The Scene of My Selves: New Work on New York School Poets

by New York School Poets, Stephen Paul Miller (Editor)

Five poets serve as the focus of this book. Thomas Lisk, Albert Cook, and James McCorkle open up new perspectives on the work of John Ashbery, while Andrew Epstein, Benjamin Friedlander, Susan Rosenbaum, and Stephen Paul Miller place Frank O'Hara's work in such new contexts as racial relations, popular culture. and the Cold War cultural environment. Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Lynn Keller, Linda Kinnahan, and Sara Lundquist establish Barbara Guest as a central figure in postwar American poetry, engaged in a vigorous interrogation of linguistic systems and the structures of human relationships they encode. David Chinitz. Theodore Pelton, and David Spurr show how the wildly inventive comic poet Kenneth Koch opens a range of new poetic possibilities. And Paul Bauschatz and Robert Thompson invite appreciation of James Schuyler's deeply civilized and warmly humane work. Terence Diggory's introductory essay. "Community 'Intimate' or 'Inoperative': New York School Poets and Politics from Paul Goodman to Jean-Luc Nancy", and Charles Altieri's theoretical overview essay, "Contingency as Compositional Principle in 'Fifties Poetics, '" round out the hook. By seeing these five as members of a close-knit community, the book provides a new look at their work and how it was affected by the cultural milieu in which they lived.

Genres: Poetry

447 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 2001