Preface

"Putting this anthology together has been a great pleasure, calling into play the usual range of problems, aesthetic and moral, which every editor with a conscience faces, continually, to offset his presumptuousness. Who knows why we selected whom we did? Does knowing a poet help you understand his work any better? We happen to know almost all the poets in this book (there is one we have still to meet), and most of these poets know each other as well. Obviously, as editors we're going on the assumption that these aquaintances and friendships, these sharings of tastes and affections, are going to go a long way toward giving this book a sense of solidarity. It would be facile as well as misleading to see these poets as forming a 'School,' to pass them off as a literary movement. Fortunately, most poets of any interest these days are so enlightened that they automatically reject, in their lives and work, the unhealthy idea of being part of a literary movement. Like water off a duck's back, such abstractions roll back into nothingness.

"Are New York poets new realists, or dissociated from any sympathy for the wretched of the earth? Are they drifting into a penumbra? Or do their sleek attractive surfaces glide by in the light? Have they freshened up the diatribe? Have any of their collaborations produced beautiful corpses? Are New York poets a diploma elite that buries its children? Are they merely tasting the ripest apple on the table, in the air? Is it a dereglement de tous les sens? Or has it become, peculiarly Americanized, only a 'leaving-out business,' a taking-away process? Have they generated a whole vocabulary of forms, a new sestina, new collages, cut-ups? Is it 'deep gossip'? Why have the old copula been expunged?

"Perhaps we do protest too much, but this is to prepare ourselves for the gruesome possibility of the 'New York School of Poets' label, one which has been spewed forth from time to time by some reviewers, critics, and writers either sustained by provincial jealousy or the bent to translate everything into manageable textbookese. Very few of the poets in this anthology were born in New York City, but many of them live here, and of these, many plan to leave, temporarily or otherwise. [...] The fact remains that New York has remained for all of them a fulcrum they continue to use in order to get as much leverage as possible in literature, a city where they met and continued their lives together, whether they came from Cleveland or Newark or Cincinnati or Providence or Tulsa. And although the New York School tag is an alarmingly useless one, it does remind one that many of these poets met in schools, at Harvard, Columbia, NYU, or the New School, sometimes as undergraduates taught by Delmore Schwartz or in poetry workshops taught by Kenneth Koch, Bill Berkson, or Frank O'Hara. The crisscrossing of friendships is surprising and inspiring, like telling someone to see a certain movie and, incredibly, they too like (or hate) it.

"[...]

"When we had very nearly finished our selections of particular poems, we began to think about the editorial paraphenalia which ordinarily accompanies such anthologies, in the back, afterthoughts. We quickly decided that manifestoes and statements on poetics were in this case unnecessary. Besides, most of the poets in this book would probably decline, with a smile, the invitation to write anything as eternal as a manifesto. In addition to this reticence, most of us would recall Frank O'Hara's Personism manifesto with a gleeful shudder, realizing it is a hard piece to top and that it in many ways speaks for us all:

"["Personism: A Manifesto" by Frank O'Hara reprinted here.]

"[...]

"[...] We will content ourselves by saying that you might find any kind of poem in this anthology; that is, there has never been any kind of hard and fast notion of how a person ought to write. If he wanted to write a sonnet he could do so without feeling that someone might look at him sideways, even if his sonnet did have fifteen lines, or fifteen thousand lines. The freedom to work with traditional forms and syntax, and the freedom to work with them freely, to use them as the Muse dictated, or to ignore them altogether, is one of the most cheerful things about these poets; with them, the idea of opposing the tradition of the old to the tradition of the new is positively ludicrous.

"[...]

"[...W]e suggested an incredible number of titles, all of them useless, among which were The Heavenly Humor, Very Good Poems, Great Feats of Harmony, Great Feet of Hominy, Loomings, Ugly Ellipses, An Agreement of Poets, Malign Machinations, Shasta Daisies, Up Against the Wall, Fear Among the Legs of a Chair, Poetry Without Fear, Lyrical Bullets, Pansies Freaked with Jet, Fleurons and Tailpieces, The Understatement of the Year, Alarming Upheavals, Le Meilleure Choix de Poemes, Of Manhattan the Son, Treed Again, A Museum of Modern Poetry, Magic City, Goodbye to Strange Phantoms, Moving Rampss, City Lights, etc. But wit has its end, and we came to that end."

--Ron Padgett & David Shapiro
New York City, June 1968
An Anthology of New York Poets