ENG 5933 Spring 2018 Epstein

This course focuses on the loose collective of avant-garde poets known as the “New York School,” a group increasingly viewed as one of the most significant and influential to emerge in American poetry since World War II. As we engage in an in-depth study of the core poets – Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler, among others – we will examine their innovative responses to modernism and the European avant-garde (cubism, surrealism, Dada), as well as their perpetuation of an American avant-garde tradition stemming from Emerson and Whitman. We will consider their work both individually and collectively, and we will interrogate – as the poets did themselves – the paradoxes of the avant-garde itself, including the problems inherent in the very notion of a “school” of poetry (after all, O’Hara himself said “schools are for fools”). We will also investigate the interconnections between these poets and some of their contemporaries, like Charles Olson, Allen Ginsberg, and Amiri Baraka, and will end the semester by looking at the work of several important poets who follow the lead of the initial movement, Ted Berrigan, Bernadette Mayer, and Alice Notley.

The course will consider New York School poetry within the historical context of postwar American culture. We will also focus on the intersections between New York School poetry and developments in the other arts, particularly Abstract-Expressionists and other visual artists (Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Larry Rivers, Jane Frelicher, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol) and cutting-edge jazz, classical, and rock music (Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, John Cage, the Velvet Underground). Throughout, we will assess the centrality of New York School poetics to contemporary American writing, and discuss issues that have been central to recent critical work on this movement and contemporary poetry more broadly, including friendship and community, poetry as a form of political/cultural critique, pop culture, gender and sexuality, consumer culture, and the everyday.