Title: Don't Ever Get Famous: New York Writing after the New York School
Abstract: Daniel Kane, ed., Don't Ever Get Famous: New York Writing after the New York School. Champaign: Dalkey Archive, 2006. 399pp. $34.95 Extending the kind of literary-historical inquiry he pursued in All Poets Welcome, Daniel Kane has edited a substantial collection of essays on New York writing (mostly experimental poetry) between the apex of the New York School circa 1960 and the ascendance of Language poetry in the 1980s. Kane's volume takes a self-consciously recuperative and critical approach to the poetry of New York writers of the 60s and 70s, aiming to foreground what he calls the significant and, until now, relatively ignored texts produced in this barely-analyzed The first nine essays deal mostly with collectives-second-generation New York School, Umbra, Image, and writers associated with conceptual art-while the remaining six serve as critical introductions to lesser-known poets who maintained some relationship to the New York scene, such as Lee Harwood, Joseph Ceravolo, Lewis Warsh, Charles North, and John Wieners. The idea of Downtown-the literary and social life defined by vanguardist practice and political counterculture centered in institutions like the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church-is the primary organizational category for this collection. The book focuses almost entirely on Lower East Side-based writers for whom disaffiliation with the mainstream was important. Since many of the essays are supported by assiduous archival work, Don't Ever Get Famous offers a ground-level view of the poetry produced during this interval, including the little magazines, literary schools, communities, and performance venues from which it emerged. Though in some cases vastly different from one another, all of the essays in Don't Ever Get Famous are recovery projects of some kind. The best examine critically neglected work that has been tremendously influential for a range of writers, including the Language poets and many younger poets working today. The twinned themes of influence and reception emerge in a number of the chapters: Andrew Epstein considers how Amiri Baraka, serving as a bridge between different factions in the writing world, to embody an exciting experiment in collaboration, friendship, and intertextuality across traditional boundaries of race; Jed Rasula reconstructs the genealogy of Image as a group moniker and as a literary-conceptual term; Daniel Kane explores how second-generation New York School poets exhibited sociability and group affiliation within their poems in a way that distinguished them from their immediate predecessors; and Bob Perelman examines poetic fucking across history to theorize literary influence and inheritance as different but related phenomena. Two other chapters-Linda Russo on Bernadette Mayer and Hannah Weiner, and Lytle Shaw on Mayer and Clark Coolidge-consider other genres, media, and aesthetic practices, providing cogent discussions of the conversation between poetry and art during the period. These six are the strongest essays in the collection. Each offers a unique interpretive scheme, which only puts individual literary works in appropriate historical context but also establishes a way to think about this work beyond the time and place of its making. Jed Rasula's conceptually hefty essay on Image tracks the development of this phenomenon as an outgrowth of Surrealism that spans several countries, generations, and traditions. The piece is putatively about a small cluster of poets-David Antin, Jerome Rothenberg, and Robert Kelly in New York; and Robert Bly and James Wright in the Midwest. After pointing to a few primary documents-including Bly's magazine The Fifties, Robert Kelly's magazine Trobar, and Stephen Stepanchev's 1965 book American Poetry Since 1945-Rasula moves on to discuss the meaning of the term Deep Image. (Bly, having grown averse to the term long after its inception, came up with an alternative in Leaping Poetry) Rasula suggests that if the deep image is not simply the 1912 Imagist image with depth as added value, then perhaps it is more cinematic than poetic, a formal device akin to the montage of attractions or the emotional shocks in the films and film theory of Eisenstein. …
Publication Year: 2007
Publication Date: 2007-10-01
Language: en
Type: article
Access and Citation
AI Researcher Chatbot
Get quick answers to your questions about the article from our AI researcher chatbot