Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions

317 Pages·2007·1.58 MB·English

by  Maggie Nelson

Maggie
literary criticism / art history Nelson
women, the new york school,
aw
and other true abstractions
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o by Maggie Nelson
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In this whip-smart study, Maggie Nelson provides
oe
tn the first extended consideration of the roles played
h, by women in and around the New York School of
m ATwood er th pporeectse,d fernotmed t haen a1l9y5se0ss otof tthhee wproerske notf, Baanrdb oarffae rGsu uenst-,
To e Bernadette Mayer, Alice Notley, Eileen Myles, and
t
Maggie Nelson is the author of a book of r n abstract painter Joan Mitchell as well as a reconsid-
u eration of the work of many male New York School
nonfiction, The Red Parts: A Memoir, as well e
ew writers and artists from a feminist perspective.
as several collections of poetry, including
With contagious enthusiasm, Women, the New York
Something Bright, Then Holes, Jane: A Murder a
y School, and Other True Abstractions ranges widely
(finalist, the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for b
the Art of the Memoir), The Latest Winter, and “After decades of listening (enthralled, of course) “So many times over the years I’ve been asked, so and covers collaborations between poets and paint-
Shiner (finalist, the Poetry Society of America’s to the knitted ribbon-dress observations of John What’s it like to be a woman in rock music? It’s tr ers in the 1950s and 1960s; the complex role played
Norma Farber First Book Award). A recipient Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, and James Schuyler, always been sort of a paralyzing question—to rk by the “true abstraction” of the feminine in the work
of a 2007 Arts Writers grant from the Creative finally, the other serious ladies of the necessarily answer it is to give the question itself meaning. a s of John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, and James Schuyler;
c the intricate weave of verbal and visual arts through-
Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation, she has taught ‘so-called’ New York School—Joan Mitchell, Maggie Nelson here opens it all up for exami- c
t out the postwar period, from Abstract Expression-
literature and writing at the Graduate Writing Barbara Guest, Bernadette Mayer, Alice Notley, nation with this incredibly timely and astute ih
Program of the New School, Pratt Institute of and Eileen Myles—are invited to give their book.” —kim gordon of sonic youth oo ism to Pop to Conceptualism to feminist and queer
Art, and Wesleyan University. Currently she full-throated response. Smart as a whip and fun no performance art; and the unfolding, diverse careers
of Mayer, Notley, and Myles from the 1970s to the
teaches on the faculty of the School of Critical as an after-hours bar, Maggie Nelson gets fresh “Maggie Nelson is deft and revelatory in bringing sl
Studies at CalArts in Valencia, California, and with heretofore queerly ignored matters poetic, sociological as well as psychological, stylistic, , present. Along the way, Nelson considers provoca-
tive questions of anonymity and publicity, the solitary
lives in Los Angeles. aesthetic, and feminist. Rearranging the school’s and political insights to bear on her title terms,
and the communal, the enduring and the ephemeral,
classroom seating, illuminating details, all the ‘women’ and ‘the New York School.’ She lays
domesticity, boredom, sex, and politics.
while demonstrating how crucial not-caring is bare an obscured history, performs imaginative
By asking us to rethink the ways in which we
to care, Nelson remaps the ‘one flow’ of poetry. and incisive readings of careers as well as books
conceptualize “schools” and “avant-gardes” and
Let me be blunt: reading her bravura study’s and poems, and foots her way with exciting skill
eventually drawing our attention to larger, compel-
like spying Joan Jett taking Helen Vendler for through the overlapping minefields of profes-
ling questions about how and why we read—and how
a joyride.” —bruce hainley sional, national, and sexual politics.”
gender and sexuality inform that reading in the first
—eve kosofsky sedgwick, author,
place—Maggie Nelson not only fills an important gap
“This is a terrific and necessary book. . . . Maggie A Dialogue on Love women,
in the history of American poetry and art but also
jacket art: On front cover, detail (2 panels) from La Vie Nelson charts new paths for work on the New
en Rose by Joan Mitchell. On back cover, entire painting York School and on postwar experimental writ- the new york school, gives an inspired performance of the kind of lively,
is shown (4 panels). All works by Joan Mitchell © the ing, and her book will be necessary reading for university of iowa Press audacious, and personally committed criticism that
Estate of Joan Mitchell. The Metropolitan Museum of and other befits her subject.
anyone working in the area—it will reach poets www.uiowapress.org
Art, Anonymous Gift and Purchase, George A. Hearn
Fund, by exchange, 1991 (1991.139a-d), photograph 1992, and other writers, visual artists, and scholars true abstractions
Metropolitan Museum of Art. interested in the New York School and in avant-
garde or experimental work; it will reach readers
interested in women’s contributions to the arts,
urban culture, and the history of New York City.” by Maggie Nelson
iowa
—susan rosenbaum, university of georgia, author,
Professing Sincerity: Modern Lyric Poetry,
Commercial Culture, and the Crisis in Reading
sPine bulk 31/32 based on 320 Pages Printing on 440 PPi stock
WOMEN, THE NEW YORK SCHOOL,
AND OTHER TRUE ABSTRACTIONS

W O M E N , T H E N E W Y O R K S C H O O L ,
A N D O T H E R T R U E A B S T R A C T I O N S
BY MAGGIE NELSON
University of Iowa Press, Iowa City
University of Iowa Press, Iowa City 52242
Copyright © 2007by Maggie Nelson
www.uiowapress.org
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Design by Teresa W. Wingfield
No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means
without permission in writing from the publisher. All reasonable steps have been
taken to contact copyright holders of material used in this book. The publisher
would be pleased to make suitable arrangements with any whom it has not been
possible to reach.
The University of Iowa Press is a member of Green Press Initiative and is
committed to preserving natural resources.
Printed on acid-free paper
isbn-13: 978-1-58729-615-4
isbn-10: 1-58729-615-2
lccn: 2007924052
07 08 09 10 11 c 5 4 3 2 1
CONTENTS
Tales in and out of School: An Introduction xiii
PART ONE
1
Abstract Practices: The Art of Joan Mitchell, Barbara Guest,
3
and Their Others
2
Getting Particular: Gender at Play in the Work of John
49
Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, and James Schuyler
PART TWO
3
What Life Isn’t Daily? The Gratuitous Art
99
of Bernadette Mayer
4 131
Dear Dark Continent: Alice Notley’s Disobediences
5
When We’re Alone in Public: The Metabolic Work
169
of Eileen Myles
209
Afterword
223
Notes
259
Selected Bibliography
275
Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First thanks go to Wayne Koestenbaum, whose impassioned and
omnivorous writing, reading, teaching, scholarship, and friendship—
not to mention his own example of when to “care” and when not
to—have greatly expanded my sense of liberty, possibility, and pleas-
ure, both in regard to this project and otherwise. I have no doubt
that I will be eternally grateful.
Thanks also to Mary Ann Caws, for opening my eyes wider to
beauty, chance, and art; Joan Richardson, for being a spiritual and
intellectual anchor from our first meeting onward; Eve Kosofsky
Sedgwick, for her astonishing pedagogy and permission; Nancy K.
Miller, for her keen advice and affidamento; and to all the other the
scholars and friends who offered invaluable insights and support
along the way, especially Brian Blanchfield, Libbie Rifkin, Susan
Rosenbaum, Daniel Kane, Louis Menand, Joshua Wilner, Melissa
Dunn, Deborah Lutz, Rebecca Reilly, Charlotte Deaver, Andy Fitch,
Christina Crosby, Janet Jakobsen, Mark Bibbins, Rodney Phillips,
and Mark Hitzges. Thanks also to David Lehman, for introducing me
to the pleasures of this topic so long ago, and to the Graduate Center
of the City University of New York, for all the support that helped
make this book possible. Invaluable assistance was also provided by
the Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant
Program. I also thank my new community at CalArts—especially
Nancy Wood, dean of the School of Critical Studies, and the wise and
visionary Janet Sarbanes, for further expanding my notion of what a
school can or might be.
For help with obtaining images, I thank Carolyn Somers and Alli-
son Hawkins at the Joan Mitchell Foundation, Hadley Haden-Guest,
Jason Murison at P.P.O.W. Gallery, Jessica Marx at Art + Commerce,
Brooke Davis Anderson and Nicole Whelan at the American Folk
Art Museum, Anselm Berrigan, and Nathan Kernan. I also heartily
thank Joseph Parsons, Holly Carver, Charlotte Wright, Allison
Thomas, Karen Copp, and Gail Zlatnik at the University of Iowa
vii
acknowledgments
Press for all their hard work in bringing this book into being.
Thanks too, and as always, to PJ Mark of McCormick & Williams, for
his ongoing guidance.
This book would have no meaning or context without all of the
friends, writers, artists, performers, activists, and publishers who
have constituted my own personal “New York School” over the
years—a list way too long to print here, but which would include
everyone I’ve learned from and worked with at the Poetry Project at
St. Mark’s Church (Anselm Berrigan, Ed Friedman, and, in the
basement long ago, Elaina Ganim); all the devoted provocateurs in
and around the first and second incarnations of Soft Skull Press;
Robert Hershon, Donna Brook, and all the good people of Hanging
Loose Press and magazine; New York dancers from a previous life,
especially KJ Holmes, for teaching me to think on my feet, and
Adrienne Truscott (of the Wau Wau Sisters and so much more) for
all the bad education; the indefatigable ladies of Fort Necessitymag-
azine, along with all the other pioneering spirits from Eileen’s NYC
workshops; Robert Polito and my students and colleagues at the
New School; Thad Ziolowski and my students and colleagues at
Pratt Institute of Art; Suzanne Snider, who braved the Storrs
archives with me long ago and who has forged the path of so much
more since; and the late, great Robert Creeley, the best kind of
poetry father one could have hoped for.
Last but not least, I dedicate this book to my excitement
sister/not-sister Cynthia Nelson, for unwittingly drawing me east,
and for all subsequent speech.
grateful acknowledgment
is made to the following sources for
permission to reprint material.
Excerpts from Girls on the Run by John Ashbery. Copyright ©
1999
by John Ashbery. Reprinted by permission of Georges Bor-
chardt, Inc., on behalf of the author.
“The New Spirit” and “The System” from Three Poems by John
1970 1971 1972
Ashbery. Copyright © , , by John Ashbery. Reprinted
by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc., on behalf of the author.
“For John Clare” fromThe Double Dream of Springby John Ash-
1966 1970
bery. Copyright © , by John Ashbery. Reprinted by per-
mission of Georges Borchardt, Inc., on behalf of the author.
viii
acknowledgments
9 1973 1990
“G- ” from Powerless: Selected Poems – by Tim Dlu-
1996
gos. Copyright © by Tim Dlugos. Reprinted by permission of
the Estate of Tim Dlugos.
Excerpts from “On the Way to Dumbarton Oaks,” “Parachutes,
My Love, Could Carry Us Higher,” “Green Awnings,” “A Reason,”
“The Poetess,” “Santa Fe Trail,” “An Emphasis Falls on Reality,”
and “Roses” by Barbara Guest, originally published by Sun & Moon
1995
in Selected Poems, copyright © by Barbara Guest. Excerpts
from “The Screen of Distance,” “Sunday Evening,” “The Location
of Things,” “Sadness,” and “The Open Skies” by Barbara Guest,
originally published by Random House in Poems: The Location of
1962
Things, Archaics, The Open Skies, copyright © by Barbara
Guest. All forthcoming in Collected Poems, to be published by Wes-
leyan University Press and reprinted here by permission of Wesleyan
University Press.
Excerpts from Rocks on a Platterby Barbara Guest, copyright ©
1999
by Barbara Guest. Reprinted by permission of Wesleyan Univer-
sity Press.
1976
Excerpt from Selected Poemsby Robert Lowell. Copyright ©
by Robert Lowell. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, LLC.
Excerpt from “Failures in Infinitives” by Bernadette Mayer,
1992
fromA Bernadette Mayer Reader, copyright © by Bernadette
Mayer. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing
Corp.
Excerpts from Midwinter Dayby Bernadette Mayer, copyright ©
1982
by Bernadette Mayer. Reprinted by permission of New Direc-
tions Publishing Corp.
“To a Politician” and excerpts from “Sonnet Welcome” by Ber na-
2005 2004 2003
dette Mayer, from Scarlet Tanager, copyright © , , ,
2002 2001 2000 1999 1997 1996 1995
, , , , , , by Bernadette Mayer.
Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
Excerpts from Another Smashed Pinecone by Bernadette Mayer,
1998
copyright © by Bernadette Mayer, reprinted by permission of
the author.
Excerpts from The Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Lettersby
1994
Bernadette Mayer, copyright © by Bernadette Mayer, reprinted
by permission of the author and Hard Press Editions, Inc.
Excerpts from “An Urban Convalescence” by James Merrill,
2001
copyright © by the Literary Estate of James Merrill at Wash-
ix