In Some Glamorous Country: The New York School Poets

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

In this course, we will deploy critical and creative modes of inquiry as we undertake a survey of mid- to late twentieth-century American poetry arising from New York City, which in the postwar period became a nexus of literary and artistic experimentation. It is within this geographic and historical framework that the New York School of Poets coalesced around the core figures of Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Barbara Guest, and James Schuyler. Focusing on this dynamic array of poets as well as their precursors (e.g., Langston Hughes, Gertrude Stein, Federico García Lorca), fellow travelers (e.g., Allen Ginsberg, Amiri Baraka, Frank Lima), and subsequent "generations" of New York poets (e.g., Joe Brainard, Bernadette Mayer, John Yau), we will consider how lines of affinity and intimacy as well as the cultural reverberations of the city drew together writers so diverse in outlook and method that Ashbery remarked, "our program is the absence of any program." In this light, to figure out what it means to be part of the this anti-programmatic community, we will explore how the New York School intersected with the Beats, the Black Arts Movement, the Boston and San Francisco Renaissances, the Nuyorican Movement, and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poetry—prompting us to consider how the concept of an avant-garde becomes, in this period, a ramifying network of friends, lovers, and intellectual rivals engaged in aesthetic cross-pollination. Our undertaking will be attentive to the intermedial dialogue between these poets and New York painters (e.g., Willem de Kooning, Fairfield Porter, Jane Freilicher), methods of collaboration, the influence of postmodern theory, and how race, gender, sexuality, and place shaped what has been cited as one of the most enduringly influential bodies of literature in the postwar world. Assignments will engage students' critical and creative talents.