the world’s most powerful city’, as Robert A. M. Stern, Thomas Mellins, and David Fishman note in the introduction to their monumental book New York 1960.11 ‘From the point of view of industrial activity, New York seemed prepared for the future as no other American city was’, Stern, Mellins, and Fishman explain, and not only was it ‘the world’s financial capital’ but, ‘after December 1946, when the United Nations agreed to locate its permanent headquarters in Manhattan, it became the world’s political capital as well’.12 Writing in 1967, the urban historian Andrew Sinclair anticipated Koolhaas’s diagnosis of Manhattan as urban laboratory by more than a decade: ‘As the home of the United Nations and as the richest seaport in the world’, Sinclair writes, ‘the city is the center of the globe. As the hub of the great American Megalopolis of some 40 million people…it is the laboratory of the gigantic cities of tomorrow’.13 In the immediate post-war years, as Stern, Mellins, and Fishman note, ‘the best measure of the city’s renewed state of health was the return of construction, particularly the construction of office buildings in midtown and, sometime later, in lower Manhattan’ (Fig.  1.1).14 But where New York’s pre-depression skyscrapers—including, famously, William Van Alen’s Chrysler Building (1930) and Shreve, Lamb, & Harmon’s Empire State Building (1931)—had been typified by their quasi-religious spires and ‘elaborate ornamental embellishments’, the city’s post-war monumentalism: celebrated repetition to the point of anonymity. The nearly identical glass-­ and-­steel office buildings that dominated New  York’s architecture from 1950 to 1970 confirmed the generally held belief that cities were little more than machines for working in. Thus the high social, urban and technological

 Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York (New York: The Monacelli Press, 1994), p. 9.  Robert A. M. Stern, Thomas Mellins & David Fishman, New York 1960: Architecture and Urbanism Between the Second World War and the Bicentennial (New York: The Monacelli Press, 1995), p. 14. 12  Ibid. 13  Ibid., p. 29. 14  Ibid., p. 19. 10 11

1  INTRODUCTION: BEFORE THE NEW YORK SCHOOL 

Fig. 1.1  New York City, Manhattan, date unknown. Photo: Werner Friedli ideals of European Modernism’s leading architects—Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe—were subverted to serve the purposes of expedient commercialism, its aesthetics reduced to a singular, obsessive minimalism.15  Ibid., p. 47.

15

7

8 

M. LOSASSO

The international modernist style swept Manhattan for a brief but intense period: between 1950 and 1970, the firm of Emery Roth & Sons alone completed seventy international style office buildings in New York, including Walter Gropius and Pietro Belluschi’s Pan Am Building (1963) (Fig. 1.2) and Edward Durell Stone’s General Motors Building (1968). What had emerged as a socially progressive and avant-garde design ethos

Fig. 1.2  The Pan Am Building (MetLife Building), New York City, 1963. Walter Gropius and Pietro Belluschi. Photo: Thomas J. O’Halloran

1  INTRODUCTION: BEFORE THE NEW YORK SCHOOL 

9

in Europe was swiftly transformed into the prevailing aesthetic of corporate America, as a stream of identikit curtain-walled office blocks appeared like dominoes on the New York City skyline, symbolising not only the United States’ post-war prosperity, but Manhattan’s rise from the architectural ashes of the depression. Yet the ‘story of New York’s architecture and urbanism in the age of Megalopolis’, as Stern, Mellins, and Fishman stress, is also ‘the story of a city that became the world’s capital in 1945 yet found itself thirty years later at the brink of economic collapse’.16 Stern, Mellins, and Fishman attribute New York’s fiscal slump, which very nearly resulted in the city’s declaration of bankruptcy in 1975, to poorly administered welfare and overspending on publicly assisted housing programs, yet the immense spending on corporate office blocks in the 1950s and 1960s (many of which would remain empty throughout the 1970s) also played a significant—not to mention highly visible—role in the city’s changing fortunes. In any case, whether propelled by political consciousness, or purely a matter of aesthetic taste, the vogue for tall, anonymous office blocks soon began to wane, and by the mid-1960s it had been superseded by a new historicist modernism, which was applied primarily to the design of civic and cultural spaces, such as Edward Durell Stone’s Gallery of Modern Art (1964) and Phillip Johnson’s Lincoln Center (1964) (Fig. 1.3). Ends signify beginnings, and the arrival of historicist modernism was no exception: while it spelled the demise of international modernism, this evolution also heralded the arrival of a new dominant architectural mode: post-modernism. ‘By the mid-1960s’, Stern, Mellins, and Fishman write: architects such as [Phillip] Johnson, [Edward Durell] Stone, [Minoru] Yamasaki and [Eero] Saarinen, a second and distinctly American generation of Modernists, were joined by a younger generation of theorists and practitioners who, though they sometimes claimed status as Modernists, were so against the recent past as to constitute a new and distinct position. By the mid-1970s this approach had come to be widely known as Post-Modernism.17

The story of New York’s architecture in the post-war decades—and of the way that its changing political, social, and economic fortunes were tied  Ibid., p. 13.  Ibid., p. 56.

16 17

10 

M. LOSASSO

Fig. 1.3  Phillip Johnson, Lincoln Center, New York 1962. Photo: the author

to its shifting skyline—is one of the defining backdrops to the New York School, even if it is not always overt or explicit in their poems. In fact, for the most part, New York City remains largely absent from this book. Though Chap. 2 develops the trajectory traced here, reading Frank O’Hara’s architectural poems alongside Manhattan’s changing political and aesthetic terrain in the 1950s and 1960s, Chap. 3 turns to British, European, and suburban American architecture as corollaries to the poems of John Ashbery. Establishing these architectural and historical contexts in Chaps. 2 and 3, Chaps. 4 and 5, on Guest and Schuyler, respectively, shift into more explicitly theoretical terrain, largely abandoning site-­ specificity and adopting, instead, a more granular approach to architextual construction. Yet, all of the chapters remain haunted—if only implicitly— by New York City and its architectural legacy. In part, this is because of the Scotch Tape stickiness of that errant New York School moniker—as I have suggested, an adherence to the label must countenance the urban and architectural specificity of the city to which it refers, the city that became the international stage for the rise and fall of modernism, the ascendency of the post-modern, and the political

1  INTRODUCTION: BEFORE THE NEW YORK SCHOOL 

11

and economic import of urban design in the twentieth century. Like the poetry of the New York School, the bricks and mortar (or glass and steel) of New York City contain the traces, not only of post-war American consumerism but of the European avant-garde, British traditionalism, and the structural and aesthetic ingenuity and innovation that defines the narrative of twentieth century art, architecture, and literature in closely related ways. This is what the poet and critic Stephen Collis gestures towards, when he claims that ‘the architectural paradigm is crucial to the understanding of twentieth-century avant-garde poetics’.18 Collis refers to the growing material and spatial self-awareness of poetry in twentieth-­century avant-garde practices—a trajectory that he traces from ‘the high archival modernism of Pound at one end [to] the formal investigations of language poetry at the other’.19 Yet, his contention also hints at broader shifts in architectural production across the century—and nowhere were these shifts more acute than in New York City that microcosm of architectural boom and bust, innovation and failure. It is important to note, of course, that Manhattan was not the only urban space to witness dramatic fluctuations in architectural design and technology and that, though they may collectively comprise one of the most sustained expressions of what might be termed an architectural poetic, the New York School are not altogether unique in their sensibility. Yet as this book argues, the architectural qualities that underpin the work of the New York School poets are textually distinctive and historically significant because they express, at once, the culmination of earlier modes of literary thinking around space and materiality, as well as the catalyst for new architectural poetic forms, which continue to shape the contemporary avant-garde. It is in this pivotal sense—as a school that sits at the seam between late modernism and early postmodernism, representing both an end point and a beginning—that these poets reflect the urban and historical specificity of mid-century Manhattan. For as I contend throughout this book, the relationship between architecture and poetry must be understood not as the borrowing and mapping of one discipline onto another, but as a continuous dialectic. Just as writers have looked to the built environment to give shape to the poetic imagination, so poetry has altered the ways in which architects and theorists have 18  Stephen Collis, ‘“The Frayed Trope of Rome”: Poetic Architecture in Robert Duncan, Ronald Johnson, and Lisa Robertson’ in Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal Vol. 35, No. 4, a special issue: LITERATURE & ARCHITECTURE (December 2002): p. 144. 19  Ibid., p. 146.

12 

M. LOSASSO

conceived, constructed, and inhabited architectural space. The New York School is important, I argue, precisely because they enter this ongoing dialogue at its apex in the mid-twentieth century.

Words and Buildings A long-standing dialectic between architecture and poetry has produced a complex and polyvalent relationship between these two disciplines. Yet all too often it is a relationship that is read from only one side of the equation: architects imbue their concrete works with abstract and ephemeral notions of the ‘poetic’, which bear little relation to the practice of writing and reading poetry; while poets and literary theorists treat architecture as an autonomous product, a material thing, divorced from its historical, geographical, and social contexts and processes to be mapped onto the clearly delineated shapes and structures of a poem on the page. This occurs, in part, because of the unassailable truth that poetry and architecture are materially and spatially divergent: one can no more ‘enter’ a poem than they can ‘read’ a building (at least, not in the ways that those terms are conventionally understood). Indeed, as Collis rightly notes, ‘no matter how concretely it is deployed, no matter how materially self reflexive it is, language does not escape being language, does not become the built, a building, a place’.20 And yet for all the evident truth of this statement, and for all the conviction with which Collis writes it, his claim is also something of a provocation, an implicit injunction to the reader to think the opposite; to imagine the tantalising possibility that poetic language might become the built, that it might become something one could access, enter, and inhabit. The poet John Hollander, who orbited the New  York School in the 1960s, made a similar observation in his essay ‘The Poetry of Architecture’ (1996). ‘On the one hand’, Hollander writes, ‘poetry; on the other, architecture—and yet one may ask whether this very formulation conjures up more of a poetic or an architectural paradigm. For in it, do not poetry and architecture seem to regard one another as if across a courtyard?’.21 For Hollander, as for Collis, poetry and architecture can never be  Ibid., p. 144.  John Hollander, ‘The Poetry of Architecture’ in Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 49: 5 (Feb. 1996): p. 17. 20 21

1  INTRODUCTION: BEFORE THE NEW YORK SCHOOL 

13

fully  reconciled: the one is concrete, the other conceptual—‘the literal structure of architecture on one side and the figurative structure of poetic language on the other’—and each can only contemplate the other across a disciplinary chasm.22 Poetry, Hollander writes, will forever be ‘gazing at the colonnade and wondering […] what to make of it’.23 Part of the challenge, then, in reconciling these disciplines in any meaningful way, must be to attempt to occupy both sides of the divide simultaneously—to understand the limitations of architecture’s grasp for some notional idea of the poetic and, at the same time, to comprehend the shortfalls of the poetic impulse to turn to architecture as a purely structural device. To bridge this gap, it is essential that we turn to language, not merely as a descriptive or explanatory tool, but as the conceptual—and sometimes material—yoke that binds these disciplines in myriad ways. Hollander invokes this linguistic turn, if only tentatively, when he notes the existence of ‘parallel elements of structure in both literary and architectural construction’.24 By way of evidence, he points to the striking number of terms that are shared between the two disciplines, including stanza, plot, frontispiece, rhythm, punning, gesture, fiction, language, vocabulary, vernacular, allusion, and quotation—though he does little more than gloss their application in a limited set of literary and architectural contexts.25 In offering only a commentary, Hollander fails to productively explicate the linkages between these terms or the structural parallels that he rightly identifies between poetry and architecture. Yet, it is not so much that the answer needs to be newly articulated, but that the question itself requires reformulating; not ‘what do words tell us about this relationship?’ but ‘how do words function in comparable ways across the theory and praxis of both disciplines?’ The architect Charles Jencks goes some way to offering an answer (or set of answers) to this question, in his seminal work The Language of Post Modern Architecture (1977). ‘There are various analogies architecture shares with language’, Jencks writes, ‘and if we use the terms loosely, we can speak of architectural “words”, “phrases”, “syntax”, and “semantics”’.26 In a sense, Jencks translates (rather than simply borrows) these linguistic terms into an architectural lexicon, defining ‘words’ as architecture’s ‘known units  Ibid., p. 25.  Ibid., p. 17. 24  Ibid., p. 19. 25  Ibid., pp. 19–21. 26  Charles Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (London: Academy Editions, 1991), p. 39. 22 23

14 

M. LOSASSO

of meaning’ (i.e. doors, windows, columns, partitions, cantilevers, and so on); ‘syntax’, as the ‘certain rules’ according to which ‘a building has to stand up and be put together’ (i.e. ‘the laws of gravity and geometry’); and ‘semantics’, as something like typological convention (a ‘coherent doctrine of semantics which explains which style to use on which building type’). Jencks also adds the term ‘metaphor’, meaning (as in literature) people’s tendency ‘to see one building in terms of another, or in terms of a similar object […] to compare it metaphorically to what they already know’.27 Speaking from opposite sides of the disciplinary courtyard, both Jencks and Hollander reveal a deep-seated assumption that words and buildings belong together: they treat the relationship almost as though it were self-­ evident, without ever quite giving voice to what it is that makes this kinship so remarkable. Part of the reason for this perceived sense of the inherent relationship between poetic language and architecture has to do with architecture’s determination in the eighteenth century to elevate itself from craft to art by self-consciously confecting family ties with poesy. As David Anton Spurr notes in Architecture and Modern Literature (2012): There exists a philosophical tradition that puts architecture and literature into relation with one another according to the particular question of what art is and how it functions. This tradition is distinctly modern and dates from a moment—roughly located in the eighteenth century—when the aesthetic dimensions of both cultural forms began to take precedence in the discourse surrounding them, that is, when architecture could be conceived as a fine art rather than essentially the science of building[.]28

The architectural historian Adrian Forty gives voice to the tradition to which Spurr alludes in his landmark book Words and Buildings (2000): ‘Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’, Forty explains, ‘a recurring need in architectural circles was to establish that architecture was a liberal and not a mechanical art. The measure of a liberal art was provided by music, and particularly by poetry’.29 Forty cites numerous examples of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century architects who turned to the poetic paradigm, including the French neoclassical architect J. F. Blondel  Ibid., pp. 52–69.  David Anton Spurr, Architecture and Modern Literature (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2012), p. 2. 29  Adrian Forty, Words and Buildings: A Vocabulary of Modern Architecture (London: Thames & Hudson, 2000), p. 13. 27 28

1  INTRODUCTION: BEFORE THE NEW YORK SCHOOL 

15

(‘Architecture is like poetry; all ornament which is only ornament is excessive. Architecture, by the beauty of its proportions and the choice of its arrangement is sufficient unto itself’), his student C. N. Ledoux (‘architecture is to masonry what poetry is to literature; it is the dramatic enthusiasm of the craft’), and the British art historian John Ruskin, whose 1873 book The Poetry of Architecture (first serialised in Loudon’s Architectural Magazine between 1837 and 1838), makes explicit claims for a ‘poetics’ of architectural craft.30 As Ruskin writes, architecture must be understood as: a science of feeling more than of rule, a ministry to the mind, more than to the eye. If we consider how much less the beauty and majesty of a building depend upon its pleasing certain prejudices of the eye, than upon its rousing certain trains of meditation in the mind, it will show in a moment how many intricate questions of feeling are involved in the raising of an edifice.31

In each of these examples, poetry functions as a critical node in the dichotomy between beauty and utility that has shaped the architectural paradigm from Vitruvius to the present day. For Blondel and Ledoux, poetics rescues architecture from base utility and helps articulate its proportional perfection as an art; for Ruskin, on the other hand, poetry gives voice to the beauty that stems from architecture’s utility—yet in each case, the fundamental tension remains the same. ‘The idea of reading a building as we would read Milton or Dante, and getting the same kind of delight out of the stones as out of the stanzas, never enters our mind for a moment’, writes Ruskin in The Stones of Venice. Yet, he argues, we must: wake to the perception of a truth just as simple and certain as it is new: that great art, whether expressing itself in words, colours, or stones, does not say the same thing over and over again; that the merit of architectural, as of every other art, consists in saying new and different things; that to repeat itself is no more characteristic of genius in marble than it is of genius in print; and that we may, without offending any laws of good taste, require of an architect, as we do of a novelist, that he should be not only correct, but entertaining.32  Ibid., pp. 69; 76; 29.  John Ruskin, The Poetry of Architecture (New York: John Wiley & Son, 1873), p. 1. 32  John Ruskin, The Nature of Gothic (London: Pallas Athene, 2021), p. 37. 30 31

16 

M. LOSASSO

Anchoring the relationship between poetry and architecture explicitly in the reading of poetic works, Ruskin eschews the lofty elevation of architecture into some notional ‘poetic’ realm, by positing the possibility of architectural idiosyncrasy; a functioning (and not merely aesthetic) form that might echo the work (and words) of great poets. By pointing to the beauty of utility, Ruskin marks a turning point in the historical relationship between poetry and architecture: where architecture had traditionally looked to the conceptual qualities of ‘the poetic’ to transcend its materiality, Ruskin looked to poetry proper in order to articulate the beauty inherent in functionality. Neither strictly a poet nor an architect—and so occupying a conceptual space at the centre of Hollander’s notional courtyard—Ruskin’s more explicitly cross-disciplinary approach anticipates an increasing interest in architecture-asengineering (or architecture-­as-­machine) that would shape modernist thinking (both literary and architectural) in the first decades of the twentieth century. As Jo Gill explains: In the early years of the twentieth century […] a new view of architecture began to emerge; no longer seen as primarily an artistic practice, architecture might now be understood as a form of engineering, appropriate to the machine age. This change was, in part, informed by innovations in European architecture including the work of the Bauhaus with its emphasis on standardization and its bold and abstract aesthetic—even as such movements were, themselves, influenced by tendencies in America.33

Gill’s account may overstate architecture’s status as ‘an artistic practice’—even after Ruskin, the discipline had never ‘primarily’ regarded itself as such—and, while the Bauhaus did draw on American feats of engineering ‘appropriate to the machine age’, they also understood their craft (perhaps more holistically that any architectural school before or since) as part of a broader arts movement. Nevertheless, she is right to point to the emerging fascination with engineering that informed both the architecture and the poetry of the modernist period. For as Collis writes, ‘in the wake of poetry’s dislocation from its traditional structural underpinnings, it is thrown—in the compositional process—back upon the issue of its

33  Jo Gill, ‘Hart Crane: The “Architectural Art”’ in Modernism/modernity Volume 29, Number 1 (January 2022): p. 2.

1  INTRODUCTION: BEFORE THE NEW YORK SCHOOL 

17

architecture. What, if not rhyme and meter, if not the sonnet or ballad, will shape the poem?’34 Where early European modernists sought to induce a sense of the alterity, alienation, and anonymity of the mechanised city (‘Joyce’s Dublin and Woolf’s London, Eliot’s “unreal city”’, as Collis notes), Gill detects a trend in modernist American poetry for ‘reading architecture as an important index of the age’. In other words, attention is pulled away from urban space and its affects, and turned, instead, towards the materials and structures of buildings themselves. As Gill explains: Wallace Stevens’s idea of order derives in part from his understanding of the aesthetics of architectural modernity […] Carl Sandburg, from his Chicago Poems (1916) onwards, portrays the materiality of the city’s distinctive architecture. In William Carlos Williams’s work […] architecture’s new dynamism frees the imagination [and] Contemporary little magazines such as Others frequently featured poetry on architectural themes.

This modernist American architectural sensibility was most fully articulated in Hart Crane’s long poem The Bridge (1930), which looks to the ‘bound cable strands’, ‘telepathy of wires’, and ‘granite and steel’ of John Roebling’s 1883 feat of cable-stayed engineering, Brooklyn Bridge.35 As Gill explains, ‘Crane reads poetry and architecture as cognate forms which face similar formal, expressive, and material challenges and which must flex and change with the strain of their load’. Or as Crane succinctly puts it in his 1930 essay ‘Modern Poetry’: ‘poetry is an architectural art’. Crane figures as an important precursor to the New York School, Beat and Black Mountain poets of the 1950s and 1960s: ‘after all’, as Frank O’Hara writes, in his mock-manifesto ‘Personism’ (1959), ‘only [Walt] Whitman and [Hart] Crane and [William Carlos] Williams, of the American poets, are better than the movies’ (CPOH 498). As Marjorie Perloff suggests, O’Hara’s ‘manifesto’ is something of a ‘sly parody’ of the Black Mountain poet Charles Olson’s seminal essay ‘Projective Verse’ (1950), which also signals the importance of Crane to this late-modern or early post-modern moment. ‘Now take Hart Crane’, Olson writes. ‘What strikes me in him is the singleness of the push to the nominative, his push

 Collis, ‘The Frayed Trope of Rome’, p. 144.  Hart Crane, The Bridge (New York: Liveright, 1970), p. 73.

34 35

18 

M. LOSASSO

along that one arc of freshness, the attempt to get back to word as handle’.36 For all Crane’s ‘singleness’, however, Olson senses that: there is a loss in Crane of what Fenollosa is so right about, in syntax, the sentence as first act of nature, as lightning, as passage of force from subject to object, quick, in this case, from Hart to me, in every case, from me to you, the VERB, between two nouns. Does not Hart miss the advantages, by such an isolated push, miss the point of the whole front of syllable, line, field, and what happened to all language, and the poem, as a result?37

Olson’s criticism of Crane—his sense that Crane overlooks ‘syllable, line, field’—might be read as a problem, above all, of space; a criticism that seems apt given Crane’s attention to bridges—spaceless structures that, as Martin Heidegger notes, ‘are buildings but not dwellings’. Yet, bridges are never simply feats of engineering; rather, they possess the ability to gather, to separate, and to make space. As Heidegger elucidates: the bridge does not first come to a location to stand in it; rather, a location comes into existence only by virtue of the bridge. The bridge is a thing; it gathers the fourfold, but in such a way that it allows for the fourfold. By this site are determined the localities and ways by which space is made.38

Following this logic, we might then say that Crane’s poetic bridge lays the archi-poetic ground for Olson’s later work; that it makes space, not within its own textual boundaries, but for the post-modern American poetry that would follow in its wake. Occupying the liminal space, so to speak, between late modernism and an emergent post-modernism (a term that Olson is often credited with coining39) in the mid-twentieth century, space itself became Olson’s solution to the problem of modernism’s ‘formal aloofness’, as Mark Byers argues in Charles Olson and American Modernism (2018).40 As Olson states in the opening line of his 1947 study of Melville, Call Me Ishmael: 36  Charles Olson, ‘Projective Verse’ in Collected Prose, ed. Donald Allen & Benjamin Friedlander (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1997), p. 244. 37  Ibid. 38  Martin Heidegger, ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’ in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), p. 152. 39  For more on Olson and the term ‘postmodern’, see: Paul Hoover, Postmodern American Poetry (New York & London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2013), p. xxix. 40  Mark Byers, Charles Olson and American Modernism: The Practice of the Self (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), p. 65.

1  INTRODUCTION: BEFORE THE NEW YORK SCHOOL 

19

‘I take SPACE to be the central fact to man born in America’—a sentiment that would be echoed in poems such as ‘La Torre’ (‘Let the tower fall. Where space is born / man has a beach to ground on’) and ‘La Préface’ (‘Put war away with time, come into space’), as well as in a series of lectures that Olson gave on the subject of space between 1948 and 1950, and in ‘Projective Verse’, which advocated an approach to composition that captured the ‘space precisions’ and ‘space-­tensions of a poem’ via mechanical means.41 Where Crane’s work had focused on materiality, structure, and engineering (‘the attempt to get back to word as handle’ that Olson admires), Olson’s projective approach—which he calls ‘COMPOSITION BY FIELD’—was concerned with the meeting of materiality and space. Arguing, through Robert Creeley that ‘FORM IS NEVER MORE THAN AN EXTENSION OF CONTENT’, Olson explored the poetic possibilities of liberating graphic signs from their grammatical contexts, transforming punctuation marks and measured spacings into quasi-musical notations through the use of the typewriter: It is the advantage of the typewriter that, due to its rigidity and its space precisions, it can, for a poet, indicate exactly the breath, the pauses, the suspensions even of syllables, the juxtapositions even of parts of phrases, which he intends. For the first time the poet has the stave and the bar a musician has had.42

Through this combination of a new post-modern (and quintessentially American) fascination with space and the material capabilities of the typewriter, the page, as Ian Davidson suggests, ‘becomes a “construction-site” of the poem’. ‘It is words and their syntactical relationships that are the building blocks of the poem’, Davidson writes, ‘and they will refer to the “architecture” of the poem’.43 There remains an unresolved tension, however, at the heart of Olson’s projective approach that has, as Byers notes, ‘been subject to varied interpretation. Does the essay argue exclusively for a speech-based prosody, or does “COMPOSITION BY FIELD” imply a plastic use of page surface, 41  Charles Olson, Call Me Ishmael (London: Jonathan Cape, 1967), p. 15; Byers, Charles Olson and American Modernism, p. 68; Olson, ‘Projective Verse’, pp. 245; 244. 42  Olson, ‘Projective Verse’, pp. 240; 245. 43  Ian Davidson, Ideas of Space in Contemporary Poetry (Basingstoke & New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 16; 22.

20 

M. LOSASSO

irrespective of oral restraints?’44 The tension that Byers articulates also troubles the work of the New York School: to what extent are these poets ‘just going on their nerve’ to paraphrase Frank O’Hara’s bodily analogy in ‘Personism’ and to what extent are they consciously constructing poetic edifices? Where, furthermore, do we position the New York School in the space that opens up between modernism and post-modernism in the middle of the twentieth century? And how can we read them as part of the American lineage that extends through Crane (and Stevens and Williams, etc.) to Olson (and Black Mountain poetry)? The first of these questions is the central concern of this book, which explores not only the ways in which the New York School constructed space, but how they then sought to figure their bodies (and the bodies of their readers) in relation to those spaces. To bridge this gap—or to overcome this tension—I am guided, throughout the chapters that follow, by the contemporary Canadian poet Lisa Robertson’s notion of the poem as ‘shelter to a gestured vernacular’.45 Employing one of the terms that sits across both architecture and poetry, Robertson’s conception of the ‘vernacular’ is rooted in a sense of language as both originating from, and remaining bound to, the body. For Robertson, poetry is uniquely capable of gathering and then sheltering spoken language, language in its ‘collective and many-bodied origins’, language as ‘shaped speaking’ which ‘carries the breath of multiple temporalities into the present’.46 To return to the question of poetic inheritance, then, we might say that where Crane supplied the poem’s materiality and structure, and where Olson opened up space, the New York School poets looked for ways into those materially inflected spaces; or, as Maggie Nelson suggests, they sought to ‘play with the gaps that invariably occur when one attempts to get one’s body into the body of one’s writing’.47 This is of course an oversimplification—a colourful heuristic that helps us to grasp the trajectory of twentieth-century American poetics and its changing relationship to architecture. Nevertheless, the New York School’s contribution to the evolving archi-poetic sensibility that I am tracing does inhere in its attention to the body, not only within poetic space but also in relation to the poem’s material presence. It is in this respect that their work

 Byers, Charles Olson and American Modernism, p. 86.  Lisa Robertson, Nilling (Toronto: Bookthug, 2012) p. 83. 46  Ibid., p. 84. 47  Nelson, Other True Abstractions, p. 82. 44 45

1  INTRODUCTION: BEFORE THE NEW YORK SCHOOL 

21

articulates—in some case even replicates—the architectural paradigm more fully and more fruitfully than any of their poetic predecessors. Placing the New York School into a poetic lineage that extends through Olson is not, however, without its problems: critical opinion remains divided over the extent to which Olson figured as an important influence on these younger (albeit contemporaneous) poets, and to what extent their work was fashioned as a self-conscious retaliation against Olson’s ‘moral’ claims for poetics—his sense that, as Byer writes, ‘the postwar generation must have “quieter notions” or an “original modesty” about human life’.48 Published between 1961 and 1962, Locus Solus—the short-­ lived poetry magazine edited by Ashbery, Schuyler, Koch, and Harry Mathews—can be read in part as a rejection of an increasingly reified sense of the contemporary American poetry scene, as enshrined in Donald Allen’s 1960 anthology The New American Poetry, which featured the work of the New York School alongside Beat and Black Mountain poets. ‘Part of the unstated objective’ of Locus Solus, Schuyler recalls, was to offer ‘a riposte at The New American Poetry, which has so thoroughly misrepresented so many of us’.49 Canonical Black Mountain (but not Beat) poets remain conspicuously absent from Locus Solus, and in their place we find the work of younger or lesser-known poets who had been overlooked in Allen’s anthology (including Edwin Denby, Kenward Elmslie, and Diane di Prima), as well as the writings of the New York School’s artist friends (such as Larry Rivers, Jane Freilicher, and Fairfield Porter). If the New York School had been ‘thoroughly misrepresented’ by The New American Poetry, and if Locus Solus sought to address this by regrouping contemporary American poets without the presence of Black Mountain writers, then the message seems to be clear: the riposte is directed as much towards the poets who have been omitted as it is towards Allen. Reading the poetry of the New York School, however, it is difficult to erase Olson from the picture—and with historical remove, it becomes easier to untangle the extent to which his thinking fed into the New York School ethos, even as these poets sought to distance themselves from his example. Although, as Perloff writes, ‘O’Hara overtly criticized [Olson] as too grandiose, too bent on making “the important utterance”’, his

 Byers, Charles Olson and American Modernism, p. 75.  James Schuyler in Terrence Diggory, Encyclopedia of the New  York School Poets (New York: Facts on File, 2009), p. 298. 48 49

22 

M. LOSASSO

tendency toward parody also, on some level, betrays a desire to emulate.50 For as Brad Gooch notes in his biography of O’Hara, ‘following his exposure to [John] Wieners’ emulation of Olson, and his own mimicry of ‘Projective Verse’ in ‘To a Young Poet,’ O’Hara began to use an open field more consistently’.51 As I argue in Chap. 2, understanding O’Hara’s growing interest in what might be called ‘open field’ composition is crucial to understanding his evolving architectural sensibility—and Olson is critical to this development. Thus, in spite of the more obvious tonal and ‘moral’ differences between the New  York School poets and Charles Olson, there are nevertheless important kinships between their work. Locating New  York School poetry within an American tradition that extends through Crane and Olson is therefore essential when discussing space, materiality, and corporeality; when it comes, that is, to reconstructing the architectural dimensions of their work.

Something Like a Liveable Space The subtitle of this book—‘something like a liveable space’—is taken from Ashbery’s introduction to The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara. Here, Ashbery suggests that O’Hara’s best poetry had something ‘basically useable about it—not only for poets in search of a voice of their own but for the reader who turns to poetry as a last resort in trying to juggle the contradictory components of modern life into something like a liveable space’ (CPOH vx). To detect, in poetry, a capacity for opening up liveable spaces is to recognise, as Heidegger does, that it is ‘poetry [that] first causes dwelling to be dwelling. Poetry is what really lets us dwell. But through what do we attain to a dwelling place?’ Heidegger asks: ‘Through building. Poetic creation, which lets us dwell, is a kind of building’.52 Heidegger’s thinking on the relationship between ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’ (as the title of his 1954 essay has it)—or between Poetry, Language, Thought (as it is expressed in the title of his collected essays on the subject)— remains problematic for its association with German nationalism; a sentiment that would find its fullest expression in his outspoken support of Nazism in the 1930s. Nevertheless, if it is possible to divorce these ideas from their wider ethics, Heidegger’s notion that ‘poetic creation […] is a  Perloff, Poet Among Painters, p. xxi.  Gooch, City Poet, p. 302. 52  Heidegger, ‘…Poetically Man Dwells…’ in Poetry, Language, Thought, p. 213. 50 51

1  INTRODUCTION: BEFORE THE NEW YORK SCHOOL 

23

kind of building’ and that, as such, it ‘lets us dwell’ remains an important touchstone for the present project. By dissociating dwelling from the physical act of ‘occupy[ing] a house’ and by thinking, instead, ‘of dwelling and poetry in terms of their essential nature’, Heidegger reveals the importance of language—specifically poetic language—to the creation and inhabitation of space; he reveals in other words, that ‘language is not a reflection of the world but produces reality as an effect of discourse’, as poet and critic Kristen Kreider argues; or, as M. K. Blasing puts it (writing about the work of O’Hara and Ashbery), ‘if poetry has a generic and general political function it may be to show us how it constructs itself into a discourse that in turn constructs a meaningful world’.53 Heidegger’s thinking around poetry and dwelling thus carves out an important space within which to imagine the relationship between poetry and architecture, not simply in terms of beauty and utility—form and content—structure and materiality but in terms of dwelling and inhabitation, conceiving of both as constitutive of something like a liveable space. The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara was published in 1971—the same year that Poetry, Language, Thought first appeared in English. It is therefore unlikely that Ashbery has Heidegger in mind when he writes about poetry’s liveable spaces, and even less likely that any of the New  York School poets were consciously working Heidegger’s ideas on dwelling into their poems. Nevertheless, there is something significant in this temporal alignment: for if, as I have been suggesting, the dialectic between poetry and architecture continued to evolve throughout the twentieth century, then the philosophical turn to poetry, space, and dwelling marked a crucial development along this trajectory—at the very moment that the New  York School poets were active. Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space (1958; 1964), for example, echoes Heidegger’s emphasis on dwelling, by attempting to map and phenomenologically reconstruct the home as ‘an oneiric house, a house of dream-memory’.54 Translating the physical place of the house into the metaphysical space of the poetic (as I discuss in Chap. 4 on Barbara Guest), Bachelard explores the extent to which 53  Ibid., 212; Kristen Kreider, Poetics and Place: The Architecture of Sign, Subjects and Site (London & New  York: I.  B. Taurus, 2014), p.  19; M.  K. Blasing, Politics and Form in Postmodern Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 19. 54  Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), p. 15.

24 

M. LOSASSO

thought is conditioned by spatial experience. ‘Philosophers, when confronted with outside and inside’, he writes, ‘think in terms of being and non-being. Thus profound metaphysics is rooted in an implicit geometry which—whether we will or no—confers spatiality on thought’.55 According to Bachelard, metaphysical thought is dictated by a sense of the spatial, by the assumption that the traditional dichotomy of ‘outside and inside’ is underpinned by geometrical truism. Yet, as he explains, this opposition is spurious, posing: problems of metaphysical anthropology that are not symmetrical. To make inside concrete and outside vast is the first task, the first problem, it would seem, of an anthropology of the imagination. But between concrete and vast the opposition is not a true one. At the slightest touch, asymmetry appears.56

As Bachelard’s example illustrates, we think according to the spaces that we experience in the ‘real’ world, but our sense of how the real world exists spatially derives, in the first instance, from our thinking: another feedback loop of building and dwelling, language and space, which exposes the transformative potential of placing architectural and poetic practices into dialogue with one another. The work of Heidegger and Bachelard (among others) paved the way for the post-structuralist and post-modern thought that would come to define the latter part of the twentieth century, at roughly the same time that the New York School were coming to maturity. In 1967, Jacques Derrida published his three seminal works, Speech and Phenomena, Of Grammatology, and Writing and Difference. Employing implicitly architectural terminology, Derrida’s ‘poststructuralist’ project involved ‘deconstructing’ the text, testing its ‘borders’, and ‘decentering’ the authority of the logos, in order to claim that ‘there is no outside the text’.57 In 1986, Derrida turned his attention explicitly to the architectural, in an essay on the work of post-modern architect Bernard Tschumi titled, ‘No (Point of) Madness—Maintaining Architecture’, in which he explores intersections between writing and architecture, arguing (in an echo of Jencks) that ‘architecture must have a meaning, it must present this meaning, and hence signify. The signifying or symbolic value of this meaning must command the structure and syntax, the form and  Ibid., p. 212.  Ibid., p. 215. 57  Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, tr. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 159. 55 56

1  INTRODUCTION: BEFORE THE NEW YORK SCHOOL 

25

function of architecture’. Following Heidegger, Derrida concludes that ‘the experience of meaning must be the dwelling’.58 This turn to the architectural paradigm (often in explicit reference to Heidegger) was pervasive in the work of Derrida’s post-modern contemporaries, among them: Henri Lefebvre (The Production of Space, 1974); Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 1977); Roland Barthes (‘The Eiffel Tower’, 1979); Jean-François Lyotard (‘Domus and the Megalopolis’, 1991); Hélène Cixous, (Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, 1993); Frederic Jameson (‘Architecture and the Critique of Ideology’, 1982; ‘The Brick and the Balloon: Architecture, Idealism and Land Speculation’, 1998); Jean Baudrillard (Mass Identity Architecture: Architectural Writings of Jean Baudrillard, 2006); and Michel Foucault (Space, Knowledge, Power, 2007).59 Yet, the work of the New  York School remained (with the possible exception of Barbara Guest) largely antagonistic to post-structuralist thinking: as Ashbery noted in an interview in 1981, ‘Deconstruction is now a popular word. It’s not what I would apply to my work, not in the accepted sense, but I was actually deconstructing my poetry in the sense of taking it apart, and the pieces were lying around without any coherent connection’.60 Ashbery’s comment reveals the extent to which the work of the New York School dovetails incidentally with post-structuralist thinking: Ashbery’s work is concerned with deconstruction, but not in the strictly Derridean sense of that word. This is because, I argue, there remains a conceptual gap in much of the post-structuralist thinking cited above, which stems from the absence of the body from the founding thinking of Heidegger and Bachelard: as Edward S. Casey notes, for all their emphasis on place and dwelling, ‘neither philosopher adequately assessed the role of the human body in the experience of significant place’.61 This deep-rooted sense of abstraction is made manifest in

58  Jaques Derrida, ‘No (Point of) Madness—Maintaining Architecture’, tr. K.  Linker in Psyche: Inventions of the Other Vol. II, eds. Peggy Kamuf & Elizabeth G. Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), p. 91. 59  For more on the relationship between architecture and literary-critical thinking, see: Neil Leach ed., Rethinking Architecture (London & New York: Routledge, 1997). 60  Quoted in Geoff Ward, Statutes of Liberty: The New  York School of Poets (London: Palgrave, 2001), p. 111. 61  Edward S. Casey, Getting Back Into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Placeworld (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993), p. xv.

26 

M. LOSASSO

Bachelard’s use of the preposition ‘of’ in his book’s title (The Poetics Of Space). For as O’Hara notes in ‘Personism’: Abstraction (in poetry, not painting) involves personal removal by the poet. For instance, the decision between ‘the nostalgia of the infinite’ and ‘the nostalgia for the infinite’ defines an attitude towards a degree of abstraction. The nostalgia of the infinite representing the greater degree of abstraction, removal, and negative capability (as in Keats and Mallarmé). (CPOH 498)

‘Personism’, on the other hand, is ‘so totally opposed to this kind of abstract removal that it is verging on a true abstraction for the first time, really, in the history of poetry’. The syntactic formulation that O’Hara rejects—‘the x of the y’—is that which has so often brought poetry and architecture together: Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space remains the definitive example, but earlier texts include Ruskin’s The Poetry of Architecture, while more recent work, such as Anthony C.  Antoniades’s Poetics of Architecture: Theory of Design (1990), attests to how firmly the phraseology has stuck. While Bachelard’s text has been important in drawing these disparate disciplines together, it has also played a role in estranging them: his approach dematerialises architecture by wafting it into the poetic imagination, while simultaneously reducing poetry to ‘the poetic quality of something’, as one Oxford English Dictionary (OED) definition for the word ‘poetry’ tautologically and abstractedly puts it.62 By placing ‘the poem squarely between […] two persons instead of two pages’, O’Hara’s abstraction of abstraction rescues poetry from the vague designation of the ‘poetic quality of something’ else and makes it—like any architectural work—a materially delineated space for the meeting of bodies. The reinsertion of the body into poetic space is, as I have noted, at the heart of my reading of the New York School, and it is here that it diverges from the phenomenological tradition of Heidegger, Bachelard, and much of the post-structuralist thinking that followed (with the exception of Barthes, who I discuss in Chap. 5). Instead, this book is guided by a more recent post critical turn in literary theory—one that, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Rita Felski, Stephen Best, Sharon Marcus, Paul K. Saint-Amour, 62  ‘poetry, n. 6. a.’, OED Online, Oxford University Press, March 2023, https://www.oed. com/view/Entry/146552?redirectedFrom=poetry#eid. Accessed 12 April 2023.  Lytle Shaw also notes the abstraction of the term ‘poetic’ in art historical writing: ‘always uncoupled from any actual examples of poetry (modern or contemporary), the word indicates a straying from the path of critical self-reflexivity’. Shaw, Poetics of Coterie, p. 14.

1  INTRODUCTION: BEFORE THE NEW YORK SCHOOL 

27

and others understand it—looks at the surface of the text, and not for what may (or may not) be hidden underneath. Or as O’Hara puts it, ‘in the relationship between the surface and the meaning […] the one is the other (you have to use words) and I hope the poem to be the subject, and not just about it’ (CPOH 497). Drawing on the work of Susan Sontag—a figure who was both temporally and geographically coincident with the New York School—surface reading makes space for an intimate, corporeal engagement with the material text, one that might ‘reveal the sensuous surface of art without mucking about in it’, as Sontag writes in ‘Against Interpretation’.63 To be grounded in this post-critical moment is, following Bruno Latour, to apprehend the critic not as ‘the one who debunks, but the one who assembles [my emphasis]’.64 It is, as Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus understand it, to take an ‘affective and ethical’ approach to criticism; to elevate description and attention above suspicion and paranoia; to recognise the problems inherent in the equation of criticism and activism; and to acknowledge that structures of domination and violence are no longer veiled, but are visibly and overtly present at the surface.65 In this respect, a post-critical approach loosely structures my readings of gender, sexuality, and social precarity in each chapter, but it is also central to the ways in which I read the relationship between poetry and architecture through the body. Rather than seeking the mystical ‘poetic’ or ‘architectonic’ threads that connect these aesthetic forms, I look for the visible points of connection, the overlaps that occur at the surface of the poems and the buildings under study. As such, each chapter crafts its own distinct surface reading, first by offering critical readings of the poetry of the New York School that reframe paranoid approaches, and then, more literally, by attending to the visible architectural surfaces (even when those surfaces open spaces, as in Chaps. 2 and 5; or possess complex structures, as I discuss in Chap. 3) with which these poems engage.

 Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays (London: Penguin, 2009), p. 19.  Bruno Latour, ‘Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern’ in Critical Inquiry 30 (Winter 2004): p. 246. 65  Stephen Best & Sharon Marcus, ‘An Introduction to Surface Reading’ in Representations 108: 1 (2009): p. 10. 63 64

28 

M. LOSASSO

Space, Structure, Surface, Aperture The term ‘architecture’—as a glance at the OED reveals—is large and contains multitudes: it is ‘both abstract and concrete’; it refers to the process of building, as well as to the theory that underlies this process, as well as to the completed work—the building. Architecture is both ‘art’ and ‘science’; at once ‘style’ and ‘action’; a ‘method’, but also a ‘set of rules’, as well as ‘construction or structure generally’.66 When we speak of ‘architecture’, then, we are never—can never be—speaking of a single entity, but of theory, process, art, science, action, style, and method. Throughout this book, I attempt to keep these various definitions alive by looking at architecture across historical, geographic, aesthetic, practical, and theoretical contexts. Ultimately, however, I follow architectural theorist, Albena Yaneva’s ethnographic approach, which advocates for responses to architectural artefacts that: engage in a continuously unfolding process of cumulative interactions; instead of discovering part of it ‘at once’, I gradually witness the building growing in front of me and with me. Experiencing the building is complex […] I account for the play of light on a building with the constant change of shadows, intensities and colours shifting reflections. A building is never immobile or still in perception. It can be perceived only in a cumulative series of interactions. There is a continuous building up of the architectural object.67

Yaneva’s ethnographic methodology (a ‘slow’ approach that I adopted for this book’s prologue) reminds us that architecture is a fundamentally mediating practice: via its processes of material construction, architecture produces spaces in and through which people and things might connect, forge communities, and build societies. Bill Hillier and Julienne Hanson (who coined the linguistically inflected term ‘space syntax’ to describe a set of theories and techniques for the analysis of spatial configurations), gesture towards this conception of architecture in their book The Social Logic of Space (1984), when they note that, though the product of architecture tends to be a ‘physical object’ like ‘other artefacts’, it is its social 66  ‘architecture, n.’, OED Online, Oxford University Press, March 2023, https://www. oed.com/view/Entry/10408?rskey=rBRAC4&result=1&isAdvanced=false#eid. Accessed 11 April 2023. 67  Albena Yaneva, Five Ways to Make Architecture Political: An Introduction to the Politics of Design Practice (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), p. 37.

1  INTRODUCTION: BEFORE THE NEW YORK SCHOOL 

29

function that distinguishes it among the arts. ‘It is this ordering of space that is the purpose of the building’, write Hillier and Hanson, and ‘the ordering of space in buildings is really about the ordering of relations between people’.68 In this formulation, architecture must be understood, at least in part, in terms of its capacity to transcend its own aesthetic and physical status by virtue of its social purpose, its capacity to shape societies: ‘Through the ways in which buildings, individually and collectively, create and order space, we are able to recognise society: that it exists and has a certain form’.69 In Hanson and Hillier’s conception, the spaces modelled by architecture are as much conceptual as physical, for though they take shape by virtue of the material structures that delineate them, the spaces themselves remain essentially immaterial and therefore, in some sense, imagined; they are only what we make of them, by linguistic consensus. And it is here, at the seam between the material and the immaterial, that poetry and architecture meet, housing bodies and shaping communities. If architecture is fundamentally social and corporeal, I am, in the end, less concerned with the idea of fixed monumentality and more committed to a notion of the fluid, the changeable, and the transient; architecture as a verb as much as a noun, defined by processes of design, construction, use, and reuse. Breaking apart syntactical rules, challenging social codes, and redefining corporeal engagements, I treat both poetry and architecture as radically world-building pursuits. Architecture might shape and order the physical world, but by rethinking language—by understanding it as something that constitutes, rather than simply represents, its own reality—avant-garde poetic practices can show us how to break down the spatial binaries that have traditionally set the standards by which we build and inhabit space. This is the relationship between poetry and architecture that this book builds: not one that is analogous, but mutually constitutive; not so much borrowing from, as troubling, challenging, and probing one another to reformulate and refresh cultural protocols for building and for dwelling—‘protocols’, as Robertson writes, that ‘we enliven, figure and transform with our bodies and their words’.70 This book is structured around four poets—Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, and James Schuyler—and four aspects of 68  Bill Hillier & Julienne Hanson, The Social Logic of Space (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 1. 69  Ibid. Note also that the strenuous work of Blondel and Ledoux, to elevate architecture from utility to beauty, has been reversed: an indication of the ways in which the channel between poetry and architecture keeps constantly reinventing established ‘protocols’. 70  Robertson, Nilling, p. 73.

30 

M. LOSASSO

architectural design—space, structure, surface, and aperture. In Chap. 2, ‘Space: Frank O’Hara’s Forward-Dawning Futurism’, I map the extremes of O’Hara’s poetic forms onto the ‘needle’ and ‘globe’—the architectural typologies that Rem Koolhaas identifies at the heart of what he calls Manhattanism. Arguing that the ‘needle’ and ‘globe’ are symbolic of international modernism’s tall, slender towers and organicism’s capacious, ovoid structures, I read O’Hara’s work through the prevailing architectural language of sterility and fertility that charged the polemics between these late modernist rivals. Through the lens of José Esteban Muñoz’s work on queer futurism, I suggest that, in full consciousness of this ongoing architectural discourse, O’Hara constructs a fertile mode of poetic expression, which opens up liveable spaces between two persons—between two bodies—and, in doing so, encodes the potentiality for queer utopian encounters. In Chap. 3, ‘Structure: John Ashbery’s Improvisatory Architecture’, I argue that over-attention to the surfaces of Ashbery’s work has engendered a critical oversight in Ashbery scholarship, which has tended to miss the complex interplay of self-supporting structure that characterises his early to mid-career poetry. Distinguishing between what I term the ‘critical’ and ‘epicurean’ reader, I emphasise the importance of pleasure and play in generating new critical readings that take account of this structural tendency. I trace the development of Ashbery’s poetic between 1962 and 1977, mapping three poetry collections onto three contemporaneous architectural movements: alongside The Tennis Court Oath (1962), I consider the visionary architecture of Archigram, arguing that Ashbery’s early experimental collection amounted to a poetic scaffolding, a kind of vision of what poetry could be; I read The Double Dream of Spring (1970) through the work of Italian post-modern architect Aldo Rossi, with whom Ashbery shares a penchant for constructing an illusory classical formalism that masks a finely wrought illogicality; and I consider Houseboat Days (1977), Ashbery’s most self-consciously post-modern and architectural collection, in relation to Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi’s Learning from Las Vegas (1972; 1977), with its emphasis on the American commercial vernacular and the decorated shed of post-modern ornament. Where Chaps. 2 and 3 are concerned with the historical specificity of the seam—or ‘coupure’71—between late modernism and early  Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham NC.: Duke University Press, 1991), p. 1. 71

1  INTRODUCTION: BEFORE THE NEW YORK SCHOOL 

31

post-­modernism, Chaps. 4 and 5—on Guest and Schuyler, respectively— shift somewhat away from historical context towards a closer engagement with literary and architectural theory. In Chap. 4, ‘Surface: Barbara Guest’s Tactile Cladding’, I argue that Guest’s ‘invisible architecture’ is scaffolded onto the wreckage of domestic space: rather than reject or demolish historical notions of the home, I suggest that Guest’s poetry reframes and recodes them, in part through an attention to the space of the artist’s (and poet’s) studio. In establishing the invisible architecture of domestic space, I turn to a consideration of textiles, looking at the ways in which Guest gives voice to silent histories of feminine labour by constructing rich verbal surfaces with which to clad her poetic scaffolding. Chapter 5, ‘Aperture: James Schuyler’s Precarious Parentheses’, explores Schuyler’s idiosyncratic use of the parenthesis as a grammatical-­ rhetorical device capable of opening up syntactic space and producing haptic engagements with the text. Comparing Schuyler’s use of the bracket with his poetic rendering of windows, I argue that through the parenthesis Schuyler translates something of his precarious existence into his poems. Yet, rather than read precarity as a necessarily negative state, I suggest that Schuyler’s parenthetical poems transform precarity into another utopian model of queer futurity, this time through the opening or aperture. In so doing, this chapter acts as a bookend, mirroring O’Hara’s queer corporeal poetic by considering the extent to which Schuyler also ‘likes to play with the gaps that invariably occur when one attempts to get one’s body into the body of one’s writing’, to recall Nelson. As I demonstrate, in his attempts to locate the body in the spaces created through parenthetical punctuation, Schuyler’s poems ask the reader to think about how and where we position our bodies, both in the constructed spaces of the built environment and in relation to the poetic text. A final concluding chapter traces the relationship between architecture and avant-garde poetic practice up to the present day. Where this introduction has sought to track the relationship between poetry and architecture in the decades leading up to the New York School, Chap. 6, ‘After the New York School’, continues that trajectory in the other direction, looking at the work of several contemporary poets whose writing fits within the wider New York School tradition. In particular, I consider the importance of place and dwelling in language, post-language and ecopoetics; the role of the digital and the virtual in contemporary poetry and architecture; and the relationship between race and space in the post-modern American tradition, which has remained (largely) absent from the New York School

32 

M. LOSASSO

discussion, but which scholarship must address if we are to continue the study of avant-garde poetic practice into the future. My own approach to the relationship between poetry and architecture has—like the relationship that I have attempted to articulate here—been defined by a continuous shuttling back and forth: from poetic texts I turned to literary theory; from there to architectural theory; and from libraries to special collections, where I encountered the New York School through tactile engagements with archival materials. I mapped the lives of these poets onto the places in which they lived and worked, undertaking field trips across Europe and the United States—from Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum to the Simonetti Stairs in Rome, from the Pompidou Centre in Paris to the UN Building, the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art in New  York—capturing locations on 35 mm film (Fig. 1.4) and developing ethnographic responses. In short, I looked from poem to building, from site to space, and back to the page again, seeking points of access into these poems. The result is a book that understands itself, to borrow the terms from architects Denise Scott

Fig. 1.4  Frank O’Hara’s apartment, 90 University Place, New York City. Photo: the author

1  INTRODUCTION: BEFORE THE NEW YORK SCHOOL 

33

Brown and Robert Venturi (which I discuss in Chap. 3), as more of an eclectic ‘decorated shed’ than a finely sculpted ‘duck’, whose contours are smooth and cohesive but ultimately closed. For if the door between these disciplines is presently set ajar, then this book seeks to throw it open and, in so doing, to lay the foundation for future discourse between poetry and architecture.

CHAPTER 2

Space: Frank O’Hara’s Forward-Dawning Futurism

And someone you love enters the room and says wouldn’t you like the eggs a little different today? —Frank O’Hara, from ‘For Grace After A Party’

Along the western edge of New York’s Battery Park City esplanade, there stands a steel handrail, designed by the late American-­Iranian architect and sculptor Siah Armajani. Like many of Armajani’s public works, the waterfront railing is cast with large bronze letters, which spell out a line from Frank O’Hara’s 1954 poem ‘Meditations in an Emergency’:  ‘One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes—I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life’ (CPOH 197). Literally—materially—imprinted onto the city’s urban infrastructure, O’Hara has become enshrined as the bard of mid-century New York City. Few writers have captured the ‘energy and sass’, to use David Lehman’s words, of New York City; few, that is, have translated a specific urban place, at a particular moment in time, so evocatively into the compressed space of a lyric poem: as Matthew Weiner, creator of the HBO series Mad Men, recalls, reading O’Hara for the first time ‘was just like total time © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Losasso, Poetry, Architecture, and the New York School, Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41520-3_2

35

36 

M. LOSASSO

travel’.1 Weiner’s remark indicates not only the extent to which the avant-­ garde poet has secured his place in contemporary popular culture (a Mad Men episode entitled ‘Meditations in an Emergency’ features the protagonist reading O’Hara’s 1957 collection of that name) but also the particular time-warping quality that makes his work so enduring. Contemporary readers of O’Hara—even, and sometimes especially, those who have never visited New York City—feel that they know mid-century Manhattan intimately through his verse: the honk of ‘hum-coloured cabs’, the sultry heat of ‘Bastille day’ at noon, the smell of ink, still fresh, on a broadsheet; the taste of ‘cheeseburgers’ and ‘chocolate malteds’; and the profane vision of ‘Neon in daylight’.2 In this respect, O’Hara’s poetry shares an affective characteristic with architecture, the form that brings us closest to the past: enter an historical building and you are, in a sense, sharing space with all of its former inhabitants, following, literally, in the footsteps of others. If O’Hara’s poetry has an architectural quality to it, that is also because architecture figures prominently in the poems. In Lunch Poems alone— O’Hara’s his best-known, pocket-sized collection,  published by City Lights in 1964—we find references to ‘the House of Seagram’, ‘515 Madison Avenue’, ‘the Empire State Building’, and ‘the UN [Building]’— all of which are examples of New York’s monumental architecture from 1930s art-deco to 1950s international modernism.3 Yet, these references tell only half the story; for in fact, as I discuss in this chapter, the relationship between O’Hara’s poetry and the architecture of 1950s and 1960s New York City is more complex and more nuanced than these named allusions to Manhattan’s monumental buildings suggest. As John Ashbery writes in the introduction to The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara: What was needed was a vernacular corresponding to the creatively messy New York environment […] In the poems [O’Hara] was to write during the remainder of his life—from about 1954 to 1966, the year of his death—this vernacular took over, shaping his already considerable gifts toward a 1  David Lehman, The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets (New York: Anchor Books, 1999), p. 20; Matthew Weiner in Scott Timberg ‘The poetry of “Mad Men”: When Matthew Weiner first read Frank O’Hara, “it was just like total time travel”’ in Salon July 6, 2016, https://www.salon.com/2016/07/06/the_poetry_of_mad_men_ when_matthew_weiner_first_read_frank_ohara_it_was_just_like_total_time_travel/. Accessed 13 March 2023. 2  Frank O’Hara, Lunch Poems (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1964), pp. 15–16; 25–26. 3  Ibid., pp. 32; 37; 38; 57.

2  SPACE: FRANK O’HARA’S FORWARD-DAWNING FUTURISM 

37

r­emarkable new poetry—both modest and monumental, with something basically useable about it—not only for poets in search of a voice of their own but for the reader who turns to poetry as a last resort in trying to juggle the contradictory components of modern life into something like a liveable space. (CPOH x)

Ashbery captures the distinctly architectural character of O’Hara’s best work through the delicate interweaving of architectural semantics, a sense of the spatial, and a feeling for the social. In Ashbery’s description, O’Hara is more architect than poet, yet the spaces that he constructs are not merely mirrors of New York’s ‘monumental’ architecture, but ‘modest’ and ‘liveable’ spaces. If O’Hara’s love of architecture is written into the poems, it is also inscribed—like the lines of his verse on the Downtown handrail—on the details of his life. Within three months of moving to New York, towards the end of 1951, O’Hara had taken a job at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). ‘When [Alfred] Barr’s Matisse retrospective opened [at MoMA] on November 14’, writes Brad Gooch in City Poet, his 1993 biography of O’Hara, he ‘was so intent on viewing and reviewing the paintings that he applied for a job selling postcards, publications, and tickets at the Museum’s front desk’.4 Yet, if O’Hara was beguiled by the artwork, he was also set on a job that immersed him in the sleek space of the museum. Designed by Philip L. Goodwin and Edward Durell Stone, and completed in 1939 (just over a decade before O’Hara arrived in the city), MoMA was one of the only European-inspired modernist buildings in an otherwise art-deco midtown in the early 1950s. As Gooch comments, O’Hara was ‘quite content to bask in the light flooding through the building’s large waxed front windows and then refracted along its hard edged angled surfaces, the modernist texture of the lobby much like that pictured in Schlemmer’s Bauhaus Stairway then hanging in a stairwell of the museum’.5 By 1965, one year before his early death, O’Hara had risen through the ranks at MoMA from desk clerk, to special assistant in the International Program, to Associate Curator of Painting and Sculpture Exhibitions.6 O’Hara’s position at MoMA has often been regarded as the incidental backdrop to his life as a poet, but as recent work by Matthew Holman 4  Brad Gooch, City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O’Hara (New York: Harper Perennial, 1993), pp. 206–207. 5  Ibid. 6  Ibid., 257.

38 

M. LOSASSO

emphasises, his ‘distinguished curatorial career for The Museum of Modern Art’s International Program […] was essential to the shaping of his cosmopolitan aesthetics’.7 Glancing through the Frank O’Hara Papers in the MoMA Archives, one is struck by the wide purview of this ‘distinguished’ role: O’Hara was copied into all internal memoranda, not only on the painterly shows but also on the many architectural exhibitions that ran during his tenure, including: ‘Structure and Space in Contemporary Architecture’; ‘The Skyscraper’; ‘Visionary Architecture’; ‘The Twentieth-­ Century House’; ‘What is Modern Architecture?’; ‘Architecture Without Architects’; ‘Twentieth-Century Engineering’; and ‘Modern Architecture U.S.A’.8 Though his direct involvement remained largely focused on fine art, these documents reveal that, in his day job, O’Hara would have been immersed in curatorial discussions around modern and contemporary American (and European) architecture from the mid-1950s onwards. In this chapter, I focus on the years that Ashbery highlights—‘from about 1954 to 1966, the year of his death’—tracing the development of O’Hara’s poetic alongside the changing skyline of New York City. Shifting focus away from the architectural poems that have received the most scholarly attention—the early compositions that not only name, but also echo the shapes of, modernist office blocks—I examine the ways in which O’Hara adopts the language and aesthetics of contemporary architecture in order to subvert New York City’s dominant modes and create ‘liveable spaces’, pregnant with the promise of what José Esteban Muñoz calls ‘the force of a forward-dawning futurity that is queerness’.9

Millions of Glassy Squares At a conference in 2018, a few months before I first visited the MoMA archives, a fellow New York School scholar told me about the notebooks that comprised part of the Frank O’Hara Papers: they were filled, he said, with handwritten drafts of poems that looked like skyscrapers. Long, thin, and elegantly written, even O’Hara’s cursive notes, it seems, possessed an architectural sensibility. Yet, when I finally arrived at the archives, I was 7  Matthew Holman, Frank O’Hara Abroad: Curatorship, Cosmopolitanism, and the Cold War. PhD Dissertation, University College London, 2020. 8  Internal memos for all of these exhibitions are located in: Department of Circulating Exhibition Records, II.1.a. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York, NY, USA. 9  José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York & London: New York University Press, 2009), p. 23.

2  SPACE: FRANK O’HARA’S FORWARD-DAWNING FUTURISM 

39

unable to track down these handwritten ‘skyscraper poems’—all I found were quick memos, doodles, and hard-to-decode diagrams of artworks, accompanied by notes like: ‘one with the wooden egg in the middle’. The closest I came to a skyscraper was an internal memorandum, onto which O’Hara had been copied, which included details of MoMA’s 1957 exhibition, ‘The Skyscraper’. One doesn’t have to look in archives, however, to find a visual connection between O’Hara’s poetry and Manhattan’s tall buildings: a cursory leaf through the first third of his monumental Collected Poems reveals the extent to which the skyscraper typology imprinted itself onto O’Hara’s work. Consider ‘Nocturne’, written in August 1955: There’s nothing worse than feeling bad and not being able to tell you. Not because you’d kill me or it would kill you, or we don’t love each other. It’s space. The sky is grey and clear, with pink and blue shadows under each cloud. A tiny airliner drops its specks over the U N Building. My eyes, like millions of glassy squares, merely reflect. Everything sees through me, in the daytime I’m too hot and at night I freeze; I’m built the wrong way for the river and a mild gale would break every fibre in me. Why don’t I go east and west instead of north and south? It’s the architect’s fault. And in a few years I’ll be useless, not even an office building. Because you have no telephone, and live so far away; the Pepsi-Cola sign, the seagulls and the noise. (CPOH 224–225)

40 

M. LOSASSO

Numerous scholars have noted that this poem, like others written in the same period, ‘is shaped like a skyscraper’, as Keegan Cook Finberg writes in ‘Frank O’Hara rebuilds the Seagram Building: a radical poetry of event’.10 Yet that terminology is not quite accurate. For in fact, the poem is shaped like the UN Secretariat Building, a ‘thirty-nine story glazed slab, 544 feet high, 287 feet wide and 72 feet thick, with 5,400 glass spandrels’—the first example of the international modernist office block in New York (a style that would dominate the city for the next decade or more), jointly designed by Oscar Niemeyer and Le Corbusier (Fig. 2.1).11 The skyscraper, on the other hand—the typology that had characterised Manhattan’s monumental architecture in the first half of the twentieth century—was defined as much by its utopian idealism as by its feats of engineering. ‘There is no manifesto, no architectural debate, no doctrine, no law, no planning, no ideology, no theory; there is only—Skyscraper’, writes post-modern architect (and Manhattan’s self-styled ‘ghostwriter’) Rem Koolhaas in his 1978 book Delirious New York.12 ‘In this branch of utopian real estate’, Koolhaas explains, ‘architecture is no longer the art of designing buildings so much as the brutal skyward extrusion of whatever site the developer has managed to assemble’.13 In other words, the classic Manhattan skyscraper of the early twentieth century was not simply an architectural typology, but ‘the earth reproducing itself’, a series of ‘artificial levels’ treated like ‘virgin sites, as if the others did not exist [Koolhaas’s emphasis]’.14 The classic, early twentieth century skyscraper is the architectural articulation of what Koolhaas calls Manhattanism. As he explains, ‘Manhattan [is] the product of an unformulated theory, Manhattanism, whose program [was] to exist in a world totally fabricated by man [sic.], i.e. to live inside fantasy’.15 An oblique conflation of the terms Manhattan and modernism, Manhattanism, Koolhaas suggests, was underpinned by two prevailing typologies, the ‘needle’ and the ‘globe’:

10  Keegan Cook Finberg, ‘Frank O’Hara rebuilds the Seagram Building: a radical poetry of event’ in Textual Practice (30: 1: 2016): p. 132. 11  Robert A. M. Stern, Thomas Mellins & David Fishman, New York 1960: Architecture and Urbanism Between the Second World War and the Bicentennial (New York: The Monacelli Press, 1995), p. 167. 12  Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York (New York: The Monacelli Press, 1994), p. 89. 13  Ibid., p. 88. 14  Ibid., pp. 88; 85. 15  Ibid., p. 10.

2  SPACE: FRANK O’HARA’S FORWARD-DAWNING FUTURISM 

41

Fig. 2.1  Oscar Niemeyer and Le Corbusier, The United Nations Building, New York City, 1952. Photo: Bernd Dittrich The needle and the globe represent the two extremes of Manhattan’s formal vocabulary. The needle is the thinnest, least voluminous structure to mark a location within the Grid. It combines maximum physical impact with a negligible consumption of ground. It is, essentially a building without an interior. The globe is, mathematically, the form that encloses the maximum interior volume with the least external skin. It has a promiscuous capacity to

42 

M. LOSASSO

absorb objects, people, iconographies, symbolisms, it relates them through the mere fact of their coexistence in its interior.16

The Eiffel Tower and the Crystal Palace—nineteenth-century feats of engineering, constructed for a new society focussed on spectacle—are the blueprints for the needle and the globe, which appear throughout New York’s World’s Fairs, from the Latting Observatory and Manhattan Crystal Palace in 1853, to the Trylon and Perisphere of 1939 (Fig. 2.2), to the Unisphere and Tent of Tomorrow in New York’s last World’s Fair of 1964. But these typologies were not simply annexed in exhibition spaces; rather, they fed into and informed Manhattan’s architectural consciousness in the early part of the twentieth century. Koolhaas continues: the history of Manhattanism as a separate identifiable architecture is a dialectic between these two forms, with the needle wanting to become a globe and the globe trying, from time to time, to turn into a needle—a cross-­ fertilisation that results in a series of successful hybrids in which the needle’s capacity for attracting attention and its territorial modesty are matched with the consummate receptivity of the sphere.17

For Koolhaas, it is the fantastical coming together of these two competing and contradictory typologies that underpins the classic New York skyscraper—which is why the arrival of the UN Building in New York sounded its death knell. For in the total separation of the needle and globe, New York’s architecture shifted from fantasy to pragmatism and marked the decisive end of Manhattanism. As Koolhaas laments, Le Corbusier’s new vision of the international modernist block: means business only. Its lack of base […] and a top […] the merciless overexposure to the sun […] all preclude occupation by any of the forms of social intercourse that have begun to invade Manhattan, floor by floor. […] He introduces honesty on such a scale that it exists only at the price of total banality. […] The glass walls of his Horizontal Skyscraper enclose a complete cultural void.18

 Ibid., p. 27.  Ibid. 18  Ibid., p. 255. 16 17

2  SPACE: FRANK O’HARA’S FORWARD-DAWNING FUTURISM 

43

Fig. 2.2  Joseph Binder, New York World’s Fair Poster, 1939

It is this vacuous, banal, and unsocial building that provides the model for ‘Nocturne’, not only lending the poem its shape and structure, but articulating a crisis of space. The poem opens in the register of a relatively conventional—if banal—love address: ‘There’s nothing worse / than feeling bad and not / being able to tell you’. O’Hara identifies ‘space’ as the obstacle between speaker and lover: ‘Not because you’d kill me / or it would kill you, or / we don’t love each other. / It’s space’. The

44 

M. LOSASSO

implication here—which is reinforced at the poem’s close—is that the speaker and his lover are living at a distance from one another (i.e. it is space that sets them apart) but O’Hara doesn’t quite say that: rather, space itself becomes the problem (and not simply its cause) and in the running together of the s’s, coupled with the sibilant ‘c’ of ‘space’, the line is awkward, difficult to parse and even harder to voice: the words must be formed between the teeth, tongue pressed to the roof of the mouth, so that in vocalising the clipped sentence, the reader is forced to compress even oral space. This pursed line signals the shift from conventional lyric address to a description of the UN Building. Like an avant-garde film, we cut abruptly to ‘the sky’, across which the roving eye of the poet-camera pans until the UN Building looms into view. The speaker returns, transforming the glass facade of the building into a poetic simile (‘My eyes, like millions of / glassy squares, merely reflect’), but then simile gives way to metaphor and we realise that the UN Building has assumed the lyric voice: the building is the speaker, and its complaints are expressions of architectural shortcomings, apparently unrelated to the lovers’ quandaries (‘Everything sees through me, / in the daytime I’m too hot / and at night I freeze; I’m / built the wrong way’). After twelve lines on the failures of this international modernist block—couched, as Finberg notes, in the language of ‘popular critiques of downtown office spaces’19—another jump-cut brings us back to the love address: ‘Because you have / no telephone, and live so / far away; the Pepsi-Cola sign, / the seagulls and the noise’. The conjunctive (‘because’) is a non-sequitur here—unless, that is, we remove the lines that follow the word ‘space’, giving us a shorter, but more coherent, poem: There’s nothing worse than feeling bad and not being able to tell you. Not because you’d kill me or it would kill you, or we don’t love each other. It’s […] Because you have no telephone, and live so far away; the Pepsi-Cola sign, the seagulls and the noise  Finberg, ‘Frank O’Hara rebuilds the Seagram Building’, p. 132.

19

2  SPACE: FRANK O’HARA’S FORWARD-DAWNING FUTURISM 

45

What, then, is the UN Building doing in the middle of this little love lyric? Finberg suggests that ‘the speaker without his lover is like a modern building under the threat of postmodernised obsolescence. The poem thus depicts these modernist architectural spaces as they sit on the threshold between modernist villain and postmodernist lover’.20 But is the plight of the UN Building so clearly yoked to the plight of the speaker? Rather than integration, I read a sense of intrusion here, as though the UN Building has interrupted the speaker to assert its own faulty presence, just as it interrupts the urban landscape in the space between the speaker and his lover. Indeed, this would quite literally have been the case for O’Hara, who was living at 326 East Forty-ninth Street at the time the poem was composed, just moments from Turtle Bay, the site of the new UN complex. Looking out of his window, O’Hara would likely have glimpsed not only the tall UN Secretariat Building but, behind it, across the East River, the Pepsi Cola Sign in Queens (Fig. 2.3). The poem thus pivots on the small but thick line ‘It’s space’, which signals the entrance of the UN Building into urban space (the space between the speaker and his lover), while also gesturing towards contemporaneous architectural debates around the spatial coding of the building itself. In Europe, the international style had emerged out of the avant-garde Bauhaus movement, but in America, these uniform, glassy buildings destroyed the ‘kaleidoscopic aspect’ (as Koolhaas puts it) of modernist Manhattan, becoming a shorthand not only for consumerism but for a McCarthyist politics of moral purity and social exclusion.21 In this respect, international modernism maintains the ‘old-style masculine values’ that Alan Powers detects in Bauhaus architecture, including an ‘insistence on conformity and punishment for deviation’. In its American incarnation, the international style took this a step further: as Robert Bennett argues, these buildings were ‘deliberately designed to homogenise, organise, and  Ibid., p. 133.  Koolhaas, Delirious New  York, p.  97. Wallace Kirkman Harrison, director of the UN building project, noted in a 1947 article for the New York Times: ‘As for building with glass, that is one of our good, new materials, and in a sense, uniquely symbolic of our civilisation since it is clear, practical, and beautiful’. These overdetermined semantics (good, clear, civilisation, practical, beautiful) indicate the extent to which the building was designed to reflect a deeply conservative and moralising Cold War society. ‘MR.  HARRISON’S OPPORTUNITY’, January 10, 1947, Section C, The New  York Times, https://www. nytimes.com/1947/01/10/archives/mr-harrisons-opportunity.html. Accessed 20 April 2023. 20 21

46 

M. LOSASSO

Fig. 2.3  The Pepsi Cola sign seen from the UN Building, New York City. Photo: the author

police the city’s complex heterogeneity’.22 In other words, these aggressively straight buildings represented the exclusion of certain social groups, including gay men and women; a subtext that O’Hara was likely aware of, as an earlier poem indicates: Is there at all anywhere in this lavender sky beside the UN Building where I am so little and have dallied with love, a fragment of the paradise we see when signing treaties or planning free radio stations? (CPOH 110) 22  Alan Powers, Bauhaus Goes West: Modern Art and Design in Britain and America (London: Thames & Hudson, 2019), p. 254; Robert Bennett, Deconstructing Post-WWII New York City: The Literature, Art, Jazz, and Architecture of an Emerging Global Capital (New York: Routledge, 2011), p. 10.

2  SPACE: FRANK O’HARA’S FORWARD-DAWNING FUTURISM 

47

In these lines from ‘October’—another ‘needle’ poem composed in 1952—the promise of ‘paradise’ is tied to the ‘fragmented’ glass facade of the building. But the term ‘fragment’ also implies rifts and breakages; a shattered political environment that denies the speaker the possibility of social belonging in his search for a space beneath the ‘lavender sky’— which is surely a coded term for queer community. As David K. Johnson explains, ‘in 1950s culture, lavender was the color commonly associated with homosexuality, as evidenced in references to the “lavender lads” in the State Department’.23 As in Nocturne, it is space that the speaker searches for, and space that the UN building denies—socially, symbolically, and physically, as the apotheosis of the needle typology, ‘the thinnest, least voluminous structure to mark a location within the Grid […] a building without an interior’. The UN Building does, of course, possess an interior, but it represents a lack of space both through its exclusionary symbolism, and as a physically uninhabitable glass-fronted office block, an unliveable space.24 It ‘enclose[s] a complete cultural void’ as Koolhaas notes—or it is ‘useless’, as O’Hara writes at the close of ‘Nocturne’. It is, one might say, an unbuilding—a building that is not one, in any inhabitable or even aesthetic sense, as its very name implies (a pun that O’Hara is surely playing on in both poems). This aesthetic banality is captured in O’Hara’s recoding of Baudelaire’s ‘lover of universal life’, who ‘enters into the crowd as though it were an immense reservoir of electrical energy. Or we might liken him to a mirror as vast as the crowd itself; or to a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness’.25 In Nocturne, however, O’Hara transforms Baudelaire’s colourful kaleidoscope into the empty, transparent glass facade of a culturally vacuous modernist office block (‘My eyes, like millions of / glassy squares merely reflect’). In the end, the speaker eats his opening words, finding a certain poetic beauty in ‘the Pepsi-Cola sign / the seagulls and the noise’ that fill the space between himself and his lover. Because, as the intrusive UN Building has revealed, there is something worse than geographical distance from one’s lover: having that love 23  David K. Johnson, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 2004), p. 216. 24  Indeed, denouncers of the intentional modernist style in 1950s America were wont to criticise it on the grounds that, as Elizabeth Gordon wrote in an article for House Beautiful magazine, it promoted ‘unlivability, stripped-down emptiness, lack of storage space, and therefore lack of possessions’. Quoted in: Powers, Bauhaus Goes West, p. 214. 25  Charles Baudelaire, ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. Jonathan Mayne (New York, Phaeton: 1995), p. 9.

48 

M. LOSASSO

policed by the socially conservative mores expressed in the homogenising panopticon of international modernism. If the needle is the triumph of structure over space, of exclusion over inclusion, of homogeneity over heterogeneity, then O’Hara’s poems are about crafting forms that evade or escape this hemmed-in typology. As a gay man living and working in 1950s New York, O’Hara’s life was circumscribed by negotiations of both public and private space. For as Maggie Nelson writes, even domestic space became a contested site amongst gay communities in 1950s America, where the ‘constitutionality of a policeman barging into a bedroom without a valid search warrant’ was rarely questioned (a situation that O’Hara captures in ‘October’, which ends with the speaker being ‘beaten to death / by a thug in a back bedroom’ (CPOH 110)).26 To an extent, then, O’Hara’s poetry always stages an engagement with, and a negotiation of, built and lived space, which is informed by his immediate urban surroundings and his professional knowledge of contemporary architectural discourse. To this end, many of the poems are more than simply a reckoning with space: they are attempts at recoding, recalibrating, and reconstituting the site of the text into an active and inhabitable space—a desire that O’Hara expresses in the notes to his 1953 poem ‘Second Avenue’: ‘I hope the poem to be the subject, not just about it’ (CPOH 497). Thus, if ‘Nocturne’ offers a glimpse into O’Hara’s architectural sensibility then it is just that; a glimpse, revealing only part of a much richer story. To complete the picture, we have to look beyond the poems that resemble monumental modernist structures, to those that incorporate the needle’s typological counterpart: the globe.

The Great Accidental Architect Four years after the composition of ‘Nocturne’, O’Hara revisited the trope of the thwarted love affair, blocked by urban space, in his 1959 poem, ‘The Lay of the Romance of the Associations’: If only, if only, cried the Fifth Avenue Association being the less élite of the two, and therefore the first to come on, I weren’t so rushed all the time! I have so much to say to you but we are far apart. 26  Maggie Nelson, Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2007), p. 68.

2  SPACE: FRANK O’HARA’S FORWARD-DAWNING FUTURISM 

49

I hear you, yodeled the Park Avenue Association in Westchester accents cracked with emotion, and I too am harried even in my very center and a strange throb of emotion fills the towering Seagram Building with a painful foretaste of love for you. But alas, that bourgeois Madison Avenue continues to obstruct our free intercourse with each other. (CPOH 320)

This time, the affair is between the personified Fifth and Park Avenue Associations, who cannot consummate their love thanks to another spatially coded separation: ‘we are far apart’; ‘Madison Avenue continues to obstruct / our free intercourse with each other.’ But there is something odd here, something elusive, in the affair that O’Hara stages: the romance is not between the streets nor is it between the buildings on the streets, but between the diffuse associations that represent those streets. As Finberg explains, ‘the Fifth Avenue Association is a long-standing group of New York merchants with a rich political history’, while the ‘Park Avenue Association, founded a little later in 1922, spent its time publishing the Park Avenue Social Review and “keeping the avenue free of commercialism and unwanted motor traffic”.’27 Yet, this detail hardly helps, for the poem does not even stage a romance between the people who make up the associations—the merchants and the publishers and the local lobbyists. As they appear in the poem, then, the associations must be all of these things (urban planning, streets, buildings, people), and none of them, their constituent parts amalgamated and anthropomorphised beyond recognition—save for their buildings, which do remain embarrassingly visible, like genitalia without its modest fig leaf (or its ‘tender evergreens of love and commerce’ (CPOH 321)). There is nothing subtle or coded about this: the Seagram Building (1958)—another international modernist office block, designed by another Bauhaus architect, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe—is Park Avenue’s ‘throb[bing]’ phallus, which longs to join with the Fifth Avenue Association (though it is less clear what part of Fifth Avenue will receive the ‘towering Seagram’) (Fig.  2.4). A few lines later, however, O’Hara introduces an unexpected twist: this is no passionate one-night stand, but an urge to ‘fecundate’. ‘[O]ur joining’, cries Park Avenue, ‘will fecundate / this otherwise arid and sterile-towered metropolis!’ (CPOH 321). The two associations thus agree to:  Finberg, ‘Frank O’Hara rebuilds the Seagram Building’, p. 123.

27

50 

M. LOSASSO

Fig. 2.4  Ludwig  Mies van der Rohe, The Seagram Building, New York City, 1958. Photo: Gottscho-Schleisner Collection […] rendezvous in Central Park behind a clump of cutthroats near the reservoir and there we’ll kiss and hold each other sweatily as in a five o’clock on a mid-August Friday in the dusk and after, languorously bathe, to sweeten city water for all time. (CPOH 321)

As Finberg notes, the terms of the rendezvous ‘can be read as a nod to gay culture, […] dissolv[ing] the restrictions and boundaries of the public

2  SPACE: FRANK O’HARA’S FORWARD-DAWNING FUTURISM 

51

sphere that privatised these acts’.28 In other words, the associations seek to ‘fecundate’ the ‘sterile-towered metropolis’ through the illicit, and spatially prohibited, act of gay sex: a contradiction in terms, given that the sexual act between two men is, in a purely biological sense, unproductive and infertile. Over-stylised and theatrically farcical, the ‘The Lay of the Romance of the Associations’ was written for Kenneth Koch and reads like a series of typically O’Harian veiled in-jokes and subtexts. Yet in staging an implicitly homosexual love affair between New York’s streets, O’Hara establishes a poetic pattern of confronting the challenges to queer desire that urban space throws up. Furthermore, in his use of the terms ‘fecund’ and ‘sterile’, O’Hara does more than simply play with a sexual lexicon: he grounds his confrontation of urban space in the language of contemporaneous architectural debate around the two prevailing, late modernist schools: international modernism and organicism. In the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, advocates of organic architecture repeatedly used the terms ‘fertile’ and ‘fecund’ to distinguish the movement from the international style, which they dismissed as ‘sterile’. The architecture critic Lewis Mumford, for example, condemned international modernism’s ‘sterile escapist projects’ and advocated instead for a modern city that could encompass ‘life in all its organic fecundity, diversity, and creativity’.29 Similarly, in his 1953 essay ‘The Language of an Organic Architecture’, the architect Frank Lloyd Wright rejected the modernist mantra ‘form follows function’ as ‘the password for sterility’, and  argued against ‘prevalent expedients now sterilizing the work of young American architects’.30 In  its place, Wright pioneered what he termed an ‘organic’ approach to architecture that would be governed not by rigid form and structure, but by ‘SPACE’, as Wright notes, ‘the continual becoming: invisible from which all rhythms flow to which they must pass. Beyond time or infinity. The new reality which organic architecture serves to employ in building. The breath of a work of art’.31  Ibid.  Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects (New York: Harcourt Brace & World, Inc., 1961), p. 570–571. 30   Frank Lloyd Wright, The Future of Architecture (Ljubljana: Mladinska Knijiga, 1969), p. 322. 31  Ibid., pp. 323–324. The parallels with Olson’s writing (see Chap. 1) are striking, not only in Wright’s capitalisation of the word ‘SPACE’ but also in his insistence on the ‘the breath of a work of art’. 28 29

52 

M. LOSASSO

Fig. 2.5  Frank Lloyd Wright, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1959. Photo: the author

The most salient expression of organic architecture in New York City is Wright’s Solomon R.  Guggenheim Museum, the only work ever completed by the architect in Manhattan (Fig. 2.5). Occupying the width of a block, the Guggenheim building consists of a large, cast concrete, cylindrical tower—wider at the top and tapering towards the bottom—which rests on a low, wide base. Using embedded cantilevers, Wright created a cut-out design, so that the tower is comprised of four tiered bands that seem to gently spiral or float autonomously, one above the other. The building’s smooth, strong and simple ovoid form is, as Wright himself noted, ‘like an egg-shell’—a motif that is repeated in the miniature geodesic domes that adorn the sculpture gardens and the oversized egg-and-­ dart detailing on the museum’s facade: features that implicitly reinforce the building’s fertile and organic aspirations (Figs. 2.6 and 2.7).32 Inside, the museum is, in a sense, all space, with its open-plan interior that stretches from floor to glass-domed ceiling. In spite of its aesthetic divergence from the sharp, sleek modernism of MoMA, O’Hara enjoyed the Guggenheim’s striking appearance: ‘It’s 32  ‘The whole building, cast in concrete, is more like an egg shell—in form a great simplicity rather than like a crisscross structure.’ Quoted in: Frank Lloyd Wright: The Masterworks, eds. David Larkin & Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1993), p. 2.

2  SPACE: FRANK O’HARA’S FORWARD-DAWNING FUTURISM 

53

Fig. 2.6  Egg-and-dart detailing on the Guggenheim. Photo: the author

Fig. 2.7  Geodesic domes on the Guggenheim. Photo: the author

wonderful looking from the outside’, he wrote, in a review of the 1962 Guggenheim exhibition ‘Abstract Expressionists and Imagists’ for Kulchur magazine ‘and when you enter the flat exhibition space on the ground floor the effect of the works near at hand, the ramps and over them glimpses of canvases, and then the dome, is urbane and charming, like the

54 

M. LOSASSO

home of a cultivated and mildly eccentric person’.33 Written in 1961, ‘F.  M. I 6/25/61’—the only poem by O’Hara to reference the Guggenheim building—captures the sense of eccentricity that O’Hara delights in. Here, in its entirety, is the poem: Park Avenue at 10:10 P.M. fragrant after-a-French-movie-rain is over                   “and shine the stars”      Kupka buildings aren’t being built, damn it and I’m locked up in this apartment outdoors for a good reason, Mario Mario? there are 20 of em in this neighborhood                     in your blue sweater     excepting there’s a staggering grid  of… air cooling, rushing along          out of the Astor                     out of the Ritz, Godfrey                     out of the Broadhurst-Plaza           I’ll have an omelette aux fines herbes   like after Dolce Vita                   like after a whole day of it I respond to your affection like a tuning fork which makes me feel                           pretty queer     no ketchup no sugar      a plain unadorned piece of meat                  you think of doom                  but you don’t give a damn and the moon so often on Park Avenue it is out and shining even on foggy days, days, nights, PMs and paper leaves with long English invitations on them to crownings gee, quite what one didn’t expect, no? yum yum            

you find the point of your life heading in the wrong direction like a compass out of whack, fun! because that’s the way it goes

33  Frank O’Hara, Standing Still and Walking in New York, ed. Donald Allen (Bolinas: Grey Fox Press, 1975), p. 126. Note, in particular, the domestic simile that O’Hara employs in his praise of the building.

2  SPACE: FRANK O’HARA’S FORWARD-DAWNING FUTURISM 

55

oops! no oysters because of the epidemic, for example                         I want            you to be very very happy like Central Park            what a wonderful city you have here I never            dreamt until we’d been together two weeks straight                      there’s the fish again             staring at us, I love that fish & I love Jean Arthur                      & I love publicity            to read about and think about and dream awake

this train is going away from the Guggenheim                      a hot “dog”                    worrying rent already paid                    Joe? he’s in the sack you know,      your eyes are the color of Miró’s back it’s a marvellous happening of Frank L. Wright     the great accidental architect                 who gives life?                 who taketh away?                 who’s kidding?                 who’s for real?            wow! (Westminster Abbey!) (CPOH 410–411)

In 1956, five years before the composition of this poem, Frank O’Hara had written to his friend Kenneth Koch to tell him that he had been ‘reading some of Charles Olson’s things, which are more attractive than most, tho’ ve/ry and quite sad making’.34 Although gently mocking, O’Hara’s parody of Olson’s style reveals the extent to which he was influenced by the older poet. As Gooch notes, ‘following his exposure to [John] Wieners’ emulation of Olson, and his own mimicry of ‘Projective Verse’ in ‘To a Young Poet’ O’Hara ‘began to use an open field more consistently’.35 ‘F. M. I’ is an extreme example of O’Hara’s adoption of Olson’s ‘open field’ approach: the form is visibly looser than in the early ‘office block’ 34  Frank O’Hara, quoted in: Joel Duncan, ‘Frank O‘Hara Drives Charles Olson’s Car’ in Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory Volume 72, Number 4 (Winter 2016): p. 89. 35  Gooch, City Poet, p. 302.

56 

M. LOSASSO

poems, as though it has exploded at the centre and its constituent parts are lying scattered across the page. In this respect, the poem’s form mirrors its representation of urban space: the rigid east/west, north/south delineations that we saw in ‘Nocturne’ (‘Why don’t I go east and west / instead of north and south?’) have spiralled into to ‘a compass out of whack’, transforming the city into a ‘staggering grid’ through which the speaker reels, the landscape heaving and swaying like an Orphic Cubist painting by František ‘Kupka’, as buildings loom in and out of view, and fragments from high and low culture jostle for space in the commodious, if discontinuous, poem. Even the ‘cooling, rushing’ air marks a fresh and breezy contrast to the UN Building’s artificial atmosphere, where ‘in the daytime I’m too hot / and at night I freeze’. And where in ‘Nocturne’ the architect was introduced (conspicuously namelessly) only to be blamed for the building’s faults, here, in the relative absence of the lyric ‘I’, Frank O’Hara fuses with ‘the great accidental architect’ of the Guggenheim, ‘Frank L. Wright’. As Olivier Brossard notes: ‘the prevailing idea here is juxtaposition as if O’Hara modelled his poem from “the great accidental architect” Frank L. Wright, as if his poems were to follow no other rule than accidental composition’.36 Indeed, looking at the shape of the poem, we might follow Brossard’s observation to its logical conclusion: where ‘Nocturne’ structurally and visually mirrors the building that it names, ‘F.  M. I’ rhymes with Wright’s Guggenheim, the lines frequently overhanging one another as if cantilevered, creating pockets of air that recall the cut-out sections on the museum’s facade and lend the composition its dizzying, spiralling form. If ‘Nocturne’ offered a critique of the ‘straight’ spaces of international modernism—spaces that implicitly circumscribed heteronormative modes of intimacy—then in the twisting, ‘staggering’, ‘fun!’37 spaces suggested by both organic architecture and organic poetics (i.e. Olson’s open field approach, of which more later), O’Hara locates the possibility for queer desire: ‘I respond to your affection like a tuning fork which makes me feel / pretty queer’. Nevertheless, there remains something unstable about this poem: ballooning across the page, its huge and expansive form 36  Olivier Brossard, ‘“The / profile of a city / exploding”: Frank O’Hara’s Aesthetics of Shock’ in Caliban: French Journal of English Studies (25: 2009: L’art de la ville): p. 24. 37  In his review of the ‘Abstract Expressionists and Imagists’ show, O’Hara noted that ‘The Guggenheim Museum is fun, and as such it justifies itself [my emphasis]’. O’Hara, Standing Still and Walking in New York, p. 128.

2  SPACE: FRANK O’HARA’S FORWARD-DAWNING FUTURISM 

57

Fig. 2.8  Interior of the Guggenheim. Photo: the author

teetering on the short block created by its closing lines (each of  which ends with an  uncertain question mark  or  precarious parenthesis), the poem struggles to hold itself together, not only formally, but in its anxious lexicon (‘staggering’; ‘out of whack’; ‘oops!’; ‘worrying’) and fretting juxtapositions of time, space, image, and mood. In the end, experiments with capacious poetic form all but efface the intimate lyric ‘I’ that characterises O’Hara’s best poetry. This is because, like ‘Nocturne’,  ‘F.  M. I’  represents another formal extreme within O’Hara’s oeuvre—and the same might also be said of the building that it emulates. For if, as Koolhaas suggests, ‘after 50 years of relative engagement, the [needle and globe] forms [we]re now completely separated’, and if the UN Building represents one extreme in this uncoupling, then the Guggenheim, with its ‘promiscuous capacity to absorb objects, people, iconographies, symbolisms’ in its spiralling interior (Fig. 2.8), must represent the other: the globe.38 What O’Hara ‘needed’,  Koolhaas, Delirious New York, p. 275.

38

58 

M. LOSASSO

to recall Ashbery’s phrase, was a ‘vernacular’ that fused the two: a ‘cross-­ fertilisation’, in Koolhaas’s terms, between the needle and the globe that might ‘correspon[d] to the creatively messy New York environment’.

The Meaning of Fertility If the drive towards what we might call formal self-effacement in ‘F. M. I’ mirrors Koolhaas’s description of the globe, it also implicitly echoes the latent sense of maternalism that underpinned the ethos of organic architecture in the 1960s. As Lewis Mumford insisted, in The City in History, ‘we must restore to the city the maternal, life-nurturing functions, the autonomous activities, the symbiotic associations that have long been neglected and suppressed. For the city should be an organ of love; and the best economy of cities is the care and culture of men’.39 Mumford’s conception of the city as a holistic maternal entity is rooted in an idealised notion of prehistory, a time when: woman’s presence made itself felt in every part of the village: not least in the physical structures with their protective enclosures […] Security, receptivity, enclosure, nurture—these functions belong to woman; and they take structural expression in every part of the village, in the house and the home […] In line with this, the more primitive structures—houses, rooms, tombs—are usually round ones: like the original bowl described in Greek myth, which was a modelled on Aphrodite’s breast.40

These notional round and cavernous proto-domestic spaces were important for Mumford, not only for their ‘protective’ qualities, but for their capacity to store foodstuffs: in early settlements, Mumford suggests, ‘maternal’ spaces offered ‘relief from forced fasting, that long-proved diminisher of sexual appetite, [which] may have given to sexuality in every form an early maturation, a persistence, indeed a potency’.41 Placing conspicuous emphasis on the fertile and maternal homemaker, Mumford’s conception of organic architecture mirrors America’s post-war efforts to get women back into the home—and repopulate. As Betty Friedan writes:

 Mumford, The City in History, p. 575.  Ibid., p. 12. 41  Ibid., p. 11. 39 40

2  SPACE: FRANK O’HARA’S FORWARD-DAWNING FUTURISM 

59

By the end of the fifties, the United States birthrate was overtaking India’s. Statisticians were especially astounded at the fantastic increase in the number of babies among college women. Where once they had two children, now they had four, five, six. Women who had once wanted careers were now making careers out of having babies. So rejoiced Life magazine in a 1956 paean to the movement of American women back to the home.42

In America, as I have already noted in relation to the international style, the post-war era was defined by a radical social conservatism that retrenched clearly defined gender roles and placed a renewed emphasis on reproduction. And just as society deemed it imperative that women were ‘restored’ to the home and to the ‘care and culture of men’, so buildings and cities followed suit,43 and no single style offered a more consummate expression of this ethos than organic architecture, which distilled femininity, fertility, and the alimentary into a single, potent symbol: the egg. If post-Bauhaus international modernism could be described as ‘egg-­ crate architecture’, as the aptly named critic Paul Overy commented in 1968, then organicism was the egg itself.44 In New York state alone, ovoid buildings included the Guggenheim; Eero Saarinen’s IBM Pavilion at the 1964 World’s Fair (an oversized bird’s egg, emblazoned with the IBM logo, nestling in the branches of stylised steel trees) (Fig.  2.9)45; and Wallace Harrison’s The Egg Performing Arts Theatre in Albany, NY (begun in 1966) (Fig. 2.10). In architectural writing of the 1950s and 1960s, theorists compared cities and buildings to eggs in varying states (embryonic, unhatched, boiled, and scrambled), including Mumford, Le Corbusier, Reyner Banham, Cedric Price, Jane Jacobs, and the futurist architect Buckminster Fuller (whom O’Hara heard speak at The Club, and whose geodesic domes were the last word in ovoid retro-futurism46). Even interior  Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (London: Penguin, 2010), p. 6.  One of the most consummate post-war examples of this is Stevenage New Town in the UK, which was laid out by Charles Madge in 1949. Writing in 1950, Madge openly commented that ‘the whole design of the garden common is based on the needs of the family at its reproductive phase’. Charles Madge, ‘Planning for people’ in The Town Planning Review 21 (July 1959): p. 140. 44  Paul Overy, ‘Bauhaus’ in Art + Artists Vol. 3, no. 6 (September 1968): p. 10. Quoted in: Powers, Bauhaus Goes West, p. 230. 45  This is mentioned in O’Hara’s 1964 poem ‘Here in New York We Are Having a Lot of Trouble with the World’s Fair’: ‘We are happy / here / facing the multi-screens of the IBM Pavilion’ (CPOH 481). 46  Gooch, City Poet, p. 215. 42 43

60 

M. LOSASSO

Fig. 2.9  IBM Pavilion at the New  York World’s Fair 1964. Photo: Alfred E. Heller. Alfred E. Heller collection of world’s fair material, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, GEN MSS 734, Box 47

design embraced the egg: Arne Jacobsen’s Egg Chair appeared in 1958; followed by Peter Ghyczy’s Garden Egg Chair in 1968; and Henrik ThorLarsen’s Ovalia Egg Chair, also in 1968 (Fig. 2.11). In other words, international modernism and organicism—the rival last gasps of late modernism—might be considered two sides of the same coin, and in their most extreme articulations, both work to reinforce conservative notions of gender and sexuality. It was in response to this socially conservative climate, where heteronormativity was literally determining the fabric of urban space, that Susan Sontag published her influential 1964 essay ‘Notes on “Camp”’, which emphasised (among other things) the importance of androgyny to camp sensibility. As she writes: The androgyne is certainly one of the great images of Camp sensibility. Examples: the swooning, slim, sinuous figures of pre-Raphaelite painting and poetry; the thin, flowing, sexless bodies in Art Nouveau prints and post-

2  SPACE: FRANK O’HARA’S FORWARD-DAWNING FUTURISM 

61

Fig. 2.10  Wallace Harrison, The Egg Performing Arts Theatre, Albany, NY, 1978. Photo: Leonard J. DeFrancisci

Fig. 2.11  Henrik Thor-Larsen, Ovalia Egg  Chair, 1968. Photo: San José Public Library

62 

M. LOSASSO

ers, presented in relief on lamps and ashtrays; the haunting androgynous vacancy behind the perfect beauty of Greta Garbo […] What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine[.]47

Much of O’Hara’s work, as numerous scholars have noted, can be read through the lens of camp: as Maggie Nelson puts it, O’Hara’s poetry has long been associated with ‘effeminate signifiers (feminized tropes, queen taste, drag, camp names)’—though, as she laments, in some scholarship this has had the unfortunate effect of ‘mak[ing] male homosexuality about women’.48 Where Nelson navigates a path out of this ‘thorny’ problem by attending to the ways that O’Hara ‘reconfigures the writer / muse dyad’ in his representations of real women, I look at the ways in which O’Hara’s poetry can be read as androgynous—which is not to say genderless, but, rather, that it queers conventional assumptions about gender, playing with (and occasionally fusing) masculine and feminine tropes.49 As I argue, the poems are neither ‘faggy’ and ‘feminine’ (the terms used by Beat poets to describe the work of the New York School) nor do they have the ‘rough camaraderie of men “on the road”’ (the terms that the Beats used to describe themselves). Rather, in true Manhattanist spirit,  they stage a ‘cross-fertilisation’ between the two.50 Substituting mankind for the genderless appellation ‘Cornkind’, O’Hara’s 1960 poem of that name is an example of his work at its campiest—and most explicitly fertile: So the rain falls it drops all over the place and where it finds a little rock pool it fills it up with dirt and the corn grows a green Bette Davis sits under it reading a volume of William Morris oh fertility! beloved of the Western world  Susan Sontag, Notes on ‘Camp’ (London: Penguin, 2018), p. 9.  Nelson, Other True Abstractions, p. 58; 56. 49  Ibid., p. 58. 50  Ibid., p. 53. 47 48

2  SPACE: FRANK O’HARA’S FORWARD-DAWNING FUTURISM 

63

you aren’t so popular in China though they fuck too and do I really want a son to carry on my idiocy past the Horned Gates poor kid    a staggering load yet it can happen casually and he lifts a little of the load each day as I become more and more idiotic and grows to be a strong strong man and one day carries as I die my final idiocy and the very gates into a future of his choice but what of William Morris what of you Million Worries what of Bette Davis in AN EVENING WITH WILLIAM MORRIS or THE WORLD OF SAMUEL GREENBERG what of Hart Crane what of phonograph records and gin what of “what of” you are of me, that’s what and that’s the meaning of fertility hard and moist and moaning (CPOH 387)

The poem opens with an agricultural image of fertility: rain falls, corn grows. Yet the introduction of Bette Davis diverts our attention from the natural towards the artificial: as Sontag notes, ‘All Camp objects, and persons, contain a large element of artifice. Nothing in nature can be campy…Rural Camp is still man made, and most campy objects are urban’.51 Indeed, Sontag explicitly cites the ‘corny flamboyant femaleness [my emph.]’ of ‘Bette Davis’ in her ‘Notes on “Camp”’, as well as ‘William Morris’, whose Arts and Crafts movement paved the way for Art Nouveau,  Sontag, Notes on ‘Camp’, p. 8.

51

64 

M. LOSASSO

which Sontag identifies as the ‘full-blown’ emergence of camp in Britain in the early twentieth century.52 But what of the poem’s frank discussion of fertility? Writing about early twentieth-century modernism, Edward Said diagnoses an ‘arid’ and ‘wasteful […] sterility of modern life’, brought about by the conjunction of post-war horror and burgeoning Freudian theory. With the ‘authoritative weight of Freud’s psychoanalytic theory’, Said explains: a significant and influential aspect of which posits the potentially murderous outcome of bearing children, we will have the unmistakeable impression that few things are as problematic and as universally fraught as what we might have supposed to be the mere natural continuity between generations.53

Said suggests that for modernists this loss ‘of the procreative, generational urge authorising filiative relationships’ was also figured as a ‘loss of subject’ in favour of ‘culture and society’; or, as he puts it elsewhere, as ‘the passage from nature to culture’. The solution, according to Said, was to be found in alternatives ‘whose social existence was not in fact guaranteed by biology, but by affiliation’.54 This is what Lytle Shaw detects in O’Hara’s poetry generally (and in ‘Cornkind’ specifically): the development of alternative kinship structures, both for the gay man, and for the poet carving out a space after modernism (the twinned search, as we have seen, that O’Hara stages in ‘October’). Shaw explains that, according to anthropologists, kinship structures can be traced along two distinct axes: alliance (‘“horizontal” association through marriage’) and filiation (‘“vertical” association through birth’). Mapping these structures on to O’Hara’s work, Shaw suggests that: O’Hara’s version of coterie, we might say, recodes both of these movements. He recodes alliances by replacing the organic and fixed social model of the family with a contingent and shifting association of friends. He recodes filiation not merely by refusing to produce offspring but also by 52  Ibid., pp. 9; 12; 11. In true camp style, O’Hara is in fact playing on the fusion of high and low culture, through the shared name of the Arts and Crafts architect and the Hollywoodbased talent agency, William Morris. 53  Edward Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, MT: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 16. 54  Ibid., pp. 18–21.

2  SPACE: FRANK O’HARA’S FORWARD-DAWNING FUTURISM 

65

refusing to be one. O’Hara’s attempt to exit the filiative model of the Great Tradition is coincident both with his cultivation of obscure, often campy, genealogical precedents and with his frequently heretical readings of canonical authors.55

Shaw’s recoding of the term coterie offers a useful way of reading these poems as textual spaces of ‘inhabitation, coexistence or alliance—concretized in gay sex, which would enact linkage in itself outside of representation and reproduction’.56 Yet the removal of ‘organic’ kinships in O’Hara’s work is not as total as Shaw implies nor is his ‘exit’ from the ‘filiative model’ so definitive. Rather, as in ‘Cornkind’, O’Hara turns to the organic and biological fact of fertility in order to capture both the present (the now of the sexual act, the mingling of bodies, ‘hard and moist and moaning’) and the future (‘you are of me’). The poem leaks beyond the bounds of representation, speaking not only to the ‘you’ of the traditional love address but also to the you of the future reader who O’Hara summons into being: ‘you are of me, that’s what / and that’s the meaning of fertility’. In doing so, he echoes Walt Whitman (a fertile link with the literary past), who similarly writes his future readership into existence in ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry’: ‘Who knows for all the distance, but I am as good as looking at you now, for all you cannot see me?’57 Spectrally reaching out from the present of his writing into the future space of reading, Whitman’s poems, like O’Hara’s, code the future in the past by transforming the poem into ‘the chant of joy and power for boundless fertility’.58

Between the Poet and the Person Scholarship on O’Hara remains torn over the question of organicism. As M. K. Blasing writes, ‘O’Hara regards form as “proceeding” rather than “super-induced,” but he is no “organicist,” because the nature of “nature” has changed’. Though she adopts the terms used by Coleridge to describe organic form (‘there is a difference between form as proceeding, and shape as superinduced;—the latter is either the death or the imprisonment of the 55  Lytle Shaw, Frank O’Hara: The Poetics of Coterie (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2006), p. 29. 56  Ibid., p. 36. 57  Walt Whitman, The Complete Poems, ed. Francis Murphy (London: Penguin, 2004), p. 194. 58  Ibid., p. 384.

66 

M. LOSASSO

thing;—the former is its self-witnessing and self-effected sphere of agency’), Blasing is adamant that O’Hara’s veneration of the city (‘I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy’) denies him entry into the bucolic realm of the organic. Yet, as Yasmine Shamma notes, the urban and the organic need not—indeed, ought not—to be considered mutually exclusive in O’Hara’s work. ‘The formal and ecocritical attributes of [O’Hara’s] poetry’, she writes, ‘have yet to be simultaneously reckoned with as suggestive of what role urban poetry might play in the broader sense of organic poetics’.59 In this, Shamma builds on Timothy Gray’s discussion of O’Hara (and other New  York School writers) as a poet of the urban pastoral—a term that Sontag also uses in her caveat to camp artifice: as she writes, ‘campy objects […] often have a serenity—or a naïveté—which is the equivalent of pastoral. A great deal of Camp suggests Empson’s phrase, “urban pastoral”.’60 To understand O’Hara’s relationship to organic poetry, it is necessary that we understand his work as the inheritor of the nineteenth-century American transcendental tradition. Building on Coleridge’s discussion of organic form as something that innately ‘shapes as it develops itself from within’, the foremost thinker of the transcendental movement, Ralph Waldo Emerson, suggested that ‘it is not metres, but a metre-making argument, that makes a poem,—a thought so passionate and alive, that, like the spirit of a plant or an animal, it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing [my emph.]’.61 Among the contemporary poets whom Emerson singled out as having ‘me[t] the demand I am always making of what seemed the sterile and stingy Nature’, was Whitman, whose own conception of poetic form, articulated with characteristic bombast in his 1855 preface to Leaves of Grass, was expressed along similarly organic lines: The profit of rhyme is that it drops seeds of a sweeter and more luxuriant rhyme, and of uniformity that it conveys itself into its own roots in the ground out of sight. The rhyme and uniformity of perfect poems show the 59  Yasmine Shamma, Spatial Poetics: Second Generation New  York School Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), p. 2. 60  Sontag, Notes on ‘Camp’, p. 8. 61  Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Shakespearean Criticism, Vol 1, ed. Thomas Middleton Raysor (London: Dent, 1967), p.  224; Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘The Poet’ in The Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Alfred R Ferguson & Jean Ferguson Carr (Cambridge & London: The Belknap Press Of Harvard University Press, 1987), p. 224.

2  SPACE: FRANK O’HARA’S FORWARD-DAWNING FUTURISM 

67

free growth of metrical laws and bud from them as unerringly and loosely as lilacs of roses on a bush, and take shapes as compact as the shapes of chestnuts and oranges and melons and pears, and shed the perfume impalpable to form.62

Both Emerson’s conception of poetic form as possessing ‘an architecture of its own’, and Whitman’s notion of ‘the free growth of metrical laws’, are echoed in O’Hara’s own description of poetic form, almost a century later, in a talk written for The Club in 1952. Bemoaning ‘how many boring poems there are whose form is like cast iron’, O’Hara suggests instead that: as the poem is being written, air comes in, and light, the form is loosened here and there, remarks join the perhaps too consistently felt images, a rhyme becomes assonant instead of regular, or avoided altogether for variety and point, etc. All these things help the poem to mean only what it itself means, becomes its own poem, so to speak, not the typical poem of a self-­ pitying or infatuated writer.63

O’Hara’s description of poetic form is spatial—there is room for air and light to enter the verse—rather than structural. In his opposition to ‘cast iron’ form, O’Hara implicitly advocates something more organic: a form that is ‘loosened here and there’; where rhyme ‘becomes assonant instead of regular’ and where the poem ‘mean[s] only what it itself means’. The ‘nature of nature’ (to recall Blasing’s formulation) has indeed ‘changed’— Emerson and Whitman couched poetic architecture in terms of plants and animals, O’Hara in terms of built space—but the organic principles nevertheless remain. For Coleridge, ‘Such is life, such is the form’; for O’Hara, ‘the poem […] mean[s] only what it itself means, becomes its own poem’.64 If O’Hara’s poems retain the essence of romantic and transcendental models of organic form, they also follow a more contemporary strain of poetic organicism, through their sustained attention to the relationship between the poem and the body. Indeed, it is this that brings his writing close to architecture; for if, as Ashbery writes, O’Hara’s poems amount to ‘something like a liveable space’, then this is, in part, because, as Josh Robinson observes, the body ‘intrudes on the poem, leaving a perceptible  Whitman, The Complete Poems, pp. 762; 746–747.  O’Hara, Standing Still, pp. 34–35. 64  Coleridge, Shakespearean Criticism, p. 224. 62 63

68 

M. LOSASSO

trace’; or, as Maggie Nelson puts it, O’Hara (and the New York School poets broadly) ‘like to play with the gaps that invariably occur when one attempts to get one’s body into the body of one’s writing’.65 In his attention to the body, O’Hara again follows Whitman, who proclaims in the 1855 preface to Leaves of Grass that ‘All beauty comes from blood and a beautiful brain’ and that ‘your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body…’66 But O’Hara also echoes the work of Olson, who contends that ‘FORM IS NEVER MORE THAN AN EXTENSION OF CONTENT’ and regards the poem as issuing ‘from the breath, from the breathing of the man who writes, at the moment that he writes’.67 Olson’s thinking would go on to influence Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov’s conception of organic poetry whereby, as Levertov writes in her 1965 essay, ‘Some Notes on Organic Form’ (in which she cites not only Coleridge and Emerson but also Frank Lloyd Wright), ‘form is never more than a revelation of content’. O’Hara’s poetry may have little in common with Levertov’s quasi-Pauline reworking of Olson (which might account for the reluctance of some scholars to read his as an organic poetry), but in his commitment to the body, there is little doubt that he shares Olson’s implicitly organic poetic instinct.68 O’Hara’s 1959 manifesto ‘Personism’—which, like Whitman’s preface to Leaves of Grass, is often read as the touchstone for his poetic ethos (and which Marjorie Perloff reads as a ‘sly parody’ of Olson’s ‘Projective Verse’69—see Chap. 1 for more on this)—is crucial for the way that it places the body at the heart of poetic composition. ‘Now, come on’, O’Hara writes: 65  Josh Robinson, ‘“A Gasp of Laughter at Desire”: Frank O’Hara’s Poetics of Breath’ in Frank O’Hara Now: New Essays on the New  York Poet, eds. Robert Hampson & Will Montgomery (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010), p.  145; Nelson, True Abstractions, p. 82. 66  Whitman, The Complete Poems, p. 747. 67  Charles Olson, ‘Projective Verse’ in Collected Prose, ed. Donald Allen & Benjamin Friedlander (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1997), pp. 245; 244. 68  For more on the relationship between O’Hara, Olson and poetic breath, see: Mae Losasso, ‘Conspiration: On Poetry and Breathing’ in The Contemporary Journal 4 (December 07, 2022). 69  Marjorie Perloff, Frank O’Hara, Poet Among Painters (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 16.

2  SPACE: FRANK O’HARA’S FORWARD-DAWNING FUTURISM 

69

I don’t believe in god, so I don’t have to make elaborately sounded structures. I hate Vachel Lindsay, always have; I don’t even like rhythm, assonance, all that stuff. You just go on your nerve. If someone’s chasing you down the street with a knife you just run, you don’t turn around and shout “Give it up! I was a track star for Mineola Prep” […] As for measure and other technical apparatus, that’s just common sense: if you’re going to buy a pair of pants you want them to be tight enough so everyone will want to go to bed with you. There’s nothing metaphysical about it. (CPOH 498)

Structure (‘cast iron form’) and technique (‘rhythm, assonance, all that stuff’) are dismissed, while the body—from the athletic body to the analogy between poetic measure and sexual attraction—becomes the beating heart of the poem: Abstraction (in poetry, not in painting) involves personal removal by the poet […] Personism, a movement which I recently founded and which nobody knows about, interests me a great deal, being so totally opposed to this kind of abstract removal that it is verging on a true abstraction for the first time, really, in the history of poetry […] It was founded by me after lunch with LeRoi Jones on August 27, 1959, a day in which I was in love with someone (not LeRoi, by the way, a blond). I went back to work and wrote a poem for this person. While I was writing it I was realizing that if I wanted to I could use the telephone instead of writing the poem, and so Personism was born […] It puts the poem squarely between the poet and the person. (CPOH 498–9)

O’Hara’s ‘true abstraction’ amounts to an abstraction of abstraction: a negative formula that works to counter abstraction altogether. In fact, the triumph of ‘Personism’ is that it is ‘So totally opposed to […] abstract removal’ that it ‘puts the poem squarely between the poet and the person’. According to Shaw, this model of abstraction might be understood as ‘a process whereby the concrete specificity of the second person operates not as a final container or destination for the significance of the poem but as an occasion for projecting the poem out into the world’ (note the Olsonian emphasis on ‘projection’).70 Through Personism, the poem is transformed into a social site, capable of bridging distance, not only across space (‘Because you have / no telephone, and live so / far away’) but also across time. And in its emphatic opposition to abstraction, and its desire to exist between persons (note the plural ‘persons’, rather than ‘people’, which works to reinforce the somatic, rather than the civic), Personism is  Shaw, Poetics of Coterie, p. 78.

70

70 

M. LOSASSO

underpinned by corporeal presence, generating an encounter not only with a single, named ‘you’, but with all possible future ‘yous’. The final thrust of ‘Personism’—in which O’Hara places the poem ‘at last between two persons instead of two pages’—not only drives this sense of authorial corporeality home but indicates the extent to which O’Hara conceives of the poem as a space for two bodies: the poet and the reader. O’Hara’s declaration that ‘Personism was born’ draws our attention back to the fertile nature of these mingling bodies, echoing the fecund ‘you are of me’ at the close of ‘Cornkind’: an indication that the future of the poem is contained, not only within the writer’s ‘attempts to get one’s body into the body of one’s writing’, but in each reader’s somatic interaction with, and activation of, the text. A similarly fertile logic also underscores both Emerson’s and Whitman’s conception of the poetic body. For against a ‘sterile and stingy Nature’, Emerson championed what he called (after Plotinus) the ‘spermatic word’.71 As Harold Aspiz notes, Emerson believed that ‘spermatic words’ might ‘impregnate the person at the receiving end, but they make him pregnant with a male thought which when uttered is capable of impregnating others’ and he ‘attributed to great writers the ability to use spermatic language that can fertilize the thought of […] female souls’.72 The ‘spermatic word’ is male, virile, but above all, fertile and fecund, in its ability to seed new ideas. In Emerson’s thinking this is purely masculine—but in Whitman’s work, this is often coded in androgynous, if not overtly feminine, ways. In her essay, ‘Whitman as Furtive Mother: The Supplementary Jouissance of the “Ambushed Womb” in “Song of Myself”’, Daneen Wardrop positions Whitman as a ‘trans-gressive’ (Wardrop hyphenates the term to draw attention to the transgender nature of Whitman’s transgression) ‘mother man’ (a term used to describe Whitman by his friend John Burroughs), who uses ‘the language of birth to exceed the bounds of the symbolic by transgressing into the mode of the semiotic.’73 Wardrop quotes Whitman:

71  Harold Aspiz, ‘Walt Whitman: The Spermatic Imagination’ in American Literature Vol. 56, No. 3 (Oct., 1984): p. 380. 72  Ibid., p. 381. 73  Daneen Wardrop, ‘Whitman as Furtive Mother: The Supplementary Jouissance of the “Ambushed Womb” in “Song of Myself”’ in Texas Studies in Literature and Language Vol. 40, No. 2, Essays (SUMMER 1998): pp. 142–145.

2  SPACE: FRANK O’HARA’S FORWARD-DAWNING FUTURISM 

71

There is something in my nature furtive like an old hen! You see a hen wandering up and down a hedgerow, looking apparently quite unconcerned, but presently she finds a concealed spot, and furtively lays an egg, and comes away as though nothing had happened! That is how I felt in writing Leaves of Grass.74

For Wardrop, the laying of the egg indicates Whitman’s feminine and maternal sensibility. As she highlights, the poems are full of terms pertaining to pregnancy, including: ‘enclose, dilation, development, growing, increase, unfolding, plenty, nest, eggs (of many kinds), incorporate, expand, assume, embody, plenum, afflatus, omnific, debouch, procréant urge, spheric product, en masse, and more’.75 Wardrop’s reading of Whitman as a ‘mother man’ is bold but often unstable: ‘he must attach ecstasy to himself in the only way a man might actually get himself with child; he grafts pleasure onto himself; he ambushes a womb; he does it in order to translate, to find a new tongue’.76 Yet her attention to the profusion of fertile and feminised imagery in Whitman’s work is revealing of the extent to which, for Whitman, fertility did not reside merely in the masculine ‘spermatic word’. Rather, Whitman’s poems suggest a queer possibility of fertility—one that neither rests on heteronormative convention nor rejects it altogether. Unlike Emerson’s conception of the ‘spermatic word’ or the Beat poets’ ‘rough camaraderie of men “on the road”’, and unlike architecture’s sterile-fertile / needle-globe polarity, both Whitman and O’Hara develop an understanding of poetic fertility as something that is camp, androgynous, epicene—and ‘ecstatically’ queer.77

Just Plain Scrambled Eggs My visit to the Frank O’Hara papers, as I noted at the start of this chapter, turned up not skyscrapers but eggs: in a letter to Monroe Wheeler, O’Hara recommends a work by Max Ernst, titled, A L’interieur de la Vue. L’oeuf (‘Inside the Sight. The Egg); in a spiral-bound notebook, he jots down the names of other artworks: ‘one with wooden egg in the middle Le Feu [?] à l’oeuf’, which is accompanied by a hand-drawn diagram, and on  Ibid., p. 142.  Ibid., p. 156. 76  Ibid., p. 145. 77  Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, pp. 185–189. 74 75

72 

M. LOSASSO

another scrap of torn paper, more egg-shaped sketches, probably of the work of sculptor, David Smith. This ephemera matched what I found throughout the poems. Early images of eggs betray O’Hara’s lingering commitment to a surreal aesthetic: ‘Listen, you really are too beautiful to be true / you egg-beater’ (CPOH 10) O’Hara writes, in the poem ‘Homage to Rrose Sélavy’, his address to Marcel Duchamp’s feminine alter ego; or the transformation of Meret Oppenheim’s fur teacup into a ‘plate of ham and eggs eaten with a fur collar on’ (CPOH 143). Later, eggs are figured as everyday consumables—‘how sad the lower East side is on Sunday morning in May / eating yellow eggs’ (CPOH 405)—a change that is indicative of O’Hara’s shift from late modernist symbolism, surrealism, and allusion towards a nascent (and surely eggs are the perfect motif for something that is yet to be born) consumer-oriented post-modernism.78 But, as in Whitman’s work—and as in the organic architecture of the 1950s and 1960s—eggs, crucially, appear as a latent symbol of fertility in O’Hara’s more nuanced lyric poems. Written in 1954, at the start of what Marjorie Perloff calls O’Hara’s ‘great period’, ‘For Grace, After A Party’ concludes with a poignant image of scrambled eggs. As Keston Sutherland suggests, the poem ‘exists much as O’Hara claimed to hope that all his poetry might, between persons’:79    You do not always know what I am feeling. Last night in the warm spring air while I was blazing my tirade against someone who doesn’t interest      me, it was love for you that set me afire,      and isn’t it odd? for in rooms full of strangers my most tender feelings               writhe and 78  Indeed, like the poetry of the New York School, the ovoid organicism of the late 1950s and 1960s represented what Frederic Jameson calls the ‘coupure’ between waning modernist aesthetics and an emergent postmodernism: eggs would continue to appear as tropes in postmodern art and architecture, from Joaquim de Ros i Ramis and Alexandre Bonaterrain’s Dalí Theatre and Museum (1974), its parapet topped with giant eggs (as well as a geodesic dome), to Terry Farrell’s Breakfast Television Centre (1981) in Camden, London, crowned with oversized eggs in striped egg cups, to Claes Oldenburg’s False Food Selection (1966), Andy Warhol’s screen print Eggs (1982), Jeff Koons’ mirrored sculpture series, Cracked Egg (1994–2006), and many others. 79  Keston Sutherland, ‘Close Reading’ in Frank O’Hara Now, p. 121.

2  SPACE: FRANK O’HARA’S FORWARD-DAWNING FUTURISM 

73

bear the fruit of screaming. Put out your hand, isn’t there      an ashtray, suddenly, there? beside the bed? And someone you love enters the room and says wouldn’t         you like the eggs a little different today?         And when they arrive they are just plain scrambled eggs and the warm weather is holding. (CPOH 214)

We can trace an implicit sexual narrative here, the poem’s opening lines buoyed by sexual innuendo, which drives towards the promise of orgasmic release. Phrases such as ‘blazing my tirade against someone’, ‘it was love for you that set me afire’, ‘my most tender feelings writhe’,80 and ‘bear the fruit of screaming’ are suggestive of a somatic, sexual surge, but the moment of climax is never realised. Instead, we skip the act and shift straight to the morning after (as the poem’s title implies) where an unnamed ‘you’ is about to eat eggs in bed. The physical release is denied by an accumulation of static imagery—the nebulous ‘someone you love’; the routine ‘plain scrambled eggs’; the middling ‘warm weather’ still ‘holding’—and the poem’s scrambled structure, which threatens to fall apart but ultimately maintains its tension until the end (unlike the more extreme globe poem ‘F. M. I 6/25/61’). Muffled by the enjambed lines, the secreted anaphora of ‘and’ towards the poem’s close quietly builds towards a climax—‘and someone you love enters the room / and says wouldn’t / you like the eggs a little / different today? / And when they arrive they are / just plain scrambled eggs and the warm weather / is holding’—that never finds release: the moment of euphoria is substituted for the bathos of ‘plain’ breakfast eggs. In doing so, O’Hara implies an association between sex and eggs—a trope that recurs throughout his mid- to late-work. As Blasing notes, ‘the intimate connection between words and food, between using language and eating in the infantile erotic / nourishing sense, provides O’Hara with a secular version of the “Word made flesh,” and accounts for the overwhelmingly alimentary nature of his imagery, including his imagery about

80  Another indication of camp, perhaps, for as Sontag notes: ‘Camp is a tender feeling’. Sontag, Notes on ‘Camp’, p33.

74 

M. LOSASSO

poetry’.81 In other words, food and consumption figure in O’Hara’s poems, not only in ways that emphasise the somatic presence of the speaker but in ways that might also be erotically charged. In ‘Us Looking Up To St. Bridget’, a poem co-written with Bill Berkson in 1961, the poets write that: ‘It is impossible / to be American if you’re not French first it is / impossible to fuck without thinking of oeufs sur/le plat’.82 The start of the line is indicative of the influence of French poetry on O’Hara—as Perloff notes, in appropriately corporeal terms, ‘O’Hara’s heart was, from the very beginning, French’.83 The line shifts abruptly to an image of ‘fuck[ing]’, which is followed, just as suddenly, by an image of eggs on a plate (‘oeufs sur/le plat.’). In part, the congruence of seemingly disassociated imagery betrays the flicker of O’Hara’s surrealist roots (also passed down from French forebears); on first reading, the line even appears to refute the possibility for anything like fertility, the semantic choice of ‘fuck’ antagonistic to either the anatomical or romanticised language of heteronormative reproduction, while the image of an unfertilised egg ‘sur le plat’ suggests an essentially unproductive act. Nevertheless the pairing of ‘fucking’ and eggs insists on an association between sex and reproduction, with the same Whitmanic promise of fertility that we have seen in ‘Cornkind’, which comes to fruition later in the poem. As O’Hara and Berkson write: […] I think everything began on August 30, 1939 I don’t think anything is interesting before that except that I discovered it later I don’t care when St. Bridget was born or David or Michelangelo or Diaghilev or William Carlos Williams they started with me because I thought about them first I built the Church of St. Bridget and feel responsible that it’s crooked […]84

The date on which ‘everything began’ is Berkson’s birthday, so the implication here is that the poet births other writers and artists simply by 81  M. K. Blasing, American Poetry: The Rhetoric of Its Forms (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1987), p. 163. 82  Frank O’Hara & Bill Berkson, Hymns of St. Bridget & Other Writings (Woodacre: The Owl Press, 2004), p. 19. 83  Perloff, Poet Among Painters, p. 33. 84  O’Hara & Berkson, Hymns of St. Bridget, p. 20.

2  SPACE: FRANK O’HARA’S FORWARD-DAWNING FUTURISM 

75

intoning them in the space of the poem.85 And not only people but places too, the poets posturing as architects, ‘building’ St. Brigid’s Roman Catholic Church in New York, replete with homosexual overtones in the ‘crooked steeple’ (removed from the church in 1962 due to safety concerns), which fascinated the lapsed Catholic O’Hara with its ‘accidental’ organicism—an antidote to the straight, sterile towers of modernism.86 If the poem’s earlier act of ‘fucking’ resulted in the image of an unfertilised egg, then the backward-looking model of literary progeny that follows would seem commensurate with this recoding of heteronormativity: fusing poetic and architectural forms of construction (‘I built / the Church’) O’Hara and Berkson open a space in which to ‘conceive’ these historical figures—in both senses of the word. By scrambling organic architecture’s fertile iconography, O’Hara’s breakfast eggs do not signal the death drive—which, as Lee Edelman suggests, is endemic to queerness—but open up a space for what José Esteban Muñoz calls ‘the force of a forward-dawning futurity that is queerness’.87 That is to say, they recode, rather than reject, prevailing ideas around fertility and fecundity, queering heteronormative assumptions without altogether ‘exit[ing] the filiative model’, as Shaw suggests. Reading O’Hara’s ‘irrepressibly upbeat’ poetry as ‘a mode of utopian feeling’, Muñoz detects ‘a vast lifeworld of queer relationality, an encrypted sociality, and a utopian potentiality’ in his work.88 Discussing the poem ‘Having a Coke With You’  Berkson admits in the notes to Hymns of St. Bridget that ‘most of these [poems] are mostly by [O’Hara] and the parts by me are mostly me trying to keep up’. Berkson, Hymns of St Bridget, p. 83. Therefore, although this section opens in what is likely Berkson’s voice, I will nonetheless treat the poem as equally O’Hara’s: the extent to which lines and words belong to which poet can never be fully untangled, and thus the poem has to be read as fully collaborative. 86  As O’Hara writes in ‘Hymn to St. Bridget’s Steeple’ (1960) ‘it is to you, bending limp and ridiculous’. Or, in the opening lines of ‘Steps’ (1961), ‘How funny you are today New York / like Ginger Rogers in Swingtime / and St. Bridget’s steeple leaning a little to the left’ (CPOH 370). This line is sharply juxtaposed by images of international modernism that counterbalance the poem towards its close: ‘and all those liars have left the U N / the Seagram Building’s no longer rivalled in interest / not that we need liquor (we just like it)’ (CPOH 371). In another poem from Hymns of St. Bridget, titled ‘St. Bridget’s Effeminacy’, the church is not only rendered camp and effeminate, but assumes O’Hara’s physical attributes: ‘The basic problem of Latin America / is that you’re here, St Bridget / how they miss your crooked / nose’. O’Hara & Berkson, Hymns of St. Bridget, p. 21. St Brigid is also an Irish ‘Muse of Poetry’, which may further explain why O’Hara so often treats the church as muse. For more on this, see: David Nowell Smith, W. S. Graham: The Poem as Art Object (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), p. 237.  87  For more on the death drive in relation to queer theory, see: Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham NC.: Duke University Press, 2004). 88  Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, pp. 5–6. 85

76 

M. LOSASSO

(1960), Muñoz notes that, ‘though the poem is clearly about the present, it is a present that is now squarely in the past and in its queer relationality promises a future’.89 For Muñoz, the poem harbours not only possibility but, crucially, potentiality—the concept that Aristotle illustrates through the image of the egg—which Muñoz describes as: a certain mode of nonbeing that is eminent, a thing that is present but not actually existing in the present tense. Looking at a poem written in the 1960s, I see a certain potentiality, which at that point had not been fully manifested, a relational field where men could love each other outside the institutions of heterosexuality and share a world through the act of drinking a beverage with each other […] I see the past and the potentiality imbued within an object, the ways it might represent a mode of being and feeling that was then not quite there but nonetheless an opening.90

In other words, O’Hara’s poems encode the potentiality of queer utopia through ‘openings’ (triggered by everyday consumption) where ‘the past is a field of possibility in which subjects can act in the present in the service of a new futurity’.91 I take Muñoz’s logic one step further, by suggesting that these openings catalyse a ‘forward-dawning futurity’, not only through a temporal rearrangement but also by embedding the possibility of corporeal engagement within the spaces of the text. ‘Put out your hand’, O’Hara writes, in the middle of ‘For Grace’, shifting the address from the ‘you’ of an implied lover to the ‘you’ of a future reader. Hitting an ashtray—the domestic object ‘imbued’ with potentiality that O’Hara places at the threshold between two persons, between two spaces—the encounter demands that the reader reconfigure themselves spatially, so that two bodies might meet through the implied action of holding hands: for in the poem’s last word, the extended hand of the reader reaches from the present to be met in the past of the poet, closing the somatic circuit that the poem stages between two persons and thus activating the utopian promise of a queer futurity. ‘The here and now is a prison house’, Muñoz writes. ‘We must strive, in the face of the here and now’s totalizing rendering of reality, to think and feel a then and there’.92 The spaces of O’Hara’s present were often, as  Ibid.  Ibid., p. 9. 91  Ibid., p. 16. 92  Ibid., p. 1. 89 90

2  SPACE: FRANK O’HARA’S FORWARD-DAWNING FUTURISM 

77

I have suggested throughout this chapter, prescriptive, policed, or imprisoning for queer individuals and communities. Through the poem, O’Hara doesn’t only ‘think and feel a then and there’ but actively carves out potential futures that not only break down the prison of the present but explore the possibility for new and different spaces—spaces in which ‘men could love each other outside the institutions of heterosexuality’—through the language of contemporaneous architectural discourse. By adopting these semantics, O’Hara’s poems are thus not only spatially crafted, filled with gaps and openings that make room for bodies, they are also predicated on a broader conception of urban design in mid-century New York. Writing at the seam between the waning of modernism and the emergence of the post-modern (in both literature and architecture), O’Hara’s poems experiment with the possibilities of ‘cross-fertilising’ the ‘sterile’ towers of international modernism with the ovoid spaces of organicism, anticipating Koolhaas’s post-modern project by nearly two decades. For if, as Stephen Collis writes, ‘the architectural gives expression to poetry’s social and Utopian desires’, then in their capacity to subvert prevailing models of urban dwelling and to imagine potential poetic architectures in their place, O’Hara’s poems must be read as fundamentally utopian. As I suggested at the start of this chapter, O’Hara’s poetry is ‘total time travel’, but not simply because it is able to capture and distil the past. Rather, in its potential to open up ‘something like a liveable space’—a commodious and relational space between two bodies—O’Hara’s poetry crosses time by extending a poetic hand into the unchartered landscape of the future.

CHAPTER 3

Structure: John Ashbery’s Improvisatory Architecture

Int: The poems have a kind of improvisatory architecture. JA: Yes, I think that’s rather a beautiful formulation, architecture being so non-improvisatory. —‘In Conversation With John Ashbery’, 1985.

The poetry of John Ashbery is difficult; this is one of the few things that critics of his work can agree upon. As John Shoptaw puts it, Ashbery’s poems are ‘an assembly of unruly, irresponsible, factional, long-winded, strange, and outspoken members’ with ‘vague, unexpected, abstracted, conflicting, misplaced, or missing’ particulars, ‘insufficiently supported, inconsistent, incomplete, and fragmented’ narratives, and a ‘twisted, disconnected, or elongated’ use of syntax.1 It is unsurprising, then, that Ashbery’s poetry has engendered something of a critical paradox; both passionately lauded and vehemently dismissed, the poems have encouraged their own misreadings—a bizarre trait that, as David Herd observes, amounts to ‘a central, perhaps the central, impulse of the work’.2

1  John Shoptaw, On the Outside Looking Out: John Ashbery’s Poetry (Cambridge & London: Harvard University Press, 1994), p. 2. 2  David Herd, John Ashbery and American Poetry (New York: Palgrave, 2000), p. 3.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Losasso, Poetry, Architecture, and the New York School, Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41520-3_3

79

80 

M. LOSASSO

Ashbery himself was aware of this divided reception. ‘I live with this paradox’, he admitted in an interview with Peter Stitt in 1983. ‘[O]n the one hand, I am an important poet, read by younger writers, and on the other hand, nobody understands me’.3 Conceiving of his readership as cleaved, Ashbery wrote poetry in the knowledge of this split, as two further comments from the 1983 interview reveal. When asked if he likes to ‘tease or play games with the reader’, Ashbery responds: I guess it depends on what you mean by “tease.” It’s all right if it’s done affectionately, though how can this be with someone you don’t know? I would like to please the reader, and I think that surprise has to be an element of this, and that may necessitate a certain amount of teasing.4

Later in the interview, discussing his 1979 poem ‘Litany’—a work written in two, contiguous blocks of verse, intended to be read simultaneously (a feat impossible for a single reader to accomplish)—Ashbery noted that: I intended, in ‘Litany’, to write something so utterly discursive that it would be beyond criticism—not because I wanted to punish critics, but because this would somehow exemplify the fullness, or, if you wish, the emptiness, of life, or, at any rate, its dimensionless quality.5

The desire, on the one hand, to ‘please the reader’ and, on the other, to evade the critic, recalls Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s distinction between ‘paranoid’ and ‘reparative’ approaches to reading. As she explains, paranoid reading stems from ‘what Paul Ricoeur memorably called the “hermeneutics of suspicion”,’ a critical approach that implicitly distrusts the surface of the text, seeking to anticipate its surprises and mine for hidden meanings.6 Reparative reading, on the other hand, is about staying with the pleasure of a text’s surface, or, as Heather Love puts it, ‘being pushed—pleasurably—to the limits of what is knowable […] and then  Peter A. Stitt, ‘John Ashbery, The Art of Poetry No.33’, The Paris Review No. 90 (Winter 1983), https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/3014/the-art-of-poetry-no-33-johnashbery. Accessed 19 April 2023. 4  Ibid. 5  Ibid. 6  Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), p. 124. 3

3  STRUCTURE: JOHN ASHBERY’S IMPROVISATORY ARCHITECTURE 

81

over the edge’.7 For the reader who eschews, or at least reframes, paranoid critical approaches—what I want to call the epicurean reader8—this is what reading Ashbery’s poetry feels like. Yet, it is precisely this joie—the fun and witty, devious and naughty, dangerous and playful textures of Ashbery’s verse—that frustrates the paranoid critic. Historically, both the pleasure and the difficulty of Ashbery’s work (or the pleasure of the difficulty) have been located at the surface of the poems. Throughout his oeuvre, Ashbery dazzles the reader with thematic and formal surfaces in every direction: here, a sheet of skating ice, there a convex mirror. For the epicurean reader, these surfaces are sites of pleasure— the sheer joy of flying across ice or of gazing into a hall of fun—yet they consciously work to repel the paranoid reader and refute the possibility of accessing the deeper meanings that, as hermeneutic models of close reading insist, must be buried beneath. The task facing the critic, then, is not to forsake, but to recalibrate the surfaces of Ashbery’s poems; to understand them outside of the surface-depth logic that has persisted in twentieth-­century practices of close reading. As Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus argue, we need to find new, post-critical forms of reading, forms that reject a well-established hermeneutics of suspicion and that, instead: take surface to mean what is evident, perceptible, apprehensible in texts; what is neither hidden nor hiding; what, in the geometrical sense, has length and breadth but no thickness, and therefore covers no depth. A surface is what is being looked at rather than what we must train ourselves to see through.9

Best and Marcus’s approach draws heavily on Susan Sontag’s 1964 essay ‘Against Interpretation’, which promotes the replacement of ‘hermeneutics’ with ‘an erotics of art’ that ‘reveal[s] the sensuous surface of art

7  Heather Love, ‘Truth and Consequences: On Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading’ in Criticism Vol. 52, No. 2, ‘Honoring Eve’ (Spring 2010): p. 235. 8  I use the term epicurean, not only because it suggests a devotion to pleasure, but because it locates Ashbery’s poetry within the tradition of the epicurean swerve, which I discuss later in the chapter. 9  Stephen Best & Sharon Marcus, ‘An Introduction to Surface Reading’ in Representations Vol. 108, No. 1 (Fall 2009): p. 9.

82 

M. LOSASSO

without mucking about in it’.10 It is in this spirit that I craft my own ‘surface reading’ of Ashbery’s poetry; not by treating the surfaces in these poems as something that hides, or as something that we must look through, but as something that we must train ourselves to look at. Ashbery’s self-professed disinterest in deconstruction as a critical framework offers a clue as to how we might begin to recalibrate the surfaces of his poems. ‘Deconstruction is now a popular word’ he noted in an interview in 1981. ‘It’s not what I would apply to my work, not in the accepted sense, but I was actually deconstructing my poetry in the sense of taking it apart, and the pieces were lying around without any coherent connection’.11 For Ashbery, the significance of the term ‘deconstruction’ is, to use Best and Marcus’s terms, ‘evident, perceptible, apprehensible’: his interest is in the structural, or architectural, possibilities of deconstruction; that is, of literally taking language apart and reassembling it in the space of the poem. And it is this that underpins his desire to create poems that ‘exemplify the fullness, or, if you wish, the emptiness, of life’. In this vexed but beautiful conflation, Ashbery reminds us that his poems are not out to ‘punish’ the critic but to invite critical responses that might be at once paranoid and reparative, operating both at and beneath the surface.12 Through this paradoxical equation, then, we might find ways of reading the textual surfaces of these poems, not merely as facades, but as an excess of structure that overspills the limiting modernist binary of surface versus depth, to get at ‘the fullness, or, if you wish, the emptiness’ of the poem. The poet John Ash understood something of this, when he described Ashbery’s poems as possessing ‘a kind of improvisatory architecture’. And Ashbery agreed with Ash’s designation—uncharacteristically, for a poet usually so reticent to concede a critic’s reading of his work: ‘Yes, I think that’s rather a beautiful formulation, architecture being so non-­ improvisatory’.13 Always drawn to paradoxical possibilities, the playful idea of an improvisatory architecture speaks to Ashbery’s sense of the poem 10  Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays (London: Penguin, 2009), pp. 19–20. 11  Quoted in Geoff Ward, Statutes of Liberty: The New  York School of Poets (London: Palgrave, 2001), p. 111. 12  Indeed, this aligns with Sedgwick’s understanding of the relationship between paranoid and reparative reading. For as Love notes, Sedgwick’s essay is not ‘only a call for reparative reading’—rather, while there ‘is no doubt that she extends this call’ she also ‘acknowledges throughout the essay the benefits of paranoid reading’. Love, ‘Truth and Consequences’, p. 238. 13  Ash, ‘In Conversation with John Ashbery’.

3  STRUCTURE: JOHN ASHBERY’S IMPROVISATORY ARCHITECTURE 

83

not only as a structure, but as a composition in a perpetual state of construction, unfolding as both writer writes and reader reads, as Ashbery hints in an earlier interview: What I like about music is its ability of being convincing, of carrying an argument through successfully to the finish, though the terms of the ­argument remain unknown quantities. What remains is the structure, the architecture of the argument, scene or story. I would like to do this in poetry.14

Leaving the argument an unknown quantity, but creating a structure that carries through to the finish: this is the ‘architecture’ of an Ashbery poem. If, as I am suggesting, the challenge of Ashbery’s poetry is located in the conflation of emptiness and fullness, then critical work must recode this conflation, no longer reading the surface as vacuous, but as the complex interplay of so many densely wrought structures—structures of form and mise-en-page; structures of syntax and grammar; structures of reading, of temporality, and of the very process of composition.

Some Crazy Balloon Ashbery’s second published collection, The Tennis Court Oath (1962), remains his most sustained and explicit experiment into the possibility of creating both empty and flexible structural forms, resulting in a kind of poetic meta scaffolding that served to support nothing other than itself. His first collection, Some Trees (1956), had donned the already threadbare patchwork coat of modernist literary tradition,15 and many of the early poems assumed familiar forms (sonnets, sestinas, pantoums, canzones), traditional genres (pastoral, autobiography, ars poetica), and conventional lyrical imagery (‘that soon / We may touch, love, explain’).16 Such 14  John Ashbery, ‘John Ashbery’ in A Controversy of Poets: An Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry, ed. Paris Leary & Robert Kelly (New York: Doubleday, 1965), p. 523. 15  Including, as W. H Auden dourly commented, surrealism. In the conciliatory letter that Auden sent to O’Hara, informing him of the outcome of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition in 1952 (which Ashbery won), he noted: ‘I think you (and John for that matter) must watch what is always the great danger with any “surrealistic” style, namely of confusing authentic non-logical relations which arouse wonder with accidental ones which arouse mere surprise and in the end fatigue’. Quoted in Herd, John Ashbery and American Poetry, p. 42. 16  John Ashbery, ‘Some Trees’ in The Mooring of Starting Out (New York: The Ecco Press, 1997), p. 37.

84 

M. LOSASSO

conventional tropes would become a signature for Ashbery, another deft conflation, this time of the avant-garde and the rearguard. But before he could integrate these two polarities, Ashbery would have to exorcise his tendency towards tradition by fully exercising a radical experimentalism. I use the term ‘experiment’ here in a literal sense, since many of the poems of The Tennis Court Oath must be read as tests or sketches on the way to Ashbery’s fuller poetic. As he himself noted in an interview, ‘I never expected these poems to see the light of day […] I was kind of fooling around and trying to do something I hadn’t done before’.17 As a result, The Tennis Court Oath polarised critical reception: heralded by younger generations, but largely dismissed by the academy, even Ashbery noted that ‘the Language Poets consider The Tennis Court Oath to be my only worthwhile book whereas everybody else hates it’.18 ‘Fool[ing] around’ with collage and textual deconstruction, Ashbery produced a series of poems in which sense was radically subordinated to form and mise-en-page. The collection is filled with challenges to the very possibility of reading, including broken syntax, blank space, and the graphic repurposing of punctuation marks: “Carol!” he said. Can this be the one time         ????????????????????????????????????????                 She had known how from (TCO 91)  Ibid.  Ash, ‘In Conversation with John Ashbery’. A ‘melancholy’ Harold Bloom asked of The Tennis Court Oath: ‘how could Ashbery collapse into such a bog by just six years after Some Trees, and how did he climb out of it again to write Rivers and Mountains[?]’, Harold Bloom in John Ashbery, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1985), p.  52. Helen Vendler has stated that: ‘I was only one of many readers put off, years ago, by the mixture of wilful flashiness and sentimentality in The Tennis Court Oath’, Helen Vendler in John Ashbery, p. 180. Even Ashbery, well aware of this critical state of affairs, would come to distance himself from the collection, admitting that ‘there are a lot of poems in that book that don’t interest me as much as those that came before or since’, Stitt, ‘John Ashbery, The Art of Poetry No.33’. Poets, on the other hand, tended to celebrate the collection. As Daniel Kane notes, Charles Bernstein, Andrew Ross, and Ron Silliman have all celebrated the collection’s experimental ambition, Daniel Kane, ‘Reading John Ashbery’s The Tennis Court Oath through Man Ray’s eye’ in Textual Practice 21(3), (2007): p. 551; Frank O’Hara called the poem ‘Europe’ the ‘most striking thing’ since The Waste Land, quoted in Shoptaw, On the Outside, p. 55; and language poet Bruce Andrews argued that the collection embodies ‘a relativism grounded in practices, in the round of language, which demands responsiveness from us and not simply decipherment’, Bruce Andrews ‘Misrepresentation: A text for The Tennis Court Oath of John Ashbery’, in In the American Tree, ed. Ron Silliman (Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation, 1986), p. 521. 17 18

3  STRUCTURE: JOHN ASHBERY’S IMPROVISATORY ARCHITECTURE 

Or:

85

Cornelia unfolded the piece of crude blue paper that is a French telegra.     ##############                   The mouth of weeds (TCO 92)

These fragments raise the question of how we read avant-garde poetry. How, for example, can we vocalise forty question marks or fourteen octothorpes? What might they sound like read aloud? And what do they do to the sense of the poem? Elsewhere, compositions resemble something a little more familiar, though sense remains, if not altogether absent, at least elusive: Piling upward the fact the stars In America the office hid archives in his stall… Enormous stars on them The cold anarchist standing in his hat. (TCO 15)

The opening lines of ‘America’ almost offer something for the hermeneutic reader to grasp: a banner of ‘stars’ (and stripes?) fluttering behind an implied ‘office’ block image of corporate America. Yet, like the flickering of a flag, these allusions quickly dissolve into ellipses, aposiopesis, severed syntax, wayward capitalisation of first lines, and the promise of an ‘anarchic’ disobedience, consigned, surreally, into the headspace of a ‘hat’. Images do flash at the reader, but sense remains buried, along with the lyric voice, as if entombed in a ‘sepulcher’ (TCO 25), to borrow that term from one of the collection’s central compositions, ‘How Much Longer Will I Be Able to Inhabit the Divine Sepulcher…’. Many of the pieces in The Tennis Court Oath make reference to ‘construction’ (TCO 64) or to a ‘piling up’ (TCO 18), the speaker offering a ‘great city’, which ‘I build to you every moment’ (TCO 31). Elsewhere, ‘Men with orange shovels come to break open the rock / Which encases me’ (TCO 25) (a veiled reference, perhaps, to the paranoid reader, desperately mining for sepulchral meaning). Various structural features ripple to the surface throughout the collection, from ‘brick arches’ (TCO 41) to ‘dynamic arches’ (TCO 51), a ‘Loggia’ (TCO 54), ‘pillars’ (TCO 13), a

86 

M. LOSASSO

‘cornice’ (TCO 57), ‘pipes’ (TCO 90), and even the ‘Crystal Palace’ (TCO 77), a construction of pure structure which ‘address[es] [itself] / To exclusively aesthetic concerns’ (HBD 48), as Ashbery will later write in Houseboat Days (1977). The poem ‘Europe’ is often lauded as Ashbery’s most formally experimental composition, and it is here that sense and imagery are most attenuated, replaced, instead, by what I want to call pure structure or self-supporting scaffolding.19 The poem is comprised of 111 chunks of numbered text, partly collaged from the 1917 children’s novel, Beryl and the Biplane. The poem opens, as Herd notes, ‘with an image of constructive deconstruction’20: To employ her construction ball Morning fed on the light blue wood of the mouth         cannot understand feels deeply) (TCO 64)

A construction ball is a contradiction in terms: the only ‘ball’ associated with a construction site is the wrecking ball, reducing structure to rubble and ruin. This is apt, for the construction of ‘Europe’ depends upon the deconstruction of familiar poetic structures; not only structures of shape and form but of grammar, syntax, and sense. Disrupting the poem’s visually neat opening stanza, the line ‘cannot understand’ steps out of the balance, as if in sympathy with its reader, who cannot understand this cut­up poem. Yet in making its declaration, this frank moment of lucidity—of legitimate sense-making—threatens structural collapse, like a block pulled precariously from a Jenga stack.21 As M.  K. Blasing notes of Ashbery’s poetry, ‘all structures are erected at an expense, and all substitutive

19  For more on the formal experimentation of ‘Europe’, see: Herd, John Ashbery and American Poetry; Shoptaw, On the Outside Looking Out; Ward, Statutes of Liberty; Liz Kotz, Words to Be Looked At: Language in 1960s Art (Cambridge, Massachusetts & London, England: The MIT Press, 2007). 20  Herd, John Ashbery and American Poetry, p. 88. 21  The name Jenga is in fact derived from the Swahili term kujenga, which means ‘to build’.

3  STRUCTURE: JOHN ASHBERY’S IMPROVISATORY ARCHITECTURE 

87

Fig. 3.1  John Ashbery, ‘Europe’ from The Tennis Court Oath. Reproduced by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc., on behalf of the author’s estate. All rights reserved

representations exact the cost of repression’.22 In other words, in order for Ashbery’s poetic structures to stay standing, representation must be ­subordinated, even stifled; otherwise, the ‘piling up’ of lines risks tumbling down around itself. For if these structures are to be truly innovative, they cannot continue to support the traditional images and narratives that Ashbery had developed in Some Trees. Only visual structure remains, then, while grammatical structures are abandoned in favour of radical asyndeton, transforming these piled-up words into self-referential material entities, rather than signifying signs. The poem thus becomes, as Section 104 makes manifest, a self-supporting scaffold (Fig. 3.1). ‘Neither inside nor outside, neither a space nor a site’, scaffolding, as contemporary poet Lisa Robertson explains: rhythmically expresses the vulnerability of the surface by subtracting solidity from form to make something temporarily animate. It shows us how to inhabit a surface as that surface fluctuates. Whatever change is looks something like this—a leaning, a consciousness towards, a showing to.23

Subtracting ‘solidity from form’, while at the same time retaining that form, the scaffolding is the perfect expression of Ashbery’s empty-full conflation. What is more, as Robertson stresses, it is the emptied form, the fluid structure, of the scaffold that not only expresses surface but that makes that surface temporarily animate; an architectural formulation that, like Ashbery’s work, complicates entrenched ideas of modernism-equals-­ depth and post-modernism-equals-surface, since pure structure doesn’t 22  M.  K. Blasing, Politics and Form in Postmodern Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 119. 23  Lisa Robertson, Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture (Toronto: Coach House Books, 2011), p. 140.

88 

M. LOSASSO

quite align with either. Where the analogy of scaffolding ‘explains what a wall is without being a wall’, as Robertson writes, ‘Europe’ explains what a poem is without being a poem; a theory that would account for so much of the frustration that has clouded critical work on The Tennis Court Oath and for why generations of ‘younger writers’ have turned to it as, to quote Robertson, a ‘soft bomb of potential’.24 A unique architectural appendage, scaffolding represents processes of both construction and deconstruction: a fitting analogue to ‘Europe’s’ ‘construction ball’. Yet we should be wary about liberally applying the term ‘deconstruction’, for as we have seen, Ashbery himself did not use it ‘in the accepted sense, but I was actually deconstructing my poetry in the sense of taking it apart, and the pieces were lying around without any coherent connection’. In this explicit rejection of Derridean theory, Ashbery asks his readers to disassociate the more tactile processes of poetic deconstruction from the post-structuralist practice of literary criticism: a signpost for critical readers to take an epicurean approach. As in the opening image of ‘Europe’, deconstruction becomes, for Ashbery, a design principle, a method of construction, where structures might be erected that eschew or repel the kind of deep critical interpretation that a figure like Derrida represents. Responding to this rejection, Geoff Ward writes that, instead of being: braced to meet Freudian or deconstructive approaches […] the poem [‘Europe’] would have disintricated and laid bare all its internal workings, not unlike those “high tech” buildings—the Centre Georges Pompidou would be an aptly Parisian example—whose pipes and stairs and rails are exposed on the outside.25

Not the suspicious deconstruction of the literary text, then—not the ‘Men with orange shovels come to break open the rock’—but the physical deconstruction of architectural material to create new structural forms. Influenced by engineering and modern technologies, ‘high tech’, as the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) explains: was a development in British Modernist architecture from the late 1960s. It was a concept of design, based on engineering, construction and […] the manipulation of space. High Tech was marked by a preference for light Ibid.; Lisa Robertson, Nilling (Toronto: Bookthug, 2012), p. 12.  Ward, Statutes of Liberty, p. 111.

24 25

3  STRUCTURE: JOHN ASHBERY’S IMPROVISATORY ARCHITECTURE 

89

Fig. 3.2  Richard Rogers, Renzo Piano & Gianfranco Franchini, Centre Pompidou, Paris, 1977. Photo: Adora Goodenough, 2019 weight materials and sheer surfaces […] and the celebratory display of a building’s construction and services […] High Tech buildings are characterised by exposed structures (usually of steel and or other metals), with ­services (pipes, air ducts, lifts, etc.) often picked out in bright colours, a smooth, impervious skin (often of glass) and a flexibility to create internal service zones, rather than rooms or sequences of rooms.26

If the ‘exposed structures’ that characterise high tech architecture—as in the Centre Pompidou (Fig. 3.2)—resemble anything, it must surely be scaffolding: these look like buildings in a perpetual state of construction (or deconstruction), supported by networks of pure, structural utility, which become ‘sheer surfaces’ or facades, ‘As pipes decorate laminations of / City unit’ (TCO 90). As in ‘Europe’, there is no separation of form 26  ‘High Tech’, RIBA Architecture.com, https://www.architecture.com/explore-architecture/high-tech. Accessed 19 April 2023.

90 

M. LOSASSO

and figuration: the two are fused so that the building literally, and visibly, supports nothing but itself. Any comparison, however, between high tech architecture and the poems of The Tennis Court Oath must be anachronistic: construction on the Centre Pompidou (the premier example of high tech) began almost ten years after the publication of The Tennis Court Oath and was not completed until 1977. Yet we can draw comparisons between Ashbery’s poetry and high tech’s precursor, the visionary architectural movement known as Archigram.27 Heralded today as ‘the toast of the Royal Institute of British Architects’, Archigram began life in Britain in 1961 as its ‘irritant’, in the form of ‘offbeat student projects’ and ‘gloriously shoe-string’ newsletters, as Simon Sadler notes in Archigram: Architecture Without Architecture.28 The group consisted of architecture students Warren Chalk, Peter Cook, Dennis Crompton, David Greene, Ron Herron, and Michael Webb, amounting to something of an avant-garde ‘coterie’. Though a British enterprise, Archigram drew on many of the same influences that shaped the New York School, including cultures of action and event; the theories of Buckminster Fuller; and the work of Jackson Pollock, Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, and Merce Cunningham.29 In turn, their work had travelled to America in 1964, by way of architectural critic Reyner Banham, and was also spreading across Europe, taking hold in France, where Ashbery was living for most of the 1960s. Ashbery never wrote about Archigram, yet he was fascinated by the possibility of visionary architecture, the tradition to which Archigram belongs, after Giambattista Piranesi and Étienne-Louis Boullée. In a review of the exhibition ‘Visionary Drawings of Architecture and Planning’, which ran at the Drawing Center in New York in 1979, Ashbery expressed his deep admiration for visionary architects when he noted that: ‘Although all artists are visionaries in some sense, architects are perhaps the most radically visionary, since their aim is to alter the world and our lives’.30 27  As Simon Sadler notes, Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers were friends of Archigram and explicitly drew on their visionary work in their design of the Pompidou. Simon Sadler, Archigram: Architecture Without Architecture (Cambridge, Mass. & London: The MIT Press, 2005), p. 3. 28  Ibid. 29  Ibid., p. 93. 30  John Ashbery, ‘Visionary Drawings of Architecture and Planning’ in Reported Sightings (Manchester: Carcanet, 1989), p. 332.

3  STRUCTURE: JOHN ASHBERY’S IMPROVISATORY ARCHITECTURE 

91

If Archigram appealed, in theory, to Ashbery’s interest in the visionary, their aesthetic also shared strikingly common themes with the poems of The Tennis Court Oath. Like Ashbery, Archigram were invested in the possibility of indeterminacy, open-endedness, and ‘a logic pursued to a point of absurdity’.31 Explicitly eschewing Derridean notions of deconstruction (‘Archigram’, as its founders stressed, ‘is not about Derrida but the staccato of ideas’), they pursued models of deconstruction that played with the paradox of ‘the formless as progenitor of form’.32 Perhaps the best example of this is Peter Cook’s ‘Plug-in City’, a scaffold-like megastructure, devoid of any actual buildings. As Sadler explains, this ‘slumbering megastructure’ was festooned with a ‘kit-of-parts’ so that ‘connections could be made and disconnected at will, like an endless syntax’—a description that one might retrofit to Ashbery’s ‘megastructure’ of ‘Europe’, that extended scaffold, built without conjunctives so that connections might endlessly break and reform.33 Archigram’s megastructures, furthermore, drew on nineteenth-century exhibition structures, including Joseph Paxton’s 1851 Crystal Palace, which, as we have seen, surfaces in ‘Europe’ as a parallel to the poem’s structure of pure engineering (Fig. 3.3). Cook’s ‘Plug-in-City’ would evolve into the ‘Instant City’, which envisaged the metropolis as a technological event, the ‘kit-of-parts’ and its provisional structures ‘borne by airships’.34 Utopian in character, many of Archigram’s projects looked skyward, incorporating ascending structures or emblems, such as ‘the geodesic framework of an aircraft, the welded tubular construction of a bridge, [and] the air structure of a barrage balloon’ (Fig. 3.4).35 Balloons also float across the landscape of The Tennis Court Oath, where flashes of ‘blue balloons / Poured out over the foul street, creasing / The original paper outside. The ladder failed’ (TCO 55); and ‘Again, going up in a balloon / Reading from the pages of the telephone directory / The scooter and the Ethiop had gotten away / The building was to be torn down’ (TCO 60). In both fragments, the balloon intersects with  Sadler, Archigram, pp. 6; 91.  Ibid., pp. 190; 78. 33  Ibid., p.  19. This ‘kit-of-parts’ also recalls Ashbery’s desire to achieve ‘a general, allpurpose experience—like those stretch socks that fit all sizes’. Mark Silverberg, The New York School Poets and the Neo-Avant-Garde: Between Radical Art and Radical Chic (Farnham, UK & Burlington, USA: Ashgate, 2010), p. 116. 34  Sadler, Archigram, p. 38. 35  Ibid., p. 110. 31 32

92 

M. LOSASSO

Fig. 3.3  Joseph Paxton, The Crystal Palace, 1851

Fig. 3.4  Peter Cook, Instant City in a Field: Part Elevation, Typical set-up © Archigram 1969. Image reproduced courtesy of the Archigram Archives

3  STRUCTURE: JOHN ASHBERY’S IMPROVISATORY ARCHITECTURE 

93

architectural structures and spaces: in the first, the city street becomes a paper landscape (like Archigram’s visionary cities on paper), where a ladder suddenly appears without direction or purpose; in the second, the rising of the balloon counterbalances the tearing down of a building, like the poetic expression of Archigram’s desire to replace the concrete stability of modernism with the transience of ‘paper cities’, ‘plug-in-cites’, and ‘instant cities’. The poem ‘Our Youth’ reads like an extended description of Archigram’s visionary vistas. It opens with an image: Of bricks…     Who built it? Like some crazy balloon When love leans on us Its nights…     The velvety pavement sticks to our feet. The dead puppies turn us back on love. Where we are. Sometimes The brick arches led to a room like a bubble, that broke when you entered it And sometimes to a fallen leaf. We got crazy with emotion, showing how much we knew. (TCO 41)

In the opening line, the solid materiality of bricks is undermined by descent into ellipsis, as indentations clear the way for blank space and the uncertainty of a question troubles the authority of the master builder: ‘Who built it?’ Here, solidity is literally subtracted from form, as bricks are replaced with ‘some crazy balloon’ and a ‘velvety pavement’—images that evoke Archigram’s ‘crazy’ 1960s aesthetic.36 Even Ron Herron’s ‘Walking City’—a metropolis in which single-body inhabitation pods roam the city on robotic legs—can be glimpsed through ‘the brick arches’ leading ‘to a room like a bubble, that broke when you entered it’. By the end of the poem, we find ourselves on another faulty scaffold, as ‘We escape / Down the cloud ladder, but the problem has not been solved’ (TCO 42). As usual in Ashbery’s case, the problem has not been articulated either and the dissolving descent parallels the structure of the poems in The Tennis Court Oath, where meandering forms lead only tautologically, in and around themselves. Balloon iconography comes to a head in ‘Europe’, where images of ‘Zeppelins’ (TCO 67), cut from Beryl and the Biplane, float across the 36  Archigram’s work, as Sadler suggests, was ‘simultaneously realistic and crazy [my emph.]’. Sadler, Archigram, p. 5.

94 

M. LOSASSO

scaffolded landscape like Archigram’s ‘Instant City’. But the Zeppelin was a lead balloon, and lead balloons are fated to come crashing down. Indeed, if the balloon can be seen ‘going up’ across The Tennis Court Oath, then by the time of Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror in 1975, ‘The balloon pops’ (SP 70)—and not long after the visionary balloons of the Archigram landscape had also drifted back down to earth. As Sadler explains, the post-modernism that would follow, ‘with piazzas, pitched roofs, classical rhythms, vaults, and mortar started nudging aside the flyaway balloons and rivets of [Archigram’s] avant-garde vision’.37

Standing Still Is Also Life Archigram was fated, in part, by its vexed relationship to the avant-garde— a relationship that also characterises the New York School; indeed, both coterie groups have been dubbed, variously, a ‘neo-avant-garde’ movement and an iteration of ‘the last avant-garde’.38 In the work of both Archigram and Ashbery, this variation of the avant-garde is characterised by a tension between futurity and nostalgia or between radicalism and conservatism. As Sadler notes, the attachment of the ‘neo-’ prefix to Archigram, designates an ‘ideological as well as temporal distance from the “historical” avant-gardes’ and ‘indicates a version of the sixties that does not readily emerge in histories of the period—avowedly “apolitical” rather than “engaged,” technocratic rather than anarchic, individualist rather than “hippie,” grounded as much in 1950s assumptions of affluence as 1960s commitments to redistribution’.39 In a talk given at the Yale Art School in 1968, entitled ‘The Invisible Avant-Garde’, Ashbery outlines a similar position: ‘Today,’ he notes, ‘the avant-garde has come full circle—the artist who wants to experiment is again faced with what seems like a dead end, except that instead of creating a vacuum he is now at the center of a cheering mob’.40 In this articulation of the empty-full conflation, the problem that Ashbery locates is the appropriation of the vanguard by the mainstream. For Ashbery, as for  Sadler, Archigram, p. 188.  See: Sadler, Archigram, p. 196; D. Lehman, The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets (New York: Anchor Books, 1999); Silverberg, The New York School Poets and the Neo-Avant-Garde. 39  Sadler, Archigram, p. 8. 40  Ashbery, ‘The Invisible Avant Garde’ in Reported Sightings, p. 394. 37 38

3  STRUCTURE: JOHN ASHBERY’S IMPROVISATORY ARCHITECTURE 

95

Archigram, the solution does not lie in hippie culture, since ‘protests against the mediocre value of our society such as the hippie movement seem to imply that one’s only way out is to join a parallel society whose stereotyped manners, language, speech and dress are only reverse images of the one it is trying to reject’.41 Instead, for Ashbery, the solution rests on the incorporation of a consumerist mainstream into an avant-garde aesthetic, where experimentalism might merge with tradition. The ‘flyaway balloons’ of Archigram may have been punctured by the post-­ modernism that would follow in its wake, but their work would continue to offer blueprints for a changing architectural sensibility. This, as Ashbery understood, is the special property of visionary architecture: it is precisely because it cannot be built that it possesses the power to radically rewrite the rules of construction. And just as Archigram would reach a ghostly arm of influence across the architecture of the late twentieth century, so, too, would the experimental poems of The Tennis Court Oath continue to inform Ashbery’s return to a more conventional poetic register. This is the splintering, or doubling, of the vanguard and the rearguard, that is sensed and shaped in The Double Dream of Spring (1970), where Ashbery ‘keep[s] the door open to a tongue-and-cheek attitude’ (DDS 31). After The Tennis Court Oath, Ashbery had published Rivers and Mountains in 1966, which saw a return to lucid and more conventional forms and registers. By the time of Double Dream, the prevailing voice was crystallising into the quasi-philosophical self-address that would come to characterise his mature poetic: as Herd notes, there is ‘the presence in The Double Dream of Spring of a voice new to his poetry: the voice of a critic (or, more precisely, a poet-critic)’.42 If The Tennis Court Oath had challenged the critic to the point of alienation, the poems in The Double Dream of Spring anticipate the presence of the critic to the point of redundancy: the experience for the epicurean reader remains pleasurable, while the paranoid critic encounters a new hurdle: their work is seemingly already accomplished between every line of verse. The collection is haunted by the figure of the metaphysical painter, Giorgio de Chirico, whose 1915 painting lends it name to the book’s title. As such, we find references to ‘dream[s]’ (DDS 15), ‘visions’ (DDS 46), and ‘fantasy’ (DDS 18) throughout the collection, punctuated with images  Ibid., p. 393.  Herd, John Ashbery and American Poetry, p. 114.

41 42

96 

M. LOSASSO

of ‘Cloud-castles’ (DDS 13), ‘a paper city’ (DDS 14), and ‘houses […] on narrow stilts’ (DDS 27). If these images continue to find their corollary in the visionary architecture of Archigram, then they are the visions of a past, a dream from which the speaker awakens and senses, as Herd notes, ‘that his writing must now be more worldly’.43 In so many of these poems, the dream has become a recollection, a state from which the speaker emerges, asking ‘what if I dreamed it all’ (DDS 25), or recalling how, ‘As one who moves forward from a dream / The stranger left that house on hastening feet’ (DDS 55). At best, the dream represents a vision; at worst, a false hope: ‘And trust in the dream that will never come true / ‘Cause that is the scheme that is best for you / And the gleam that is most suitable too’ (DDS 27). In this anapaestic triplet, the dream of the experimental avant-­ garde has been exposed for what it is: Archigram’s utopian vistas have entered the colourful realm of a Dr. Seuss picture book—whimsical and fun, but little more than a fantastical relic of the 1960s. Indeed, the poems in Double Dream seem resigned to the fact that now ‘newness or importance has worn away’ (DDS 75) and: today there is no point in looking to imaginative new methods Since all of them are in constant use. The most that can be said for them further Is that erosion produces a kind of dust or exaggerated pumice Which fills space and transforms it, becoming a medium In which it is possible to recognize oneself. (DDS 53)

All that can remain of the visionary impulse is the dust of an eroded ruin, since all forms are now ‘in constant use’: a poetic iteration of ‘The Invisible Avant-Garde’, in which, we recall, ‘instead of creating a vacuum [the avant-garde artist] is now at the center of a cheering mob’. Yet, as in the image of a vacuum and its mob, the pumice from eroded ruins does not leave behind an emptiness but ‘fill[s] space and transforms it’. The availability of aesthetic form thus engenders a fullness that amounts to the vacuity of dust—or the cheering mob of the mainstream. The dream that haunts this collection is, however, a double one, and just as Ashbery does not rescind all possibility for an avant-garde in his Yale talk, he does not abandon the visionary altogether; rather, it is  Ibid., p. 113.

43

3  STRUCTURE: JOHN ASHBERY’S IMPROVISATORY ARCHITECTURE 

97

reframed in these poems to be more ‘worldly’. For now, ‘We have rolled into another dream’ (DDS 15) in which: Night after night this message returns, repeated In the flickering bulbs of the sky, raised past us, taken away from us, Yet ours over and over until the end that is past truth The being of our sentences, in the climate that fostered them, Not ours to own, like a book, but to be with, and sometimes To be without, alone and desperate. But the fantasy makes it ours, a kind of fence-sitting Raised to the level of an esthetic ideal. (DDS 18)

Ashbery’s vision is still turned skyward, only now ‘balloons’ and ‘Cloud castles’ have been replaced with the ‘flickering bulbs’ of electrical reality. The ‘message’, we are told, ‘returns’ and repeats ‘night after night’— though, in typical Ashberyan style, we are never told what the message is. All we know is that it is ‘ours’ but not in the sense of possession: the importance of the textual artefact lies not in the finished product of the ‘book’ but in the ‘being of our sentences’. Performing the message that it describes, the poem evades the paranoid critical reader even as they attempt to untangle it: we can parse these lines, or try to, but we can never really access the message, only begin to understand that the movement of the poem’s ‘architecture’ amounts to the ‘fantasy’ of a message, which is no message at all but only a ‘fence-sitting / Raised to the level of an aesthetic ideal’. The term ‘fence-sitting’ typifies the apolitical posturing of post-modern aesthetics. As Blasing writes, ‘only a desacralized, demystified poetic language that declines morally, politically, or aesthetically superior positions can still resist being totally appropriated’.44 In other words, the only way to escape the ‘cheering mob’ is to assume an aesthetic position on the fence and abnegate political, moral, or social responsibility in one’s work. In The Double Dream of Spring, this fence-sitting is manifest in Ashbery’s return to convention: if the cut-up and collage techniques of The Tennis Court Oath remain his last breath of late modernism, still founded on the Poundian drive to ‘make it new’, the post-modern aesthetic that characterises the true ‘Ashberyan poetic’, is marked out by the production of a more seamless register that might belong in the late-nineteenth-century.45  Blasing, Politics and Form, p. 62.  Herd, John Ashbery and American Poetry, p. 71.

44 45

98 

M. LOSASSO

Yet, in spite of this shift in tone, Ashbery’s later poems are no more driven by meaning than his earlier experiments; simply, they possess the outward sheen of lucid sense through the promise of syntactical structure. And if the eschewal of meaning fits within an avant-garde drive to separate sign from signified, to transform words into strictly material units, it also, perhaps ironically, aligns with the post-modern gap that emerges between politics (with a capital P) and aesthetics, which recognises that ‘meanings are not inherent in the material’.46 In this new post-modern lag between sign and meaning, construction takes centre stage: as Blasing explains, ‘if poetry has a generic and general political function it may be to show us how it constructs itself into a discourse that in turn constructs a meaningful world’.47 In this formulation, the poem that is able to ‘construct a meaningful world’ is the poem that not only exposes its own structures, but the poem that understands itself as existing in the process of its own construction. The term ‘construction’ is central to the process-oriented artistic backdrop against which the New  York School emerged. Famously dubbed ‘Action Painting’ by the art critic Harold Rosenberg, the work produced by visual artists such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and Joan Mitchell (all of whom moved in the orbit of the New  York School) came to understand the canvas as ‘an arena in which to act’.48 Writing in 1952, Rosenberg’s reading of the canvas as ‘an arena’ echoes Charles Olson’s ‘composition by field’ approach, set out two years earlier in ‘Projective Verse’. Here (as I discuss in the introduction to this book) Olson advocates an attention to process, which ‘can be made so to shape the energies that the form is accomplished’. As he urges, ‘USE USE USE the process at all points, in any given poem always, always one perception must must must MOVE, INSTANTER, ON ANOTHER!’49 Influenced by Olson’s thinking, language poet Barrett Watten has articulated what he terms the ‘constructivist moment’ as ‘a dual concept that refers to a generative moment in poetics in which a work of literature or art takes shape and unfolds’.50 Neither a historical epoch, nor a cohesive  Blasing, Politics and Form, p. 19.  Ibid. 48  Harold Rosenberg, ‘The American Action Painters’ in ARTnews (January 1952): p. 22. 49  Charles Olson, ‘Projective Verse’ in Collected Prose, ed. Donald Allen & Benjamin Friedlander (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1997), p. 240. 50  Barrett Watten, The Constructivist Moment: From Material Text to Cultural Poetics (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2003), p. xviii. 46 47

3  STRUCTURE: JOHN ASHBERY’S IMPROVISATORY ARCHITECTURE 

99

aesthetic, Watten’s ‘constructivist moment’ is the instant in which a text constructs itself in materially reflexive ways. By virtue of its desire to ‘lay bare the device of its construction’, Watten explains, ‘the literariness of the material text is not simply an artefact of avant-garde formalism but may be seen as a moment of social construction, from the writing of the text to the processing of it, here and now’.51 We have encountered the notion of ‘laying bare’ in Ward’s description of ‘Europe’, which ‘laid bare all its internal workings, not unlike those “high tech” buildings’. In Watten’s description, however, this laying bare is ‘not simply an artefact of avant-­ garde formalism’ but ‘a moment of social construction’: by revealing its own processes in this way, the material text resists petrifaction, remaining in a lively and active state of perpetual construction. Thus, when Liz Kotz suggests that ‘“Europe” represents a kind of visual artefact, like a snapshot of the ceaseless activity of textuality, an instantaneous recording of language made possible by the typewriter’,52 she touches on the importance of the constructivist moment in Ashbery’s work—but she forgets the message of ‘Soonest Mended’: that the poem is ‘Not ours to own, like a book’, not an artefact as such, but something ‘to be with […] a kind of fence-­ sitting / Raised to the level of an aesthetic ideal’. The term construction fascinated Ashbery for its ability to mediate between the poetic and the architectural. Reviewing an exhibition of the drawings of Italian post-modern architect Aldo Rossi, Ashbery again betrays his fascination with the promise of the visionary: If drawings can be equated with architecture, then architecture itself must be something quite different from what we commonly take it to be, and that is precisely what Rossi is proposing. For him architecture is ‘construction’, and construction itself is a broad heading that covers many kinds of activity. For instance, it is somewhat like the act of writing[.]53

If The Double Dream of Spring can be said to harbour a dual vision of architecture—the dream of the ‘paper city’ just breaking, the promise of concrete structure still sleep-gummed—then Rossi is the figure who best encapsulates this duality. Described by the architectural critic Ada Louise  Ibid.  Kotz, Words to Be Looked At, p. 116. 53  Ashbery, ‘Aldo Rossi’ in Reported Sighings, pp. 334–335. 51 52

100 

M. LOSASSO

Fig. 3.5  Aldo Rossi, Cimitero di San Cataldo, 1971. Photo: Camouflajj

Huxtable as ‘a poet who happens to be an architect’, Rossi is known as much for his realised buildings as for his visionary drawings and writings.54 On the surface of things, Ashbery and Rossi appear to have little in common. Rossi is perhaps best known for his 1971 design for the cemetery at San Cataldo, which he dubbed his ‘city of the dead’ (Fig. 3.5).55 The site’s central structure is striking for its eery sparseness: a stolid cube of terracotta-covered render forms the ossuary, punctuated by perfectly symmetrical rows of glassless apertures on every facia. It has the look of an industrial ruin, freshly built: though quasi neo-classical in its simplicity and symmetry, the cemetery at San Cataldo could only have been imagined in the latter part of the twentieth century. Rossi’s architecture, as Ashbery notes, is thus an architecture of the future built out of the past. In other words, if Rossi adopted the backward turn of post-modern aesthetics, he did so with one foot in the future, just as the Ashbery of The Double Dream of Spring (published only a year before Rossi’s design for San 54  Quoted in: Diane Ghirardo, Aldo Rossi and the Spirit of Architecture (Newhaven & London: Yale University Press, 2019), p. 4. 55  Ibid., p. 172.

3  STRUCTURE: JOHN ASHBERY’S IMPROVISATORY ARCHITECTURE 

101

Cataldo) blended the visionary with the worldly. This utopianism-which-­ is-not-one finds its fullest expression in Rossi’s whimsical sketches, which, like Piranesi’s impossible designs for Rome, reimagine: the city itself as a model for the architect’s activity. Not the utopian concept of an urban planner but the city as it is continuously coming into being—a concept perpetually modified by the exigencies of everyday reality, where what is unbuilt or incomplete has a function no less important than what is actually there, as part of a never completely visible or measurable totality.56

‘Continuously coming into being’ and ‘perpetually modified’, what is important to Ashbery is not the completeness of a building but that which is ‘never completely visible’: the process of construction itself. As Ashbery will later write in ‘Daffy Duck in Hollywood’, ‘It’s not the incomplete importunes, but the spookiness / Of the finished product’ (HBD 33). Something of this Rossi-esque, constructive self-awareness is captured in Ashbery’s poem ‘The Bungalows’. After contemplating ‘thoughts on construction’ (DDS 71), the speaker swerves to a detached register that sits somewhere between a manifesto and a philosophical tract: We shall very soon have the pleasure of recording A period of unanimous tergiversation in this respect And to make that pleasure the greater, it is worth while At the risk of tedious iteration, to put first upon record a final protest: Rather decaying art, genius, inspiration to hold to An impossible “calque” of reality, than “The new school of the trivial, rising up on the field of battle, Something of sludge and leaf-mold,” and life Goes trickling out through the holes, like water through a sieve, All in one direction. (DDS 71)

The poem favours traditional form and structure: regimented stanzas, long lines in the Whitmanic tradition, and capitalisation corresponding to lineation rather than grammar.57 Where a poem like ‘Europe’ does not even attempt to convey lucidity—visual, grammatical, or sensical—‘The  Ashbery, ‘Aldo Rossi’, p. 335.  This tendency towards capitalisation according to lineation is, incidentally, is one of the most distinctively traditional—and consistently employed—features of Ashbery’s poetry: an antiquated tic that looks unusual for the time that he is writing. One rarely encounters such formalism in the work of Guest, Schuyler or O’Hara. 56 57

102 

M. LOSASSO

Bungalows’ appears cogent, rational, even systematic. Indeed, were one to skim the poem absent-mindedly and then try to recall its salient points, they might reasonably assume that what they had read possessed a perfect, if complex, internal logic, and that their mind had simply wandered from the argument; or, as Ashbery writes in ‘The Other Tradition’, ‘Only then did you glance up from your book, / Unable to comprehend what had been taking place, or / Say what you had been reading’ (HBD 2). The phrase ‘other tradition’ is a fitting one for the poetic register of a poem like ‘The Bungalows’, with its uncanny blend of the conventional with an off-­ kilter flavour of the avant-garde that it is hard to articulate. In this respect, the poem mirrors the rationalism of Rossi’s architecture, which as Ashbery notes, was tasked with ‘supplanting the narrow functionalism of the glass box with a superior rationalism which must take account of the irrational as well’.58 Rossi’s structures pass, superficially, as conventional edifices, classical allusion quietly conforming to Vitruvian ideals. Yet in both Rossi’s buildings and Ashbery’s poems, neat structure masks unexpected elements of form and materiality: the empty apertures at San Cataldo are like the ‘holes’ in the poem’s form through which ‘life / Goes trickling out’, capturing the quality of incompleteness that drives the ‘The Bungalows’ through its strategy of tergiversation. The term ‘tergiversation’ means to make conflicting or evasive statements or to abandon a belief or loyalty. The term thus corresponds to a post-modern ‘fence-sitting’ attitude, emptied, as it is, of belief and loyalty, while at the same time signalling Ashbery’s distinctive grammatical structures even as they embed themselves as discrete variations of the Lucretian swerve. Where James Schuyler turns to parenthetical dislocation (as we will see in Chap. 5) or another of Ashbery’s contemporaries, the British poet Tom Raworth, employs anacoluthon, Ashbery favours this more fluent form of the swerve, which works to lull the reader into a dream-like sense of continuity, cohesion, and integrity of argument—when, in fact, the narrative-disrupting drift remains at play. And if this rhetorical trickery takes its place within the Epicurean tradition (just as Rossi’s architecture assumes its place within the Classical tradition), it also speaks to the ‘constructivist moment’, since it demands that each ‘perception’ moves ‘instanter, on another’ (to use Olson’s terms) within a structure of rigorous grammatical lucidity.  Ibid.

58

3  STRUCTURE: JOHN ASHBERY’S IMPROVISATORY ARCHITECTURE 

103

The poet Ben Lerner gestures towards this impulse in his discussion of what he calls ‘Ashbery’s lyric mediacy’ in his essay of that name. ‘Part of the bizarre power of Ashbery’s best poetry’, Lerner writes, ‘is that it seems to narrate what it’s like to read Ashbery’s best poetry, and when his work manages to describe the time of its own reading in the time of its own reading, we experience mediacy immediately’.59 Lerner describes the moment of the poem’s construction, always knowing itself, always revealing itself to the reader. For Lerner, this mediacy rests on a certain cyclical tautology (a poem narrating itself narrating itself, etc…), in which ‘form becomes content as one reads because the poem itself fills the vacuum left by indefinite deictics’.60 An Ashberyan conflation of empty and full drives Lerner’s reading, which places structure, and the perpetual construction of it, centre stage, via a pedantic grammatical logic. In this way, Lerner concludes, ‘Ashbery pins us to the moment of reading and frustrates retrograde interpretive strategies that would stop the flow of language at its source’.61 Hermeneutic modes of criticism are once again thwarted, this time by the onward march of the poem (precisely what stimulates the epicurean reader), transforming an emptiness of meaning into a fullness of structure as it moves. It is in this spirit, then, that Ashbery concludes ‘The Bungalows’, not with the question of ‘meaning’, but of ‘building’: All this came to pass eons ago. Your program worked out perfectly. You even avoided The monotony of perfection by leaving in certain flaws: A backward way of becoming, a forced handshake, An absent-minded smile, though in fact nothing was left to chance. Each detail was startlingly clear, as though seen through a magnifying glass, Or would have been to an ideal observer, namely yourself— For only you could watch yourself so patiently from afar The way God watches a sinner on the path to redemption, Sometimes disappearing into valleys, but always on the way, For it all builds up into something, meaningless or meaningful As architecture, because planned and then abandoned when completed, 59  Ben Lerner, ‘The Future Continuous: Ashbery’s Lyric Mediacy’, boundary 2 Vol 37, Issue 1 (Spring 2010): p. 203. 60  Ibid., p. 206. 61  Ibid., p. 203.

104 

M. LOSASSO To live afterwards, in sunlight and shadow, a certain amount of years. Who cares what was there before? There is no going back, For standing still means death, and life is moving on, Moving on towards death. But sometimes standing still is also life. (DDS 72)

Whether meaningless or meaningful is of secondary importance: what matters is the process of building up and then abandoning via the swerve of tergiversation. Meaning is deserted and, in its place, only the tautological narrative of the poem’s own construction remains, borne out through syntactical structure. The address to the self—not so much to the writer but to the poem as an autonomous entity (as Ashbery writes, ‘I think of my poems as independent objects or little worlds which are self-­ referential’:62 as Blasing writes, the poem ‘constructs itself into a discourse that in turn constructs a meaningful world’) pervades this stanza and locks the reader into a contemplation of the verse that cannot extend beyond perpetually cycling around itself; another full vacuum created from self-­ supporting structure. Where the poems of The Tennis Court Oath amount to little more than scaffolding, ‘The Bungalows’ ‘builds up into something’ by virtue of its forward-moving process: ‘always on the way’; ‘Who cares what was there before? There is no going back’. Yet, in amounting to ‘something’ these poems also complicate their own propulsion. True to Ashbery’s tic of tergiversation, this forward drive is cut-off suddenly in the poem’s closing image, as Ashbery abandons what has been building towards a climactic conclusion. With a subtle swerve, Ashbery leaves the poem on a note of undecidability: ‘But sometimes standing still is also life’. This final contradiction captures the strangeness of an art form that knows its own process of construction. As in the action painting of Jackson Pollock, the projective verse of Charles Olson, or the visionary architecture of Aldo Rossi, process-driven art also results in a finished product: the poem unfolds, is always unfolding, but, when it reaches its denouement, must also crystallise, must halt, must stand still. The scaffolding of The Tennis Court Oath—the suggestion of what poetry might be—has thus been transformed into a process of perpetual construction, an architecture that is the act of writing.

 Quoted in: Shoptaw, On the Outside Looking Out, p. 211.

62

3  STRUCTURE: JOHN ASHBERY’S IMPROVISATORY ARCHITECTURE 

105

A Turret There, an Art-Deco Escarpment Here Two years after The Double Dream of Spring, Ashbery published Three Poems (1972), a dense collection of prose poetry, where page space is obliterated under the weight of thick paragraph chunks. The series represents the peak of the insular philosophising that Ashbery had been developing in Double Dream and advances a new formal strategy for conflating the opposing states of emptiness and fullness. ‘I thought that if I could put it all down’, writes Ashbery, in the opening to ‘The New Spirit’, the first of the Three Poems, ‘that would be one way. And next the thought came to me that to leave all out would be another, and truer, way’.63 The poems that follow perform this empty-fullness, through the piling up of existential contemplations without any clear sense of overarching meaning. In a brief flash of versification, for example, we are told that: Because life is short We must remember to keep asking it the same question Until the repeated question and the same silence become answer In words broken open and pressed to the mouth And the last silence reveal the lining Until at last this thing exist separately At all levels of landscape and in the sky And in the people who timidly inhabit it The locked name for which is open, to dust and to no thoughts Even of dying, the fuzzy first thought that gets started in you and then there’s no stopping it.64

The section performs its own vacuity, promising the appearance of life’s great question but, in this extended non sequitur, letting it dissolve quietly into ineffable silence: more ‘dust’ and ‘no thoughts’ in another swerve of tergiversation. In the end, we realise that the density of these poems is less about meaning than it is about textural rhythm, another poetic structure that works to displace sense since, as Ashbery tells the reader (who is really himself): ‘There is nothing to be done, you must grow up, the outer rhythm more and more accelerate, past the ideal rhythm of the spheres that seemed to dictate you, that seemed the establishment of your seed and the conditions of its growing, upward, someday into leaves and  Ashbery, ‘The New Spirit’ in The Mooring of Starting Out, p. 309.  Ibid., p. 311.

63 64

106 

M. LOSASSO

fruition and final sap’.65 In fact, Ashbery did ‘grow up’, poetically speaking, to be dictated by the ‘sphere’ of Parmigianino’s convex mirror, bringing his poetic to ‘fruition’, at least by the standards of the literary ‘establishment’: published in 1975, Ashbery’s next collection, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, would win him the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In Self-Portrait, it was as if Ashbery had emerged, blinking, from the poetic therapy of Three Poems, refining his lyric voice to amplify the critic over the philosopher, this time in the guise of the art critic, who steps into the poem to proffer descriptions and close readings of Parmigianino’s painting: ‘What is novel is the extreme care in rendering / The velleities of the rounded reflecting surface / (It is the first mirror portrait), / So that you could be fooled for a moment / Before you realize the reflection / Isn’t yours’ (SP 74). The poem is often read as evidence of Ashbery’s adherence to the surface of post-modern aesthetics, since ‘your eyes proclaim / That everything is surface. The surface is what’s there / And nothing can exist except what’s there’ (SP 70). The problem, however, is that this reading does not take into account the direction of the address: this is not Ashbery espousing his own view, but Ashbery reading Parmigianino’s expression (‘you could be fooled for a moment / Before you realize the reflection isn’t yours’). A few lines on, Ashbery complicates this notion of superficiality, when he offers his own perspective: ‘there are no words for the surface, that is, / No words to say what it really is, that it is not / Superficial but a visible core’ (SP 70). Surface, then, is rendered an integral structure at the heart of the poem and, as if to entrench this reading, Ashbery admonishes the mistaken critics, losing his temper with ‘those assholes / Who would confuse everything with their mirror games / Which seem to multiply stakes and possibilities, or / At least confuse issues by means of an investing / Aura that would corrode the architecture / Of the whole’ (SP 79–80). The critics’ insistence on the surfaces, superficialities, and mirror games of Ashbery’s poetry overlook—even ‘corrode’—the architecture, the structure, and the emphasis on construction that drives the poem with the forward ‘momentum of a conviction that had been building’ (SP 77) since The Tennis Court Oath. Two years after the success of Self-Portrait, Ashbery published Houseboat Days (1977), a collection that maintained the lyric voice that had earned Ashbery his accolades, while injecting a dose of pop-post-­modern  Ibid., p. 310.

65

3  STRUCTURE: JOHN ASHBERY’S IMPROVISATORY ARCHITECTURE 

107

pastiche. Ashbery reprises the ‘rhythm of standing still’ (DDS 89) that had pervaded The Double Dream of Spring, yet here this static motion is a less an articulation of the ongoing construction of structure and more an acknowledgement of the communicative possibility of ephemeral structures of sign, symbol, and ornament. ‘To praise this, blame that’, Ashbery writes, in the collection’s title poem, ‘Leads one subtly away from the beginning, where / We must stay, in motion’ (HBD 39). In another iteration of aesthetic fence-sitting (or, more accurately, a disavowal of poetry with a moralising agenda), Ashbery signposts us back to the beginning of the poem as the point at which we must stay in motion, always holding off the sense of an ending, ‘the spookiness / Of the finished product’ (HBD 33).66 Later, in the poem ‘And Ut Pictura Poesis Is Her Name’ (the closest Ashbery gets to a defence of his poetic), we discover that the beginning matters not only in opposition to the ending, but because it is here that understanding might ‘be undone’. As Ashbery writes:                  […] Something Ought to be written about how this affects You when you write poetry: The extreme austerity of an almost empty mind Colliding with the lush, Rousseau-like foliage of its desire to communicate Something between breaths, if only for the sake Of others and their desire to understand you and desert you For other centers of communication, so that understanding May begin, and in doing so be undone. (HBD 45–6)

In the collision between ‘the extreme austerity of an almost empty mind’ and ‘the lush, Rousseau-like foliage of its desire to communicate’, we find another instance of the empty-full conflation that we have seen threading through Ashbery’s poetic structures ever since The Tennis Court Oath. If the desire to communicate meets an empty mind, Ashbery admits, then the result for the critic can only amount to an illusion of understanding, unravelling at the very moment that comprehension begins to take shape. And yet, as Herd writes, ‘communication is more than ever the issue in Houseboat Days’.67 The task facing the critic, then, is one in which 66  A similar idea has been discussed, in relation to fiction, in Frank Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (from which I take the phrase) and Peter Brooks’ Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. 67  Herd, John Ashbery and American Poetry, p. 168.

108 

M. LOSASSO

Fig. 3.6  Las Vegas, Clark County, Nevada. Photo: Charles O’Rear

familiar modes of communication (full) must be recalibrated according to the models of structure (empty) that have been evolving throughout Ashbery’s oeuvre. In a passing analogy, Shoptaw detects a parallel between Ashbery’s drive towards communication in Houseboat Days and Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi’s lessons on the commercial signage of the Las Vegas Strip (Fig. 3.6). ‘Ashbery’, Shoptaw writes, ‘had evidently learned enough from [Denise Scott Brown and] Robert Venturi’s Learning from Las Vegas (1972) to construct a poem less like a storm than a “strip” (a street, a comic strip and a strip-tease)’.68 Considered among the pioneers of post-­ modern architecture, Scott Brown and Venturi are perhaps best known for their seminal book (with Steve Izenour), Learning from Las Vegas. Here, they advocate ‘learning from the existing landscape [as] a way of being revolutionary for an architect. Not the obvious way, which is to tear down Paris and begin again, as Le Corbusier suggested in the 1920s, but another,  Shoptaw, On the Outside Looking Out, pp. 203–204.

68

3  STRUCTURE: JOHN ASHBERY’S IMPROVISATORY ARCHITECTURE 

109

more tolerant way; that is, to question how we look at things’69—a sentiment that is echoed in Ashbery’s ‘Daffy Duck in Hollywood’: ‘Not what we see but how we see it matters’ (HBD 34). Rejecting the radical futurity of movements like Archigram, Scott Brown and Venturi seem to argue that, in the utopian architecture of the 1960s, ‘the present ha[d] done its work of building / A rampart against the past, not a rampart, / A barbed-­ wire fence’ (HBD 19), as Ashbery writes in ‘Business Personals’. Instead, for Scott Brown, and Venturi, ‘there is perversity in the learning process: We look backward at history and tradition to go forward; we can also look downward to go upward’—or, as Ashbery puts it ‘the historical past owed it / To itself, our historical present’ (HBD 86).70 Yet, Scott Brown and Venturi’s backwards glance is not demonstrative of a tendency towards conservatism, or even retroactivism; rather, it aimed to open the eyes of young architects to forms that had been overlooked in modernist assumptions of radical futurity (à la Corbusier). Taking umbrage against the architects who ‘contemptuously reject the current vernacular of the United States, that is, the merchant builders’ vernacular of Levittown and the commercial vernacular of Route ’66’, Scott Brown and Venturi suggest that the root of the problem can be located in modernism’s rejection of symbolism: The content of the symbols, commercial hucksterism and middle-middle-­ class social aspiration, is so distasteful to many architects that they are unable to investigate openmindedly the basis for the symbolism or to analyze the forms of suburbia for their functional value[.]71

Scott Brown and Venturi do not celebrate ‘commercial hucksterism and middle-middle-class social aspiration’ for the sake of post-modern provocation, but to demonstrate that the ‘liberal’ architect’s ‘viewpoint throws out variety with vulgarity’ and that its narrow-minded allegiance to ‘uncluttered architectural form’ risks overlooking anything of value in the symbolism of vernacular ‘suburbia’.72 It forgets, in other words, to ‘question how we look at things’. 69  Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown & Steve Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form (Cambridge, Mass & London: The MIT Press, 1977), p. 3. 70  Ibid. 71  Ibid., p. 153. 72  Ibid.

110 

M. LOSASSO

This is also Ashbery’s stance in ‘The Invisible Avant-Garde’, where he argues ‘that traditional art is even riskier than experimental art; that it can offer no very real assurances to its acolytes, and since traditions are always going out of fashion it is more dangerous and therefore more worthwhile than experimental art’.73 Like Ashbery’s ‘Invisible Avant-Garde’, Learning from Las Vegas does not position itself as a wholesale rejection of the vanguard, but as an experiment in looking backwards to look, if not forward to the future, then head-on at the present. In any case, by the time that Ashbery published Houseboat Days, his thinking on the avant-garde had been displaced by Peter Bürger’s The Theory of the Avant-Garde, published a year earlier in 1976, whose diagnosis was even more despairing: Bürger had taken the vanguard’s dying pulse, the avant-garde had passed into history, and the poems of Houseboat Days, like the lessons from Las Vegas, reflect this shift.74 In seeking a new-old poetic tradition, Ashbery (who, in The Double Dream of Spring, had penned not only ‘The Bungalows’ but also ‘Sunrise in Suburbia’) mirrors Scott Brown and Venturi in his commitment to an American vernacular. As Adam Fitzgerald notes, the ‘strange syntax and subject matter’ of The Tennis Court Oath (written after Ashbery’s emigration to France) ‘belie just how fascinated he was by being severed from the vernacular he so loved’.75 We might thus understand Ashbery’s poetic trajectory as one that is, in part, determined by a rediscovery of the American vernacular, at around the same time that Scott Brown and Venturi’s ideas were entering the mainstream: the first edition of Learning From Las Vegas was printed in 1972; its second edition in 1977, the same year that Houseboat Days was published. The topography of Houseboat Days reads like a catalogue of the architectural mores from which Scott Brown and Venturi sought to learn. In ‘Pyrography’, a poem commissioned by the United States Department for the Interior to celebrate the country’s Bicentenary (the closest Ashbery gets to sincere Americana), we are told, in Robert Frost-esque vernacular,76 that:  Ashbery, ‘The Invisible Avant Garde’, p. 391.  Peter Bürger, The Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), pp. 15–34. 75  Adam Fitzgerald, ‘John Ashbery’ in Bomb 128, Jul 1 2014, https://bombmagazine. org/articles/john-ashbery/. Accessed 15 March 2023. 76  The first line of ‘Pyrography’ bears a resemblance to the opening lines of Frost’s ‘The Gift Outright’: ‘The land was ours before we were the land’s’. Robert Frost, ‘The Gift Outright’ in In the Clearing (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1972), p. 24. 73 74

3  STRUCTURE: JOHN ASHBERY’S IMPROVISATORY ARCHITECTURE 

111

The land wasn’t immediately appealing; we built it Partly over with fake ruins, in the image of ourselves: An arch that terminates in mid-keystone, a crumbling stone pier For laundresses, an open-air theater, never completed And only partially designed. How are we to inhabit This space from which the fourth wall is invariably missing, As in a stage-set or dollhouse, except by staying as we are, In lost profile, facing the stars, with dozens of as yet Unrealized projects, and a strict sense Of time running out, of evening presenting The tactfully folded-over bill? (HBD 9)

The unappealing land recalls the barren Mojave desert, which was built up into the Las Vegas Strip in less than half a century. Like Scott Brown and Venturi’s description of ‘Caesars Palace with its Classical plastic columns’, the landscape of ‘Pyrography’ is covered over with ‘stage-set’ scenery and ‘fake ruins’ (Fig. 3.7).77 Informed by the pastiche of the strip, the architecture that Scott Brown and Venturi propose makes a feature of its eclectic and tongue-in-cheek inauthenticity, a well-wrought facade that creates a ‘space from which the fourth wall is invariably missing’. As they explain, ‘this architecture of signs is anti spatial; it is an architecture of communication over space’.78 To many readers of Ashbery’s work, it might seem a wilful misreading to compare his poetic to Scott Brown and Venturi’s ‘architecture of communication’; even Ashbery himself noted that ‘my poetry is often criticized for a failure to communicate’.79 Yet this failure, as Ashbery goes on to point out, is really on the part of the critics: ‘I take issue with this; my intention is to communicate and my feeling is that a poem that communicates something that’s already known by the reader is not really communicating anything to him and in fact shows a lack of respect for him’.80 Ashbery’s strip-style poetry—like the anti-­ architectural ‘how we look’ of Learning from Las Vegas—does offer forms of communication in the building of signs and symbols, though they remain signs that respectfully make the critical reader work to find meaning—or, more accurately, play for it.  Venturi, Scott Brown, Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas, p. 51.  Ibid., p. 8. 79  Janet Bloom & Robert Losada, ‘Craft interview with John Ashbery’ in New York Quarterly 9 (Winter 1972): p. 12. 80  Ibid. 77 78

112 

M. LOSASSO

Fig. 3.7  Caesars Palace, Las Vegas. Photo: Thomas Duelling

The poem in which Shoptaw finds evidence of Ashbery’s Las Vegas education is ‘Daffy Duck in Hollywood’, his most self-consciously parodic, urban, and architectural poem, stocked with references to ‘White cardboard castle[s]’, ‘New Brutalism’, ‘pavilions’, ‘skyscrapers’, and ‘Model cities’ (HBD 32–34). Narrated in the voice of Daffy, the poem opens with a profusion of pop imagery: Something strange is creeping across me. La Celestina has only to warble the first few bars Of “I Thought about You” or something mellow from Amadigi di Gaula for everything—a mint condition can Of Rumford’s Baking Powder, a celluloid earring, Speedy Gonzales, the latest from Helen Topping Miller’s fertile Escritoire, a sheaf of suggestive pix on greige, deckle-edged Stock—to come clattering through the rainbow trellis Where Pistachio Avenue rams the 2300 block of Highland Fling Terrace. (HBD 31)

3  STRUCTURE: JOHN ASHBERY’S IMPROVISATORY ARCHITECTURE 

113

Billie Holiday modulates into Handel, a can of baking powder mimics the aesthetic trend for tinned goods (Andy Warhol’s 1962 Campbell Soup Cans had already entered Bürger’s annals of avant-garde history), jewellery is a plastic symbol of the celluloid film industry, and cartoon characters have risen to the ranks of pulp fiction and pornography.81 All of this takes place on a fictional Hollywood intersection, a place, Ashbery explains, where:              […] You meet Enough vague people on this emerald traffic-island—no, Not people, comings and goings, more: mutterings, splatterings, The bizarrely but effectively equipped infantries of happy-go-nutty Vegetal jacqueries, plumed, pointed at the little White cardboard castle over the mill run. (HBD 31–2)

This is the ‘new scale of landscape’ that Scott Brown and Venturi locate on the Strip, where ‘Styles and signs make connections among many elements far apart and seen fast. The message is basely commercial; the context is basically new’.82 This is because the signage of the Strip is aimed not at the pedestrian—‘no, / Not people’—but at the driver who ‘has no time to ponder paradoxical subtleties within a dangerous, sinuous maze. He or she relies on signs for guidance—enormous signs in vast spaces at high speeds’.83 These signs are the ‘mutterings, splatterings’, the ‘White cardboard castle’, or plastic Roman villa, that rises ‘over the mill run’ or above the Strip, signalling in the ‘bizarrely but effectively’ bright lights of quick symbols. And just as the signs of the Strip ‘contain messages beyond their ornamental contribution to architectural space’, the images that crowd the  Shoptaw, On the Outside Looking Out, p. 204.  Venturi, Scott Brown, Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas, 8–9. The question of this commercial aspect is also important to Ashbery’s (and the New  York School’s) late-capitalist poetic. As Blasing notes: ‘In the end, even not making sense is a strategy the poet must market. Ashbery’s aim to communicate without communicating anything of substance reaffirms exchange value over absolute use value and use value alike and is perfectly consonant with a consumer economy’ (Politics and Form, 154). This idea of communication without communicating anything also corresponds to Scott Brown and Venturi’s Strip architecture: commercial signage has something to say, but in the ‘multitudinous style’ of post-modernism, individual meanings are fragmented and dispersed, and thus remain fundamentally apolitical. 83  Ibid. 81 82

114 

M. LOSASSO

Fig. 3.8  Light patterns created by multicoloured casino displays in downtown Las Vegas. Photo: Charles O’Rear

poem must be read as more than signifying signs (Fig. 3.8).84 As Ashbery explains, ‘I mean them to be there for themselves, and not for some hidden meaning…They are just the things that I selected to be exhibited in the poem at that point’.85 In the aesthetics of this new post-modern tradition, then, sign and symbol may dominate, but in the drive toward  Ibid., p. 5.  Quoted in Shoptaw, On the Outside Looking Out, p. 203.

84 85

3  STRUCTURE: JOHN ASHBERY’S IMPROVISATORY ARCHITECTURE 

115

communication, the emphasis on process and structure still remains the keystone: ‘to be ambling on’s / The tradition more than the safekeeping of it’ (HBD 34). Ashbery gestures towards this in ‘Daffy Duck’:          […] since all By definition is completeness (so In utter darkness they reasoned), why not Accept it as it pleases to reveal itself? As when Low skyscrapers from lower-hanging clouds reveal A turret there, an art-deco escarpment here, and last perhaps The pattern that may carry sense, but Stays hidden in the mysteries of pagination. Not what we see but how we see it matters (HBD 34)

‘They’ (the critics again) who reason in ‘utter darkness’ put store in ‘completeness’—but, as we know, Ashbery privileges the process of construction above ‘the spookiness / Of the finished product’. As he writes in ‘Syringa’, ‘The singer thinks / Constructively, builds up his chant in progressive stages / Like a skyscraper, but at the last minute turns away’ (HBD 71). The half-finished skyscraper of tergiversated thought poses a stylistic challenge in ‘Daffy Duck’: the glass-box of international modernism (see Chap. 2) has been transformed into the eclecticism of post-­ modernism, to ‘reveal / A turret there, an art-deco escarpment here’ and, in this anti-spatial architecture of sign and symbol, we might draw nearer to ‘The pattern that may carry sense, but / stays hidden in the mysteries of pagination. / Not what we see but how we see it matters’. Ashbery’s choice of a cartoon duck to sound the death knell for modernism suggests the conscious influence of the work of Scott Brown and Venturi, whose analogy of the ‘duck’ and the ‘decorated shed’ to distinguish between modern and post-modern architecture remains seminal. ‘Ironically’, they write, ‘the Modern architecture of today, while rejecting explicit symbolism and frivolous appliqué ornament, has distorted the whole building into one big ornament. In substituting “articulation” for decoration, it has become a duck’.86 This is the sculptural ‘duck’ of modernism (named after the ‘Long Island Duckling’, a building selling eggs that have apparently popped out of the oversized, bird-shaped structure), whereby ‘architectural systems of space, structure, and program are  Venturi, Scott Brown, Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas, p. 103.

86

116 

M. LOSASSO

submerged and distorted by an overall symbolic form’.87 On the other side of the equation, the ‘decorated shed’ comprises a simple construction ‘where systems of space and structure are directly at the service of program, and ornament is applied independently of them’.88 This distinction is often misread as the divide between a modernist commitment to depth and a post-modern dedication to surface; yet, like the Ashbery of Self Portrait, Scott Brown and Venturi show us that the architecture of postmodernism ‘is not / Superficial but a visible core’. In other words, it is not that ornament and symbolism trump structure, but that they remain independent of it: rather than subordinate, ‘submerge,’ or ‘distort’ structure under the didactic impulses of modernism, the post-modern application of ornament permits structure to retain its integrity. Looking more closely at the Las Vegas Strip, then, we find that it is not comprised simply of free-floating signs, but that it is built on vast networks of scaffolding, a scaffolding that remains in place and on display, a structure of supports that makes symbolism possible without dominating, distorting, or submerging it.89 As Ashbery writes in ‘And Others, Vaguer Presences’, ‘It is argued that these structures address themselves / To exclusively aesthetic concerns, like windmills / On a vast plain’ (HBD 48)—or like those towering structures of signage that seem to sway on the ‘vast plain’ of the Mojave desert. For Scott Brown and Venturi, this interplay of structure and surface amounts to an inversion of ‘the solid-to-void ratio’, where structure remains essentially vacuous (or anti-spatial), so that its ability to communicate might be heightened; another empty-full conflation in which, as Ashbery writes, ‘there is / Nothing solid, nothing one can build on’ (HBD 73).90 For Scott Brown and Venturi—as for Rossi before them, and Archigram before him—it is the possibility of fun, play, and pleasure that underpins the turn towards Las Vegas. These sites are, as they write, ‘pleasure zones’, from which, ultimately, Scott Brown and Venturi learn ‘that people, even architects, have fun with architecture’.91 In the concluding lines of ‘Daffy Duck in Hollywood’, Ashbery, too, reminds us that, in the end, there is only one continuous thread, one unending structure that has driven the  Ibid., p. 87.  Ibid. 89  Ibid., pp. 3–4. 90  Ibid., p. 19. 91  Ibid., p. 53. 87 88

3  STRUCTURE: JOHN ASHBERY’S IMPROVISATORY ARCHITECTURE 

117

poems from The Tennis Court Oath to Houseboat Days (and beyond): a desire to play with, or to please, the reader:              […] This mulch for Play keeps them interested and busy while the big, Vaguer stuff can decide what it wants—what maps, what Model cities, how much waste space. Life, our Life anyway, is between. We don’t mind Or notice any more that the sky is green, a parrot One, but have our earnest where it chances on us, Disingenuous, intrigued, inviting more, Always invoking the echo, a summer’s day. (HBD 34)

In these closing lines, Ashbery reveals his hand, the ‘shield’ become a ‘greeting’ (SP 82) (as Ashbery writes of Parmigianino’s hand in ‘Self-­ Portrait’): that life, the empty-full condition of living, sits somewhere between the ‘mulch for play’ and the ‘big / Vaguer stuff’, those ‘maps’ and ‘model cities’, that bring Ashbery close to the figure of the visionary architect—‘the most radically visionary’ of all artists. And it is here, between this mulchy play and the fluid architecture of the poem, between the epicurean and the paranoid, that the post-critical reader finds themselves and notices that ‘the sky is green, a parrot / One’. In other words, Ashbery’s poems do create sensuous surfaces, but these are made possible, not by some hidden depth, but by an excess of structure, where life is lived ‘between’: ‘Not what we see but how we see it matters’.

CHAPTER 4

Surface: Barbara Guest’s Tactile Cladding

This house was drawn for them it looks like a real house perhaps they will move in today —Barbara Guest, from ‘An Emphasis Falls on Reality’.

If Frank O’Hara’s poetry creates liveable spaces, and John Ashbery’s can be read as the perpetual construction of self-supporting structure, then as this chapter argues, the work of Barbara Guest might best be understood in terms of surface—or, more properly, cladding. An embrace of ornamentation typified the post-modern architecture of the 1970s and 1980s, distilled (as I discussed in Chap. 3), in Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi’s articulation of the ‘decorated shed’. In my chapter on Ashbery, I reframed this approach, demonstrating that Scott Brown and Venturi’s architectural ethos amounts to more than the superficiality with which it has historically been read. Rather, their ‘architecture of signs’, I suggested, is built on a scaffolding, a structure that remains in place and on show, making symbolism possible without distortion or submission to structure. Staying with Lisa Robertson’s notion of poetic scaffolding and maintaining a post-critical surface approach that rejects the traditional modernist binary of surface vs depth, this chapter focuses on the tactile surfaces that clad the ‘invisible architecture[s]’ (FOI 18) of Barbara Guest’s poetry. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Losasso, Poetry, Architecture, and the New York School, Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41520-3_4

119

120 

M. LOSASSO

For over three decades, critics relegated Guest to the margins of the New York School ‘club’ to which she unquestionably belongs. In 1970, the second-generation New  York School poets Ron Padgett and David Shapiro edited An Anthology of New York Poets, which conspicuously omitted her work; a move that, as poet and critic John Wilkinson notes, has subsequently been taken as ‘a dereliction […] to epitomise sexual prejudice’.1 Between 1993 and 2001, a trio of critical works on the New York School (Geoff Ward’s Statutes of Liberty, David Lehman’s The Last Avant-Garde, and William Watkins’s In the Process of Poetry) enshrined its membership as what Maggie Nelson terms the ‘Big Four’—Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, James Schuyler, and Kenneth Koch.2 Nelson is one among a number of scholars who have worked hard in recent years to redress Guest’s ‘shocking erasure from anthologies’, as Rachel Blau DuPlessis puts it, and place her back into the New York School context to which she unquestionably belongs.3 In his 2010 study, The New York School Poets and the Neo-Avant-Garde, Mark Silverberg notes that ‘While Guest is now acknowledged as an important New  York School poet, there has been limited success in explaining her involvement with this movement in aesthetic terms (beyond the most obvious inter-arts connections)’.4 This must be, in part, because Guest—a self-professed late-modernist—does not easily align with the so-­ called post-modern aesthetics of O’Hara, Ashbery, Schuyler, and Koch. Where post-modern poetry has been read in terms of its pop superficiality (an assumption that Chaps. 2 and 3 sought to dislodge), Guest’s ‘unironic 1  John Wilkinson, ‘“Couplings of such sonority”: reading a poem by Barbara Guest’ in Textual Practice 23: 3 (2009): p. 481. 2  Maggie Nelson, Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2007), p. 232n2. 3  Rachel Blau DuPlessis, ‘The gendered marvelous: Barbara Guest, surrealism, and feminist reception’ in The Scene of My Selves: New Work on New  York School Poets, eds. Terrence Diggory & Stephen Paul Miller (Orono, Maine: The National Poetry Foundation, 2001), p. 190. See also: Sara Lundquist, ‘The fifth point of a star: Barbara Guest and the New York “school” of poets’ in Women’s Studies 30:1, pp. 11–41. As Mark Hillringhouse notes, Guest is, ironically, the only one of the New York School poets who ‘believes the term [New York School] is accurate’. Mark Hillringhouse, Talking All Night, Interviews, Essays, and Photographs (South Orange, NJ.: Serving House Books, Forthcoming 2023). 4  Mark Silverberg, The New York School Poets and the Neo-Avant-Garde: Between Radical Art and Radical Chic (Farnham, UK & Burlington, USA: Ashgate, 2010), p. 64.

4  SURFACE: BARBARA GUEST’S TACTILE CLADDING 

121

investment in theory and philosophy couldn’t stand further from O’Hara’s “there’s nothing metaphysical about it” attitude’, as Maggie Nelson notes, and ‘while Ashbery certainly gets metaphysical, none of the New  York School men really holds a candle to the degree of abstraction of Guest’s writing’.5 As Guest herself stated in an interview with Mark Hillringhouse in 1992: ‘I don’t like that term “postmodern.” I think it’s a cheap idea. There’s no such thing as postmodernism; you’re either modern or you’re not. “Postmodern”! That sounds like some sort of advertising cliché’.6 Nevertheless, there remains one ‘obvious’ aesthetic link that Silverberg traces between Guest and her New  York School contemporaries: those ‘inter-arts connections’. Like O’Hara, Ashbery, and Schuyler, Guest worked as an art critic throughout her life, and many of her poems betray a personal and professional interest, not only in the visual arts but also in architecture.7 Over the last twenty years, what scholarship there is on Guest has often couched her work in architectural terms. Kathleen Fraser, for example, detects a ‘lyric gorgeousness and inventive architecture’, while Wilkinson has picked up on Guest’s ‘architectonic tactics’ [all my emphasis].8 Yet, if this mode of criticism has been pervasive, it has also been consistently inconsistent: critics, it seems, have difficulty articulating the shape and structure of Guest’s poetic architecture. According to Robert Kaufman, ‘Guest constructs the edifice by musical phrase; the result is usually an architecture at once monumental and ghostly’; Lisa Donovan writes that, ‘like the Gothic architects, Guest created a carefully constructed form with very little materials […] she at once formulates a structure by erecting and  Nelson, Abstractions, p. 32.  Barbara Guest & Mark Hillringhouse, ‘An Interview by Mark Hillringhouse’ in The American Poetry Review Vol. 21, No. 4 (JULY/AUGUST 1992): p. 26. 7  But not Koch. ‘Writing about this quartet of poets’, Lehman notes, ‘one is struck by how often a useful generalization fits three of the four principles’: homosexuality, Harvard education, and services in the armed forces. These ‘useful generalization[s]’ may offer a preliminary guide to the ‘Big Four’, yet what strikes one most clearly about Lehman’s list is its incompleteness: the failure at actually identifying a single trait shared by all members of the so-called school. Lehman does note one additional quasi-generalisation, when he adds that ‘three of the four poets of the New York School were professional art critics’. Koch is the odd one out here, but the substitution for Guest turns this ‘useful generalization’ into a cogent biographical principle. 8  Kathleen Fraser, Translating the Unspeakable: Poetry and the Innovative Necessity (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999), p. 129; Wilkinson, ‘“Couplings of such sonority”, p. 487. 5 6

122 

M. LOSASSO

dissolving walls’; and, as Elizabeth Robinson notes, ‘[Guest’s] is an architecture whose integrity is built upon the reliability with which it folds, collapses, inverts, moves’ [all my emphasis].9 As this chapter argues, this kind of critical undecidability emerges when critics look too hard for an ‘architecture’ that is, self-professedly, invisible. As Guest writes in her 2002 essay, ‘Invisible Architecture’: ‘There is an invisible architecture often supporting / the surface of the poem, interrupting the progress of the poem’ (FOI 18). Meaningless without a poem to support, yet integral to that poem, Guest’s invisible architecture is, as we will see, another kind of scaffolding—a structure that both supports (the construction of) and interrupts (by facilitating the deconstruction of) a larger (and more permanent) structure. Yet, where Ashbery’s poetic scaffold signified nothing beyond itself—the poem, in his case, is the scaffold, an endlessly self-supporting network of structures—Guest’s scaffolding must be read as a contingent entity; for, as she writes, it supports and interrupts the surface of the poem. Translating this formulation into architectural terms, this chapter argues that Guest’s poems must be read in terms of a textu(r)al cladding, which decorates an ‘invisible’ architecture. As I discussed at length in Chap. 2, the period out of which Guest was writing saw the wane of international modernism, an architectural style that was often ‘deliberately designed to homogenise, organise, and police [New York] city’s complex heterogeneity’, as Robert Bennett notes.10 Locating Guest within the context of a burgeoning post-modern architecture, Bennett reads her poetry as antagonistic to the ‘rigid geometrical spaces’ of ‘post-WWII America’, suggesting, instead, that her ‘fragmented, chaotic, and abstract’ poetic parallels ‘a new post-modern sense of space’.11 He writes that: Advocating urban paradigms similar to those of the New York avant-garde, a new generation of post-modern architects and urbanists rose to prominence by challenging the fundamental premises of International Style 9  Robert Kaufman, ‘A Future for Modernism: Barbara Guest’s Recent Poetry’ in The American Poetry Review Vol. 29; No. 4 (July/August 2000): p. 12; Lisa Donovan, ‘Barbara Guest: Text as Ruin, Architected Negation, and the Gothic Structure’ in Jacket 36, 2008, http://jacketmagazine.com/36/guest-donovan.shtml, accessed 15 March 2023; Elizabeth Robinson, ‘Direction’ in Jacket 36, 2008, http://jacketmagazine.com/36/guest-robinson. shtml. Accessed 15 March 2023. 10  Bennett, Deconstructing Post WWII New York City, p. 10. 11  Ibid., pp. 98; 107.

4  SURFACE: BARBARA GUEST’S TACTILE CLADDING 

123

Modernism. For example, Robert Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture criticized modernism’s “bland architecture,” “blatant simplification[s]” and “puritanically moral language.”12

Bennett aligns Guest’s work (and the work of the New  York School generally) with the post-modernism of Robert Venturi (and Denise Scott Brown) and, in so doing, contends that Guest’s ‘spatial images aggressively confront and challenge conventional notions of space, and this critical deconstruction of space plays a crucial role in her notion of what it means to write’.13 In spite of her personal dislike of the term ‘post-­modern’, Guest’s work, as Bennett suggests, nevertheless shares a number of traits, if not with the emergent post-modern literature of the period, then with the post-modern architecture of the time. Yet in one important respect, I diverge from Bennett’s reading: rather than cast Guest as ‘aggressive’ in her deployment of ‘Nietzschean-Derridean hermeneutic models’ (couched exclusively in relation to the male figures who dominated the art and architecture of the twentieth century), this chapter positions Guest’s ‘post-modern’ poetic architectures within a wider tradition of feminine domestic (as well as poetic and architectural) labour.14 If her work can be said to ‘confront and challenge conventional notions of space’, then that space is often domestic—a space that is altogether overlooked in Bennett’s account of starchitects and named commercial buildings. Furthermore, if ‘this critical deconstruction of space plays a crucial role in her notion of what it means to write’, then the parameters of that question need to be redefined: not simply ‘what might it mean to write’ but, more specifically, what might it mean for a female poet to write in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s? What are the spaces that characterised Guest’s lived experience? And how might she be writing through or about or around those spaces? Zoe Skoulding’s work on the ‘urban specific’ and ‘urban generic’—a (largely) gendered distinction that describes the ways in which poets incorporate urban space and site into their writing—provides a helpful framework for responding to these questions.15 Skoulding’s starting point is Peter Barry’s pre-emptive defence of the scarcity of female poets  Ibid.  Ibid., p. 93. 14  Ibid., p. 95. 15  Zoe Skoulding, Contemporary Women’s Poetry and Urban Space (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. 21. 12 13

124 

M. LOSASSO

discussed in his book Contemporary British Poetry and the City. Barry writes that: Naming public spaces, like streets, squares and locales is an act which proclaims ownership and identification, and it may be that poets who are women feel less confident of such ownership, and are therefore less likely to name hotels, pubs, workplaces and public buildings than male poets.16

Rather than challenge Barry’s reading, Skoulding claims it, by championing the potential of female writers ‘to disrupt or critique the referential character of language, refusing to take for granted the ways in which names fix external locations as isolated entities distinct from the processes and relationships that form both subjects and cities.’17 Skoulding’s reading of the urban generic shows us one way in which female writers can reclaim, rather than reject, the spaces traditionally appointed to them and, at the same time, find ways of disruptively occupying conventionally male space. By unhooking language from systems of naming and signification, Skoulding suggests that the work of experimental female poets can transform poetic space into a constructive material entity, rather than simply a series of signs with referents in the mapped, public sphere. Thus, I argue, if there is a lack of clarity in Guest’s ‘ambiguous and confusing poetic spaces’, this should not be read simply in terms of an alignment with a masculine modernist tradition; rather, it is because the nameless space of the home is not fixed as an ‘external location’ or ‘isolated entit[y]’. It cannot be geometrically plotted onto the coordinates of international modernism, named buildings, and notable architects but must remain anonymous, and it is through this nameless ambiguity that Guest’s architectural poetic disrupts semantic referentiality and, with it, both social and spatial convention.

Invisible Architecture      There is an invisible architecture often supporting    the surface of the poem, interrupting the progress of the poem. It reaches into the poem in search of  Ibid.  Lisa Robertson, Nilling (Toronto: Bookthug, 2012), p. 22.

16 17

4  SURFACE: BARBARA GUEST’S TACTILE CLADDING 

125

     an identity with the poem; its object is to possess the poem for a brief time, even as an apparition appears. (FOI 18)

In the opening lines of her 2002 essay, ‘Invisible Architecture’, Guest describes—and at the same time activates—the lyrical essay’s eponymous structure, its invisible architecture, rendering it, if not visible at least in some sense tangible through her use of blank space. As we can see, this invisible architecture supports the first two cantilevered lines (see Chap. 2 for more on the cantilever), while elsewhere interrupting the text through indented and truncated lineation. The text is simultaneously coming into being, while gently unravelling at the same time, swaying from rigid, critical prose into loose versification to explain what a poem is without being a poem. ‘Scaffolding is analogy’, writes Lisa Robertson, ‘It explains what a wall is without being a wall’.18 Robertson’s ‘Doubt and the History of Scaffolding’, which I discussed in Chap. 3, reconstructs the history of the scaffold; a history that, as Robertson explains, ‘has been dismantled. We can’t write this history because there are so few documents—only a slim sheaf of photographs. So we use the construction of the present and form theories.’19 For Robertson, these theories become an articulation of lived experience: We believe that the object of architecture is to give happiness. For us this would mean the return of entropy and dissolution to the ephemeral. The architecture of happiness would rehearse a desanctification of time, which is itself only a scaffolding. We live on this temporary framework of platforms and poles.20

Giving voice to this unplaceable and ahistorical construction, Robertson’s theoretical scaffold speaks to experimental tendencies in both architectural and poetic construction. ‘Neither inside nor outside, neither a space nor a site’, the scaffold, Robertson writes, is ‘lively’ in its desire ‘to fall away from support’; it is ‘the negative space of the building […] architecture’s unconscious displayed as a temporary lacework’ (Fig.  4.1).21 18  Lisa Robertson, Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture (Toronto: Coach House Books, 2011), p. 139. 19  Ibid., p. 138. 20  Ibid. 21  Ibid., pp. 139–142.

126 

M. LOSASSO

Fig. 4.1  Building Kenwin, Bryher at Kenwin in Switzerland, October 1977. Photo: Barbara Guest. Barbara Guest Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, MSS 1185, Box: 135, Folder: 1930

Robertson’s repatriated history of the scaffold—her practice of giving voice to an unrecorded architectural history, of sounding silent space— echoes the work of feminist historians who have reclaimed the long-silent site of feminine labour: the home. The distinction between home and city, private and public, dates back at least as far as the ancient Greek

4  SURFACE: BARBARA GUEST’S TACTILE CLADDING 

127

delineation of polis and oikos,22 but can be more properly located in the eighteenth century, when the public sphere as commonly understood (i.e. a male-­dominated space for collectively regulating state power) was properly codified.23 In their defining account of ‘separate spheres’ ideology, Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall observe that if public space was crystallising in this period, then its opposite, private space, also began to assume recognisable shape along a (largely) gendered division at around the same time. Their historical canonical survey maps women’s (and men’s) lives from the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century, reading ‘home’ as much as ‘a social construct and state of mind as it was a construction of bricks and mortar’.24 Exploring the etymology of the term ‘private’, Davidoff and Hall note that ‘the Latin roots of the private go back to deprive, mutating into withdrawn or concealed’. Like the history of the scaffold, the story of these invisible female spaces is one that remained ‘concealed’ for many years and continues to call for reconstruction in contemporary scholarship.25 The scaffold, or invisible architecture, that underpins Guest’s poetic is built out of or onto the domestic—a space that is also strangely invisible in  For more on this see: Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1958), pp. 22–78. 23  See: Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry Into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1991). 24  Leonore Davidoff & Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780–1850 (London & New  York: Routledge, 2002), p.  358. Davidoff and Hall’s account has been revised, added to, and altered, by a wealth of subsequent feminist scholarship that seeks to reclaim (as the present chapter does) private and domestic spaces as hybrid sites of creative labour, economic gain, social interaction, and curatorial display, such as: Nancy Fraser, Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse, and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989); Amanda Vickery, ‘Golden Age to Separate Spheres? A Review of the Categories and Chronology of English Women’s History’ in The Historical Journal Vol. 36, No. 2 (Jun., 1993): pp.  383–414; Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2005); Jane Hamlett, Material Relations: Domestic Interiors and Middle-class Families in England, 1850–1910 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010); Jason Edwards & Imogen Hart, ed., Rethinking the Interior, c. 1867–1896: Aestheticism and Arts and Crafts (London: Ashgate, 2010). Nevertheless, their work remains critical for bringing hitherto overlooked aspects of public and private life to light. 25  Ibid., p. xxv. 22

128 

M. LOSASSO

her poetry, but never altogether absent. In ‘The Location of Things’, the first composition that appears in her Collected Poems,26 Guest describes a space that both invokes and resists an image of the home: Why from this window am I watching leaves? Why do halls and steps seem narrower? Why at this desk am I listening for the sound of the fall of color, the pitch of the wooden floor and feet going faster? (CPBG 3)

The desk, the window onto the world, and the pitched wooden floor all imply domestic space—yet it bears little resemblance to Gaston Bachelard’s maternal and protective ‘nest’, ‘the essence of the notion of home’, which, as he writes, imprints itself onto ‘all really inhabited space’.27 Instead, Guest paints a picture of private space that feels strangely unsettled: the architectural features are transitory (‘window’ ‘halls’, ‘steps’); the space seems to compress (‘Why do halls and steps seem narrower?’) and tilt (‘the pitch of the wooden floor’); there is a threat of invasion (‘feet going faster’); and the speaker appears to seek release (‘Why from this window am I watching leaves?’). In the second stanza, release is granted in an abrupt shift to ‘Madison Avenue’, where the speaker is seen ‘having a drink’ (CPBG 3) (note the intrepid blend of the ‘urban specific’ with the ‘urban generic’). Just as suddenly, street and bar combine through the architectural figure of the cantilever:        […] The street, the street bears light and shade on its shoulders, walks without crying, turns itself into another and continues, even cantilevers this barroom atmosphere into a forest and sheds its leaves on my table. (CPBG 3)

26  ‘Hotel Comfort’, the final poem that appears in the Collected Poems, provides a poignant counterpart to ‘The Location of Things’, with its mirror images of ‘roof’, ‘street’, and ‘windows’ (CPBG 516), indicating the extent to which Guest’s interest in the architectural was sustained throughout her poetic career. 27  Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), pp. 5; 100.

4  SURFACE: BARBARA GUEST’S TACTILE CLADDING 

129

The private space of the opening stanza has given way to the public space of ‘Madison Avenue’, but the transition is not straightforward. Guest follows the meandering weave of the street, as it ‘bears light and shade on its shoulders’ and allows this wandering path to transform the interior space of the bar into an organic ‘forest’ where ‘leaves’ are ‘shed’ onto a ‘table’. Here, it is the hidden (invisible?) structural support of the cantilever that permits this organic28 conflation in Guest’s poem, collapsing the traditional binaries of outside and inside, public and private, urban and pastoral, so that the interior spaces of the poem do not merely amount to a description of the home, but to a poetic recalibration of spatial expectation, which is transformed into the power ‘to disrupt or critique the referential character of language’, to recall Skoulding. The Location of Things (1960), Guest’s first printed collection in which this poem appears, is filled with architectural references to windows, halls, steps, wooden floors, cantilevers, corridors, stairs, brick walls, apartments, houses, roofs, walls, rooms, alcoves, edifices, columns, buttresses, balconies, friezes, palaces, and villas.29 Yet one word remains conspicuously absent from the collection: throughout these thirty-one architecturally nuanced poems, the term ‘home’ never appears. Then again, if Guest’s writing can be called architectural, perhaps it is apt that the word ‘home’ remains absent; for as Davidoff and Hall note, ‘home’ determines not so much a bricks-and-mortar construction, as a culturally shaped idea. Discussing Guest’s ‘architectonic tactics’ in the poem ‘The Hero Leaves His Ship’ (another early composition from The Location of Things), John Wilkinson addresses this absence, noting that: Towards the poem’s close ‘I ask if that house is real’; the question is addressed both to the poem and to the questioning voice it houses and which composes it. This sense of the poem as a house (but not a home) is characteristic of Guest’s early poems […] There, cabin and manse alike are construed as manifestly literary performances […].30

28  The cantilever, as I discussed in Chap. 2, was widely used in the organic architecture of the period, particularly in the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, who embedded prominent cantilevers into his two most iconic buildings, the Solomon R.  Guggenheim Museum and Falling Water. 29  See: Guest, The Collected Poems of Barbara Guest, pp. 3–31. 30  Wilkinson, ‘Couplings’, p. 487.

130 

M. LOSASSO

Wilkinson differentiates between ‘house’ and ‘home’ for syntactical qualification here, to clarify his use of the term ‘house’ as a verb (‘the questioning voice it houses’). Yet, in doing so, he also reinforces the difference between a (feminised) concept of the home and a (more masculine) architecture of the house, which betrays a desire, however implicit, to drag Guest’s work away from the feminine space of the domestic. By burying the term ‘home’ within the disposable space of the parenthesis, Wilkinson’s delineation shuts off, encloses, and diminishes the very notion of home: a striking textual parallel to the historical realities of enclosed domestic space. In the same essay, Wilkinson also cautions against ‘the too-frequent essentialist assertion of an affinity between female sex and open field poetics’, explaining that: because of her syntactical arrangements, Guest has been hailed as a pioneer of a distinctively feminist strand of ‘open field’ poetic practice, but that is a partial reading, even if historically important given her work’s already-cited exclusion from An Anthology of New York School Poets (1970).31

While the conflation of feminism and ‘open field’ poetics can risk promoting the reductive idea that, as Wilkinson writes, the ‘dispersal [of words] about the page resembled flowing, female garments’, there is nevertheless something equally problematic about the strenuous work of male critics to rescue Guest from anything that might be read as quintessentially feminine.32 Placing her, as Bennett also does, into a canon of exclusively male artists, risks missing much that Guest actively writes into these poems about the experience of being a woman and inhabiting domestic space—a subject that appears frequently in the interviews that Guest gave throughout her life. As she observed to Hillringhouse: It’s very hard on me not having a definite place. It has created a great deal of anxiety […] I never really had a ‘home’ […] so I am grateful for this house [in Eastern Long Island] as long as I am permitted to live here […] When I say the word ‘home’ I almost whisper it.33

 Ibid., p. 486.  Ibid. 33  Guest & Hillringhouse, ‘An Interview By Mark Hillringhouse’, p. 26. 31 32

4  SURFACE: BARBARA GUEST’S TACTILE CLADDING 

131

Guest’s feeling about the house here is unambiguous—‘I am grateful for this house’—yet her sentiment towards the ‘home’ remains ambivalent: she dances around that word, initially avoiding it altogether (referring to it only as a ‘definite place’), and then whispering it provisionally, as if its very existence were dubious: ‘[w]hen I say the word “home” I almost whisper it’.34 Is this a veneration of the domestic or a betrayal of discomfort at having settled in the space of the home? Or could it, perhaps, be both at once? As Nelson notes, ‘none of the New York School men really holds a candle to the degree of abstraction of Guest’s writing’; and, on the same page: ‘Guest’s poems repeatedly return to images of “homemaking,” often to pose a parallel between the construction of a house and the architecture of a poem-on-the-page.’35 If the word ‘home’ is absent from Guest’s early poems, then this does not, I argue, signal a wholesale rejection of domestic space, but a ‘fantastical and relentless deconstruction and reconstruction of the domestic’, as Erica Kaufman writes, which ‘establishes that it is possible to reclaim gendered space, and this possibility is manifest in language itself.’36 The poetry must, therefore, engage with existing conventions of domestic space; it cannot, as implied by the erasure of home and domesticity in both Wilkinson’s and Bennett’s accounts, overlook these conventions altogether. Like the invisible architecture of the poem, representations of the home are present in Guest’s work—just not where critics expect to find them. Initially embedded within her home, Guest’s ‘studios’—which she used, according to Hillringhouse, ‘as a painter would who demands light and space’—became essential sites for poetic production (Fig. 4.2).37 As she explains in a discussion with Kathleen Fraser, Elizabeth A. Frost, and Cynthia Hogue:  The quotation marks are, presumably, Hillringhouse’s addition to the typed interview. Note however, that the term ‘house’ is not contained by them. The transcription of the interview contains frequent references to Guest’s tone of voice, or to her laughter, so it is fair to assume that these scare quotes capture Guest’s tentative vocalisation of that term—or perhaps even the physical gesture of air quotation. 35  Nelson, True Abstractions, p. 41. 36  Erica Kaufman, ‘On “The Location of Things”’ in Jacket 36, 2008, http://jacketmagazine.com/36/guest-kaufman.shtml. Accessed 15 March 2023. 37  Hillringhouse, Talking All Night, Interviews, Essays, and Photographs. For more on Guest’s studios, see also: Claire Hurley, The Poetics of Site: Reading the Space of Experimental US Women Poets (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Kent, 2017), pp. 119–189. 34

132 

M. LOSASSO

Fig. 4.2  Barbara Guest’s Studio. Photo: Mark Hillringhouse. Reproduced courtesy of Mark Hillringhouse I was fortunate in that I was able to rent an apartment away from my home as a writing studio, where I could really go inside. A friend rented it for me, and I think that the separation was crucial, that I was able to get away to write. Because I never wrote at home.38

For the female poet, the need to escape the home is driven by the need to create: an assumed privilege for the male artist, but one that requires a kind of ‘courage’ that is ‘particularly urgent for women’, as Hogue and Frost note. ‘Yes’, Guest responds: because you cease being a good mother. Automatically. I was fortunate to have had somebody to be there, with the children in the apartment. But it certainly separates you from home. At first, I did try to write at home. I remember there was an extra room, and I tried to write at home. But the work was just awful.39 38  Barbara Guest in ‘An Interview with Barbara Guest and Kathleen Fraser’ in Innovative Women Poets: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry and Interviews, eds. Elizabeth A. Frost & Cynthia Hogue (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2006), p. 359. 39  Ibid., p. 360.

4  SURFACE: BARBARA GUEST’S TACTILE CLADDING 

133

In a tribute to Guest, the poet Mei-mei Berssenbrugge remembers the architectural spaces that shaped her life: the ‘small penthouse’ that ‘she rented […] to write in’; ‘an airy rented house’ where she would ‘[talk] about writing with beloved visitors’; ‘the studio […] on 16th street, a long series of rooms ending with a kitchen that looked out on a parking lot illuminated at night by mercury vapor lamps’; the concussion that Guest suffered after ‘a mugging on the stairs of her studio in the late 80s’; and the poignant memory of ‘bringing my family to stay with her on Mercer Street and spreading out on the stairs with my baby […] and washing Martha in her bathroom sink’.40 These are not quite domestic spaces; but they are not not domestic spaces either. In these ‘apartments’ or ‘penthouses’, with their ‘kitchens’ and ‘bathrooms’, domestic activities became suspended or, at the very least, relegated during Guest’s tenancy, because these were spaces primarily in which to work, to undertake creative labour. At the end of the ‘The Location of Things’, Guest retreats back into private space but this time she peels back the veneer of domesticity to reveal the performative nature of homemaking—or the act of playing house: through this floodlit window or from a pontoon on this theatrical lake, you demand your old clown’s paint and I hand you from my prompter’s arms this shako, wandering as I am into clouds and air rushing into darkness as corridors who do not fear the melancholy of the stair. (CPBG 4)

The final stanza revisits images of architectural transit, but here they have become histrionic: a ‘pontoon’ on a ‘theatrical lake’ replaces the ‘window’, which is now ‘floodlit’, as if with stage lighting, while the speaker offers make-up and fancy dress to an unidentified ‘you’, who enters the poem suddenly, as if from offstage. This air of make-believe has entered through the window, which is no longer (as in the first stanza) a frame for entrapment, but a locus of inspiration through which the poet can gaze on the public world to gather poetic stimulus as she works at her ‘desk’. The uncertain tone, expressed in the repeated questions of the first stanza, has been replaced by intrepidity—the speaker no longer fears ‘the 40  Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, ‘Recalling a Friendship’ in Chicago Review Vol 53/54; Vol 53, No. 4—Vol. 54, No. 1/2 (Summer 2008): pp. 114–116.

134 

M. LOSASSO

melancholy of the stair’ but embraces the generative promise of playing house. To free it from the weight of cultural and historical determination, then, the deconstruction (and subsequent reconstruction) of the home must rely, first and foremost, on the adoption of domestic space—just as Guest’s studios were built upon the foundations of the home. Scaffolded onto invisible histories of domestic space (personal as well as cultural), it is the invisible architecture of Guest’s poetry that provides the platform from which to make this recalibration; it both interrupts extant assumptions and supports the construction of new ones.

This Quilt’s Virago Guest’s ‘relentless deconstruction and reconstruction of the domestic’, to recall Kaufman’s terms, relies in part on the textual construction of transitory or transitional architectural features, such as the halls, cantilevers, windows, stairways, and pontoons, which appear throughout ‘The Location of Things’. As Zac Schnier writes, Guest is ‘at home within the corridors of imagination, the transitional sites in which the subject is constituted and reconstituted ad infinitum’, and the speakers of her poems are often ‘ready to abandon the comforts of the Cold-War hearth and its gendered significations for the indeterminacy of corridors and staircases, means of exchange between locations, conveyances into the unknown or the other’.41 If scaffolding is the transitional structure that undergirds Guest’s work, then windows (another mode of ‘invisible’, or see-through, architecture) provide an opening at the surface, appearing not only throughout the poems (‘Why from this window am I watching leaves?’) but also in Guest’s prose, where they possess a critical function in the formation of the writer-reader dyad. ‘Inside the window is the person who is you, who are now looking out’, Guest writes, in her 1990 essay ‘Shifting Persona’, ‘shifted from the observer to the inside person and this shows in your work’ (FOI 37). For Guest, writer and reader are capable of meeting in the quasi-domestic or ‘private space’ of the poem by virtue of the slippage between inside and outside—which is activated by the window. ‘The person inside a literary creation can be both viewer and insider,’ Guest writes, ‘[…] dwelling in a private space where emotive speculation is 41  Zac Schnier, ‘Between “Location” and “Things”: Barbara Guest, American Pragmatism, and the Construction of Subjectivity’ in Canadian Review of American Studies Vol. 45, No. 3 (Winter 2015): pp. 371; 364.

4  SURFACE: BARBARA GUEST’S TACTILE CLADDING 

135

stronger than fact or action’ (FOI 36). According to Guest, the relationship between the outside and inside of a text has the potential, when activated as a kind of flux between writer and reader, to produce great art, as in the work of ‘Jane Austen’, Pablo ‘Picasso’, Diego ‘Velázquez’, and ‘Italo Calvino’ (FOI 38–40). Austen sits conspicuously among this group of male artists, like Guest among the ‘Big Four’ of the New York School, because of her exemplary ‘ability to project both windows’ in depictions of domestic space. Guest explains that: In writing concealed within a limited physical environment, as in the work of Jane Austen, the threat of claustrophobia hangs over the whole body of the novels. In order to relieve this environmental tension, the writer with her strokes of genius elevates the characters above a physical dimension, so that although their persons appear to inhabit a closed drawing-room they are actually removed from the interior to the exterior as they move beyond their limited space through the projection of the author. […] They are relieved of ordained claustrophobia, as is the reader, who might be stuck in that drawing room, who is lifted by the author’s inked quill […] (FOI 38)

The language is deliberate: the ‘limited physical environment’, the ‘threat of claustrophobia’, the ‘environmental tension’, and the ‘closed drawing-room’ all gesture towards a history of domestic space as a stifling zone of confinement (for women). In scene after scene throughout Austen’s novels, this claustrophobic ‘threat’ hangs in the air of a familiar tableau: men are announced into drawing rooms, which are occupied by seated women who rarely move (except perhaps to sew), while their interlocutors often stand and sometimes pace (with the expected degree of propriety). Guest turns to Austen because, in her use of free indirect discourse, she seamlessly shifts between writer, character, and reader; by passing persona from person to person, Guest suggests, she prevents the stifling claustrophobia of the drawing room from overwhelming the narrative. Yet, as Guest surely implies, Austen also achieves this through her staging of, and small rebellions against, the gendered occupations of these spaces. In a scene towards the end of Sense and Sensibility, for example, Austen writes that: He [Edward Ferrars] rose from his seat and walked to the window, apparently from not knowing what to do; took up a pair of scissars [sic] that lay there, and while spoiling both them and their sheath by cutting the latter to

136 

M. LOSASSO

pieces as he spoke, said, in an hurried voice, “Perhaps you do not know— you may not have heard that my brother is lately married to—to the youngest—to Miss Lucy Steele”.42

Edward has invaded the female space—emphatically female in this novel, since the house is occupied only by the Dashwood sisters and their mother. In his embarrassment, he moves indecorously about the limited confines of the drawing room, gravitating to the window, where inside and outside meet, and ‘spoiling’ the unfamiliar tools of domestic labour. On hearing his declaration, ‘Elinor could sit it no longer. She almost ran out of the room’, while Edward, ‘without saying a word, quitted the room and walked out towards the village;—leaving the others in the greatest astonishment and perplexity’.43 On quitting the drawing room without acknowledging the proper respect for social propriety, the pair flout convention, liberating themselves physically from the space, as well as from the possibility of ‘ordained claustrophobia’, through their decision to marry in defiance of social expectation. Just as Guest scaffolds her poems onto the home in order to reconstruct domestic space, so Austen adopts social (and spatial) conventions, but twists them, if only subtly, to ‘elevat[e] the characters above physical dimension’. Capable of disrupting the conventional separation of inside and outside, public and private, writer and reader, windows become essential to Guest’s project of reclaiming domestic space from the ‘ordained claustrophobia’ of gendered convention, not only through staging (as in Austen’s work) but through an attention to the materiality of language and the spaces it creates. As the poet Lyn Hejinian writes in ‘The Rejection of Closure’ (1983), ‘the experience of feeling overwhelmed by undifferentiated material is like claustrophobia. One feels panicky, closed in. The open text is one which both acknowledges the vastness of the world and is formally differentiating. It is the form that opens it, in that case’.44 An important forerunner to the language ‘movement’ to which Hejinian belongs (of which more in Chap. 6), Guest’s poems not only acknowledge the claustrophobia of closed form but seek to open it, I argue, through confrontations with historical assumptions about domestic space.  Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility (London: Penguin Books, 2014), p. 335.  Ibid. 44  Lyn Hejinian, ‘The Rejection of Closure’ in Postmodern American Poetry, ed. Paul Hoover (New York; London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2013), p. 894. 42 43

4  SURFACE: BARBARA GUEST’S TACTILE CLADDING 

137

In her 1986 essay, ‘Mysteriously Defining the Mysterious: Byzantine Proposals of Poetry’, Guest draws an analogy between poetics and curtains—the fabric drapes conventionally used to dress windows. Recalling the purchase of exotic silks in the Turkish town of Mersan, Guest writes that: The poet listening to the silk hears the singing of birds. I took home the rare silk. The silk was turned into curtains and began to lead a domestic existence, its history asleep, much as a poem enters into an anthology. (Who knows when those Mersan curtains rustled and their sound entered my poetry.) (FOI 84)45

Here, wanderlust submits to domestication: enshrining the exotic silks in the humdrum habitat of the home, the curtains become a surrogate for the poet, who has also entered a ‘domestic existence’, her pre-marital ‘history asleep’. Yet, crucially, the entrance of sound into her poetry from ‘those Mersan curtains’ is distinct from the stagnant entrance of the poem into the anthology, as signalled in the use of parentheses: the line is an intimate aside, a puncture, an admittance of kinship between poet and silk, the two rustling together within their hemmed domestic existences. For Guest, the analogy between poetry and textile is rooted in the private, female space of the domestic, a space about which Guest remains, characteristically, ambivalent. She continues: The experience in Mersan may be called a first encounter with the Byzantine. Underneath the surface of the poem there is the presence of “the something else.” Mallarmé said, “Not the thing, but its effect.” The “effect” is what I have been leading to with my curtains from Mersan. The “thing” is the poetic process which lends its “effect” (the silk of the curtains) to the poem. (FOI 84)

45  Guest’s description of the sound of silk bears more than a striking resemblance to a comment made by the textile artist, weaver, and Bauhaus student (and later teacher), Otti Berger: ‘One has to eavesdrop on the fabric’s secrets, feel the sounds of the materials, one must grasp the structure, not only in the brain but one has to feel it with the subconscious. Then one knows the individuality of silk, which is cold’. Otti Berger, ‘Stoffe im raum’ in ReD (Prague) Bauhaus special issue, vol 3., no. 5 (1930): p. 143. Quoted in Alan Powers, Bauhaus Goes West, p.  167. Working at the intersection of architecture and textile production, Berger’s synaesthetic sense of the sound of fabric offers another link between Guest’s tactile poetic surfaces and early twentieth century architectural cladding.

138 

M. LOSASSO

Fig. 4.3  View from the Westbeth Centre, New York. Photo: the author

The silk of the curtains (the effect) is draped over the invisible architecture (the thing, the process) to produce the poem (Fig.  4.3). Guest is explicit here: the poem amounts to the interaction of textile cladding and invisible scaffolding, firmly rooted in a conception (albeit a deconstructed one) of domestic space. Images of textiles appear throughout Guest’s writing as a metaphor for the poem; a trope that is most fully realised in Quilts (1980), her mini collection-cum-extended poem, which is patched together from fourteen shorter parts. Loosely charting the history of textile production, Guest travels from ‘First Dynasty 3400’, where quilts ‘for warmth’ parallel ‘papyrus for words’ (CPBG 192); through ‘MEDIEVAL’ (CPBG 192) times; 1850s ‘Log Cabin’ (CPBG 196) Americana; Romantic poetry; the modernist literary canon; and contemporary visual art. Adopting the form of a patchwork quilt of histories, movements, images, and words, Guest’s extended poem hinges around the association between the writing of poetry and the production of textiles: ‘And just / think of all the unfinished quilts—I mean—poems / he [Shelley] left’ (CPBG 198). Giving voice to the silent female histories of textile work, Guest has moved from the attention to domestic space that shaped her early poems, to an interest the work carried out both in and for that space. As Davidoff and Hall remind us:

4  SURFACE: BARBARA GUEST’S TACTILE CLADDING 

139

one of the greatest silences about women’s lives was undoubtedly filled with needlework. From the long flat-fell seaming of sheets to the embroidered chair cushions, from making up boys’ suits to exquisitely worked velvet slippers for papa at Christmas, middle-class women were constantly sewing […] the samplers, quilts and other surviving artefacts speak forcefully for what is seldom said in words.46

In Quilts’ opening fragment, Guest makes explicit recourse to feminised domestic tropes, placing her writing into traditions of both homemaking and female poetry: You float now tideless, secure in the rhythm of stuffing and tying, edging and interlining, bordered and hemmed; no longer unacquainted you inhabit the house with its smooth tasks sorted in scrap bags like kitchen nooks the smelly cookery of cave where apples ripen and vats flow domestic yet with schemes of poetry sewed to educate the apron dawn. Not exactly a hovel, not exactly a hearth; “I think a taxi’s like a little home,” said Marianne Moore, this quilt’s virago. (CPBG 191)

Devoid of a first-person pronoun, the ‘you’ of the poem becomes a self-­ address, meted out in tones of command or admonishment: a reminder that the female occupation of domestic space remains structurally enforced by systemic—and often internalised—patriarchal convention. Here, the diurnal motion of the tide no longer dictates the rhythm of the day (‘You float now tideless’), for ‘you […] inhabit the house’, working instead to the rhythm of domestic labour. Engaged in feminine duties of clothes-­ mending—‘stuffing and tying, edging and interlining’—the poem’s subject finds herself ‘hemmed’ in by traditional expectations of a woman’s role. The ‘tasks’ are ‘smooth’ but also ‘smelly’ and though an opportunity for ‘educat[ion]’ presents itself, it only extends as far as ‘the apron dawn’,  Davidoff & Hall, Family Fortunes, p. 387.

46

140 

M. LOSASSO

implying intellectually limited home economics and long hours of domestic labour. In Guest’s fragment, domestic female existence is not excruciating, but it’s not desirable either: ‘not a exactly a hovel, not exactly a hearth’, a sentiment that, again, captures Guest’s ambivalence towards the home. At the end of the section, Guest finds release in another transitory reworking of the domestic: ‘I think a taxi’s like a little home’. The citation is Marianne Moore’s, and in naming the earlier poet ‘this quilt’s virago’, Guest grounds the poem in a tradition of female authorship. Yet, Moore remains (like Guest in the New York School) something of an outlier: the rest of the poem weaves silent and unnamed female domestic histories into the male canon of experimental writers and artists. Stanzas that collage together Pound, Joyce, and Lawrence; Byron, Shelley, and Keats; or Rauschenberg, Johns, and Rivers sit beside images of traditional feminine labour, as in section eight, where Guest stitches a scattered verbal surface out of women’s names:                 […] Seen on the way to Aunt Dinah’s quilting bee:          Aunt Dinah Phebe’s visitor              Rebekah from Chattanooga Falls   Phebe               Nellie      Liza        Sarah           Emily Jane           Quilting the Log Cabin Pattern: 1850 (CPBG 196)47

The passage is simultaneously anonymous and specific: these names signal a female history, but they do not signify in the way that the names 47  Guest’s choice of patchwork pattern—the Log Cabin Pattern—also lends this surface depth: here, the phrase ‘Log Cabin’ signifies not only a specific historical quilt pattern but a vernacular space for habitation or dwelling. As Lisa Robertson notes, in an essay entitled ‘Playing House: A Brief Account of the Shack’: ‘If architecture is writing, the shack is speech. Like a folk song is stores the vernacular’. In her poem-as-shack model, Robertson conflates not only the poetic and the architectural, but the house and the home, as implied in the essay’s title, ‘Playing House’. For to pretend to the domestic bliss of homemaking relies on the structure of the house to imbue this make-believe with meaning. Robertson, Office for Soft Architecture, pp. 153–4.

4  SURFACE: BARBARA GUEST’S TACTILE CLADDING 

141

‘Joyce’, or ‘Byron’, or ‘Rauschenberg’ do. Without specific referents, these women’s names become empty signs, comprising a material (rather than intertextual) history. By giving voice to historically unrecognised female artistry, by reclaiming silent textiles  through materially inflected words—scattered like the Aunt Dinah quilt pattern across the page— Guest transforms the poem into a kind of quilt, a material surface that overlays the poem’s invisible architecture. Such an emphasis on reality (to paraphrase  the  title of a poem from Guest’s 1989 collection Fair Realism, of which more later)  underpins Quilts; it is, we might say, the invisible architecture that both supports and interrupts the poem. As Guest writes, in the section that names ‘Rauschenberg / Johns / Rivers // Reality could be their tassel / and Reality is there, that’s what I think about a quilt / it’s Reality, and it satisfied Rauschenberg’ (CPBG 197). Discussing this section of the poem, Brian Teare notes that: The “Reality tassel” of Quilts sums up Guest’s mid-period approach to artifice. This poetry charms because of its certain, deft weave, its serious epistemological fabric annotated by decorative whimsy. Her craft becomes virtuosic when what could have remained effete aestheticism turns densely metaphysical, connecting artist and mythmaker, both of whom treasure the moment when “the other world” touches the real.48

In her 1984 essay ‘A Reason for Poetics’, Guest reinforces this metaphysical seam between ‘real’ and ‘poetic’ worlds, when she describes the poem as ‘A pull in both directions between the physical reality of place and the metaphysics of space. This pull’, she explains, ‘will build up a tension within the poem giving a view of the poem from both the interior and the exterior’ (FOI 20). Guest’s spatial conception of the poem again transcends rigid boundaries of outside and inside, complicating the distinction between a metaphysical (or poetic) notion of home, and the physical place (or architecture) of house. In the end, for Guest, this ‘pull’ means that ‘poet and reader perform together on a highwire strung on a platform between their separated selves’ (FOI 21). Her formulation recalls O’Hara’s description of the poem ‘at last between two persons instead of two pages’; yet, where O’Hara only implies a spatial dimension, Guest is explicit: she 48  Brian Teare, ‘Revelation’ in Boston Review (January 01, 2009), http://bostonreview. net/teare-reveleation. Accessed 15 March 2023.

142 

M. LOSASSO

positions poet and reader on another transitory structure, this time a ‘platform’ (or scaffold: to recall Robertson, ‘we live on this temporary framework of platforms and poles’) and connects them by the stringing of a wire (or thread). ‘The usefulness of this tension set up in a poem is to arrange its dimensions. The poem stretches, looking outwardly and inwardly, thus obtaining a plasticity that the flat, the basic words—what we call the language of a poem—demands and, further, depends upon’ (FOI 21–22). In other words, the stringing of a wire across the scaffold of invisible architecture functions doubly: at a textual (metaphysical) level, it creates verbal surfaces and, because these surfaces are material, it then connects reader and writer in ‘physical space’. In her essay, ‘The shuttle of discourse: Chris Tysh on Marjorie Welish’s “Begetting Textile” poems’, Jill Magi explains that ‘in weaving—from basic hand weaving to mechanized looms—the direction is back and forth, left to right and right to left and again […] In reading and writing poetry of course,’ she continues: we work with the line—but our movement is from left to right or right to left or up to down, depending on the language we are working in. There are some poets who come to mind, though, when I think about the poetics of weaving and the motion of “back and forth.”49

It is Marjorie Welish who comes to Magi’s mind (whose poetic series ‘Begetting Textile’ explores the creative relationship between the crafting of a poem and the weaving of fabric), yet this thinking might equally apply to Guest, in whose Quilts we discover not only the patchworking of fragments but the back and forth that Magi identifies as ‘the poetics of weaving’.50 In section six, for example, Guest fabricates: Old time seas of quilts            coverings

49  Jill Magi, ‘The shuttle of discourse’: Chris Tysh on Marjorie Welish’s ‘Begetting Textile’ in Jacket 2, April 13 2015, https://jacket2.org/commentary/shuttle-discourse-chris-tyshmarjorie-welishs-begetting-textile-poems. Accessed 15 March 2023. 50  Indeed, Welish is explicit about the influence of Guest on her work and has penned several essays on the older poet. For more, see: Marjorie Welish & Matthew Cooperman, ‘Diagramming Here: An Interview’ in Conjunctions, August 17 2004, https://www.conjunctions.com/online/article/marjorie-welish-08-17-2004. Accessed 19 April 2023.

4  SURFACE: BARBARA GUEST’S TACTILE CLADDING 

143

in the gull dawn          like picking up a sardine on the beach     I see those tickling threads minnows on muslin (CPBG 195)

Where section eight parallels the pattern of a quilt, here the movement of the lines insists that we ‘shuttle’ back and forth. And if, in weaving, this oscillatory motion produces the textile—the ‘muslin’ out of ‘tickling threads’—then the implication must be that the reader plays an essential role in the production of the poem: ‘poet and reader perform together’. If the platform is the scaffold—the invisible structure of the poem on the page as a kind of loom—then the highwire is the thread that makes the poem possible, the interaction between the writer’s unconscious and the reader’s conscious activity of reading; of moving, that is, across a surface created by words. Casting the surface of the poem as the product of weaving, draped over the scaffold of an invisible architecture, Guest echoes the work of nineteenth-­century architectural historian Gottfried Semper. In his seminal work, The Four Elements of Architecture, Semper explains that in ancient cultures ‘the festival apparatus, the improvised scaffolding’ was thrown up, not in the service of another, more permanent building, but as a structure in its own right, to be adorned with ‘splendor and frills […] covered with decoration, draped with carpets, dressed with boughs and flowers, adorned with festoons and garlands, fluttering banners and trophies’.51 Crucially, for Semper, these ancient festival frills are more than superficial adornment: ‘the beginning of building,’ he contends, ‘coincides with the beginning of textiles’. As he explains: we might recognize the pen bound together from sticks and branches, and the interwoven fence as the earliest vertical spatial enclosure that man [sic.] invented, whose construction required a technique that nature, as it were, put into the hand of man [sic.].52

51  Gottfried Semper, The Four Elements of Architecture and Other Writings, trans. H.  F. Mallgrave & W.  Herrmann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 255–256. 52  Ibid., p. 254.

144 

M. LOSASSO

Following the construction of ‘pen’ and ‘fence’ (the external ‘erection of defensible barriers’), Semper explains, ‘the dyeing and knitting of colourful carpets were invented for wall dressings, floor coverings, and canopies’. Semper differentiates between the firmer walls of stone and brick, designed for ‘protection and defence, to secure permanence in the enclosure, or to serve as foundations and supports’ and these woven walls, which carry out an ‘ancient, original function as conspicuous spatial dividers’. Accordingly, Semper argues, these ‘more or less artificially woven and seamed-together, textile walls’ are the ‘true and legitimate representatives of the spatial idea’, and it is in them that we find the first articulation of ‘the “home”, the inner life separated from the outer life, and […] the formal creation of the idea of space’.53 Semper’s revisionary history of textile production transforms domestic labour into architectural innovation—a revision that has significant ramifications for women. For  as the Greek literary scholar Ann Bergren explains: ‘Given Semper’s account of the “beginning of building”, by marking weaving as exclusively female, early Greek thought attributes to women the founding form of architectural art […] the female becomes the archetype of an architect’.54 In the introduction to this book, I noted Bachelard’s suggestion that ‘philosophers, when confronted with outside and inside, think in terms of being and non-being. Thus profound metaphysics is rooted in an implicit geometry which—whether we will or no—confers spatiality on thought’.55 If, as Semper suggests, woven walls are responsible for the ‘creation of the idea of space’, for the separation of ‘inner life’ from ‘outer life’, and if women are the archetypal producers of these partitions, then it follows that female domestic labour is responsible for ‘confer[ring] spatiality on thought’ and promoting the distinction between ‘being and non-being’ in metaphysics. The implications of this line of thinking are profound, yet in his suggestion that these walls contain merely  the seeds of ‘the spatial idea’, Semper implicitly undermines their defining trait: the assumed evolution from fluid partitions into sturdy walls robs these early textile screens of their significance, rendering them merely a link in a chain towards ‘entombed structure or thanatos’, to borrow a phrase that Robertson uses

 Ibid., pp. 254–5.  Ann Bergren, Weaving Truth: Essays on Language and the Female in Greek Thought (Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies, 2008), p. 6. 55  Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, p. 212. 53 54

4  SURFACE: BARBARA GUEST’S TACTILE CLADDING 

145

to describe reified architecture.56 In her discussion of the terms ‘Civis’ and ‘Domus’ (the Latin precursors for ‘civic’ and ‘domestic’) in an essay on poetry and vernacular language, Robertson also notes the importance of reading these feminised spaces on their own terms. In their original context, Robertson explains, the terms ‘Civis’ and ‘Domus’ ‘did not pertain to concepts of bordered and material spatial limitation’ but to ‘immaterial concepts of collective reciprocity’. ‘Domus’, she tells us, denotes the ‘house in its social and moral aspects, not as a construction’.57 In turning to originary models of domestic space, Robertson seeks to reclaim the historically female zone from ‘the site of the abuse of labour’, by imbuing it with political force: If, in the Greek polis and in the Roman city, citizenship was limited to the male speaker of the master-language, in a pointed elimination of women, beasts and barbarous speakers from a linguistically bordered polity, her domus, her civis, the commodious, illustrious and exilic vernacular, will shelter her for the rhythmic duration of a refusal.58

The poem may possess a public character, but it does not equate to the polis, which can only ‘interpret, fix or abstract the fluency of the linguistic given’. Rather, it finds its corollary in the ‘vulnerable’, feminised space of the home, where the fluid vernacular utterance might be ‘overheard’— and where citizenship is coded in terms of reciprocity: the poem, with its provisional distributions and tentative relationships, its chaotic caesura, temporarily gathers a received and spoken reciprocity, where the I and the you create one another for the pleasure of a shapely co-recognition.59

If women are responsible for the ‘creation of the idea of space’, then it must be an idea of space that does not conform to contemporary assumptions, enshrined in the architectures that have historically been determined by men. And though, with Wilkinson, I do not want to lump feminine models of space in with ‘flowing, female garments’, I also remain suspicious of the critical tendency to retrench the norms (poetic, architectural,  Robertson, Office for Soft Architecture, p. 110.  Robertson, Nilling, p. 80. 58  Ibid., p. 87. 59  Ibid., pp. 74; 87. 56 57

146 

M. LOSASSO

cultural) that have been concretised (or ossified) by centuries of male artists, architects, poets, thinkers, and so on. For, at root, a resistance to ‘flowing, female garments’ rests on a pejorative association with femininity—which is precisely why an attention to Guest’s weaving of silent female histories into established male canons is so critical.

Nudism Is Born If the question of reality had been driving Guest’s poetry and prose of the early 1980s, it had come to a head by the time she published Fair Realism in 1989: in these poems, as one title in the collection has it, ‘An Emphasis Falls on Reality’. In a poem named ‘Words’, Guest draws the reader’s attention to the materiality of language by illustrating ‘The simple contact with a wooden spoon and the word’ (FR 237). In meeting the word, the material curve of the spoon—an item tangible in its thingliness60—transforms language into an object, as it sits on ‘paper / now gleaming and potent, wise and resilient’ (CPBG 237). Later, Guest tells us that:        […] The nearest possession would house them both, they being then two might glide into this house and presently create a rather larger mansion filled with spoons and condiments, gracious as a newly laid table where related objects might gather to enjoy the interplay of gravity upon facetious hints, the chocolate dish presuming an endowment, the ladle of galactic rhythm primed as a relish dish, curved knives, finger bowls, morsel carriages words might choose and savor before swallowing so much was the sumptuousness and substance of a rented house where words placed dressing gowns as rosemary entered their scent percipient as elder branches in the night where words gathered, warped, then straightened, marking new wands. (CPBG 237).

Here, words take on the shapes, textures, smells and even tastes of household items. As in the opening lines of ‘Invisible Architecture’, ‘Words’ describes a fantastical house of object-words and kitchenware, 60  For more on the relationship between literature and things, see: Bill Brown, A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003).

4  SURFACE: BARBARA GUEST’S TACTILE CLADDING 

147

while also, in a sense, performing this site and spectacle: the poem is that house, and the words are just as real and material as any culinary utensil that exists inside it. Spoons, dishes, knives, and bowls find their way into the poem by virtue of their contact with words; just as, in ‘real’ life, a spoon is only a ‘spoon’ (and not just ‘curved utensil’) because of its word-­ sign. Indeed, Guest flags the ‘importance of Texture—the texture of a poem’ in her short essay ‘The Voice of the Poem’, asking, ‘What does it feel like—how layered is the poem, what substance is it composed of, what does it taste like—and we learn this through the poet’s manipulation of language and the control of the structure of the poem’ (FOI 92). With its dense, compressed, single stanza construction (a shape that Guest experiments with throughout the collection), the structure of the poem assumes the properties of a conventional, domestic room: it rests, once again, on the scaffold of domestic space. Guest’s poem thus reminds us that the relationship between words and reality must be twofold: on the one hand, words shape reality by giving voice to inanimate objects, but they also possess their own material reality, with the potential to transform a poem into a tangible space with tactile textures. This sense of materiality is further explored in ‘The Screen of Distance’, where Guest transposes it onto an image of decorative cladding. Here, Guest creates a screen—a moveable partition, traditionally made from fabric, like ancient woven walls—out of words: On a wall shadowed by lights from the distance is the screen. Icons come to it dressed in capes and their eyes reflect the journeys their nomadic eyes reach from level earth. Narratives are in the room where the screen waits suspended like the frame of a girder the worker will place upon an axis and thus make a frame which he fills with a plot or a quarter inch of poetry to encourage nature into his building and the tree leaning against it, the tree casting language upon the screen. (CPBG 226)

In the poem’s opening stanza, ‘the screen’ sits on a shadowed ‘wall’, where it yokes together poetic construction and architectural engineering: the screen is built out of ‘narratives’ while also ‘suspended like / the frame of a girder’. But then, in line 5, the screen shifts from the stability of the wall to a position of suspension, much like the woven partitions of early

148 

M. LOSASSO

homes which were first used as rugs and wall hangings and only later as ‘suspended’ screens to divide internal space. Guest is careful in her language, invoking the structural girder in order to remind her reader of the weight-bearing properties of conventional walls, while simultaneously distinguishing her screen as nothing more than an ornamental frame. This frame, we learn, is filled with ‘a plot or a quarter inch of poetry’, entrenching our sense of the screen as a composite of the poetic and the architectural, built upon structural integrity, but imbued with poetic permeability. Later we are told that: A difficult poem intrudes like hardware decorating a quiet building, a tic taking [sic.] over the façade, a shrug exaggerated by a column—(CPBG 229)

In her study of Greek women and architecture, Bergren distinguishes female and male elements of architecture in terms of a distinction between ‘vertical space-enclosure and columns supporting a horizontal load’.61 She tells us that ‘the two primary processes of architectural construction are the woven wall, in Penelope’s web, and the column, in the living tree that forms the post of Odysseus’ marriage bed’.62 Horizontal walls are the preserve of the woman; vertical columns, the virile symbol of masculinity. We might thus read Guest’s nonchalant ‘shrug’ as a dismissive gesture, directed towards the phallic ‘column’ which she castrates with the hard, horizontal dash at the stanza’s end: feminine surface trumping masculine structure. With its tic-tacked facade, Guest’s ‘decorated shed’ also poses a challenge to the masculine ‘duck’ of sculptural modernism (see Chap. 3 for more on this distinction). Scott Brown and Venturi’s post-modern approach was informed, in part, by an interest in the application of what was called ‘atectonic fabrication’, a kind of ‘shell, skin, cladding, or covering’ that might be tacked onto a facade to create the illusion of ‘dematerialization’.63 As David Leatherbarrow and Mohsen Mostafavi explain in Surface Architecture:  Bergren, Weaving, p. 6.  Ibid. 63  David Leatherbarrow & Mohsen Mostafavi, Surface Architecture (Cambridge, Mass. & London: The MIT Press, 2005), p. 80. 61 62

4  SURFACE: BARBARA GUEST’S TACTILE CLADDING 

149

While the dematerialization of the wall can result in vacuous and impoverished architecture, it can also allow for the development of new modes of figuration. The first stage of this development was the formulation of a conceptual distinction between the outer and inner elements of the wall, designating the former—the shell, skin, cladding, or covering—as the non-load-bearing or tectonic part.64

Fashionable among early twentieth-century modernist architects, this ‘fabric analogy for architectural cladding […] drew on the teachings of Gottfried Semper’.65 In their reading of Josef Hoffman’s Palais Stoclet, Leatherbarrow and Mostafavi describe this atectonic fabrication in terms of a disruption of the conventional surface-depth dichotomy (Fig. 4.4). With its flattened facade, formed from a series of interlocking panels, Leatherbarrow and Mostafavi explain that: volume or thickness is subordinated to surface, allowing the sliding and gliding of elements past one another in the shallow depth of the surface. Thinning the plane and the elements in this way, and compressing depth into a shallow surface, tends to free the cladding from the building […].66

These buildings do not lack depth, they are not two-dimensional, but through atectonic cladding—through an attention to the fluid properties of fabric—they are able to visually compress ‘depth into a shallow surface’. Using newly available lightweight materials and technologies, these designs altered the established notion of a building and its facade, which had dominated architectural design since the development of architecture parlante in the eighteenth century, by explicitly drawing on the spatial codes that had been established by female weavers in the construction of the home.67 From the 1920s onwards, however, the development of a new and more radical modernism in Europe marked the end of the short-lived vogue for atectonic construction, in its desperation to cast off all trace of ornament and surface in favour of geometrical, mathematical, and sculptural precision. This was the architecture of the Bauhaus (broadly speaking), the modernist ‘duck’ that would morph into the homogenous  Ibid.  Ibid. 66  Ibid., p. 82. 67  Ibid., p. 10. 64 65

150 

M. LOSASSO

Fig. 4.4  Joseph Hoffman, Palais Stoclet, Brussels, 1905–11. Photo: PtrQs

international modernism of 1950s corporate America. A key proponent of this school of design, the Czech architect Adolf Loos rebelled against early modernist ‘ornamentalism’68 in his 1913 manifesto ‘Ornament and Crime’, urging his reader to ‘weep not! See, therein lies the greatness of our age […] we have outgrown ornament; we have fought our way

68  I borrow the term ‘ornamentalism’ not from David Cannadine’s book of that name, but from: Patricia Conway & Robert Jensen, Ornamentalism: The New Decorativeness in Architecture & Design (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982).

4  SURFACE: BARBARA GUEST’S TACTILE CLADDING 

151

through to freedom from ornament’.69 For Loos, the ‘crime’ of ornament inheres in ‘the Kaffir who weaves ornaments into his fabric according to a particular rhythm […] the Slovak peasant woman who embroiders her lace, the old lady who crochets wonderful things with glass beads and silk’.70 The ‘retrograde’ native and the woman, with their rhythmic (read: poetic) ornamental activities, are at the root of what Loos calls ‘the ornament disease’—a phrase that is symptomatic of Loos’s sense that both ornament and femininity are bound up with a base sexual proclivity that abstemious ‘men of the nineteenth century’ must ‘outgrow’.71 The ornamental (as opposed to integral, structural, or seamless) cladding of ‘atectonic fabrication’, was derided by Loos not only because of its relation to textile production, but because of its association with skin, which has long been associated with the excessive, the erotic, and the feminine. In an essay on Loos and Josephine Baker (for whom Loos designed, but never completed, a house), Anne Cheng explains that, though Loos ‘attributes the origin of architecture not to structure or solid material […] but to mobile surfaces: fabric, even skin’, his call for the ‘the march of progress’ was nevertheless shaped by his belief in the ‘erasure of erotic material excess’, which he ‘deemed to be the exclusive and natural domain’ of women.72 In other words, surface-equals-skin-equals-eroticism and, in this formulation, femininity is deemed ‘useless, pathological, degenerate, and criminal’.73 Cheng is one of a number of feminist scholars who have reclaimed skin in recent scholarship by engaging productively with its feminine, excessive, and erotic tendencies.74 In Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism (1994), Elizabeth Grosz ‘explores the ways in which the social inscriptions on the surface of the body generate a psychical interiority— the movement from the outside in’.75 Grosz develops a reading of the female body as ‘a purely surface phenomenon, a complex, multifaceted 69  Adolf Loos, ‘Ornament and Crime’ in Programs and Manifestoes on 20th-Century Architecture, trans. M. Bullock (Cambridge, Mass & London: The MIT Press, 1976), p. 20. 70  Ibid., p. 24. 71  Ibid. p. 20. 72  Anne Cheng, ‘Skins, Tattoos, and Susceptibility’ in Representations Vol. 108, No. 1 (Fall 2009): p. 102. 73  Ibid. 74  See also the work of: Donna Haraway, Sara Ahmed, and Rosie Braidotti. 75  Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), p. 115.

152 

M. LOSASSO

surface folded back on itself, exhibiting a certain torsion but nevertheless a flat plane whose incision or inscriptions produce the (illusion or effects of) depth and interiority’.76 For Grosz, the female body is nothing but surface; a reading that allows for a ‘multifaceted’ complexity with all of the illusion of ‘depth and interiority’, transforming the female body into a site that simultaneously occupies inside and outside: relations occurring on the surface of the skin and various body parts [e.g. touch as sexual pleasure] […] are not merely superficial, for they generate, they produce, all the effects of a psychical interior, an underlying depth, individuality, or consciousness, much as the Möbius strip creates both an inside and an outside.77

By casting the female body as a Möbius strip, Grosz deconstructs pejorative notions of the surface as something that covers or conceals depth, offering, instead, a model that sees surface and depth as continuously and inextricably linked: ‘Tracing the outside of the strip’, she clarifies, ‘leads one directly to its inside without at any point leaving its surface’.78 This idea is echoed by Robertson, when she writes that ‘scaffolding […] is a skin’: The deep structure of skin is intricate. It disproves the wrongheaded and habitual opposition of ornament and concept. It does act as an excitation screen but the function of skin includes a necessary psychic dimension not mediated by the conscious bodily senses. This dimension extends beyond the visual plane of the surface, as if the entire skin were spun outwards in its excitable permeability to become an idea threshold.79

If scaffolding is an intricate skin, then Grosz’s and Robertson’s accounts show us how to marry Guest’s invisible architecture with the poem’s surface. Just as the skin can never really be independent of the structure of the body, so the words of a poem are never independent of the ‘invisible architecture’ that underpins them. Depth and surface are fluid in Guest’s work because the continuous skin of the poem’s cladding is inextricable from the ‘deep structure of skin’—the scaffold—that holds the poem together.  Ibid.  Ibid. 78  Ibid., p. 117. 79  Robertson, Office for Soft Architecture, p. 140. 76 77

4  SURFACE: BARBARA GUEST’S TACTILE CLADDING 

153

Fig. 4.5  Amedeo Modigliani, Nude on a Blue Cushion, 1917. Oil on linen. Chester Dale Collection. Reproduced courtesy of the National Gallery of Art’s Open Access policy

Guest reclaims skin in her poem ‘The Nude’, granting autonomous agency to the historically passive figure of the female muse in Western art (Fig. 4.5). Flagging the painterly tradition in the poem’s title, Guest slyly subverts the conventional terms of ‘acting’ and ‘appearing’ (‘Men act and women appear. Men look at women, women watch themselves being looked at’,80 as John Berger writes in Ways of Seeing (1972)) by writing as a female artist (or poet) and art critic herself. And while the decision to name only the nude (and not the artist) in the title might pose as a continuation of the Western tradition, the fact that the poem is more narratival than ekphrastic ultimately works to undermine the figure of the painter, as we will see. The poem opens in the artist’s studio: Studios are stations of reminiscence in the nimble wind they are shadows

80  John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin Books, 1972), p. 47.

154 

M. LOSASSO

The artist attaches himself to the shadow he attempts to revive it after the wind ceases, This mixture of dark and light is mysterious and adds depth To the position of his model who rephrases the shadow. (CPBG 238)

In the ‘mysterious’ space of the studio, the artist is passive, merely attaching himself to the shadow, while the nude—that ‘purely surface phenomenon’—‘rephrases the shadow’ through her luminous skin, and in this ‘peace without clothes’, Guest writes, ‘nudism is born’ (CPBG 239). ‘To be born a woman has been to be born, within an allotted and confined space, into the keeping of men’,81 writes Berger. If female experience has historically been defined according to physical enclosure, then this is distilled in the image of the nude posing in the artist’s studio. Yet in Guest’s poem, the question of space is troubled: for here it is not the model, but the artist, who seeks to ‘add depth’; or, as we are later told: the ‘narcissism of the artist escapes into a body / that defines his emotions, // An interior where his own contour is less misty’ (CPBG 239). The metaphor of the room, or ‘interior’, for female sexuality is a familiar trope in Guest’s work, appearing in the earlier poems ‘Saving Tallow’ and ‘Belgravia’.82 On first reading, the association appears to entrench a sense of vulnerable penetrability. Yet, as Bergren notes, the ‘identification of body and house is embedded in the word for “own” itself, οἰκεῖος, an adjectival form of οἶκος “house.” Your “own” thing is the thing of your house, and your house is your “ownership”—your “ownness” itself’.83 In the conflation of body and architecture, the female interior is not simply a cavity to be colonised but a room of one’s own, a space over which she holds dominion, a Möbius strip that flows seamlessly from surface into depth.  Ibid., p. 46.  John Wilkinson notes that, in ‘Saving Tallow’, ‘the “deep water” of the room becomes associated unmistakably with female sexuality’, Wilkinson, ‘Couplings’, p. 491; in ‘Belgravia’, the ‘many interiors’ (CPBG 29) in the household of her sterile lover—a figure who bears more than a passing resemblance to the artist of ‘The Nude’—also, I suggest, denote female sexuality. 83  Bergren, Weaving, p. 311. 81 82

4  SURFACE: BARBARA GUEST’S TACTILE CLADDING 

155

‘To be naked is to be without disguise’, Berger writes, ‘To be on display is to have the surface of one’s own skin, the hairs of one’s own body, turned into a disguise which, in that situation, can never be discarded. The nude is condemned to never being naked. Nudity is a form of dress’.84 Again, however, Guest upsets these painterly conventions, turning the tables on gendered expectation: The figure is a nominal reminder that existence is not pantomime as relieved by the artist, The body of the model, the lift of her torso the extension of limbs, fold of skin Express reality beyond tenure of the brush, shell or escapist sail, A severe distance is established between her realism and his anxious attempt to define it. (CPBG 239–40)

This body is ‘not pantomime’ but ‘realism’, a fleshy, corporeal presence set at a ‘severe distance’ from the posturing artist—‘a nominal reminder’ of the inadequacy of his brush and its limited ‘tenure’. The artist becomes anxious (a trait often associated with neurotic women), while the model reclines openly and sensuously in ‘the lift of her torso / the extension of limbs, fold of skin’. The artist desires his muse, but his touch is impotent, only an approximation of skin behind a veil of silk: The painter desires the image he has selected to be clothed in the absolute silk of his touch, Lonely himself he has admired the glance of kimonos, mirrors, fans and bestowed them on her Who for many minutes of this day borrows from art to cover her nudity. (CPBG 240)

The appearance of the mirror is also a familiar convention in the tradition of nude painting, ‘often used as a symbol of the vanity of woman’, as  Berger, Ways of Seeing, p. 54.

84

156 

M. LOSASSO

Berger explains.85 Yet even this is subverted in Guest’s poem, for here it is the artist who ‘admires the glance’ of mirrors, deflecting his own narcissism (or prudery?) onto the body of his muse by ‘bestow[ing]’ pigmented clothing onto her. At the end of the poem, the model regards the artist’s canvas, only to discover that ‘There is no figure […] she asks, where am I?’ (CPBG 242). The question is existential as well as literal: the woman locates herself—her body as well as her ontological subjectivity—within the physical space of the studio, rather than on the canvas, where ‘the sheen of her body only survives’ (CPBG 243). The artist justifies his abstraction by claiming that ‘“Each day I define myself”’ (CPBG 243), yet the model responds as though she has not heard him: ‘“It is a glimpse into the future, / fields light up”, she sighs’ (CPBG 243). Not only does the nude offer her critical analysis (like Guest, the art critic), she sighs it, as if to signal her sense of weariness at the artist’s egotism and pictorial failure. In the closing image, the nude finishes the painting ‘reach[ing] for ombre, noir / “It is the narrowness of time.” / Respectful moonlight inhabits them’ (CPBG 243). While some scholars have read this final scene as an expression of artistic collaboration—the nude asserting an equal role in this traditionally masculine space—the poem’s closing image is in fact more subversive than this egalitarian reading suggests.86 For Guest’s poem is surely a response to Christina Rossetti’s ‘In an Artist’s Studio’, in which a female muse, ‘Fair as the moon’, remains ‘hidden just behind those screens […] Not as she is, but as she fills his dream’, while a vampiric artist ‘feeds upon her face by day and night’.87 Echoing Rossetti’s measured tone, Guest’s narrative, on the other hand, exposes the artist’s anxiety, narcissism, and impotence, while allowing the muse, at last, to appear ‘as she is’: physically confident, rephrasing the space of the room (as Guest does in her domestic poems), speaking ‘the essentials of life’ and the ‘future’ (as she does in her art criticism), and taking up the brush to add the final stroke and correct the artist’s vanity. Guest’s ability to thread this subplot under an unwavering narrative voice resembles Austen’s use of free indirect discourse: projecting both windows, as she puts it, Guest gives voice back to another silent female history, shifting persona to lift writer, character, and reader alike  Ibid., p. 51.  See: Hurley, The Poetics of Site, p. 130. 87  Christina Rossetti, ‘In an Artist’s Studio’ in Selected Poems, ed. Dinah Roe (London: Penguin, 2008), p. 49. 85 86

4  SURFACE: BARBARA GUEST’S TACTILE CLADDING 

157

out of the ‘ordained claustrophobia’ of gendered space. And it is female skin—sensuous, erotic, excessive—that makes this possible. No longer simply an artist’s muse, Rossetti’s ‘nameless girl’ has become the poem itself, her skin sighing, like Guest’s rustling Mersan curtains, in the shadowy space of the studio over which she holds dominion.88 If invisible architecture is the scaffold of the poem, then the non-verbal, acoustic gesture of the sigh is its sonorous analogue, articulating the possibility of sounding silence. And this is where the force of Guest’s work lies: in the word not spoken, but spectrally present. Guest’s early depictions of the home are not to be found in the word ‘home’, but in the creation of an invisible architecture that recodes domestic space. In later work, Guest sounds the silent histories of women through the textiles they have produced, through a material attention to language, and through a reclaiming of skin as sensuous surface. In the delicate conflation of invisible architectures, transitory windows, permeable walls and porous skin, Guest transforms surface into something coterminous with space and structure, disrupting the assumed dichotomy (and hierarchy) of surface and depth. To look too hard for an invisible architecture is to miss the textures, the colours, even the ‘tastes’ of Guest’s material poetic: for the poem is a quilt, a screen, a fold of skin, rustling out of domestic existence like the melodious whisper of Mersan silk.

 Ibid.

88

CHAPTER 5

Aperture: James Schuyler’s Precarious Parentheses

Int: Did your parents encourage you to write? JS: No, I had wanted to be an architect rather than a writer. —‘An Interview with James Schuyler’, 1993.

On the 25th August 1985, James Schuyler accidentally locked himself in his diary: The utter improbability of me sitting here typing my equally unlikely diary (I am keeping it with malice aforethought: i.e. I would like to make some money out of my writing for a change: oh well, winning an extra thousand for a long poem in a non-long poem contest. The Paris Review? Isn’t that where something good always happens? As usual I have locked myself inside a paren. Must bust loose: not always the best idea in life or anywhere else). Where was I?1

A few lines into his digression on the placement of digressional poetry (‘a long poem in a non long poem contest’), Schuyler finds himself ‘locked inside’ the space created by the parenthesis, the ‘paren’. The situation, it seems, is not only familiar (‘as usual’) but also corresponds to the poet’s  James Schuyler, The Diary of James Schuyler, ed. Nathan Kernan (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1997), p. 175. 1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Losasso, Poetry, Architecture, and the New York School, Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41520-3_5

159

160 

M. LOSASSO

life (‘not always the best idea in life or anywhere else’), engendering a bodily interaction in the negotiation out of parenthetical space: ‘Must bust loose’. Emerging from the paren, Schuyler fuses memory with physicality, the cognitive with the corporeal, in his use of the spatial idiom for the lost train of thought: ‘Where was I?’ In her 1990 article for the Denver Quarterly, ‘James Schuyler: The Vuillard of Us’, Barbara Guest observes that: ‘Schuyler translates the vagaries of inhabitancy, of wherever he is, his locale, particularly into his poetry. So that if you are already acquainted with a particular house he has lived in, you come to know it even better’.2 The term ‘vagary’, denotes ‘a wandering in speech or writing; a rambling from the subject under consideration; a digression or divagation’.3 In writing, of course, the figure that signals the digression is the parenthesis or bracketed aside—Schuyler’s favourite textual device.4 From his earliest compositions to his last—as well as throughout his diaries and letters—brackets appear with quietly powerful force: in early works, Schuyler asks his reader to look at the brackets, to hear them as they open and close, and to think about the spaces they create. Elsewhere, long parenthetical intrusions rupture the temporality of the poem, recalibrating our relationship to the time of reading. Yet the term vagary also has another denotation, meaning ‘a wandering or devious journey or tour; a roaming about or abroad; an excursion, ramble, stroll’.5 Guest’s use of the term to describe the ‘vagaries of [Schuyler’s] inhabitanc[ies]’ thus captures not only the poet’s digressional style but his unsettled and precarious existence, marked out by brief 2  Barbara Guest, ‘James Schuyler: The Vuillard of Us’, undated, Barbara Guest Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, YCAL MSS 1185, Series II, Box: 84, Folder: 1482, p2. 3  ‘vagary, n.’, OED Online, Oxford University Press, March 2023, https://www.oed. com/view/Entry/221010?rskey=L7HgTL&result=1&isAdvanced=false#eid. Accessed 11 April 2023. 4  I adapt this phrase from Howard Moss who notes that the colon is ‘the poet’s favourite device’, Howard Moss, ‘James Schuyler: Whatever Is Moving’ in The American Poetry Review Vol 10, No. 3 (May/June 1981): p. 15. In The Last Avant Garde, David Lehman also comments on Schuyler’s use of the colon, when he notes that: ‘Only A. R. Ammons among contemporary poets has relied so heavily on the colon as a means of emphasizing the connections between clauses in constant postponement of closure’, D.  Lehman, The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets (New York: Anchor Books, 1999), p. 246. The parenthesis, however, is overlooked in almost every study of Schuyler’s work. 5  ‘vagary, n.’, OED Online.

5  APERTURE: JAMES SCHUYLER’S PRECARIOUS PARENTHESES 

161

apartment tenancies, long stays with friends, hospital admissions, and extended hotel residencies.6 This precarious, volatile, and often prescribed (rather than self-selected) mode of living, may explain why, as Maggie Nelson notes, Schuyler’s poetry is characterised by ‘an intense attention to the details of both the physical body and its surroundings’, often ‘calling our attention back to his body in the present’ or else sustaining an ‘attentiveness to the body alongside a meditation on the passing of time’.7 On and off from 1951 until the end of his life, Schuyler was committed to mental health institutions—or, as he describes them, ‘prisons / transposed to hospitals’ (CPJS 241). This fine line between sanctuary and incarceration is acutely felt within the poems, not only in the way that Schuyler describes real spaces (and registers the body’s position within them) but in the way that he formally constructs textual spaces: ‘As usual I have locked myself inside a paren’. Given that, as Nelson notes, ‘Schuyler was sometimes not physically or psychologically able to wander the streets’, he ‘often he wrote from his room at the Chelsea Hotel, and married the interior with the exterior from there’.8 Indeed, Schuyler’s fascination with the window—the framing device through which he marries the interior with the exterior—is as pervasive in his writing as his use of the parenthesis. On ‘January 1, 1968’—the second entry that appears in Nathan Kernan’s edited collection, The Diary of James Schuyler—Schuyler notes that ‘[t]he MacCarthy house through my north window isn’t white it’s pink’. Twenty-three years later, in his final entry on ‘Tuesday, January 1, 1991’, Schuyler marks another new year through his window view, observing ‘[s]ooty tatters of cloud in a warm blue sky (although the day is cold), coasting low among the buildings that reach up to be gilded by the sun resting on the horizon before it sets’.9 As Schuyler himself remarked to Raymond Foye in 1989: ‘You know what my diaries are like, they’re mostly about looking out the window’.10 The same can also be said of his poems, which, through window views, register everything from a ‘chimney, breathing a little smoke’ (CPJS 4), to ‘a bird […] building a nest out 6  As Anne Porter remarked: ‘Jimmy came for a visit and stayed 11  years’. Quoted in: Timothy Gray, ‘New Windows on New York: The Urban Pastoral Vision of James Schuyler and Jane Freilicher’ in Genre 33: 2 (1 June 2000): p. 175. 7  Maggie Nelson, Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2007), p. 81. 8  Ibid., p. 86. 9  Schuyler, The Diary of James Schuyler, pp. 27; 277. 10  Ibid., p. 14.

162 

M. LOSASSO

of torn up letters’ (CPJS 85), to the window itself, ‘one pane slivered / by a crack’ (CPJS 148). In poem after poem, windows provide frames, not only through which to look but at which to look (at the wood, at the glass, at the dirt on the glass) and, at times, through which one not only looks but inserts one’s body. If we can say that the parenthesis is Schuyler’s favourite textual device, then the window is his favourite architectural device, and for Schuyler the two possess comparable—and often conflated—functions within the text. Both create permeable boundaries between spaces, functioning as apertures that frame observations, while also representing tantalising (if sometimes dangerous) points of physical egress. Both constitute a tear within the poem—an opening or rupture, suspended in a precarious temporality that shifts our focus and diverts our course, if only momentarily, away from the ‘straight time’ of the present.11 And, as this chapter will show, both make possible what Guest calls the vagaries of living, by way of the vagaries of looking.

Sitting, Staring, Thinking Blankly In his 2010 essay, ‘Jim the Jerk: Bathos and Loveliness in the Poetry of James Schuyler’, John Wilkinson notes that ‘only modest attention has accrued around the poetry of James Schuyler despite his routine appellation as a major poet of the New York School’.12 More than a decade later, and the situation remains little changed: Schuyler’s work is still the least attended to of the New York School poets, and critical attention tends to appear as something of a parenthetical footnote to the more prolific work of his friends, Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery. In his attempt to unpick this critical oversight, Wilkinson suggests that ‘part of the reason may be that his poetry is low-key, and its successes so subtle that its differences from the routine or the failed take effort to discern or specify’.13 Schuyler’s poetry is driven by the cycles of daily habit and the humdrum passages of seasonal change, which may account for why its ‘differences from the routine’ are so hard to discern. His interests are indeed 11  I discuss Lauren Berlant’s notion of the ‘impasse’ and José Esteban Muñoz’s concept of ‘straight time’ in greater detail towards the end of this chapter. 12  John Wilkinson, ‘Jim the Jerk: Bathos and Loveliness in the Poetry of James Schuyler’ in On Bathos: Literature, Art, Music, eds. Sara Crangle & Peter Nicholls (London, New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2012), p. 73. 13  Ibid.

5  APERTURE: JAMES SCHUYLER’S PRECARIOUS PARENTHESES 

163

‘low key’ or modest (as Schuyler puts it in an early poem, ‘The said to be boring things / dreams, weather, a bus trip / are so fascinating’ (CPJS 60–61)), his tone conversational and intimate (‘Let me tell you…’ (CPJS 228)), and his focus obsessively observational. As Mark Silverberg writes, Schuyler’s poetry is ‘lazy and meditative, focusing almost exclusively on things seen rather than things done, on the still life, the view from the window, the quiet ordinariness of each “day like any other”’.14 Rarely straying into the experimental, Schuyler’s poems oscillate between truncated lineation (tall slender poems, which—like Frank O’Hara’s early compositions—resemble the ‘awesome spiky postcard / view’ (CPJS 248) of New York City skyscrapers) and extended lines of ecstatic, Whitmanic prose poetry. Crafted around a love of gardens, flowers, birds, the weather, and the cycle of seasons, Schuyler’s penchant for the pastoral is inextricable from his affinity with the city, a simultaneity of focus that Timothy Gray terms ‘the urban pastoral’.15 In all of this—the routine, the humdrum, the intimate, the observational, and the formally modest— Schuyler’s style is best understood as diaristic: not only was he inspired by other diarists, he also kept his own, and much of the material from them made its way into the poems. Indeed, many of his published compositions read like diary entries—titled with only a date and written in an unfolding present tense—which amount to a parenthetical mode of thinking: observation generating more observation; a drifting, a swerving, a digressional excess of things and of thoughts. Schuyler’s conversational and even mundane poetic style is given formal shape in his most overused device, the parenthesis.16 Indeed, Schuyler is surely one of the twentieth century’s most significant poets of the parenthesis—and yet, this fact has been overlooked by almost every critic of his work to date. Only Nathan Kernan comments, fleetingly, on Schuyler’s use of parentheses, when he notes in his introduction to The Diary of James Schuyler that ‘a failure to close parentheses was typical for 14  Mark Silverberg, ‘James Schuyler’s Poetics of Indolence’ in Literary Imagination Vol. 11, No. 1 (2008): p. 28. 15  See: Timothy Gray, Urban Pastoral: Natural Currents in the New York School (Iowa City: Iowa University Press, 2010). 16  Properly speaking, the term ‘parenthesis’ refers to ‘A word, clause, or sentence inserted as an explanation, aside, or afterthought into a passage with which it has not necessarily any grammatical connection’ (OED). The grammatical marks that surround this afterthought can differ but, for the purposes of this chapter, I take a parenthesis to be the text contained within round brackets or ‘lunulae’, properly termed.

164 

M. LOSASSO

Schuyler’—an observation that fails to account for Schuyler’s far more frequent use of brackets to create ostensibly conventional digressional asides.17 Such an oversight may seem remarkable when we account for just how prevalent parentheses are throughout Schuyler’s oeuvre; then again, this bracket-blindness aligns with a long history of reading parentheses as ‘additional, irrelevant, extraneous, subordinate, or damaging to the clarity of argument,’ as John Lennard notes in But I Digress: The Exploitation of Parentheses in English Printed Verse.18 As Lennard explains, the sixteenth-­ century poet Henry Peacham dismissed the parenthesis in his 1577 literary style guide, The Garden of Eloquence, as little more than ‘an unnecessary parcell of speach’ and ‘although it give some strength, yet when it is taken away, it leaveth the same speach perfect inough’.19 At best dispensable, at worst, as Robert Grant Williams writes in his essay ‘Reading the Parenthesis’, the bracketed aside: signifies dead text, an appendage to the work which is neither vital nor functional, an appendix which instead of contributing to organic unity only stores toxic waste, a solute which defying homogeneity clouds the solution’s transparency—the intrusive adjunct which readers quickly skim over.20

If parentheses are ‘dead’, ‘toxic’, and ‘quickly skim[med] over’, then why do we continue to use them? If, as Williams writes, ‘the parenthesized comment is just an insertion with no grammatical connection to the text, why did the author not spend the time to integrate the lazy fragment properly?’21 Williams’s question may be rhetorical, his designation of the parenthesis as a ‘lazy fragment’ part of a wider critical strategy, yet the phrase echoes Mark Silverberg’s description of Schuyler’s poetry as ‘lazy and meditative’. Although this label risks unfairly accusing Schuyler of idleness (a charge that overlooks the physical and psychological issues that often forced him to remain within a given space for extended periods of time), Silverberg’s use of the term nevertheless draws attention to the  Kernan in The Diary of James Schuyler, p. 17.  John Lennard, But I Digress: The Exploitation of Parentheses in English Printed Verse (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 242. 19  Robert Grant Williams, ‘Reading the Parenthesis’ in SubStance Vol. 22, No. 1, Issue 70 (1993): p. 56. 20  Ibid. 21  Ibid., p. 58. 17 18

5  APERTURE: JAMES SCHUYLER’S PRECARIOUS PARENTHESES 

165

spatial and physical limits of the work—‘the view from the window’—just as Williams’s description of the ‘lazy fragment’ highlights the spatial quality of the floating, parenthetical ‘insertion’. This is what Lennard implies, when he notes that ‘within the process of composition and authorial editing, lunulae [round brackets] have a special status: for while an author may think in cola, but fail to supply the colons; and may certainly think in commata, but fail to supply the commas; it is unlikely that an author will think in parenthesis, but fail to supply the lunulae’.22 In other words, authors do not fail to supply lunulae because they possess an inherently spatial quality: we open and close round brackets in order to access syntactical spaces that feel distinct from the rest of the text in a way that other parenthetical clauses (those marked off by commas, dashes, colons, etc.) do not. Indeed, the term ‘parenthesis’ derives from the Greek παρένθεσις, meaning ‘to place in beside’—and though that word refers to all parenthetical constructions (i.e. cola, commata, etc), it captures the uniquely spatial relationship between a bracketed aside and the wider text (which may account for why we tend use the terms ‘bracket’ and ‘parenthesis’ interchangeably). By creating syntactic zones of enclosure or segregation—by appearing simultaneously in and beside the text—the bracketed parenthesis thus draws out the inherent spatiality of all writing, whether intentionally or not. Acutely aware of the bracket’s spatial properties, a number of Schuyler’s early poems stage encounters with the quasi-paradoxical possibility of placing sections of text at once in and beside the larger body of the poem. Consider the following lines from the poem ‘Like Lorraine Ellison’:                […] I            send you all the love    (“Who’s Zéphyrine?”            in the world    (“She was a somebody            or would    (once, now            if it were mine    (she is            to    (a rose”            give (CPJS 124)  Lennard, But I Digress, p. 243.

22

166 

M. LOSASSO

The poem offers an example of Schuyler’s early experimental ‘failure to close parentheses’, literally placing the brackets both in and beside: justified to the left of the main text, they are, at the same time, seamlessly woven into the body of the poem. Formally experimental moments like this are not typical of Schuyler’s work—nor of his use of parentheses, which crystallise into something subtler and more diaristic in his mature writing, as we will see—but instants like this do signal something important: that Schuyler’s attention to the ‘said to be boring things’ extends to the functional joints of language—the visual and sonic textures of grammatical marks—and lends his poems an explicitly spatial self-awareness. This raises the question of how we read brackets—generally, but also specifically in Schuyler’s work—in terms of architectural analogy. Williams poses this question, when he notes that: If the round brackets designate an icon of a barrier, then metaphoric or metonymic substitutions enable the reader to specify the kind of barrier operating between the two discourses. When likened to fences, shields, palisades, breastwork, or other similar obstructions, the marks present the further quandary of enclosed space. Fortifications surround prisons as well as strongholds. In both edifices, wherever the citizens reside, walls serve to confine the dangerous alien to either an outside or an inside space. Therefore, are the marks bastions which create a sanctuary for a parenthesized comment under siege, or are they bars which imprison linguistic criminals, textual rogues?23

For Williams, the bracket is a formal barrier; the question is whether it creates sanctuary or incarceration. Schuyler’s image of ‘prisons / transposed to hospitals’ captures precisely this undecidability—though his desire to ‘bust loose’ from the unwieldy ‘paren’ of his 1985 diary entry might be indicative of a general sense that brackets are the ‘bars which imprison linguistic criminals, textual rogues’. Feelings of imprisonment and incarceration underpin ‘The Payne Witney Poems’, a mini, parenthetical series contained within the larger collection The Morning of the Poem in which Schuyler paints a series of vignettes of the titular psychiatric clinic to which he was committed in early 1975. In the opening poem, ‘Trip’, parentheses are employed in order to spatially compartmentalise moments of neurosis:  Williams, ‘Reading the Parenthesis’, p. 64.

23

5  APERTURE: JAMES SCHUYLER’S PRECARIOUS PARENTHESES 

167

Wigging in, wigging out: when I stop to think the wires in my head cross: kaboom. How many trips by ambulance (five, count them five), claustrated, pill addiction, in and out of mental hospitals, the suicidalness (once I almost made it) but—I go on? Tell you all of it? I can’t. When I think of that, that at only fifty-one I, Jim the Jerk, am still alive and breathing deeply, that I think is a miracle. (CPJS 252)

Here, the parentheses add a schizophrenic voice to the text, housing Schuyler’s neurotic moments—‘(five, / count them five)’—as well as the admission of an attempted suicide—‘(once / I almost made it)’. Contained within the ‘protective’ space of the brackets, these troubled moments mirror Schuyler’s bodily enclosure within the ‘Pale green walls and / a white ceiling’ of the sanatorium, building a sense of confinement into the verse itself. Indeed, all but two of the poems in the series adopt a single stanza form (the compressed space of a room), heavily enjambed to create a disjunctive and staccato mode of thinking through the interruptions that occur across truncated lineation: a formal manifestation of Schuyler’s hours of ‘Sitting. Staring. Thinking blankly’ (CPJS 257). Many of Schuyler’s poems, like this one, both register and formally construct a sense of entrapment and enclosure, often in explicit reference to lived experience. Yet, they also locate openings for release, not only thematically, through the figure of the window, but textually, through the parenthesis. Read in this way, we might even say that, rather than reinforce a sense of entrapment, the parentheses in ‘Trip’ become punctures, embedded within, while also existing to one side of, the otherwise tight

168 

M. LOSASSO

space of the poem, opening up the possibility of release from stifled space (‘(once/ I almost made it)’). In this sense, the parentheses in Schuyler’s spatially coded poems function more like the windows through which he so often looks than the prison bars that secure them: for just as a window marks an opening in architectural space, the parenthesis cuts an opening in textual space, and both contain the possibility for bodily interaction, and perhaps even escape.

Remember to Slam the Parentheses Behind You If parentheses signal liberation in Schuyler’s work, this is, in part, because the poet’s early fascination with brackets is marked by an interest in the liberation of ‘inherited line, stanza, over-all form, what is the “old” base of the non-projective’, as Charles Olson puts it.24 The poem ‘Seeking’, which appears in Schuyler’s first published collection, Freely Espousing (1969), explores the radical possibility of looking at grammatical marks, of divorcing them from utility and experimenting with the sounds, signs, and spaces that such a recalibration of grammar might entail. Here, as elsewhere, Schuyler is acutely conscious of the openable (and closable) nature of the bracket, as though it hung on implicit hinges:25 Remember to slam the parentheses behind you ) bang and ) bang and ) ) double bang (to be on the safe side). (CPJS 30)

Uncoupled from grammatical context, Schuyler’s focus is on the materiality of the mark, its sonic as well as visual textures. Published almost 24  Charles Olson, ‘Projective Verse’ in Collected Prose, ed. Donald Allen & Benjamin Friedlander (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1997), p.  239.  For more on the vexed  influence that Olson had on  New York School poets, see Chap. 1, pp. 35–36.  25  In relation to mental health, there is a point to be made about the term ‘hinged’—or, rather, ‘unhinged’—in the work of a poet who sometimes removes brackets from their hinges through his typical ‘failure to close parentheses’. David Bradshaw makes a similar point in his introduction to Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway—another writer attuned to the subtleties of the parenthesis, and a writer whom Schuyler loved. Bradshaw writes that ‘the reference to taking doors off their hinges in the second and third lines of the novel most evidently relates to the preparations for Clarissa’s party, but it may also be a cue to readers to ask themselves which character or characters, if any, are “unhinged” (as a verb meaning “to unsettle, unbalance, disorder in mind, throw into confusion” (OED), unhinge had been in use since the early seventeenth century) in Mrs Dalloway’. David Bradshaw in Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 3.

5  APERTURE: JAMES SCHUYLER’S PRECARIOUS PARENTHESES 

169

twenty years after Olson’s ‘Projective Verse’—which is, itself, parenthetically subtitled, ‘(projectile (percussive (prospective’—‘Seeking’ fits into an avant-garde tradition of exploring the poetic possibilities of liberating graphic marks from syntactical propriety.26 Using the typewriter, Olson suggested, poets could transform these marks into score-like notations, indicative of breath, speed, pause, and silence. ‘It is the advantage of the typewriter’, Olson writes, ‘that, due to its rigidity and its space precisions, it can, for a poet, indicate exactly the breath, the pauses, the suspensions even of syllables, the juxtapositions even of parts of phrases, which he [sic.] intends’.27 Schuyler adopts this projective approach in ‘Seeking’, where the parentheses do not sign for something else that slams (as, for example, the word ‘door’ might), but are, themselves, what is being slammed. The effect is at once visual and sonic: not only do these brackets look like something that might open and close, we also hear them in the onomatopoeic use of ‘slam’ and ‘bang’.28 The convention of the bracket as a mark that begs to be neither seen nor heard has been overturned—yet Schuyler is not quite ready to relinquish its functional propriety altogether. In fact, his deconstruction of the parenthesis serves to heighten our awareness of its proper use by reminding us, idiomatically, that we open and close (or in this case slam) brackets when we use them in writing. In so doing, Schuyler’s poem does more than simply flag the enclosed semantic spaces that parentheses create: it seeks (as the title implies) innovative points of access into those spaces. For after the brackets are ‘slammed’ in ‘Seeking’, the reader finds herself ‘(on the safe side)’—a parenthetical line that holds its own, both restoring and emphasising the grammatical function of the bracket, while creating a textual pocket of ‘safe’ space. As usual in Schuyler’s work, however, the question of safety is ambiguously raised, leaving us to wonder: does the safe side signify the syntactic space within the bracket, or is it safer to be on the other side? Schuyler’s slammable parentheses might evoke doors more readily than windows, but a scene from ‘The Morning of the Poem’ reminds us that, in the house in which Schuyler grew up, ‘casement window[s]’ (CPJS

 Olson ‘Projective Verse’, p. 239.  Ibid., p. 245. 28  Which raises the question of how one might read this poem out loud. 26 27

170 

M. LOSASSO

Fig. 5.1  Casement window. Photo: Jack E. Boucher

287) (i.e. windows hung on hinges, rather than weighted and sliding) could be slammed as easily as a door (Fig. 5.1)29: 29  The specificity of Schuyler’s childhood home is significant here—as he noted in an interview with Carl Little in 1986, the composition of ‘The Morning of the Poem’ ‘was so involved with being in the place—being in my mother’s house’. Schuyler in Little, ‘An Interview with James Schuyler’, p. 178.

5  APERTURE: JAMES SCHUYLER’S PRECARIOUS PARENTHESES 

171

                    […] As it was     it was enough to Sit and eat and watch it, wet weavings of a summer morning,     and try to stop My mother from slamming every window and shutting out     the smell, The sweet, sweet, sweet smell of morning rain, in      your nose, on bare skin. “Don’t shut that window: it isn’t coming in.” “Well,     it might come in and I’m the one who will have to clean it up.” Slam. I     open it again: “This Rain will last about thirty seconds (it did), I’m watching     it and if It starts to blow in I’ll close the window.” (CPJS 282)

The scene signals not only the window’s capacity to slam but also to let in ‘Fresh Air’, to borrow the title of a poem by Kenneth Koch. Bemoaning the ‘stale, pale skunky pentameters’ of bad contemporary poetry, Koch speaks for his New York School contemporaries when he cries ‘haven’t you ever looked out the window’ to a room full of ‘mediocr[e]’ poets.30 Koch suggests that there may be ‘a reason for the lack of poetry / In these ill-­ contented souls, perhaps they need air! // Blue air, fresh air, come in, I welcome you […]’.31 Rejecting, with Koch, the ‘baleful influence’ of ‘the great poets of our time’, Schuyler throws open the parentheses in early poems like ‘Seeking’ and ‘Like Lorraine Ellison’, letting fresh air into stale poetic tradition in order to liberate the ‘inherited line’.32 If one of the principal functions of a window is to let in air, then another is to shed light—which is also one of the key properties of the parenthesis, grammatically speaking. In the poem ‘A Man in Blue’, which appears in the same early collection as ‘Seeking’, Schuyler explores the capacity of the parenthesis to shed light, both grammatically and formally.

30  Kenneth Koch, ‘Fresh Air’ in The New  York Poets: An Anthology, ed. Mark Ford (Manchester: Carcanet, 2004), p. 111. 31  Ibid., p. 114. 32  Ibid., p. 112. The fresh air that Schuyler lets into his poem has a distinctively Gertrude Steinian flavour: the ‘sweet, sweet, sweet smell of morning rain’ echoes Stein’s ‘Sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet tea’ from ‘Susie Asado’. Gertrude Stein, ‘Susie Asado’ from Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein, ed. Carl Van Vechten (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), p. 549.

172 

M. LOSASSO

Here, the parenthesis has shaken off its experimental skin and is masquerading as a purely ancillary flourish: Ensconced in resonant plump easy chairs covered with scuffed brown leather in a pungent autumn that blends leaf smoke (sycamore, tobacco, other), their nobility wound in a finale like this calico cat asleep, curled up in a breadbasket, on a sideboard where the sun falls. (CPJS 17)

As in ‘Trip’, the seemingly conventional aside works to quietly puncture internal space: like a window, it sheds light by offering an implicit glimpse onto an exterior. Like all ‘disposable’ parenthetical asides, the line remains precarious, while at the same time possessing a sort of gestural emphasis: our eye is drawn to the three words suspended in the bracket, in part because this is one of the few lines in the poem to resist enjambment and retain syntactical integrity, and it is this simultaneity of vulnerability and stress, gesture and precarity (of which more later), that lends the bracketed moment its force. This becomes clearer if we remove the brackets: ‘a pungent autumn that blends leaf smoke sycamore, tobacco, other’. We might place a colon, comma or dash after ‘smoke’ to preserve a sense of parenthetical clarification (e.g. ‘a pungent autumn that blends leaf smoke: sycamore, tobacco, other’), yet in removing the brackets, we also remove the visual and formal quality of containment. Without brackets, these words spill out and merge with the rest of the text, flattening the tone, acoustic rhythm, and visual character of the line and displacing the spatial particularity that the lunulae, or brackets, create. This raises the inevitable question: What do the brackets do to the tone, acoustic rhythm, and visual character of the verse? In this autumnal example, the conventional hierarchy of the text and its parenthetical aside is, to all appearance, maintained: the bracket is humble, its half-moon curvature sliding into the poem so as to be both unassuming and self-negating in the way that grammatical convention demands. It follows, then, that the line contained in brackets possesses a certain auditory quietness: the words are muted, if not muffled, hushed, if not whispered, in a way that echoes the peacefully curling, scented smoke of autumn. Far from Shelley’s bombastic apostrophe to the ‘breath of Autumn’s being’, Schuyler’s invocation of

5  APERTURE: JAMES SCHUYLER’S PRECARIOUS PARENTHESES 

173

autumn has more in common with Wordsworth’s ‘lines / Of curling mist’.33 His eye rests on the quotidian details—the ‘said to be boring things’—whose delicate ephemerality is translated into the precarious space created by the brackets: emphasised while also hushed, sycamore and tobacco smoke disrupts the main flow of the poem, so that, for a moment, it is spectrally suspended in lingering curlicues (made more evocative by curve of the bracket itself) of vapour and pungent smell. Without naming a window, the parenthesis becomes one, granting us sensory access to the Keatsian ‘mist and mellow fruitfulness’ of the autumn air outside.34 Schuyler’s dual vision—his ability to look both at and through parentheses—recalls Roland Barthes’ analogy for the relationship between meaning and form: […] if I am in a car and I look at the scenery through the window, I can at will focus on the scenery or on the window-pane. At one moment I grasp the presence of the glass and the distance of the landscape; at another, on the contrary, the transparence of the glass and the depth of the landscape; but the result of this alternation is constant: the glass is at once present and empty to me, and the landscape unreal and full.35

In spite of our focus favouring one perspective, it is nonetheless necessary, as Barthes explains, for both planes to be visually experienced at the same time: we can only really grasp the distance of the scenery because we can grasp the nearness, the materiality, of the window’s ‘wood and glass’ (CPJS 33) (Fig. 5.2). In this sense, Schuyler’s engagements with parentheses amount to a ‘haptic’, rather than ‘optic’, experience, to borrow the distinction from architectural theorist Juhani Pallasmaa. ‘The very essence of lived experience’, Pallasmaa writes, ‘is moulded by hapticity and peripheral unfocused vision. Focused vision confronts us with the world whereas peripheral vision envelops us in the flesh of the world’.36 To return to 33  Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘Ode to the West Wind’ in The Selected Poetry & Prose of Shelley (Ware: Wordsworth Editions Limited, 2002), p. 401; William Wordsworth, ‘The Prelude’ in The Major Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 390. 34  John Keats, ‘To Autumn’ in Selected Poems, ed. John Barnard (London: Penguin, 2007), p. 219. 35  Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991), p. 122. 36  Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin (Chichester: Wiley-Academy, 2007), p. 10.

174 

M. LOSASSO

Fig. 5.2  Raindrops on New York window. Photo: Diego Gennaro

Barthes’ analogy, whether one looks at or through a window, they must engage peripheral vision, in order to push either the glass or the landscape out of focus—and the same may be said for the parenthesis. In conventional usage, we have trained ourselves to see through parentheses: we rarely stop to look at the bracket itself, treating the grammatical mark as though it were invisible, and often skimming the parenthetical thought within. This engagement permits our attention to fall in with the main flow of the text. In Schuyler’s disruptively material and spatially self-aware use of the parenthesis, however—even when disguised as conventional—this attention is upended: we are diverted away from the main flow, the parenthesis shifting from content to form, so that our attention refocuses on the mark of the bracket. In doing so, Schuyler invites a haptic and embodied engagement with the text, as in the following scene from ‘The Morning of the Poem’:             […] The days go by like leaves That fall in fall, not yet, soon, so soon, I feel my death in      currents of damp air on the back of my neck, Filtered through a window screen (a casement window screen I

5  APERTURE: JAMES SCHUYLER’S PRECARIOUS PARENTHESES 

175

     open in the watches of the night, too lazy To make it to the john, and take a moonlit piss into the taxus),      death, my death, over fifty years and that is What I am building toward. No cremation, thanks, worm food […] (CPJS 287)

The opening of the window (the hinged casement window of his mother’s house), and the awkward physical insertion into the space it creates, is formally mirrored in the opening of the parenthesis: the window screen is invoked; the bracket, like the window, is opened; and just as Schuyler locates his body in the physical space created by the opening of a window, so he locates his textual presence in the syntactic space created by the lunulae. The brackets close (and so, perhaps, does the window) and, piss completed, Schuyler resumes his train of thought. In this instance, the window-bracket has not simply been observed—has not merely been looked through or looked at—but has been physically engaged with. As a result, the opening of this double aperture, and the somatic interaction it engenders, has ruptured the poem, derailing the quiet routine of ‘days go[ing] by like leaves’ and bringing Schuyler into morbid confrontation with his own mortality: ‘death, my death’.

What Is There I Have Not Forgotten? If the bracket invites us to conceive of the text spatially, it also implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) asks us to figure our bodies in relation to that space. Yet there is more to the relationship between the parenthesis and the body than simply the somatic presence implied by textual space. For even when the parenthesis is not spatially coded, there remains something inherently corporeal about the digressional language contained therein. Impromptu, intimate, and unmediated, digressional language is fundamentally conversational: it notates the spoken rather than issuing directly from the written. In this sense, we might say that the bracketed parenthesis makes possible the translation of the spoken into the written—or the vernacular into the poetic, as Lisa Robertson might put it (see Chap. 1)— keeping alive something of the meandering quality of thinking aloud. We can better understand this through Barthes’ notion of ‘writing aloud’, a phonetic form whose:

176 

M. LOSASSO

aim is not the clarity of messages, the theater of emotions; what it searches for (in a perspective of bliss) are the pulsional incidents, the language lined with flesh, a text where we can hear the grain of the throat, the patina of consonants, the voluptuousness of vowels, a whole carnal stereophony: the articulation of the body, of the tongue, not that of meaning, of language.37

If Barthes’ window analogy offers a way of looking at the textual bracket, then his notion of ‘writing aloud’ suggests a way of reading the text contained within: set at a remove from the main body of the text (the ‘meaning’, to use Barthes’s term), the bracketed aside becomes a purpose-­ built shelter for these fleshy, blissful moments—these fissures through which the writer inserts their own voice and, by extension, their own corporeality, into the text. In this sense, the excessive38 nature of the parenthesis becomes its essential quality: just as the dramatic aside in a play transforms the parenthetical remark into a pivotal plot device, so the voluptuous vocality of the language contained in a poetic parenthesis has the potential to determine the texture, the rhythm, and even the temporal development of a poem. A sense of the performative underpins Schuyler’s mature use of parentheses, which often have the feel of a stagey aside. As Geoff Ward notes: Schuyler is a subtle as well as an overtly comic writer, and his mimesis of New  York life is a latter-day comedia dell’ arte […] leaving the audience pleasurably unsure as to what was rehearsed and what plucked from the air […] Schuyler both internalizes and dramatizes the self […] within the poem’s theatre of irony.39

Ward does not turn to the gestural parenthesis as evidence of Schuyler’s ‘latter-day comedia dell’ arte’, though he does note that Schuyler’s observational poetic is in the tradition of the Modernist ‘cult of the Moment, as it appears in Virginia Woolf or Ernest Dowson’ which ‘sidestep[s] difficulties of dealing with a temporal, layered-space world by putting art or 37  Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc., 1998), pp. 66–67. 38  According to Maggie Nelson, a ‘tendency towards excess’ is ‘a crucial part of the New York School legacy’—and it is through excess that Schuyler’s poetry ‘repeatedly awakens to this “moment of being” via an intense attention to the physical body and its surroundings’. Nelson, Other True Abstractions, pp. 78–81. 39  Geoff Ward, Statutes of Liberty: The New York School of Poets (London: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 15; 22.

5  APERTURE: JAMES SCHUYLER’S PRECARIOUS PARENTHESES 

177

experience into that timeless, deep space parenthesis’. The term ‘deep space parenthesis’ remains ambiguous in Ward’s account—he neither elaborates on this notion nor explicitly connects it to Schuyler’s parenthetical poems—but in connecting the term parenthesis with a Modernist ‘cult of the Moment’, Ward’s phrase calls to mind David Jones’s 1937 prose-­poem In Parenthesis. As Jones notes in the text’s introduction: This writing is called ‘In Parenthesis’ because I have written it in a kind of space between—I don’t know between quite what—but as you turn aside to do something; and because for us amateur soldiers […] the war itself was a parenthesis—how glad we were to step outside its brackets at the end of ’18—and also because our curious type of existence here is altogether in parenthesis.40

What Jones understands by the term parenthesis is simultaneously spatial (‘a kind of space between’) and temporal (‘how glad we were to step outside its brackets at the end of ’18’); at once specific (‘the war itself was a parenthesis’) and generic (‘our curious type of existence here is altogether in parenthesis’). Understanding Ward’s ‘deep space parenthesis’ through Jones’s modernist imagination, I want to extend my discussion of Schuyler’s parentheses-as-apertures, by looking not only the syntactic spaces that they create but at the deep temporal spaces that they open, out of the ongoing present of the poem. Schuyler’s mature use of the bracket finds its fullest expression in his Pulitzer Prize-winning collection, The Morning of the Poem (1980), where it is characterised by a conversational, bodily, and often theatrically comical quality. Consider the following scene from the poem ‘I sit down to type’:         […] In fact, I am a Presbyterian: but before I was confirmed I’d read Of Human Bondage (if that phone rings one more time I am going to castrate it with nail scissors)  David Jones, In Parenthesis (London: Faber & Faber, 2018), p. xvii.

40

178 

M. LOSASSO

and became an atheist: imagine it: losing your faith because of a book by one of the most overrated writers of all time. (CPJS 240)

The poem is composed in the present tense—a fact emphasised by the title, which also doubles as the first line: ‘I sit down to type // and arise whatever for?’ What for, we discover, is to open the window: ‘My window faces west. I mean south’, Schuyler writes. ‘I push it up and, in / the guise of sunbeams, / God floods my room. / He’s in one of his / less malevolent moods. / But God? I don’t believe / in God’ (CPJS 240). It is the opening of the window that sets the speaker’s thoughts in the direction of religion but, as he digresses, he gets momentarily side-tracked by the ringing of the telephone: the vagaries of Schuyler’s thinking have been interrupted by a digressive instance of his comedia dell’ arte, which generates a sense of persona more palpably than the plain facts of Presbyterianism. The ringing phone has pulled the speaker’s thoughts away from the tangent that was sparked by the opening of the window and, in registering his annoyance in this intimate aside, he permits the reader to share in the experience of distraction: our attention, too, is momentarily pulled away from the poem. Then again, it isn’t, for this is still a line in the poem, even if it is contained within parentheses. What is happening, then, is something strange, not so much to the form of the poem, but to the time of reading. In all of these layers of digression and distraction, a question arises: when is the poem being composed? Or, rather, what is relationship between the temporality of the ‘action’ (so to speak) and the time of the poem’s composition? Ostensibly, this is a poem that documents its own process of composition (‘I sit down to type’), exemplifying what Douglas Crase calls Schuyler’s ‘working principle […] to register your attention […] in words, before it could be altered by your expectation of how things should [be]’.41 But, in fact, Schuyler has arisen before he has even started to write—‘I sit down to type // and arise whatever for?’. The poem is thus frozen, not in the moment of its composition but in a present that exists prior to the time of its coming-into-being.

 Douglas Crase, ‘A Voice Like the Day’ in Poetry Vol. 163, No. 4 (Jan 1994): pp. 228.

41

5  APERTURE: JAMES SCHUYLER’S PRECARIOUS PARENTHESES 

179

All literary texts exist in what Paul K. Saint-Amour calls the ‘the eternally present immediacy of the textual artefact’, where the ‘presence of the voice had been given a home outside the ephemerality of the body’.42 The literary present, as Saint-Amour defines it, is a proxy shelter for the writer’s voice, a surrogate for the body—in much the same way that, as we have seen, the bracketed aside might be read as a shelter for vulnerable, vernacular speech. Yet in Schuyler’s poem, the literary present is doubled or intensified: first the opening of the window, and then the opening of the parenthesis, the two working together to generate a present that is both in and beside the literary present. What is more, Schuyler’s deep, parenthetical present also registers the inherent corporeality of the literary present twice over, first because (like all texts) it houses the speaker’s voice ‘outside the ephemerality of the body’, and then because it registers the speaker’s affective responses in explicitly bodily terms: ‘I am / going to castrate it / with nail scissors’. We might then say that the bracketed aside functions as a punctum within the poem. As Barthes writes in Camera Lucida, ‘the punctum is the element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me’.43 Barthes’ notion of the punctum is particular to photography: a kind of accidental visual detail, the part of the photograph that is not intended by the photographer, but which attaches to the viewer’s attention to the point of distraction from the primary focal point. Given its accidental nature, the punctum is harder to ascribe to poetry, where images rarely appear by chance—yet the parenthesis might offer one possibility for locating it in a poem, especially given that, as Barthes explains, the Latin term punctum ‘also refers to the notion of punctuation’.44 When the nail scissors appear in the digressional punctuation of the parenthesis, they thus become—almost literally—a poetic punctum, a ‘pointed instrument’ capable of ‘wounding’, as Barthes writes, which draws the reader’s attention away from where it should be focused (the confession of faithful lapse), towards an embarrassingly corporeal image: the trimming of

42  Paul K. Saint-Amour, ‘The Literary Present’ in ELH Volume 85, Number 2 (Summer 2018): pp. 369; 371. 43  Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (London: Vintage Books, 2000), p. 27. 44  Ibid.

180 

M. LOSASSO

overgrown fingernails.45 In four clipped lines, the speaker has inserted his ­corporeal presence, alerting us to his body in situ, his nails, and even his genitals, which haunt the Freudian term castrate. In dragging the reader’s attention away from the more prosaic flow of the text, the parenthetical punctum produces what Williams calls ‘a temporary amnesia’. The parenthesis, he explains: obstructs reading by inducing temporary amnesia in its readers; the inconvenience divides meaningful passages in two, distancing text from context, distancing the immediate past from the present as though both writer and reader stood helpless as this diabolical force wiped their short term memories clean.46

When Schuyler returns from his castration fantasy, we have lost the thread of the poem’s primary flow: ‘and became an atheist’. The effect is one of a ‘cleaving in the mind’, to paraphrase the opening of Emily Dickinson’s ‘The Lost Thought’, in which, as she writes, ‘The thought behind I strove to join / Unto the thought before’.47 The disorientation produced by Schuyler’s parentheses demands that we go back to the line before the opening bracket, in order to pick up this ‘lost thought’, to recall how we arrived at atheism in the first place. But then, how far back do we need to go? Will the line immediately preceding the bracket—‘Of Human Bondage’—suffice, or will we need to follow the thread of the poem all the way back to the root of the sentence? In this way, the parenthesis structurally parallels the speaker’s personal journey from religion to atheism: how far back, in his own life, does he need to go to reach the root of his atheism? Was it really Of Human Bondage that triggered this loss of faith, or might it have been set off by an earlier incident? There also, of course, remains the possibility that we don’t go back at all because often we feel that the momentum of rhythm and flow is paramount to the experience of 45  Ibid. That the nail scissors should comprise a punctum is especially apt, given that, for Barthes, the punctum is so often figured through an attention to fingernails: ‘One of them holds a gun that rests on his thigh (I can see his nails)’; ‘many of the men photographed by Nadar have long fingernails’; ‘the grace of the punctum, is Tzara’s hand resting on the doorframe: a large hand whose nails are anything but clean’; ‘Warhol […] offers his hands to read, quite openly; and the punctum is not the gesture but the slightly repellent substance of those spatulate nails’. Barthes, Camera Lucida, pp. 25; 35; 45. 46  Williams, ‘Reading the Parenthesis’, p. 59. 47  Emily Dickinson, The Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. R. W. Franklin (Cambridge, Mass.; London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 379.

5  APERTURE: JAMES SCHUYLER’S PRECARIOUS PARENTHESES 

181

reading of a poem (and perhaps, with the speaker, we don’t want to dwell on childhood and religious lapse—better to plough on in sinful determination). In which case, we keep going, at the expense of the poem’s narrative, perhaps, but in deference to its staccato rhythm (‘the articulation of the body, of the tongue, not that of meaning, of language’, to recall Barthes), which is heightened by the transformation of another grammatical mark into rhythmic notation, the colon: ‘and became an atheist: / imagine it: losing your / faith because of a book’. Displacing the time of reading, the parenthesis-as-punctum creates what I want to call a radical present: a present tense that the aperture of the bracket is uniquely capable of opening onto. Given that this poem (like all literary texts) necessarily exists in the literary present, the experience housed within the brackets exists, to return to Ward’s phrase, in a ‘timeless, deep space parenthesis’, a suspended node of the present, that nestles both in and beside the various layers of presentness created by the poem (including the reader’s present, at the time of reading). To return to Dickinson’s term, this radical present therefore cleaves a temporal rift within the poem: it creates a delay, severing the main flow of the text in two, pressing one half somewhere into the future, the other half out of our minds and into the past through a ‘temporary amnesia’. At the same time, however, the parenthesis also cleaves these layers of the present, in the sense that it sticks them back together: housed within the ‘disposable’ space of the bracket, the parenthetical section prevents the rest of the text from ever really pushing back into the past or pressing forward into the future. Layered time has been punctured by the deep and floating space of the parenthesis so that, even as we inhabit our own present, the poem is able to open out onto the present of the speaker, rupturing—and then, at almost the same moment, suturing—this multi-layered temporality. Schuyler’s longest parenthetical intrusion appears in the poem ‘Dining Out with Doug and Frank’, where a single bracketed ‘aside’ spans 37 lines of verse. Here, again, brackets work to disrupt the poem’s temporality: by playing with the temporary amnesia that they induce Schuyler transforms the parentheses into what we might call a subconscious mnemonic device, something capable of dredging up buried memories. The poem opens with an O’Harian burlesque of pop-cultural observation: Not quite yet. First, around the corner for a visit to the Bella Landauer Collection

182 

M. LOSASSO

of printed ephemera: luscious lithos and why did Fairy Soap vanish and Crouch and Fitzgerald survive? Fairy Soap was once a household word! (CPJS 244)

Schuyler appears to be deferring the main event, the dinner with Doug and Frank, as part of a narrative strategy, taking the reader with him en route to the restaurant: not quite yet, he seems to be saying, because first I have to get there, from ‘Broadway and West 74th’, via the New York Historical Society (which houses the ‘Bella Landauer Collection’), and around ‘Central Park’. But then the poem shifts to ‘Part II’, and we find ourselves in the time after dinner, before it has even been served: ‘Now it’s tomorrow, / as usual’ (CPJS 245). The passage from today to tomorrow is a usual one—in the sense that it is at once normal and routine—but enjambement signals the unusualness of it being tomorrow now: a temporal impossibility, made possible by the poetic strategy of deferral, by the poem’s ability to occupy different temporalities at once, pushing backwards and forwards between the present, the past, and some expectation of the future. Dinner eventually arrives, and, having shifted from the ‘not yet’ of futurity, back to the ‘so I went’ of recollection, we realise that it was never the activity of dining out that was being deferred: so I went with Frank (the poet, he makes his dough as a librarian, botanical librarian at Rutgers and as a worker he’s a beaver: up at 5:30, home after 7, but over striped bass he said he had begun to see the unwisdom of his ways and next week will revert to the seven-hour day for which he’s paid. Good. Time and energy to write. Poetry takes it out of you, or you have to have a surge to bring to it. Words. So useful and pleasant) to dine at McFeely’s

5  APERTURE: JAMES SCHUYLER’S PRECARIOUS PARENTHESES 

183

at West 23rd and Eleventh Avenue by the West River, which is the right name for the Hudson when it bifurcates from the East River to create Manhattan “an isle of joy.” Take my word for it, don’t (shall I tell you about my friend who effectively threw himself under a train in the Times Square station? No. Too tender to touch. In fact, at the moment I’ve blocked out his name. No I haven’t: Peter Kemeny, gifted and tormented fat man) listen to anyone else. (CPJS 246)

If we remove the parentheses, the dominant line contracts to: ‘So I went with Frank to dine at McFeely’s at West 23rd and Eleventh Avenue by the West River, which is the right name for the Hudson when it bifurcates from the East River to create Manhattan “an isle of joy.” Take my word for it, don’t listen to anyone else’. According to the historical style guides, this is the important part, the rest is just ‘dead text […] the intrusive adjunct which readers quickly skim over’. Only, we don’t skim over the parenthetical sections because, in fact, they contain the real substance of the poem: our introduction to the titular Frank, the event of ‘dining out’, and Schuyler’s lapse into something like an ars poetica: ‘Poetry / takes it out of you, or you / have to have a surge to bring / to it. Words. So useful and / pleasant’.48 We don’t skim these parenthetical sections, yet Schuyler writes them in the knowledge that, conventionally, readers do. And it is in this knowledge that here, as elsewhere in the poem, Schuyler ‘buries’ his dead friends, engendering another corporeal engagement with this semantic space by literally transforming the parenthetical lines into

48  Note Schuyler’s interest in the usefulness or utility of words here, which also conditions, as I have been arguing, his experimental attitude to the parenthesis.

184 

M. LOSASSO

what Williams calls ‘dead text’.49 As Howard Moss notes, the poem becomes a kind of ‘burial ground’: In ‘Dining Out with Doug and Frank’, parentheses perform their usual grammatical function, but they also bear the burden of a unique task; they become enclosures, safety pockets of memory, each of which is a burial ground. There lies Bill Aalto, and there Peter Kemeny, and there Ally Nichols.50

It is the contemplation of death that the speaker has been staving off since the poem’s opening, but which creeps into those moments of parenthetical dislocation. Moss’ suggestion that these ‘burial grounds’ amount to ‘safe’ spaces recalls Schuyler’s ambiguous adjunct in ‘Seeking’, ‘(to be on the safe side)’, and in a sense, these brackets do become safe spaces in which Schuyler is able to face his fears: his fear of forgetting dead friends, of the death of his memory, and of his own death. Yet, there is also a sense in which these death-filled spaces store the ‘toxic waste’ that Williams identifies within the parentheses, and it may be safer (if more banal) to remain with our superficial observations on the other side. In these tender, digressional asides, Olsonian grammar (excessive colons; staccato full stops) behaves like musical notations that encourage us to linger, while the main flow chatters safely on, minimally punctuated and eminently skimmable. The poem thus registers our strange relationship to mortality by setting up these simultaneous mental channels of prattle and profundity: the layered space of the ongoing present, punctuated by the deep space of memory. It locates our desire to defer contemplation of death, to distract from it, to block it out—‘at the moment I’ve blocked out his name’—in spite of the inevitability of our attention being dragged back towards it—‘No I haven’t: Peter Kemeny’—in explicitly haptic and corporeal terms—‘Too tender to touch’. The speaker’s temporary amnesia here is mirrored by the amnesia of the parenthesis, which forces us, again, to forget the poem’s 49  This follows a tradition of placing death in parentheses. In Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, several of the main characters’ deaths are stowed in bracketed asides—‘(Mr. Ramsay, stumbling along a passage one dark morning, stretched his arms out, but Mrs. Ramsay having died rather suddenly the night before, his arms, though stretched out, remained empty)’— and, in Nabokov’s Lolita, the death of Humbert’s mother is famously registered as, simply, ‘(picnic, lightning)’. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 105; Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (London: Penguin Books, 2006), p. 8. 50  Moss, ‘James Schuyler: Whatever Is Moving’, p. 15.

5  APERTURE: JAMES SCHUYLER’S PRECARIOUS PARENTHESES 

185

main flow: these interruptions slice into the reader’s attention, troubling her relationship not only to the present—the time of reading—but to memory itself. Like Schuyler’s fear of forgetting his dead friends, the poem, with its temporal rifts, reminds the reader of the ease with which one forgets: as Schuyler writes elsewhere, ‘what / is there I have not forgot? / Or one day will forget’ (CPJS 232).

(Here, on My Desk) If, as I have been suggesting, Schuyler’s parentheses are textual windows or apertures, then what they open onto is a precarious present—a present that, as I have shown, exists suspended, both in and beside the continuous present of the poem  (like the there and now of a window view, which exists at a remove from, though coterminous with, the here and now of our situated present), and that remains precarious because of the inherently dispensable nature of the parenthesis. I borrow the term ‘precarious present’ from Lauren Berlant’s 2011 book Cruel Optimism, which ‘tracks the emergence of a precarious public sphere’.51 Documenting ‘the shifting up of economic precarity into what Giorgio Agamben calls the “planetary petty bourgeoisie”’, Berlant defines precarity as ‘a condition of dependency—as a legal term, precarious describes the situation wherein your tenancy on your land is in someone else’s hands’.52 In the ‘neoliberal feedback loop’ that has intensified over the past three decades or so, our lives, Berlant explains, are increasingly determined by states of precarity, insecurity, and ‘the instability of the ongoing present as the ground for living’.53 Her project is thus one that recognises the present as a ‘moment in extended crisis’ and that looks for ‘potential openings’ out of the ongoing present that ‘constant crisis creates’.54 Rooted in dependency, tenancy, and insecurity, Berlant’s notion of the precarious present speaks not only to Schuyler’s lived existence, marked out by temporary living conditions, but to his precarious parenthetical intrusions, which, as apertures or openings, mirror the points of egress that Berlant locates out of the ongoing present. Berlant turns to what she broadly terms ‘gestures’ as potential forms of escape from the crisis of the present. As she writes, ‘the gesture does not 51  Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011), p. 3. 52  Ibid., pp. 191–192. 53  Ibid., p. 196. 54  Ibid., p. 7.

186 

M. LOSASSO

mark time, if time is a movement forward, but makes time, holding the present open to attention and unpredicted exchange […] A situation can grow around [a gesture] or not, because it makes the smallest opening, a movement-created space [all my emphasis]’.55 Such gestures, Berlant explains, can take many forms, including ‘the situation, the episode, the interruption, the aside, the conversation, the travelogue, and the ­happening’, which manifest as ‘a disturbance, a sense genre of animated suspension—not suspended animation. [They] have a punctum, like a photograph; [they] forc[e] one to take notice, to become interested in potential changes to ordinariness’.56 The gesture, then, is the opening or aperture; the situation, interruption, or aside, the punctum that grows out from it. Or, to translate this into Schuyler’s poetry, the gesture is the bracket itself (and we might think, to use Ward’s terms, about the performative gesture of the dramatic aside), while the situation is the corporeal text (what Berlant calls the ‘aside’ or ‘interruption’)—that unfolds within. Crucially, for Berlant, these gestures open onto ‘a stretch of time that is being sensed and shaped—an impasse’, in which: one keeps moving, but one moves paradoxically, in the same space. An impasse is a holding station that doesn’t hold securely but opens out into anxiety, that dog paddling around a space whose contours remain obscure. An impasse is decompositional—in the unbound temporality of the stretch of time, it marks a delay that demands activity. The activity can produce impacts and events, but one does not know where they are leading. That delay enables us to develop gestures of composure, of mannerly transaction, of being-with in the world as well as of rejection, refusal, detachment, psychosis, and all kinds of radical negation.57

The parenthesis produces just such an impasse: it opens a syntactic space that is non-progressive. We move within that space, but always as a kind of dog-paddling because, in the ‘unbound temporality’ of the poem, the parenthesis ‘marks a delay’. If the poem is linear, the parenthesis is the culde-sac of the present; it doesn’t take us anywhere, but defers the present of the poem’s main flow into an unspecified future—or a past-present that prefigures the literary present of the time of writing (as in ‘I sit down to type’ and ‘Dining out with Doug and Frank’). Within the soft contours of the rounded brackets, the parenthesis ‘doesn’t hold securely’ but offers a  Ibid., p. 199.  Ibid., pp. 5; 195. 57  Ibid., p. 199. 55 56

5  APERTURE: JAMES SCHUYLER’S PRECARIOUS PARENTHESES 

187

version of the present that is perpetually ‘being sensed and shaped’. Yet, like the impasse, the precarious present of the parenthesis is never stagnant; rather, ‘it marks a delay that demands activity’. By interrupting the poem, by disrupting expectations of temporal and spatial progression, the parenthesis is uniquely able to alter the reader’s passive relationship to the text. The space of the impasse might be read as anxiety-inducing, stagnant, and constitutive of psychosis (states that can all be found in Schuyler’s writing—and, at times, in his attitude to constrictive parenthetical space); but it might also trigger ‘impacts and events’, freeing us from the ongoing crisis of the present without a clearly defined trajectory. In other words, while the impasse remains suspended, it also catalyses the promise of a future, even if that future remains undefined. A similar possibility is rooted in SaintAmour’s notion of the literary present: ‘Might the literary present be decoded, in some instances, as a kind of future?’, he asks.58 To answer this, Saint-Amour turns to José Esteban Muñoz, whose 2009 book Cruising Utopia, rejects Lee Edelman’s notion of the ‘queer death drive’ in favour of a model of queer futurity and sociality (as I discussed in Chap. 2). ‘In disrupting what it took to be the tyranny of the here and now’, Saint-Amour writes, ‘Muñoz’s book might find the there and then of queer futurity salted away inside the tense of the here and now, perhaps especially in the literary present’.59 In Cruising Utopia, Muñoz does find the possibility of ‘the future in the present’—buried in a poem by Schuyler:60 A photograph shows you in a London room: books, a painting, your smile, a silky tie, a suit. And more. It looks so like you and I see it every day (here, on my desk) which I don’t you. […] (CPJS 186)

Before turning to Muñoz’s reading of this poem, I want first to look at how the parenthesis functions here. The poem poses a temporal and spatial question: Where are we as we read this poem? Apart from being  Saint-Amour, ‘The Literary Present’, p. 378.  Ibid., p. 379. 60  Ibid., p. 382. 58 59

188 

M. LOSASSO

wherever our bodies happen to be at the time of reading (a situation that shouldn’t be taken for granted, since the poem—like O’Hara’s ‘For Grace, After A Party’—implicitly asks us to move beyond this location), we are with the speaker ‘(here, on my desk)’, looking at a photograph of a room in London. And yet, before we can locate ourselves in the ‘here’ of the poem, we’re thrown into the time and space of the photograph: ‘a London / room: books, a painting, / your smile, a silky / tie, a suit’. The acts of looking and reading are conflated and so, too, are the locations in which these activities occur: we are occupying several spaces at once, through the different media of photograph and poem. But the ‘here’ of the poem’s compositional time and place is given special weight: residing in the space of the brackets—and in one of the few sentences that is not enjambed across truncated lineation, thus retaining syntactical integrity over a full line—‘here’ creates an obtrusive rift in the poem’s form, puncturing the unfolding narrative, cutting into the main flow, and drawing the reader deeper into the space inhabited by the speaker. If ‘here’ denotes a particular space it also signals a particular time: here, now. Existing both in and beside, ‘here’ is figured as a suspended and precarious present, embedded within the poem, while remaining at a remove from the ostensible focal point of the London room. Yet, if this is a poem that exists on the temporal plane of the radical present, it is also a poem that changes gear between past and future—a shift that is activated by the delay that the parenthesis produces. After establishing the precarious present, Schuyler moves to a recollection of the past:         […] Last Friday night was grand. We went out, we came back, we went wild. You slept. Me too. The pup woke you and you dressed and walked him. When you left, I was sleeping. When I woke there was just time to make the train to a country dinner and talk about ecstasy. Which I think comes in two sorts: that which you know “Now I’m ecstatic”

5  APERTURE: JAMES SCHUYLER’S PRECARIOUS PARENTHESES 

189

like my strange scream last Friday night. And another kind, that you know only in retrospect: “Why, that joy I felt and didn’t think about when his feet were in my lap, or when I looked down and saw his slanty eyes shut, that too was ecstasy. Nor is there necessarily a downer from it.” […] (CPJS 186)

Schuyler plays, again, with memory: we have not, in fact, moved back into the past, but remain in the ‘here’ of the present, recalling the minutiae of events from a week before. But then, as the speaker wanders through his recollections, he turns to ecstasy as a trope through which to conflate these temporal states: on the one hand, he explains, ecstasy is an intense experience in the present (‘Now I’m ecstatic / like my strange scream / last Friday night’); on the other hand, it is something ‘that you only know in retrospect’. In this temporal doubling, ecstasy does precisely what the parentheses do in Schuyler’s poems: it opens up a precarious present that is ‘perceived, first, affectively’, as Berlant puts it, and then ‘sensed and under constant revision’.61 For Muñoz, it is the bifurcation of ecstasy in Schuyler’s poem that contains the possibility of the future in the present. He writes that: To know ecstasy in the way in which the poem’s speaker does is to have a sense of timeliness’s motion, to understand a temporal unity that is important to what I attempt to describe as the time of queerness. Queerness’s time is a stepping out of the linearity of straight time. Straight time is a self-­ naturalizing temporality. Straight time’s “presentness” needs to be phenomenologically questioned. Queerness’s ecstatic and horizontal temporality is a path and a movement to a greater openness in the world.62

To step out of the linearity of straight time and into timelessness’s motion is to enter the dog-paddling space of the impasse, since doing so  Berlant, Cruel Optimism, p. 4.  José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York & London: New York University Press, 2009), p. 25. 61 62

190 

M. LOSASSO

will also alter our relation to the future, a future in which Schuyler looks forward to ‘the perfectibility / of man’. As he announces later in the poem: ‘I really do believe / future generations can / live without the in- / tervals of anxious / fear we know between our / bouts and strolls of / ecstasy’ (CPJS 186–7). ‘When “future generations” are invoked’, Muńoz writes, ‘the poet is signalling a queerness to come, a way of being in the world that is glimpsed through reveries in a quotidian life that challenges the dominance of an affective world, a present, full of anxiousness and fear’.63 Indeed, for Berlant, the anxiety of the impasse is positively translated into a sense of ‘being-with in the world’ via models of queer phenomenology that are concerned with: following the tracks of longing and belonging to create new openings for how to live, and to offer the wild living or outside belonging that already takes place as opportunities for others to re-imagine the practice of making and building lives. In this work social attachments are always working in the now and are active and responsive without being expressive, necessarily, of ideologies, or truths, or anything.64

This is the ‘literary futurate’, to return to Saint Amour, an ‘ekphrastic present [that] could trigger but not harbor futurity’.65 Through the ekphrastic (and ecstatic) present—the radical present opened up by the deep space parenthesis—the poem does not yearn for a future—does not attempt to contain, map, or even imagine a future—but triggers the possibility of one. As such, the impasse contained by the bracket is never stagnant in Schuyler’s poetry, just as it is never really superfluous or disposable; rather, like an open window, it permits a view out of the ongoingness of the present, the routine, the everyday.

To Go Out There, into the View At the start of this chapter, I suggested that Schuyler’s poetry is invested in the everyday. Yet, as an attention to his temporally and spatially disruptive parentheses have revealed, Schuyler often constructs a sense of the quotidian only to focus on the moments that derail it. His poems are not simply lazy meditations, to paraphrase Silverberg, but remain actively open  Ibid.  Berlant, Cruel Optimism, p. 198. 65  Ibid., p. 383. 63 64

5  APERTURE: JAMES SCHUYLER’S PRECARIOUS PARENTHESES 

191

to the chance moments that break routine, like the ringing of a telephone, or the memory of a dead friend, or the rush of ‘damp air’ through a window. And if, as I have shown, Schuyler uses parentheses as a formal strategy for breaking the ongoingness of routine, then it is the window that functions as the thematic counterpart: again and again, Schuyler alights on an unexpected detail through a window view, which throws his thinking into new and unexpected directions. Thus, we have come full circle: the parenthesis and the window in Schuyler’s poetry are not only functionally comparable (for their ability to open and close, to let in air, and to ‘shed light’), they also perform the same disruptive role, breaking routine, disintegrating divisions between ‘here’ and ‘there’, ‘now’ and ‘then’, and, in so doing, containing the utopian promise of the ‘literary futurate’. One of the last works to appear in Schuyler’s Collected Poems captures this disruptive relationship. Titled, simply, ‘A View’, the poem is one of Schuyler’s typical window compositions: seated indoors, beside a window (placed in beside), Schuyler tracks what he can see, looking not only through, but at and within, the frame. Like a diary entry, the poem is subtitled with a place name and a date: ‘Little Portion / Tuesday, May 10, 1988’.66 An Episcopalian Friary on Long Island, Little Portion is where Schuyler’s ashes would be interred (contrary to his wish in ‘The Morning of the Poem’ to become ‘worm food’), but for now, he is only visiting (Fig. 5.3): How come a thickish tree casts so thin a shadow and that sign-supporting pipe none at all? (here comes Tom) The road dries off, lighter and lighter (there goes Tom, in the red car, after flour). In the further distance, a baby-blue camper, after reeds and dead tree trunks, 66  Schuyler also logged an entry in his diary on this day, which reads (in its entirety): ‘Little Portion / May 10, 1988 // at midnight I will rise to give you thanks… // Noon office’, Schuyler, The Diary of James Schuyler, p. 219. The elliptical note signals just how fluid the distinction between diary entry and poem are for Schuyler, whose poems often offer a comprehensive account of the events of a day, and whose diaries often read like poetic fragments.

192 

M. LOSASSO

Fig. 5.3  Little Portion Friary, Mount Sinai, New York. Photo: Iracaz peeled and weathered, and the creosoted phone poles Closer, on grass, the sunlight breathes: fades and brightens, brightens and fades, sparkles yellow-green on green Out of nowhere, a breeze tosses the junk (soon to be leaves) on twig ends. Here comes Charlie, the cat. Closer, window screen and a six-light window sash pushed part way up another makes a fifteen-light window

5  APERTURE: JAMES SCHUYLER’S PRECARIOUS PARENTHESES 

193

framed by thick white net. Closer, a bag says, The Cellar. Closer, a pair of slippers, and (khaki canvas) a Maine hiking shoe invites my foot to go out there, into the view of May 10th, 1988          Here comes Tom (he got the flour) and there sits Charlie, a white cat on a green hummock. (CPJS 417–418)

Gazing through the window, Schuyler notices the shadows of trees and pipes, faraway cars, telephone poles and ‘dead tree trunks’. The arrival, and subsequent departure, of ‘Tom’ (Schuyler’s friend Tom Carey, who had recently joined the Brothers of Saint Francis and was living at Little Portion) are contained in brackets, creating small parenthetical intrusions that are both part of Schuyler’s view, and also separate from it, signalling a puncture in the routine of idle watching. After Tom drives away, Schuyler’s field of vision begins to narrow, like a camera pulling focus: far away, we see ‘a baby blue camper’ then ‘closer’, Schuyler tells us, and we can see sunlight sparkling on the grass, leaves lifting on the breeze, and a cat called Charlie. ‘Closer’ again and we’re looking at the ‘window screen’: Schuyler counts its six panes, but then observes that it is ‘pushed part way up’, so that the intersecting panes create a further nine, which are ‘framed by thick white net’. And now we’re in the room, ‘closer’ again, this time looking at a bag that reads ‘The Cellar’ and a pair of slippers and a ‘Maine hiking shoe’, which ‘invites my foot to go / out there, into the view’. The line abruptly curtails Schuyler’s vagaries of looking and implies a desire to step, not out of the door but through the window itself, a suicidal subtext (which we have already encountered in ‘The Payne Witney Poems’) that is reinforced by the word ‘invitation’, implying something sought-after, but forbidden. And then Schuyler marks the date: ‘May 10th, 1988’. Secreted in the poem, this reads less like a diary entry and more like a suicide note or an epitaph: there is a finality to the sudden intrusion of the date, like a mark of posterity, preempting the sudden, floating appearance of the word ‘Here’, which in turn seems to signal Schuyler’s corporeal presence,

194 

M. LOSASSO

having stepped through the window—and out of the poem’s lineation— and suspended in descent. Only, as the next stanza reassures us, it is not Schuyler who has left, but Tom who has arrived: ‘Here // comes Tom’. As in ‘A photograph’, the word ‘here’ has ruptured the ongoing present, which Schuyler senses and shapes through the frame of the window. If the gesture is the open window, then the situation is the invitation to step through it: the ‘(khaki canvas) […] Maine hiking shoe’ has created a punctum, an incidental detail, that disrupts the rhythm of watching and produces a kinetic sense of release from the stagnation of ‘Sitting. Staring. Thinking blankly’. And if there is a suicidal subtext buried in the desire to step through the window, there is also an exhilarating promise contained in the notion—the potentiality—of a corporeal interaction (as with Schuyler’s ‘moonlit piss’). Schuyler’s conception of the window not merely as a frame but as a functional aperture—as something that opens and closes, as something through which one could, if only in theory, pass— makes possible his vagaries of looking and, by extension, ‘wild living’ (to echo Berlant). And it this, too, that shapes his use of the parenthesis. To be ‘locked […] inside a paren’ is, indeed, to be hemmed in; but to open the parentheses—or to push up the window and let in the smell of autumn smoke or God in a sunbeam—is to puncture the ongoing present, to establish oneself ‘here, now’, and to create a kind of ‘animated suspension—not suspended animation’, to recall Berlant’s distinction, in which precariousness can become a mode of living on. If, as Moss argues, Schuyler’s parentheses store dead text, if they act as a kind of burial ground, then it would seem prescient that Schuyler should construct a parenthetical poem at Little Portion, the place where his body (or, rather, his ashes) would be laid to rest three years after its composition. But if Schuyler’s poems register death—and they do—then it is part of a subtle strategy for reaffirming life. ‘I really like /dining out and last night was / especially fine’, writes Schuyler, towards the end of ‘Dining Out with Doug and Frank’. ‘A full moon / when we parted hung over / Frank and me. Why is this poem / so long? And full of death? / Frank and Doug are young and / beautiful and have nothing / to do with that’ (CPJS 250). Schuyler’s confrontations with death are windows onto the impasse—moments of mortal consciousness, which puncture the ongoingness of the present—but these are not dismal burial grounds. Rather, as in these lines from ‘The Morning of the Poem’ these moments are:

5  APERTURE: JAMES SCHUYLER’S PRECARIOUS PARENTHESES 

195

     […] the truth, the absolute Of feeling, of knowing what you know, that is     the poem, like The house for sale buried in a luxuriance of      overgrown foundation planting […] (CPJS 262).

What is buried, in Schuyler’s parentheses, are moments of absolute truth of feeling—that, he says, is the poem. And just as the poem-as-house is buried in the ‘luxuriance of / overgrown foundation planting’, so the parentheses are buried in the rich observational details of the verse. Shining a bright, Paterian, light on the present, such ecstatic moments—such windows out of the routine and into the unbound temporality of the impasse— are, in the end, reminders for Schuyler that ‘I [...]  am / still alive and breathing / deeply’ and ‘that I think / is a miracle’.

CHAPTER 6

Conclusion: After the New York School

When Geoff Ward wrote the postscript to his 1993 study, Statutes of Liberty, critical reception of the New York School and its subsequent generations had not yet crystallised. Delimiting the original New York School as ‘a loosely collective practice from O’Hara’s and Ashbery’s time at Harvard in the late 1940s, to 1976, the year when Ashbery won all three major American literary awards for his Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror’, Ward traces a lineage of New York School inheritors, from Ted Berrigan in New  York, to the British poets Tom Raworth, Lee Harwood and John James, to the language poets Charles Bernstein, Clark Coolidge, Ron Silliman, Diane Ward, and others.1 Six years after the publication of Statutes of Liberty, the book’s second edition was released with an updated postscript. Picking up where the 1993 edition left off, this later addendum continued to trace the legacy of the New  York School with greater attention to the language poets. Discussing Barbara Guest (whose name had been conspicuously absent from the first edition), Ward suggests that ‘if one alternative model of the “School” would feature Barbara Guest, another might come up to the present day so as to view Language writing not as an inheritor or successor

1  Geoff Ward, Statutes of Liberty: The New York School of Poets (London: Palgrave, 1999), p. 9; pp. 177–189.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Losasso, Poetry, Architecture, and the New York School, Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41520-3_6

197

198 

M. LOSASSO

but actually as a part of the New  York School in an expanded sense’.2 Ward’s ‘expanded sense’ of the language poets includes Joan Retallack, Lisa Robertson, and Leslie Scalapino—none of whom, he notes, offered ‘work that was dependent on New York School traditions, but all offering poems that could not be quite the way they are, had not certain styles and their theoretical implications been developed by John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara’.3 The remainder of Ward’s 1999 postscript is given over to Ashbery’s 1990s publications, the best of which, he opines, is among ‘the poet’s most multi-faceted and subtle writing since the 1970s’—an indication that Ward’s temporal location of the first-generation New York School (from the 1940s to 1976) had already shifted by the turn of the millennium.4 Both of Ward’s postscripts—but particularly the later one—expose the challenges inherent in any discussion that takes after the New York School as its subject. As Ward’s definitions become increasingly capacious, the possibility of a post–New York School trajectory raises such questions as: What might it mean for there to be an ‘after’ the New York School? When might this ‘post’ period have begun? And when (or if) concluded? Who counts as a post–New York School poet? And how do we discuss this ‘after’ period in terms of successive ‘schools’ or temporal phases, when some of its ‘founding members’ were still publishing well into the 2000s? By now, at least, the notion of a second-generation New York School is well-established, thanks, in part, to Daniel Kane’s Don’t Ever Get Famous: Essays on New York Writing After the New York School (2007) and Yasmine Shamma’s Spatial Poetics: Second Generation New  York School Poetry (2018). In a sense, Shamma’s monograph—though it predates this book by nearly five  years—is the conclusion to Poetry, Architecture and the New York School: it picks up where O’Hara, Ashbery, Guest, and Schuyler leave off, looking at the architextual shapes and forms of the poems composed by the so-called second-generation New York School poets, namely Ron Padgett, Alice Notley, Ted Berrigan, and Joe Brainard. Explicitly positioning these poets as the inheritors of the O’Harian (rather than Ashberyan) line, Shamma takes time to think through the implications of later generations of New York Schools—of how they have

 Ibid., p. 197.  Ibid., p. 192. 4  Ibid., p. 204. 2 3

6  CONCLUSION: AFTER THE NEW YORK SCHOOL 

199

been formed and what it might mean to be a New York School poet. She offers the following commodious definition: The broader New  York School includes the work of any poet, living and writing in New York City from 1950 to the present, which, I argue, formally registers a sensitivity towards the urban and/or built environment, thematically showcasing the influence of Frank O’Hara’s or Kenneth Koch’s directly, colloquial, quotidian poetry.5

Shamma’s definition is even more capacious that Ward’s—and tighter only than Ted Berrigan’s, which spills out of these already loose boundaries, to open out even beyond the urban specificity of New York City: I used to tell people they could join for five dollars, and they would write a certain kind of poem. Then I had an idea that the New York School consisted of whomever I thought. And I could have that idea, see, because there was no New York School. I didn’t have to consult John Ashbery to see if it was alright to think Philip Whalen from the West Coast, was in it, too.6

Berrigan’s quip points to the necessity of the second generation in enshrining the first: a reverse engineering in which both the first and second waves become mutually dependent upon one another. This implies that the very notion of ‘the New York School’ is predicated on its ‘after’ image (indeed, the first-generation New  York School was, itself, ‘established’ in relation to the existing—and equally spurious—New York School of painters) and on the possibility—perhaps even the necessity—that this lineage might wend its way into the future in expansive ways. But even when we do agree on successive waves of generations, how do we then agree where each generation starts and ends, who is ‘admitted’ into each successive ‘school’, and who, furthermore, is the gatekeeper? Do we include all of the poets who formed part of a particular coterie or social crowd? Or do we include poets who have simply been influenced by the New York School? If so, how explicit does this influence need to be? Must the tag relate to New York City, or can it spill out across the United States, or even into the United Kingdom, Europe, and beyond? And is there such a thing as a New  York School today? When these questions arose at a 5  Yasmine Shamma, Spatial Poetics: Second Generation New  York School Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), p. 10. 6  Ted Berrigan, quoted in Spatial Poetics, p. 5.

200 

M. LOSASSO

Network for New York School Studies conference in 2018—co-organised by Shamma and attended by Ward—what became immediately clear was how little consensus there continues to be. While some poets and critics were adamant that the New York School was historical, others argued that the tag continues to be relevant, but only with respect to poets living and working in New York (or else closely associated with the city), while others were even looser with the term, insisting that there are still waves of New York School poets, living and working around the world—and that this is consistent with the ‘school’s’ original ethos. I am not concerned, in this concluding chapter, with having the last word on successive generations of New York School poets: what is to be gained by codifying a School who have, since their inception, resisted programmatic identity? Indeed, my own project has, to a large extent, been less concerned with insisting on the biographical details of the ‘School’ itself, and more interested in what this loose group of poets (however we choose to identify them) can reveal about the relationship between poetry and architecture. It is in this spirit, then, that I want to think about ‘after the New York School’. Like Ward, I turn to the poets who do not necessarily work in an explicit New York School tradition, but whose poems, nevertheless, ‘could not be quite the way they are, had not certain styles and their theoretical implications been developed by John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara’—as well as Barbara Guest and James Schuyler. In other words, I want to think about how the ‘modest and monumental’ poetry of the New York School offered an architectural sensibility ‘for poets in search of a voice of their own’, to borrow the phrase that Ashbery uses to describe O’Hara’s work. If I began this book by suggesting that the New York School poets appeared at a decisive moment in the twentieth century’s archi-poetic trajectory, then this final chapter seeks, albeit speculatively, to look at some of the directions that this course has taken in the wake of the New York School (or in what might called the long New York School tradition), and to think about the ways in which an architectural approach to poetics has continued to trickle down through later poetry— that is, how contemporary poets might be working after the New York School, not only in terms of a ‘post’ temporality but also in terms of influence. In his seminal work, The Anxiety of Influence (1973), Harold Bloom posits a theory of literary influence as an oedipal struggle: younger poets always casting an anxious glance over their shoulders in their desperation to shake—even to ‘murder’—their literary fathers by turning the

6  CONCLUSION: AFTER THE NEW YORK SCHOOL 

201

precursor into a son. Strong poets, Bloom argues (and he includes Ashbery), can do this because, to borrow Edward Said’s precis of Bloom’s later companion book, A Map of Misreading, their ‘effect on the future is practically biological; the future is his [sic.] production (progeny) just as his [sic.] present is of his [sic.] own anxious making’.7 The possibility of literary progeny (both forward looking and retroactive) is, as I argued in Chap. 2, at the heart of O’Hara’s poetry, and of all the New York School poets, his influence may be the most visible today. Yet in talking about influence—in writing after the New York School—I do not wish to repeat these anxious father-son relations: like O’Hara, I want, rather, to reformulate them. Looking at a number of (largely female) post-modern American (and Canadian) poets—who, for the most part, refuse to conform to poetic clubs and coteries, and for whom the question of influence remains useful without being panic-inducing—I want to offer an altogether less anxious model of influence: one that we might read as the gathering of loose poetic threads, or the collective construction of more expansive, and more accommodating, poetic spaces. In so doing, I seek to demonstrate the ripple-effect of the New York School, and to reveal that, far from an isolated phenomenon, the relationship between poetry and architecture continues to be relevant—perhaps more so now than ever. What follows, then, is not a comprehensive lineage, traced directly from the original New York School to the present day (even a single volume would not be sufficient to contain that project) but a series of sketches towards something like a liveable space.

A Family Resemblance There is little to add to Shamma’s comprehensive work on the role of space and place in the work of the second-generation New York School poets: her ground-breaking book deftly reveals how ‘this avant-garde American poetry ambitiously strives to create space for the “feeling” of living within small and often poor quarters, within the small space of stanzas’—or, as Alice Notley writes of Ted Berrigan’s poems, ‘New York bricks and human density have become the interior walls of someone always

7  Edward Said, ‘The Poet as Oedipus’ in The New York Times, 13 April 1975, https:// archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/11/01/specials/bloom-misreading. html. Accessed 10 March 2023.

202 

M. LOSASSO

reading and thinking. Outside-in’.8 It was out of—or in tandem with— this second-generation of New York School poets that the language poets emerged: another loosely assembled group of avant-garde writers who, as Stephen Collis notes, took the twentieth century’s ‘increasing interest in the material out of which poetry is made’ to its fullest conclusion.9 The relationship between the language poets (who, as Ward suggests, might be read not simply as ‘an inheritor or successor but actually as a part of the New York School in an expanded sense’—a designation I do not subscribe to, but which nevertheless reveals a close kinship) and the first-generation New York School has also been well-documented in literary scholarship, though I would like, briefly, to comment on a few significant points of intersection, in relation to architecture and dwelling. Writing in a blog post in 2005, language poet Ron Silliman offered the metaphor of a rock making ripples in a pool to describe the motion of subsequent New York School generations: If that first stone was, as I would argue, Frank O’Hara, then by the time of the 3rd 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, 4th generation, let alone 5th or 6th, which is about what we would be at right now.10

Silliman neither denies the existence of, nor attempts to pinpoint, these subsequent generations, but in spatialising this process through the image of ripples bouncing back and intersecting with one another he does gesture towards the problems that inhere in any approach that reads the various New  York School generations in terms of a clearly delineated—and linear—trajectory. In fact (and this is close to Ward’s point about the broader influence of the New York School), many of the poets who may have been considered second, third, fourth, fifth (and so on) generations 8  Alice Notley in Ted Berrigan, The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan, eds. Alice Notley, Anselm Berrigan & Edmund Berrigan (Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press, 2007), p. 4. 9  Stephen Collis, ‘“The Frayed Trope of Rome”: Poetic Architecture in Robert Duncan, Ronald Johnson, and Lisa Robertson’ in Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal Vol. 35, No. 4, a special issue: LITERATURE & ARCHITECTURE (December 2002): p. 160. 10  Ron Silliman, Silliman’s Blog, November 23 2005, https://www.writing.upenn.edu/ epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2005/11/jordan-davis-curtis-faville-ended-up. html. Accessed 01 March 2023.

6  CONCLUSION: AFTER THE NEW YORK SCHOOL 

203

may also have been claimed by other poetic trends or movements, including language, post-language, the abstract lyric, conceptual poetry, flarf, digital poetics, ecopoetics, and so on. One of the canonical texts of the language tradition, Silliman’s ‘The Dwelling Place’—an anthology of nine poets (Bruce Andrews, Barbara Baracks, Clark Coolidge, Lee De Jasu, Ray DiPalma, Robert Grenier, David Melnick, Barrett Watten, and Silliman himself), which appeared in the ethnopoetics journal Alcheringa in 1975—reveals the significance of Barthesian (and, implicitly, Heideggerian) notions of dwelling and linguistic materiality to the language ethos. In his article ‘Surprised by Sign (Notes on Nine)’, which appears at the end of the anthology, Silliman suggests that what binds these poets is ‘a fix-in-time of writing which bears a family resemblance’. In the New York School spirit, then, there is something loose and implicitly intimate (‘family resemblance’) in the early formation of this language ‘school’ or camp.11 This family resemblance is distilled into the drive ‘to diminish the reference’ of words, through ‘the creation of non-referring structures […] disruption of context […] forcing the meanings in upon themselves until they cancel out or melt. By effacing one or more elements of referential language (a tactic commonly employed by the Russian Futurists)’, Silliman writes, ‘the balance within and between the words shifts, redistributes’.12 To articulate this ‘diminished referentiality’, Silliman quotes a section from Barthes’ 1953 essay ‘Is There Any Poetic Writing?’: It is the Word which is ‘the dwelling place’… it shines with an infinite freedom and prepares to radiate towards innumerable uncertain and possible connections. Fixed connections being abolished, the word is left only with a vertical project, it is like a monolith, or a pillar which plunges into a totality of meanings, reflexes and recollections….13

The ellipses are Silliman’s, and they highlight his desire to draw out Barthes’ architectural analogies (if also betraying a wilful misreading of the original text, as Danny Snelson has noted): discarding the sentences that appear between Barthes’ invocation of the word as dwelling place and the word as monolith, Silliman condenses these metaphors into a single 11  Ron Silliman, ‘Surprised by Sign (Notes on Nine)’ in Alcheringa Volume 1, Number 2, (1975): p. 118. 12  Ibid. 13  Ibid.

204 

M. LOSASSO

articulation, so as to stress the spatial, structural, and material valency of the word in modern poetry.14 Silliman’s poetic contributions to the anthology include a number of concrete poems, one of which is constructed out of the words ‘builder / the building the roof girder / of pyramidologists / portcullis’, while Barbara Barack’s contribution contains references to a ‘geodesic dome’ and ‘a rather milky city’, and an excerpt from Barrett Watten’s prose piece Opera–Works opens with the line: ‘You’re inside a building and then outside it’—all of which bear the palpable trace of Ashbery, whose collections The Tennis Court Oath and Three Poems were crucial touchstones for the language poets.15 Four years after the publication of ‘The Dwelling Place’, Charles Bernstein and Bruce Andrews would cite (without commentary) the same passage from Barthes’ ‘Is There Any Poetic Writing?’ in the opening to the second issue of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E journal—an indication of the extent to which the text had been fully imbibed by the language movement.16 However much the excerpt may have been distorted by Silliman, Andrews, and Bernstein, the fact remains that, from the outset, the language poets sought to establish dwelling (as well as space, structure, and materiality) as a guiding poetic ethos. This is surely, in part, what Paul Hoover refers to, when he notes, in the introduction to the second edition of his anthology, Postmodern American Poetry, that ‘language poetry raises technique to a position of privilege […] Rather than empty language as a transparent window onto experience, the language poet prizes the material nature of words’.17 Hoover’s aptly architectural analogy echoes the traditional tension between beauty and utility that governed architectural discourse in the seventeenth century (as I discussed in the introduction). Here, however, the historical relationship has been fully reversed: where architecture had reached for poetry to elevate itself above technical craft, language poets increasingly looked to architecture in order to privilege technique. And if this impulse had been implicit in the poetry of New York School, it was explicit in the 14  For more on Silliman’s misreading of Barthes, see: Danny Snelson, ‘The Dwelling Place / Surprised by Sign’ on Simultaneously Agitated Space (Blogspot), http://simultaneouslyagitatedspace.blogspot.com/2007/04/dwelling-place.html. Accessed 02 March 2023. 15  Silliman, ‘Surprised by Sign (Notes on Nine)’, pp. 115; 106; 117. 16  Bruce Andrews & Charles Bernstein, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Volume 1, Number 2 (April 1978): p. 1. 17  Paul Hoover, Postmodern American Poetry, ed. Paul Hoover (New York; London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2013), p. xliii.

6  CONCLUSION: AFTER THE NEW YORK SCHOOL 

205

Guest and Ashbery-inspired work of the language poets, who understood themselves, as Bruce Andrews puts it, as ‘Technicians of the Social’. In his essay ‘Poetry as Explanation, Poetry as Praxis’, Andrews describes poets as architects of poethical space. Setting forth a ‘conception of writing as politics, not writing about politics’ (an echo of O’Hara’s ‘I hope the poem to be the subject, and not just about it’ (CPOH 497)), Andrews advocates for forms of writing that might bring the ‘building blocks & limits of meaning & sense back inside the writing, giving you greater distance by putting them within the internal circuitry’.18 In this spatialised conception, Andrews reveals the extent to which language poets understood the poetic text as possessing an inside (note the parallel with Guest’s essay ‘Shifting Persona’), which renders the poem not referential (not ‘about politics’), but self-signifying (‘as politics’). ‘Limits aren’t located until they’re pushed’, Andrews writes: Rewriting the social body—as a body to body transition: to write into operation ‘a reading body’ which is more & more self-avowedly social. Lay bare the device, spurn the facts as not self-evident […] stop repressing the active construction, the making of meaning, the making of sense—social sense.19

Language poetry may be more programmatic, and more explicitly political, than the New York School, yet in its commitment to the reading body, to the social, and to active construction, we can hear the resounding echoes, not only of Guest but of Ashbery—who ‘lay[s] bare’ the structures of his poems, even in the process of ‘active construction’—as well as O’Hara and Schuyler, whose poems are guided by the drive to create socially productive openings and to get the body into the spaces produced by the poem. The pervasive New York School fascination with openness and openings is echoed in the work of the language poet Lyn Hejinian, who—like O’Hara, Ashbery, Guest, and Schuyler—is invested in the construction of forms that resist closure, in architecturally nuanced ways. In her essay ‘The Rejection of Closure’, Hejinian describes the way in which ‘the experience of feeling overwhelmed by undifferentiated material is like claustrophobia. One feels panicky, closed in’. On the other hand, she explains, ‘the open 18  Bruce Andrews, Paradise and Method (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1996), p. 50. 19  Ibid.

206 

M. LOSASSO

text is one which both acknowledges the vastness of the world and is formally differentiating. It is the form that opens it, in that case’.20 In rejecting closed form, Hejinian implicitly evokes Olson’s open field poetics, yet her preoccupation with ‘language [a]s a passageway’ (a notion that she borrows from Lacan), and her analogy between writing poetry and building ‘a sequence of steps […] tunnels, or windows’, is more evocative of Guest’s attention to architecture’s transitory spaces, which also seeks to release a sense of ‘ordained claustrophobia’.21 Like Guest’s, Hejinian’s poetry is shaped by the sense that the ‘progress of a line or sentence, or a series of lines or sentences, has spatial properties as well as temporal properties. The spatial density is both vertical and horizontal […] The very idea of reference is spatial: over here is the word, over there is the thing at which the word is shooting amiable love-arrows’.22 If the early language poets attempted to locate poetic dwelling in the areferential materiality of the word—whereby, as Marjorie Perloff writes, ‘poetry is not speech-based but a form of writing; it cannot represent the full presence of the spoken voice’—then for the contemporary Canadian poet Lisa Robertson, this possibility is reversed.23 ‘Architecture’, Robertson writes, ‘can only interpret, fix or abstract the fluency of the linguistic given’. ‘The poem’, on the other hand, ‘transforms th[e] vernacular into a prosodic gift […] In poems and thorough vernaculars, citizens begin themselves because only here speech still evades quantification, escapes the enumerating sign, and follows language towards its ear’.24 Robertson’s notion of the poem as a ‘commodious’ ‘shelter’ for the vernacular has guided the present book from first to last: her writing—on the ‘soft architecture’ of scaffolding, cabins, and domestic space—has appeared in almost every chapter, providing a lens through which to articulate my own sense of the fundamentally corporeal relationship between architecture and the poetry of the New York School. Thus, while the language poets may more properly be understood as the inheritors of the (largely Ashberyan and Guestian) New York School archi-poetic ethos, it is Robertson’s post-language lyric that, I argue, has more in common with the New  York School’s capacious poems, in its capacity to house the  Lynn Hejinian, ‘The Rejection of Closure’ in Postmodern American Poetry, p. 894.  Ibid., pp. 895–897. 22  Ibid. 23  Marjorie Perloff, ‘Unoriginal Genius: Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project as Paradigm for the New Poetics’ in Études anglaises Volume 61, Issue 2 (2008): p. 230. 24  Lisa Robertson, Nilling (Toronto: Bookthug, 2012), pp. 74; 83. 20 21

6  CONCLUSION: AFTER THE NEW YORK SCHOOL 

207

speaking, breathing body, and in its potential to open up something like a liveable space. Robertson is among the poets whose work, Ward suggests, ‘could not be quite the way [it is], had not certain styles and their theoretical implications been developed by John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara’. In one sense, Robertson might be read as another satellite of the langue poets: as Zachariah Wells has noted, Robertson is ‘steeped in the canon of American Language Poetry, but […] has taken pains to differentiate herself from Bernstein, Hejinian, Silliman et al., even while acknowledging their importance to her work’.25 Though Robertson herself has noted that ‘poetry is not bound by movements, periodicities and canons’, she is generally regarded as belonging to the Kootenay School of Writing—another group that mirrors the New York School with its misleading nomenclature.26 As Andrew Klobuchar and Michael Barnholden write in the introduction to their edited collection Writing Class: The Kootenay School of Writing Anthology, ‘it is not in the Kootenays, it is not a school, and it does not teach writing (at least, not in the ordinary sense)’.27 Emerging out of the Canadian political climate of the 1980s, the poetry of the Kootenay School positioned itself in response to the neoliberal Thatcher-Reagan axis: like the language poets, these writers were explicitly class conscious and politically engaged in ways that, by and large, the New York School rarely were (as Maggie Nelson notes, the New  York School have traditionally been characterised by a ‘“not caring” apolitical stance’).28 Nevertheless, the Kootenay School does share more than a misnomer with the New York School. Founded on ‘friendship and a common perspective on poetry’, ‘a critical sense of language itself as a prime constituent of community in general’, and a strong awareness ‘of the complex interdependence between art and ideology’, the school’s countercultural roots can be traced back to Warren Tallman, who coedited The Poetics of the New American Poetry with Donald Allen (a follow-up to Allen’s The New American Poetry 1945–1960, which anthologised the work of O’Hara, Ashbery, Guest, and 25  Zachariah Wells, ‘Sometimes You Need a Record of Your Life: on Lisa Robertson’ in Critical Flame Issue 42, May–June 2016, https://criticalflame.org/sometimes-you-need-arecord-­of-your-life-on-lisa-robertson/. Accessed 03 March 2023. 26  Ibid. 27  Andrew Klobuchar & Michael Barnholden, Writing Class: The Kootenay School of Writing Anthology (Vancouver: New Star Books, 1999), p. 1. 28  Maggie Nelson, Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2007), p. 69.

208 

M. LOSASSO

Schuyler).29 And, like the cramped and often shabby domestic spaces inhabited by both the first- and second-generation New  York School poets, every address held by the Kootenay School has been ‘small, the furniture used and in constant need of repair […] low-rent and at a considerable distance from the city’s better neighbourhoods’.30 Like both Ashbery and Guest (and, perhaps to a lesser extent, O’Hara and Schuyler), Robertson occupies a fluid space between poetry, art, and criticism, which results in a hybrid lyrical style that collapses genres and disciplines by writing at the intersection of architecture and poetry more convincingly, perhaps, than any other contemporary poet-critic. This is why Collis has positioned her as a key figure in ‘twentieth-century poetry’s architectural turn’: for Robertson, as for the poets of the New York School (as also for a number the Language poets), ‘the poem as city, or as public architecture, seeks to be the poem as polis’.31 Yet her eschewal of the term ‘dwelling’ is noticeable, indicating a refusal to align her thinking with either Heideggerian philosophy or with the language programme, precisely because her sense of the poem as a commodious shelter positions the body (via vernacular speech) at the heart of her thinking. Appearing in her 2009 collection, Lisa Robertson’s Magenta Soul Whip, ‘A Hotel’ (dedicated to Oscar Niemeyer, co-architect, with Le Corubuiser, of the UN Building in New  York) bears the trace of O’Hara’s ‘Hôtel Transylvanie’. Here are the opening stanzas of Robertson’s poem: I will take my suitcase into a hotel and Become a voice By studying stillness and curtains I will take my stillness into a hotel Careening, not flowing, through Cities become his voice Into a hotel I will take my city And roads And the entire moving skin of history32

 Klobuchar & Barnholden, Writing Class, pp. 4; 5; 2.  Ibid., p. 1. 31  Collis, ‘The Frayed Trope of Rome’, p. 147. 32  Lisa Robertson, Lisa Robertson’s Magenta Soul Whip (Toronto: Coach House Books, 2009), p. 18. 29 30

6  CONCLUSION: AFTER THE NEW YORK SCHOOL 

209

And here is a passage from O’Hara’s:         oh hôtel, you should be merely a bed surrounded by walls where two souls meet and do nothing but breathe breathe in breathe out. (CPOH 351)

In O’Hara’s poem, the hotel opens up a space in which to ‘do nothing but breathe’; in Robertson’s (which is likely a reference to Baudelaire’s long and anxious tenancy at the Hôtel du Grand Miroir in Brussels), it transforms the speaker into nothing but ‘a voice’. Yet death lingers at the edges of these invocations of breath and voice: ‘you will continue trying to cheer everyone up’, O’Hara writes, ‘and they will know as they listen with excessive pleasure that you’re dead’; and then, a few stanzas later, ‘you may not be allowed / to die as I have died’ (CPOH 351). The coding of death in the poem—of ‘your’ death but also of the poet’s own death— indicates O’Hara’s Keatsian conception of the poem as a living space in which to enshrine the breathing body of the writing poet: ‘This living hand, now warm and capable’, Keats writes, ‘see here it is— / I hold it towards you’.33 In an essay on Keats and breath, Andrew Kay coins the term ‘conspirational’ poetics, to describe this co-constitutive corporeal relationship between writer and reader: a concept of forms as scores laden with physiological cues, which depend on readers to instantiate and complete them. Form, by this logic, is not an achieved textual product but a collaborative process, one in which readers grant poetic structures a material reality in their own flesh and, in so doing, resuscitate the men and women who fashioned them.34

The breath of the poem is also embedded in Robertson’s notion of the poem’s ‘shaped speaking’, which, as she writes in Nilling, ‘carries the breath of multiple temporalities into the present’.35 ‘A Hotel’—which is implicitly impelled by the breath—functions in precisely this way, resuscitating ‘the dead’ on a more grandiose scale than we see in O’Hara’s poem:  John Keats, ‘This living hand, now warm and capable’ in Selected Poems, ed. John Barnard (London: Penguin, 2007), p. 237. 34  Andrew Kay, ‘Conspiring with Keats: Toward a Poetics of Breathing’ in European Romantic Review 27, no. 5 (2016): p. 578. 35  Robertson, Nilling, p. 84. 33

210 

M. LOSASSO

     […] History does not respond To this project—History, who has disappeared into Architecture and into the Generosity of the dead. This states The big problem of poetry. Who could Speak for the buildings, for the future of the dead The dead who are implicated in all I can say?36

History (with a capital H) ossifies the dead, just as architecture (with a capital A) ‘can only interpret, fix or abstract the fluency of the linguistic given’. But the ‘big problem of poetry’, Robertson suggests, is how to give voice, not only to the dead but to buildings. The poetic voice thus becomes a container for the future of the dead: not the indifferent glaze of monumental History, but a vernacular shelter for the voice—a shelter that not only houses voice, but is voice, thereby ‘speak[ing] for the buildings’. Through ‘breath’ and ‘voice’ (and the two are intimately connected), O’Hara and Robertson share the desire to transform the text into a temporary yet intimate public-private space (the transitory space of the hotel room), in which future occupants (readers) might reactivate the breathing body of the writer by giving voice back to vernacular words. Such is poetry’s ‘prosodic gift’.

Strangeness and Fragility If the post-modern (largely American) poetic tradition has become fractured in recent years, this must be, in part, due to the expansion of the internet and the spread of social media. Here is the conceptual poet Kenneth Goldsmith writing about the impact of the internet on poetry in 2009: Any notion of history has been leveled by the internet. Now, its all fodder for the remix and recreation of works of art: free-floating toolboxes and strategies unmoored from context of historicity…All types of proposed linear historical trajectories have been scrambled and discredited by the tidal wave of digitality, which has crept up on us and so completely saturated our culture that we, although deeply immersed in it, have no idea what hit us. In the face of the digital, postmodernism is the quaint last gasp of modernism.37  Robertson, Lisa Robertson’s Magenta Soul Whip, p. 19.  Kenneth Goldsmith in Postmodern American Poetry, p. lv.

36 37

6  CONCLUSION: AFTER THE NEW YORK SCHOOL 

211

Goldsmith gestures towards the extent to which the internet obstructs the possibility for coherent movements: how can we continue to understand poetic trajectories in terms of cogent ‘schools’ with clearly defined boundaries, when history itself has become scrambled, and when poetic ‘strategies’ are ‘free-floating’ or ‘unmoored’. Goldsmith is not wrong— yet what he does not fully anticipate (or, at least, what his account overlooks) is the extent to which, through social networks, the internet would come to simultaneously dilute and retrench poetic coteries. For while the traditional coterie mentality that had structured the first-generation New  York School—one that centred largely around place—no longer holds, social media, video conferencing platforms, and other online networks have created the conditions for new forms of global coterie. As Perloff writes, traditional sites of poetic community have been superseded by: the new transnational and global culture of the internet […] It is not just a matter of the increasing mobility of those who produce poetry, but also the indeterminacy of their location in space in the early twenty-first century […] Under these circumstances, communication is likely to shift from geographical location (as in Silliman’s San Francisco / New York clusters), from identity politics, or even from one’s circle of native speakers, to those, wherever and whoever they are, who share a particular set of interests and allegiances. The word “community” thus takes on a new meaning.38

The Network for New  York School Studies—established by Shamma and Rona Cran in 2018—is an explicit attempt to reinstate a sense of community into contemporary New York School scholarship and poetic practice on a global scale. On the members page of the Network’s website, an introductory passage stating that ‘Anyone can become a member of the Network for New York School Studies’, sits beneath the Berrigan quote cited above (‘I used to tell people they could join for five dollars…’)—an indication that the Network understands itself as a contemporary articulation of this New York School capaciousness. At the time of writing, the network comprises 88 members and 10 advisors, all of whom are scattered across the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe, and Australia, with events taking place across a similar geographical spread. And while the network itself meets, where possible, in person, the internet has  Perloff, ‘Unoriginal Genius’, pp. 230–231.

38

212 

M. LOSASSO

elsewhere enabled the establishment of new forms of poetic community (forms that became especially pressing during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021), which tend to cohere around global (rather than local) concerns, whether political or aesthetic. Yet, though the internet may have broadened our capacity to broadcast, share, and socialise, ‘new media technologies’ as Todd Teitchen notes: often work to refashion preexisting media within new protocols and networks of use; technological change enables the emergence of concomitant media of expression that alter the ways in which we organize our experience of the world through existent expressive forms—altering, in turn, our use of those existent forms.39

In his essay ‘Frank O’Hara and the Poetics of the Digital’ Tietchen reads O’Hara’s poetics as a precursor to contemporary forms of social networking. Tietchen draws attention to O’Hara’s recurrent interests in ‘film, telephony, radio, television, and news media’, as well as to the unfiltered immediacy of self-narration that characterises many of the compositions printed in Lunch Poems (in particular, ‘The Day Lady Died’ and ‘Poem (Lana Turner has collapsed)’).40 This tendency, as Teitchen suggests, opens up a spatial dimension in O’Hara’s work. Drawing on the work of Sherry Turkle, he notes that: Networked technologies capable of interfacing with virtual worlds, social networking sites, and mapping software synchronize our activities in two or more spaces simultaneously, constituting what Turkle has characterized as a “sense of continual copresencing,” expressed within the coterminous (or casualized) timescales generated by social computing […] In a fashion quite similar to the simultaneity of lives that Turkle has deemed “copresencing,” O’Hara’s poetic consciousness straddles two locations from within the third space of the poem.41

If Jack Kerouac’s continuously scrolling manuscripts can be said to anticipate the ubiquitous digital scroll, then the intimate public spaces of O’Hara’s coterie poems might be read as the antecedents of social 39  Todd Tietchen, ‘Frank O’Hara and the Poetics of the Digital’ in Criticism Vol. 56, No. 1 (Winter 2014): p. 52. 40  Ibid., p. 53. 41  Ibid., pp. 50–51.

6  CONCLUSION: AFTER THE NEW YORK SCHOOL 

213

networking platforms: blurring public and private, organic instantaneity and ‘technical temporality’, many of O’Hara’s poems are not unlike contemporary Tweets, as Tietchen observes, existing in a kind of ‘free-floating’ space (to recall Goldsmith). Only, of course, that is not really the case, for as Tietchen is at pains to point out: O’Hara’s longing for instantaneity and interactivity—or we might say the desire to address Lana Turner in real time—is necessarily held at bay by print’s relationship to the prevailing media architecture, as literary composition remains asynchronous with the reader’s experience of the text.42

In other words, the printed text keeps poetic space sacrosanct and, though the influence of new technologies may produce something like a ‘taxonomic crisis’ in avant-garde poetry, the poem is a poem (and not a Tweet) in part because it is constructed within print (rather than media) ‘architecture’. Then again, social networking platforms are becoming increasingly multi-dimensional: Goldsmith’s 2009 account already seems outdated because it reads virtual space as ‘levelled’ or ‘scrambled’ when in fact, our sense of the virtual is becoming progressively architectural. At the time of writing, discussions about the feasibility of the metaverse—a hypothetical iteration of the internet that combines physical, augmented, and virtual reality in shared online space—are becoming increasingly widespread in architectural circles. As the architect Patrick Schumacher notes, in his 2022 article ‘The metaverse as opportunity for architecture and society: design drivers, core competencies’, ‘the metaverse is being built as we speak, rapidly. But who is designing it? Who should design it?’ Schumacher’s response, unequivocally, is that ‘the design of the metaverse falls within the remit and core competency of the discipline of architecture’. For Schumacher: the societal function of architecture and design applies also to web design and the framing of all digitally mediated forms of social interaction. This insight must now be made the explicit premise and agenda for a systematic design research project that bridges architecture and interaction design in 3D virtual worlds.43  Ibid., p. 57.  Patrick Schumacher, ‘The metaverse as opportunity for architecture and society: design drivers, core competencies’ in Architectural Intelligence 1: 11 (2022): pp. 1–2. 42 43

214 

M. LOSASSO

Schumacher’s interest in the metaverse is, like much of the architecture that he is responsible for as principal architect of Zaha Hadid Architects, largely driven by corporate interest and investment: it should not, therefore, be taken as the last word on the feasibility—or, for that matter, desirability—of the metaverse and its attendant architecture. Nevertheless, the fact that such high-profile architects are already giving credence to the possibility of the metaverse (designing not only virtual spaces but also, as Schumacher explains, creating new ‘architectural spaces that double up as interfaces via panoramic screens, or holographic projections’) indicates the extent to which our conception of virtual space is becoming increasingly architectural and our sense of the architectural increasingly virtual.44 Since the early 2000s, avant-garde poetry has responded to the development of virtual architecture(s), with poetic practitioners including Goldsmith, Stephanie Strickland, Nick Montfort, Brian Kim Stefans, Loss Pequeño Glazier, and others exploring the spatial possibilities of poetry in a digital age. As Strickland writes, in her 2009 essay ‘Born Digital’, ‘e-poetry describes or reflects upon worlds by building them’.45 Adopting the language of world-building that courses through avant-garde poetic practice, as well as post-structural philosophy and critical thinking, Strickland explains that: Poems have always ‘built worlds’, in a sense: Dante builds the whole of Christendom for his time. But this is not the kind of world a reader can enter and change; nor is it the kind where authors choose the very rules of life, physics, evolution, and succession. An example of a world where different physics apply is seen in the background of Alan Sondheim and Reiner Strasser’s short poem ‘Tao’. The rules of evolution and succession are author-chosen in generative poems.46

For Strickland, the ‘playable’ or interactive nature of e-poetics—the fact that the reader can be actively engaged in the generation of the digital text—means that digital space finally enables poetry to build worlds that ‘a reader can enter and change’. As Strickland puts it, ‘e-literature is built as much as it is written; one could speak of text engineering as a new kind of writing. As with engineering and big building projects, many kinds of  Ibid., p. 1.  Stephanie Strickland, ‘Born Digital’ on The Poetry Foundation, 2009, https://www. poetryfoundation.org/articles/69224/born-digital. Accessed 28 February 2023. 46  Ibid. 44 45

6  CONCLUSION: AFTER THE NEW YORK SCHOOL 

215

expertise are involved in its production; in some cases, a number of readers are required as well as a number of writers’.47 For the first time, perhaps, poetry and architecture find themselves operating on the same plane: to speak of a building and a poem in the virtual arena is no longer to speak of two disciplines that are radically divergent in terms of both means of production and material composition, but merely to speak of different digital typologies. In virtual reality, poems and buildings might both be constructed and activated by many players; both might be built out of the same virtual matter; and both, in a sense, might be inhabitable. Then again, and by the same token, we might also say that neither digital poetics nor digital architecture are inhabitable: in place of the page, we have simply substituted the screen as the mediating force between reader and text, while physical space (the kinds of corporeal space that, as I have been arguing, avant-garde poets have long been trying to open through the text) has been subjugated to the interests of bodiless avatars. Yet as Strickland points out, screens are not the only medium through which we can encounter digital poetics. ‘E-poetry explores three-dimensional space in three ways’, she writes: on screens, in gallery installations, and by directing people using mobile devices as they move around on earth. Such poetry leads to exploring the interaction of surface and depth when reading words; it allows such effects as reading from front to back instead of left to right, reading texts in motion or reading overlapping texts, all of which simultaneously explore the texts and their effects on human perception and neural processing.48

In other words, digital poetry, like digital architecture, has the potential to intersect with built space in ways that have traditionally been denied to the printed word: we may not be able to literally inhabit a virtual poem, but digital practices may bring poetry and architecture closer in new and unexpected ways. The pace of digital change is fast, and each year brings radically new technological developments. Indeed, many of the e-poems or digital projects that Strickland cites (and provides hyperlinks to) in her 2009 essay are no longer operable on today’s browsers, and at the time of writing, OpenAI’s ChatGPT—an artificial intelligence chatbot, capable of  Ibid.  Ibid.

47 48

216 

M. LOSASSO

composing poems (among other textual forms) in real-time response to a simple prompt—has changed our conception of what ‘digital poetics’ might mean almost overnight. One of the largest language models ever constructed, ChatGPT uses a vast pre-programmed neural network to produce human-like language. For the time being, at least, this software is a long way from being able to write convincing poetry; in fact, its ‘pretty awful’ attempts have had the effect of shoring up poetry’s ‘essential strangeness and fragility’, as Walt Hunter writes in The Atlantic.49 Nevertheless, novel digital forms like ChatGPT (which will, no doubt, already seem outdated by the time of this book’s publication) do raise important questions about the future of poetics in the digital arena. These issues are too numerous and too knotty to address here: suffice to say, however, that such language-based technologies will have significant ramifications for future generations of poets and for our sense of poetic space, and while they may well prove a useful tool for poetic innovation (as Olson discovered with the typewriter in 1950), they may also redefine the poem in the form of a riposte: we may, that is, find ourselves returning to the traditional spaces of poetry—as well as to conventional architectural spaces—in an attempt to retain the ‘essential strangeness and fragility’ not only of poetics but of our very social and bodily lived experience.

How Does Air Feel with Waves Inside It Any discussion of space, place, and dwelling in post-modern avant-garde poetry must countenance not only a leaning towards the digital but also contemporary trends in ecopoetics—though precisely how we plot ecopoetry remains somewhat undecided. As Angela Hume notes, in the introduction to ‘Imagining Ecopoetics: An Interview with Robert Hass, Brenda Hillman, Evelyn Reilly, and Jonathan Skinner’: Belonging to no single school or camp, ecopoetics is expansive in its reach, cropping up in everything from conventional lyric to innovative poetry and politically radical texts […] it can now take on almost any form imaginable. For these reasons, among others, the term remains somewhat amorphous.50  Walt Hunter, ‘What Poets Know That ChatGPT Doesn’t’ in The Atlantic, February 13 2023, https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2023/02/chatgpt-ai-technology-­ writing-poetry/673035/. Accessed 12 April 2023. 50  Angela Hume, ‘Imagining Ecopoetics: An Interview with Robert Hass, Brenda Hillman, Evelyn Reilly, and Jonathan Skinner’ in Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 19.4 (Autumn 2012): p. 751. 49

6  CONCLUSION: AFTER THE NEW YORK SCHOOL 

217

The term does not, as Hume observes, belong to a single school or camp; yet a glance at Jonathan Skinner’s ecopoetics journal, which has been decisive in shaping our understanding of that term over the last two decades, reveals the extent to which ecopoetry must, in part, be read as the inheritor of the Beat, Black Mountain, and New York schools. Over the years, the journal has included contributions from New York School poets and scholars (Alice Notley, Bernadette Mayer, Lytle Shaw), language poets (Charles Bernstein, Bruce Andrews, Clayton Eshelman), digital poets (Loss Pequeño Glazier), conceptual poets (Kenneth Goldsmith), and others working in the post-modern avant-garde tradition that I have been tracing. In itself, then, the journal offers yet another articulation of the rippling post–New York School landscape, revealing the extent to which ecopoetics must be positioned within the increasingly overlapping Venn diagram of contemporary avant-garde Anglophone poetry. Furthermore, Skinner’s journal reinforces my suggestion that, in the wake of the internet, the poetic schools that traditionally formed around geographically determined coteries have gradually given way to what I want to call a tropic poetics, whereby the galvanising forces are more global, more politically oriented (and often tied to activist movements) and less club-centred. In the introduction to his ‘Ecopoetics’ series in the online poetry magazine Jacket2, Skinner explains that ecopoetics is not only: a matter of theme, but of how certain poetic methods model ecological processes like complexity, non-linearity, feedback loops, and recycling. Or how ‘slow poetry’ can join in the same kind of push for a sustainable, regional economy that ‘eating locally’ does. Or how poetic experimentation complements scientific methods in extending a more reciprocal relation to alterity—ecopoetics as a ‘poethics’.51

By rejecting the notion that ecopoetics is only or exclusively thematic, and by suggesting instead that it might be understood in terms of formal innovation and experimentation, Skinner implicitly positions ecopoetics within the ongoing trajectory of post-war avant-garde poetry (and more specifically, within the post-language tradition) to which it surely belongs. Crucially, as Skinner has emphasised in interviews, statements, and essays, 51  Jonathan Skinner, ‘Yard work’ on Jacket2, https://jacket2.org/commentary/yard-­ work. Accessed 28 February 2023.

218 

M. LOSASSO

the ‘eco’ prefix implies an ‘at-homeness […] (after the Green root oikos)’. As he writes: ‘Eco’ here signals—no more, no less—the house we share with several million other species, our planet Earth. ‘Poetics’ is used as poesis or making, not necessarily to emphasize the critical over the creative act (nor vice versa). Thus: ecopoetics, a house making.52

This is decisive. For if, as I am suggesting, the New York School poets (among their contemporaries from adjacent poetic schools) represent a watershed in twentieth-century poetics by virtue of their spatial, material, and architectural sensibility, then ecopoetics must be understood in its historical specificity as one more articulation of poetry’s increasingly material self-awareness of its world-building—even homemaking—capacity. This is not incidental, for as Jonathan Bate suggests in The Song of the Earth (2000) ecopoetics has a Heideggerian legacy: The poem is a clearing in that it is an opening to the nature of being, a making clear of the nature of dwelling. But such a clearing can only be achieved through a dividing and a destroying […] When we hear the poem properly, so that even the silence speaks, we participate in the gathering […] The experience of the poem is that of feeling at home, being gathered into oneness with the surrounding environment.53

Seeking to ‘pass from hermeneutics to ecopoetics’ (another articulation of the post-critical turn), Bate reads ecopoetics through a Heideggerian lens in order to suggest that poetic dwelling might be conceived, more broadly, in terms of environmental or ecological engagement.54 As both Skinner and Bate reveal, ecopoetics might therefore possess the potential to refigure our sense of the earth as ‘house’ or ‘home’—and, in so doing, to offer new ways of imagining the poem as a kind of dwelling place—or as something like a liveable space. My suggestion that the New York School might be read as part of this development builds on Timothy Gray’s work on the ‘urban pastoral’. In the introduction to Urban Pastoral (2010), Gray argues that ‘poets of the New York School, however devoted they may have been to avant-garde  Ibid.  Jonathan Bate, Song of the Earth (London: Picador, 2000), p. 280. 54  Ibid., p. 247. 52 53

6  CONCLUSION: AFTER THE NEW YORK SCHOOL 

219

techniques like abstraction, should be placed […] in the ranks of contemporary American nature writers’.55 As Gray explains: San Francisco and Black Mountain College […] usually take pride of place in eco-critical discussions. […] Poets of the New York School did not take this route, and in the opinion of most, their writings about gallery openings, ballet performances, and other city events are about as distant from natural discourse as is possible. My aim in Urban Pastoral is to rethink such assessments, looking beyond the School’s celebration of cosmopolitan energy to shake up common conceptions about what constitutes nature writing.56

Though the Black Mountain and Beat poets have traditionally been read as the architects, so to speak, of contemporary ecopoetry, it is the New York School poets who are, I argue, more consistently engaged with poetry’s architectural possibilities and, by extension, with what it might mean to dwell poetically. If, as Bate suggests, all poetic dwelling is an ecopoetic act, then the New York School must, as Gray argues, be understood as crucial in the development of the ecopoetic turn. Building on Gray’s thesis, then, I would add that these poets’ shared sense of the poem as a dwelling—as, in some sense, an inhabitable space—also places their work into the realm of ecopoetics (or, at least, opens a space for contemporary eco-critical engagement with it). The poet Brenda Hillman (about whom Silliman asks, in his 2005 blog post on successive New York School generations ‘Where do you put the likes of […] Brenda Hillman?’) cites not only the Bay Area and Black Mountain poets as key influences on her own ecopoetic practice but also the ‘impulses that foreground “language-as-material” […] in the work of Mallarmé, Gertrude Stein, Wittgenstein, and John Ashbery’—an indication of the significance of New York School thinking on her work. Like Robertson, Hillman—who calls herself an ‘eco-feminist’—has been notoriously difficult to place in terms of a poetic school. This may be because, as she herself has noted, since ‘art movements have been primarily boys’ clubs […] literary history is based in part on the neglect of the work of women and minorities, and only later do we discover the important voices

55  Timothy Gray, Urban Pastoral: Natural Currents in the New  York School (Iowa City: Iowa University Press, 2010), p. 3. 56  Ibid.

220 

M. LOSASSO

of women and minorities that were busy making art throughout history’.57 As she explains, in an interview with Julia Fiedorczuk in 2017: I gravitate toward the poets who are rocky in relation to official avant-gardes […] Very often groups that are self-proclaimed avant-gardes like Surrealism, Objectivism, Black Mountain School, Beat Poetry are understandably organized around friendship groups and common interests; in each of those groups there are usually only a few woman poets—Denise Levertov for Black Mountain writers, Lorine Niedecker for the Objectivists. Barbara Guest was a friend of many of the New York School poets.58

To label Hillman an ecopoet, then, is to acknowledge the fact that women (like Guest, like Robertson, like Levertov and Niedecker) often find themselves on the outside of the more programmatic clubs and schools, whether by design or otherwise. Yet it is also to acknowledge, in Skinner’s terms, the way that her ‘poetic methods model ecological processes like complexity, non-linearity, feedback loops, and recycling’. If Hillman’s work is part of an ecopoetic turn, then this is as much for its formal innovation as for its unplaceability or its ecological subjects and themes. In her 2005 collection, Pieces of Air in the Epic, Hillman explores the delicate relationship between air and space through an architectonic attention to the materiality of language. As the poems in the collection gradually reveal—both through their subject matter and experimental forms—air is never empty (it is filled, variously, with breath, vowels, dust motes, radio waves), just as the white (or black, as in the poem ‘Nine Untitled Epyllions’) space around the printed word is never blank. Filled with references to ‘cities’, ‘borders’, ‘balustrades’, ‘porticoes’, ‘unplanned towns’, ‘Street Corner[s]s’, ‘Stateless Architecture’, and ‘The villages we built’ that ‘can’t be spoken’, the collection must be ‘read as the L between word and world’, as Hillman writes—or as the bridge between language and reality, between poetic space and built space.59 Like Guest, Hillman’s sense of the weight and heft of language is palpable throughout 57  Brenda Hillman, ‘“All of the Bees in a Hive Are Having Imagination”: An Interview with Brenda Hillman’ in Polish Journal for American Studies Vol. 11 (Spring 2017): p. 8. 58  Ibid. 59  Brenda Hillman, Pieces of Air in the Epic (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2007), pp. 16; 41; 23; 3; 32; 24; 48.

6  CONCLUSION: AFTER THE NEW YORK SCHOOL 

221

the collection—‘Vowels dropped in the three-branched world’, she writes in ‘Reversible Wind’, as ‘Your singing architect’ (an allusion to the poet, who builds textual constructions out of ‘vowels’ and ‘syllables’) is ‘no readier for death than you are’—as is her fascination with the relationship between textiles and poetic surface: ‘It’s all a kind of seam’, she writes in ‘String Theory Sutra’, ‘Threads inspired this / textile picnic’.60 Yet it is Hillman’s experimentation with grammar and punctuation that places her eco-feminist poetics into closer dialogue with Schuyler’s distinctive brand of urban pastoral than any of the other New York School poets. Throughout Pieces of Air, Hillman explores the relationship between air and page space through grammatical marks, which she employs to signal the invisible or unsayable sounds and textures that throng the air. In ‘Doppler Effect in Diagram Three’, for example, Hillman asks: How does air feel with waves inside it Does it feel more With the radio on How do airwaves get through all the numbers & how does the ( ( ( ( ( ( (( do it 61

The passage recalls Schuyler’s slammed parentheses in ‘Seeking’, yet where Schuyler’s brackets became textual doors, Hillman’s have become airwaves, demarcating poetic space by filling it, rather than delimiting it. Devoid of any punctuation marks (save for these unhinged brackets), the poem instead spells out its ‘parentheses’ (‘Parentheses from the hawk a day sound’) and its ‘hyphens’ (‘The worry hyphens inside the molecule’), in order to complete the transformation of grammatical notation into pieces of material hardware, which no longer sign for something else, but that simply exist within the spaces carved out by the poem.62 Elsewhere, Hillman places entire poems within parentheses (as in the aptly Heideggerian-titled poem ‘The E in Being’) or stages extended parenthetical interruptions in an offhand style that echoes Schuyler’s most sustained parenthetical intrusions. Here are the opening lines from the short poem ‘Your Fate’:  Ibid., pp. 7; 81.  Ibid., p. 17. 62  Ibid., pp. 17–18. 60 61

222 

M. LOSASSO

Waiting for the tech support person to come back, rereading the epic — actually, the translator’s notes; strange to start liking the on-hold music (Here’s a section where chaotic motion, interims of wandering, invisible orders meet twisted blue marginalia from school […] but fate rides only in reverse) tech support hasn’t returned yet […]63

Playing out across 15 lines of the 24-line poem, the parenthetical intrusion produces a similar effect to Schuyler’s in ‘I sit down to type’: the mundane details of the day (the telephone call on hold) have been pushed outside the brackets, while the text within contains the wandering, twisting, chaotic motion of poetic thought. In her attention to air as something complex, material, and multifaceted, filling space rather than marking its emptiness, Hillman, like Schuyler, turns to the punctuation—the conventionally invisible hardware of the poem—to create poetic architectures that structure and support her ecological thinking. And while Hillman’s poetic architecture does construct a ‘house’, it does not signal (as in Guest and Schuyler’s work) an attempt to carve out domestic space—the space of the home—but the attempt to locate, in writing, ‘the house we share with several million other species, our planet Earth’.

Are We Fine? Pieces of Air in the Epic stages an exploration of poetic space through a reckoning with the fact that, just as ‘air’ does not equal ‘empty’, so ‘white’ does not always equal ‘blank’ or ‘neutral’. But what happens when the space of the page is not white but black? In other words, if the white space of the page has traditionally been read as poetry’s dwelling place, then where or what are the black spaces, who are their architects, and how do we read them? Such questions are at the heart of recent work by contemporary poet, artist, and novelist, Renee Gladman. Working at the intersection of writing and drawing, Gladman’s textual architectures implicitly follow in the New  York School tradition by creating hybrid forms that straddle art and poetry. In doing so, Gladman’s work tends towards the  Ibid., p. 56.

63

6  CONCLUSION: AFTER THE NEW YORK SCHOOL 

223

third, self-signifying form that I have been attempting to construct throughout this book: poetry’s liveable space. The third book in a series of collected drawings—preceded by Prose Architectures (2017) and One Long Black Sentence (2020)—Gladman’s Plans for Sentences (2022) is positioned at the spatio-temporal seam between word and image: this is not a book of poems and drawings but an architecture of the future. ‘For a long time’, Gladman writes in the book’s acknowledgements, ‘I hadn’t wanted legible, narrative language anywhere near my drawings. I felt that no matter how I arranged them, one or the other (i.e., the text or the drawing) would fall into the category of illustration’.64 Gladman circumvents this problem by allowing both text and image to be a description for an absent entity: the titular sentences. ‘These are descriptions for future sentences’, she explains, ‘however the plans for those sentences (i.e., their actual futures) are still the drawings’.65 The abstracted images—what Gladman calls her plans for future sentences—appear to have been created from tiny loops of cursive script. Look closely, however, and you realise that these hand-written lines are illegible, like Cy Twombly’s sweeping calligraphic works in miniature; step back again, and you find that these tangles of twisted lines are suggestive of asemic cityscapes, vistas that try to imagine (but not articulate) the dialogue between words and buildings. The passages of text that accompany Gladman’s images are also descriptions of the sentences that have not yet come into being. As the book’s opening line states: ‘These sentences—they—will begin having already been sentences somewhere else, and this will mark their afterlife, and this will be their debut’.66 There is a temporal slippage here between then, and now, and sometime that positions Gladman’s sentences—like Schuyler’s parentheses or Ashbery’s continuously occurring structures—within the space of the extended present: ‘These sentences’, she writes, ‘will hold time’.67 Throughout the book, Gladman’s future sentences promise to ‘scaffold’, to ‘spire’, to ‘canopy’, to ‘awn’, to ‘dome’, and to ‘house’; but also to ‘chapter’, to ‘comma’, to ‘figment’.68 Using the verb forms of nouns traditionally associated with architecture and literature, Gladman  Renee Gladman, Plans for Sentences (Seattle and New York: Wave Books, 2022), p. 139.  Ibid. 66  Ibid., 1. 67  Ibid., p. 21. 68  Ibid., pp. 31; 5; 27; 59; 25; 13; 73. 64 65

224 

M. LOSASSO

Fig. 6.1  Renee Gladman, ‘Fig. 29’ from Plans for Sentences. Reproduced courtesy of Renee Gladman

asks language to perform in unpredictable ways; ways that are mutually dependant on her cursive scribbles. For neither the sentence that we read, nor the image that we look at, are in fact ‘spiring’—only the future sentences that the book describes contain this possibility. Instead, what both the text and the loops that crescendo out of the low-lying landscape like Gothic cathedral spires (Fig. 6.1) show us is something like potentiality (to recall Muñoz’s use of that term): a reminder that the relationship between poetry and architecture is, as Collis argues, a utopian one—a ‘good place’ that is also, and always, a ‘no place’.69 What matters then, as Gladman’s plans for sentences show us, is the promise, the possibility, of poetic architecture: or, as Ashbery writes, ‘It’s not the incomplete importunes, but the spookiness / Of the finished product’ (HBD 33). To spire, however, is also to breathe and Gladman’s sentences know this too: ‘these sentences’, she writes ‘will gasp, will allow gasps to become  Collis, ‘The Frayed Trope of Rome’, p. 144.

69

6  CONCLUSION: AFTER THE NEW YORK SCHOOL 

225

walls and then will bellow and fray’, ‘they will make an underground for your breathing’.70 Just as the organic architectures of O’Hara’s poems make space to breathe, so Gladman’s coding of the breath gestures towards a sense of the poem as a collective space for ‘conspiration’, to use Kay’s term. And if O’Hara’s poetry might be read through the prism of queer futurity, so Gladman’s must be read through the lens of Afro-futurism. As she writes, ‘these sentences […] will blacken gasps into the page’ they will ‘be a black luminous, slow-going forward’.71 In her earlier book One Long Black Sentence, Gladman’s cursive images glow in white ink against black paper. In conversation with Gladman, poet and theorist Fred Moten—who penned what he calls the ‘Anindex’ to the book—comments on the work’s capacity to create spaces that ‘welcome’ the body of the reader (and, for Moten, crucially, we are readers, and not simply viewers, of Gladman’s drawings). ‘The kind of art I like’, Moten reflects: is the kind of art that makes me want to walk up into the artwork. And your work is like that for me, it creates a place that I want to go to. And that’s not metaphorical. I literally want to figure out what I can do physically to my now so-called body so that I can enter into those drawings […] There’s something topographical going on here, that I could get in it, that I could get inside.72

For Gladman, the black page is essential to the creation of the deep, traversable space that Moten identifies in the work. As she notes: ‘the black paper is really integral to the drawing […] so different from the white space […] If you think of the writing as landing on the page, I felt like the black space sort of extended it back, so it had this depth as you went into it […] It made more space, it created space’.73 The black space— or the ‘blackground’, as Moten calls it, ‘that nonrepresentational capacity that lets all representation take place’—becomes intrinsic to the forms of these drawings: it is not simply a void, an inert blank canvas on which

 Gladman, Plans for Sentences, pp. 53; 59.  Ibid., pp. 47; 93. 72  Fred Moten, ‘July 28: Renee Gladman and Fred Moten in conversation’ on PCG Studio, Tuesday July 28th 2020, https://paulacoopergallery-studio.com/posts/renee-gladman-­ and-fred-moten-in-conversation. Accessed 9 March 2023. 73  Ibid. 70 71

226 

M. LOSASSO

these lines are projected, but an active presence.74 Buttressing Gladman’s illegible writing—which has been stripped down to its essential material form, the cursive mark—the blackground shows us what space looks like. For Moten, the inversion of the traditional monochrome hierarchy (black ink on white paper) creates a ‘two-dimensionality that we can move through’, which he reads as ‘a Black historical’ phenomenon: ‘Our visual art and our music and all of that’, Moten says, are ‘theoretical interventions into the social project of the enrichment of an imposed two-­ dimensionality’. […] What if two-dimensionality is also something about the nature of the social? People use that phrase ‘social fabric’. What if the social fabric is two-dimensional but thick. Two-dimensional but real’.75 For Moten, Gladman’s use of the blackground offers a way of engaging with the page as a two-dimensional space with depth—a depth that welcomes its reader, inviting them to overstep writing’s threshold—rather than the flat and impenetrable veneer that we are conventionally confronted with when we look at black text on a white page. But this is also, crucially, part of a Black tradition for Moten: a tradition that is implied in the book’s title, One Long Black Sentence, which is indicative of a line or lineage or continuous breath that flows through the work of Black artists, musicians, and writers. As Nan Collymore writes, ‘Gladman evokes the line as a form of spatial poiesis grounded in a Black queer feminist construction of art history, an intersecting line of women artists/a canon’.76 If Gladman’s work traces the breath of Black artists—if it understands itself as part of a Black queer feminist canon—then in what sense might we read it in the context of ‘after the New  York School’—after, that is, a poetic tradition notable for its whiteness? Gladman herself notes the influence of language poetry on her work. ‘I grew up as a poet and writer in the Bay Area’, she tells me, ‘so the contemporary work that was most influential was that of Leslie Scalapino, Lyn Hejinian, early Carla Harryman—essentially, the women of the Language Poetry movement, particularly those who wrote in sentences’.77 Indeed, references to Hejinian, as well as Mei-mei Berssenbrugge and Eileen Myles, appear in Gladman’s prose, indicating the extent to which she figures her work in  Ibid.  Ibid. 76  Nan Collymore, ‘Queering the Line with Renee Gladman & Fred Moten’ in C&10, 26th August 2020, https://contemporaryand.com/magazines/centering-blackness-and-­ queerness/. Accessed 9 March 2023. 77  Renee Gladman, E-mail to Mae Losasso, 18 April 2023. 74 75

6  CONCLUSION: AFTER THE NEW YORK SCHOOL 

227

relation to this post–New York School tradition.78 And, while ‘West Coast experimental writing in prose felt more spacious for [her] then newly queer self’, Gladman does also note that she ‘was drawn to the architecture of many New  York School poets’ poems’.79 Like Robertson, then, Gladman’s work is haunted—if not overtly influenced—by the poetic architectures of the New York School; particularly the poetry of Barbara Guest, whose work, as Gladman observes, is ‘in conversation with’ the language poets whom she cites. However loose these strands of influence may be, they remain important—for, in tracing an after the New  York School through the relationship between poetry and architecture, my project is not one of codification but one that attempts to unpick the threads that have, to a greater or lesser extent, woven their way into the poetry that has followed in its wake. And in as much as I want to follow those threads, I also recognise this project as an unravelling: for if there are threads to be found, then surely these untethered strands indicate the coming loose of the perceived forms of poetic dominance that have shaped the post-modern canon. As I have tried to emphasise throughout this concluding chapter, there are not—or should not be—inscribed ways of reading the New York School, be that the first generation, or successive generations, or subsequent schools, or individuals whose work bears the trace, explicitly or spectrally, of this poetic moment. Thinking about lines, as Gladman does, the ambition of this book has been to trace a line that passes through the New York School, looping through the spaces, structures, surfaces, and apertures of four individual poets, and then continuing on its way. To relinquish the anxiety of influence that has conventionally structured the poetic canon is, thus, not only to make space for new work but to develop new forms for reading that which came before. As Gladman puts it in Plans for Sentences, this book has sought to ‘make an unravelling that will void at the edges’ and then ‘loop the unknown and unfinish it’.80 To retrace these New  York School trajectories, then, is to challenge long-held assumptions, including the racial visibility of the post-modern American tradition. Of the 114 poets collected in Hoover’s anthology, only nine are African American (Amiri Baraka, Ed Roberson, Wanda 78  Renee Gladman, ‘Untitled (Environments)’ in e-flux Journal, Issue #92 (June 2018), https://www.e-flux.com/journal/92/203283/untitled-environments/. Accessed 9 March 2023. 79  Gladman, E-mail to Mae Losasso, 18 April 2023. 80  Gladman, Plans for Sentences, pp. 51; 23.

228 

M. LOSASSO

Coleman, Nathaniel Mackey, Will Alexander, Cecil S. Giscombe, Harryette Mullen, Mark McMorris, Clauidia Rankine) and only six Asian American (Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, John Yau, Myung Mi Kim, Wang Ping, Tan Lin, Brian Kim Stefans). Yet Black avant-garde scenes were not only active, but widespread and vibrant throughout 1960s and 1970s America, as Amiri Baraka’s Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing (1968) and, more recently, Charles Henry Rowell’s Angels of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry, testify. Understanding these poets’ separateness from the prevailing white movements (Baraka’s decision in 1965, for example, to definitively break with the New  York School and the Beats), while at the same time recognising the importance of their integration into a comprehensive history of post-modern American poetics is crucial. Which is why Gladman’s work must be read within a ‘Black queer feminist’ canon and as part of the wider American avant-­ garde tradition; a tradition that has, over the last hundred years or so, attempted to draw architecture into its orbit in order to make space for bodies and explore social potentialities, and a tradition that the work of Gladman—along with other contemporary poets writing after the New York School—picks up and promises to take forward into the future, where ‘These sentences will be the collective wondering about change; they will grain and blacken in the wings where the paragraph breaks open and will congregate around the question: Are we fine?’81

 Ibid., p. 69.

81



Epilogue: Finding Compulsive Stairs

And having reached the summit would like to stay there even if the stairs are withdrawn —Barbara Guest, from The Blue Stairs

A few years after my trip to Amsterdam, I was going over some papers from the Barbara Guest Collection, when I came across a typed manuscript of ‘The Blue Stairs’ (Fig. 1). In the title of this early version, Guest had omitted the definite article and before ‘Stairs’ a word had been crossed out and replaced with ‘Blue’ in Guest’s neat, cursive hand. What was the

Fig. 1  Barbara Guest, ‘Blue Stairs’ draft. Barbara Guest Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, MSS 1185, Box: 67, Folder: 1362 © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Losasso, Poetry, Architecture, and the New York School, Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41520-3

229

230 

EPILOGUE: FINDING COMPULSIVE STAIRS

original title? It looked like ‘compulsive’ or ‘comprehensive’, though it was impossible to say—Guest’s scribble had overwritten the earlier word to the point of illegibility. Whatever that word was, this new document revealed something crucial: that I had been looking for a set of blue stairs that had never existed—at least, not in the way that I had expected. I began my search by looking for something fixed, immovable, definite— but in the absence of a single set of blue stairs, I had discovered many. I stitched together fragments of architecture and poetry until the lines began to blur. The harder I looked, the less material architecture seemed to be and the more concrete poetry became. It was not that architecture had ceased to be relevant, but that its relationship to the poem had shifted: the text no longer existed in deference to architecture’s tangible authority. Instead, architecture and poetry had begun to speak to one another, as different sets of stairs changed my reading of the poem and as the poem shaped the way I read the different architectures I encountered. As I looked at Guest’s scribble, I realised that, like the white stairs in the Stedelijk, Guest’s poetic stairs are also a palimpsest: like all poems, and like all buildings, they have been overwritten, they have been altered, and they have been amended; in manuscripts, in reprints, and in the critical work of others. And that was when I found Barbara Guest’s blue stairs; not in a museum, but on the page in front of me. I couldn’t see them, because they possess an ‘invisible architecture’, but I had taken the first step long ago—my annotations were my footprints—and I had already reached the summit, which was not a blackish linoleum landing, but the spatial promise of poetry. And I wanted to stay there—even if the real stairs had been withdrawn.

Bibliography

Andrews, Bruce. Paradise and Method. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1996. Andrews, Bruce & Bernstein, Charles, ed. L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Volume 1, Number 2 (April 1978). Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1958. Ash, John. ‘In Conversation with John Ashbery’. PN Review 46 Volume 12, Number 2 (November-December 1985). https://www.pnreview.co.uk/cgi-­ bin/scribe?item_id=5781. Accessed 11 April 2023. Ashbery, John. The Mooring of Starting Out. New York: Ecco, 1997. Ashbery, John. ‘The New York School of Poets’ in Selected Prose, edited by Eugene Richie. Manchester: Carcanet, 2004. Ashbery, John. Reported Sightings. Manchester: Carcanet, 1989. Aspiz, Harold. ‘Walt Whitman: The Spermatic Imagination’. American Literature Vol. 56, No. 3 (Oct., 1984): pp. 379-395. Austen, Jane. Sense and Sensibility. London: Penguin Books, 2014. Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Translated by Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press, 1994. Barbara Guest Papers, YCAL MSS 1185, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New Haven, CT, USA. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. Translated by Richard Howard. London: Vintage Books, 2000.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Losasso, Poetry, Architecture, and the New York School, Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41520-3

231

232 

Bibliography

Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Translated by Annette Lavers. New  York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991. Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. Translated by Richard Miller. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc., 1998. Bate, Jonathan. Song of the Earth. London: Picador, 2000. Baudelaire, Charles. ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays. Translated by Jonathan Mayne. New York, Phaeton: 1995. Bennett, Robert. Deconstructing Post-WWII New York City: The Literature, Art, Jazz, and Architecture of an Emerging Global Capital. New  York: Routledge, 2011. Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. London: British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin Books, 1972. Bergren, Ann. Weaving Truth: Essays on Language and the Female in Greek Thought. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies, 2008. Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011. Berrigan, Ted. The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan, edited by Alice Notley, Anselm Berrigan & Edmund Berrigan. Berkeley; Lisa Angeles; London: University of California Press, 2007. Berssenbrugge, Mei-mei. ‘Recalling a Friendship’. Chicago Review Vol 53/54; Vol 53, No. 4 – Vol. 54, No. 1/2 (Summer 2008): pp. 114-117. Best, Stephen & Marcus, Sharon. ‘An Introduction to Surface Reading’. Representations 108: 1 (Fall 2009): pp. 1-21. Blasing, M. K. American Poetry: The Rhetoric of Its Forms. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1987. Blasing, M.  K. Politics and Form in Postmodern Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Blau DuPlessis, Rachel. ‘The gendered marvelous: Barbara Guest, surrealism, and feminist reception’. The Scene of My Selves: New Work on New York School Poets, edited by Terrence Diggory & Stephen Paul Miller. Orono, Maine: The National Poetry Foundation, 2001. Bloom, Harold, ed. John Ashbery. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1985. Bloom, Janet & Losada, Robert. ‘Craft interview with John Ashbery’, New York Quarterly 9 (Winter 1972): pp. 11-33. Brossard, Olivier. ‘“The / profile of a city / exploding”: Frank O’Hara’s Aesthetics of Shock’. Caliban: French Journal of English Studies 25, L’art de la ville (2009), pp. 215-228. https://doi.org/10.4000/caliban.1564 Brown, Bill. A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003. ‘The Building’. Stedelijk: News & Press, August 14 2019. https://www.stedelijk. nl/en/news/the-­building. Accessed 18 April 2023.

 Bibliography 

233

Bürger, Peter. The Theory of the Avant-Garde. Translated by Michael Shaw. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. Byers, Mark. Charles Olson and American Modernism: The Practice of the Self. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Casey, Edward S. Getting Back Into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-world. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993. Cheng, Anne. ‘Skins, Tattoos, and Susceptibility’. Representations Vol. 108, No. 1 (Fall 2009): pp. 98-119. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Shakespearean Criticism, Vol 1, edited by Thomas Middleton Raysor. London: Dent, 1967. Collis, Stephen. ‘“The Frayed Trope of Rome”: Poetic Architecture in Robert Duncan, Ronald Johnson, and Lisa Robertson’. Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal Vol. 35, No. 4, a special issue: LITERATURE & ARCHITECTURE (December 2002): pp. 143-162. Collymore, Nan. ‘Queering the Line with Renee Gladman & Fred Moten’. C&10, 26th August 2020. https://contemporaryand.com/magazines/centering-­ blackness-­and-­queerness/. Accessed 9 March 2023. Conway, Patricia & Jensen, Robert. Ornamentalism: The New Decorativeness in Architecture & Design. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982. Crane, Hart. The Bridge. New York: Liveright, 1970. Crase, Douglas. ‘A Voice Like the Day’ in Poetry Vol. 163, No. 4 (Jan 1994): pp. 225-238. Davidoff, Leonore & Hall, Catherine. Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780–1850. London & New York: Routledge, 2002. Davidson, Ian. Ideas of Space in Contemporary Poetry. Basingstoke & New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Derrida, Jacques. ‘No (Point of) Madness—Maintaining Architecture’, tr. K. Linker. Psyche: Inventions of the Other Vol. II, eds. Peggy Kamuf & Elizabeth G. Rottenberg. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology, tr. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. Dickinson, Emily. The Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by R.  W. Franklin. Cambridge, Mass.; London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999. Diggory, Terrence. Encyclopedia of the New York School Poets. New York: Facts on File, 2009. Donovan, Lisa. ‘Barbara Guest: Text as Ruin, Architected Negation, and the Gothic Structure’. Jacket 36, 2008. http://jacketmagazine.com/36/guest-­ donovan.shtml. Accessed 15 March 2023. Duncan, Joel. ‘Frank O’Hara Drives Charles Olson’s Car’. Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory Volume 72, Number 4 (Winter 2016): pp. 77-103.

234 

Bibliography

Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham NC.: Duke University Press, 2004. Edwards, Jason & Hart, Imogen, ed. Rethinking the Interior, c. 1867–1896: Aestheticism and Arts and Crafts. London: Ashgate, 2010. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. ‘The Poet’. The Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, edited by Alfred R. Ferguson & Jean Ferguson Carr. Cambridge & London: The Belknap Press Of Harvard University Press, 1987. Fiedorczuk, Julia. ‘“All of the Bees in a Hive Are Having Imagination”: An Interview with Brenda Hillman’. Polish Journal for American Studies Vol. 11 (Spring 2017): pp. 7-17. Finberg, Keegan Cook. ‘Frank O’Hara rebuilds the Seagram Building: a radical poetry of event’. Textual Practice 30: 1 (2016): pp. 113-142. DOI: https:// doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2015.1064015 Fitzgerald, Adam. ‘John Ashbery’. Bomb 128: 20014, Jul 1 2014. https://bombmagazine.org/articles/john-­ashbery/. Accessed 15 March 2023. Ford, Mark, ed. The New York Poets: An Anthology. Manchester: Carcanet, 2004. Forty, Adrian. Words and Buildings: A Vocabulary of Modern Architecture. London: Thames & Hudson, 2000. Frank O’Hara Papers, 24. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York, NY, USA. Fraser, Kathleen. Translating the Unspeakable: Poetry and the Innovative Necessity. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999. Fraser, Nancy. Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse, and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. London: Penguin, 2010. Frost, Elisabeth A. & Hogue, Cynthia. ‘An Interview with Barbara Guest and Kathleen Fraser’. Innovative Women Poets: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry and Interviews, edited by Elizabeth A. Frost & Cynthia Hogue. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2006. Frost, Robert. In the Clearing. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1972. Ghirardo, Diane. Aldo Rossi and the Spirit of Architecture. Newhaven & London: Yale University Press, 2019. Gill, Jo. ‘Hart Crane: The “Architectural Art”’. Modernism/modernity Volume 29, Number 1 (January 2022): pp.  1-25. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/ mod.2021.0069. Gladman, Renee. Plans for Sentences. Seattle and New York: Wave Books, 2022. Gladman, Renee. ‘Untitled (Environments)’. e-flux Journal, Issue #92, June 2018. https://www.e-­flux.com/journal/92/203283/untitled-­ environments/. Accessed 9 March 2023. Gladman, Renee & Moten, Fred. ‘July 28: Renee Gladman and Fred Moten in conversation’. PCG Studio, Tuesday July 28th 2020. https:// paulacoopergallery-­studio.com/posts/renee-­gladman-­and-­fred-­moten-­in-­ conversation. Accessed 9 March 2023.

 Bibliography 

235

Gooch, Brad. City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O’Hara. New York: Harper Perennial, 1993. Gray, Timothy. ‘New Windows on New York: The Urban Pastoral Vision of James Schuyler and Jane Freilicher’. Genre 33: 2 (1 June 2000): pp. 171-198. Gray, Timothy. Urban Pastoral: Natural Currents in the New York School. Iowa City: Iowa University Press, 2010. Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. Guest, Barbara. Forces of Imagination. Berkeley: Kelsey St. Press, 2003. Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry Into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Translated by Thomas Burger. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1991. Hamlett, Jane. Material Relations: Domestic Interiors and Middle-class Families in England, 1850-1910. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010. Hampson, Robert & Montgomery, Will, ed. Frank O’Hara Now: New Essays on the New York Poet. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010. Heidegger, Martin. Poetry, Language, Thought. Translated by Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper and Row, 1971. Herd, David. John Ashbery and American Poetry. New York: Palgrave, 2000. ‘High Tech’, RIBA Architecture.com, https://www.architecture.com/explore-­ architecture/high-­tech. Accessed 19 April 2023. Hillier, Bill & Hanson, Julienne. The Social Logic of Space. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Hillman, Brenda. Pieces of Air in the Epic. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2007. Hillringhouse, Mark. Talking All Night, Interviews, Essays, and Photographs. South Orange, NJ.: Serving House Books, Forthcoming 2023. Hollander, John. ‘The Poetry of Architecture’. Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 49: 5 (Feb. 1996): pp. 17-35. Hoover, Paul, ed. Postmodern American Poetry. New York & London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2013. Hume, Angela. ‘Imagining Ecopoetics: An Interview with Robert Hass, Brenda Hillman, Evelyn Reilly, and Jonathan Skinner’. Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 19.4 (Autumn 2012): pp. 751-766. Hunter, Walt. ‘What Poets Know That ChatGPT Doesn’t’. The Atlantic, February 13 2023. https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2023/02/chatgpt-­ ai-­technology-­writing-­poetry/673035/. Accessed 12 April 2023. Jameson, Frederic. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham NC.: Duke University Press, 1991. Jencks, Charles. The Language of Postmodern Architecture. London: Academy Editions, 1991.

236 

Bibliography

Johnson, David K. The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government. Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 2004. Jones, David. In Parenthesis. London: Faber & Faber, 2018. Kane, Daniel. All Poets Welcome: The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960s. Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press, 2003. Kane, Daniel. ‘Reading John Ashbery’s The Tennis Court Oath through Man Ray’s eye’. Textual Practice 21: 3 (2007): pp. 551-575. Kaufman, Robert. ‘A Future for Modernism: Barbara Guest’s Recent Poetry’. The American Poetry Review Vol. 29, No. 4 (July/August 2000): pp. 11-16. Kaufman, Erica. ‘On “The Location of Things”’. Jacket 36, 2008. http://jacketmagazine.com/36/guest-­kaufman.shtml. Accessed 15 March 2023. Kay, Andrew. ‘Conspiring with Keats: Toward a Poetics of Breathing’. European Romantic Review 27, no. 5 (2016): pp. 563-581. Keats, John. Selected Poems, edited by John Barnard. London: Penguin, 2007. Klobuchar, Andrew & Barnholden, Michael, ed. Writing Class: The Kootenay School of Writing Anthology. Vancouver: New Star Books, 1999. Knittle, Davy. ‘Bodies-cities part 2: James Schuyler’s somatic urbanism’. Jacket2, January 9, 2018. https://jacket2.org/commentary/bodies-­cities-­part-­2-­ james-­schuylers-­somatic-­urbanism. Accessed 11 April 2023. Koolhaas, Rem. Delirious New York. New York: The Monacelli Press, 1994. Kotz, Liz. Words to Be Looked At: Language in 1960s Art. Cambridge, Massachusetts & London, England: The MIT Press, 2007. Kreider, Kristen. Poetics and Place: The Architecture of Sign, Subjects and Site. London & New York: I. B. Taurus, 2014. Larkin, David & Pfeiffer, Bruce Brooks, ed. Frank Lloyd Wright: The Masterworks. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1993. Latour, Bruno. ‘Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern’. Critical Inquiry 30 (Winter 2004): pp. 224-248. Leach, Neil, ed. Rethinking Architecture. London & New York: Routledge, 1997. Leary, Paris & Kelly, Robert. A Controversy of Poets: An Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry. New York: Doubleday, 1965. Leatherbarrow, David & Mostafavi, Mohsen. Surface Architecture. Cambridge, Mass. & London: The MIT Press, 2005. Lehman, David. The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets. New York: Anchor Books, 1999. Lennard, John. But I Digress: The Exploitation of Parentheses in English Printed Verse. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. Lerner, Ben. ‘The Future Continuous: Ashbery’s Lyric Mediacy’. boundary 2 Vol 37, Issue 1 (Spring 2010): pp.  201–213. DOI: https://doi.org/10.121 5/01903659-­2009-­042. Little, Carl. ‘An Interview with James Schuyler’. Agni No. 37 (1993): pp. 152-182.

 Bibliography 

237

Lloyd Wright, Frank. The Future of Architecture. Ljubljana: Mladinska Knijiga, 1969. Loos, Adolf. Programs and Manifestoes on 20th-Century Architecture. Translated by M. Bullock. Cambridge, Mass & London: The MIT Press, 1976. Losasso, Mae. ‘Conspiration: On Poetry and Breathing’. The Contemporary Journal 4 (December 07, 2022). DOI: https://thecontemporaryjournal.org/ strands/emergency-­emergence/conspiration-­on-­poetry-­and-­breathing. Love, Heather. ‘Truth and Consequences: On Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading’. Criticism Vol. 52, No. 2, ‘Honoring Eve’ (Spring 2010): pp. 235-241. Lundquist, Sara. ‘The fifth point of a star: Barbara Guest and the New  York “school” of poets’. Women’s Studies 30: 1 (2001): pp. 11-41. Madge, Charles. ‘Planning for people’. The Town Planning Review 21 (July 1959): pp. 131-144. Magi, Jill. ‘The shuttle of discourse’: Chris Tysh on Marjorie Welish’s ‘Begetting Textile’. Jacket 2, April 13 2015. https://jacket2.org/commentary/shuttle-­ discourse-­chris-­tysh-­marjorie-­welishs-­begetting-­textile-­poems. Accessed 15 March 2023. Moss, Howard. ‘James Schuyler: Whatever Is Moving’. The American Poetry Review Vol 10, No. 3 (May/June 1981): pp. 14-16. ‘MR.  HARRISON’S OPPORTUNITY’, January 10, 1947, Section C. The New  York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/1947/01/10/archives/mr-­ harrisons-­opportunity.html. Accessed 20 April 2023. Mumford, Lewis. The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects. New York: Harcourt Brace & World, Inc., 1961. Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York & London: New York University Press, 2009. Nabokov, Vladimir. Lolita. London: Penguin Books, 2006. Nelson, Maggie. Bluets. Seattle & New York: Wave Books, 2009. Nelson, Maggie. Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2007. O’Hara, Frank. Lunch Poems. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1964. O’Hara, Frank. Standing Still and Walking in New York, edited by Donald Allen. Bolinas: Grey Fox Press, 1975. O’Hara, Frank & Berkson, Bill. Hymns of St. Bridget & Other Writings. Woodacre: The Owl Press, 2004. Olson, Charles. Call Me Ishmael. London: Jonathan Cape, 1967. Olson, Charles. Collected Prose, edited by Donald Allen & Benjamin Friedlander. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1997. Pallasmaa, Juhani. The Eyes of the Skin. Chichester: Wiley-Academy, 2007. Perloff, Marjorie. Frank O’Hara, Poet Among Painters. Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press.

238 

Bibliography

Perloff, Marjorie. ‘Unoriginal Genius: Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project as Paradigm for the New Poetics’. Études anglaises Volume 61, Issue 2 (2008): p. 229-252. Powers, Alan. Bauhaus Goes West: Modern Art and Design in Britain and America. London: Thames & Hudson, 2019. Robertson, Lisa. Lisa Robertson’s Magenta Soul Whip. Toronto: Coach House Books, 2009. Robertson, Lisa. Nilling. Toronto: Bookthug, 2012. Robertson, Lisa. Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture. Toronto: Coach House Books, 2011. Robinson, Elizabeth. ‘Direction’. Jacket 36, 2008. http://jacketmagazine. com/36/guest-­robinson.shtml. Accessed 15 March 2023. Rosenberg, Harold. ‘The American Action Painters’. ARTnews (January 1952): pp. 22-50. Rossetti, Christina. Selected Poems, edited by Dinah Roe. London: Penguin, 2008. Ruskin, John. The Nature of Gothic. London: Pallas Athene, 2021. Ruskin, John. The Poetry of Architecture. New York: John Wiley & Son, 1873. Sadler, Simon. Archigram: Architecture Without Architecture. Cambridge, Mass. & London: The MIT Press, 2005. Said, Edward. ‘The Poet as Oedipus’. The New  York Times, April 13th 1975. https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/11/01/specials/bloom-­misreading.html. Accessed 10 March 2023. Said, Edward. The World, the Text, and the Critic. Cambridge, MT: Harvard University Press, 1983. Saint-Amour, Paul K. ‘The Literary Present’. ELH Volume 85, Number 2 (Summer 2018): pp. 367-392. Schavemaker, Margriet. The White Cube as a Lieu de Mémoire: The Future of History in the Contemporary Art Museum. Amsterdam: Reinwardt Academy  Amsterdam University of the Arts, 2016. Schnier, Zac. ‘Between “Location” and “Things”: Barbara Guest, American Pragmatism, and the Construction of Subjectivity’. Canadian Review of American Studies Vol. 45, No. 3 (Winter 2015): pp. 354-374. Schumacher, Patrick. ‘The metaverse as opportunity for architecture and society: design drivers, core competencies’. Architectural Intelligence 1: 11 (2022): 1-20. Schuyler, James. The Diary of James Schuyler, edited by Nathan Kernan. Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1997. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Touching Feeling. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. Semper, Gottfried. The Four Elements of Architecture and Other Writings. Translated by H.  F. Mallgrave & W.  Herrmann. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Shamma, Yasmine. Spatial Poetics: Second Generation New  York School Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.

 Bibliography 

239

Shaw, Lytle. Frank O’Hara: The Poetics of Coterie. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2006. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. The Selected Poetry & Prose of Shelley. Ware: Wordsworth Editions Limited, 2002. Shoptaw, John. On the Outside Looking Out: John Ashbery’s Poetry. Cambridge & London: Harvard University Press, 1994. Silliman, Ron, ed. In the American Tree. Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation, 1986. Silliman, Ron, ed. ‘The Dwelling Place: 9 Poets’. Alcheringa Volume 1, Number 2, (1975): pp. 104-120. Silliman, Ron. Silliman’s Blog, November 23 2005. https://www.writing.upenn. edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2005/11/jordan-­davis-­curtis-­ faville-­ended-­up.html. Accessed 01 March 2023. Silverberg, Mark. The New  York School Poets and the Neo-Avant-Garde: Between Radical Art and Radical Chic. Farnham, UK & Burlington, USA: Ashgate, 2010. Skinner, Jonathan. ‘Yard work’. Jacket2. https://jacket2.org/commentary/yard-­ work. Accessed 28 February 2023. Skoulding, Zoe. Contemporary Women’s Poetry and Urban Space. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Snelson, Danny. ‘The Dwelling Place / Surprised by Sign’. Simultaneously Agitated Space (Blogspot). http://simultaneouslyagitatedspace.blogspot.com/2007/04/ dwelling-­place.html. Accessed 02 March 2023. Sontag, Susan. Against Interpretation and Other Essays. London: Penguin, 2009. Sontag, Susan. Notes on ‘Camp’. London: Penguin, 2018. Spurr, David Anton. Architecture and Modern Literature. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2012. Stein, Gertrude. Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein, edited by Carl Van Vechten. New York: Vintage Books, 1990. Stern, Robert A.  M., Mellins, Thomas & Fishman, David. New York 1960: Architecture and Urbanism Between the Second World War and the Bicentennial. New York: The Monacelli Press, 1995. Stitt, Peter A. ‘John Ashbery, The Art of Poetry No.33’. The Paris Review No. 90 (Winter 1983). https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/3014/the-­art-­ of-­poetry-­no-­33-­john-­ashbery. Accessed 19 April 2023. Strickland, Stephanie. ‘Born Digital’. The Poetry Foundation, 2009. https://www. poetryfoundation.org/articles/69224/born-­digital. Accessed 28 February 2023. Teare, Brian. ‘Revelation’. Boston Review, January 01, 2009. http://bostonreview.net/teare-­reveleation. Accessed 15 March 2023. Tietchen, Todd. ‘Frank O’Hara and the Poetics of the Digital’. Criticism Vol. 56, No. 1 (Winter 2014): pp. 45-62.

240 

Bibliography

Timberg, Scott. ‘The poetry of “Mad Men”: When Matthew Weiner first read Frank O’Hara, “it was just like total time travel”’. Salon, July 6, 2016. https:// www.salon.com/2016/07/06/the_poetry_of_mad_men_when_matthew_ weiner_first_read_frank_ohara_it_was_just_like_total_time_travel/. Accessed 13 March 2023. Ward, Geoff. Statutes of Liberty: The New  York School of Poets. London: Palgrave, 2001. Wardrop, Daneen. ‘Whitman as Furtive Mother: The Supplementary Jouissance of the “Ambushed Womb” in “Song of Myself”’. Texas Studies in Literature and Language Vol. 40, No. 2, Essays (SUMMER 1998): pp. 142-157. Warner, Michael Publics and Counterpublics. New York: Zone Books, 2005. Watten, Barrett. The Constructivist Moment: From Material Text to Cultural Poetics. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2003. Welish, Marjorie & Cooperman, Matthew. ‘Diagramming Here: An Interview’. Conjunctions, August 17 2004. https://www.conjunctions.com/online/article/marjorie-­welish-­08-­17-­2004. Accessed 19 April 2023. Wells, Zachariah. ‘Sometimes You Need a Record of Your Life: on Lisa Robertson’. Critical Flame Issue 42, May-June 2016. https://criticalflame.org/sometimes-­ you-­need-­a-­record-­of-­your-­life-­on-­lisa-­robertson/. Accessed 03 March 2023. Whitman, Walt. The Complete Poems, edited by Francis Murphy. London: Penguin, 2004. Wilkinson, John. ‘“Couplings of such sonority”: reading a poem by Barbara Guest’. Textual Practice 23: 3 (2009): pp.  481–502. https://doi. org/10.1080/09502360902868845. Wilkinson, John. ‘Jim the Jerk: Bathos and Loveliness in the Poetry of James Schuyler’. On Bathos: Literature, Art, Music, edited by Sara Crangle & Peter Nicholls. London, New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2012. Williams, Robert Grant. ‘Reading the Parenthesis’ SubStance Vol. 22, No. 1, Issue 70 (1993): p. 53-66. Williamson, Caroline. ‘Working methods: Painting, poetry and the difficulty of Barbara Guest’. Jacket 36, 2008. http://jacketmagazine.com/36/guest-­ williamson.shtml. Accessed 04 April 2023. Woolf, Virginia. Mrs Dalloway. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Wordsworth, William. The Major Works. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Venturi, Robert, Scott Brown, Denise & Izenour, Steve. Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form. Cambridge, Mass & London: The MIT Press, 1977. Yaneva, Albena. Five Ways to Make Architecture Political: An Introduction to the Politics of Design Practice. London: Bloomsbury, 2017.

Index1

A Abstract Expressionism, 3n4 Action painting, 98, 104 Allen, Donald, 21, 207 Andrews, Bruce, 84n18, 203–205, 217 Aperture, 28–33, 100, 102, 159–195, 227 See also Windows Archigram, 30, 90, 90n27, 91, 93–96, 93n36, 109, 116 Architextual, 10, 198 Aristotle, 76 Ashbery, John, 2, 5, 10, 21–23, 25, 29, 30, 36–38, 58, 67, 79–117, 119–122, 162, 197–201, 204, 205, 207, 208, 219, 223, 224 “Aldo Rossi,” 114–116, 118, 130 “America,” 85 “And Ut Pictura Poesis Is Her Name,” 107

“The Bungalows,” 101–104, 110 “Daffy Duck in Hollywood,” 101, 109, 112, 116 The Double Dream of Spring, 2, 30, 95–97, 99–101, 104, 105, 107, 110 “Europe,” 84n18, 86, 88, 89, 91, 93, 99, 101 Houseboat Days, 30, 86, 101, 102, 106–113, 115–117, 224 “Introduction to The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara,” 22, 36 “The Invisible Avant-Garde,” 94, 96, 110 “The New Spirit,” 105 “Our Youth,” 93 “Pyrography,” 110, 110n76, 111 Rivers and Mountains, 84n18, 95 “Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” 94, 106, 117, 197

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Losasso, Poetry, Architecture, and the New York School, Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41520-3

241

242 

INDEX

Ashbery, John (cont.) Some Trees, 83, 84n18, 87 “Soonest Mended,” 99 The Tennis Court Oath, 2, 30, 83–86, 84n18, 88–91, 93–95, 97, 104, 107, 110, 117, 204 Three Poems, 105, 106, 204 Atectonic fabrication, see Cladding Austen, Jane, 135, 136, 156 Avant-garde, 3n4, 8, 11, 29, 31, 32, 36, 44, 45, 84, 85, 90, 94–96, 98, 99, 102, 110, 113, 122, 169, 201, 202, 213–218, 220, 228 B Bachelard, Gaston, 23–26, 128, 144 Balloons, 83, 91, 93, 94, 97 Banham, Reyner, 59, 90 Baraka, Amiri, 227, 228 Barthes, Roland, 25, 26, 173–176, 179, 180n45, 181, 203, 204 Camera Lucida, 179, 180n45 Bate, Jonathan, 218, 219 Baudelaire, Charles, 47, 209 Baudrillard, Jean, 25 Bauhaus, 16, 45, 49, 137n45, 149 Beats, 17, 21, 62, 71, 217, 219, 228 Bennett, Robert, 4, 45, 122, 123, 130, 131 Berger, John, 153–156 Bergren, Ann, 144, 148 Berkson, Bill, 74, 75, 75n85 Berlant, Lauren, 162n11, 185, 186, 189, 190, 194 Bernstein, Charles, 84n18, 197, 204, 207, 217 Berrigan, Ted, 3, 197–199, 201, 211 Berssenbrugge, Mei-mei, 133, 226, 228 Best, Stephen, 26, 27, 81, 82 Black Mountain, 17, 20, 21, 217, 219, 220

Blasing, M. K., 23, 65–67, 73, 86, 97, 98, 104, 113n82 Blondel, J. F., 14, 15, 29n69 Bloom, Harold, 84n18, 200, 201 Bracket, see Parentheses Bridge, 13, 18, 20, 91, 213, 220 Brooklyn Bridge, 17 Heidegger, 18 Bürger, Peter, 110, 113 Byers, Mark, 18–20 C Caesars Palace, 111, 112 Camp, 60, 62–64, 64n52, 66, 71, 73n80, 75n86, 203, 216, 217 Cantilever, 14, 52, 125, 128, 129, 129n28, 134 Casey, Edward S., 25 Cheng, Anne, 151 Chrysler Building, 1, 6 Cixous, Hélène, 25 Cladding, 148, 149, 151 atectonic fabrication, 149, 151 in Guest, 119–157 as skin, 148, 149, 152 textile, 138 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 65–68 Collis, Stephen, 11, 12, 16, 17, 202, 208, 224 Coterie, 3, 3n4, 64, 65, 90, 94, 199, 201, 211, 212, 217 Crane, Hart, 17–20, 22, 63 The Crystal Palace, 42, 86, 91, 92 D Davidson, Ian, 19 de Chirico, Giorgio, 95 de Kooning, Willem, 98 Deleuze, Gilles, 25 Denby, Edwin, 21

 INDEX 

Derrida, Jacques, 24, 25, 88, 91 di Prima, Diane, 21 Dickinson, Emily, 180, 181 Domesticity, 131, 133 Duchamp, Marcel, 72 Duck & decorated shed, 33, 115, 148 E Ecopoetics, 31, 203, 216–220 Ecstasy, 71, 188–190 Eggs in architecture, 59, 72, 72n78 on the Guggenheim, 59 in Mumford, 59 in O’Hara, 35–77 in Whitman, 71, 72 Elmslie, Kenward, 21 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 66–68, 70, 71 Empire State Building, 2, 6 Epicurean, 30, 81, 81n8, 88, 95, 102, 103, 117 E-poetry, 214, 215 F Femininity, 59, 146, 151 Feminism, 130 Fertility, 30, 58–65, 71, 72, 74, 75 Finberg, Keegan Cook, 40, 44, 45, 49, 50 Fishman, David, see Stern, Robert A. M. Forty, Adrian, 14 Foucault, Michel, 25 Fraser, Kathleen, 121, 131 Freilicher, Jane, 21 Friedan, Betty, 58 Frost, Robert, 110, 110n76 Fuller, Buckminster, 59, 90 Futurity/futurism, 30, 31, 38, 75, 76, 94, 109, 182, 187, 190, 225

243

G Gender, 27, 59, 60, 62 Ghyczy, Peter, 60 Gill, Jo, 16, 17 Gladman, Renee, 222–228 Glazier, Loss Pequeño, 214, 217 Goldsmith, Kenneth, 210, 211, 213, 214, 217 Gooch, Brad, 22, 37, 55 Gray, Timothy, 4, 66, 163, 218, 219 Gropius, Walter, 7, 8 Grosz, Elizabeth, 151, 152 Guattari, Felix, 25 Guest, Barbara, xxi–xxiv, xxix, xxxi, xxxii, 2, 5, 10, 23, 25, 29, 31, 101n57, 119–157, 160, 162, 197, 198, 200, 205–208, 220, 222, 227 “The Blue Stairs,” xxi, xxii “Invisible Architecture,” 122, 125–134, 146 “Location of Things,” 128, 129, 133, 134 “Mysteriously Defining the Mysterious: Byzantine Proposals of Poetry,” 137 “The Nude,” 153, 154n82 Quilts, 138, 139, 141, 142 “A Reason for Poetics,” 141 “The Screen of Distance,” 147 “Shifting Persona”, 134, 205 “Words”, 146 H Hanson, Julienne, 28, 29 Harrison, Wallace Kirkman, 45n21, 59, 61 Heidegger, Martin, 18, 22–26 Hejinian, Lyn, 136, 205–207, 226 Herd, David, 86, 95, 96, 107 Hermeneutics, 80, 81, 85, 103, 123, 218

244 

INDEX

Hillier, Bill, 28, 29 Hillman, Brenda, 216, 219–222 Hoffman, Josef, 149 Palais Stoclet, 149 Hollander, John, 12–14, 16 Home, 6, 23, 31, 54, 58, 59, 70, 124, 126–132, 134, 136, 137, 139–141, 140n47, 144, 145, 148, 149, 157, 170n29, 179, 182, 218, 222 Hoover, Paul, 204, 227 Huxtable, Ada Louise, 99–100 I Impasse, 162n11, 186, 187, 189, 190, 194, 195 International modernism, 9, 30, 36, 45, 48, 51, 56, 59, 60, 75n86, 77, 115, 122, 124, 150 J Jacobs, Jane, 59 Jacobsen, Arne, 60 Jameson, Frederic, 25, 72n78 Jencks, Charles, 13, 14, 24 Johnson, David K., 47 Johnson, Phillip, 9, 10 Jones, David, 177 K Kane, Daniel, 84n18, 198 Kaufman, Erica, 131, 134 Kaufman, Robert, 121 Keats, John, 26, 140, 209 conspiration, 209 “This living hand, now warm and capable”, 209 Kline, Franz, 98 Koch, Kenneth, 5, 21, 51, 55, 120, 121n7, 171, 199

Koolhaas, Rem, 5, 6, 30, 40, 42, 45, 45n21, 47, 58, 77 Delirious New York, 20n10, 54, 54n12, 59n21, 71n38 Manhattanism, 30, 40, 42 needle and globe, 42, 57 Kreider, Kristen, 23 Kupka, František, 54, 56 L Language poetry, 11, 204, 205, 226 Las Vegas, 108, 110–112, 114, 116 for Learning from Las Vegas (see Venturi, Robert; Denise Scott Brown) Latour, Bruno, 27 Le Corbusier, 7, 40–42, 59, 108 Leatherbarrow, David, 148, 149 Ledoux, C. N., 15, 29n69 Lefebvre, Henri, 25 Lehman, David, 2, 4, 35, 120, 121n7, 160n4 Lerner, Ben, 103 Levertov, Denise, 68, 220 Liveable space, 22–27, 30, 37, 38, 67, 77, 119, 201, 207, 218, 223 Locus Solus (magazine), 21 Loos, Adolf, 150, 151 Love, Heather, 80, 82n12 Lucretian swerve, 102 Lunulae, see Parentheses Lyotard, Jean-François, 25 M Mad Men, 35, 36 Manhattanism, see Koolhaas, Rem Marcus, Sharon, 26, 27, 81, 82 Masculinity, 148 Mathews, Harry, 21 Mellins, Thomas, see Stern, Robert A. M. Mitchell, Joan, 98

 INDEX 

Modernism, 7, 9–11, 18, 20, 30, 40, 52, 60, 64, 75, 77, 93, 97, 109, 115, 116, 123, 148, 149, 210 Montfort, Nick, 214 Moore, Marianne, 139, 140 Mostafavi, Mohsen, 148, 149 Mumford, Lewis, 51, 58, 59 Muñoz, José Esteban, 30, 38, 75, 76, 162n11, 187, 189, 190, 224 Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) (New York), 32, 37–39, 52 Myers, John Bernard, 2, 3 Myles, Eileen, 226 N Nelson, Maggie, xxiv, xxxi, 3n4, 20, 31, 48, 62, 68, 120, 121, 131, 161, 176n38, 207 New York City, 2, 4, 5, 7–11, 32, 35, 36, 38, 41, 46, 50, 122, 163, 199 New York School of poets, 2–4, 11, 20, 22, 23, 68, 120, 120n3, 162, 198–202, 208, 217–219, 227 New York World’s Fairs, 42, 59, 60 Niemeyer, Oscar, 40, 41, 208 Notley, Alice, 3, 198, 201, 217 O O’Hara, Frank, 2, 3n4, 5, 10, 17, 20–23, 26, 27, 29–32, 68–70, 83n15, 84n18, 101n57, 119–121, 141, 162, 163, 188, 197, 198, 200, 201, 205, 207–210, 212, 213, 225 “Cornkind”, 62, 64, 65, 70, 74 “F. M. I. I 6/25/61”, 54, 73 “For Grace After A Party”, 72, 188 “The Lay of the Romance of the Associations”, 48, 51 Lunch Poems, 36, 212 “Nocturne”, 39, 43, 47, 48, 56, 57

245

“Notes on Second Avenue”, 48 “Personism”, 17, 20, 26, 68–70 Oikos, 127, 218 Olson, Charles, 17–22, 51n31, 55, 56, 68, 98, 102, 104, 168, 169, 206, 216 Call Me Ishmael, 18 “La Préface”, 19 “La Torre”, 19 open field, 22, 55, 56, 206 “Projective Verse”, 17, 19, 22, 55, 68, 98, 104, 169 Oppenheim, Meret, 72 Organicism in architecture, 51, 52, 56, 58, 59, 72, 75, 129n28, 225 in Frank O’Hara, 51, 65, 67, 75, 77 in poetry, 56, 66–68 Ornament, 15, 30, 107, 115, 116, 149–152 P Padgett, Ron, 3, 120, 198 Parentheses, 31, 137, 159–195, 163n16, 168n25, 221–223 Perloff, Marjorie, 3, 17, 21, 68, 72, 74, 206, 211 Personism, see O’Hara, Frank Piano, Renzo, 89, 90n27 Piranesi, Giambattista, 101, 104 Play, 20, 28, 30, 31, 51, 66, 68, 80, 102, 111, 116, 117, 123, 143, 176, 189 Polis, 127, 145, 208 Pollock, Jackson, 90, 98, 104 Pompidou Centre, 32 Pop, 94, 112, 120 Porter, Fairfield, 21 Post-critical, 26, 27, 81, 117, 119, 218 Post-language, 31, 203, 206, 217 Postmodernism, 9, 11, 18, 20, 31, 72, 72n78, 94, 95, 113n82, 115, 116, 121, 123, 210

246 

INDEX

Poststructuralism, 38–40, 102, 228 Powers, Alan, 45 Precarity, 27, 31, 172, 185 Private space, 48, 127–129, 133, 134 Public space, 124, 127, 129, 212 Punctum, 179, 180, 180n45, 186, 194 Q Queer(ness), 30, 31, 38, 47, 51, 56, 62, 71, 75–77, 187, 189, 190, 225–228 R Race, 31 Raworth, Tom, 102, 197 Reality, 23, 29, 51, 76, 97, 101, 130, 141, 146, 147, 209, 213, 215, 220 Rivers, Larry, 21, 140 Robertson, Lisa, 20, 29, 87, 88, 119, 125, 126, 140n47, 142, 144, 145, 152, 175, 198, 206–210, 219, 220 “Doubt and the History of Scaffolding”, 125 “A Hotel”, 208, 209 Nilling, 209 Rogers, Richard, 89, 90n27 Rosenberg, Harold, 98 Rossetti, Christina, 156, 157 Rossi, Aldo, 30, 99–102, 104, 116 Royal Institute of British Architects, 88, 90 Ruskin, John, 15, 16, 26 S Saarinen, Eero, 9, 59 Sadler, Simon, 90, 90n27, 91, 93n36, 94 Said, Edward, 64, 201

Saint-Amour, Paul K, 26, 179, 187, 190 St. Brigid’s Roman Catholic Church, 75 San Cataldo cemetery, 100 Scaffolding, 30, 31, 83, 86–89, 104, 116, 119, 122, 125, 134, 138, 143, 152, 206 Scalapino, Leslie, 198, 226 Schumacher, Patrick, 213, 214 Schuyler, James, 1, 2, 5, 10, 21, 29, 31, 102, 120, 121, 159–195, 198, 200, 205, 208, 221–223 The Diary of James Schuyler, 161, 163, 191n66 “Dining Out with Doug and Frank”, 181, 184, 186, 194 “I sit down to type”, 177, 178, 186, 222 “Like Lorraine Ellison”, 165, 171 “A Man in Blue”, 171 “The Morning of the Poem”, 166, 169, 170n29, 174, 177, 191, 194 “A photograph”, 194 “Seeking”, 168, 169, 171, 184, 218, 221 “Trip”, 166, 167, 172 “A View”, 191 Scott Brown, Denise, 30, 32–33, 108–111, 113, 113n82, 115, 116, 119, 123, 148 Seagram Building, 40, 49, 50, 75n86 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 26, 80, 82n12 Semper, Gottfried, 143, 144, 149 Separate spheres, 127 Shamma, Yasmine, 3, 4, 66, 198–201, 211 Shaw, Lytle, 3n4, 26n62, 64, 65, 69, 75, 217 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 138, 140, 172 Shoptaw, John, 79, 84n18, 108, 112 Silliman, Ron, 84n18, 197, 202–204, 207, 211, 219

 INDEX 

Silverberg, Mark, 3, 3n4, 120, 121, 163, 164, 190 Skin, 41, 89, 148, 149, 151–155, 157, 171, 172, 208 Skinner, Jonathan, 216–218, 220 Skoulding, Zoe, 123, 124, 129 Smith, Hazel, 4 Sontag, Susan, 27, 60, 63, 64, 66, 73n80, 81 Spurr, David Anton, 14 Stairs blue stairs, xxi–xxxii (see also Guest, Barbara, “The Blue Stairs”) Simoetti Staircase, xxix, xxx, 32 Stedelijk Museum, xxi, xxii, xxviii, 32 Stefans, Brian Kim, 214, 228 Stein, Gertrude, 171n32, 219 Sterility, 30, 51, 64 Stern, Robert A. M., 6, 9 Stone, Edward Durell, 8, 9, 37 Strickland, Stephanie, 214, 215 Surface reading, 27, 82 Surface-depth dichotomy, 149 T Tergiversation, 101, 102, 104, 105 Thor-Larsen, Henrik, 60, 61 Transcendentalism, 80–81 U UN Building, 32, 42, 44–47, 45n21, 56, 57, 208 Urban pastoral, 66, 163, 218, 221 Utopianism, 115 V van der Rohe, Mies, 7, 49, 50 Venturi, Robert, 30, 33, 108–111, 113, 113n82, 115, 116, 119, 123, 148

247

Vernacular, 13, 20, 30, 36, 58, 109, 110, 140n47, 145, 175, 179, 206, 208, 210 Visionary architecture, 30, 90, 95, 96, 104 W Ward, Geoff, 2, 4, 88, 99, 120, 176, 177, 181, 186, 197–200, 202, 207 Wardrop, Daneen, 70, 71 Warhol, Andy, 72n78, 113, 180n45 Watkins, William, 3, 120 Watten, Barrett, 98, 99, 203, 204 Weiner, Matthew, 35, 36 Whitman, Walt, 17, 65–68, 70–72 Wilkinson, John, 120, 121, 129–131, 145, 154n82, 162 Windows in Guest, 128, 128n26, 129, 134–137, 156, 206 as parentheses, 168, 169, 185, 191 in Schuyler, 31, 161, 162, 164, 168, 169, 175, 178, 179, 185, 190, 191, 193–195 Woolf, Virginia, 17, 168n25, 176, 184n49 Wordsworth, William, 173 Wright, Frank Lloyd, 51, 51n31, 52, 56, 68, 129n28 organic architecture, 51, 52, 129n28 Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 52, 129n28 Y Yaneva, Albena, 28 Z Zeppelin, see Balloons