I write from Mississippi on a rainy Monday, and from the middle of a class on The New York School of Poets and the New York School diaspora. The class has graduate fiction writers and poets who are part of Southern Mississippi’s Center for Writers, and a graduate student in literature, as well. All are fully engaged in exploring the NYS aesthetic and how well it suits our current condition—how in John Ashbery’s poetry city can turn itself inside out into farmstead; how New York is a peoplescape in Frank O’Hara, and the past socializes with the present; how Kenneth Koch revolutionizes the apostrophe and makes comedy and tragedy compadres; and how James Schuyler seamlessly joins the human and the natural in lines like these from “Closed Gentian Distances”: “A nothing day full of / wild beauty and the / timer pings.”
Mississippi may seem very far from New York—but the New York School imagination specializes in motion. It goes everywhere on its nerve, and its energies are enlivening the work of poets all over the place. (Sometime during this week I hope to include a report on the NYS in Poland.) Our course will end with a special symposium, to which you are all invited. For details, go to www.usm.edu/english and click on the Moorman Symposium link. Our celebration will include readings by former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins, along with award-winning poets Denise Duhamel, Barbara Hamby, David Kirby, and BAP’s own David Lehman, who will moderate a panel discussion on the New York School Diaspora.
True to form, my students are teaching one another—and me—new things about the NYS. Over the next few days you’ll be hearing their thoughts about the big four New York School poets and beauties, energies, and perplexities their work provides.
– Angela Ball