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Don't Ever Get Famous: Essays on New York Writing after the New York School

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In the wake of his book whose argument (that St. Marks Church in the 1960s and 1970s became the epicenter of everything exciting about poetry) was met with stupefied confusion in some quarters, anger in others, delighted agreement in many, critic and poet Daniel Kane has returned with another book as stimulating and controversial as the first. This time he's playing editor to a wide field of critics, essayists, fellow poets, professors and mavericks writing on--well, it's a little vage at first, but that's part of the issue itself, that the very miscellany of the later "New York School" poets fuzzed up their individuality and made us think of all of them in a blur. If I. A. Richards were running his course in "Practical Criticism" today, I ask myself, printing poems without bylines, would I be able to tell a Charles North from a Tom Clark? Why do I torture myself pondering such questions? It's because DON'T EVER GET FAMOUS makes them obligatory. It's a fascinating compendium of critical work that will change your mind about poetry and the ways in which we manipulate it into a canon, a history, a narrative.

Wish I had the space to speak about all of them, but I'll have to confine myself to a few examples of the different *sorts* of argument you'll encounter here. Patrick Masterson and Paul Stephens take up the thorny case of Joseph Ceravolo, arguing against Kane's own inclusion of Ceravolo as a typical 2nd generation NY School poet. He is not ironic, nor urban, nor does he drop the names of his contemporaries, nor does he employ Beat writing practices. Masterson and Stephens have a little bit of a tendency to over-activate their critical analysis, someone must have told them once to make every word snap, so they elude me in some of their descriptions "In a way, everything that takes place in [Ceravolo's Fits of Dawn]" takes place `too fast,' in some remote time `ago.'" That's true, but `in a way' every other thing in the world does too, it all depends on how precise you want to get, and how far away you can afford to step away from the thing you're observing. And what happened to my nose for smut? For the life of me I can't find the off-color in what the authors call Ceravolo's "slightly off-color statement, "how great it is to be forgotten and then come back to life again, even though you are dead." Or is this off-color `in a way'? Otherwise the authors make some wise observations and clear some genuinely new ground.

Andrew Epstein again makes the case that something must have "gone on" between LeRoi Jones and Frank O'Hara around the time Personism got invented, otherwise why would (the man now known as) Amiri Baraka have gotten so panicky around the question of homosexual love? In his book BEAUTIFUL ENEMIES Epstein had already probed the awful daring of a moment's surrender, but here, in the context of Kane's anthology, his argument becomes all the more pointed. Is there an actual "droit du seigneur" like in A TALE OF TWO CITIES between members of different poetic generations? Maybe his subtitle should have been "The New York School After the Second Generation," with the word "After" embellished in letters singed with erotic flame.

Jed Rasula has a comprehensive look at the poetics and politics of "deep image," a short-lived movement of the late 1950s pioneered by Jerome Rothenberg and Robert Kelly who, to their chagrin, saw Robert Bly and James Wright run away with their chevrons and change them into something totally different than the relatively stable and useful sense they had found there. Rasula can't write an unpleasing sentence, and he demonstrates that, however "sloganistic" deep image became in Bly's hands, it's still an interesting prism through which to view, for example, Robin Blaser's "Image Nation" poems or Spicer's AFTER LORCA, though this is wandering rather far afield from the "after New York School" narrative. However it shows that editor Kane is pretty much not afraid to throw the dice and play them as they lay. If the heterogeneity of this generation of poets has obscured their work, Kane tries to clear the playing field by declaring this heterogeneity a plus, a radical practice of democracy in which no method is reified at the expense of any other.

Of course, he would like it both ways, to celebrate the very existence of a "poetics of sociability" in which individual talent isn't privileged as it had been in previous modernist generations--AND he would also argue that many of the party participants were geniuses of the first water. By the end of the book I'm like, totally in agreement with him on both counts.

I still don't know if I'd be able to tell a Charles North poem if it came and bit me in the Astor Bar, but I'm getting to a place where I know it's a good test of poetry. I enjoyed nearly everything about the book; oh, but for one thing, unfortunately Dalkey Archive which otherwise did a fine job with the volume, doesn't ssem to have employed a fact checker--I guess even scholarly presses don't often do so nowadays? Otherwise editor Kane should have asked a friend to read through the manuscript from beginning to end and note where things are just plain wrong. The old red pencil mark? I wonder where on earth Andrea Brady, in an otherwise synpathetic and illuminating study of the Boston poet John Wieners, ever got the idea that he was a member of Jack Spicer's "Poetry as Magic" workshop in San Francisco? (And why no editor corrected this error.) Well, I guess I see why, it certainly seems plausible, and it would explain a lot, and it was like Wieners to join in on things, often from a perpendicular and slightly goofy angle, and so he might have applied for the Magic Workshop if he had been living in San Francisco at the time, but he wasn't, so he didn't, but now everyone will take it as a fact that he did. Even I started doubting myself, thanks to the combined scholarly heft of Andrea Brady, Daniel Kane, and Dalkey Archive.

And I don't like that!

But all in all you have to get this book and don't let anybody's nitpicking critiques deter you. As Baraka said, "YOU LOVE THESE DEMONS AND WILL NOT LEAVE THEM."